Chaos Cipher

by Den Harrington

  ‘We’ll teach you how to walk here,’ Vance assured, leading him further around the spiralling lobby.

  A giant data-bubble expanded into the sky above their heads and Vance seemed to operate the object with ease, managing layers of data imprinted across the surface, which peeled back to sub layers like onion skin, changing colours as it cycled. Vance stopped on a green page and pointed for Malik to see.

  ‘To operate a data-orb you simply hold out your hand with your thumb tucked in,’ Vance aptly explained. ‘The data-orb will come to you. The rest is user friendly, easy I imagine for a scholar of non-linear science.’

  They ambled through the promenades of Atominus Phalange and Vance showed his brother the great bulwark structures harmonised to hold the city together, while anti-gravmex simulators operated to make the impossible seem possible. Water fountains that rained upwards, pools of liquid impossibly sustained without a visible containment in large pockets beneath the structure, where swimmers trusted their fate to the technology making it all possible. They swam leisurely through the unbound baths, looking down into endless clouds where below the spires of buildings pointed back and the blink of lights and radio dishes pulsed. Malik was no longer sure if this trickery was in the hardlands or in the quasilands but he imagined it was a little of both.

  Swarms of tiny quadro-blade drones flew about, carrying parcel shipments from place to place. Androids wondered onto walkways that seemed to self-construct beneath their feet to prevent them from falling into the sky. The intelligent magneto dishes aimed their pads to orient the base material into position and the androids marched fearlessly with equal confidence that the paths would carry them forth above the sky. In the Nexus, Malik would see the androids striding onto Lilly pads suspended in the air.

  Malik saw it all shifting and changing, a city that was never the same, completely malleable, but what they witnessed in the Nexus was contradictory in the Real. Where the androids walked there was clearly a bridge, where the people swam in the inverse baths they could see a lagoon, merged with the Nexus the superficial images altered what was really there, and as the people constructed their reality in the Nexus, reality outside the virtual worlds automatically complied and transformed to make real what was not and to bolster the digital fantasy.

  ‘The law that exists is very contradictory, Malik,’ Vance orated, ‘it takes a hard willed philosopher to find ethics here. We have a law called the limitation law, which is our main law. But law, old law, is a construct for people outside of the Atominii still living in the hardlands, it’s a law designed for social control in order to preserve all of this. For instance, it is law for every person to be neurophased with a neuro-ligature. I mean, it would be damn well ridiculous for them not to have since they would be able to operate nothing in the city without them. The city would not receive such people without the neural adaptations and it would reject them like antibodies. The other laws; no Olympians and no Precariat rebel unwilling to comply with our divine order. Olympian Genetics, you’ll be happy to learn, are today seen as more lethal than twentieth century nuclear weapons. We do not tolerate the pessimistic obsolete here. They don’t understand that here in the Atominii, in the Nexus quasilands, you are free, spiritually, creatively, legally to a point. There are divisional cultures who are returning to philosophical notions in this universe. They dream of reordering law. We have religions uniting to create for the first time a simulation of God, to envision for ourselves a divine reality. But for the most part we are like the dawning civilisation...free to do whatever we want. Our every desire enacted upon unburdened by our guilt and moral conscience and without the consequences of suffering, either from guilty feelings or real violence. If violence is indeed one’s fantasy then here it can be indulged via the simulation...nobody real need die.’

  ‘Why would violence be a necessary human desire?’ Malik questioned, smiling playfully.

  ‘Many people do it,’ said Vance without irony. ‘It’s a common characteristic in mankind. It is human nature to be violent.’

  ‘This world...’ Malik said thoughtfully, ‘this world is Pandora’s box. Everything has consequence. Whatever exists in the hardlands, the laws, the authority of a secret government, it all bleeds into the quasiland. Violent structures breed violent people. One can make a strong case to say that mankind is equally cooperative as it is violent. When you create a being in the digital world you are exercising a part of this AI protocol and the AI is learning something about your nature reciprocally. When you kill that personality, what do you suppose the AI learned from it? Was that ever considered? Pardon me, Vance, but I don’t believe by denying the facts you are being very smart in your domination, brother.’

  ‘Funny you should say about violence bleeding into the Nexus. There is an affliction here,’ said Filipe additionally, ‘which your brother doesn’t wish to talk about. It is the disorder classified to a reclusive social group of people on the Nexus referred to as Wire-heads.’

  ‘Is that so?’ Malik crowed, ‘do tell.’

  ‘Well,’ Filipe started, ‘Wire-heads refers to a condition called Nexus Source Amnesia. They are obsessed with their virtual lives. It is, of course, when a person is lost within the varying artificial realities. If you think about it, you can see that humans naturally adapt to environments, they construct our memory, our experiences with reality are necessary to develop our psyche. In this universe, things are changing always, things are not constant, so one loses a sense of what reality is and a sense of perspective, there’s no reference in the Nexus, no consistency, no laws of nature. It is no different for Titans, we’re evolved from humanity. If you cannot feel the plants, taste the food as reality informs us, then when we experience these artifices we lose our earthly connection, the simulation is not quite the same as the real thing. And of course our connection with each other is also very important but...’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Vance obstinately, ‘stop vacillating between morality and reality Filipe. Per angusta ad augusta, Filipe. This is our present life, a Dionysian world within an Apollonian state. This is a free world where we are free to make it as we will and make it our own...’

  ‘What are they like these...Wire-heads?’ asked Malik. ‘I want to know more about them; you said they have Nexus Source Amnesia?’

  ‘As I said,’ Filipe resumed, ‘they’ve lost the ability to recognise the hardland real world. To them reality seems tiresome, drab and dull. This is why Titans are by the limitation law encouraged to walk around the city, disconnect now and then from the Nexus for what we call sentience exercising. Otherwise, you can get lost...like the Wire-heads. They do not care about permadeath, all it means is they’re thrown into another experience. Death for them is not just a myth, it is almost a fantasy as well. This is why we say they are a little lost.’

  ‘I wish you’d get lost,’ Vance maliciously spited. ‘This is a rare disease you are talking about.’

  As they passed into a new part of the city, they ambled onto a platform that seemed to hover away from a solid part of the ground and carry them across the air as a boat gracing still waters, and in the Nexus, they had stepped onto a large wooden junk that hung on sail lines from a hot air pillow, and up in the wheelhouse, an android steered them through the clouds.

  The Nexus created for Malik grand antebellum schemes, motifs of gilded baroque houses, the large pillars holding up Borromini curved walls sheltering the nameless, stucco effigies of human memory in their coves, symbolic and lost. Slanted mansard roofs and Baldachin steeples, where suspended giant, bronze bells swung and chimed their droning peals. Fragmentary castellations left to hang and jut into the sky, teetered over a waterless river of air, a gravity lake of skinless invisible vibrations providing buoyancy for their journey.

  ‘In this place anybody can get lost,’ said Filipe, staring in astonishment at the faux impressions of buildings and pseudo-keels. And they hovered under a large arching bridge that founded the substructure for more houses and windows. Yet,
when Malik dropped out of the Nexus interface, the viscera returned to its pallid uniformity, of basic shapes, a machine house of plain geometrical constructs shifting to build walkways beneath people’s feet, or to uphold the walls and ceilings, where needed. The clockwork technology was the skeleton of humanity’s dreamscapes, technology instrumental to their fantasies, the thing that moved hidden beneath it all, yet never changed. And though the bridge was real, there was nothing upon it but air, and under their feet now ran several tracks to support the platform upon which they stood, that in the Nexus appeared as a junk suspended from a helium balloon.

  ‘Who would deny one’s right to get lost in their dreams and fantasies?’ Vance pondered aloud. ‘Is it not right for man to realise his deepest desires?’ and he looked to Malik in preparation to hear his rebuke. ‘Or are you still with Heraclitus on this one?’ he asked. ‘Would it not be better for mankind to be given their desires?’

  Malik held his hands behind his back and shrugged. ‘If anything, I’ve been sated many desires since my arrival home.’ He commented. ‘I don’t believe it has informed anything but my acceptance and a notable spark in my ego.’

  ‘Good,’ Vance said. ‘A true Serat is nothing without his ego.’

  Several times the Nexus servers pestered Malik to connect to the interface, but he preferred to see the real mechanics of their illusion. It was the intrinsic mechanisms that fascinated him the most, not the superfluous, but the things that ran beneath the skin of the Nexus artifice. He understood the purpose of the fantasy, understood well that he was missing aspects of the ideology that would be very telling of their culture, but there was something about the way these physical boundaries moved beneath the façade that reminded him of his sub-dimensional theories. Though one seemed fruitless without the other, the logic of its premise was real, it was for him, a city that was detailed and patterned as one big puzzle. But it’s within substructure which lay the true limits of the Nexus, here he saw the raw kernel of its real identity, uniform and simple and elegant, yet formulating a great complexity, holding its citizens within unseen boundaries, serving them while contemporaneously making them build. Much it was the way with people. Malik began to contemplate that perhaps one of the reasons why he did not get on well with people was because he was too busy exploring their mechanisms, their greedy desires, their compulsions and shallow hedonisms and so many predictable similarities, all the while missing their masks, their personalities.

  Atominus Phalange was nothing more than an enlarged version of Yerma’s cognitive tests back on Orandoré. He would not be part of the fantastic construction, hoping he’d sense only the surface suggestions, but Malik couldn’t help but see deeper. He would look for another pattern, another use for this wondrous potential. He was thinking about structure.

  They moved finally into a large room void of almost everything save an enormous window where daylight slanted in from above and cast a white quadrilateral crop of light across its palladium tiles and a very wide stairway, and Vance stepped up to the edge and stared out at the endless foam of the stirring cyclone below.

  ‘Behold the beautiful nimbolantis.’ He introduced. ‘This storm has been turning for the last thirty years. Incredible, don’t you think? They come and go every now and then. We haven’t burned a barrel of oil in centuries and yet today...we still see the shadow of yesterday. Small things...big consequences as you’d say.’

  ‘That is truly the mark of chaos,’ said Malik. ‘But global climate change was no small thing.’

  ‘Ah,’ Vance harked with a slanted smile, ‘non-linear physics, is your speciality. You are the chaotician of the Erebus, Doctor Malik Serat. And speaking of chaos,’ Vance jovially adduced, ‘let me get you accustomed with some more entertaining features of the Nexus. I think a little warm up should suffice before we start some…’ and Vance smiled at his brother, ‘memory hacking.’

  -30-

  Dak and Sonja both led the way through the sky port’s atrium towards their assigned gate and Kyo followed, shouldering a few essential items they’d picked up earlier from home. Amongst which he’d grabbed a thermal jacket, well-padded and black, well insulated with a thick collar. He didn’t like the way Dak was behaving lately and felt that maybe he was disgruntled at him for something. Then Sonja turned to face her son and smiled evenly with some reassurances, as if sensing his anxieties.

  ‘You okay?’ she asked.

  Kyo nodded, eyes shifting to the air zone where he saw distantly the Perigrussia Skybus basking in the sunlight. They walked through the long empty lanes, passing several unused gates with empty take-off and landing pedestals for the SkyLarks. At the far end they saw the usual sky gliders, testing their fan powered boogies and curving into the low altitudes. The air zone strips had otherwise been cleared for a clean-down, and only the Perigrussia now stood upon its runways where the various robots and volunteers swept and worked. The Perigrussia Skybus belly was open, a cargo elevator with various boxes and containers waiting below to be lifted into the artichoke viscera of the cargo’s cabin.

  Krupin’s security staff stood attentively at the ship’s ascending stairway, their muscles engineered, visibly displayed on their one suits, which delineated information such as recent nutritional intakes and strength capacity and potential, a superfluous intimidation tactics, which were usually insincere, but many would never dare put such people to the test. The bodyguards were tall and unflinching, almost identical in stature and feature, like two carvings clad in military smart-fabrics.

  ‘Is that him?’ asked Dak glaring angrily out of the lane’s window panels running the length of the long hall.

  ‘Yes,’ said Sonja. ‘That’s him.’

  ‘Alright, let’s do this quickly.’ Dak said, ‘Kyo, hide yourself between us.’

  Kyo didn’t question, he did as he was told.

  Out on the runway, a SkyLark sat on its cupped pedestal, a pilot already checking the engines and making sure the power cells were operational and the navigation computer was accessible. Dak unfastened his backpack and ensured he had the navigation codes.

  ‘All set,’ he said checking the nano-tronic graphene sheet as various navigation digitals swirled around before him.

  ‘Dak,’ said Sonja, scaling the side of the machine ‘don’t forget. We’re issued with a special code for returning to the dome.’

  ‘I’ve got the codes saved on Quantic-W.’ He said offhandedly as he analysed the readouts before him.

  ‘Good,’ said Sonja, loading bags into the back with Kyo, ‘Enaya said she’ll keep us informed about what’s happening.’

  Kyo checked his Quantic-W and accessed the caller menus and looked up Pania.

  ‘Hey,’ she said, her face appearing on the screen. ‘You in the air yet?’

  ‘Not yet,’ he answered solemnly, ‘just setting off now, thought I’d test my caller line.’

  ‘Good,’ she sighed, ‘I’m going to let you in on what’s happening here. Looks like we’re gonna come down heavy on Lewis for the fire. He won’t be expecting this kind of action, I think. But I’m going to have to come clean about my vandalism stunt which could probably hurt my own reputation but…at least I got one.’

  ‘Well,’ Kyo said thoughtfully. ‘I thought you were justified. He is a fascist.’

  And she laughed. ‘Suppose you’re right.’

  ‘Everyone knows it,’ Kyo smiled. ‘Also, it was a great job. You should make a satirical Hitler version of me some day.’

  ‘No,’ Pania sniggered, ‘you’d be more like…I dunno…something that eats pencils.’

  Kyo smiled and promised. ‘I’ll be back as soon as I can.’

  ‘Don’t forget your pencils.’

  Kyo pulled a chewed pencil from his coat and jammed it between his teeth, his eyes carrying a joyous smile. Pania winked and blew him a kiss, then disconnected the call.

  After test running the engines, the pilot stepped down from the launch pedestal and Dak punched in the engine codes. Sonja set
tled in as the cabin slid over their heads and sealed them in and the launch pedestal rose into the air like a large crane. A downward thrust balanced the vessel and the launch-codes decoupled them and in a moment the SkyLark was away and hovering up above the large city dome.

  Kyo looked down and spotted the area where he was sure they lived as they ascended higher into the sky and finally left Cerise Timbers. From so high the aftermath of the fire in Hangar-Fifteen didn’t look so bad, but he knew first-hand the destruction within its charred shell. He watched as the towns below vanished under the stealth material mimicking the impression of a seamless forest where the city was and he looked on at the vast frozen planes of Siberia’s mountains.

  The engines whirred softly, sending dull vibrations through the vessel and Kyo sat back and did his best to enjoy the ride.

  *

  It still wasn’t too late to make an evening call to Pierce Lewis, no matter how besotted he was with alcohol. She was sure Laux might have given her an evening C.A.L.C time by which he was sure Lewis was also sticking to, but it wasn’t relevant. The day was not over.

  Enaya stood alone in the main office of East B’ One Federal building and waited for the Q-net’s peer-to-peer connection service to find reception at the Lewis residence. It was her third attempt and nobody had answered. She was just about ready to give up and acquire mercenary assistance to guard her while she paid him a personal visit when the screen began to change. The call made it through and Hattle stood at the other end, his crude face dotted with perspiration, he breathed heavily, clearly effeted by the physical task of training.