Chaos Cipher

by Den Harrington

  ‘We’re going to make it,’ she promised.

  Suddenly, the turbulence was upon him again, the sickening pull of gravity drawing him down. Malik cried out against it, his diaphragm twitching for shallow breaths. And the chaos cipher’s numerous shapes and codes appeared all around the chamber like lightning, scarred hotly into the dark ceramic walls.

  ‘NO MORE!’ Malik screamed.

  Shoots of water erupted from the pit all around him, flooding the room in exploding columns like geysers. Malik was suddenly in a whirlpool, fighting for breath against the turning density of black water. Penelope drifted closer like a ghost, shimmering in the splash and eruptive spills, reaching out for him.

  ‘We have to sleep now Malik…’

  ‘Who was she?’ Vance’s voice returned. ‘Focus Malik!’

  But he could not. The freezing water threatened to asphyxiate him. Blasts of it sprayed like a hurricane, and the codex of the chaos cipher emanated through the waters like hot crimson wires.

  ‘Concentrate!’

  Penelope’s face was no longer there. She had only the shadow outline, a blackened pit opened in her skull, the endless void of the Charybdis, swallowing light coalescing into an ocular crown, searing now, burning, and pulling apart the room. Malik screamed as he entered it. He roared as he heard its dull bass tones and became the dense blackness itself.

  And for a moment nothing more.

  When Vance had him pulled from the sensorium chamber Malik was dry as a bone, yet his skin was pale, as though he’d suffered his hallucinations physically, his lips a dark blue, eyes sunken and febrile.

  Two Adamoss avatars lay him out in a recovery room, and Vance was waiting by his side in the dimly lit private space, waiting for him to awaken.

  ‘Your memories are jumbled, Malik,’ said Vance. ‘Nothing makes any sense in there. It’s as though you’ve been living in a house of mirrors. All I see are ghosts.’

  Malik opened his eyes wearily.

  ‘You’ve made history my brother. You’ve come closer to a black hole’s event horizon than anyone else without falling in. And there’s nothing I can learn from you. The whole Erebus project…the whole investment…the very meaning of your existence has been a sham.’ And Vance sighed disappointedly. ‘You were created in a very crazy time in human history.’

  ‘My life has value!’ Malik croaked.

  ‘Not without purpose,’ Vance stated aggressively. ‘We invested everything on the Erebus. My parents grew you for this purpose before I was conceived. Imagine what it was like Malik. Living with you, the clone, the egotistical gene-freak Titan, test-tube built for the Erebus project. Always living in your shadow, never receiving the normal compassion and upbringing, I so yearned. Mother and father never cared for you Malik. You were a way for the family name to enter the history books. That’s all. I inherited the future…you were never even supposed to come home.’

  Malik glared fiercely, hands shaking, adrenaline rising. Suddenly, he found himself unable to move. Vance leaned a little closer until he was over him.

  ‘The neurophase,’ he sniggered, ‘I have your mind, Malik. You’re my puppet. I have your thoughts. You must be so conflicted by that now, you know. I wonder what it feels like to hate me one moment, want me dead, and then love me the next. Do you love me?’

  Malik struggled, lips peeling hatefully over his teeth, spittle foaming at the lips he answered. ‘Y-yhu-yessss!’ And he meant it. He suddenly couldn’t understand his hatred but it wouldn’t go away.

  ‘Will you lick my boots?’

  ‘Yu-yissth!’

  Vance delighted with laughter. ‘Of course, I’m just playing with you brother. Consider it a sample of my power. It’s a fraction of what I can do with your thoughts now. But not to worry, I won’t need to do it again providing you give me what I want.’

  ‘What?’ Malik growled.

  ‘Tell me about Penelope Hurt,’ he said. ‘Tell me about the chaos cipher.’ And Vance leaned over with a napkin and dabbed Malik’s lips.

  ‘The chaos cipher was designed by her,’ he told Vance at last, fatigued from his mental torment. ‘She was its architect.’

  ‘What does it do?’ Vance asked sharply.

  ‘It maps dimensional rifts in space time.’

  ‘You’re not telling me anything. That’s a word salad to me. How does it work?’

  ‘The quantics!’ Malik seethed. ‘There was an explosion on the Erebus. And we lost someone. They were outside, working the tests. He fell.’

  ‘He fell?’ Vance repeated.

  ‘Into the Charybdis.’ Malik explained, eyes burning with hate. ‘He fell inside. We were recovering our orbit. We fell very close ourselves, over two Schwarzschild radii of the event horizon. Dathan Fallows was gone. But he was communicating to us. We thought it was impossible. But he was. He was.’

  ‘How?’ asked Vance.

  ‘Superluminal communication,’ Malik said. ‘Your commercialised entanglement communicators were allowing him to send messages, the same data stream that was feeding back information from the atomic clock tests. He’d hacked it, managed to send a message out to us. It was text only, no sound. Primitive. But something was getting out.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘We didn’t know at the time…the entangled counterpart on the Erebus, the other communicator was bringing through more than just Dathan’s messages…it was leaking gravitational radiation. The whole Erebus was infected with gravitational ripples, temporal Doppler’s.’

  ‘Temporal Doppler’s? You mentioned those during your memory hike.’

  ‘It’s the name we gave the phenomenon.’ Malik breathed anxiously. ‘That’s why you can’t make sense of my memories, Vance. Because time was fractured, moments stretched and warped wherever there was a Quantic device. The future, the past, the present, all mingled. This is true Chronoshock. We were lost in a maze of time, meeting future and past selves. A house of mirrors. And Penelope saved us. She saw the pattern. She understood the process and how to move around this maze of convoluted time and space.’

  ‘Then what happened? What process?’

  ‘To survive!’ He gasped, his eyes lost in the depths of his horrified memories, a resurgent flashback he’d have lived long without wanting to revisit. ‘She assigned each of us a code. We were to write it on the walls. I was X and I, she was zero and phi, Captain Zemi took the theta mark, Scott took the ampersand. We coded the walls, changing the colour of our marker pens, chalk or manner of inscription all changed on an hourly basis as instructed by Penelope. We’d watch how time shifted them around, vanishing as that part of the wall fell into the past, or aging as it moved into the future, new symbols appearing out of nowhere, our future inscriptions. She saw the pattern, was able to construct our future tagging, getting us from moment to moment despite how infinitely complex it all seemed. She got us to the cryonic facilities. There were deaths along the way. Mistrust. Mutiny. Confusion still, as our future selves accidentally leaked compromising information, thinking they were sharing the same space-time as their present companions. When you see yourself…when you meet yourself in the hallways, I can’t explain the terror of remembering both moments, existing in both moments while being one consciousness. But when you meet your friend in a past moment, neither one of you are sure which is living ahead or behind the other. Until you learn…which of you knows a little bit more. And how much that imparted knowledge then informs the inevitable bootstrap paradoxes of unavoidable events. Once it’s out…neither can control the wake of its chaos, so we learned all too late to remain stoic.

  ‘Zemi had to rip up half the Erebus just to ascend out of orbit. We purged fuel cells, radiation shield plating, shuttles, and half an environment just to get to a safe orbital location. I felt sick from the gravity. But we made it Vance, thanks to Penelope and the chaos cipher.’ Malik inched his head off the pillow. ‘The code!’ He said. ‘That code was her legacy. If somebody can understand it the way she did…we could permeate the limits
of time. That’s what we returned to earth with. That’s how meaningful our lives are. We have knowledge that can impart and inform our future anew. We can begin a new paradigm, not the Second Horizon…but the next dimension entirely. We could become gods.’

  Vance considered this for a moment and got to his feet. He approached the recovery ward’s observation window and transformed the limpidity of the glass from opaque and saw the turning nimbolantis storm below. Swarms of drones milled about the misty clouds, planes drifting through the lower atmosphere like trinkets in a tornado, all seemingly without destination, yet all certainly with purpose.

  ‘You did happen to overlook one critical factor in your quest to permeate the limits of time,’ Vance said morosely. ‘And that is the limits of human temperament. Lust, hate, greed…envy.’ He raised his brows on the last word, as though surprised with himself. Vance turned on his heels from the window, his dull shadow cast across Malik’s dour and enraged face, resuming his train of thought acrimoniously. ‘You were never meant to come here Malik. The human race stopped being human centuries ago. There is no transcendence. I am here to ensure the Atominii is conserved. This, our glorious utopia is forever actualised. The Nexus feeds our imagination with no risks. Why would we ever want to transcend this and risk it all on the notion of the Erebus?’

  Vance smiled and bowed his head.

  ‘Amuse me,’ he told Malik. ‘How does that famous oath of the Chrononauts go again?’

  ‘No depth of knowledge must go unexplored,’ Malik started reluctantly, his countenance grimaced with the words, preferring to stop himself from speaking yet the words just poured out anyway.

  ‘-no-single thing unaccounted for in the sphere of our empirical wisdom. Should such a thing exist, it does so against our reason and accord. Be it the deepest oceans and dead stars, to the clock-work of the heavens and the mechanics of the atoms, all must be known. This is the oath we take in the name of new horizons.’

  ‘Ah yes yes,’ Vance laughed, ‘that’s it. Yes…music to my ears. Oh you once said those words with such pride Malik.’ And he stood at the foot of his stretcher now, analysing Malik’s neurological readings, which spiked with activity. ‘Oh, you are deeply distressed I see. So let me leave you with something to sleep on before the next neuro-stimulant kicks in.’ And Vance wrapped his fingers tightly around the recovery stretcher’s foot rails, his knuckles white with anticipation.

  ‘That explosion on the Erebus was meant to destroy you!’ He said, simpering. ‘My parting gift. But you are a tenacious soul Malik. You make an honourable Serat my big, younger brother. Unfortunately for you, however, you’re in my world now. If the Serat name is to make any more legendary frontiers…should it matter if the name is Malik or Vance when both are Serat? I am the limits of this world. If anything is worth changing, then I will be the one to call it.’

  Malik growled and seethed, he twisted and turned, rage building, yet his muscles would not cooperate as the nerve harmonics continued to dull his motion. Malik could only scream, and he roared, desperate to beat Vance’s skull against a wall.

  ‘You can make your time here heaven or hell.’ Vance reminded, heading for the door now. ‘And one is especially good when you taste a bit of both.’

  Malik thrashed his head, growling, shaking, desperate to break free of his cybernetic-induced ataxia.

  ‘You’ll forgive me,’ Vance tenderly pledged. ‘You’ll forgive me again and again, Malik. You are, oh so, forgiving. And thank you for giving me the chaos cipher. My research team has a big job piecing it together.’ Vance said leaving the room. ‘But it is funny how we think of time, isn’t it? Time of my world. Time for the Atominii. Time for returning to Earth…’ Malik thought he saw Penelope Hurt again, reaching from the cryonic chambers, inviting him into the cold, numbing and subduing ice. ‘Time to sleep.’

  And from the wailing and roaring, Malik’s neural oscillations flat lined on the beta waves, fluctuating evenly on alpha waves and delta, plunging him quickly into a deep and dreamless sleep.

  -46-

  It was a short ascent up to the Lewis family house through the garden. Edge Fenris scowled at the verdant and neatly trimmed gardens typical of Lewis style. He’d fed the security dog with tranquiliser Laux had batched up earlier, a fact that wouldn’t make Pierce Lewis very happy but delighted him all the same. As he suspected, most of the doors were electronically locked, but that never stopped Edge from getting past a security panel. Slowly, he crept under one of the home’s large multi-platform veranda and shifted up against the wall where the glass door was. At the security panel, he held in the two buttons Laux told him about, the hash tag and the star, and waited like this for a whole minute until the panel made a sound. Seems the professor was right again, he knew the hack would work for this model. Now, Laux said something about the reset code being generic for this locking key panel, a simple one, one, two, two eight. Another long tone from the panel and the code waited for the new assignment. Edge Fenris punched in the new code and hit the enter button to set it. Once the panel was ready, he dialled in the code he’d just made up once again and the light turned green.

  ‘That’s how you hack a security panel, Pierce.’ And he shifted inside and slid the door to the frame behind him.

  Edge Fenris looked around carefully, riffling through notes and magazines sat on the oversized and otherwise bare marble window ledges. The space of the living room was neat and there was hardly anything inside. Edge moved across to Pierce’s mini bar and spied a half emptied bottle of Metaxas just sitting on the counter in a bottle goblet. He took the bottle by the neck and unplugged the stopper, gulping down a big swig, shivering after the brandy’s flavour hit home, Edge planted the crystal back down with a dull knock.

  ‘Now for the incriminating evidence,’ he muttered to himself. Edge started from the basement. The lights flickered to life to illuminate a gym at the bottom of the stairs. The smell of sweat and dry paint was strong in the otherwise cool shaded air. Edge looked around, checking the equipment, the storage rooms where sandbags were heaped beside dumbbells, and he even walked around the ring. Once he was satisfied, he moved up a level, back into the Lewis kitchen to descry the cooking method, making sure it didn’t need oil of some kind like the shit he poured around Hangar-Fifteen just before setting the place ablaze. Edge opened higher cabinets and still found nothing. He moved up a level, into the privacy of Pierce’s bedrooms. The bathroom boasted a large shower area and a tub. It was tiled with blue and white marble and mirrored. He hadn’t expected it, but the place was spotlessly clean, meticulously ordered and tidy. Everything in its place.

  Edge tried Hattle’s room first, slipping through the sliding door. There was everything that could be expected from a young man of Hattle’s age littered around. The bed was folded neatly, as though regimented by Pierce’s influence, and the window ledge was without a speck of dust, but around the floor lay piles of clothes dumped and some masturbatory content littered under the bed, a secret stash he’d been collecting unbeknown to his father, he imagined. Edge wondered in and turned to the large screen on the wall. He tried to switch it on but the screen demanded a biometric reading, and something as sophisticated as this he wasn’t sure how to hack, so he let it be.

  Edge Fenris approached the master bedroom. The doors were doubled and slid apart on rails as he entered. It was an oval room, nicely lit with a balance of daylight, the roof designed to prevent too much of the sun coming in directly, and a king size bed was centred. A fitting room stood at one side, glass doors leading out onto a veranda on the other. Edge snooped out of the panoramic windows and could see the curving dome to the East. He opened the fitting room and looked around, finding smart suits and opticidyne fabrics but nothing obscure or out of place, the evidence was illusive still.

  Edge roamed into the middle of the room and slipped a cigarette in his mouth and lit it. Tapped his foot thoughtfully and walked out onto the veranda overlooking the garden.

  ‘If I was an
egotistical arsonist, where would I hide my toolbox?’ he asked himself, realising all too soon the ironies of such a statement. Edge Fenris had been told on many occasions he was quite literally mad, and his credentials did nothing to absolve that. Suddenly, he heard a voice coming from the garden, and Edge ducked low behind the balustrades, peering through the gaps as the person walked under the veranda.

  ‘-So, what’s the next move?’ asked the Bear.

  ‘We got the kid as collateral,’ said Pierce Lewis from the Bear’s Quantics. ‘Next plan is to reinstate rule on Cerise Timbers. We’ll be backed up by the Atominii soon. Krupin said he’s taking us to his training camp where he’s going to request Atominii Syridan support for the operation and help us.’

  He’d never heard Pierce so upbeat, and no wonder. It sounded to Edge like he was on the cusp of a massive coup.

  ‘Well, you should know,’ said Berengar, ‘they’re sending people after the kid. Apparently, Artex Valdek will be leading an expedition to retrieve him.’

  Pierce started laughing. ‘That I gotta see.’

  ‘It leaves a little vulnerability in East B’ One’s militia,’ said the Bear, ‘with Artex out of the way, most other ex-Atominii Syridan Mercs are just scattered about.’

  ‘How does he plan on tracing us?’

  ‘Nobody knows,’ said the Bear, ‘and if they do, they aren’t talking.’

  ‘What about that bitch Enaya?’ Pierce asked. ‘Has she been sniffing around?’

  ‘Not recently,’ said Berengar. ‘Whatever you’re gonna do though, I’d get moving on it. You leave this place for too long, they’ll put your house to use.’