Chaos Cipher (27 page)

The V-TOL
plane drew gradually onto a platform, which stepped over the edge
of the quarry, and rolled to a stop. A moment later the platform
began to descend, gliding down towards the lake at the bottom of
the scree where boulders rested and reeds strung across the
conglomeration of rocks. Dry shoots and stalks nested in the marsh
where artificial terns and plovers settled about the shallow. The
elevator platform set down into the bottom and a narrow glass
bridge ascended from the water to meet with the platform’s edge,
constructing a roadway that led to the building and bridged the
lake’s basin. They rolled smoothly across the bridge, its
hydrophobic surface unsticking the water like skeltering beads of
mercury that left it perfectly dry for the wheels. And they soon
arrived to the building’s foyer where the golden lights bloomed
from chandeliers. Holograms swept the sky and androids were serving
drinks to the socialites and special guests who were fraternising
and consorting in celebration this night. The V-TOL plane shifted
slowly into the building and people stepped out of the way as
tables slid apart to create a road and people on the banisters and
stairwells were applauding and cheering.

‘
This is for
you, Doctor,’ Filipe declared with an inebriated smile. Malik
noticed how alcohol seemed to cling to him, he’d only had a few
glasses and the smell stuck to him like he was a
brewery.

It was not
the besotted and debauched behaviour he had been expecting and
could have expected from his time period, they were elegant, young,
established and well mannered, probably stimulated by super-drugs
rather than alcohol. They regarded him with respectful applause and
not some overwhelming cheer and did so with a semblance of pride
and propriety that Malik Serat may have once known from his
Father’s side of the family, his mother had never been one for
celebration.

‘
Welcome
home, monsieur,’ said Filipe.

‘
This is not
my home,’ said Malik distantly.

The V-TOL
plane rolled through the opening in the foyer and eventually met
with another elevator. It glided inside, a perfect fit, as though
the purpose of the elevator was for this very vehicle. And the
doors closed before the platform began to ascend once more through
the building.

‘
This is us,’
Filipe explained throwing the glass recklessly aside and standing
from his padded black leather seat to open the door. Malik waited
until Filipe was out of the cabin and stretching his arms and legs
in the elevator somewhere. Then he too stepped out of the
vehicle.

‘
What is this
place?’

‘
This is one
of your homes, Malik,’ he reminded gently touching the Doctor’s
shoulder. ‘We’re going to get you the best treatment, get rid of
your psychosomatic problems and grow your hair back. You’ll be
fixed up again, back to your happy old self. Then you can tell us
how things fell apart on the Erebus.’

The elevator
finally arrived at the penthouse and the doors slid into the walls
and opened up. Malik followed Filipe into the room outside. There
must have been three hundred square metres of space, expanding into
a rounded open area, lit elegantly in auspicious blooms of gold and
black pearl. Floor to ceiling windows encompassed most of the
building, creating a panoramic vista of the quarry and the lake
outside. He could see now that lasers and light shows were
patterned onto the far limestone walls to create interesting
projection mapped displays which changed the rock face into an
entertainment feature of cinematic art. Further inside he saw the
flaked black shadows of things once living, birds of prey stuffed
and positioned with huge wingspans like blackened spectres in their
ghoulish drapes frozen as in time in the dim light. These were
species he had been told were now extinct, preserved only to gaze
at now. The far wall obtained a mounted shark, vertically halved to
fit the wall, while its other half lay preserved in glass by the
veranda’s transparent doors, its internals perfectly visible to see
and sealed in the material.

He stepped
across the black marble floor where arabesque frescoes swirled in
animated shifting demonstrations beneath his feet. He saw animated
there golden ripples shimmering out from under his gecko socks
where he stepped as though he was walking above a liquid surface of
gold. He saw projection map fields still active and glowing by the
large black-leather corner couches and the lambencies of a radiant
plasma ball contained within a magnetic field giving out soft waves
of heat and light. There was an open kitchen with table tops and
work surfaces and wenge cupboards, there was even an old fashioned
zero-energy bio fridge he recognised from his youth, a vertical
storage vat with a bio-polymer gel containing bits of food in air
bubbles. This was the only aspect that remained primitive and
revivalist of an old capitalist culture in an energy crisis. He’d
already learned the traditional methods of receiving goods were by
drone air postage. And dominating the central open space stood a
large and slender shaped piano. Malik knew that it was an old
classic, a Bogányi.

He saw an
ornamental statue of David, a traditional shrunken replica of
Michelangelo’s marble masterpiece, fixed into a square pedestal
which stood above a mantelpiece. Serat wasn’t happy with its
position on the mantelpiece. The sculpture was aligned but not
perfectly. He pointed his finger and nudged it a hair’s length into
position to appease his compulsion to fidget.

To his
surprise the statue crumbled gently apart like a set of microscopic
dominos, faltering like leaves to reassemble into a new shape,
building up again until they formed the sculpture of Atlas down on
one knee holding up the celestial globe on his
shoulders.

‘
I see my
brother still collects clatonic sculpture pieces,’ said
Malik.

‘
He still
prefers traditional cooking, too,’ another voice echoed from the
veranda.

A man shifted
inside, head hunched as he picked at something from his suit,
before stepping under the boundary of light. He was wearing a black
suit fashioned rather like a tuxedo, with features of opticidyne
textures and applications installed into the software of the
electro-fabric. He was tall unlike Malik, and gaunt, his face
chiselled with wrinkles that etched throughout his sun kissed skin,
like brown leather left out in the desert. He had white hair still
shaded with youthful blackness at the flanks and smartly combed and
gelled into place, and his beard was long, narrow, neatly trimmed
and combed with a black strip running from his lower lip to the
longest hair-tip, waxed, Malik suspected, and well cared for. He
had a glass of thirty year matured red wine cupped in his hand and
smiled most endearingly.

‘
Against all
odds, you finally made it back to Earth, my younger big
brother.’

-19-

L
aux shifted around the new display
screen, satisfied with his work. From here he’d soon be receiving
transmissions from the rest of the city and the Q-net access would
be complete.

‘
Eureka
supreme!’ He said with his hands up to the screen, blowing kisses
to the new setup. ‘Speakers…I need speakers…’ he began pacing back
and forth irritably. He looked at his wrist Quantic and checked the
time. In Cerise Timbers they didn’t have clocks; time was
irrelevant to many of the civilians. They simply didn’t care about
time. But Laux was a punctilious man who saw time as something more
than just a method for social management. He saw it as an absolute
necessity for calculations, for deadlines, for fermentation
periods. He’d gone as far as to set up receivers that could pick up
messages from the Atominii, messages relaying the global time. The
Atominii clocks were called C.A.L.C stations, Caesium Atomic
Lagrange Clocks. They were set up into points of space where a
negative gravitational influence occurred in Lagrange points.
Quantum computers return the data in qubits to the Atominii, a
superluminal communication, instant data using entangled particles
and basic Morse code. It’s all synchronised into one true time, and
Laux was proud he’d found a way to acquire that time. A silent
achievement, since nobody else here cared.

His Quantic-W
was currently running several timings on different schedules, a
watch with many coloured fingers, each one representing a different
count down. Each one gauging only Laux knew what.

‘
Where’s the
kid?’ he said pacing back and forth again. He ran his sleeve up and
checked the time. ‘The kid the kid, where is he?’

Suddenly
there was a crash as wires, cables and broken equipment spilled to
the floor, all heaping from a torn backpack which crashed there
heavily. Laux glared with big brown eyes at young Kyo who stood
above the backpack, his nose running with blood, his eye bruised
and his cheek scuffed. He was gasping for air and he let the wounds
speak for themselves.

‘
Holy
Atomagod!’ He harked, running to the boy’s aid. Laux tilted his
head to check his nose and slowly turned it the other
way.

‘
Ouch!’ Kyo
moaned. ‘Agh-no no no…ooff!’

‘
Look at
me.’

‘
Just a
second.’

‘
Eyes
straight.’

‘
Okay.’

‘
Can you see
this?’ he said, taking a chewed up pencil from his top
pocket.

‘
Yeah I said
I’d stop eating those…’

‘
Eyes
forward, follow the pencil…up…down…now follow.’

Laux observed
closely as Kyo’s eyes followed the pencil from side to side and he
saw the bruising on the eye was quite severe.

‘
Let’s get
you cleaned up,’ he smiled amiably.

Laux dashed
to the first aid cabinet and opened the shutters to retrieve one of
the vials. He hurried over with swabs and cotton and after dabbing
the liquid applied it to Kyo’s wounds. Kyo sat on a nearby stool
and Laux put on a pair of glasses as he worked. They looked like
the bottom of jam jars, bloating his eyes like fisheye
lenses.

‘
So do you
wanna tell me who did this to you?’ Laux asked, sitting in front of
the kid and dabbing his brow.

‘
No,’ he
hissed in pain. ‘Not really.’

‘
Somebody you
know?’

‘
Not
personally,’ and Kyo thought about what he’d said. ‘Well…I guess
now it’s personal.’

‘
Uh-hu.’

‘
But before
I’d only heard of him.’

‘
It was
another kid who did this to you?’

‘
Yeah. An
older boy. I guess he’s like eighteen or something. Bigger
too.’

‘
Well the
good news is you’ll be right as rain again in a couple of days.
Olympians are fast healers.’ Laux noted. ‘You’ve strong bones. I
believe there’s nothing broken here.’

‘
Feels
broken,’ Kyo sniffled.

‘
No, it’s
perfectly fine,’ Laux nodded, ‘maybe a minor fracture. Some
bruising on your eye that concerns me a little but if you can see
then you’ll be back to nibbling my pencils and pens again
soon.’

‘
You got any
whiskey?’

‘
How old are
you?’

‘
Twenty
one-’

‘
Yeah, real
cute,’ Laux said with a frown. ‘None for you,
youngster.’

‘
Well,’ Kyo
sighed looking down, ‘sorry about your equipment.’

‘
Ahh, that
doesn’t matter,’ Laux shrugged, ‘what matters is that you’re safe.’
And the Professor patted both his shoulders and gave them a firm
squeeze. Laux gathered his things from the table, cleaning up the
blood swabbed cotton and buds then scrapped everything into a
nearby bucket. He put a plaster over Kyo’s nose and nodded in his
usual approving way.

‘
All done,’
he said. ‘You’ll fit right in around here wearing those things.
Pania I believe considers it a fashion statement.’

Laux turned
around and took hold of the beaker and headed back to the first aid
cabinet. He kicked wires from his legs and tripped slightly, a
clinking and scattering of tools ringing out over the
floor.

‘
Do you have
any enemies, Laux?’ Kyo asked, leaning over the table. His voice
sounded nasally with the blocked nose.

‘
Oh,’ Laux
started, removing his large glasses and putting them away in the
cabinet. ‘I’ve a few.’

‘
Anybody I
know?’

‘
I doubt it,’
Laux said, ‘not unless you’ve wondered around the Atominii cities
or overpopulated areas of the hardlands.’

‘
You don’t
talk much about your past,’ Kyo said. ‘How come? My pops always
said that the past is part of your identity.’

Laux raised
his eyebrows and glared into space for a moment.

‘
He’s not
wrong,’ he said almost to himself. ‘But! One must be careful never
to live in the past.’

‘
You
mean…nostalgia?’

‘
Precisely!’
Laux smiled wide. ‘You might just miss something important
happening now.’