DUALITY: The World of Lies (30 page)

Whereupon that realm's shore he had been laid
was mostly a matter of guesswork. He knew sure enough that his
bearing now was south southeast and set to it through more
uncharted lands that grew wetter and more tropical with each day’s
trek. He ventured through towering stone forests, layered tropical
steppes bursting with bright enormous flowers, and a volcanic
fireland seeping with lava flows and billowing sulphuric smoke,
natural hotsprings and geysers, then to more jungle domains of ape
and tiger where he dared not let his guard down and forewent four
nights of sleep in the crossing. In the viniest wrangling depths of
jungle, he discovered yet another gem along his journey, an ancient
overgrown Dharma temple, camouflaged by the ever encroaching
environs in such a way that it enhanced its hidden splendors. To
his delight, there were monks there, dozens, in a quiet sect. He
took shelter with them and prayed at their shrines and took their
tutelage for a nearly a week. They held great discourses on the
world of Samsara that rang true as they opened Gahre's mind even
further on the matter. He told them of his intentions, and he was
given an old parchment, a map, that showed him how to circumvent
the populated cities of Kirodomo and find passage on old roads all
the way to Kum Damma on to Pyre and the eastern edge of the known
world.

Their maps proved true, and Gahre surefootedly
pressed the charted course, foraging as he went on sustenance
primarily of snakes and rodents. The jungle presented new
challenges that he met as hardily as all that had come before. And
sure enough the land became increasingly sparse and the air more
arid until he reached the very end of it and set his eyes upon upon
a beige vista that stretched to the horizon and what he knew to be
a great many more beyond: The Sea of Sand.

“G
et up!
Wake up you slumbering jackass.”

Mei burst into the Captain's quarters,
hollering and shaking Aru's soundly sleeping form forcefully until
he roused in a state of confused annoyance. She didn't care,
something was very, very wrong aboard the Kinetic.

“Mei,” he yawned, “have you been
vaping?”

She had been and liberally, but that was
entirely beside the point! Now that she had awakened him in a
frenzy, she found herself at a loss as to how to explain the
problem without revealing certain aspects of it that needed to
remain hidden, leaving her tongue-tied and silent. Maybe she was a
bit out of control, but this was no delusion. She was certain of
that much.

“You have,” he concluded, sitting up and
squinching his tired eyes with a sigh. “And we've been down this
road before, haven't we? Delusion, paranoia, psychotic
episodes...”

Mei wasn't having it, not now. She struck him
square and hard in each shoulder with the heels of her hands,
sending his head thumping back on the headboard. For a split second
she thought maybe she had overdone it, but then it occurred to her
how many times he had banged her head off the very same headboard,
and repeatedly.

“Listen to me, dammit!” she hissed. “I've
received confirmation instructions from Service Intelligence, and
the thing of it is...”

Alert now, Aru quickly grasped both her wrists
with the better measure of his strength, and lowered them to the
surface of the bed where he held them in place. He was face to face
with her and glaring.

“What? You sent a covert transmission to
Occitania routed through the trans-star hyper-relay network without
clearing it with me first?”

By the Folly of Mandu! How could she explain
this to him? “Well, yes and no,” she answered, bobbing her head
from side to side. She could not tell him the coded method she and
her contact used; it was a covert system she was obliged to keep
concealed. Essentially, she sent personal messages to friends and
family, which were monitored as metadata by the Arathian L-5
network. Service intelligence, or at least a certain member of it,
could read them and decode the hidden message from the content by
order of what she chose or did not choose to discuss, by
cross-referencing a chart correlating the number of words used, the
timestamp of the message, and its content. That coded chart only
existed in the minds of two human operatives, one of which was Mei,
and thus was considered uncrackable by whatever machine decoders
might also be scanning through her messages.

“Let's just say there is a serious error in
the response code, which leads me to believe it has been
intercepted and compromised.” It was a message returned from her
“old school classmate” discussing in alternating order her life
then Mei's then hers again, which was another aspect of the code.
Except the message should have been received four days ago and the
timestamp and coded opening paragraph didn't match the chart
confirmation format. The rest of the message was encoded correctly
and told her that they were to rendezvous with a service patrol
ship in long range Occitanian orbit with the proper code-signal and
follow it into dock on the bloodmoon Oberion. That was all set out
in the message correctly, but the beginning of it, explaining why
she didn't respond sooner, was botched. Additionally, they were
only eight hours com distance now from Occitania via the
hyper-relays, and it should not have taken her contact three days
to respond. If there had been a legitimate reason for
the delayed response, the opening part of the email should
have discussed an entirely different topic that correlated to the
timestamp in accordance with the chart confirmation
format! It was totally fucked up and should not have happened
under any circumstances, but she also could not tell Aru any of
this without severely compromising a very valuable clandestine tool
of human Service Intelligence -particularly to a bloody Red bastard
like him!

“Well, Hell, Mei! What do you want me to say
here? I don't know who you are dealing with or how. If you are
using a code, especially transmitting to Tropica, you'd better
believe Rubelian Intelligence has all that metadata too, and you my
dear, are almost certainly on their surveillance short-list. The
good news is that if Red High Command intercepted, held, and
incorrectly modified the response, it means they don't
have it cracked.”

Yeah, ok, that was... possible. Maybe. But
no...

“The Red L-6 network on Occitania would never
compromise clandestine control that way, never. That's the first
rule of CC! The Machine Lord would damn well know the code before
he went manipulating it, and only then for damn good reason.
Otherwise, it would have come through on time and intact. What this
reeks of... is desperation.”

“Yeah, how?” he yawned.

“Like whatever entity held it knew
it didn't have the code cracked but knew it had to modify it in
order to....” To suit the altered timestamp! That was right. The
botched manipulation was the opening statement explaining why the
response was late. This entity may not have known the code, but it
knew it was a coded message and manipulated it to explain away the
late response. But it was not a late response; it had been sent
on-time and held back by the intervening entity, who then tried to
make it appear.... 
or...
wait!
 Mei was thinking
feverishly. 
No... that was too much.
It couldn't be! Oh but what if it is?

“In order to what?!” Aru prodded for her to
pick up where she had blankly left off. “You haven't
managed to convince me of anything more than how doped up you are
right now. Start making sense or I'll do what I did last time we
found ourselves here.”

Oh shit! Not that
again. 
He'd had the security bots
tranq her and lock her up in the medbay for a week to detox,
which was totally unnecessary overkill in her opinion. Aru and his
haughty anti-drug stance was the most hypocritically nauseating of
his character flaws. He had better not try it. She'd left the EMP
gun on deck. Damn. She would have to cool this
off with him until she was armed again. That EMP would
take out his stupid security bots in a flash. “If you even try that
again, I promise you I won't be the one who finds himself
incapacitated this time!”

“Dear, I have full command authority over the
ship. What are you going to do, lock me up with Ming? Making
threats like that doesn't bolster your case one bit. Quite the
opposite. I swear woman, that herb is going to be the death of
you -or more likely the both of us.”

Fucking
fuck! 
Infighting was pointless. She
knew that. “Who threatened who first? Aru, you have to trust me at
least a little. And there's more. We've both been so groggy
lately...”

Aru cut her off. “Yeah, well, I only got... oh
nine hours of sleep. Wow, that is a lot more than I would have
thought.”

“Right, and I was down for six of them too,
but guess what? It feels longer. Do you know what I mean? It's
like, you know, I can't remember my dreams well, but I feel like I
had more, like something in excess of the norm. Instead of one or
two fleeting flashes of them, I feel like there is a whole
anthology of dreams I'm trying to sort out.”

“Come, Mei, we've had a quite a run
recently. And we're passing through the solar borders into the
Cearulein heliosphere which always has some effect. Let’s remember
all the ship's systems that were damaged by the thermal meltdown.
System reported circadian simulation was still down, that alone can
strongly affect REM cycles -to say nothing of how copious vaping
might exacerbate things.”

God, he sounded just like Indulu right now,
harping on her habit like that to the exclusion everything else,
like it was the only thing that mattered. As soon as she vaped up,
apparently, everything else in the fucking universe stopped moving.
This kind of malarkey drove her nuts. If he would only open up a
little to what she was trying to convey to him. If she could only
articulate it…

“We passed through magnetic
sheathing borders two hours ago and are now reading low Cearulein
solar winds. I was on deck at the time. You know we always get a
velocity drop and a power surge crossing the heliosheath. As usual,
the burn sequencing started to normalize velocity, but it wasn't
normal… at least... it didn't
feel
like a normal acceleration. It feels like we're
going a lot faster than System reports.”

“Mei, for God's sake. You know as well as I do
that the inner ring is stabilized in such a way that one
cannot feel acceleration positive or negative aboard the Kinetic.
By the time we “feel” anything at all we're already in Code 1 Red
Alert. Let's look at this, shall we? Your message seemed “weird.”
Your dreams are “weird.” The ship feels “weird.” And I'm supposed
to discount your erratic behavior and twitching eyes that stem
directly from blatant drug use as an underlying cause of things
feeling “weird” to you? Behavior, I might add, that we've seen
before, the same kind of paranoia we get on every go-around with
this addiction of yours!”

Ugh, there just was no getting past this with
him. He even had her questioning herself! Granted, it was all
pretty iffy and sounded borderline delusional, all of it except for
the message coding error! She knew she wasn't imagining that, and
if she could only just elaborate on it to him, he might see that
she wasn't stark raving mad. The herb… he didn't understand it. It
relaxed her and changed her mode of perception. Yes, in some ways
it made her irrational, but what it took away in intelligence it
added in extrasensory perception. Something was terribly off about
this ship, and there was only one highly probable explanation for
that: Ming.

“It's the prisoner!” she declared.
“He's manipulating the ship somehow. You said it yourself, Aru.
He's a nascent Machine Lord in his own right, and he's found a
way...”

“There is no way, Mei, no way for him to hack
the ship from the zero-com room. It's quadruple redundantly
designed to block all forms of transmission, 100%. The air and the
water and the wastewater all route through the analog side
chambers, EMPed in a series of insulated transmission proof
compartments. We've already established that his containment is
effective. If not, we never would’ve seen him in the first place.
He'd just be running the ship and we'd be dead or detained
ourselves. He's complied with every rule I've set forth for him
over this past week. We can't keep going in circles with this. The
bottom line, and I want you to calm your mind and introspect on
this, is that you are high, very high. We need to get you clean and
thinking clearly then we can discuss this issue with the message
and figure out what it really portends. I mean, if it had been
just the message, Mei, but you're talking about dreams, and
speaking half-coherently at best. You can see that,
right?”

“One does not preclude the other!” She
was getting really upset that he wouldn't let this go. “Yes, I'm
vaped out, yes! But that doesn't change anything. I'm going to
check on the prisoner.”

“No. I will see to that on my own. Then I'll
take my coffee on the auxiliary bridge with you. I want
you to take a sedative, Mei. If you don't agree, I'll have Kinny
make sure of it. Are we clear?”

Yeah, there was about zero chance she was
going to do that, but he could go ahead and believe whatever suited
him for now. “Ok, fine I'll do it,” she lied. “Reconnect on
auxiliary bridge in ten then?”