Chapter 8
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We carried Del back to Cora’s locker on the eighteenth floor, laid her on Cora’s bed and closed the door. Only a few questioning eyes passed us on the way.
“So, that was an interesting way to tell someone you’re glad to see them.” I pushed my hands into my pockets and leaned against the wall beside the door, taking the weight off my swollen ankle. C18-18 was stencilled on the door in black spray paint. The hallway was quiet, no one hanging around, no foot traffic, no noise. It seemed to be in a forgotten corner of the arcology, untouched for years. The only thing that told me otherwise was the bright yellow graffiti sprayed across the wall and door along one whole side of the corridor. In huge stylised letters, it read ‘Free Khalo’.
The recent demonstrations and threats made to the Bond Governments over Khalo’s sovereignty had been an ongoing struggle for the past year. As soon as Dr Marie Allard blew the whistle on Neotec’s treatment of their scientists and engineers, and all the –as yet uncorroborated, yet incredibly disturbing– allegations made about their teleportation technology, the political paradigm on Khalo was thrown into turmoil. Suddenly, the possibility that the entire trucking industry would be rendered redundant created huge questions about the future of Khalo, the truckstop turned metropolis. If Earth and Luksha could trade without needing to move freight from one point in space to another, but instead could simply fold space-time in on itself so the two points were physically next to each other, what would happen to the last two centuries’ worth of infrastructure for The Bond’s logistics? What would happen to the thousands of truckers employed by The Bond’s respective logistics industries? What would happen to Khalo?
Dr Allard’s accusations had forced her into hiding, or so the story on the news cycle goes, but she still regularly posts damning rants directed at Neotec to her now millions of followers on Earth’s mediasphere. News of her public condemnation of Neotec has even reached Luksha. Since Neotec is a Bond corporation, and thanks to growing pressure for them to respond to the accusations, two months prior to Del’s stall exploding, they publicly denounced everything Dr. Allard had said about the company, painting her as a disgruntled former employee. It’s not a new tactic to discredit voices that big corporations don’t want heard, and it just fuelled the flames of anti-Bond sentiment, not only on Khalo, but the Bond worlds too.
There’s an old saying from Earth: “Don’t believe anything until it’s been officially denied.”
Anyway, the Free Khalo movement has been gaining traction ever since. Even a few Khal-Sec guards were involved in it, desperate to get out from under the bootheel of both Earth and Luksha. And I had to admit, in terms of wordplay, they had the upper hand with the whole “free from Bond-age” thing.
“I thought about hugging her, but then I remembered she let me really worry about her for three days. No contact at all. Not a word. That pissed me off.”
Cora’s hard tone reverberated in the quiet hallway, bouncing off the flat steel walls, uninterrupted by anything soft or porous.
“No shit.” I tried to keep my voice low and soft. “Well, she actually saved my ass. Drones were sweeping the side of the arco I was climbing down and if it hadn’t been for her pulling me through a window and taking me through the guts of the station back to Cho, I’d be in the brig now.”
“Was it her?” said Cora, flatly.
“That killed Ferro? I don’t know for sure. But I suspect yes.”
“Why were you climbing down the side of an Arco?”
“Wait till I tell you about my daring escape!” I regaled Cora of the chase through the streets of Sheim, my stairwell nightmare, and my leap from the terrace before meeting Del. Only omitting the parts where I puffed and panted my way up the stairs or clumsily fell off ladders.
“There’s something else too,” I said. “When we were in the guts, we were caught by a young engineer. Long story short, I had to convince Del to not kill her. I really thought she was going to break this kid’s neck.” I tried to look apologetic, but it didn’t seem to make a difference. Cora just sighed.
“She’s going to stay with me tonight.” She gestured at the closed door. “I’ll try find out more. Why don’t you go get some sleep and see what Adio says in the morning?”
“Sure. Don’t you want to be there for that, though?” I asked.
“Nah, you got it. Let me know how it goes, though, I’ll be here” She said, her eyelids looked heavy. She often suggested that I get some sleep if she was tired herself. It was a much nicer way to say “Go away, I’m tired.” I liked that about her.
“Right. I’ll see you tomorrow then.” I said turning toward the stairwell. I was only a few floors down, on 13, so it wouldn’t take long to get to my locker.
“En.” Cora said, stopping me by the arm. “Thanks, I owe you one for tonight.”
“Mark it off from what I owe you then. I’ll get it down to even-Stevens sometime.” I smiled and carried on. I had a feeling that sleep was going to hit me like a ton of bricks.
***
The next morning, I went straight to Adio’s cabin. It was a 10-minute walk from my building to his, through the cramped and angular corridors of Downtown Cho. When it got busy, people defaulted to shuffling along on the right-hand side, allowing traffic to flow in both directions. At intersections, there was no such organisation, which meant that, usually, one or two corridors got backed up til there was a break in the bottlenecked queues coming from whatever offshoot. There was an unspoken rule that people who were in a hurry could squeeze through the middle, between the two traffic flows, though that often led to more problems at one point or another.
I shambled along with the crowd, sluggishly lumbering along towards the widest point in Cho, Xi Square, a nexus point for every route through the district. It wasn’t a square, though. It was a cube. One hundred and ten floors from the skin, just under two kilometres from the heart, routes branched off in six directions. I was still a few hundred yards away when I noticed the two people, one human, one lukshae, standing in the middle of the corridor asking the passers-by to take a moment to engage their SubComs. They were each holding something in their left hands, beacons. Improvised electronic devices designed to broadcast media within a short range to active SubComs. Businesses used them a lot for advertising. How better to attract the attention of someone walking past then have an ad jump out in front of them to beckon them in.
Out of curiosity, and after seeing the shocked reactions of the people who’d engaged walking the opposite way, I tapped my temple and activated my SubCom. The grid overlay found the exact dimensions of the corridor and laid itself over it perfectly before outlining as many of the bodies in the small space as it could resolve. It flashed the foreshortened shapes of doors, hatches, lighting veins, anything my SubCom’s recognition model identified as an object, person or structure. I blinked a few times to let my eyes adjust to the overlay. It highlighted the graffiti on the wall to my left. I hadn’t noticed it before. Between the shambling crowd, my SubCom picked out the word and brought it forward.
Khalo
I could see there was more farther down the corridor in the direction I was headed, but still too far away for the interface to pick out. Still no sign of whatever the beacons were broadcasting either. Ten paces or so got me to the next word on the wall.
Will
I was close enough now to hear the two messengers.
“They won’t show this on the news cycle.”
“Dr. Allard speaks the truth!”
“Accept the terms on your SubCom to download this footage.”
“More people need to see this!”
A small, red-bordered window appeared on the bottom right of my field of view. It had a logo for KSPublic and a blue circle with a blue dot in the middle above it. I stared at the dot, effectively signing my name on a dotted line, and giving permission to who-knows-who to sell my information to who-knows-what. The circle changed from blue to green.
A woman’s face appeared in the window. Her eyes were baggy and lit with an unspoken fire. She stared into the feed, intensely, leaning forward so that her straight jet black hair hung and curled around her eyes.
“I finally did it.” She said with a sigh. Behind her, a messy apartment was half-lit by a deep golden light that flooded in from the wide windows on her left. The contrast between the darkness behind her and the almost solid gold light would’ve looked like a graphic painting were it not for the clutter on every surface. Paper files were stacked in monolithic piles on the counter, old ceramic plates and coffee cups littered the windowsill, and there were dark bags piled into a corner at the far wall.
“I knew there would be evidence, but I wasn’t sure what form it would take. I knew Neotec was a leaky ship, but for so long I didn’t know where to look. Until recently.”
She smiled like she had a winning poker hand and no poker face.
“I was contacted anonymously by someone who works for Neotec. At first, I didn’t believe what they were telling me they had. They said they had genuine security footage from Neotec’s archive of the first field test of their teleportation technology. I thought they were full of shit. A ploy to bring me out into the open. But no. They were legitimate. More importantly, the information and footage they shared with me are legitimate. There is no doubt. What you’re about to see is one hundred per cent genuine.”
I kept shuffling along with the slow traffic, passing by the two messengers. One of them, the lukshae, turned to me and looked me dead in the eye.
“Help us stop this mad scientist of a corporation. They are messing with forces they do not understand and it will mean death for all of us!” He turned the rest of the corridor, escalating his plead until he sounded like a preacher.
The conclusion of the graffiti on the wall highlighted itself.
Burn.
The woman in the window had continued her account despite my attention wavering. She seemed to be finished by the time I started watching the feed again. She disappeared, replaced by a static camera feed, seemingly placed in the top corner of a large laboratory. In the middle of the room, large apparatus was set up. Two circular platforms surrounded by low towers that flung out multicoloured cables that snaked in every direction on the lab floor. People in white coats scurried around like ants on a hill, tapping at data slates while they looked over every aspect of their creation. Large displays manifested active readouts, blocks of shifting green text scrolled vertically while charts pulsated with what looked like real-time monitoring data.
A few seconds into the feed, the whitecoats placed a large crate onto one of the platforms then congregated behind a huge, clear partition. It was hard to make out exactly what was in the crate, but it was alive, shifting from one haunch to another. My gut tightened a little, anxious about what was going to happen next. I was pretty sure testing a teleportation rig with a living animal went against some convention or other but then again, I supposed, corporations like Neotec didn’t concern themselves much with that sort of thing. A moment where there seemed to be a buzz of excitement among the whitecoats, then nothing. They looked at each other, waiting, the tension of the moment slowly fizzling out.
Then the crate was gone. The space around it folded in on itself, like a piece of hanging cloth being pinched from behind, leaving the space as it was before the crate had been there. The whitecoats all craned their necks to look at the second platform expectantly. When nothing appeared, they looked at each other again. Then they began tapping at their data slates, presumably something had gone awry.
I got to the entrance to Xi Square when the bright lighting veins flooded the cubic hollow just as the window on my interface flashed, dazzling me. I stumbled a little out of the main current of traffic. Patrons of a noodle bar risked sidelong glances as I put my hand on the counter to steady myself. The little lukshae behind the bar said something with clicks and pops and waved me away from the line of stools.
The video continued in spite of my disorientation. Xi square lurched in front of me like a die coming to a slow, climactic stop. People filed in orthogonal queues, crisscrossing the floor, while an anti-clockwise stream circled the space on a walkway that intersected the centre of the huge cube. The centre was occupied by a shaft that housed a two-way hydraulic lift, a stuttering stream of commuters filed in and out as the platforms disappeared out of view before the next one appeared a few moments later.
I shut my eyes tight and shook my head. The window stayed where it was, burning bright but slowly dimming. After another second, I recognised with some confusion the unfolding horror on the little window. The second platform was ablaze with a bluish flame. It wasn’t that the equipment itself was on fire, I realised after a moment, but the fire, if it was fire, seemed to be floating above, but tethered to the platform by some unknown force. The more my eyes adjusted to the brightness, the bluish flame, no, not flame, something more fluid, it settled into a kind of organic undulation. It pulsated in a way that drew me in. Held my attention like a hypnotist’s pocket watch. I almost didn’t notice the reactions of the white-coats. A few of them were hiding, crouched behind the partition, holding their heads. Others were fighting, and not just fighting, tearing at each other, tearing at themselves, blood had been spilt on the floor and was pooling gently around one of the scientists’ bodies. Something despicable had come from that bluish, pulsing shape and it was making the scientists, for lack of a better description, fucking crazy. I saw one of them drive their thumbs into the eyes of another, heads were bashed into the clear screen that was meant to protect them, one was swinging something heavy and metal around. When they found a target they ferociously beat the poor figure with it till there was no more sign of life. One shambled slowly towards the anomaly, surrounded by chaos, and stood in front of it, head tilted to one side, staring. Then something changed in it. Its colour darkened and something like electricity sparked across its surface then shot out towards them. Around them, like a shocking embrace. Static hissed across the feed. The scientist was pulled into the now thrashing shape and disappeared. It folded in around them and fizzled out, leaving in its wake some malignant knowledge that neither humankind nor lukshae had encountered before.
The feed cut back to Dr. Allard’s intense stare.
“This was the first test they did. Many more took place while I was employed by Neotec. The bodies I examined after each of these horrific tests were beyond description. The survivors of such events have been committed to mental institutions or have met terrible conclusions to their life. This is what Neotec have been spending their resources on for the last three years, at least. They are messing with forces they can neither control nor comprehend. It needs to stop. Now.”
She stared at the feed for another second before it blacked out and the little window winked closed.
I stood, dumbfounded. Xi square came to rest, suddenly upright and solid. The traffic still flowed, as it always did. A conveyor belt of bodies, seemingly unperturbed by what the messengers were broadcasting. I had too many questions to really consider asking any single one first. But if I had to choose.
What the fuck did I just watch?
Whatever that –thing– was, it affected everything in the lab in an incredible way. A room full of, presumably, sane and rational scientists, at the mere appearance of the –thing– turned into a riot of insane chimpanzees.
Was it a direct influence from the thing? Or maybe it emitted something? Some kind of toxin that made them go crazy.
I had no idea what it was, but the fact that it, whatever it was, showed up and then all hell broke loose was enough of a revelation to be worried about what it could mean if they could weaponize it. The Bond government-sponsored media might spew out all the altruistic propaganda they can fabricate but there were still wars going on in the Sol system. Wars over resources that were available in abundance around every star. Wars between corporations. Wars over which god was the correct god, or gods, to worship, or fear.
I had to get to Adio. Despite whatever wild shit was happening, on Khalo or off, it was hard to tell, it didn’t change the fact that I needed to see Adio as soon as possible. He probably already knew about Ferro’s death. I made a point of not watching the news cycle on the daily but I guessed his death would’ve already featured. If not, Cora seemed pretty convinced that Adio had a few streams of information flowing in his direction. I felt a knot in my stomach considering how he might react to Ferro’s demise and whether he’d expect me to explain it. I wasn’t sure I could.