by Eliza Green
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NEWLY DISCOVERED CHAPTERS
IN EXILON 5’S HISTORY
How much did humans know about the secret project their government had created? And that the result lived beneath their feet? The level of building work he’d seen from space hinted that things were set to improve for one race on Exilon 5, and it wasn’t the Indigenes.
He reached the New Victoria Maglev station tracks and followed the well-worn path back to the door of District Three. The decontamination procedures began. He clawed at the skin on his neck, sick of the filtration device controlling his breathing. Tired of the artificial skin changing him into something he was not.
The door took too long to open. Stephen jammed his fingers into the door’s crevice and winched it open. Safely inside, he dropped to his knees and yanked the filtration device out. His Stetson fell to the ground and he pushed it away. Next, he tore the jacket and shirt from his body and clawed the rest of the silicone skin off his face. Clumps of the pigmented membrane fell to the floor; the remainder clung to his clammy skin in ugly patches.
He was home. Standing over him were Pierre, Leon and Elise.
Where’s Anton? Leon frowned at the open door. Is he following?
Stephen shook his head as Elise helped him up off the floor. The air grew uncomfortably warm. For once he was grateful for her calming power.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘We’ll figure something out. At least you’re home and safe.’
Stephen looked each of them in the eye. ‘I wish it were that simple. We’ve got bigger problems.’
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Continue the story with GENESIS LIE, Book 2: With the government’s lie partly exposed, Bill Taggart and Stephen return to face new challenges in their search for a missing Anton. GET GENESIS LIE
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DUALITY: Jonathan Farrell is stuck between two realities. Who put him there, and can he escape before he loses his grip on the real world? Read this story with flavours of The Matrix and Inception. GET DUALITY
Turn the page to read an excerpt from GENESIS LIE now.
GENESIS LIE – CHAPTER 1
Bill Taggart’s hands shook as he held his wife’s coded letters. He ran a finger across his name on one of the cream envelopes, trying to remember every little detail about Isla’s handwriting. Were these written under duress?
Laura O’Halloran, the woman who worked in the Earth Security Centre, had been given these letters. Her last admission swirled around his head: ‘The government, Bill. It’s been them all along. Deighton was responsible for Isla’s disappearance. The board members ordered her to be killed.’
But without a body, how could he be sure they’d carried out those orders? What if Isla was hiding out somewhere?
The ‘T’ in Taggart had its usual curlicue at the end of the horizontal line. He loved her handwriting, so feminine, almost like calligraphy.
His stomach flipped as he turned the envelopes over in his hands. What was so important that she had to write it down? He’d thought of nothing except these letters for days now. Isla hadn’t been herself for months before her disappearance, over two years ago. Maybe the coded letters contained an explanation... So why couldn’t he open them?
Because they reminded him of his failure to protect her.
He snatched up his mug and took three large gulps of coffee, then set it down with a sigh. He had to open them at some point.
Bill ran his fingers over the chair he sat on, covered in a cream fabric that Isla had chosen. He’d followed her all over Nottingham so she could hunt down the right shade to match the synthetic alpaca wool rug in the living room. Everything in their privately owned apartment had been chosen by her.
His skin prickled as he looked around their shared space. This was the first time he’d been back since he was sent to Exilon 5 to head up the investigation into the Indigenes. On his return to Earth, the CEO of the World Government had ordered him to work in the International Task Office in Washington DC, closest to government offices. After two weeks and with no work, Bill was sent to the London-based ITF office. He assumed Charles Deighton had lost interest in him.
But Bill had been back on English soil a full day now and he still hadn’t heard from his London ITF boss, Simon Shaw, as to when he might return to duty. Doing nothing was killing him; he needed to keep his mind active. He needed to know if Isla might still be out there, waiting for him to find her. The thought punched him in the gut.
Stacks of boxes of Isla’s things sat next to the window, stuff he’d packed away in moments of anger and self pity. He hoped to have a reason to unpack them one day. The coded letters gave him hope. For now the boxes, placed four high and two wide against the blind-covered windows, served another purpose: to block any external view into the apartment. Bill stood up, collected the blanket from the back of the sofa, and pinned it to the wall. The blanket barely covered the Light Box’s virtual facade, but it would mask the view of any ITF spies clever enough to decipher the Box’s encrypted pass code.
Bill returned to the kitchen table and cleared the glass top of two burgundy placemats, a white milk jug and a matching sugar bowl. With the table clear, he sat down again and checked the boxes one final time to make sure they covered the window.
Items in one box—some of Isla’s clothes—caught his eye. The guilt he’d felt over packing her life away bloomed fresh in his chest. Another box contained a bowl that used to sit by the front door, stuffed with dried lavender and patchouli flowers. The music function on the Light Box hadn’t been activated since she was last here—the last selection was Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, her favourite. After her disappearance, he’d slipped back into his former isolated existence with alarming ease. Her letters had to contain a clue as to her whereabouts. The lingering smell of perfume on the envelopes gave him hope that she’d only recently written the letters.
He placed the three envelopes on the glass surface, lining the edges up against each other.
There were no instructions with the envelopes, no order on which to open first. He pulled his DPad out of his bag and placed it beside him. Laura had not been able to identify the code used. To help decipher them, Bill had downloaded a bunch of articles on secret languages and codes from the Nottingham Central Digital Library.
He slid his finger under the already opened flap of one of the envelopes, noting the sections where the glue felt thicker. Laura had received them, already opened, from the woman from booth sixteen, but the glue indicated that someone else had re-sealed them prior to that.
It chilled him to think about the Earth Security Centre or the World Government showing an interest in his wife’s letters.
At least they were coded.
Bill pulled two letters out of each of the two envelopes and a fifth letter out of the last one. He laid each one flat on the table. The fifth, solitary letter, he noticed, was not coded. Skimming the top line, he drew in a tight breath and refolded it, shoving it deep into the back pocket of his trousers.
The four remaining letters had a number scrawled in the top right hand corner, possibly indicating the order in which they’d been written. The first letter read:
Dhtei teiao osonm dorta etire estch cehae ihaed veust
Rrone osugi bvake eebia mcipc eooeo mnnad ruati ertsn
hpytfa awieoe imodui sernbo wurteu ichuya sasloe tticlr hitole
ridngh esebee ugttne rtoude ehorid yiitks onnoin iaieanl fdmpcep
Bill pulled his DPad closer and opened the downloaded files about codes and ciphers. He worked through the files sequentially, to figure out which code Isla had used. The only one vaguely familiar to him was Morse code, something Isla had mentioned once a long time ago and which had sparked her interest in developing a secret language. He should have pushed her to share her ideas. But her back-to-back shifts as a military trainee on Exilon 5 had left her with little energy to do anything other than sleep.
Each evening they’d chat over the Light Box. And whenever he’d
asked how her day was, she always said the same thing: ‘I’ve had a dog day, Bill.’
‘Anything I can do to help?’ he’d ask.
‘Nah,’ she’d say, playing with the tags that hung around her neck. ‘All part of the job, I suppose.’
Bill opened the first file on his DPad and read about the different codes that someone might use in a message. The first code used ciphers or substitution of letters. He tried various permutations, starting with the first letter, substituting the A for C, B for D, C for E, and so on. When the first word made little sense, he increased the distance of the substitution, until the A became Z, B became A, and C became B. But the first sentence still made no sense, and after an hour wasted he finally discounted that method.
Bill scrubbed his head as he stared at the letters. Ciphers were too obvious a choice. Presuming the letters had originated from inside the ESC, where the woman from booth sixteen had discovered them, then someone would have tried to read them. But Bill believed their continued existence meant the gibberish had been too complex to decipher. Isla would have used something other than ciphers to code these. Not only was she trained military, but her father, a military man with an obsession for security, would have taught her a few things beyond the standard textbook regime.
Bill considered using a substitution cipher wheel, the next topic mentioned in the first document he had downloaded, but he had no clue on what key to use with the algorithm. He opened the library icon and poised his finger over the library avatar. With one touch, he could engage with the avatar, ask about the most likely algorithms that someone might use. But his hesitation grew when he remembered all avatars recorded their conversations and requests. He didn’t want to give the World Government a heads up that he had the letters. Pinning the section, he moved on. If no other methods worked, he would try the wheel last.
Next was a document on Pig Latin, where the first consonant of a word is moved to the back and the letters ‘ay’ tagged to the end. But Isla’s text didn’t fit at all—there were no ‘ay’s anywhere in her letters.
The third section discussed transposed cyphertext, but both the sender and receiver had to know the algorithm or method to unlock the code. He couldn’t think of anything Isla might have said or left behind that would enable him to decipher it.
Bill scrubbed his head again.
What are you trying to tell me, Isla?
He fought the urge to work through the problem out loud. While he’d somehow kept his Nottingham apartment off the grid, the ITF had ways of worming their way into his life. He would do another sweep for any listening bugs later, but his priority now was to keep the content of Isla’s letters a secret.
Bill stood and looked down to the street below. It was around this time that the beggars changed shifts. He watched as those off the clock walked towards the bullet train station while new ones wrapped themselves in the filthy blankets left behind. Passersby ignored the beggars sat cross-legged and shivering in the bone-chilling air on Nottingham’s cold streets. Few people cared for the less fortunate. With the conditions that prevailed on Earth, everyone was in more or less in the same situation.
One of the street beggars removed something from his pocket. Bill pulled a pair of magnification glasses out of his bag and zoomed in. He saw the beggar talking into a communication device.
He shook his head and smiled. One of Deighton’s men, presumably, reporting back to base that their unpredictable investigator was still in his apartment. He closed the blinds and rearranged the boxes. Something else caught his attention and he went rigid.
Shit.
Isla had left him a clue, several to be exact, but he hadn’t had the motivation—or letters—before now to connect the dots.
Numbers. That had to be it. It was the perfect algorithm.
‘I’ve had a dog day,’ she used to say. She hadn’t been looking for sympathy. She’d been trying to tell him something.
Bill ran to the bedroom and jerked the wardrobe door open. The door creaked as he pulled his old leather suitcase out and flung it on the bed.
His adrenaline-charged hands fumbled with the code that kept the old-style metal clasps in place. He punched in a number. The panel flashed red and he cursed. On the third try, it opened. Bill yanked the suitcase apart and turned it upside down. Everything he owned that mattered to him fell out onto the bed. He ran his hand along the smooth base of the suitcase until he heard a click. The false panel came away in his hand and he tossed it onto the floor. Among the hidden items were Isla’s dog tags, the ones she’d been given when she first transferred to Exilon 5. The ones she had conveniently forgotten to take with her on her last trip.
He ran his finger over the indented metal tag, over Isla’s name, but more important over the nine-digit number allocated to her:
8 9 6 7 3 4 5 1 2
Bill clutched the dog tags so tight, the metal bit into his skin. He returned to the kitchen table and grabbed the first letter. He thought about keying the information into his DPad; it would be faster. Instead, he flipped over one of the other letters, fished a pen out of one of Isla’s boxes, and scribbled the numbers down on the back. He took the first line of text from letter one:
Dhtei teiao osonm dorta etire estch cehae ihaed veust
He listed each word into columns, as the article on transposed cyphertext had suggested.
D T O D E E C I V
H E S O T S E H E
T I O R I T H A U
E A N T R C A E S
I O M A E H E D T
Then he placed Isla’s dog tag number on the top row above each letter and rearranged them in numerical order. Suddenly words appeared.
I V E C O D E D T
H E S E S O T H E
A U T H O R I T I
E S C A N T R E A
D T H E M A E I O
He shook his head and smiled. ‘Isla, you crafty girl.’ As fast as he could, he applied the code to the rest of the text until he had deciphered the first letter:
I’ve coded these so the authorities can’t read them. Remember our conversation about speaking in code? I came up with this. Sorry I couldn’t tell you before. If you’re reading these, I’m in too deep to turn back. Indigenes need help.
Bill’s nerves jangled as he applied the same method to the three remaining letters. He read them several times.
CD has asked DG to spy on me. They’ve already searched my locker at work, probably looking for these. I’ve hidden them away, but if they get their hands on them, they should be meaningless. I have a contact on E5. He’s more open to change, I think.
We were ordered to flush the Indigenes out of their hiding place and into the open. The government wants us to capture one, so they can study it in greater detail. You need to tell the Indigenes this. I never had a chance to. They pulled me off the case before I could. Trust your instincts, Bill. You were always good at that.
The military are playing games with me, probably at CD’s request. I don’t know how much longer I will last here. They have created individual files on each of the Indigenes, the ones who’ve surfaced in the last year. They seem most interested in the younger ones, the newest generation. You have to warn the Indigenes. Nothing else matters. Remember I love you.
Bill tossed the letters onto the table and sat down hard on the chair.
Remember I love you. It sounded too much like she was saying goodbye.
He pulled at his grey speckled hair, ignoring the pricks of pain. Hours passed in this way. To him, it felt like seconds.
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Word from the Author
This is the second edition of a book I first published in 2012 as Becoming Human. It features new scenes for fan favourites and focuses more on the cent
ral theme of the story. While I loved the first version, I felt it meandered into subplots a little too much and left key character scenes underdeveloped.
After completing Genesis Cure, Book 7 in the series, I could see the first book needed serious updating to bring it in line with my current writing style. Yes, I’m a completely different writer in 2020 than in 2012! Whether you’re a long time fan or new to the series, I hope you enjoyed the new version. I must say I got great pleasure from tearing the story apart and rebuilding it, while keeping the stuff that mattered.
Thank you to Tom, Jessica, and John for road testing the new version for me. When I started writing, I never thought I’d have readers so willing to help me out whenever I asked. I am really and truly grateful for your help.
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About the Author
Eliza Green tried her hand at fashion designing, massage, painting, and even ghost hunting, before finding her love of writing. She often wonders if her desire to change the ending of a particular glittery vampire story steered her in that direction (it did). After earning her degree in marketing, Eliza went on to work in everything but marketing, but swears she uses it in everyday life, or so she tells her bank manager.