by Alex Scarrow
‘Correct. The Rebornist's long-awaited Last Prophet.’
‘Hmmm. As things stand, Deacon, the Administration can ride out this wave. We're the Hand That Rocks the Cradle.'
She was talking about planetary birth rates. The perfect leverage; the Administration could deny rebellious moms and dads on rebellious planets the ability to produce rebellious little kiddies. Wait around long enough and a planet full of deadly insurgents would become a planet full of creaking old people moaning about the weather.
'Population-leverage is our Big Blunt Hammer, but the marines, they're our expensive surgical tool, Deacon. We can't afford to deploy them everywhere.'
She settled back in the plastex chair and lightly stroked the back of her manicured hand with the other. ‘We can win a waiting game if the status quo is maintained, but not a galaxy-wide crusade. We can tolerate Rebornists for the time being. But this radical faction of theirs, these Awoken are attracting increasing numbers of followers.'
'I'm well aware of that, Councillor.'
'I wonder if you really are. You don't have the big picture. You have no idea how thinly stretched our assets are. Putting 'boots on the ground' is becoming something of a luxury we can ill afford.'
He watched her as she traced a finger across her well-defined knuckles and down into the valleys between them.
'If Mason’s creature is something those terrorists can use…perhaps, as you suggest, Deacon, as a genetically engineered prophet, that will certainly boost the numbers of those fanatics….we’re going to be in for a whole lot of fucking trouble.’
Deacon twitched in his chair. The language was uncharacteristic of her. It didn't sound vulgar, it sounded dangerous.
‘You assured me, when we spoke back on Liberty, when I first briefed you, that you would sort this problem out quickly and quietly.’
‘That was before I found out that the Awoken were involved too.’
She nodded. 'Hindsight…if we'd known it was more than Mason, then we could quite simply have glassed this entire planet from orbit and be done.'
'Indeed.'
‘Well…now we both have a fair understanding the scope of this problem and you have all the resources we can spare…' she leant forward, her head over the table, a long tress of her dark red hair spilling like lava onto its scuffed surface.
'…I want you to turn this system upside down Deacon. Tear it to fucking pieces if you have to…but find her!’
‘I will. Like I said, with the quarantine, she's bottled up.’
‘And…you say you have acquired some samples of her DNA, I presume we can unwrap them and work out what nasty surprises Mason has installed in her?'
‘My experts tell me there are several significant portions of her genome that can’t be decoded. Mason's done a very good job of encrypting her…purpose.'
'For God's sake…if any old precinct lab technicians can soft-simulate what a person's face looks like from a drop of blood, why can't we-'
'The encryption is foolproof. We can't simulate it, Councillor.'
'I'd really like to know…' her voice went from ice cool to an angry snarl 'what kind of ticking bomb we're fucking dealing with!' She balled a fist and banged it down on the table. Her cup jiggled in its saucer and spilled a drop of tea. She looked down at it. Angry. Angry with herself for letting her composure slip momentarily.
‘I do have a suggestion, Councillor.’
She tilted her head. ‘Yes?’
‘We could recreate her. See what she turns into.’
OMNIPEDIA:
[Human Universe open source digital encyclopedia]
Article: Cosmetic Gene Therapy: The Eternal fight against Mother Time!
Ever since the beginning of civilisation, humans have sought to turn back or halt the natural processes of ageing. In ancient Pre-Colonial times, a civilisation known as the Egyptinians used to colour their faces with paints that contained poisonous chemicals that caused their noses to rot and fall off. A famous landmark sculpture called the ‘Spinx’ [fact-challenge pending: user> Garriott3554] that existed before it was destroyed in the Second Nuclear War, depicted this widespread disfigurement.
In the twenty-first century, a widespread beauty treatment was to inject silicate gels under the skin to even-out bumps and creases. The practice became so common among the rich and famous that their faces became mobile rigid masks of hardening gel beneath the skin, permanently locked into an expression of startled surprise.
Over the next few centuries, until the major wars and the colonial era, beauty treatments and anti-ageing therapies used more sophisticated stem-cell technology and finally genetic ‘surrogating’. For those few who could afford it, complete surrogate clones were kept on ice; perfect facsimiles grown in vats and kept sedated and unconscious, ready to be harvested for replacement parts.
These days, the technology of beauty and age-reversal has become a very niche industry favoured by only the extremely rich and powerful. One of the most well-known users of extreme beauty and anti-ageing gene therapy is [article redacted by order of Administration Dept (Cultural Maintenance): 23:11:93]
User Comment > CohenShmoen411
This article is ancient!!! Look at the date! It’s over two hundred years out of date!!! Does anyone ever bother to clean out Omni?!
User Comment > ToftyLovesMufty
More to the point, Cohen…there’s an example of the Administration’s censorship right there! I did a history course on the Administration-Era, and the person this article is referring to (before it was deleted!) was one of the ruling council members.
User Comment > CohenShmoen411
I know! They were complete fascists. You should read this article on the Old System concentration-camp planets. It’s quite horrific. Particularly some of the vid-images. They were truly barbaric.
User Comment > Anonymous
*****myLove, my froobyGroovy Love**** buy it: here!!!!
User Comment > CarlCohen23
MyGod. For anyone who’s interested. I think CohenShmoen was my great-great grandfather. I was looking up my ancestors trying to track their comments on Omni. It’s incredible to find something he posted here…like it was just yesterday! Weird, it’s like he’s alive somewhere out there, right now.
User Comment > XXX-bloodlineSearch-XXX
Want to track your ancestors back to Administration-era, or Pre-Colonial times? Come try us out. We charge credits by results only.
User Comment > [[[[aaaaaaaaaaadvice?]]]]]]]
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User Comment > Anonymous
Talk about out of date! Even this last (non-spam) user comment above is ancient! (if you query-gesture the user name, the comment above was posted THREE hundred years ago!!!) Seriously. The archives REALLY need cleaning up.
CHAPTER 7
‘Ladies, gentlemen…and genetically fabricated chimpanzee, are you ready to be amazed and aghast?!’
Jez tucked her fingers into her mouth and wolf-whistled. ‘Get on with it!’ she heckled good-naturedly.
Gray ignored her. ’Beyond these doors lies a magical kingdom. A world of possibilities and wonder…’
He was standing in front of the closed bulkhead to World Three like some travelling showman before an audience of straw-chewing hicks. Shelby stood beside him, arms crossed and eye-lids fluttering with irritation.
‘Behind these carbosteel doors lies a world beyond your imagination. A place where…’
‘Oh, good grief.’ Shelby turned to the coms panel. ‘Mother? Open the bulkhead doors please.’
‘Certainly, Shelby.’ Mother’s beady eyes shifted to Gray. ‘Were you showing off again, my dear?’
Gray shook his head and huffed. ‘Just adding some drama to things.’
Motors either side of the bulkhead doors hummed and a moment later they parted revealing a slither of bright light that lanced out into the gloomy passageway. Ellie and Jez shielded their eyes from the gl
are as the doors cranked slowly to the sides.
‘Behold!’ bellowed Gray, ‘The Magical Kingdom of….Fantastika!’
Shelby looked at him. ‘Fantastika? Really?’
'Hey, bud…I just, you know, came up with it.' Gray wrinkled his nose. ‘Gotta give the place a name, right?’
Ellie squinted back at the sunlight pouring out, her eyes beginning to adjust to the brightness. The last time she’d seen it had been three days ago. The army of mini arachnid-like fabricators had just about finished laying the underlying geometry blocks. Since then Shelby had repeatedly denied her any more peeks into the biome. Both men agreed on this, they wanted it to be a surprise for the girls.
‘Oh-my-God!’ gasped Jez. She stepped forward past both men, over the lip of the doorway and into the world. ‘Oh-my-fregging-God!’
Ellie and Frazier followed her in. The warm, brilliantly-lit sky was still too bright to look directly up at. Instead Ellie aimed her gaze down at the ground. She was standing on grass. But not grass that could possibly exist in any real world. It was orange, a perky and cartoon-world bright, unnatural orange, every fine blade looked as soft and tender as the feathers of a freshly hatched chick. She stooped down and ran her fingers through it. To her surprise, each blade she brushed shuddered under her fingers.
She let her gaze drift upwards. The grass stretched out before her, a gently sloping tangerine carpet, punctuated here and there with clusters of tall purple plant stems that drooped under the weight of heavy melon-sized bulbs. Her eyes were drawn to some nearby decorative rock formations, blue-green jagged spires that tapered to a point and were dusted white to look like miniature mountain snowcaps.
The air seemed to be teaming with movement and life. Nearby what appeared to be soap bubbles floated several feet above the ground. As they drifted closer she could see they weren’t bubbles, but simple life forms.
‘Those are based on sky anemones,’ called out Gray. He came over to stand beside her. ‘Like the ones they have on Lostromo.’
Ellie shook her head. She’d not heard of Sky Anemones, or even Lostromo.
‘Don’t you ever watch nature videes?’
‘Not really.’
‘The 'bubbles' contain hundreds of small spores. They float around and eventually pop when they bump into something and deposit their spores. Which, if they find moisture, grow and become more anemones.’ He stepped forward and jabbed at one. It burst and a small cloud of particles floated in lazy spirals down towards the ground.
‘Drool, huh?’
She smiled. Gray was beginning to pick up Jez’s idioms. ‘Very drool.’
Shelby and Frazier joined them and for a moment they all watched Jez as she, noticing how the grass was reacting to her feet, had dropped down to the ground and started rolling around. ‘This is fregging awesome!!!’
‘We used a basic high-fantasy design template,’ said Shelby. ‘Although Graham insisted on customising it; he adding this stupid orange grass for example.’
‘I call it Love Grass.' He hunched his shoulders immodestly. 'It’s my design,’ said Gray. ‘Like it?’
Ellie nodded. ‘It’s kinda fun, I guess.’
‘It’s idiotic, is what it is.’
Gray looked at Shelby. ’You really have no poetry in your soul, do you, buddy?’
‘I have no soul,’ he replied. ‘Nor do you. Nor does anyone for that matter. It is a mythical construct. Anyway…there’s a war to be fought, we should introduce our two generals to the battlefield and their respective armies.’ He sighed. ‘Although I use the terms ‘generals’ and ‘armies’ loosely.’
Shelby led the way forward, past Jez still lolling on the ground like a labrador rolling in freshly-discovered muck. ‘Come on you…get up. You’re worse than a dog.’
Jez sat up. ’What’s a dog?’
*
‘Those two constructions are your defensive redoubts,’ said Shelby. He looked at Jez. ‘Or home base, if you don’t know what the word ‘redoubt’ means.’
They were standing roughly in the middle of a gentle valley half a mile wide. At the top of each slope, on either side of them, stood a small castle. One was a salmon pink, the other a pastel blue.
‘Ellie, you will be playing the red side, Jez you are the blue.’
‘So what do we do then? We going to trash each other’s castles?’ asked Jez impatiently.
‘No. The objective of this wargame is to capture and return to your castle…a tactical totem.’
Ellie looked around. She was expecting a flag or a banner, after all that’s what Shelby had called this template; a ‘capture the flag’ scenario. She could only see clusters of those tall drooping melon-head plants, the shoulder-high mini-alpine mountain rock formations…and…
…surely not?…That's the 'totem'?
A large green and orange ball.
Shelby noticed her looking at it. ‘Yes…that giant peach.’ He sighed and rolled his eyes. ‘Another of Graham’s ideas, the peach…not mine.’
‘I did some research on Old Earth fairy tales,’ said Gray. ‘There was a very famous one called Jane and The Giant Peach, I think. Seemed like a neat idea. Big-ass peach.’
‘Anyway,’ Shelby continued, ‘the army that can transport that ball back to its castle is the winner. That, is essentially it.’
‘Where are our armies?’ asked Ellie.
‘They’re waiting for you up in your castles,’ replied Gray.
‘I will take Ellie to meet her's,’ said Shelby. ‘You take Jez. Shall we say one hour to let them meet their troops, plan and prepare before we sound the starting klaxon?’
Gray nodded. ‘One hour.’
‘And no creaping out before! No sneak-getting the high ground! No cheating Graham, all right? I'm serious. I'm sick and tired of you-’
'Relax.' Gray shrugged and grinned. ‘Shelbs…it’s just a game, man. Just a bit of fun for the girls.’
‘No…I’m serious. It is not a proper game if people cheat. It's pointless chaos. When people start cheating it simply becomes a complete waste of everyone’s time.’
‘Relax. No sneaking out, I promise.’
Shelby turned away and led Ellie up the slope towards her pink castle. ‘The last war game we played, he smuggled in some reinforcements. Cheating, it really makes a mockery of the whole damned thing.’
They picked their way up the hill and nearing the top of the slope Ellie turned and looked back at the world. The ground seemed to glow like a rolling blanket of lava under the warm glow of the sun. The craggy razor peaks of the miniature mountains cast clearly defined geometric purple tinted shadows while clouds of bubble-creatures drifted lazily on the breeze. The world even smelled inviting. The air seemed to have citrusy tang to it, as if someone close by was juicing oranges.
It’s so beautiful. She wondered if the real universe contained any worlds or landscapes that were as visually inviting as this one.
‘Here we are,’ said Shelby. He reached for the handle of the thick oak door leading into her castle. ‘Your army awaits you.’
He pushed the heavy door inwards to reveal a small courtyard, surrounded by high pink crenellated walls….and there, before her, filling the courtyard, a carpet of fur and pairs of dark beady eyes that studied her intently.
She felt intimidated by the sight of so many of them.
It might not have been quite so bad if, under many of those pairs of beady black eyes, there hadn’t been lines of sharp jagged canine teeth protruding from bulging leathery lips, and further down, on the end of their short stocky, muscular, arms, long sickle shaped claws that looked like they could gut a person with one easy swipe.
‘They understand rudimentary english, by the way. You won’t get Frasier-level conversation out of them, but they’ll understand simple instructions. Think of them as children.’
Ellie nodded.
'Well there you go….they're all yours. So, what do I do?'
'You talk to them, give them orders.'
&nbs
p; 'Uh…so…' she clapped her hands together loudly, ‘uh, good morning everyone!’
‘Truly inspiring,’ muttered Shelby to himself. ‘You’d make Sun Tzu proud.’
For a moment her voice echoed unaccompanied around the square walls of her castle. Then as one, in a feminine-sounding chorus, they replied.
‘Good morn-iiiing General!!!!’
CHAPTER 8
Captain Tez ‘Big T’ Mahmoud should have been feeling immensely relieved. He should have been feeling a crud-load better than he was. His company freighter, like every other ‘delivery donkey’ in the system was parked along one of the many five mile-long radial docking arms of GateWay, unable to proceed about its business because of the system-wide quarantine being enforced. That meant he and his small crew were stuck here in this vast playground, on full pay of course, for the foreseeable future.
It could have been a lot worse. They could have been stuck on Holstein, where there was a planet-wide religious ban on alcohol and narcotics and a population of glum-looking pious cattle farmers. Or New Mercurio, a small super-heated world far too close to the sun, populated by ore refineries and an almost entirely male workforce comprised of snarling convicts.
GateWay, truth be told, was by far the best place in this system for him and his crew to be kicking their heels until the quarantine was eventually lifted. They had back-pay to spend and places to spend it; flesh-bars, PlusParks, Drinkos; a veritable orgy of hedonism for his crew to indulge in until either they’d exhausted their swollen credit accounts (and had to live back onboard the ship) or until things eased up across the system and they got company orders to saddle up and take their ship through the gateway. They had a cargo hold that was mostly filled with a consignment of refrigerated meat due to be delivered to the Neumann system at a grotesquely inflated price. Some senior ‘Suit’ in Harmony Transport’s HQ had probably already calculated that keeping this freighter waiting at GateWay, ready to go through as soon as the quarantine was lifted, made more economic sense than ditching the meat cargo and sniffing around for any crumbs of permitted business within the Seventh Veil.