Prisoners of Paradise

by Brandon Lars Erikson

  The hallucinations started again without any warning.

  Harris looked at the gray clouds that were advancing towards him. In the rolling clouds, he saw faces forming. They appeared to be screaming in pain and agony. The clouds began to wave as if they were mimicking flames. Harris felt his pulse racing as he saw those same tortured faces begin to swirl around in the choppy waters around him. Their terrified eyes pierced his.

  “Or maybe not,” Harris thought as he began to lay prone onto his board. He clenched his teeth and began to paddle as hard as he could towards the shore.

  “You can try to pull me under if you want! But you will all have to catch me first!” He cried. “Come and get me you maggots! Come and get me! I’ll see you in hell!”

  Harris felt his stomach drop as the wave picked him up, causing him to become suddenly vertical and looking towards the rushing blue streak below.

  He pushed himself up and got to his feet.

  The wave began to roar like the engines of a space-freighter as it rolled over onto the reef below with the force of an enormous waterfall. Harris felt his feet slip from underneath the board. His heart started to pound even harder as he suddenly felt himself falling towards the torrid waters below.

  The initial impact with the churning waters was painless. Harris felt as if several tons of rock and debris from an avalanche had fallen on top of him. He felt his lungs burning for just a moment as he was forced underwater and sucked into a dark void.

  The water rumbled for a few moments before his body went limp. The watery space he floated in soon became silent, and moments later, everything went black.

  Epilogue

  Location: Undisclosed.

  Ailanian Standard Time: 0710 Hour

  Van Dien sighed and rubbed his tired eyes. He exhaled and shook his head back and forth just enough to make himself wake up from the exhaustion he was fighting. His monitor had a digital chess game on it. The digital chess pieces had a classic shape to them and were either black or white. At this moment in the game, he was beating the computer simulator quite handily as he had ten important pieces in strategic positions, while his computerized opponent, had just a few white pieces left, which were quickly being backed into a corner.

  Knowing that he was certain to win, Van Dien gazed over his shoulder at another large monitor that was attached to a giant computer system. The long rows of numbers scrolling down the black screen indicated encrypted files that the computer was currently trying to break codes for.

  Van Dien felt even more confident as he thought, “And soon, Jacob…every bit of information in those files from your computer systems that I confiscated will be ready for me to read…and the whole world is going to know the truth about you…”

  The computer behind him began to squeal just as Van Dien turned his head back to the chess game. He narrowed his eyes and slowly turned his swivel chair around in order to see what the noise was all about. The black background on the monitor suddenly began to change into a wavy, blue pattern and Van Dien felt his feel beginning to grind as he saw an image of Jacob Colombe’s smiling face staring right at him.

  “Greetings!” Jacob said as he waved his delicate hand, “If you are watching this…then I am dead, and am about to receive my reward from the gods for my martyrdom…you, however…are currently under a multi-faceted computer viral attack…which is going to piss you off in three, two…”

  Van Dien leapt from his chair and grabbed the computer monitor with both hands and threw it across the darkened room. He whirled around on his heels once he realized that the gaunt, young human was now talking to him through the monitor his chess game had been on.

  “That’s right,” Jacob said as his face began to twist with red and orange lines of code. “I wanted all that attention I attracted to myself…I wanted those hack law enforcement agents to find me because I knew if they did…you’d be hot on their trail. I knew you would want your files back…I knew good and well that you’d want any files I had about my righteous organization if you could get your hands on them. And guess what? Here they are! They’re all encoded with viruses that are going to shut down your computer systems for hours!”

  Van Dien stomped his foot. His fists shook at his sides as he watched Jacob’s grin getting wider. Jacob suddenly began to look menacing as he said, “Did ya think that we were going to let you fool the people of this planet into drinking the Kool-Aid? I bet you didn’t count on this happening? Not by a longshot, you evil bastard. We know what you did to this world…and we know what you have planned. This message, which I created to give you post mortem, is simply to remind you that we are going to continue to do everything in our power to stop you…even if that means all we can do, is black out your computer surveillance systems long enough…so that we might be able to provide some assistance to someone, who might be able to stop you…just in case we fail.”

  Van Dien suddenly began to smile. He allowed his shoulders to relax as he reached into his suit jacket for his pack of cigarettes. After he had lit one and taken a long, slow drag, he exhaled a long cloud of smoke and thought to himself, “well played, Kalapana…you sneaky bastard. You are finally making yourself into a worthy opponent.”

  Van Dien grimaced as he inhaled on his cigarette. He inhaled as hard as he could before he threw the burning butt into the corner of the room with an exhale that sounded like an angry growl, “Schultz! I’m going to need a damage assessment very soon!”

  “It’s coming, sir!” The nervous, little man said from a comlink on the other side of the room.

  Van Dien exhaled his disappointment as he lightly kicked the floor in order to let out the last of his fleeting frustration, “Don’t worry, Schultz…I’m sure this is only a minor glitch.”

  “Sir…we have a problem…it got past the firewall.”

  “What?”

  “The viral package…it’s released at least a dozen worms…they are cutting connections…”

  Van Dien began to grind his teeth as he said, “I could care less about our ability to keep continuous surveillance…are the files safe?”

  The radio silence nearly made Van Dien’s heart stop. He bit his lower lip for what seemed an eternity.

  “We are…we…currently,” Schultz stuttered, “We don’t know…that will take some more time to analyze.”

  Van Dien closed his eyes with contempt, “And the surveillance blackout that we are about to face…how long will it last?”

  “Six to twenty four hours, sir.”

  Van Dien felt his jaw beginning to ache as he said, “And that’s more than enough time for someone to commit all sorts of mischief…because of this viral attack, someone will have the ability to freely go about breaking the laws that I must enforce. The damage they could inflict upon my plan could be…potentially incalculable.”

  Schultz’s timid voice squeaked over the com, “Sir, I have good news for you. The files are all safe…but we suspect they might have damaged a certain file in the biochemistry data.”

  “And that would be?”

  “A recipe for making Cutz from Makani leaves.”

  Van Dien’s eyes flew open as he shouted, “Oh my gods! Please tell me they didn’t hack into File Thirteen of that data base!”

  “There is good news, sir. They only got the instructions and ingredient list for synthesizing the street drug. File Thirteen is safe. They couldn’t get past the micro-firewall.”

  Van Dien inhaled a deep, satisfying breath of fresh air. “Cutz is a vital ingredient in a serum, which is needed for an important process that those people in The Penitentiary must be subjected to…if that file ever got into the wrong hands…I dare not even think about what could happen…”

  Suddenly, the room in which Van Dien stood was bathed in white light as Jacob’s face seemed to shine from the monitor again. Jacob appeared to be giggling as he said, “Do you know the odds of your pl
an succeeding with so many of your enemies given this time to organize an attack against you?”

  Jacob’s face disappeared and a single pawn, from a digital game of chess, appeared on the monitor screen and placed itself onto a black and white holographic chess board.

  Van Dien smiled as he noticed how the small, white pawn had placed itself directly in front of a group of large, black pawns which were strategically blocking a path to a large, impressive black king. The game of chess had been set in a David versus Goliath fashion.

  Only Jacob’s confident voice could be heard within the room as the young revolutionary said, “Just think of how many enemies you have, either trying to stop your plan…or attempting to hijack your plan from underneath you for their own selfish desires.”

  The white pawn split into two pawns, which became four pawns and so on in an exponential fashion.

  Van Dien didn’t flinch as he saw the white pawns divide into an incalculable army, which then proceeded to start taking out the black pawns.

  Jacob said, “Think about your enemies…what could they possibly be doing right now?”

  The monitor suddenly flashed a picture of Wram Karamotzain as Jacob said, “this guy can’t seem to focus on what he really wants to say about half the time…but both he, and his friend and close ally,High Senator Brawnsworthwould love to be the one calling the shots instead of you. I can tell how much these men resent having to work under your imperialist organization.”

  The picture then flashed to show an image of Wallace, looking scared as he ran away.

  Jacob said, “This man was chosen to be a simple distraction at first, but his desire to use what he knows about your plan, so that he might find a way to stop you is incalculable. He doesn’t fear what you can do to him…his will is strong. Do you know what he plans to do? Do you wonder if he knows about how much danger the man in the Mele Entertainment Penthouse currently presents …does he know how the man in the penthouse desires to change his position in life?”

  Van Dien swallowed nervously. His heart rate began to increase as he saw a picture of Marco Giraudoux along with a few pictures of Loko Kalaheva and Makula Pilikoa. Jacob’s voice became deeper and almost sinister as pictures of Pete, Cindy and Landra flashed across the screen.“Do you wonder about those enemies that you’ve killed…are they really dead? Do ever think about those who you’ve had sent away…are they truly not coming back to haunt you?”

  Van Dien’s hands formed into shaking fists and his teeth began to grind as he saw the screen beginning to flash pictures of Audrey Winters, Jack Bauman, Keiki Karatau and Ailanian CIA Director Moke Kalapana.

  Jacob’s voice was calm and confident as he said, “There are so many individuals out there…this planet has so many people who really only want what is best for themselves – either because they refuse to fall in line with the rest of the world’s view – or because, like you…they have dark secrets that they don’t want the rest of the world to know about. They are going to present a challenge to you, simply because their desire to be themselves could inadvertently cause them to take actions that will eventually slow your progress…and maybe even stop your plan. In addition, there are so many people on this planet, who are making personal choices…that could eventually destroy you. And the funny thing is, many of these people don’t really understand what the consequences of their actions are even going to be.”

  Van Dien’s eyes narrowed as the white pawns multiplied until they surrounded the large, black king and covered it in an immense sea of white as Jacob said, “whether you know it or not…we’ve started a chain reaction…and the revolution is growing!”

  Van Dien roared in anger as he raised his foot and kicked in the monitor screen. Sparks flew as his foot stomped the floor. The room became very dark for a few moments as Van Dien reached into his jacket pocket and retrieved his cigarettes. The sound of a lighter being flicked echoed through the room as an orange glow lit up his face.

  A sadistic smile crossed his lips as he inhaled deeply, slowly. As smoke began to fill the room, Van Dien began to laugh, quietly at first until the laughter slowly built up into a raucous, echoing guffaw. His face lit up in the glow of his cigarette as his thoughts became confident, yet melancholy.

  “Desperate times, call for desperate measures. What are you so desperate to achieve at this point in your life, Captain Moke Kalapana? What are you going to do with this window of opportunity that your reluctant ally has provided you with? Are you taking some sort of action that will save this world…or are you scheming up something that will simply allow you to save yourself?”

  Van Dien began walking into the darkness that lay on the other side of the room, his smile widened as he reached out and pressed a few buttons on the lightless wall. The small, red lights switched on and off with every touch of his fingers. His thoughts became smug as he pressed in a complicated code, “You might think you know exactly what you are doing, Captain Kalapana…and you might think your efforts are valiant and maybe even logical. But I have always been one step ahead of you…and no matter what you do, in your attempt to stop my plan. There is nothing that you can do in order to save your soul from the damnation and defeat I am about to hand you. I will win this game of ours…for I have one, tried and true advantage that you simply do not possess…”

  The room was soon bathed in a blue light as Van Dien briefly caught a glimpse of his reflection in the glass in front of him. Van Dien saw his white hair and the lines that the stressful years had put on his face. His heart beat faster as he saw the deep blue water behind the glass. He started grinding his teeth while he contemplated what to do next.

  “This decision is an easy one…all too easy…and all too human…”

  Van Dien pressed a large button with one deft motion of his index finger. The water churned with bubbles as two skinny men were dropped into the tank. When the bubbles cleared the blue water, the men’s eyes opened and they struggled against the restraints that held their arms close to their torsos and bound their legs. The men could breathe from respirators that were strapped over their noses and mouths. They were fully awake and their naked eyes appeared to be in a state of panic.

  Van Dien’s eyes narrowed. His piercing gaze made their eyes become as wide as saucers while their heads shook back and forth in terror.

  “My dear, Captain Kalapana, the reason why I am going to win this game of ours…and hand you a crushing defeat…is simply due to the fact that I possess a superior weapon that you will simply refuse to use against me…”

  Van Dien reached out and pressed one more button on the wall before placing his other hand flat against the glass.

  “And soon, all of those individuals out there who oppose me…will soon know the full extent of this weapon…”

  Van Dien stood up straight and gave the men inside the tank one more serious gaze as he thought, “And my weapon is…the ability to be cruel.”

  “Good morning, Gentlemen,” Van Dien said in a stoic voice, “We have not formally met and I suppose you are wondering who I am. Well, let me get right to the point…I am the law.”

  Van Dien took a drag from his cigarette as he noticed the terror in the men’s eyes. Their faces were covered with an expression shown by someone who knew they had been caught red handed and had no idea what to expect.

  Soft, white smoke danced around the glass as the white haired man said, “You are in this position, because I am enforcing Ailana’s unwritten rules, which are meant to protect a highly classified operation that is taking place on this planet. It is a secret plan with great risk, which involves the highest levels of authority within The Alliance. I have been charged with a grave task…and believe me…I take my work very seriously. Let me assure you…anyone who comes to Ailana and tries to circumvent the rules that I enforce…has to deal with some very harsh consequences. For example, those men, who came before you, wanted to know if my pet had teeth or baleen.�
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  The men inside the tank struggled and appeared to scream underneath their respirators.

  Van Dien smiled as he said, “and now, you’re gonna get to find out the answer to their question.”

  A large, scaly head emerged from the depths of the tank like a lightning fast reflex. The creature grabbed the two men between its jaws and then quickly swam away from the glass. Van Dien laughed for a moment as a man’s head bobbed in the water for a few seconds before it slowly sank into the red, inky water. The visibility within the tank soon became very poor due to the large amount of blood that was now mixing with the infinite number of water molecules within the tank.

  “And the next man, who must be punished for breaking the rules, is Captain Moke Kalapana…and I will make sure he begs for a death that was as swift and merciful as theirs’ was…”

  Van Dien then took one last drag from his cigarette before he dropped it onto the cold, concrete floor. With a smile crossing his lips, he turned around and walked away into the darkness.

  To be continued….