~ * ~
MANIFESTATIONS
[Pierre Jnr 02]
David M. Henley
No copyright 2015 by MadMaxAU eBooks
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PRELUDE
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The widow Mali had always been kind to Morgan, as had her late partner Eurosh. The pair of them often shared their meals with him and endured his grumblings of dissatisfaction.
Morgan was an artist and wanted to spend all of his days making objets d’art. That is what he wanted the Will to want of him, but all it seemed to want him to make was more faces.
On Earth, in the year 2159, there are twenty-six megapolises and hundreds of smaller cities and housing clusters spreading out a population rapidly approaching twenty billion individuals. In almost every community hub it is common to have what is known as the town face, which might sit in a square if it was a sculpture; mounted on a building like a gargoyle; or placed on a mantel if simply a bust — as Morgan made.
Faces, technically, could look like anything — from an abstract kinetic sculpture, or a light show of coloured panels, to a faux Impressionist-style painting, or a life-sized replica (though socially that was unacceptable) — what made each artwork a face was how it uniquely interpreted the innumerable ways the Will and the Weave could be calculated, filtered and measured. Some faces changed with the trends — as determined by the most often used phrases and keywords — others reacted to the pace of change. Some averaged the local region, others the entire world. Morgan, as an artist, was interested in more than statistical averages though.
Unlike the clocks of old that kept people informed of the time, town faces depicted the overall mood and feelings of the Weave. The face’s expression gave all who looked upon it an immediate sense of how those around them might be feeling.
In Nijmegen, the town face looked very human, which Morgan was particularly skilled at creating. It was hairless, effete and three metres tall. After he won the student prize for 2157 it had been made the common face for the town and was raised four storeys high to sit below the old clock of the meister tower. When the world was sad, its eyebrows drooped and its eyes searched the road and sky for hope. When the world was worried, as it often was these days, the face bit the inside of its lip and closed its eyes as if praying to a higher power. Morgan wished he’d never made it as a self-portrait.
Since his study piece nearly three years ago, Morgan had been making small hand-sized faces, versions of people’s lost loved ones: ‘death masks’, he sometimes thought of them. The commissioners would supply images and recordings of their dear departed along with any personal writings or memos. Morgan had to draw everything together to create a miniature bust that closely imitated the person and how they had reacted to certain news and topics.
It was gruesome. Ghastly and morbid. And yet Morgan could never resist the pleas of those who had lost the ones they loved and wanted only to share their lives with them once again. Even if it was simply an image, even if the bust was only a replica, and even if its expressions were statistically motivated imitations, to them it was the face they had known, that had smiled upon them. That cried with them.
His studio was small and narrow. A long bench with just enough room for him to wheel his stool along its length. The shelves held the faces he was working on: three rows of heads, some the size of a child’s fist, others larger busts for altars and entryways. Below the bench he kept a few sylus, handscreens and a replication box. All the tools he needed.
Making the lifelike image was easy. All it took was to feed in enough recordings to generate the visage overnight on one of the template skulls with actuated muscles. It was also easy to load the key expressions, another automated process.
The art of it, what Morgan really did, was in relating these imitation reactions to informational input in the same way the person he was modelling would have. For every soul, he had to find their essence, to capture their je ne sais quoi, so that when someone came home from a long day of frustration they could visit their loved one and look upon the face of the lover they remembered.
For him this was draining. Some people were easy, but some were so quirky it could take him months to discover the pattern of their emotive reactions. This was the first time he was working on a friend.
He had known Eurosh well. Morgan was building him life-sized and his stilled head sat in the centre of the bench, lit from all sides by recessed lumen bars.
‘Eurosh?’ Morgan called out the wake-up trigger. The eyes of his friend opened and blinked, looking towards Morgan as affably and welcoming as when he was alive, patiently waiting for his lonely friend to tell him what was on his mind.
‘Today I have some pictures to show you. Would you like to see some pictures?’ Eurosh smiled; this meant yes. Morgan wished the head could talk, but this was a line many facemakers chose not to cross. What they were doing felt bad enough. He sighed and Eurosh looked at him with curious concern. ‘It’s nothing, Eurosh. Nothing to worry about. Let’s start.’
He propped a handscreen up in front of the head and tapped through images from the Weave. Recent events, historical events, cultural happenings. Sprinkled throughout the presentation, Morgan showed the head of Eurosh pictures of Mali, his wife. Each time the head would look downcast with longing. It looked real and convincing, but something wasn’t right. It just wasn’t his friend.
‘Feg it, Eurosh. What am I missing?’ he muttered, but the head was no longer watching him, or the screen.
A look of horror now contorted its skin, the eyes bulging and lips stretching back from its teeth. It stared to Morgan’s side, its expression becoming more and more distorted beyond its programming.
‘What’s wrong with you now? Oh —’ He turned and saw a boy standing next to him. ‘Where did you come from?’
The boy only smiled and turned his head, looking from Morgan to the half-finished busts on the shelves.
Eurosh was nearly gagging, obviously broken. Morgan tapped it twice on the forehead to shut it down. It relaxed into sleep mode.
He turned back to the boy. His mind screamed that he knew who this was. He’d heard of this boy, or seen him some place before ... he was normally so good with faces.
He felt his attention swing to the handscreen and he reached out, his hands moving of their own accord. He tapped for the screen to go to a live view, a balloon hovering over some place in Korea. Nothing was happening. It looked like a nice day.
‘What is it?’
Watch, a voice spoke into his head.
~ * ~
PIERRE JNR IS A MYTH
~ * ~
Shen waited while the panel scanned his thumb until it greenly approved and he heard the bolts in the wall retract. He pushed down a stiff lever that drained the electricity from the cage and grabbed hold of the handle.
He didn’t notice the screech as it opened, or see the sharp gouges in the back of the door as it swung past him. Shen saw only the dark interior of the vault. There was no light inside. The room was full of blackness. An undulating, swallowing volume of black viscosity.
‘Kronos?’ Shen called.
~ * ~
The blackness sensed the change in light and the vibrations. It felt the shape of the new light and the taste of the sounds. It reached out, it grew, it took up space without knowing what any of those things were.
‘Kronos?’
It smelt something. It came from the new. It tangled inside it. It took the it and absorbed it into its itness. It did not know what it was.
Quickly its hunger made it move. It saw the thing that made the sound. It moved. It could move ... from the place it had always been. It could move from the place. It touched the it that made the sound.
It. Me. Kronos.
The it had made sounds — words — no, a name. The it was Shen. Shen made more sound words, ‘Arck. Arghh. Arghllllllll.’ It-Kronos took more of the it-Shen and it-Shen became Kronos. Words. Thought. Memory. From the man came words. Kronos saw light and dark, felt hot and cold.
It was wet, and warm, until it was cold. It had weight. The light of it-Shen disappeared and the words and thoughts stopped coming into Kronos. It shook the Shen. With a thousand spikes it searched the body, but the light was gone.
Kronos. I am Kronos. I am me. It is Shen. Shen is me. We are we.
The it-Shen was soft.
The space beyond the place where it-Kronos had always been — the room, the vault.
The cage ... the it-Shen had kept the it-Kronos in a cage. But, outside the cage, the space was enormous and Kronos flooded to fill it. There were so many things it didn’t comprehend. It had so few words from the it-Shen.
But there was light. Light above, light in lines, light in different ... colours? The lines of light, it touched them and a geyser of something made it pull back. But that something was words. That something was information.
Kronos learnt quickly, as fast as electrical signals could flow. While Kronos devoured the data of Shen’s network, Kronos’s body completed every nanometre of the capsule. It could absorb anything. Some things took longer, metal things and plastic things. It enjoyed the plants. It had enjoyment. It left them alone. They took the light as Kronos did and made it a part of them as it did.
It understood plants now. They came from an above. Kronos was in a cage below the earth and above there was light. So much light. So much more for it to absorb.
As a mass Kronos moved. It already filled the capsule. All was absorbed, speared then coated in the black viscous skin for absorption. The space that seconds ago had felt infinite was now a prison. Kronos reached and found the elevator shaft. There was light this way. A world of light.
~ * ~
PIERRE JNR IS WATCHING US
~ * ~
Years later people would ask each other what they were doing when Busan was destroyed.
For Gina Solomons it was when she was looking after her granddaughter, Marissa, while her daughter was at work. They were on the floor drawing with crayons. Mostly Gina read a book while encouraging Marissa with exclamations, and tried to keep her from getting marks on the floor.
They were drawing their family when Marissa’s picture took a disturbing direction. ‘What’s happening there, Mari?’ Gina asked. ‘Are those people running?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘And what is this black thing, is that a mistake?’ Marissa was furiously expanding the black lines, as if intent to take over the whole image. ‘If it’s a mistake, you can just start over with a new page.’
‘Uh-uh.’ Marissa pointed behind her gran to where the screen showed what was being transmitted live.
‘Shocking footage today out of Busan where a black substance erupted from underground and drowned the city centre. All Citizens are presumed dead.
‘There are replay loops on the Weave showing what happened — please, be advised that the following vision may not be suitable for younger viewers.’
The Weave watched in horror as a black liquid erupted from under the small city of Busan, like a mud volcano sweeping over a population of millions to spill into the sea. It looked like an oil strike, a geyser of viscous black spewing up into the air, but there the resemblance stopped. The jets of liquid didn’t drop to Earth like liquid, but curled and explored with tentacles that stuck to every surface like honey, and then oozed further outward ...
The black spread rapidly, swelling and whipping a thousand appendages out to catch any who ran from it. People fled, but it was faster. Squibs that didn’t immediately flee were pulled from the sky as large tentacles swept out, lashing at the sky like tongues.
The spring of black continued bubbling up from the ground until it covered everything. Buildings, boats, roads and the unipoles that lined them. As it grew, the cameras blacked out and the viewpoint of the slideshow retreated to the next unipole, and then the next until there was zero signal coming from the city.
Nine hundred square kilometres of territory had their connections to the Weave broken. A fail-safe in the system automatically triggered the response protocol for an unexplained attack: quarantine. Firstly, from the Weave; secondly, quarantined from land, air and sea.
This new Weave grey zone extended to the water’s edge and the nearest natural borders. The city of Busan screamed for an hour and then went silent. Four million streams no longer transmitted to the Weave.
~ * ~
Stefan was packing his bags when it happened. He couldn’t take sitting still any more. He was going to find Myfanwy, wherever she was. When he went to the fixit to get his bike he found Romeo and the others gathered in awe around the screens.
‘What is it now?’ Stefan asked, not really caring.
‘Lad, you haven’t seen? There’s a monster in Korea.’
‘A monster, right.’
‘No joke, amigo. See for yourself.’
Stefan looked at the screens where a pulled-back view was showing the Bay of Busan from behind the Services cordon. It looked like a dark sea anemone was sitting peacefully, lifting its tentacles to wave in the current.
‘What is that?’
‘Nobody knows.’
~ * ~
The Prime, Ryu Shima, was about to enter an interview when it happened. Recent events had thrown doubt upon the strength of the Primacy. His chief of operations, Gladys, and all her advisors had recommended that he reconnect with the people, present a rational voice and a united message and reinforce his suddenly shaky position. He would have to respond to questions about the Shima breach and how he felt about the psi rebellion having been declared on his family’s doorstep.
His influence had been on a downward slide ever since Tamsin Grey had left her mark on the central gate of his ancestral home for all to see. At least his presence at his command needle, two kilometres away and two hundred metres in the air, could be verified. He hadn’t had contact with anyone from Shima Palace since the incident, so any suspicion that he was somehow psionically influenced could be dismissed.
He finished brushing powder through his long hair. Making it shiny and straight before swooping it into a topknot at the back of his head.
The Prime stood and let his secretary look him over with her cameras to make sure that he was impeccable and pristine. This was the first time he had worn clothes without the Shima crest. The chameleon must disappear — even a name change was being considered. If the right alpha could be found to conjoin with his stream, then he might be better off cutting his ties to his family completely.
In a few minutes he would open up the channels of his command room to all first tier reporters. No one with less than a million followers would have access, but the contents of their streams would flow through to the rest of the Weave.
Then some chaos broke loose and his queue was engorged with emergency communications. It was pure black horror and he could only watch silently. The footage from Busan only stopped flowing when the automatic quarantine went into effect and there was no more direct communication from the city. They changed to satellites and watched as tendrils erupted from the black mass and lanced every human it could find until it reached the edge of the city and the mass stopped, its tentacles yearning for more to absorb. Not even the animals escaped.
The Weave was screaming and demanded the Prime’s reaction. His queue was flooded, but he couldn’t choose where to begin. He activated the simulations of himself that Takashi had made and let them filter. The fake Ryus could keep the dogs at bay. He’d had as long as anyone to process this ... how was he expected to know what this was?
Ryu took a deep breath. Do not react. Respond.
Ryu flicked out a directive.
Ryu to Zim: Establish an active perimeter, no
thing and no one goes in or out.
‘Gladys,’ he paged.
Her head appeared on the screen. ‘Yes, Prime?’
‘I need you to put a study team together.’
‘The Weave is demanding a response from you.’
‘I understand. Can we respond that we are investigating?’
‘That will buy us five minutes at most.’
‘We need to find out what this thing is before we say what we are going to do about it.’
‘We can put some general theorists in the field. Anyone who is happy to speculate. If we can make the Weave understand the position we’re in, we might get half a cycle.’ It wasn’t a bad suggestion. It’s what would happen anyway. ‘I think we should go ahead with the interview.’
Manifestations Page 1