The Eden Paradox

by Barry Kirwan

  He ignored the rush of blood to his groin, pushed his chair backwards and got up and walked away from her.

  "Look, Louise, I’m sorry, this is really hard work, and it’s really urgent. I need to concentrate."

  She stalked towards him, but not too close. The smile was gone, replaced by a harshness that made him remember she was Chorazin.

  "Don’t apologize, Micah. It’s a sign of weakness. Do what you decide to do and swallow the consequences. Regret, guilt and sorrow – they’re all irrelevant. You do look like you need a break, though – or a diversion."

  "I need a coffee, Louise. Really." He forced a smile. "I’m close, I can sense it." He tried to stare her down, like a cat and a mouse, but she was the cat.

  "You want her, don’t you? Your coffee-mate."

  "I don’t know what you’re talking about. She’s – she’s already seeing someone. She’s not interested in me."

  "Someone working on the Project?"

  "You could say that. Yes and no, actually." As soon as he’d said it, he knew it had been a mistake – he could see Louise latch onto it, like a bloodhound picking up a scent.

  "Interesting," she said. "Do you love her?"

  Micah flushed. He wanted to deny it: no reply meant it was true, and even he didn’t want to believe it, it made him such a fool aside from anything else. He’d made his mind up last night, but only with his brain he realized – his emotions lagged far behind.

  She reached down and with both hands smoothed one of her stockings all the way up her leg. "Your loss. Do you have any idea what you’re giving up?"

  He sensed he was almost off the hook. "I have an idea, Louise. That is, I have a good idea that I have no idea what I’m giving up, but it just won’t work. Sorry."

  "Good. You’ve made a decision." She smoothed her skirt back down. "I’m going to send your girlfriend to you. Try to keep your mind on your work."

  As she reached the exit, he called after. "Louise, the scars on your back. Are they what I think they are?"

  She stopped at the door, her hand gripping its handle. She didn’t turn around.

  "They used to queue up for me, you know." Her voice wavered. "All hard. I can still smell the stink of their sweat, anticipation, lust, even their guilt – a few of them, anyway. Each time one of them came inside me, I swore I’d kill a man for it, one day, somehow. I never pulled at the chains; wanted to be in good shape to escape later." She paused to inspect her wrists. "When the camp was raided by our side after I’d spent three months in the cages, they captured and rounded up thirty of them, to take them prisoner, interrogate them. I was being shuffled with a few other girls into the air ambulance. I snatched an assault rifle from a soldier who looked sorry for me." She paused and glanced over her shoulder. "He looked young and naïve – like you, Micah. I shot every one of them where it hurts most. Takes quite a while to die that way. Some of the soldiers tried to stop me at first, but the Colonel – a woman – she knew what had been going on there. She ordered her men back. Afterwards, she told me the only way to avoid criminal proceedings was to join the Chorazin. She was sure they’d have me. We took off, then she dropped a clean-up bomb, vaporized the whole base."

  Micah hardly breathed. He stared at her back – part of him wanted to comfort her, but the sane part held him back.

  "Did you get even? Have you killed enough men now?"

  She turned to face him. Her eyes steeled. "Not even close."

  Micah swallowed.

  "You see, Micah, I saw men, and a few women, do unspeakable things during the War, and ever since. It’s human nature, just needs the right circumstances to bring it to the surface. They should all…" She bit her lip. "Micah, you’re only the second man to ever say ‘no’ to me. Interesting. Not sure how I feel about that." The door swung closed behind her.

  Micah slumped into his chair; feeling way out of his depth. They should all… He thought of a dozen ways to end that sentence, none of them good. He shook himself, glad that she was Chorazin and not Alician.

  His gaze drifted back to the gleaming Optron. He thought of Antonia, the astronauts, Vince, the ship and the sea creature he’d heard about on the net, and what he sensed was coming. He switched it to power-up again. He needed something far stronger, but decided an ultresso would have to do.

  When he came back with his fifth ultresso of the day, Micah found Antonia sitting, hands atop her knees, waiting for him. She was dressed almost identically to Louise, which made him uncomfortable. He suppressed an image of her, instead of Louise, seducing him in the bathroom in Kane’s suite.

  "Er, hi. You okay?" he asked. Her porcelain face looked ready to crack.

  "Yes. Just… next time please could you pick up the phone and call me – don’t send that woman to come and find me."

  He wondered what had happened, but judged she didn’t want to talk about it. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know in any case.

  "Sure. You need a coffee?"

  "No. Look, I assumed you didn’t send a Chorazin agent to escort me here to have coffee." She trawled her hands through her hair. "Sorry. She just makes me uneasy, I don’t even know why. She looks at me so strangely." She’d been fidgeting with her hands, and promptly folded them, sitting up straight.

  He walked up to her, and almost put his hand on her shoulder, but stopped just in time. "Listen," he said, "I have the telemetry from Ulysses – the real telemetry. I’ve been over and over it a dozen times. I think there may be messages in there hidden by Kat’s simulacrum, but I need a key to unlock them. A password, a clue – anything, really – I don’t know exactly what I’m looking for. Did Kat give you any key word or phrase?"

  She flared for a moment then stared toward the wall. Micah guessed it was because he had mentioned her lover’s name.

  "I know it may be private, but it could be important…"

  She shot to her feet, glaring at him with a face suddenly flushed red, hands on hips. She shouted. "You think I don’t know that?" She began pacing. "She’s up there, Micah, maybe dead, maybe alive. How can it not be important to me?"

  Micah stepped back. "Of course. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean…"

  "Do you love me?"

  "What?" What the hell had Louise said?

  The anger drained from her face.

  She turned and paced again. "I’m sorry, Micah, it’s not you. It’s that woman. She said some things on the way down here. I knew it was lies – why does she do that? But it’s just that if you did – I couldn’t cope – I couldn’t work with you, but we need to, to help, maybe even save Kat and the others."

  Micah’s face masked the tornado of thoughts in his mind. He nodded. He was still trying to process what had just happened, like taking a fast bend and finding a truck coming the other way in the middle of the road – swerving, just missing the fatal accident, and then driving back in the sunshine again. As if nothing had happened.

  "It’s – it’s okay, Antonia. She’s just fucked up. I really like you – I mean, who wouldn’t." He searched for a cliché. "Maybe under different circumstances… but you’re with Kat, and I’m…" stop you idiot – you almost said with Louise. "Just trying to do my job, trying to help you. You and Kat. And the whole crew. And Earth."

  He waited to see her reaction.

  "Fucked up, eh?" she laughed, obviously not used to saying that word. "You’re right about that. I pity the poor schmuck who she is fucking, or fucking with." And as she laughed some more, Micah joined in, without really knowing why. He decided he maybe survived the truck, and was still alive in the car, driving along in the sunshine.

  She approached him. "I’m sorry for doubting you." She reached forward and gave him a kiss on the cheek. She stayed there. "Micah," she said, locking his eyes. "May I ask you a favor?"

  Anything. Everything. "Sure."

  "Would you hold me for a moment? Just a moment. I really need a hug. Kat used to hug me so often."

  Silently, they embraced, and he knew who she was thinking of, and he wis
hed Kat could be here right now, and he could take her place on Eden, because the truck had got him after all.

  Three hours and a sandwich later, and after at least a hundred ideas for passwords had gotten them nowhere, he noticed her necklace.

  "A gift from Kat, just before she left: platinum, gold and silver. Quite unusual, especially since it looks like titanium."

  Micah began typing at the console.

  "What are you doing? Does my necklace mean anything?"

  "We’ve been looking for a password, but truth is, I’m not sure how I would use a password in any case. But a digital password – that would give me something to look for – the numbers could signify a carrier wavelength."

  "What numbers?" she said.

  "Atomic weights. Antonia, of the three metals in your necklace. I need to go inside the DataStream again."

  "I’d like to remain here, with you."

  Micah looked at her. "Normally I go in alone."

  She stared at him.

  "Okay. Just please don’t touch anything, no matter what happens."

  As he strapped into the Optron chair, she walked over to him and put her hand on his shoulder. "Good luck Micah. And thanks for doing this. I know you’re doing your job, but I feel you’re becoming a true friend."

  He made his face move into what he hoped resembled a smile, and then lay back and keyed in the command sequence. As he slipped into the DataStream vista, he called up a digi-wizard to enter the atomic weights and search for a construct that might use the base numbers. Within seconds, it appeared – a single silver strand twining around others in the distance.

  He flew towards it. Although he’d programmed it to look a certain way, it seemed to have a life of its own. He followed the filament upwards, where it separated from the others. His mind surfed along it as it twisted and curved out into what seemed to be space. He noticed something up ahead, dissolving from out of the shadowy depths of a star-less void, a space that should have been unencoded, and therefore blank territory.

  His heart rate ramped up as he realized this was way beyond the capabilities of Kat or the simulacrum – something, possibly alien, had embedded a transmission into the Ulysses data-streaming processing system. It showed up first as a dark planet eclipsing an orange sun. It grew larger, and he felt himself falling, then accelerating towards its hard, sheer black terrain. He tried to slow down but couldn’t. He’d never programmed gravity, and to his knowledge no one ever had – this shouldn’t be happening. He began to panic. He imaged the emergency bail-out signal to stop the Optron session but nothing happened. He flailed his arms and legs, uselessly, as he tumbled. The dark, solid planet tore towards him at terrifying speed, and despite it all being illusory, he did what any normal person would do, and screamed.

  Chapter 29

  Whispers

  Vince piloted the Chorazin hover-jet, Louise by his side, as they sailed over dust towns in what used to be Virginia, on the way to New Washington. Vince had always found it ironic that after the War, the key cities, the ones most irradiated, had never been completely abandoned – rather, new versions were grafted onto the original cities’ outskirts. It seemed unthinkable to Americans that the seat of power could exist anywhere else. New York was different – completely decimated, the ground turned to black glass in the worst bombing in the War outside of Central Asia and Western Europe. Vince was a New Yorker.

  Seeing the ghost towns triggered reflections about the War. An airbase outside New York – his brother had been stationed there – had been the US home for the infamous World Alliance’s Deathwatch drones – autonomous stealth aircraft able to reach tactical targets anywhere in the world and deliver an atomic payload. Way better than suicide pilots, they’d been used to quell numerous uprisings, and to seek and destroy terrorist cells. Prior to the War, the drones had facilitated an unprecedented decade of peace; not a single War nor government overthrown. The world united in its fight against impending environmental collapse, building underground cities following the 2038 heat excursion, and accelerating the World Alliance Space Program, trying to crack warp drive theory to find a second home. The Golden Age.

  He veered the aircraft around a slim tornado stretching from the gloomy carpet of cumulus down to the tan desert floor. This area was prone to ‘whispers’, sudden vortices spearing to the ground below, sucking sand and dust back up into the billowing clouds. There were no people around to be harmed – it was fifty degrees Celsius down in the desert, but they made a pilot’s job challenging; one reason he guessed Louise was quiet, letting him concentrate. He should have had it on auto, since the onboard computer could anticipate and react quicker, but they both knew what happened if you relied too much on automation.

  Like the Deathwatch drones. He recalled how the fledgling World Alliance became complacent, ignoring warnings. They mistook overt peace and opulence for the real thing. The terrorist cells and groups moved deeper into the undergrowth, biding their time. Anti-government factions waited until they had the key tactical advantage: they learned how to hack through the Deathwatch’s firewalls, convincing their AI units that the enemy had annihilated their sovereign races, so the drones started laying waste to their home countries in retribution. In the US, the first twelve nukes detonated were American origin. It took three days to even work out who the enemy was.

  More whispers lay ahead, a lattice of lethal natural power.

  "We could go above cloud," Louise offered.

  Vince retracted the wings by half, and accelerated, slaloming a pathway through whipcords of extreme turbulence. She didn’t complain. They broke through, the desert succumbing to scrub land. Cracks in the sky appeared, brutal sunlight lancing down on Dalgleish, one of a string of new frontier towns for displaced Irish, most of whom had emigrated to the US after Ireland had become too rad-saturated for any clean-up to have an effect. Vince respected these Fringers – they’d turned down opportunities to live in the new cities or underground, choosing instead the toughest areas, trying to recreate the emerald isle they’d lost. Doomed to failure in his view, but they were proud folk; their sacrifice had ended the War. He’d seen it the final weeks; it was where he’d learned his greatest lesson about leadership.

  The Deathwatch drones were eliminated in the first month of the War, and counter-warfare developed based on focused EMP satellite beams. After almost three years of ‘traditional’ non-nuclear warfare, save a few sporadic volleys which penetrated satellite-based detection grids, a new delivery system emerged. The ‘fly-drones’ were so-called because they flew like insects, in sporadic fractal patterns, continually changing direction. New stealth tech gave them a basic immunity to the satellite EMP beams. They took longer to arrive but were much harder to shoot down. Their guidance systems were genetically engineered, and a typical drone’s propulsion chassis could push fifteen gee’s as it ricocheted towards its goal.

  Their target had been the fledgling peace talks in Orleans; there was so much distrust on either side that face-to-face talks had become the only option. The French militia, in Operation Hailstorm, launched three hundred suicide pilots in stealth jets to detonate as close to the drones as possible. Still half of them got through, but the delegates escaped to their next rendezvous in Galway, Ireland. As peace was finally being hammered out, the drones attacked, coming in from all sides. The only way to stop the drones was to detonate nuclear warheads in advance – a nuclear firebreak – taking out the drones before they homed in; the ‘mushroom curtain’ as it was later dubbed. The final wave of drones required so many counter-nukes that a powerful EMP harmonic wave was created, shutting down all drones and aircraft alike over a five thousand mile radius, switching off war machines from Western Asia to the Eastern American seaboard. Once War had been stopped, few had the stomach to start it up again; all sides were losing. Peace, which had been hanging by its fingernails over a cliff, gained a foothold.

  The Irish premier had given the order for the nuclear curtain, and seen it through, enveloping t
hree separate waves of drones. Forty-five per cent of Ireland was engulfed in flame that raged for weeks. The day after peace accords were signed, three weeks later, she put a bullet through her head, her home town and family having been nuked by her signature. Vince had been impressed. He’d thought political accountability to be a lost art.

  The ground below transitioned from fringe-towns to the city’s sprawling edge. They overflew one of the Goliath-like Fabricators, a massive mobile factory constructed before the War, capable of building small towns in less than a year; the pinnacle of the Recycling Age. He banked the aircraft to circle it, taking a better look. In the past decade since the War they’d been a Godsend; luckily only one of the thirty originals had been destroyed – no government had the resources to build new ones. He glanced at Louise, but she was absorbed, watching the towering ‘dung beetle’ as kids called them, as it crawled glacially over virgin terrain and deposited squat homes, roads, sewers and other infrastructure in its wake. Vince felt a rare spark of optimism. He levelled out and headed towards the nest of skyscrapers on the shimmering horizon.

  He reflected on humanity’s moral balance sheet during times of war – ineptitude, betrayal, cowardice on the one hand, and self-sacrifice, bravery, and leadership on the other. He knew that at the heart of the Chorazin was a ruthless professionalism, borne of a mission to ensure that the scales never again tipped far enough backwards to allow humanity to destroy itself. Nobody liked the Chorazin, but most were privately glad it was there. That made perfect sense to Vince. He couldn’t see how it could be any other way – people needed protecting from others – and from themselves.

  A holo appeared in the middle of the cockpit asking for a security code. Louise tapped in a response, and it dissolved. Several towers glinted in the distance.

  Vince chose a flight corridor over the craters where the Pentagon and the White House had once sat. Most avoided this route, but Vince swore never to forget why his mission mattered. He swooped over the renewed suburb of Maryland, the only surviving original district. No one could stay there for more than a month at a time, due to the radiation, despite advances in medical counter-measures and massive shielding around the worst areas. So people worked a month on, two weeks off, out in the country, such as it was, or by the bleached sea. The rich lived most of the year in Africa, relatively untouched by nuclear weapons, and the super-rich and super-powerful lazed in the famed Oasis Hotels in the Antarctic.