The Teristaque Chronicles

by Aaron Frale

  People of the IF didn’t mince words, backstab each other, or swindle their way to power. They respected each other with a well disciplined and ordered society. It was nothing like the business and politics world of his father, and Makiuarnek enjoyed every moment of it. The members of his squad meant more to him than his father ever did. It didn’t matter that Rasmus had the largest fortune in the galaxy. He didn’t want it. He wanted to do his job.

  And he was good at his job. He was one of the youngest captains in the fleet. When he discovered his talent as an Enforcer, his unit exceeded every other Enforcer unit in the galaxy. The only criminal that ever got away on his watch was Sarge. That was until he met that Nig woman. If there was one regret that Makiuarnek had, it was that he couldn’t bring those two to justice.

  Despite his failures, his successes were so numerous and swift it was no wonder they had picked him to test the new Enforcer prototype. It was a shame that he never had a chance to test pilot the machine. Because the technology was leaps and bounds beyond anything ever produced by Earth before, his impressive service record would have only gotten better.

  “I want to tell you about the ship, son.” His dad’s voice cut through his thoughts. He had been ignoring his father’s rambling up to now, as there was nothing his father could say that he wanted to hear. “I wanted the ship to go to you. I was proud of your achievements. I knew you were ascending to greatness, so I sold the Decrand Mining Corporation. I put all my assets into that damned vessel. It wasn’t for the IF or the UPE. Those bleeding heart alien lovers can be tossed into a black hole for all I care.”

  Makiuarnek couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Had his father sold DMC? He loved that company more than he loved his son.

  “I did it for you,” his father continued. “I sold everything for you. I created a military research company under your name. I knew I pressured you into the family business when you were young, and you always wanted something different. I was heartbroken when you joined the IF, but I still kept up with your career. Then there was that incident, the riot on Fendpaake. I knew you were based out of there. I realized how short life was, and how I didn’t know you. You were almost taken away from me, and I couldn’t bear that thought. The Nigramoto mines were producing more than expected. It was a perfect time to get out of the mining business. I wanted to show you that I cared. It was the only way I knew how. Now you are going to die… I’m sorry… I’m sorry.”

  Makiuarnek could hear his father’s voice break. During Makiuarnek’s entire life, he had never heard his father cry. When he was a child, there only seemed to be two emotions from his father: anger and barely constrained anger. He spent most of his life fearing the man. Now here he was, blubbering like an idiot. It was also the first time he had ever gotten even the slightest inkling that his father cared about him.

  If Makiuarnek could talk, he would have screamed at his father. A gift wouldn’t make up for the years of indifference and disapproval. It didn’t matter how great of a ship he had designed. His father couldn’t win back his love with a meaningless gesture. Sure, Makiuarnek was excited about the ship, but his father had been an asshole his whole life. A prototype wouldn’t change that. Makiuarnek seethed in anger. He wanted nothing more than to choke his father. It would please him to take his father with him to the grave.

  _______

  Makiuarnek spent most of the next few weeks reading up on eco-terrorism and all the left wing, crazy ideologies that he didn’t give a crap about until he met a girl that was into them. The only reason why he liked Cassie was that she was probably as opposite of his father as she could be. She thought Jupiter’s depletion was a destruction of a historic landmark, and Rasmus thought that it paved the way for new decrand innovation. Makiuarnek didn’t care either way. Jupiter was in the history books. And while Cassie spent late nights worrying about some far off planet that she would never visit, Makiuarnek only pretended to worry because he wanted to sleep with Cassie.

  He came to her shop every night, asked about the drive, and they would verbally spar with each other. It wasn’t until he made some oblique reference to some obscure social cause that a leftist nut like her would care about when she kissed him and couldn’t stop kissing him. He took her on the counter of the junk shop. Vigo was out on an errand or had the good sense to make himself scarce.

  Either way, Makiuarnek thought that he would be done with her. Like most of his conquests, he assumed that he would have to ignore her long enough for her to get the hint. He prepared for the onslaught of messages that would eventually turn into hate when he wouldn’t respond. She didn’t even make the slightest effort to contact him. It wasn’t until a week later when he realized that he couldn’t stop thinking about her. He thought about her in school, at home, when he was out with friends, and even when he was with other women.

  When he stopped by her shop to see how the hard drive was doing, it was like he had never left. When they were together, they picked up where they left off and when they weren’t, she didn’t smother him. It was the perfect casual relationship. Makiuarnek couldn’t believe he had finally found someone who had gotten him.

  However, he never really got her, but they seemed to share a common enemy. It was his father. He hated his father because he was an asshole. She hated him because DMC was bent on mining out every gas giant in the galaxy. The truth be told, Makiuarnek didn’t mind if his father mined out every last one of them. It wasn’t as if anyone could live on a gas giant anyway. Sure, some of them had exploded in the past, wiping out solar systems, but those glitches had been worked out. If his father was good for one thing, it was making sure the company followed all safety requirements. After all, accidents would eat into profits.

  Despite his father’s ruling of safety protocol with an iron fist, Cassie still worried about decrand mining and the impact it was causing on the galaxy. From her perspective, decrand was an endless feedback loop that would just end up using every resource in the galaxy and lead to the decimation of all life. Solar systems were delicate things. If one gas giant was mined into oblivion, the orbits of every other planet would go out of alignment. Planets could smash into other planets, decay and fall into their parent star, or even just float away into space.

  In civilized systems, orbital correction units could help maintain balance. However, they were expensive and needed decrand to keep running. Meanwhile, it wasn’t men like Makiuarnek’s father who were paying for it. The taxpayers were keeping their world’s afloat. A study Cassie cited much too often was a study about a planet in a mined out system. It was a planet named AIG-231B with life on it but wasn’t inhabited by an intelligent race. The missing gas giants in the system caused the orbit of AIG-231B to decay to the point where it was on a collision course with its sun in about five hundred thousand years. Since no one lived there, no one wanted to pay for orbital corrections. However, Cassie always said that just because there is no intelligent life now doesn’t mean there wouldn’t be in the future. Life evolves into intelligence. In effect, DMC had just condemned a not yet born species to death before they even had a chance, not to mention the loss of an untold amount of biodiversity.

  Makiuarnek didn’t care about what happened to some far off world five hundred thousand years in the future. By his estimation, planets with thriving biology died all the time from gamma ray bursts, supernovas, and all sorts of interstellar phenomenon. There would always be another planet ready to evolve new creatures. If life didn’t evolve the intelligence to save itself, then maybe it wasn’t worth saving.

  However, Makiuarnek enjoyed sleeping with Cassie, so he pretended to care, or at the very least didn’t voice his opinions about her beliefs. At first, he thought it was a purely physical connection. He’d burn through an entire decrand fuel cell to reduce the travel time from London to New York to about an hour. His dad didn’t care or even question as long as he was doing well in school and he wasn’t making headlines. And the only reason his father cared about his school was the m
isguided belief that Makiuarnek would get a business master’s one day.

  Their relationship went smoothly for months. They spent almost every waking hour together. His father didn’t even notice he was gone most nights. Makiuarnek’s friends couldn’t believe a woman could settle him down, and they wanted to meet her. He didn’t give a crap about his friends and enjoyed just being with Cassie.

  It wasn’t until he made some off-handed remark about some species deserving their fate when their planet burned in an environmental disaster from dirty power stations where they had their first argument. It wasn’t even an argument at that. It was more of a stonewalling. She kicked him out of her shop and told him to go fuck himself.

  She wouldn’t respond to any of his attempts to contact her, whether it was in person, via social media on the galactic network, or any of the myriad of ways he tried to contact her. The deafening silence from her end began to crawl under his skin.

  Finally, he broke and decided to pay her a visit to apologize. Makiuarnek had never apologized in his life. He entered the shop and saw a customer. The man was a green Haallaak with long legs and a long torso. Vigo haggled with the man over a part for a home immersive arcade unit.

  “Human, go to the back,” Vigo screeched. While it sounded like a threat, Makiuarnek knew that it was just that Vigo’s people, the Kapkt, were about as off-putting as an alien race could be. Their friendly speech inflections were grating, aggressive, and near nonsensical. If there was any sentient species least equipped for the delicacies of customer service, it was the Kapkt. With that and the over inflated prices, it was amazing that Cassie’s shop had any customers at all.

  Although, due to the sensitive nature of her real business, Makiuarnek was pretty sure Vigo was hired intentionally to chase off customers. The last thing Cassie wanted was a thriving junk shop business. For what Vigo lacked in social graces, he made up in loyalty. Makiuarnek knew that if Cassie ever really wanted him dead, Vigo wouldn’t hesitate, no matter how many times he had been welcomed into the shop.

  He left the painful haggling process behind and made his way to the back past the amp room where he had first met with Cassie. She was a musician at heart and played just about anything that could be plugged in and could carry a tune. Whenever she was too stressed to think about a computer problem, she would go to the amp room and play. Makiuarnek had waited a few times here and there before entering the room so that he could hear her play. She was good for being a person without any genetic modifications.

  He opened the door to the back and stepped into the workshop that was more a jumble of wires and computer parts than an actual working space. The tendrils of cords snaked their way through the ceilings and floors of the building. They all seemed to center on a stalactite of monitors and computers that hung from the ceiling. There were systems from all different eras. They ranged from ancient systems that should be sitting in a museum to the sleek quantum computers used today. The screens ranged from cathode tubes all the way to fully immersive, tactical, projection systems like the ones in the immersive arcades.

  Cassie was sitting at a workbench cluttered with parts and various tools. She had a pair of goggles over her eyes that seemed to be relaying a complex stream of data to her. There was a wire connecting her to the data drive, and she was completely engrossed in the task. Makiuarnek had seen her in this state enough to know that the sun could be going supernova, and she wouldn’t so much as look up at him. He lifted a circuit board on what would be a pile of junk for most people.

  She turned to him and said, “That circuit board is older than your grandmother’s grandmother. Now put it down. If it breaks, I will break you.”

  He knew her well enough to know when she was being serious and put the circuit board back.

  “I don’t see what’s so important about all this junk anyway,” he said.

  “What do you know about your history?”

  “Humans were assholes, so they formed the UPE. Humans are still assholes, so nothing much has changed.”

  “Except for the computer, that changes all the time. Would you believe that in the beginning, computers were getting smaller and smaller? Then along came the atomized quantum processor, and it couldn’t get any smaller. When the computer became the smallest functional size possible, there was nowhere to build but up. Meanwhile, the tasks and calculations required to be performed by a computer got more and more complex, so computers began to grow and grow. This drive defies all of that. It’s neither a shrinking nor growing technology,” Cassie said and turned back to the data drive.

  After a moment of silence, Makiuarnek couldn’t hold it in anymore. “So I have to say this. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately, and I like you. And well, I came here to apologize. I didn’t mean that comment I made last week.”

  “Sometimes it’s good to see if there is a historical precedent. I keep old hardware around because maybe someone out there already has a solution for my current problem. However, it was built with different fundamental principles than our current computer systems. And I’m sorry, did you say something?”

  “I apologized, about last week. You know when I was an insensitive dick.”

  “What? That? Does it look like I care about that? So you were an asshole, there’s no reason to dwell on it.”

  “You’ve been ignoring me.”

  “I’ve been working. I have no time to answer every lovey-dovey text. Just cause we’re fucking doesn’t mean we are going to get married!”

  That was his line! Makiuarnek didn’t know how many times he had used that line and only got trouble afterward. Now that it was used on him, it only made him want her more. “You don’t know how much that makes me want you.”

  “Later. Look at the encryption on this drive. It’s different than anything I’ve ever seen. Most encryptions still run on archaic principles that used keys like the old 128 SSL of the past. When quantum computers could crunch a 128 like it was nothing, the keys just got larger and more layered, but they still worked on the same idea. When you have data you don’t want someone to see, you lock it up with a key.”

  “And this is important… why?

  “This drive doesn’t have a key or even a keyhole.”

  “So?” he said.

  “So? So? It’s like trying to open a door with a lock that doesn’t exist. Hell, I’m not even sure the door exists. What I’m trying to say is that humans did not create this data drive.”

  “So this is alien tech?”

  “Digitally speaking. The hardware is Shusharian.”

  “What’s my dad doing with a Shusharian hard drive?”

  “That’s not the point. The encryption software is alien, even to the Shusharians. We are dealing with something completely new. Like, not something from this world or any world that we know about. Encryption data is like seeing a jumble of garbage. However, if you stare at anything long enough, you’ll see patterns. Those patterns are the keyholes, entries into the system. With this drive, there are no repeating patterns. This data looks like nothing, like garbage. There must be something else. There has to be something else. Even encrypted data follows a pattern. Substitute all the A's for E's then the E's for M's on the next pass, and so forth.”

  “So how do we unlock it?”

  “That’s when I found a piece of code. It wasn’t a way in. It was just a one off reset switch. A break glass in case of emergency deal. Wipe the hard drive and start over.”

  “What good would that do? Wouldn’t that destroy the data?”

  “That’s why I’ve been ignoring it, but the solution was so simple. It’s been staring me in the face all this time! The reset switch, it wanted to get the biometrics of the new user. This drive is DNA locked. We are going to need samples to get it opened. So, you going to invite me over for dinner with your dad or what?”

  Makiuarnek’s face flushed. He couldn’t help himself. No one had ever caused him to do that before. There was something about Cassie that made him always feel out
of kilter, and a part of him loved it.

  Cassie looked up from her work and noticed him as if it was for the very first time. A knowing smile grew across her face. They started kissing. Makiuarnek lifted her onto the desk. He would invite her over to dinner, but not as some punk girlfriend that would try to get a rise out of his dad, but as an accomplice, a partner worthy of his time and attention.

  _______

  Dinner with Makiuarnek’s father was painful. The conversation was stifled and short. The table was too large to have a reasonable conversation. Cassie picked at her food and crinkled her nose on more than one occasion. Makiuarnek loved her even more for it.

  She had cleaned up rather well. She was wearing a dress that was more expensive than the entire content of her junk shop. It was white, long, and flowing, and what all the rich offworlder women were wearing.

  Makiuarnek had insisted on buying it for her, not because he wanted her to wear more dresses; he liked her gutter punk look. It was more because, for his dad to believe that she was a woman worthy enough to bring home to his family, she had to look as if she came from the upper class. She would rather burn the dress than wear it.

  The strange part of the dinner was not the food that was shipped in from every corner of the galaxy that would cost the average worker a year’s salary. Nor was it the formality of the event with proper table clothes, silverware, and servants attending to their every need. Those were things that his father did for all of his guests to flaunt his wealth.

  The strange part was that his father welcomed the chance to meet the woman he was dating. His father seemed to find any excuse to avoid the affairs of his son. If he had a sporting event or a performance at school, his father would always have important business. His father seemed to care little about what happened in his life, so it felt strange that he cared about it now.