Chapter Three
Beren
It had been a few weeks now since Chantel had received the corrupted Soul download. Since that day she had tried playing the hologram over again and each time the glitch was the same. The momentary grainy images, the distorted vision, the synchronicity of the purebloods. She didn’t know what to make of it all. Each day she continued her usual ritual, but she could not shake the visions of the purebloods from her mind.
It was something she would have to speak to Beren about, she decided. Beren Marley was a dear of friend of hers. She had known him since the time a few years ago when he was the most brilliant tech eng at Pangaea. The brightest graduate of his class, a software hacker by the age of 10, Pangaea had no choice but to hire him. He was the best, and he knew it. However, despite his obvious intelligence and thirst for innovation, Beren was hampered in his ambition by possessing a strong moral compass and a propensity to question all that he did not agree with, and he disagreed with many. The use of implants, the restrictions on data formats, the laws against migration, the law against interoperability. These were matters against which Beren expressed such vehement opposition that he was eventually sidelined in his career, shunned and forced out.
On top of all this, there was the hacking scandal which gave Pangaea the convenient excuse it needed to quickly turn its back on Beren. There was no question that Beren indulged in some unconventional hacking. Being a genius at his art, it was only natural that Beren’s intelligence would manifest into an uncontrollable curiosity and thirst for knowledge. His deep cravings for information extended to everything from history to current affairs. His quest for access to facts from the past, present and future was insatiable. What really lay beyond the wasteland? What algorithms did the global five use for their data compression formats? Who were the people representing the global five in parliament? These were all questions he had tried to answer through legitimate and illegitimate means.
Finally, being the smart Alec that he was and not being content with just accessing the information but with sharing it also, the affinity that he felt towards his fellow human beings got the better of him. Hacking into Pangaea’s mainframe he accessed a number of files ranging from research reports to historical databases. Unscrambling the algorithms that protected these files in the .pga format, he then format-shifted the content into a technology neutral format so that it could be accessed by anyone and using any device. To do so, Beren determined and unscrambled not only Pangaea’s format algorithm but also each and every algorithm used by the other companies in the global five.
Naturally, the global five were outraged. In an uncharacteristically cooperative move, all companies banded together to effectively hunt Beren down. Every trace of the format shifted content was deleted from global servers and the algorithm Beren used to release the content in the technology neutral form was immediately classified as a breach of security protocol and put on a watch list. Its use would be considered a breach of global security in the highest order. Beren himself was arrested and prosecuted. However, knowing that it would take some time for the global police to reach location -64+30 from Shanghai, which was located in the central quadrant, Beren had the time and foresight to destroy most of the physical evidence that could incriminate him. Unfortunately, in the process of destroying the evidence and being pursued by the global police in a city wide automobile chase, Beren lost control of his vehicle, crashed and suffered horrific injuries. He suffered a broken spine, collarbone and arm. The bones in his collarbone and arm eventually healed. His spine didn’t. Beren was left a paraplegic and paralysed from the waist down.
With the court case against him delayed while Beren recovered from his injuries, the filters Beren imposed on the format-neutral information he released gradually deleted most of the incriminating data. The case against Beren for circumventing the technological protections on data remained circumstantial at best. He was given the lenient sentence of incarceration in Sydney’s white collar prison for three years. It was here, ensconced with fraudsters, embezzlers and plenty of other computer hackers that according to Beren, his mind was able to flourish. A component of white collar crime would generally involve some level of infiltration into the networks of the global five, whether to extract money or falsify records and other such technological theft. These were the gravest crimes imaginable that required the most extreme punishment. The white collar prison was a particularly severe prison, reserved for those who had committed the most serious of crimes. As punishment, all prisoners in the white collar prison were cut off from the mainframe. The internet of information, entertainment and communication was isolated from prisoners as retribution for the sins these people had wrought upon society. Any electronic implants inserted in prisoners were deactivated for the time of their incarceration, rendering inaccessible any files on the hard disk. If a prisoner wanted to use a communicator they would have to enter a separate room where communication devices were set up on a table and had to be raised to the ear to function. The only sources of entertainment available to the prisoners were of the analogue kind. While others deplored their situation and attempted suicide, Beren rejoiced in the freedom of being beyond connectivity. He found himself being inexplicably attracted to books of the past. As a consequence, Beren’s main pastime for the three years of his imprisonment was reading.
“Books, Chantel. Glorious books!” Beren would shout, his eyes glistening with excitement when meeting Chantel upon his release. “Books, with actual spines and covers, with pages I could turn. Oh, it was wonderful. I couldn’t believe how many there were. I had never even seen one book before and there in the prison, there were more than I could possibly imagine, all waiting for me to feast my eyes on. Chantel, I have to find a way to go back there. There’s still so many I haven’t read!”
Chantel could hardly believe it. Her friend, that she had not seen for three years as a result of him being sent to jail, had not atoned, had not repented, had not at all reformed but on the contrary seemed to be plotting ways in which he could break the law again.
“Are you absolutely crazy? You were just released early for good behaviour and you want to be sent back to prison?”
“Godammit, don’t remind me about that. Me and my cursed good behaviour. Of course I was like an angel in there. There wasn’t really much mischief that a cripple like me could get into, was there? And being stuck in this wheelchair all I could do were the boring, hands-only chores, so of course I did an exemplary job at finishing all these. I was just the model prisoner wasn’t I, damn it all to hell!”
“Well you are out now and you better stay out. No one will want to look at you if go back in again. Even as it is now Pangaea will never take you back. In fact, none of the global five will ever go anywhere near you. You’ll probably be arrested again if you even go near their office.”
“Oh Chanty, are you giving me ideas again? I knew you were always the bright spark.”
“I am dead serious Beren. Don’t even think about it. You need to get your act together now. You need to find a job. We need to get those chips working again. We need to find you a place to live.”
That was a year ago and miraculously, Beren had not managed to return to prison since. He became a teacher of history at the university - the only other place where he could get his hands on the occasional book. It was the history in the books that excited him. After his three years in prison Beren acquired a wealth of knowledge that was noticeably absent from the annals of history available from the mainframe. Chantel had to agree that it was only after his prison stint that Beren became a more interesting person. Rather than boring her with technical details of his latest hacking venture, after being released Beren regaled Chantel with tales of ancient cities and countries from a past no longer known by many on earth. He was fascinated with the migration of the human race and studied trading and travelling routes from one country to the next. He analysed ancient systems of government and the evolution of democracy to the pre
sent day election of the Chairperson. After his stint behind bars, Beren became a wealth of knowledge and Chantel knew that he would have the answers to the mysterious appearance of the purebloods on her Soul download.
Finishing work slightly earlier than usual that day, Chantel’s mood was elevated at the prospect of breaking from her usual routine and riding the tube to the other end of town to Sydney University. She arrived on the campus which was one of the few vestiges of foliage left in the metropolis and proceeded to Beren’s office. She found him there, nose buried in a decrepit looking manuscript, analysing the great financial turmoil that wreaked havoc across developed economies over two hundred years ago.
“Beren, where did you dig up that moth-eaten rag?” Chantel joked.
Beren swung around, knocking over several piles of books and a cup of coffee in the process.
“Well, bloody hell Chantel, if it isn’t you sneaking up on me again. You could have given me some warning that you were coming. Oh wait a minute, you did too. I remember now. Look at that, is that the time already. Okay, come in and sit down. Yes, just put those books in the corner. I’ll make some room as well. To what do I owe this pleasure? Did you tell me over the communicator or telephone should I say? No wait, you said it was all very hush hush. Yes, it’s all coming back to me now.”
Chantel was used to the drill by now. While the offices of all the other lecturers were squeaky clean with nothing but a projection screen and interactive display to light up the otherwise bland space, Beren’s office was a cluttered mess. Even now, she wondered how he managed to manoeuvre his wheelchair into the space behind his desk. The entire floor space was strewn with books, coffee cups, odd bits of paper, take away containers and the random banana peel. She perched herself in the midst of all this on a rickety looking chair.
“Beren, I’ll cut straight to the chase.”
“Yes, fine, good, it’s nice to see you too. What wonderful weather we’re having today don’t you think?”
Chantel ignored Beren and continued.
“I downloaded a movie the other day, from a download station on Pitt Street. I didn’t use the wireless download this time. It was a bizarre little booth, one I haven’t been to before. Anyway, it was a movie called Soul, supposed to be a romantic comedy. When I tried to watch the movie later that night, the most bizarre images flickered over the hologram. It was just for a moment, it couldn’t have been for more than a minute. But there was some sort of glitch on the file showing all these bizarre images. There were these people, all turning some giant spiral around and the colour of these people Beren…they were all purebloods. There must have been fifty, maybe even a hundred of them! Beren, I’ve never seen anything like it. It all sounds crazy doesn’t it –“
“Whoa, hold on there tiger,” Beren remonstrated. “Just take things back a notch now. What the, what, you saw what?”
“Purebloods, heaps of them! Pure black purebloods. All…I don’t know what they were doing, labouring, pushing something. I couldn’t really make out what it was all about. It was just the craziest thing I’ve seen in my life. It came out of nowhere, on this movie I downloaded, which was supposed to be about time travel, and a comedy at that!”
“Time travel, you say. Could it be possible the hologram you saw was actually made in the past? Purebloods haven’t been seen for hundreds of years.”
“Well it could possibly have been…but something did make me feel that this was more recent footage. I mean the hologram technology only came about in the last twenty years or so. This had to have been filmed at least that recently.”
“But where Chantel? Purebloods are a lost race. If there were as many of them as you say you saw…why, where would they all be hiding?”
Chantel paused, struck suddenly by what should have been obvious to her all along.
“There were letters and numbers, flashing before the footage. Randomly, now that I think of it, they might have been coordinates. Of course, why didn’t I realise that before. -23-134, I think was there, -32-85 was one I remember. They all seemed to be in the -134 to -85 range come to think of it.”
Beren’s eyes lit up with excitement.
“-134 to -85, you know what lies along that longitude right? Its times like these when I need to pull out my trusty old map.”
Chantel returned a blank stare.
“My dear Chanty, after everything I’ve taught you. Okay, let me show you a map. It’s a very ancient map so please be gentle.”
Beren rifled through his books, finally digging out the one he was after.
“Now let’s see here. Oh yes, here we go. Here is a map of the world. See we are here on the grid. Location -64+30. This continent here was what used to be known as Australasia and this huge country – Australia. Sydney was…well, not the capital of the country but let’s say the most lived in city. Now if we go across to the western quadrant of the grid. This huge land mass here – this is all Africa, home of the purebloods with the dark skin. See this used to be broken up into all different countries. Each colonised by another country, but that’s a story for another day. Now what did you say one of the coordinates were? -23-134. Okay that would be somewhere over here. The old nation of Sierra Leone. A place called Freetown by the looks of it.”
Chantel was stunned. Rarely had she seen a map of the globe before and the existence of lands on the other side of the world was a concept she found difficult to fathom, let alone names being given to each of these different land masses.
“Africa? What’s Africa? Are you sure that’s what the numbers mean? There were letters as well. What did those letters stand for?”
“Well look at this map Chantel. Let’s see if we can pull up something a bit more recent, hey. Look I’ll put something up on the projection screen that is from this century. Ooh, it has pretty colours as well. That’s a language you can understand isn’t it?”
Chantel ignored Beren’s jibes. While other people commonly felt affronted by Beren’s deprecating manner, she had become more or less immune to his oblique way of teasing. She chose to ignore it, partly because he was brilliant and there was always an element of truth in his underhand comments and partly because she knew that despite his insensitivity, Beren was the most well-intentioned, genuine and upstanding person she had ever known. However, it was easy for Chantel to forget this when he turned into an obssessed, crazed lunatic upon coming across a new idea. Beren projected a map on the projection screen in his office and began gesticulating wildly with reference to both maps.
“See, almost the whole of Africa is a manufacturing zone or wasteland, except for these few agricultural tracts around what used to be Kenya and South Africa. Oh and one metropolis right at the tip of the continent. Okay, now if we transpose this map of today over this prehistoric map with countries on it, we can see where all the zones are. What you’re describing sounds like something that if it was happening at all in this world, it would be happening in a manufacturing zone. And it makes sense that the coordinates point to Africa because that’s where the purebloods originated from.”
“Okay, but if the numbers that I mentioned point to these coordinates, which was - what was the name of the place, Freetown – then that place is in the wastelands, not the manufacturing zone.”
“Which is why this is stranger still, Chantel! No one knows what is in the wastelands right? This glitch that you’ve somehow managed to download for yourself, that could be the greatest clue ever discovered. Chantel, you have to let me have a look.”
Chantel’s face whitened.
“Beren, you can try to download the movie yourself and see if the glitch is on the copy you download…but you know I can’t let you see my copy, and you can’t offload it from my hard disk. Beren if they catch you doing that sort of thing again they will throw you in jail for sure and they will definitely charge me as well for offloading the file to you. Beren, it’s not worth it. I don’t want to take the risk!”
“Oh poo you goody two shoes. So you should
go to jail. It will do you a load of good. You never know, you just might learn something useful in there,” Beren sulked. “Well I have to have a look at what we are dealing with here somehow. It’s perfectly evil of you to tell all of this to me without letting me see with my own eyes what this is all about.”
Chantel knew that Beren could behave like an insolent child if he didn’t get what he wanted and as much fun as she had taunting and aggravating him further on such occasions, she also knew that in this instance, his point was entirely warranted.
“Okay, I’ll cut you a deal. If you download the movie and this glitch is not on the copy you download, then you can tap into my hard drive if you promise, absolutely swear, that there is no way in the world anyone can possibly trace you. But I agree Beren, you need to see this with your own eyes.”
Beren’s face brightened.
“That’s more like it Chanty. And of course no one will be able to track me. You know you are dealing with the master here. Now what time is it…oh, would you look at the time. Let’s head back to my apartment so I can grab my glasses and see what all this crazy talk is about.”
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