Heir of G.O'D. Revelations Read online

  “I pay my people extraordinarily well,” Musa spits. “Every one of them is trustworthy, otherwise they wouldn’t be here.”

  “I’ve only your word for that.” A heavy clunk sounds off the warehouse walls, making me gasp – even though I don’t need to see to know exactly what it is. I brace for the second thud. Sure enough, a breath later, Denver thumps the butt of his rifle on the ground precisely as he does in-Sim when he’s super-angry.

  “You won’t find it without me,” Musa growls.

  After wasting too much time arguing, we eventually move as a six. My visor is still tucked in the backpack, and Denver’s told me to wear the sunglasses in case someone sees us (even though Musa’s told him repeatedly we won’t be leaving her complex). At least I can hold onto Mika’s Sol-Lite belt as I follow them.

  We leave the cavernous room and, by the echo of our footsteps, move along a lengthy corridor into another vast storage space. Sweat pools on my face, my palms grow clammy and my breathing becomes shallower.

  “What is this place?” I ask Mika through gritted teeth.

  “Some sort of storeroom, I think.” Mika pats my shoulder, but we move again before I can ask more questions.

  We head down a concrete staircase set somewhere in the centre, then along another corridor. The atmosphere is tense, and I can hear the metallic chink of guns against clothing and the stomp of combat boots in the long, confined space. Denver appears on my left, his voice low and tense. “I don’t like this, Ana.”

  For once, I agree. My inner voice squeals in warning. “I think …”

  “We’re here,” Musa says from somewhere ahead. “Up these stairs.”

  “She’d better be right.” Denver’s voice is so quiet that I almost miss it. Louder, he adds, “C, scope it. Cover him, A. Two by two.”

  By the sounds, I know Denver has readied his weapon. Mika eases me to the side until my back presses against the cold wall, then he stands in front of me. From his breathing, I think Mika’s as tense as Denver. I want, more than anything, to be back in-Sim, with my weapon drawn and ready to defend myself. Realworld, like this, I’m totally dependent on SCAR, and it strikes me more than any other time how reliant on Denver I really am. A realisation hits me like a bullet; aside from Hamilton, Azeema and SCAR, Musa and Samir are the first people I’ve spoken to realworld for months.

  “Clear,” Omar says, his voice echoing from above.

  Pressed between Denver and Mika, I follow SCAR to the stairs and climb a few floors until Mika taps me to stop. Someone opens a door and a light breeze wafts past me, bearing the faint scent of antiseptic.

  Footsteps approach and Musa’s breath tickles my ear as she speaks. “Baran Celal is just beyond the doorway. We’ve had him under guard, but Denver’s ordered my team away.”

  “It’s really going to happen, isn’t it?”

  She places her hands on my shoulders and hugs me, catching me by surprise. Musa speaks directly into my ear, too quiet for anyone else to hear. “Are you sure you can trust Denver? There’s something…”

  “Ana, move it. It’s safe. He’s through there.” Denver does absolutely nothing to hide the surprise in his voice that the engineer is real and waiting.

  As Musa moves away, another hand clamps my shoulder and roughly pushes me forward. The grip is too small to be Denver or Mika, and Omar’s still ahead. Fingernails dig into my shoulder through my clothing, hard enough that my skin will likely bruise. I refuse to give Nele the satisfaction of any reaction, and instead focus my thoughts on who’s waiting beyond the door, and what’s about to happen.

  “Ana,” says Musa, “are you ready to see what we look like?”

  -18-

  Now that the moment’s here, I’m not sure how I feel. Beyond the door is someone who can perform a realworld miracle and allow me to see. But what if the engineer can’t do it? Or, as Denver says, he works for Sol-Corp or another corporation. What if this is all a ruse by some snert looking to cash me in?

  I brace myself, my hands searching for the locket that I don’t actually wear realworld, and follow the others inside. The trace of antiseptic I detected earlier is so thick inside the room that it makes me sneeze. The clomp of our boots on the floor changes as we step from concrete to tiles.

  “Keep back!”

  I stop immediately and duck down, my arms wrapped around my head. Mika’s large hand slips under my arm and lifts me up. “It’s okay, Ana. He’s set up a mobile clinic in the room, all sterilised and shiny. Only, Omar was going to walk in there with his dirty boots. I reckon the medic was about to have fracking kittens.”

  “Better. Be careful, cleanliness is essential young man. Is that the patient?” By his accent, I’m guessing Celal is from the eastern Med area, Turkey or perhaps Syria.

  “Yeah,” Denver replies before I can speak.

  “Good. Bring her closer, put her on this sheet and have her put this on.”

  “I can hear you,” I say, somewhat disgruntled by his attitude. I’m blind, not helpless. I allow Mika to guide me forward until we’re walking on some sort of crinkly plastic that covers the floor. Mika steers me to a chair.

  Someone with gnarled fingers lightly grasps my wrist and scans the ID implant chip until it bleeps. “G@n@le0, correct?” I nod, still disgruntled by the engineer’s attitude. “Change your boots to these covers and wear this gown.”

  “Please,” I mumble. After three attempts I can’t unfasten the laces, partly Denver’s fault for tying them too tight, but mostly because my hands won’t stop shaking. “Fracking knots. Denver can you help, please?” More shuffling, and then Denver’s familiar touch as he raises my foot against his thigh. “What’s it like?”

  “The tent? It’s a mobile medic tent, transparent sides, with a medical chair inside and a trolley full of fragile-looking tools. There’s an assistant too.”

  I’m still quivering, but Denver’s touch is reassuring. “Can you come in with me?”

  “It is not possible,” Celal says in a clipped tone, like a small yapping dog. “The room must remain sterile.”

  “Denver, why don’t you lose the gun and put one of those suits on,” Musa says. “Will that do, Celal?”

  “Yes, I suppose so.”

  “Good. Come, Ana. You need to wear one too.”

  Whatever it is that Denver’s wearing crinkles with every movement. It reeks of chemicals, a bit like my container toilet, but sharper and more caustic. I ease my feet into the legs of the suit and pull the plastic onesie over my clothing. Denver finishes dressing himself, tucks my hair inside the suit and settles the hood over my head. Sometimes he can be so caring and tender (but mostly he’s a grade-A-grouch). Denver places cloth slippers on my feet and guides me across the plastic-covered floor. I can feel the alien, slick surface through the slippers and my tights; I’ve never experienced anything like it before. My mind searches for something to compare the sensation to – perhaps standing on frozen muddy ground. It’s a weak comparison, but the surface is new to me and I allow the distraction to keep my mind occupied. We step through another plastic doorway into an artificially warmed room that reeks of metal, plastic and bleach.

  “Don’t let go,” I whisper to Denver. “Frack, I left my visor out there.”

  “We don’t need it,” Celal replies. “I made a new one. We need to run some tests first.”

  “Will this take long?” Denver asks.

  “Three hours, perhaps more.”

  “Roger. Relax people. Fetch chairs if you need, rotate breaks. Cover stairs and windows. Secure access.”

  Denver leads me away from the door and spins me around until the edge of a chair brushes against the back of my legs. As I sit back, someone clicks a button and the chair first reclines, then raises. Celal holds my wrist while something sharp pricks the back of my hand. He extracts some blood and presses a cloth to the wound. The blood test is followed by a myriad of scans as Celal takes measurements, extracts DNA, more blood, and who knows what else. After scanning my imp
lant’s unique signals Celal, at last, announces that he’s ready to try a visor.

  I tense and squeeze the chair arm with one hand, and Denver’s fingers with the other. He grunts, but doesn’t complain. My desperate search for engineers, the planning and months of effort to raise $uns, and it’s all dependent on the outcome of this one moment. Expectation eats away at me like acid corroding metal. What if Celal fails? I hope with every ounce of my being that Celal is as good as he claims, because I don’t want to go through all of this for nothing.

  Celal slides a lighter and smaller visor over my eyes, resting the arms on my ears. It moves as Celal adjusts something, then fizzes to life as he turns it on and…

  Nothing.

  I could scream.

  “Anything?”

  “Frack all,” I spit.

  “Patience. Each visor must be tuned to the individual. The signals of the receiver implanted in your visual cortex are unique. It can take an hour or more to adjust the settings. Tell me when anything changes.”

  “Sure.” Denver’s squeeze reminds me to be patient, but I’m almost bursting with anticipation. The visor bounces on my nose and ears as Celal adjusts the settings. Three times he removes the visor, twiddles with it, then replaces it on my head.

  “Still nothing.”

  I can tell by his tone, and his breathing, that Celal is growing frustrated too. “Your receiver is a different model than any I’ve encountered before, certainly custom-made,” Celal says, as he fiddles with a screw or knob, or something in the exposed visor housing above my left ear. “It’s truly exceptional. It’s almost like … Perhaps if I adjust this …”

  The visor flares with light.

  “Oh, wow!” I exclaim, jerking up in my seat.

  “What do you see, Ana?” Celal asks in his clipped voice, which contains no hint of the excitement that I’m feeling. If anything, he sounds relieved, but then he is surrounded by armed people.

  “Light! Glorious, majestic, miraculous light, Baran.” After an hour or more of being this close, we’re on more than first name terms (he didn’t like being called Barry, though).

  “Nothing else?”

  “No, but I can see some light. Is it working? Tell me it’s working!”

  Rather than answer, he chuckles to himself as he adjusts the same screw–or perhaps one next to it–in microscopic increments. With excruciating slowness, the glow coalesces into squares of light and dark, then evolves into blocky shades of grey. I tell Baran each time something changes. At one point, he moves to my right side, and I perceive him like a shadow as he passes in front of me. He’s only a grey blocky outline, but I can see him. As he alters the settings on the visor’s right temple tip, the grey splits into hues and colours, like I’m focusing on something emerging from shrouding mist. At first, the colours are muted, like washed-out watercolours. They grow stronger, though, and I can distinguish yellows and blues and reds from the murk. They merge into purples, browns, greens, then finer blends.

  “Ana,” Denver whispers in my ear. I relax my hand a little and turn to face him. I can detect the outline of his hair, the shadow his nose makes across his face, the dark shaded pits of his eyes. But everything is still blocky, instead of Sol-like clarity, everything appears as if extracted from an ancient pixelated sandbox game.

  “I can see you, Denver.”

  Baran speaks softly, close to my ear. “Describe to me precisely what you see, Ana. Is it clear?”

  “No, not yet, just boxlike. Like Minecraft.”

  Musa chuckles from outside the tent. “I used to play that when I was a kid.”

  Baran ignores her and focuses on the right panel. Whatever he changes this time makes the image worse, not better. I want to focus on Denver, on Musa, and the others. But whatever he did, Baran can’t get the blocky images back. Colours are discernible, but with no definition. What I see now is more impressionist than realism, two gloopy faces overlaying each other. Denver’s face resembles a portrait by Alex Garant that’s been rendered in Minecraft, and it’s a bit freaky.

  “Bok! Fragman beni!”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I can’t fix it here. I must replace the sensor, and I need more accurate equipment.”

  “You said you could manage without,” Musa challenges from outside the tent. She steps closer, but is nothing more than a gold and red blurry column to me.

  “I said I would almost certainly be able to. But each patient is different. I told you that when you hired me.”

  “Now what?” says Denver.

  “I must take this to a lab.”

  “We’re not going anywhere,” Denver confirms, his hand reassuring on my shoulder.

  Baran steps closer to me and removes the new visor from my face. The light and the blurry outlines wink out instantaneously. The others begin to argue, but I can’t focus on them.

  I almost saw, it was close enough to touch, and now I’m in darkness again, but it’s worse now because I was so close. Baran Celal is stealing my sight, and he’s taking my new life-changing visor with him.

  “Why can’t you do it here?” I screech in frustration, and with the terror of knowing that my dream is slipping away.

  “Ana. Ana!” Musa soothes. “He just showed me the problem. The sensor’s reached its maximum setting. He’s got an image of a replacement, but the new part and the tools he needs aren’t here.”

  It’s so fracking annoying. I don’t want to listen to this at all. “What now?”

  “I must return to our lab here and make the adjustments. As a sign of goodwill, the new sensor should cost an extra 50,000 $uns, but I will not charge you extra.”

  “Thanks,” I spit, sarcasm flooding my voice. Then I force myself to calm down, controlling my breathing. If I manage to frack Celal off, there’s no way that he’ll come back, and there are no more safe engineers. I realise my fingers are playing with the ghost locket again and let my hand slip idly to my side.

  Celal, I can tell it’s him by his bony fingers, takes hold of my hand. “Ana, listen to me. I have seen this before. Most often the field clinic is good enough. But, occasionally not. You saw through the visor. Not perfectly yet, but you have. We will be able to make this work. Trust me.”

  “Can’t you at least leave me the visor you brought?”

  “No. Apologies, but I need a proper lab to replace the sensor inside. We will be here tomorrow, I promise. I will message Musa. Understood?”

  It’s not like I have a choice. At least Celal won’t get paid until he’s finished the install. I allow Denver to lead me back to the warehouse, but I’m not feeling sociable. Instead of joining the others for vodka and hot food, I take myself to my makeshift cot. Reunited with my trusty visor and a plate of hot wraps for company, I return to Sol and endeavour to avoid a night of endless nightmares about being scammed and never being able to see again.

  Sunday, Halley 21st, 2044

  8 days before Baktun

  I, Gary O’Drae, hereby agree to restore the simulation herein referred to as “Sol”, for the use of all survivors of the Devastation, and their descendants. I make this pledge on the express understanding that the corporation herein referred to as “Sol-Corp” retains sole licence for “Sol”, until my only Heir reaches the age of their majority, at which time ownership transfers automatically to them.

  Gary O’Drae, creator of Sol, founder and CEO of Umbra, on this day, the 31st December, 2028 (SolDate Rebirth Day, 2028)

  Umbra Covenant

  -19-

  “What did he say?” My legs are shaking with nerves, my feet tapping out that 12-note song I ‘made up’. The thought of breakfast makes my stomach perform loops, so I take to sipping water instead.

  Musa agrees to something and disconnects her call. She doesn’t sound at all happy. “Celal’s been called back to their base.”

  “Frack!” I thump the chair.

  “Which base?” Denver asks.

  “Constantinople. He’s a technician for FibreHaptics.
”

  “I knew it! He does work for Sol-Corp.” Denver’s voice is laden with unspoken ‘I told you so’ smugness.

  “A subsidiary of them, yes Denver. There are only three haptic Corps, he’s got to work for one of them.”

  “Does that mean I don’t get the visor?” I interrupt, reining the conversation back.

  “Celal has made the adaptations, but he needs to fit and adjust the visor now. It should take under an hour, he thinks. The problem is that he doesn’t have time to travel here, do the fitting and return to catch his boat. If we want to complete the deal, we’ll need to get to Al Ghubaiba within the hour.” Musa is trying to keep calm, but the tension in her voice is obvious.

  “I don’t like this, Ana.” Denver starts pacing the room. “Coming here was risky enough, heading to the port without scoping the area out... No, it’s too dangerous.”

  Of course, it is. “We’re so close, Denver.”

  “Close to being dead,” someone squeaks. I conveniently forgot that Nele Mouse is in the room with us.

  “Musa. Do we know when he’s coming back?”

  “Could be months, this was his first trip here since Babbage. It depends on his job.”

  “What do you mean?” I snap, then instantly regret it. “Sorry, I’m tense.” Keep calm, Ana, we can sort it, I try to tell myself. I’m struggling though because my dream was so close, and now it might not happen.

  “He was updating their network, Baktun prep. Something went wrong in the Delhi HQ. Who knows what will happen after Baktun?”

  “This change, the new plan, it’s too much of a coincidence.” Denver pauses his pacing for a moment, then walks towards me. “Ana, we know he can fix it. Let’s wait and make arrangements on our own terms.”

  “How are we going to contact him?” I ask.

  “He can call Musa.”