POD (The Pattern Universe) (12 page)

The shield was keeping him from getting banged up from the ride, but it wouldn't stop him from drowning. He lay flat out, keeping his face upward where the air was. He was dragged under as the vortices created by the narrowing tunnel forced him to higher speeds through the smaller space. This, he didn’t like.

He held his breath, and, as it strained his lungs, he allowed a little air to dribble out through his nose to relieve the pressure. He did this twice and was just beginning to feel the onset of his body’s reaction to depleting oxygen levels, when he felt the pressure around him ease. He found himself bobbing on the surface again, the thermal gear providing him with sufficient buoyancy to keep him afloat. He took in a few freezing cold lungfuls of air to recover his oxygen balance.

The glow globe showed him that he was entering the approach to the exit from the Fortress shield. All he had to do then was stop himself being ejected over the edge of the waterfall and instead climb down where he knew there was a goat trail. Lang felt confident as he entered the last stretch. Once past the nullifiers he would be free.

Everything happened at once. He inexplicably sank. His shield, which had been providing him with a small amount of resistance against the water pressure, was gone. He hit the wall and starting gulping in water as he lost all control of his movements and continued to submerge.

He floundered in the darkness; his glow globe not helping in the turbulent river. Something hit him in the back, he felt his right leg go. The pain of it breaking, somewhere above the knee, hit him a second later causing him to open his mouth involuntarily in a scream of agony. The water rushed in; he coughed, causing his lungs to spasm.

As he flowed past the nullifiers, his drowning body was caught by something, his rucksack hooking somewhere, he was held fast while the water, in full explosive force, ripped past his body. His damaged leg, twisting in the tumult, carried new waves of exploding pain into his brain. He felt pressure as he was pulled against the current until he was free of the water and suspended in a small cavern where the nullifiers were placed.

He coughed, and puked up water, retching it out of his body, while he continued to hang over the water. His head was aching, but he willed his eyes open to try and make sense of what had happened. His shield shouldn’t have failed. He shouldn’t be drowning; he shouldn’t... his eyes took in the view in front of him, the glow globe illuminated his worst nightmare. Ferris.

“Lang, you little shit!” Ferris bellowed. It echoed around the cavern. Ferris was holding him up by the straps of his rucksack and looking into his eyes as he pulled him level with his Ferrazine strength.

“Did you honestly think you could leave here without my approval, eh?” He shook Lang as if he was a little doll. The strength of the man was superhuman, and the puny body he was holding was nothing to him in terms of mass.

Lang screamed as his leg went a different way to his body from the momentum.

Ferris laughed. His smile disappeared in the light of the glow globe, to be replaced by an evil scowl.

“You have something of mine, Lang, and I WANT it.” He glowered at him, seemingly impervious to the fast water flowing around his feet and the cold air which was freezing Lang as he hung there, shivering from the cold as much as the shock.

“I... I... don’t..” was all that Lang could utter, his voice gone, the fear, shock of the injuries and the cold sapping all of his concentration.

“Oh! don’t worry, Lang, I know where it is.” Ferris' other hand yanked Lang's shield emitter off the strap and waggled it in front of his eyes. “You were right to suspect the globes, Lang, very astute of you. However, you never thought to check for cameras and monitoring devices in your rooms, did you now, eh?”

“Wha... what... you going to do to m...me?” Lang stuttered nervously. He didn’t want to know, but hope inside him burned a hole in his fear. He was still valuable to Ferris; he couldn’t disarm the nanites without him. He was about to tell Ferris that when Ferris bawled at him.

“Do with you, Lang?” he laughed gleefully. “Why, I’m going to let you go, Lang,” he chortled, his face looking more demonic in the half light from the glow globe. “In fact, I am going to let you go NOW!” he roared with laughter.

Lang felt himself thrown back into the freezing me-lee. As he struggled to fight the fierce current, he almost passed out as the torrent took him. Within seconds, he was in deep water. He banged painfully against the wall on the other side of the underground river, distracting him only momentarily. He screamed as he saw the black maw of the water-filled tunnel rush towards him, knowing that beyond it, was the empty expanse of space, and freedom.

He was barely conscious as he was forcefully ejected out through the waterfall. Free of the water's power, his body gave him peace from pain for his last few remaining seconds on Earth. He felt nothing as his body hit the ground, two thousand feet below. The snow of the coming winter turned red with his blood, which froze on contact until it too became covered, the white carpet hiding Lang’s body until the Spring thaw.

Ferris walked in on Goeth, who was painstakingly counting something on his microscope using a manual counter. The ‘click’, ‘click’, ‘click’ indicated the progress his eye made across the slide.

The shield emitter in Ferris’ hand, landed in front of Goeth, forcing his eyes away from the scope. Distracted now, he turned his attention to his partner. “Is it done?” he asked Ferris.

“Aye, the little shit has gone down the sluice, without that,”he indicated the shield emitter in Goeth’s hand. “There won’t be much left of him by the end of winter.”

Goeth fingered it, reluctant to play with it. “He will have sabotaged it. Are you sure he inserted the code in this?” he asked, dubiously.

“Aye, you can see the recordings from his spy globe,” the term they called the personal globes every worker was forced to have with them at all times. Also known by the manual workers as ‘Guardians’, the scientists preferred to believe the globe was there for their own personal use and used it for lots of silly tasks. Its only job was to spy on them.

Goeth shook his head. “No, I believe you, Ferris,” he picked up an instrument off his desk, turning back to Ferris and placing the emitter on the table in front of them.

“Are you just going to open it? Haven’t you got some means of pulling the information out of there, without damaging it?” Ferris queried when he saw the scalpel in Goeth's hand.

“If it’s sabotaged, it won’t help us. Our only chance is to recover as much as we can before it does whatever it’s going to do. He pulled a squeeze bottle with a clear fluid near to him and a couple of throwaway cloths.

Ferris leaned over, placing his hand on Goeth’s arm, restraining him. “We aren’t going to blow this just because you don’t have a better idea.” He took the emitter back and placed it in his pocket. “Tell me you have a plan, and I will bring it back for you to work on. In the meantime, that boy was working on something important, work some magic on his drive and find out what it was.”

Ferris walked out leaving Goeth seething. He knew he was right, but Goeth also knew there was practically no way of getting in there except by brute force. He knew Lang’s nature and abilities; he was a smart little bastard. He would have set whatever was in there to disintegrate the moment the seal was popped.

He sighed, looked back at the counter he had in his hand again. Clicking it back to zero, he put his eye over his scope and was soon clicking away again. Science sometimes was very monotonous, but he knew he was close to the secret of the Ferrazine. He had been testing it as a substitute platform for the computer processors. Its crystal properties were perfect for temperature control and the conductivity was the best they had ever found.

The monitoring globe that Pod had left hovering over the Fortress detected the movement in the lower levels of the Fortress. It had been instructed to monitor anything out of the ordinary, as well as the development of the trojan virus that Pod had infiltrated into the computer system previously. When it found the activity had moved to a specific point it had been told to raise the alarm over, it did so, forwarding the observation that the signature of the human, Ferris, was present. In response, Pod arrived, not thirty seconds later by D-Jump, and observed the last few seconds just as Lang was ejected back into the river.

Pod, not aware of what had occurred, quickly made the assumption that Ferris would not have thrown the individual into the water if he had not meant for him to be killed by the two thousand foot drop to the base of the mountain.

This seemed important for some reason so Pod, without the time to intervene, patterned the person as it fell the distance to the floor of the valley. It incidentally noted the contents of the rucksack as part of the patterning and removed these items with the D-Field as Lang plummeted. Pod managed to complete the pattern as Lang hit the rocks at the base of the mountain.

Holding the pattern was no problem, but Pod now didn’t know what to do. It had naturally recovered the genetic imprint. It had instinctively worked on the premise of the enemy of Zeke’s enemy was a ‘friend’ and, having met its instinctive obligations, Pod now had to decide what to do. Pod examined the data-pad files. It identified the pattern as a scientist called Lang. Interesting.

It pulled up the data log on the monitoring globe and ran a set of search criteria. When it discovered the hack virus had penetrated Lang’s computer and transferred itself via that to the whole network Pod began to look deeper. The virus was charged with sifting data, collating it and then depositing , in unused portions of the system, often in three or four different locations, in case one, or another failed. As a result, the virus program had compiled everything out of Lang’s computer right up until he destroyed his computer with his own destructor nanites. This was what he was hiding from Ferris and, in all probability, why he was killed.

It took Pod another ten minutes to track Ferris’ movements and establish the fact that Lang’s shield was the target of Ferris’ efforts. Pod set the virus it had installed with additional coding, so that if Ferris should, somehow, unload the software from the shield, the program would immediately move, encrypt and notify the surveillance globe.

Pod then carried out the grisly task of removing Lang’s remains, then D-Jumped back to Space Island where it re-patterned Lang who was left laying unconscious on Zeke’s bunk. The nanites Pod had inserted in the re-patterning would repair his leg and other injuries. He would awaken when they had finished.

Pod’s last task was to allocate a surveillance globe to Lang. It secured the door, both from incoming and outgoing visits, then returned to Osbourne who hadn’t seen him disappear and would be wondering where he had gone.

- 10 -

Pod returned to the laboratory, parking itself silently on the cupboard top. It considered how it was going to tell Ossie that it had rescued a Fortress scientist and re-patterned him. Not only that, but the human was currently locked in Zeke’s apartment while the medical nanites repaired his body. Pod was constantly studying the reactions of humans in an effort to understand them. It had learned never to anticipate their reactions.

Ossie noticed Pod’s return. The small change in air pressure was just enough to cause a draft in the small room he called a laboratory. He turned around in his chair and cast a baleful eye in the direction of the cupboard.

“You’re cloaked, Pod. What have you been up to?”

Pod uncloaked, allowing Ossie to focus on the small tear-drop craft.

It had recorded the whole incident so, instead of explaining, Pod simply transferred the series of files across to Ossie’s terminal and auto-played it, which diverted Ossie's attention temporarily. Pod was unable to comprehend why humans could not just read the data records and make the correct interpretations. Ossie was better than most but would still require simple explanations at the end of the replay.

Ossie sat back and blew air out his mouth extending his cheeks as he did so. It was a human trait that Pod was still trying to comprehend. It seemed to signify something, but Pod had not found much information to help it understand the expression.

“Pod,” Ossie said eyeing the AI up speculatively. “Someday you guys are going to have to let us play with that Dematz technology you have there. It’s truly amazing.”

Pod bobbed up and back down in silent acknowledgement. It understood the question required no answer. It had been asked and answered many times. Not until the humans had progressed to the point of self discipline, where knowledge of such science didn’t immediately cause the destruction of its species through misuse, would they be allowed to have it.

Ossie swung his chair around to face Pod, leaned forward and cupped his hands around his chin. Pod understood this to be a sign of contemplative thought, so waited.

“So,” Ossie began, “this scientist was stripped of something, his personal shield, according to the account you have here. He was then deliberately thrown over the waterfall to his death.”

Ossie continued piecing together the story from the recording. “Where is this person now? Did you bring him here?”

Pod told him that Lang was recovering in Zeke’s apartment and would probably be unconscious for a day, perhaps two, while the nanites repaired the compound fracture his leg had suffered.

Ossie nodded his approval at that. His mind though was drifting onto something else.

“What was it he discovered, I wonder, that forced Ferris to kill him, and what was it about the shield? Was it just to ensure he would die when he was thrown out by the waterfall?” Ossie was ruminating, not expecting Pod to have the answer. Pod didn’t realise that, so considered its response.

Pod determined that the programming work on Lang’s nanites was, by its own standards, evolutionary and derived from humans independently learning and understanding Jenari and AI coding language. In this, Lang was indisputably following an acceptable evolutionary pathway. Pod had no desire to restrict the knowledge of how to miniaturise the software for nanite production, so he told Ossie what Lang had uncovered.