Shanakee's Tale Read online

  Shanakee's Tale

  a dystopian novella

  D. Wink

  Shanakee’s Tale. A PROMETHEUS dystopian novella (prequel)

  Copyright © Diana Wink (2018). All rights reserved.

  dwink-author.com

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by reviewers, who may quote brief passages in the review.

  All characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Requests to publish work from this book should be sent to:

  [email protected]

  Editing by Luke Gerwe

  Cover Design by Carlo Neira

  Created with Vellum

  PART I

  AIDEEN

  This was the underground. It sheltered the secrets of the future, secrets she had been chasing for nearly a decade. Her nerves were tight with tension, but not from fear. From anticipation.

  The lights flickered in the long black corridor. For all she knew, all of it could be virtual reality ground she was blind to. The darkness was cold. She walked down that corridor with quick and certain steps, as if she belonged there. The leather boots echoed against the concrete. The LEDs flickered unnervingly.

  Voices.

  She had to be close.

  Aideen’s hands were wrapped in black leather gloves that she kept in the pockets of her long beige cloak. It fluttered with the speed of her steps. Her long red hair was wrapped into a careless bun. She felt the gun at her side, ready to draw it at any second.

  It took her five years to find this place. The hackers concealed it with more care than their IPs. The air smelled moist and void of oxygen. This was the moment she had worked towards as long as she could remember. Her life pointed towards it, but she suppressed the hope that threatened to rise inside her chest. Would she really find the answer here?

  The voices sounded hollow, and she realized that most of them were voice commands. Hackers rarely used keyboards anymore.

  The metal door separating her from those voices stood unlocked. Aideen took a deep breath.

  The door flew open, nearly unhinged by the force Aideen crashed it against the wall with. She held the gun in front of her and moved before the others could react. Her lenses scanned the space — bare stonewalls, metal chairs, bunk beds and dirty mattresses. Five hackers spread across the room, each of them engrossed into the virtual reality on their lenses. It smelled of sweat, fast-food and too many people in a windowless room. They lived here. It was their reality. Those milliseconds it took them to shut off the virtual world were the seconds that sealed their fate. They never stood a chance, not against her who had been trained since she was a little girl, still in school. At least not in the real world.

  She sprinted across the room, beating the first of them unconscious with one single punch, and giving the second a bleeding nose. Before the third hacker — an unkempt and bearded male with a dirty “FSOCIETY” t-shirt — could pull out a gun, she shot him in the knee. His scream of pain echoed across the room while she snatched the gun out of his hand. As she raised her weapon towards the two in the far right corner — a girl of maybe eighteen and a boy with washed out pants — they had their arms raised in defeat.

  Aideen had swept the room like a hurricane, but now, silence had settled over them. Only the moans of pain echoed between the walls, coming from the bearded hacker.

  “I’m looking for Conall Hubbert.” Aideen’s tone was calm. “If you can help me, you might live.”

  Silence.

  “We don’t know any Conall Hubbert,” a muffled voice behind her resounded, and she turned to face a middle-aged man whose nose she had broken. She’d anticipated the resistance. The hackers were a sworn community, a betrayal would not come easily.

  Aideen went across to the bearded one whose face was red from pain. She pushed his upper body down and started quenching his injured knee. His screams echoed across the room, his face twisted. He desperately fought to break free, but her grip was too strong. After several seconds, she let go and pointed the gun to the other knee.

  “Wait, wait, wait…,” Panic ruled his expression. “We really don’t know any Conall Hubbert. Not down here. Or anywhere else in the net.”

  Her elbow smashed against his jaw.

  “If he were in the net, we would have found him by now.”

  “Depends on how clever he is …” an ironic voice resounded from behind.

  It tickled her nerves. You know nothing, boy. But she resolved to ignore it.

  Instead, she approached the girl, grabbed her hair that felt like straw in her palms, and pulled her to the middle of the room, the gun still extended. She yelled.

  “Please, please,” the boy next to her mumbled. “We really don’t know any Conall Hubbert! But I’ll tell you everything you want to know. Everything I can!”

  Aideen watched him with knifelike precision.

  “All right. Tell me where I can find the forbidden books.”

  The boy’s reaction betrayed that he knew nothing, so she wouldn’t waste her time with him. Instead, she pulled the girl further, towards the other end of the room. Her cries echoed between the walls.

  “How about the two of you?”

  She grew anxious. She couldn’t leave this place empty-handed. She had to find at least something.

  The hacker Aideen had knocked out had awoken by now. It was a man in his forties, beard mixed with gray and black, obese and unkempt. Looks were not important in the underground. He could be whomever he wanted in the virtual reality—a wise king, a muscular warrior, a beguiling maiden.

  “All the books have been burned,” he said with a shaking voice, “You know that after the digital reform …”

  Aideen punched the girl in her stomach, and shot her directly in the foot. The girl crashed to the concrete floor, yelling curses from the top of her lungs.

  “Don’t tell me what I already know!” Aideen’s voice grew more aggressive. It was all part of the tactic—pushing them towards a wall, slowly, breaking them. Hopefully, they would break soon.

  Bleeding-nose spoke, his voice barely audible.

  “After the purge, all the books that could be saved were smuggled to Skye Island. That’s where they still keep them.”

  “Skye Island is deserted.” she replied.

  But he shook his head.

  “That’s what they make you believe. Fifteen years ago, when the purge began, it was all over the dark net — a call to summon all the books, bring them there. To some castle. That’s all we know, I swear.”

  A castle on Skye Island.

  On the outside, she would not let her relief show. But she got what she came for. They just had to follow the books now.

  She knew what she had to do. This was the uncomfortable part, but Aideen had learned over the years how to shut down and do her job. She had to, if she wanted to survive.

  She raised her gun and shot them, one by one. The “FSOCIETY” t-shirt was soaked red with blood. The girl on the floor stopped screaming. The hacker with the injured knee collapsed on his chair. As Aideen turned around to face the boy, whose eyes filled with panic and shock, he yelled: “But you said we will live!”

  Her voice was steady.

  “I said you might.”

  The boy collapsed to the ground, and she looked away, hoping those dead faces would soon vanish from her nightmares.

  Aideen turned around to leave, through the door, towards the long dark corridor. She pushed an earpiece into her right ear.

  “They didn’t know Conall. But I know whe
re the books are. If we follow them, we’ll find him.”

  On the other end, a deep male voice replied:

  “Where?”

  “Skye Island. In a castle.”

  “I will lead a division there today.”

  “Do you want me with you?”

  “No. Prepare for the journey ahead. After all those years …” he suddenly stopped. He was enjoying the triumph, Aideen figured. She could barely believe it herself.

  “Good job.”” he said, and his voice was gone.

  CONALL

  Conall slammed the book shut and threw it to the ground. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, read the title. He had studied it twice now. He had studied all of them multiple times. But it was no use. He stepped back and shivered. The castle had grown cold over the first month of autumn, and it was drizzling outside. A wooden table stood in the middle of the room, covered in piles of books. Before him spread a dark wooden floor, scarlet walls and a massive beautifully carved fire place where a small fire was burning. All of it — the floor, the walls, except for the fire place — was the stage for the huge biomatrix Conall had created with the last remains of paper he found here in the castle.

  He had the naturosphere on the left, the psycho-sociosphere in the middle, and the technosphere on the right. Notes were pinned, nailed or glued to the wall according to which system they belonged to, interconnected in-between each other by markers Conall had pitilessly painted all over the walls. Biomatrix theory was the foundation of future science, showing that social orders emerge from nature, and technology and everything produced by individuals originated in psychological and social systems in return. Thus, it represented all the systems in the universe. In fact, the matrix had grown so large that Conall was running out of space, and would soon need to occupy the walls outside of the room.

  Here was everything he had accomplished over the last eleven years. He had studied all of the books in the castle — biology, chemistry, laws of physics, all of the historical books they’d been able to preserve. The countless pieces of paper where he had scribbled historical events, theories, laws, and patterns stared back at him. Still, it was only a poor imitation of the algorithm he had created once.

  It was so quiet that he could hear his own breath against the crackling of the fire. But he had grown accustomed to the silence. It helped him think. He looked around, desperate. Even after all those years, he seemed unable to outthink World5. The fact that it was a computer program didn’t console him in the least. Time was running out. How could it have calculated the scenario? And where would it originate? He had studied all the effects of causation, he was sure of it. According to those effects, the lifecycle of the new world would end in six, maybe even seven decades. So why? Why had the machine calculated the Prometheus Scenario?

  A loud noise made him spin around. The slamming of the front door echoed between the walls of the empty castle. Conall made a deep breath. He had grown so used to the silence, being in solitude for a whole week now, that the intrusion made him angry. Several seconds later, he saw a familiar figure entering the room through the two doors that lay widely open. It was Jed, a man in his late forties, a little bit younger than Conall. He was thin and his cheekbones marked a longish face with decisiveness and wisdom. He wore a dark blue cloak and a hood that had protected his brown hair from the rain, but his slightly wrinkled face was wet. He made a deep breath as he entered the room, and leaned his body against the doorframe.

  “When was the last time you’ve eaten anything?”

  Yesterday, Conall thought. He had forgotten about food, so deep had he sunk into the state of ecstasis. It was the only way he could think faster, leave his consciousness behind. Ecstasis had become something the world had been chasing more and more in all its forms, he had heard, but Conall himself had become addicted to the ecstatic feeling of knowledge long ago. To the rush of solving problems.

  Jed was right, of course. If he kept up like this, he soon would become dizzy and unable to think. But Conall didn’t answer. He stubbornly stared at the crazy mess that the room had become.

  Jed’s eyes rolled across the countless notes, pondering. Conall had explained the matrix to him once, and he had no doubt that he could grasp at least some of it, although he was forced to leave university while still in his Bachelor’s degree. He had initiated the smuggling of books all across the British Isle back then, spread it all over the dark net.

  “Anything?,” he finally asked.

  Conall just shook his head, painfully admitting the defeat.

  “Maybe it had been a mistake after all …, “ Jed began, but Conall interrupted:

  “We’ve been over this. World5 has never made a single mistake. It’s me who’s missing something.”

  Conall stared at the room again. He had mapped out the patterns, knowing that there was an infinite ray of them, repeating themselves in a breathtaking cosmic kaleidoscope. Since Einstein had demystified the nature of time, future science had opened a door to mastering the direction time was moving towards.

  Jed approached with slow steps.

  “Conall …,” There was this parenting tone to his voice that Conall detested. “You’ll never be able to reverse it, all of it. You won’t be able to bring Kyla back.”

  Kyla. Why did he have to bring her up? A pain spread across his chest at this name. It had been five years since she had vanished. No note. No goodbye.

  “I know that time is irrevocable. The future is the only thing I can change.”

  The future could be mapped out. But the fact that the world was a deeply interconnected reality, in an infinite process of becoming, where everything emerged and evolved from prior conditions, entities, and systems and thus created continuity between past, present, and future—in short, antecedence —made it a highly complicated task. Seeing all of those interconnected laws and systems in the universe was close to an impossibility for the conscious human mind. This is why Conall was constantly looking to be in ecstasis. Plato described it as an altered state where our normal waking consciousness vanishes completely, replaced by an intense euphoria and a powerful connection to a greater intelligence.

  “At least come to the village for several days. Get something to eat.”

  “There’s no time left. For all I know, he’s somewhere out there already, and I have to find him.”

  “Well, if he’s out there, you should finally leave this place, for the sake of the gods, and look for him!”

  He sensed that Jed was losing his patience.

  Still, Conall dismissed the comment with a wave. It was a pointless discussion. Where would he even start looking? He turned to face the windows, and observed the blurred shore while the sizzling raindrops carefully caressed the glass. Jed walked across the room and extinguished the fire.

  Conall drove his fingers through his unkempt gray hair. The window reflected a tired and disheveled figure that stared back at him. Has he really grown so old already?

  “The drone will return soon.” Jed said, waving him to the exit. “Let’s go.”

  Conall threw one last look across the room, scanning the notes, memorizing them. He was reluctant to leave.

  Jed cleared his throat impatiently and raised his eyebrows. “It’ll still be here when you return. C’mon, I’m starving!” Jed gave him a warm smile, and Conall was thankful for it. He had to admit that if it wasn’t for his regular visits, he would have probably lost his mind already. As useful as the ecstatic state was, it was also dangerous, toying with the unconscious and messing with the mind.

  Finally, Conall gave in and left the room. But the anxiousness that had grown stronger with every passing year refused to leave him. Time was running through his fingers. Soon, it would be too late.

  JOHN

  John was asleep. But he wasn’t dreaming.

  He saw her clearly in front of him, the girl with the fiery red hair. It was straight and long, and it danced with the wind while flames burned all around her. Her dark eyes reflected th
e fire, and pierced him into the depths of his soul. Although he had never seen her before, he knew her. Their fate was neatly intertwined. Screams were all around them, and she fought her way towards him. He wanted to run. He wanted to stretch out his hand for her. But she seemed too far away. Unspeakable fear filled him suddenly. He was unsure why, but it ate him like acid. He tried to breathe, but the oxygen was swallowed by the fire. So all he could do was scream. As loudly and as desperately as he could.

  His own scream awoke him. John instantly straightened up in his bed. His body as well as the fur he slept on were drenched with sweat. He cursed. Yet again, he would have to wash it. He closed his eyes, but her face was still in front of him. Not clearly, but more like in a memory long gone.

  Hopefully he didn’t wake his grandfather. The fire in the middle of the hut had burned out, only the coals were still hot. The cold of the wooden floor instantly shot up his bare feet as he walked over to check on the old man in the other corner of the room. He was asleep, snoring through his thick nose hair. John rubbed his hands against each other from the cold. Autumn was coming. As he started to light the fireplace, there was a dump knock on the door. Who would come here in the middle of the night? John walked over, feet still bare, and carefully opened the door to a slot. Two pairs of boyish eyes stared back at him.

  “You’re alright?”

  Arthur’s voice had grown deep over the last months, and he was proud of it. His blonde hair was done into a bun, and stubble marked his longish face.

  “We heard you scream …”

  “No, you heard him scream and woke me up,” Sena murmured through clenched teeth. He was grumpy about his sleep. His tall and thin figure hung nearly lifeless, like a puppet, and dark circles marked his blue eyes.