Shanakee's Tale Page 3

  They would kill her. Manasseh would kill her.

  She was on the ground already, instinctively protecting her head with her arms while the metal continued to hit her body and break her, bone by bone.

  “Think, Conall,” Manasseh whispered, his voice as calm as a lake.

  Conall tried to steady his breath, closed his eyes, the room in Dunvegan with the biomatrix clearly in front of his mind’s eye. Think! Think! He scanned it, looking, searching for anomalies, anything. Her screams grew duller, but she was still breathing. Panic overwhelmed him. She would die. And he would be the next to be tortured. Was he really unable to see it? Cold sweat dripped down his spine. Think!

  And then there was something. A note saying Glencoe Massacre that struck Conall like never before.

  He tore his eyes open.

  “Area Three. Area Three!”

  Manasseh watched him for a moment longer, then nodded, and the blows ceased.

  How could he have missed it for so long? This one simple but clear hint that he suddenly became aware of. Like it hadn’t been there before.

  “Area Three,” Conall repeated. Had he really just given it away that easily?

  It was an impulse of the moment, the result of the shock that had gripped him. He just wanted to save that innocent woman that lay beaten in from of him.

  But suddenly, Manasseh raised his weapon and shot her. Just like that. Her heavy breathing stopped abruptly. Conall’s heartbeat accelerated with rage, and he clenched his fists. Instinctively, he fought the arms that gripped him to throw himself at Manasseh. He hated him, but maybe, he hated himself more for having made Manasseh who he was today, for having given him that power.

  “Take him to the trucks. We leave for the city,” Manasseh commanded.

  “What will you do to him?” Conall cried, “Kill him?”

  Manasseh stopped for a moment, and watched his captive with interest.

  “Maybe even I have overestimated you.” he finally said, “You don’t seem to have grasped what our program had predicted. But I will let you in, because you will rot in a laboratory cell for the rest of your life anyway. Prometheus is the dawn of a new era. A new species. A new evolutionary step for humankind. And I will pave the way for this step.”

  Conall’s eyes widened. Had Manasseh’s madness no end? It seemed like his obsession for the ideal world had grown so deep it knew no end.

  The soldiers snatched Conall by the arms, punched him in his stomach so that he thought he might pass out yet again, and tossed him into an army truck.

  Now, everything was lost.

  AIDEEN

  The scent of salt filled her nostrils, carried by the heavy wind that came from the coast. Here she was, putting on yet another mask. Her car was parked a safe distance away. Aideen hoped she had hidden it well enough as it was her only escape route in the middle of nowhere. She walked towards the northern hills of the Welsh Outer Area—a grim place, deserted and cold now that the summer was over. Her brain vibrated with a sensation of an incoming satellite call. The connection came from the mandatory RFID chip implanted in the dawn of the bio-technological reform. This chip held everything needed to be part of society—all the accounts, IDs, insurances, monitoring, and connected the brain directly to the world wide web. But there was no internet out here in the Outer Areas, so it had to be a satellite.

  Manasseh’s deep voice resounded on the other end through the earpiece, crackling: “It’s Area Three.”

  She felt her fingertips tickle with anticipation. They had found him.

  “We have a spy there already,” Manasseh continued, and Aideen was annoyed by this unnecessary complication. “But I want you there. Proceed with the plan. Find him, you are the only one who can.”

  A navigation map appeared in her lenses that Manasseh sent via the connection. Area Three was in the Scottish Highlands, in Glencoe.

  “I’m on my way.” Aideen replied.

  “I know.”—a pause, a reminder that he always monitored her carefully—“Good luck.” With these words, the connection was cut.

  Aideen put the earpiece in her pocket.

  It was a lucky coincidence Snowdonia was on the way to the Highlands. Aideen took out the lenses, and hid them in a small box before she went any further, just to be sure. Sometimes she suspected they hacked her visual connection as well.

  She continued to walk across the valley at the feet of the hills, wondering if this was a wise choice, getting involved with the Sub. But the movement had been growing in the past decade into a number even the government was barely suspecting. Know your enemy, they said, and she needed to know both of them.

  A cloaked figure appeared in the distance. There was probably a whole army hiding in the hills. Aideen cringed at the thought, and covered her long red hair with a headscarf, following their customs. Even from the distance, she recognized the shape of a woman, wrapped in linen and wool, her head and even face covered with a scarf, except for the eyes. She was not surprised they sent a woman. Contact between members of the opposite sex was considered out of bounds in public. When Aideen approached, the woman took the scarf from her face and revealed youthful features, big dark eyes, striking red lips, and a neatly formed nose. She was young, maybe even younger then Aideen, but she held herself with mature confidence.

  “My name is Kaahla.” Her voice was steady. No accent.

  Aideen nodded and introduced herself in return. She watched Kaahla with interest. How would someone so young get involved with such an organization? What was it that was driving her? Kaahla might be wondering the same, it occurred to her.

  “I just got the call. We found him.” Aideen had to raise her voice to compete against the wind.

  “Where?”

  Aideen hesitated.

  “You have to promise not to intervene. Never to reveal my identity.”

  Kaahla nodded.

  “We just need to know the location to protect our interests.”

  Aideen nodded.

  “Area Three. You guaranteed immunity and protection.”

  Kaahla smiled.

  “Of course. As long as you deliver.”

  Alive or dead, Aideen remembered. This was the plan. But only one option was good enough for her own purposes.

  “Once you’re ready, send us a signal.” Kaahla passed her a pill with a yellowish gel inside, “But swallow this first to get an encrypted connection.”

  Aideen took the pill, having trouble keeping her hands steady. It felt like it was her against the whole world. Kaahla gave her a nod that contained a slight smile. A smile that set her at ease.

  “Salam,” she said, and wrapped the linen around her face and left.

  Slowly, Aideen walked back to her car with a strange feeling of unrest. The Sub had always evoked mixed feelings in Aideen, but it was the only organization powerful enough to protect her from Manasseh’s wrath once she would betray him.

  The matte gray Toyota was parked in-between the bushes. She started the quiet electric engine to warm the inside a little and get her hands to steady. Then, Aideen took out a scalpel to make her masquerade complete. On the back of her right hand, where she chip was hidden, she made a deep cut. Blood ran down to her palm, and she quickly caught it with some tissues. She had resolved long ago to deceive Manasseh, and it was a difficult choice. Manasseh had recruited her when she was still a teenager in school, had mentored her and made her go beyond her limits. And as much as she despised everything he represented, she admired the man.

  Aideen cut deeper. The injury had to look real, as if she had removed the chip completely. The scar that remained would be a sign of belonging to the Outer Areas. This was how they distinguished the outsiders from the city population. She clenched her teeth from the pain. Somewhere in-between the blood and the flesh, she spotted the tiny little chip, and resisted the impulse to tear it out right now. She had to finish her mission first. She had to kill Prometheus.

  CONALL

  The truck drove through uneven
roads abandoned by civilization. It would be pitch dark inside if not for the several tiny windows that lit the space where soldiers sat opposite each other, and with them—Conall, driving towards his own destruction. He cursed Manasseh. He cursed himself. For the first time in eleven years, he had been this close to the solution of the riddle, yet so powerless to solve it.

  A deafening noise resounded from afar. Conall suspected it belonged to a military helicopter, propellers already in full speed. The car came to an abrupt halt.

  “Time to go to sleep, scientist.” Beside his black exoskeleton that provided his movements with speed and his blows with strength, the soldier wore a self-sufficient smile of disdain. He put a cloth over Conall’s head. His world went black. What would they do to him? Torture? Experiment on his brain? Let him rot in a cell? With his hands neatly tied behind the back, they dragged him outside. The fresh cold air of the Scottish mountains hit him with force after the long drive in the stuffy cabin. He tried to soak it in through the cloth for the very last time. The helicopter noise was overwhelming now while he was dragged further towards it.

  They stopped abruptly. Something was wrong. He sensed it more then he saw or heard anything through the noise and the cloth that blocked his view. Why did they stop? Conall began to panic. He wanted to tear off this damn cloth from his head, but had no hands to do so. The grip dragging him suddenly let go, and he began tossing and turning when he was snatched again, and dragged into another direction, away from the helicopter. Conall nearly stumbled over his feet and crashed to the ground from the surprise and the speed those hands pulled him with.

  “Hey!” he yelled. “Hey! What is this?”

  A hand was put in front of his mouth to shut him up, and a voice resounded in the distance: “Quiet.”

  Was it Jed’s voice? Conall couldn’t believe it, this was so unlike Jed. He would never go to this length to save one single person, not even for old friendship’s sake.

  They stopped after a while. When the cloth was removed from his head, it was Jed indeed who stared back at him, along with three other men from the village. While his hands were untied, Conall looked around wildly. They were safely hidden at the edge of a forest. Between the trees, the trucks just drove into the massive helicopter, and it rose into the air. They were leaving. No chase, nor pursuit. Conall turned to face Jed with a confused expression. How on earth did he do this?

  “We distracted them by staging a fake attack at the helicopter,” Jed explained, “Then we swapped you with Thomas. It was fate that they’d put this cloth on your head, otherwise we stood no chance.”

  “Thomas?” Conall’s voice shook. There was somebody else in this helicopter instead of him? “They’ll kill him when they find out!”

  Conall was trembling now.

  “He made the choice himself. He volunteered.”

  Thomas. Conall tried to remember the guy. He had grown very detached from the village in the past years, especially since Kyla had vanished. But he still knew many from the old Cambridge years, Thomas amongst them. Once a chemistry student, now in his late fifties, height and body shape pretty similar to his, warm eyes, always in a good mood. Why? Why would he do such a thing?

  Conall made a step back.

  “I didn’t ask for this … You had no right to sacrifice another man …”

  “Thomas made the choice himself. It was his idea.”

  His chest suddenly ached. Manasseh would vent his whole spleen on Thomas once he found out he had been framed, robbed of the satisfaction of revenge. This would not be a quick death. Conall’s hands trembled. They had no right to do this.

  “Thomas did it so that you could finish what you started.” Jed said, “You are the only one who can.”

  It struck Conall with strange alienation that Jed suddenly showed so much interest in this whole endeavor. Maybe after all those years, he finally came to believe in the prophecy himself?

  Conall had difficulty processing it, all of it. For eleven years, he had been staring into books and scribblings, alone with himself and his thoughts. Eleven years. He somehow longed for the embrace of solitude again, longed to return to his castle where he alone was king.

  Now, everything was happening too fast. Manasseh had already started the hunt for Prometheus, for all he knew. How could Conall even compete with a global army?

  “They’ll come back to look for me,” he murmured.

  “They won’t find the village.”

  Jed was right, the village was in a forest one could only access thought a tiny cave in a mountain, right behind the fairy pools. The forest was so dense that everything inside was hidden from the eyes of a drone, plane, or satellite. The hideout had stayed undiscovered for over a decade now.

  Conall took a deep breath. He had no choice. At least he had to try and fight Manasseh, find Prometheus and protect him. Or her. Whoever it was. As overwhelming as this task suddenly seemed, the heat of battle seized Conall. He still remembered how it felt to be young, and it was as if his whole life had led to this moment. He could not let Manasseh win, not again.

  He had created World5.

  And he had to protect the future his algorithm had predicted.

  ARTHUR

  Arthur jogged along the valley towards the village in the late afternoon sun. The last sun rays of the fading summer caressed his face and the involuntary proud grin he wore. He carried a dead rabbit he had slain during the hunt. His moderate shooting skills improved with every year, and his father had sent him as a messenger to the village to announce the good news and signal the preparations for dinner to his mother. Arthur was the only one amongst his friends who enjoyed the hunt. Sena was too sensitive, and John plainly detested it. Sometimes he was glad. John had a natural talent for the hunt—he had a feeling for the animals, an instinct of sorts, and an eye of an eagle when it came to shooting. He didn’t need yet another reason to envy John. On the other hand, Arthur was often swallowed by loneliness and felt left out—he was alone in the woods amongst experienced men while the boys chitchatted during their work in the fields. But today, he was proud of his accomplishments. For once, his father had not sent him home preliminary as a punishment.

  He was still at least half a mile from the village that beautifully spread out on the backdrop of the mountains. It looked mostly empty, fieldwork would go on until the sunset, and only some women and elderly were there this time of day. Suddenly, he thought that he saw a shape walking towards the village from the South. He blinked, panic rising up inside of him. Should he run back and tell his father? But when he looked closer, he noticed that the figure was limping, holding on to his or her right hand as if in pain. As soon as Arthur was sure that this person was no threat, he began to run faster. Closing in, he recognized the shape of a girl. She looked his age, twenty probably. Long silk hair the color of a tulip was carelessly carried by the wind. She looked tired and pale while she slowly limped towards the huts, wearing rags that looked like city clothes—a long beige coat, tight black jeans that were torn and dirty now, and strangely impractical looking boots covered in mud and earth.

  She must have heard his steps because she turned her head towards him, and her green eyes stared into his. Arthur was captivated for a moment. Small freckles covered her carefully shaped features and strong cheekbones. She was stunning. There were more girls his age in the village, but he thought he had never seen a girl as beautiful. There was something about her. A menacing presence, an uncertainty that she suddenly brought into his life. While he still stared, she abruptly collapsed on the grass. Arthur was still in paralysis for a short moment, but then ran towards her, kneeling to find her breathing heavily. Her eyes were open and absently stared into the fading sky.

  “Are you alright?,” he murmured, “Hey …” He touched her shoulder and she shrunk back, as if she had just now sensed his presence. Fear gripped him. How ill was she? The girl opened those thin lips with a heavy breath, and whispered:

  “Water.”

  Arthur nodd
ed.

  “C’mon, let’s get you to the village.” While he spoke, he helped her get up from the grass. An arm around her shoulders, the other still carrying the dead animal, he slowly walked her to his house. He noticed that the back of her right hand was bleeding from a deep cut. She had cut out her chip. A girl from the cities. His presumption was confirmed, and a mixture of horror and fascination overcame him.

  It became a long and exhausting walk where she threatened to collapse with every step. Arthur’s heart was beating heavily against his chest, and he was very aware of her tender but muscular shape touching his. He scolded himself for the improper thought, but could do nothing about it. He barely could withstand the urge to constantly stare at this girl. How did she get here?

  The leader’s hall was at the centre of the village. It was built just like a blackhouse, with a turf roof, but with wooden walls instead of stone. It was much larger and could at times accommodate the whole village when they gathered for a feast. The private chambers of the hall were in the far back, separated by curtains, decorated with wool and fur. They crossed the village and earned several stares from the inhabitants.

  John was at the far end of the village, at his doorstep, putting on his boots to get back to the fields. He also caught a glimpse of the two of them. John’s eyes persistently lingered on the girl. Arthur felt like time stood still for a moment when their eyes met, and somehow, John’s stare infuriated him. Was he only imagining it? The moment was gone as fast as it came, but it awoke a worry in Arthur’s heart. Or maybe it was jealousy?

  They barely passed the hall’s door sill when his mother, a strong and mostly quiet woman, ran towards them. The girl nearly collapsed when Arthur tried to sit her down at the table, and ran for a jar of water. He had to force it between her lips. She looked even paler, barely able to perceive her surroundings. The fear in Arthur’s heart worsened. Would she die? The water still fresh between her lips, her eyes slowly fell shut, and she crashed to the ground before Arthur could catch her.