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Interlude
Page 18
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The weak noon sunlight filtered through the metacracks in Pasifika
City’s upper and middle plates to Norrie’s dingy, beloved bungalow. He
was tidying up. Odep hadn’t stayed long but he had always been the type
to shoot off on some new adventure and it was no surprise. It had been
damn good of him to come all the way down here just to call in a favour
from an old man and his momma. The bed Odep had slept in was still
clean enough to reuse and he made a point of smoothing out the sheet
and fluffing the pillow just in case his old friend were to return with
another vague plea to hide out under the cover of Norrie’s
comprehensive datajamming systems running on the machine he
affectionately called his blitzserver. The amassed concoction of
salvaged gadgets hummed and sizzled cacophonously but they did
shut out most of the world’s virtuachat from Norrie’s little slice of
heaven, and that was what they were for. He smiled to think that Odep,
who had always given him shit for it, had finally come to appreciate
the work he’d put in to being stoically off the grid.
His arm bumped something on the bedside table. Funny, thought Norrie. Odep leaving secret tips now? He
picked up the crumbled, white paper envelope and looked it over. He
chuckled as he remembered the way his old friend used to roll a die
each time he tipped a doorman back when they’d toured together. How much you roll for me and my five star service, ‘Dep?
With
a long, yellowed fingernail he sliced open the top of the envelope. The
symbol on the sticker sealing it was a capital ‘E’ written in the old
style.
The page inside was very thin and folded multiple
times. It was a letter, and at first he thought it was written by Odep.
After reading the first lines, however, it became evident that this was
someone else’s letter, and a desperately important one at that. He sat
down hard on the bed and read the thing from start to finish. When he
was done he simply held it, his mind reeling, considering the
implications.
From what Norrie could deduce, the message
was written by an employee of a place called Epsilon Syndicate. They
claimed to have escaped from the company’s employ stealing or rescuing
something dangerous, some “Butcher Code.” The letter described in
detail how the thing had managed to kill some of the author’s fellow
escapees and seemed to have several different aspects of itself like
someone with multiple personality disorder. The main component of its
“personality,” Norrie had read, was akin to that of a child and this
aspect of the “Butcher Code” managed to keep control of its other
aspects most of the time. The letter implored the reader, whoever it
was, to find destroy the Butcher Code.
Norrie
groaned with frustration. His blitzserver ticked and popped nearby in
its perpetual symphony. This was one piece of trouble that the machine
could not protect him from. It was on paper.
The medium had obviously been selected for a specific purpose and he
sensed that it was not in order to appeal to the sensibilities of those
who valued antiquity. It was, he realised, chosen as a practical
means of isolating information from the global net. This was no
novelty. It was a spy’s tool. It seemed to suggest that the information
it contained was so absolutely top secret that it could not be risked
publishing or even transmitting on the Net or by any electronic means.
I’m probably the only one who knows this! He thought, thinking of the seal he’d broken. E for Epsilon Syndicate. He was terrified.
I have got to tell Odep, he thought.
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