NAAN (The Rabanians Book 1) Page 2

  “I can improve the performances of the box,” Daio interrupted.

  Mr. Revsheka and the man both looked at him.

  “It won't matter how it performs if he doesn’t know how to use it,” scolded Revsheka.

  “I can set it up so that by the end of the week your surfing performance will improve dramatically.”

  Mr. Revsheka turned his head back to the customer reluctantly.

  “And how much will this cost?” asked the man.

  “For a good customer like you I’ll do it for free,” said Daio, then immediately looked at Revsheka hoping he hadn't gone too far.

  The man looked back at Revsheka and then slowly pushed the box to the left towards Daio.

  “It won't take long,” said Daio still looking at Revsheka for approval.

  Revsheka nodded slightly and Daio took the box into the workshop.

  He returned it to the counter a short while later. “That should do it. Let's talk again in few days,” said Daio as the man came forward to collect his box.

  “You can count on it,” the man replied, then took the box and left the shop.

  That moment was the beginning of a new career for Daio. The angry customer was pleased and word got around that Daio could turn any novice surfer into a fearful scrambler in days. Two months later Daio launched a new service for upgrading accelerators. At first he collaborated with Mr. Revsheka, who channeled customers to him, but after a while he didn't need him anymore.

  I was eleven then. A few months later we moved into a larger house that was closer to the city. It became our center of operations. Daio and Dug were doing most of the work, but as time passed I joined the business as well. At first I built boxes based on their designs, but I learned fast and soon I was in charge of the in-house workshop.

  Most of our accelerators were custom jobs, but as I gathered more knowledge I began to think independently. Before long, in addition to the custom made boxes, I started building some based on my own ideas.

  A major part of my time was spent on network testing the performances of our boxes. I loved this part of the job. I often found myself wandering the network looking for strange, remote planets. Sometimes I set little scrambling traps just to pass the time. While waiting for someone to fall into one of them I watched movies about those far off planets. I was fascinated by their wild nature. I didn't know if the movies were accurate, the network was scrambled to a point where everything could be faked, but at the time this didn't bother me. I never would have expected the role nature would eventually play in my life.

  Looking back on this period of my life, my mental capabilities were like a little chick still inside the shell passively drawing nourishment from its surroundings. I was slowly integrating myself into the family business. Just being around the workshop however was a catalyst for my talents. It was like someone suddenly injecting a genetically engineered super food into the shell. My brain began to take on many aspects of the accelerators I was building. As time passed my capabilities grew rapidly until my mind was a hundred times more powerful than any available accelerator.

  I didn't know this was happening. I was an introverted child. I kept my work to myself, hidden even from my brothers. They saw the yellow boxes I made and hooked up to my terminal, and they knew I was trying new things, but they had no idea how far I was taking things. They had warned me about the risks of getting caught, but they never suspected what was really going on. When I no longer needed the yellow boxes they assumed it had simply been a phase of my development. They thought that I had just given it up.

  I don't know why I never told them that I was doing everything in my head. I knew my capabilities were not normal, but I guess I misjudged how unusual I was. At first, when my brothers were exposed to my capabilities accidently, they thought my skills were only a coincidence. To them I was a child whose scribbling accidently ends up looking like something more.

  One day Daio saw me making a very fast neck movement that he thought was impossible. Neck movement is not typical with neck sensors. These sensors are built to sense throat vibrations or silent vocal vibrations. These vibrations are translated to commands that are transmitted to the network. I guess the neck movement added a small change to the pitch of the vibration. He smiled at me and asked me to repeat it. When I repeated the surfing move three times, and on the fourth time I added a little twist that decelerated the surfing abruptly, his smile faded away into disbelief. I could tell that he was shocked, but he didn’t say anything. He never had time to digest what exactly had happened. A few days later the storm swept over us and we were pulled into the maelstrom.

  The Governor of Bull, in the Kirpa system, escaped his planet just ahead of a coup attempt. He fled to the tiny planet of Korma at the far end of the planetary system. He disappeared for a few weeks and allowed his troops to regain control. When he tried to return and again take up his office, the citizens of Bull were shocked by the news of his death.

  His funeral was broadcast on every news network. His wife was shown wiping away a tear as his young daughter looked around in confusion. Supporters who’d fled with him after the coup were in attendance. The videos were taken from several directions by multiple, independent cameras.

  It all looked very authentic but it wasn’t. The Governor was alive and well. There was no funereal for his family to take part in.

  When the news arrived on Korma the Governor set up a press conference to prove he was alive. The scrambled scenes from the funeral were so real that most people were convinced it was the press conference that was faked. The whole situation was only another example of how far information scrambling had twisted reality.

  Even the story of Bull’s Governor was relatively tame. Except for his injured pride, no one was hurt. There were many bloody incidents of information scrambling as well. Without living witnesses the only knowledge of them was indirect. They became legends, told on dark nights around campfires.

  One of the legends told of the Planet Ziltan where all life was wiped out in a single day. It was said that it started out as a simple extortion attempt that had gone wrong. In the confusion, control over the entire nuclear power infrastructure was lost. The prevailing view was that the control protocols for one of the stations were scrambled and somehow this spread through the network to the others. No one was left to tell the tale of what exactly happened there but few doubted the cause of such total annihilation.

  Paraday had had good reason to send the Doctor and the shuttle hundreds of years before. They desperately needed to find a cure for the disease of information scrambling. Even then information scrambling was growing and becoming more evil. Like random noise masking a true signal, scrambling made the information flowing through the network irrelevant.

  “If scrambling was done by hand we would have cut the hands off of every suspect,” said a judge in Paraday Supreme Court once. “But information scrambling, like network surfing, is done with neck sensors and so the only way to stop scramblers is to cut their throats!"

  Indeed governments all over the galaxy considered scrambling an unforgivable perversion. On every civilized world the sentence for information scrambling was death.

  Nevertheless information scrambling became a plague in the galaxy. Though the perversion was outlawed, like murder and rape, it seemed unkillable. The blanket prohibition, vindictiveness, and power drunkenness made it the darling of the lowest segments of the population, and the talented in these deciles madea respectful living from it.

  Distrust of the network’s information also spawned a new galactic industry. Messengers began carrying information from one point in the galaxy to another with a reliability factor of 1. Messenger agencies became common in every city on every planet. Soon they were as ubiquitous as fast food stands. The need for messengers reflected the decline of the information age. The world constantly progressed but the availability of valuable information stepped back thousands of years.

  Throughout the galaxy entertainment was suppli
ed through wireless and optic communication and displayed on three-dimensional screens. Hovercrafts crisscrossed the wilderness of every abandoned planet, and shuttles passed through gravity bending wormholes to bring passengers to their remote destinations. Yet credible information was restricted to the walking pace of a messenger service.

  We switched houses twice once the business got going. Every time we moved a little closer to the city. Six years after we had left Taglam our financial status had improved dramatically. Although we still belonged to the lowest class of society, our newest house was part of an endless line of houses in the suburbs not far from the city proper. Across the street were dangerous, rickety ruins, some concrete, some tin. The city planning department intended to replace them with new houses but it never happened.

  Daio had hoped that one day we would be rich enough to buy an apartment or even a house in Seragon City itself. He felt we belonged there. At the same time he thought that our financial state was already good enough. He thought we should focus on improving legal acceleration boxes and avoid the risks of scrambling.

  The three of us were at home when it happened. Dug was in the kitchen cutting different flavors of synthetic food cubes for dinner. Daio was in the living room lying on the couch next to the window. I was sitting beside the table that separated the kitchen from the living room surfing the network. Daio saw them first. He noticed a yellow light reflected by the curtains. He rose, shifted the curtain a bit and looked outside.

  “Yellow police,” he hissed and jumped from the couch.

  Like in a military drill, we ran down the hall leading to our rooms, turning off every light along the way. I opened the trapdoor in the floor and went down the ladder. A flashlight was waiting for me beside the ladder. I turned it on and aimed it towards the tunnel. Dug followed me down and Daio closed and locked the door above us. Dug grabbed an envelope that was hidden inside a niche next to the ladder and gave it to Daio. It contained an unmarked credit card and a telephone. We knew that in a real raid we might forget the envelope so in our practice runs we’d decided they should pass it between them to make sure we didn’t forget.

  As we crawled along the tunnel we paused at the house doorstep. Above we heard a police officer talking and then the door blasted off its hinges. The air in the tunnel was humid and stuffy and soon we were panting heavily. Nerve racking minutes passed before we emerged in the ruins across the street. We didn't look back and immediately started to move towards the city, passing through backyards and narrow corridors between buildings.

  “What do you think?” asked Dug when we stopped for a short rest.

  “I don't know,” answered Daio. “I don't remember anything extraordinary taking place lately. All the work we did was regular. All regular customers except one.” He shook his head. “I don't think he has anything to do with this.”

  “Maybe someone turned us in.”

  “Maybe, I don't know,” said Daio.

  “It doesn't have to be one of our clients,” continued Dug, “It could be one of our competitors.”

  “We have no competition,” I said.

  “There is no competition for our products," replied Dug angrily, "but we do have competitors who want to steal our clients, and they would be happy if we disappeared.”

  Throughout the night we dodged police vehicles and hovercrafts that were patrolling the area as if it was the middle of the day. We thought it was only bad luck. None of us believed they were all after us.

  Exhausted by the walk and by lack of sleep we finally made it to the outskirts of the city just before dusk. We waited in a closed parking garage until people and cars started to appear in the streets. Daio and Dug knew the city well but I had seldom left the street where we lived. To me the city was just lights on the horizon. I was fascinated by everything I laid my eyes on. The incredibly tall buildings, the stores, and the odd smells overwhelmed my senses and pushed away my weariness.

  Three days earlier I was checking a box I had built for a customer that integrated three improved, yellow boxes. The box was as legal as growing hallucinogenic herbs. When I tested its performance I noticed something strange. I used the same surf route for testing all of the different boxes I built, and this time was no different. At the end of the test, when I twisted my neck to slow the surfing abruptly, a door opened for fraction of a second and then disappeared.

  I wasn't sure if it had really happened or if I’d only imagined it. Hidden doors were common in the network but hidden doors that only opened for a fraction of a second, during very specific surfing operations, weren’t supposed to exist. I tried and failed several times to reopen the door. Then I spent fifteen minutes trying to replicate the exact neck twist while surfing at the same speed. Suddenly the door flashed in front of me. I could not resist and went inside; the door wasn't there officially and no one could blame me for entering a forbidden site.

  There are no accidents and there is no such thing as luck. When it looks as if something has suddenly fallen on you from the sky, part of it is because you were there, in that place at that time. A salesman who misses his flight to an important meeting blames it on his bad luck. When he hears later that the same shuttle was lost in space, along with everyone aboard, he will surely change his opinion. But this salesman would have never have had such an experience had he been a teacher in a nearby school instead.

  My discovery of Shor behind this hidden door was very similar. It seemed like bad luck that I managed to twist my neck sensor to slow down just as I arrived at this innocent looking place in the network. I didn’t intend to open the door. It was just something that happened. I thought it could have happened to anyone. Later I realized it was my unique capabilities and not my luck that controlled my future. Not a twist of fate, but the twist of my neck.

  The network had thousands of databases, most of which I had been accessing for years, so at first I didn't think Shor was that special. I thought the hidden door leading to Shor's treasures was just some network anomaly. I didn't understand that its design hid it from normal people. I assumed I was one of many who had accidently bumped into this door, that there were others who had visited Shor. I lacked self-esteem. I didn’t understand how special my brain had become. It was a blessing and a curse, and it completed my fall into the trap.

  We stopped at the first information center we came across. Daio peeked in to see how crowded the place was. Only two people were sitting in front of terminals. Deep inside the hall sat an overweight controller on a low platform. She was surfing on the terminal in front of her but looked tired and bored. We went in at different times to avoid suspicion. Daio went in first. He surfed immediately to one of the local news sites. His and Dug’s faces were on the front page. He gazed at me as I walked in. His face was pale. I was startled when I saw their faces on his monitor. I stopped and sat in front of the terminal next to him. Dug’s jaw dropped as he passed behind us.

  The controller took a sip from a large cup, her eyes fixed on the monitor. I attached the neck sensor for my terminal and started to surf. I bypassed a few obstacles and accessed her terminal to see what she was looking at. She was only flipping randomly through the news site and from her surfing history I could tell she was only browsing through the different pages.

  “The yellow police are asking for the public’s help in locating the brothers Daio and Dug Plaser,” whispered Dug when he leaned in between us. “Are they crazy?”

  “I don’t know what to think,” whispered Daio. “What are we missing? There are hundreds of people doing the same thing we are doing. Why us? And where did they get our pictures?”

  “The reliability factor is still low,” said Dug. "Maybe it's a mistake?”

  “It's not a mistake. The police were at our house!” said Daio.

  “I can replace the pictures and the names,” I offered.

  "It's all over the news channels," said Dug, flipping through the feeds.

  "That won't be a problem," I said.

  Daio looked
at me and then at Dug. “Maybe you should remove the information completely.”

  “I can, but I think replacing the names and pictures will be better.”

  “Why?” mumbled Dug.

  "It will take them longer to find out the real names and pictures were replaced," I said. "Longer than it would take them to realize someone removed the report altogether.”

  They looked at each other for a few moments. Daio gazed at their pictures on the screen one more time and then turned to me. “Do it from the terminal next to the door. Leave immediately after you are done.”

  I stood up and walked to the monitor beside the door then sat down in front of it.

  When Sosi’s neck started to vibrate Daio looked at the controller to see if she had noticed. Monitoring changes in the network was her job, but it looked as if she hadn’t detected anything. From time to time she lifted her eyes from her monitor and sipped from her drink. Whatever was in the cup, it apparently didn't improve her vigilance.

  A minute later it was done. I had swapped Daio and Dug's names and pictures with those of people I pulled from other reports. I didn't need to go through all the news channels. It would have taken too long and would have exposed me to too much danger. Instead I scrambled the network control; I gave a reliability factor of 1 to the new pictures and names in the channel where I’d made the change and let the network update the rest. Once finished I stood and walked out of the information center. Dug left immediately and Daio a minute later.

  “I don't know how long this will last,” I said as Daio approached us.

  “Let's move,” he said and we followed.

  “I’m shaking,” said Dug.

  “We are all tired,” said Daio.

  “I don't think it's tiredness,” said Dug and shook his head. “This is crazy,” he added, his voice trembling.

  Daio didn't respond. I thought about the trembling in Dug’s voice for one more second, then dismissed it and looked up to admire the tall and oddly shaped buildings around us.