A World Called Ocean Read online

  Gareth MacIntyre

  A World Called Ocean

  First published by Gareth MacIntyre Publishing 2020

  Copyright © 2020 by Gareth MacIntyre

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  Gareth MacIntyre asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  First edition

  This book was professionally typeset on Reedsy

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  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Epilogue

  Chapter One

  The African Pact Shuttle fell across a world of green and brown, the North African landscape far below her seeming more like a detailed, three-dimensional relief map than the real thing. It was close to sunset, and already strings of light were scattered across the parts of the continent which had slunk into night, all the way from Cape Hope to Tangier. She thought there was an almost hallucinatory quality about the world below her; and for a few moments the colours seemed to grow brighter, intensifying into basic primaries that twisted together like paint on a child’s palette. And then it faded, her eyesight returning to normal after a few moments. She blinked, and tried not to think too hard about what was happening in her brain at that very moment.

  The Shuttle vibrated a little now and then, slamming its way through the thin air of the upper atmosphere at the absolute border between space and the Earth’s protective blanket of air. Falling towards the Central African Plains. They were dropping now, moving towards their final destination. She’d never flown in a sub-orbital before, never been in space; she’d flown halfway around the world in only a couple of hours.

  Her thoughts drifted back, and she remembered what Dr Nakao had told her, that the growing neural interface within her skull would affect her perception in different ways.

  He had a certain way of smiling that seemed to use his whole face and not just his mouth; the lines on his forehead would crinkle in a particular sort of way, his features a blend of European and Asiatic that stretched back generations. Nevertheless, he seemed proud of his Japanese ancestry.

  * * *

  “How are you feeling?” he had asked, in that bland manner perfected by doctors since the beginning of time.

  “Awful,” she had replied, sitting down in a chair across from his desk. The desk, painted in a chipped camouflage green, almost filled the tiny office. Behind him, the lawns that encircled Vancouver’s Observer Institute were visible, bathed in bright sunshine.

  He smiled. “That’s good news. There are lot of changes taking place in your cortex. Any second thoughts?”

  “About what?”

  “Being an Observer,” he said, grinning with his whole face.

  She smiled back. “No, not at all.”

  “That’s good. Because, you know …”

  “The process isn’t reversible. I don’t know how many times I’ve had that said to me. If you’re trying to psych me out, doctor, it won’t work. I’m still entirely committed.”

  “Well, that’s good. In case you were wondering, I asked you to come here as part of a routine check-up. You’ve been scheduled for a battery of tests starting tomorrow morning.”

  She groaned. “Don’t worry,” he said. “Nothing too hard. Just an overall look at your motor skills, verbal, aural, visual ability. Helps us keep track of how the implant is doing.”

  * * *

  She fingered the skin in the middle of her forehead. It was an unconscious habit she had picked up. Sometimes she thought she could feel the tracery of lines that threaded through her flesh, still-growing filaments of the Ceti device buried inside her brain. All the time they kept at it, like a mantra shared by would-be Observers; once it’s in there, you can’t take it out.

  She thought, then, of Lian, and of the books she had sent to her with her last letter before she had disappeared. All in the shoulder bag, packed away above her head behind a sliding plastic door.

  She looked out of the window again; the shuttle was banking this time, and the vast night-lit metropolis of Nairobi was clearly visible below her, like a brilliant starfish reaching out a thousand arms across the continent, the Spindle dead at its centre.

  The shuttle banked again, sweeping over and past Nairobi in seconds, still dropping lower, banking again and approaching from another direction in a long, parabolic curve that let her see to the East.

  She was too low now, to be able to spy any sign of the Indian Continent, but she knew what she’d see there if she could. Vast deserts, devoid of any life, hiding the bones of tens of millions of deformed corpses. Lian had talked about nothing else, when she’d returned from Karachi. Lian told her all about the Blight, and why Ceti tech was so evil. Because Ceti tech had caused the Blight.

  The shuttle fell into a holding pattern high above the Nairobi skyscrapers, and she peered out of the tiny window, trying to catch a glimpse of the Spindle, but it was still too far away to make out any real detail.

  Chapter Two

  She lingered for two days before finally being called to Nairobi’s Observer Institute. It occupied a six-storey whitewashed building in a quiet suburb that Alis might have missed if she hadn’t been looking for it. The Institute’s insignia was displayed discreetly on a low marble dais that barely came to her knee. As she walked up to its entrance, she could see the Nairobi Spindle rising above the downtown ‘scrapers, reaching up and up and on to its terminus point out in space. Alis had discovered a saying since she had arrived in Africa; all roads lead to Nairobi. Which was quite literally true. From above, the Spindle seemed like an umbilical tying all of Africa together, a tightly knotted package held together by the huge transcontinental motorways that ended at the Spindle’s base.

  A van was parked on the street alongside the Institute building.
Men in coveralls the same colour and shade of blue as the van were spraying some kind of liquid onto a fungus-like substance that clung to the corner of one wall of the building with long, whip-like hoses that trailed into the interior of the van. One workman reached out and tugged at some of the fungus. It came away, but underneath she could see the stone of the building looked like the flesh of a rotten apple; the fungus had penetrated deep, the wound in the wall stained blue. She shuddered, recognising the telltale symptoms of Blight. When the wind blew the right way, the spores were easily carried over to the African mainland. There was still no easy way to kill it, and it might yet ravage Africa the same way it had ravaged India.

  She walked inside.

  * * *

  Another doctor, more tests. They flashed lights into her eyes and measured her responses. They asked her to read a paragraph of jumbled nonsense and measured her pulse while she did it. They left her in a waiting room for two hours with glossy magazines printed in French and then they took an encephalogram of her brain. They left her again, and after a while they showed her pictures of the inside of her head. The implant was growing rapidly, infiltrating every layer of her cortex. She watched a video of her brain coming apart in slices, the alien implant filling her skull like a ball of cotton candy, inextricably wound into the grey matter of her brain.

  She felt nothing. She’d been prepared for this a long time, had seen similar films and photographs.

  Then they sent her to speak to someone called Pyotr.

  * * *

  Pyotr stood as she entered his office. He wore the loose robes and white shirt of an East African businessman and shook her hand with what seemed like real pleasure. He wore pince-nez balanced on the bridge of his nose, an affectation she found archaic and contrived in the otherwise modern and slightly austere room. There was a single featureless desk with a workstation built into its surface. It seemed cold, indifferent, in contrast to the colourful robes Pyotr wore.

  “Sit down, sit down, please, Miss Dorican,” he said, gesturing towards a chair. “Did your tests go well?”

  “Fine, as far as I know,” she replied. “Getting a little fed up with them. I know they’re necessary, but …” she shrugged in what she hoped was an amiable fashion.

  “Of course. I never had the implant myself, being nothing more than a lowly administrator, but you can never be too careful now, can you?” he said, smiling broadly. His accent was Russian, but Alis thought there might be a touch of French creeping in there.

  He pressed a finger to the top of his desk, a much more hi-tech affair than Nakao’s had been, and a file popped up on the workstation’s screen. From where she was sitting, in a comfortable but low seat, she couldn’t quite see what Pyotr was looking at. She sat up, trying to see without being obvious about it, but it was impossible. The effect was probably deliberate, she realised. Designed to make you uncomfortable, assuming you might have something to hide.

  “I see you are going to Ocean,” said Pyotr at length, a wistful expression on his face. “I have met so many people, you know, who have had the privilege to travel to another world, and I never fail to be awed by it. Never.” She smiled, despite herself; despite, that is, what she recognised as her growing unease, a feeling she found herself unable to place in terms of origin or meaning. But there was also something charming about the man, a certain little-boy quality she suspected he used to charm women in a less professional context, that overrode the unease. She found herself reacting accordingly.

  “And halfway across our galaxy at that,” Pyotr exclaimed, shaking his head as if this was something entirely new to him. “Sometimes I marvel at the gifts the Cetis have left us.” He sighed, and looked up from the screen, a genial smile on his face. “According to the documents I have seen, it was your specific request, that you be assigned to Ocean.”

  She cleared her throat. “Yes, that’s right. I found out they were looking for people with sociological qualifications, which was perfect for me. Also, as an Observer, I would be able to make recordings of events around me. Make books,” she said unnecessarily. She was nervous, and showing it.

  “It must be wonderful to read a book,” he said, clasping his hands before him and looking back up at her. “But until they decide to let more people take the implant, or until they find a way around the implant, I can never find out. Can you read yet?”

  She shook her head. “I haven’t had the Ceti device in me long enough. They say it’ll be fully functional by the time I get out to the Oort Station, and I’ll have plenty of opportunity to try it out after I go through the jump point.”

  He nodded, seeming marvelled by the thought. She realised she still didn’t know who he was. Thinking straight was getting harder; she hadn’t slept in, what? Almost forty-eight hours. First the flight from Vancouver to Los Angeles, then from LA by sub-orbital to Nairobi, then straight to the Institute without pause to be put through yet another interminable battery of tests before finding herself, exhausted, before this man, this official, in his featureless office in a part of the world completely strange to her.

  “Excuse me,” she said, “But I’ve been up for so long I can’t think straight. Why am I speaking to you?” she said, phrasing it as politely as she could.

  He chuckled lightly, shook his head. “Rather, forgive me for not introducing myself. I am the Nairobi Institute’s chief of security.”

  Alis felt as if cold ice water had been poured down her spine.

  “I see. Am I considered some kind of a security risk?”

  “Really, Miss Dorican, you should have nothing to fear about. However, there are a few points I would like to clear up, and then you’ll have plenty of time to rest. It’s still another few days before you go, and in the meantime I should like to ask you a few simple questions.”

  “Go on,” she said, already knowing what he was going to say.

  “It’s about your sister, Lian Dorican. I believe she’s on Ocean at the moment, isn’t she?” It was as if a switch had been thrown, and Pyotr’s friendly, almost bumbling manner had been stripped away to reveal a glittering carapace, something hard and unyielding that could cut her with its questions. The cold, undecorated office suddenly seemed more like a holding cell in a police station.

  Alis swallowed. “Yes, she is. But that’s not the reason I’m going. I—”

  “That’s not what I said. Let’s face it, Miss Dorican, given a choice between a dozen human colonies in deep space, why did you pick the one that your sister, a known fugitive, has run off to?”

  “She is not a fugitive!” she said, her voice rising, anger flushing her cheeks. “Look, I’ve gone over all this before. I never hid the fact that my sister was involved with the Gaean Principle. That’s her business, not mine. If I see my own sister, that’s my business, not yours. If you’ve got a problem with that, if you think I’m some kind of terrorist, then tell me and I’ll go somewhere else.”

  The hardness faded from Pyotr’s eyes again and he settled back in his chair. “I’m not accusing you of anything, Miss Dorican. It’s simply that I’m required to follow up any avenues of enquiry that might turn up. If I didn’t, I’d end up cleaning up Blight with those workers outside.” He said it with a smile, and it seemed so genuine and apologetic she had to stop herself from relaxing and smiling back.

  Still, maybe he meant it. She wasn’t Lian; she had nothing to worry about.

  Unless they found out about the books in her luggage and asked about them. She didn’t know just what she should say then. If there was anything there that she shouldn’t have, well … it was hardly her fault.

  “I understand that, but I’m…I’m a little edgy right now. After all the trouble last year—” she shrugged. He nodded sympathetically. Watching her.

  “People just seem to assume I’m the same as Lian,” she continued. “But I’m not. We don’t agree on very much, I’m afraid. We never really saw eye to eye.” She stopped and looked at him, but he said nothing; in fact, he seemed to be waiti
ng for her to say something more. After a few seconds the silence had become uncomfortable, and she continued, partly to fill the silence, partly because Pyotr was still making her nervous.

  “But she is my sister, and I care about her. I’ve wanted the assignment to Ocean as long as I’ve wanted to be an Observer. If I see her, I see her. But she’s not a fugitive, remember that,” she said defensively. “She was never charged.”

  “But she was wanted for questioning. She certainly knew people within the Gaean Principle who were implicated in terrorist actions, here in Nairobi and beyond.”

  “I know,” she said. “I just don’t see what it has to do with me. I really don’t care to talk about this any more.” She stood, looked at him, felt real fear. He probably had the power to stop her going to Ocean. He might even be within his rights.

  Then the smile came back, and he stood, stepping around the desk and holding the door open for her. “Sure. I understand. It can’t be easy. Well, have a safe journey to Ocean. I can recommend taking a look around town before you leave.”

  She nodded, relieved he was letting her go. She walked down the corridor towards the elevators and glanced back, saw him peering briefly after her, and then he closed the door.

  She should have expected this, she thought. What the hell had she been thinking? You’re being watched, she told herself. That’s the message they’re giving you. You’re going to Ocean, and you’re going to try and find your sister. Wherever you go, they’ll be peering after you.

  Chapter Three

  Nairobi passed in a blur. A room was provided for Alis at an adequate hotel on the outskirts of the city, and she bought a three-day travel pass that gave her unlimited journey time within the city boundaries. The Spindle dominated everything, rising into the clouds like some towering behemoth, a direct connection to the gods.

  She wondered what it would be like to touch its surface, feel the faint vibrations humming through it, thinking of the space station it linked to, far above. She read a pamphlet that told her that, sometimes, locals or farmers from the provinces would sneak through the perimeter to touch its surface or bless a child. Touching it was to be in contact with the other world, and was meant to bring good luck.