Manifold [An Interstellar Sci-Fi Progression Story with LitRPG Elements]

[Several TAF-days prior…]

Brzzt… brzzt…

The transceiver around his wrist buzzed incessantly, taking his mind away from the present, from the here and now.

The disturbance was unwelcome and intrusive.

He pushed it to back of his mind, inhaled and held his breath, casting his vision across the verdant green stretching out below his feet and before his eyes, tracing the contours of the still branches and the shuddering rustle of leaves, feeling the soft touch of rose-scented wind stroke the hairs of his forearm. The wind coiffed up his messy hair, entangling them in a skew that fell over his eyes. He blinked to find the sun-bathed forest partially obscured and ran his fingers through his hair to clear his sight.

His lungs were filled, and, save for the unwelcome vibrations traveling up his right arm, all was still and peaceful. There was equilibrium in the drone of the cicadas, a peace for those who knew where to find it. There was no need to move, no need to breathe.

10 seconds. 30 seconds. 1 minute.

His lungs started to protest for lack of air. The urge to release, to claw in more oxygen—the urge built to fever pitch and his heartbeat became so noisy in his ears that blotted out the ceaseless hum of his transceiver.

He exhaled once he could no longer fight the urge, and he gulped ragged breaths once, twice, then fell back into a silent breathing, forcing his body to regulate itself.

It was less than 10 seconds before he reached equilibrium again.

Whoever was calling him wouldn't take no for an answer. It was still going, the vibrations, the buzzing. He knew because this thumb twitched with the sensation of being stuck with a thousand pins, and his palm felt numb to his mind. He knew it was the carpal tunnel and he wondered if he should visit Doctor Orida again, maybe line up a surgery instead of relying on the 'trad' methods and 'clean foods' his wife kept bugging him about.

If he took the call now, there was a high chance he would end up back at the office for something 'urgent'. And then he would have to put off this rare weekend trip to the Phytologic Gazebo, the only time in the week he could enjoy all this in solitude, far away from the politics, far away from the legal wrangling, far away from his wife's nagging…

'There's too much urgency to go around. If it's not this problem, it's that,' he mused, leaning forward over the steel rail and looking downward through the transparent pane flaring out under him to admire a bloom of golden daffodils and ultramarine hyacinths and lilac-anemones glistening under the cool afternoon glow.

'So what will they need me for? Discrete payments to a brothel? Pleasure-servitor purchases? Money transfers to a Proxy dealer? Maybe Mr. President needs more money to build those geostationary satellite-villas…'

He brought the transceiver up and confirmed the identity of the caller—Atanya Kradir—before tapping the connection through.

Static, rattling, then a click. A woman's voice filtered through.

"Finally! Mr. Alsouad, we need you back in the office ASAP—"

"Hardly surprising, and very irritating. It's the third weekend in a row," he snapped, interrupting the smooth-voiced Atanya and stamping his feet lightly onto the transparent pane and sending up dull reverberations into the air that melted into the trees. A distant creature squawked awkwardly, startled by the sound, and Bransol Alsouad raised his head to see a bird with navy-dark feathers and a crown that was deeply, philosophically blue flutter away with forlorn whistles on its beak.

At least I managed to see old Drongo today.

The spot of blue left an indelible impression on Bransol's mind and he thought of the new season of Nouveau-Klein's blue suits and about whether he should buy one, maybe treat himself a little, for his own upcoming birthday.

"I apologize, Mr. Alsouad, but you'll have to come in again today. It's urgent."

"When is it not," he sighed, but he had already turned his back to nature. He walked away from the rail, passing by the quiet, neutral-lighted cafe were one or two couples sat drinking kaffreinne, and entered a short structure through a small aperture that was wide as a single man. Static filled his earpiece—reception was bad here. He sauntered down the hallway, counting down the stairwell numbers, moving quickly through the blazing patches of light. He kept his eyes peeled for the correct stairwell, feeling a kernel of anticipation blossom up out of his stomach. He'd taken his four-wheeled Model 4850 Pinochet-cruiser today, and man, did he feel excited about seeing it again.

The static fizzled out. The call re-connected.

"—souad? Mr. Alsouad, can you—"

"I can hear you."

He figured Atanya didn't like calling him in any more than he did, and sometimes he felt bad for making her life so difficult—but damned if he was going to censor his displeasure at being called in on a weekend from some fucking nepotistic hire. The things he had to put up with in order to keep his job… why couldn't they just promote him already?

Maybe they were looking for an excuse to get rid of him. Him, Bransol Alsouad, only Povaduran Services's best revenue-generator for the last two years.

Fuck it. So what if he was replaceable? Everybody was, if you tried hard enough. In the mean time he'd continue being mean to good ol' Ms. Kradir—he'd always been good at toeing the line.

"Mr. Alsouad sir, you have to come back. It's urgent. Super urgent, I don't know how else to put it," Atanya said, and though Bransol found Atanya's pleading voice music to his ears, at same time he felt a little guilty for it.

Bransol didn't reply. He went on down the hallway, coming at last to the stairwell he was looking for.

There it is. I'm coming, my Pinochet!

He tramped up the staircase of slate, Tzevtao-pouch slapping against his thigh, and found himself in an immense, open-topped parking area only sparsely populated with vehicles. The Gazebo hadn't been very crowded ever since the Jegorich curfew regulations kicked in about a year ago, and Bransol couldn't tell why that was the case—it was a beautiful place, to be so underutilized. As far as he was concerned, places of solitude like the Gazebo were even more important to personal and mental health, when the law forced you to spend all of your nights around the wife and kids.

"I don't know, I'm have a really big date in about half an hour and we have our reservations at the Dome-Palazza. You think I should reschedule?"

"Sir! They've told me to get you back no later than seven, the—"

"They've told you, huh? Too damn lazy to call me themselves…"

Bransol halted his step and turned to regard the jewel of his life. There it was, the petroleum-fueled four-wheel-drive he would sacrifice his firstborn for, the titanium-rimmed beast wrapped from grille to spoiler in ultramarine satin chrome, the Pinochet he'd imported at great personal cost…

Doing the government's dirty work had helped him pay for it, of course, but though it was tainted money it never made him lose sleep at night because he never killed anyone for money—it was all boring stuff, the kind of everyday thing quadrillionaires, technocrats, and kings needed done in order to run their empires of dust.

"Mr. Alsouad, they have the guest waiting in the meeting room for you, and we verified that he was referred by PO's[PO: Presidential Office] Mr. Halley and that he's employed by Tacoma—"

Holy shit, captain, Tacoma? Isn't that the Lebensraum subsidiary? Play it cool, man, don't make it seem you care too much.

"—and he's saying he won't talk to anyone that isn't a Forensic Accountant, says he wants the best, says he has a blank cheque that—"

"I'm on my way," Bransol snapped, hanging up on Atanya and slipping adroitly into his beloved Pinochet amidst the jangle of its traditional key-and-lock security system.

The engine flared a loud and savage growl that dredged from the pits of his soul an excitement so visceral it gave him a hardon. Power, at his fingertips. Palpable power, unlike the pathetic whine the battery-powered holo-vehicles made.

It's going to be a long night.

If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

Bransol decided to take the Overpass joining the western to the eastern half of the Dome, if only to see the city spread away into a distant fog, if only to experience that feeling of "floating on clouds" he'd begun to hanker for in the small hours of the morning. 'It was the dreams,' he thought, 'the dreams I've been having lately', and though his wife always listened to him carefully whenever he yapped about it, she couldn't really understand just how trapped he felt, literal-minded woman that she was. Trapped by his work, trapped by the children, trapped by their marriage. A typical feeling, if what he'd found surfing the Protectorate-Intraweb's chathub commicube was to be believed. A typical feeling, and one that presaged divorce, was what his commicube friends told him.

He'd suspected it was going in that direction for a long time, anyway.

The city was edgeless and mysterious by the final minutes of the afternoon, and the slow change in the constitution of light made an imposing totem of the tall structure stuck into the middle of Jegorich.

The structure—the Central Tower, or Bujarrat in the low-ses parlance—had a base that was intimidatingly girthy; so gargantuan it felt like something out of the works of that great pre-Old Empire artist, Zdzisław Beksiński. Jegorich's interminable fog hid the top of the Central Tower from view, and although Bransol knew that the Tower terminated at the flexible membrane enclosing Jegorich (indeed, provided an anchor point for the Bubble), he liked to think it went on all the way up to space.

He was one with the Pinochet, moving fast, speeding past the holo-car laggards in his lane. Swerve left, swerve right. The road was empty, because people who could afford to live in the Dome could afford also to play evening golf on TAF-Sunday, or the 'Shabbat', his wife had begun to call it after that workshop on Democratic etiquette.

Swerve right—these damn self-driving fops must have their speed set to 'safe'—swerve left. Exit left onto the Overpass highway. The highway led the Pinochet up two more stories to make a mountain's height from the ground, and the thin road it comprised of was supported on both sides by thin, white columns which Bransol always thought looked like stilts.

Islands of skyscrapers looming in the distance and islands of factories belching smog into the sky; yet, everything looked small compared to the Central Tower. The mess that was Jegorich could under some circumstances be beautiful because it was vast and mysterious. The sprawling city was a hundred million individual stories all crammed into a single space, a wellspring of everything a human could possibly be, refracted over and over and over…

He made it back in record time, before the overhead glower had eased the city into its twilight mood. He stalked across the dark basement Povaduran Services LLE had leased as a parking lot. It was up the elevator and into the climate-controlled lobby.

He ignored Atanya, who was waiting by the reception desk for him, the lithe and smooth-skinned and hazel-toned too-sexy-for-her-own-good Atanya Kradir whose rump and breasts were shapely and full (stop thinking about her, stop thinking about her!), and he walked on through the corridor and made a bend toward the meeting rooms, Atanya following behind him and rattling off several key facts concerning the client.

Hurry up now, I'm in a rush, in a rush to serve a client. The client is always king, the client knows best. I'm doing what I get paid to do and that makes it the most important thing in the world.

The meeting room was spacious and adequately furnished with a large table around which six plastic chairs were placed. It had some of those yellow-dwarf-mimicking bulbs fitted, the room, and Bransol always felt the light had a calming effect on him. This time though, his heartbeat raced as he finally beheld his client.

It was a figure with a masculine silhouette, built out of blacksteel and polycarbonate fittings, this creature who hailed from the Deathworld Hyggambia, a figure that stood tall enough that its shoulders loomed far above Bransol and its head almost touched the ceiling (not a man, but rather a machine-man, a cyborg, a half-man at most).

Tenor Ravelash had a face that was bleached-white and fashioned of glossy plastic, and his scalp was a pate of gleaming chrome bolted down with metal screws and inked with smallprint script. And yet, his eyeballs looked organic and sharply intelligent, and they observed Bransol carefully, unmoving, unblinking, insectoid.

It was the second time he'd seen a Kurubim, as the older Jegorichians called them, the third if you counted the Lebensraum Annual Dinner he'd attended last year, these offworlder beings that had committed to replacing as much of their flesh as possible. This cyborg was perhaps the most extreme example— nothing fleshly, nothing organic save for the eyes, a body of geometric plating and nerves of silver pulsing with electricity.

As far as Bransol knew these Kurubim usually worked as Contractors—freelance mercenaries who sold their services to corporations and politicians and revolutionaries. The best Contractors commanded fees large enough to indebt entire worlds for decades, but most were considered too unreliable or indiscrete for permanent employment.

However, Tenor Ravelash was an employee of the Lebensraum subsidiary Tacoma, meaning that he had been vetted by what was perhaps the Democracy's most powerful family and, ultimately, found worthy of employment. Curious and frightening to think about, what sort of thing this creature was capable of.

"Mr. Ravelash," Bransol cleared his throat nervously, "good to meet you."

"She must leave. This conversation must be private. No recordings are to be made," Ravelash said, his voice percussive and tinny and yet somehow unmistakably human.

Without waiting for Bransol to say anything, Atanya made herself scarce, closing the door after her.

Bransol motioned for Tenor to take a seat and, as they lowered themselves, he winced to hear the chair creak dangerously under the cyborg's weight. The creature of metal moved smoothly and without sound, and Bransol glanced at the socketed joints to see if they might leak grease onto the furnishings.

"Mr. Ravelash, I was told you required a Forensic Accountant."

"You are the Alsood who manages the Gimma Ashby account?"

Bransol's eye twitched. So it was about that.

"Yes, I am Bransol Alsouad, please feel free to call me Bran."

It was impossible to discern anything from Tenor's face, Bransol decided, and he settled into the perpetual smile he'd cultivated to set clients at ease.

"I was referred to you by name. As I told your secretary, this case has already been cleared as a blank cheque job. You will submit a list of your expenses, fully itemized, to be verified by Tacoma's Ms. Burrell; otherwise, there will be no cap on your fees, to be billed to a local entity to be incorporated at a later date by Tacoma Intersystem."

Bransol was nodding solicitously and smiling and nodding some more. He wondered if it was working, his smile. A blank cheque from Lebensraum was not something that came around all the time. He was already thinking of importing a pomeranian to shut his wife up, and maybe another Pinochet… or a Salazar.

Oh, a Salazar, that beautiful snub-nosed bulbous-eyed thing—

"As for your client-on-record, that will also be the locally-incorporated LLE. Are we agreed?" Tenor finished.

"Y-yes," Bransol managed meekly. "But… we'll need an engagement letter signed…"

"Send it to Ms. Burrell. Her contact is with your secretary."

"Understood, we will—"

"I have no time to waste, Alsood. Your objective is simple: the Gimma Ashby account is to be accelerated. As a first tranche we will make available to you one billion credits to be provided securely to the Gimma Ashby, to be used on specified purposes. It is imperative that none of this funding be traceable to Lebensraum. You can find the list of specified purposes exhaustively itemized in the schedule I have already sent to your firm's private relay."

"I understand," Bransol bowed his head. It was a mind-boggling amount of money, 1,000,000,000 credits, an inconceivable sum to be thrown around so freely. Sweat began to bead upon his forehead.

"I reiterate. It is key that the funding remain untraceable. But we will have to tightly control the Gimma Ashby's use of the money, and for this reason you will arrange a meeting with the Mandalazief to communicate our intentions."

"Could I … ah… have a sensing of what these intentions are?" Bransol inquired.

But Tenor simply sat and stared, and after thirty seconds Bransol felt uncomfortable enough to clarify his meaning.

"... I'm just asking for discussion's sake. Since… ah… the Saltillans have been poking around and probing the funding issue, and they're a smart bunch so they'd be able to tell if there were a marked change in the activities of such a vocal group, is what I mean."

"Gimma Ashby is to organize public demonstrations on as large a scale as they can manage, and they should do so as often as possible, but no less than once every month. They are to play the media for support, use whatever they can, and perform sabotage operations aimed at damaging Saltilla's mass-compulsion-matrices. Finally, I expect that the Tacoma Board will soon instruct on measures to deal with a TAF-Subaltern. Marja Mentzer. The Mandalazief should start sourcing for personnel to undertake a termination operation."

Termination. Assassination, he meant.

"Marja Mentzer? The one who was recently appointed as Deputy Marshal of the Allied Forces?" Bransol squeaked, scrunching his face up in confusion. The Mentzers ran Lebensraum—what the hell was going on?

But… it was not his place to ask the why. As a professional, he concerned himself only with the how.

"That is the Marja Mentzer I am referring to. Our broader intention is to engineer, as soon as practicable, the breakdown of public order in Saltilla. Further, it is my instruction that Tacoma will intervene, if necessary, against action by Caturdhara Industries or any Caturdhara subsidiary or partner thereof, if such action is targeted at destabilizing Jegorich. It is the Tacoma Board's decision that Jegorich is generally to be supported against Saltilla for the purposes of this intra-Protectorate competition."

Bransol leaned forward to massage his temples with his palms. Even the promise of a Salazar couldn't blind him to the scale and severity of the actions being contemplated.

It was an attempt to change the fundamental balance of power within the Sylvan Protectorate, and it had the potential to spark a civil conflagration at a time when they were engaged in a mortal struggle against the Chimerae. It meant death, chaos and anarchy; the billion lives comprising the Sylvan Protectorate, entangled within the cynical plans of these offworld corporations.

Entangled, like him.

'Come on,' Bransol thought, mentally slapping himself. 'It's just work. What the fuck are you thinking so much about it for?'

He was just a man who loved gasoline-powered cars. If he didn't do it, they'd find another.

"I understand, Mr. Ravelash, we will make the necessary arrangements. Separately, may I check if your current accommodations are satisfactory? If you wish, Povaduran Services can assist you with booking an executive suite at the Tower Hotel, all expenses to be fully paid by us. It's an exclusive service we provide to our very biggest clients," Bransol smiled wide enough to show his teeth. "The views there are to die for…"

"I must decline," Tenor crackled, already on his feet, "I will be in Saltilla by tonight."