The Cygnus Virus Read online

  The Cygnus Virus

  A Novel

  T.J. Zakreski

  Copyright © 2016 by Terry J. Zakreski

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Dancing Star Publications

  500, 123 - 2nd Avenue South

  Saskatoon SK Canada S7J 7E6

  https://www.facebook.com/thecygnusvirus/

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1: The World

  Chapter 2: Solving The Butterfly Words

  Chapter 3: The Turning of the First KEE

  Chapter 4: The Turning of the Second KEE

  Chapter 5: The Turning of the Third KEE

  Chapter 6: The Cosmic Jackpot

  Chapter 7: The Bad Man

  Chapter 8: The Gospel of Mary and the Cloth

  Chapter 9: Somewhere, Who Knows Where

  Chapter 10: The Man Who Fell From Earth

  Chapter 11: Fuckeditization

  Chapter 12: Cygnus and Andron Make a Helmet

  Chapter 13: Life on the Tetherball

  Chapter 14: The Lovers

  Chapter 15: A Loud Crack That Nobody Can Hear

  Chapter 16: Andron C. Varga, G.C.C.B.

  Chapter 17: Andi-o Goes Beastmode

  Chapter 18: The Devil

  Chapter 19: Zoroaster

  Chapter 20: The Ho-lee Mother Juliette

  Chapter 21: [Nathan]

  Chapter 22: The Hanged Man

  Chapter 23: The Multiplication of Loaves

  Chapter 24: The Magician

  Chapter 25: Leave Day

  Chapter 26: The Chariot

  Chapter 27: The Rodeo

  Chapter 28: The Hierophant

  Chapter 29: Analog High

  Chapter 30: Jim the Chisel

  Chapter 31: Graduation Day

  Chapter 32: Enter the Shaman

  Chapter 33: The Somnambulant Awakens

  Chapter 34: The Accusatory Dawn

  Chapter 35: Follow the Money

  Chapter 36: The Tiger Dream

  Chapter 37: Ezra Felderstein

  Chapter 38: Fato e Destino

  Chapter 39: Silent Night

  Chapter 40: Operation Roman Candle

  Chapter 41: Wheel of Fortune

  Chapter 42: Death

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  At twenty-five, Commander Penny N. Armstrong is the oldest humanoid on board Earth’s Mayflower.

  Since kicking out of Light Warp Propulsion forty years ago, every crewmember has been successfully regenerated. After hundreds of years of traveling, they are now only a decade or so from their final destination, Planet Kelvin 429xcj.

  Everything has gone according to plan, except she faces a major crisis — they’ve picked up a stowaway and Cdr. Armstrong doesn’t know what to do about him, or her. She hopes Lieutenant Carlo M. Yeager got something useful out of CAM-DI.

  She enters the Neuro-Electro Grid Command Center.

  “So what did she come up with?”

  “I really can’t say for sure.”

  Lt. Yeager looks over at CAM-DI, who shrugs her shoulders.

  “Well I kinda need to know whether this fellah took a shit on our planet.”

  “You can look for yourself.”

  Cdr. Armstrong taps the side of her head to activate her Heads Up 3D Display contact lens.

  She’s equally mystified by what she sees. There are nine illustrated cards arranged in a cross-like pattern.

  The World, The Lovers, The Devil, The Hanged Man, The Magician, The Chariot, The Hierophant, Wheel of Fortune and Death.

  “What the heck are these supposed to be?”

  “CAM-DI says they’re tarot cards. They were used in fortune telling, a very long time ago.”

  “Fortune telling?”

  “Yeah, they didn’t always have Chaos Averaging Modulators like our CAM-DI.”

  CAM-DI smiles and flips her hair back.

  “So what do they mean?”

  “I think they’re meant to tell a story.”

  Chapter 1:

  The World

  Who I am doesn’t matter.

  What matters is the story.

  We need to find someone first.

  We need to find Andron Varga.

  He’s in the Milky Way, in the Orion constellation, in the Solaris system, on planet Terra, in the northwestern hemisphere, on a large continent, on the northwestern plains, in Manitow Springs, in the suburbs, by an open field, in a townhouse.

  He lives alone.

  There’s frost on his windows.

  We always end up here, by the way. We always have and always will. It’s part of the recurrence of things.

  Andron’s sitting in his chair in the dark. He’s about forty-five. He has watery blue eyes. They float when he looks at you, the same way that Andron has floated through much of his life.

  His skin and small hands are soft, befitting a professional man. He’s larger than normal and might have been athletic at one time. He has grey-tinged hair that is longer than what you’d expect, since Andron is very much a traditional onion, wrapped in layers of convention. He has worked hard at achieving this comfortable state — neither a burden nor burdened by anyone.

  So he sits there, in his chair, a conventional man passively floating in a spinning world.

  Andron’s home, street, his town, and indeed Andron himself, have an average quality about them. Except they all have fragments of stars within them.

  Normally Andron didn’t give a shit about the stars, especially during the day. During the day, they were unthought-of, unseen. At night was different. At night, the cosmos pressed its nose against his windowpane.

  At night, the stars were all up there, shimmering away.

  This was usually his favorite part of the day, this last remaining bit. Where he could feel the street outside, the frozen ground beneath it, the buzz of the lonely street lamp, illuminating what it could in the vast darkness. Where he could float on a tranquil empty scene.

  Where he could be dead tired and half drunk so that he could easily descend unbothered and thoughtlessly into unconsciousness. But, the shimmering stars keep him awake this evening, and pin him to his chair.

  So he slowly swirls the ice in his rum and coke and thinks of her again.

  Then he utters something of immense importance to us all. He utters his Butterfly Words, as they would later be called.

  I am asking you and this empty room, surely, there must be someone somewhere to love me.

  These seventeen words were not the loneliest words ever spoken. Nor were they the most eloquent, or revealing. They were, then, mere butterfly wings fluttering about his room and would have faded harmlessly into oblivion on any other night.

  Only, on this night, the butterfly wings got into Andron’s nearby computer and caused the Butterfly Glitch.

  Andron’s computer had been malfunctioning for months. He discovered this one evening when he coughed and it mysteriously shut off. The pitch of Andon’s voice, it seemed, rubbed a transistor in his computer’s CPU the wrong way. It responded to the frequency of Andron’s voice like a bent wheel that wobbled only at a certain speed. When Andron spoke, his computer did bizarre things.

  So he learned to keep quiet around it.

  The Butterfly Words, the Church of the Holy Cloth’s CAM computer finally solved, were needed to cause what happened next. No other words, or combination of words, worked. The atmospheric conditions prevailing in Andron’s living room, mixed with the pitch and sadness in his voice, caused the transistor to produce an anomalous fault in the
SRAM cells surrounding it in a butterfly pattern, thus earning its name.

  Just as the ILEAP program, to which Andron earlier subscribed, was downloading packets of data from radio telescopes from around the world for analysis, the Butterfly Glitch caused the computer to not only download four seemingly unrelated packets in rapid succession, but to read them in an unusual way.

  The program wasn’t supposed to operate this way.

  The normal procedure was to download a packet, analyze it, and communicate back to the mainframe. The next data packet was to go to the next computer in queue and so on. The program was designed this way, not only to spread the work of scrutinizing space noise for signs of intelligent life over many computers, but also to minimize the chance for a miss, should a single computer miscalculate, disconnect or otherwise malfunction.

  The Butterfly Glitch caused the ILEAP program to read the signals as they were intended, as Quadra Code instead of Binary Code. So when the ILEAP program submitted the four signals to its algorithms the four packets interacted in unusual ways, bonded, and grew. Within microseconds Andron’s computer’s capacity was swamped.

  Within minutes, Terra’s entire Internet went down.

  Andron stumbled off to bed that night, having no idea what he had done or the cards that he had just been dealt. The world would never be the same, thanks to him. Not only was he the first person on Terra to download a virus from outer space.

  He was the one who let Cygnus in.

  Chapter 2:

  Solving The Butterfly Words

  How do we know about Andron’s Butterfly Words, spoken on a lonely night, by a solitary man so long ago? Simple. Years later a computer, the first of its kind on Terra, will calculate them. That computer, owned by a sinister and powerful organization called the Church of the Holy Cloth, will crack the code with a Chaos Averaging Modulator, or CAM for short.

  Here’s how it works:

  As you read this, you’re likely stationary somewhere. Look up. If you happen to see people (or wait until you do), pay close attention to their patterns of movement. Eventually, you’ll join them in a stream of movement as you make your way in the world. The movements you make in relation to the other widgets in this stream can be programmed using a series of simple rules. Most of your movements reflexively follow these widget rules.

  Next to be programmed are your preferences, tastes, education, experience, physical characteristics, language (or languages), level of intelligence, and bodily state. It’s a tall order, but doable. From these inputs, much of what you say and do can be predicted. The rest is chaos — random thoughts, inspirations and utterances.

  A jar of jellybeans solved the chaos part.

  Hundreds of years ago a scientist discovered that averaging the guesses of a large group of people regarding the weight of an ox, produced a surprisingly accurate result. The same wisdom of the crowd works with a jar of jellybeans — with the crowd usually coming within a few jellybeans of the actual number.

  The next major milestone in CAM technology came as a result of the National Security Service’s war on terrorism.

  In a national contest, the NSS invited the public to submit guesses on where and how terrorists would strike next. Participants were invited to be as diabolical and creative as possible. Millions participated. The results were tabulated, analyzed and ultimately used to thwart terrorist attacks in the making.

  The next level was to use a computer to create the crowd guesses. A random number generator was used to help a computer create chaos guesses and then averaged them. This proved to be a highly accurate method of determining what happened in any past event and a reliable predictor of the future.

  Naturally, the more guideposts that can be fed into the computer, the more accurate it becomes. The guideposts of the most value are events of significance called Key Energy Events, or KEEs for short. Key Energy Events are thrown in with billions of generated scenarios before they are averaged. For example, in one scenario Andron gets up off his chair, drains a bottle of rum, and dances an Irish jig. In another, he crashes through his frosty plane glass window and runs down the street screaming:

  Death to the Shaman Overlord.

  Death to the Shaman Overlord.

  To arrive at the correct result, the CAM computer needed three Key Energy Events that were compiled by investigators and researchers working for the COHC/NSS. They plowed through security tapes, recorded conversations, interviews of eyewitnesses, and every piece of information they could lay their hands on about Andron.

  The best source of information was an old interrogation file.

  The CAM computer helped fill in the blanks.

  Two Key Energy Events were experiences he had that day. The third was the person he was thinking of.

  Chapter 3:

  The Turning of the First KEE

  The First Key Energy Event is a conversation between Andron and his client Dylan Hill.

  As reconstructed, the conversation went something like this:

  “I think your man kinda shit the bed there today, bud.”

  “Well good thing I got out of bed early then, Dylan.”

  Dylan is an old friend and client of Andron’s, but few would put them together. Andron has fine features and lawyer hands. Dylan has jagged features and rancher hands. Andron is almost handsome. Dylan isn’t ugly, plain or handsome, just useful looking — an all-weather man.

  On this day, like every day, he wears jeans, cowboy boots, a Western shirt, a light brown corduroy sport jacket and a black Stetson. He flashes a silver tooth when he smiles.

  Dylan understands rodeos, fighting, and hard work. The rest is bullshit. He’s a successful developer, but still runs a ranch on the side.

  He likes Andron, because he’s practical, level-headed, and he keeps his word. Most of all, Andron makes him laugh.

  To Dylan, Andron wasn’t half bad, for a lawyer.

  Friends from high school, too.

  Andron sent Nathan Penny in to argue a court case earlier involving one of Dylan’s developments and to give the kid some experience.

  A lien had been slapped on one of Dylan’s properties by a church group, the Church of the Holy Cloth (COHC), who were claiming that they were the rightful owners based on a donation made to them years ago. Dylan scooped the land up in an estate sale subject to the interest, even though Andron advised against it. Nevertheless, the court motion was supposed to be a cakewalk for the kid. The church wasn’t even expected to show up.

  “Okay…what happened?”

  Dylan folds his muscular fingers together and rests his elbows on the arms of his chair.

  “Well, bud, the kid started out okay with his seven points of this and seven points of that, that the judge seemed to buy. Then that other lawyer got up and went off like a dead battery. So I was thinking that it was looking pretty good for us and bad for the Church of Bullshit.”

  Andron grins.

  “That’s when your guy walked up to the judge and handed him a case that the other lawyer somehow forgot. And I’m thinking, isn’t this guy supposed to be my lawyer? The judge looks at it, thinks for a while, and then says he’s going to have to reserve. Reserve? I guess means delay. I couldn’t get a straight answer out of the kid. Christos, I’ve got a construction schedule to keep and that so-called church is screwing up my plans, bud.”

  “Well, that’s not how we scripted it. Listen, Nathan’s a good kid and pretty bright. I need to talk to him to see what happened, but it sounds like he was just, ah, following an ethical rule that we lawyers have…are required…to follow where if you know about a case that the other lawyer didn’t bring up, you have to tell the judge about it, as dumb as that may sound.”

  “I see. So he was just being ethical?”

  Andron presses his lips together and nods.

  “Then let me tell you what’s unethical Andi, what’s unethical is how much you are charging me for this crap.”

  Andron laughs and puts up his hands.

  “O
kay, Dylan. I’m sorry that this happened but I told you there was a risk taking this land with something registered against it. We’ll have to wait for the decision, but this is usually a good time to cut a deal. Like I’ve been saying, bullshit or not, there are no guarantees. The only guarantee is finding out what these people want and buying them off.”

  He taps his fingers on his desk to buying them off.

  “Anyway, they’re supposedly a church, Dylan, so you’d think they’d be less greedy.”

  Dylan chews on this for a while and then flashes his silver tooth.

  “Fine, see what these people want, I guess.”

  “Maybe they’ll want you to join them.”

  “Sure thing, bud, and the first order of business will be to donate your legal fees.”

  “Now hold up there, Dylan, what have I been telling you about joining these cults?”

  Chapter 4:

  The Turning of the Second KEE

  The Second Key Energy Event, is a conversation between Andron and Nathan at a local lounge.

  “Look.”

  Andron takes a large swallow of his third rum and coke.

  “Hill’s an asshole. But that’s just on the outside. On the inside he’s all intestines and organs.”

  This makes Nathan smile, but he’s a bit put off, once again, by his employer’s lack of decorum.

  “Actually, Dylan’s not that bad of a guy. He’s just like most of the clients who employ us. They don’t dabble in the shades of grey this world is made of. They just want to know if they won or lost and how much it’s going to cost them. The legal niceties of it all, the law’s varied nuances and fine distinctions are, in their view, our boring business.”

  Andron drinks some more.

  “Our job, if I may put it this simply, is to squeeze as much of the subtle grey world as we can into a tidy win or loss, a yes or a no, or a one or a zero to adapt myself to our modern digital age. So, for the benefit of our well-heeled and good paying client, who the fuck are these people and what the fuck do they want?”