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PROPHET
Without Honour
Anarchy Online Book One
Ragnar Tørnquist
P W H
rophet ithout onour
Anarchy Online Book One
by Ragnar Tørnquist
Prophet Without Honour
© FUNCOM 2001
Prophet Without Honour
Anarchy Online original storyline created by
Gaute Godager, Tommy Strand, and Ragnar Tørnquist
Prophet Without Honour: Anarchy Online Book One written by
Ragnar Tørnquist
www.ragnartornquist.com
Play the game
www.anarchy-online.com
Prophet Without Honour
“And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and
the top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angels of God ascending
and descending on it.”
- Genesis 28:12
“All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.”
- Edgar Allan Poe
Prophet Without Honour
Prologue
Rubi-Ka, 29475 AD
The gleaming towers of Omni-1 reflected the fiery maroon light
of twin suns succumbing to distant sandstorms, red dust stirred up by
incessant winds along the arched horizon hundreds of miles due north.
Large flotillas of ships passed north and west, rising slowly like
grey whales drifting to the ocean surface, seeking to avoid the storms by
crossing over them. To the east, there was the faint silvery gleam of
another flotilla returning from the mines.
While the storms were still much too remote to be heard – even
with the most sensitive of implants – Philip Ross felt them. Rubi-Ka was,
after all, his world. Not a sparrow would fall to the ground without him
knowing.
Figuratively speaking, of course. There were no sparrows on this
planet.
Ross focused. The windows darkened, and the panorama before
him grew dim, leaving his office in a comfortable gloom.
The office was located on the top floor of one of Omni-Tek’s most
imposing and heavily fortified towers in the capital city. It encompassed
a sprawling circular expanse Ross privately thought of as his private
Colosseum, and though it lacked lions and gladiators, it had the desired
effect on his subordinates and colleagues.
It intimidated them. They were impressed with size. Size meant
power. His office made them feel small, smaller than him.
And everything about Philip Ross was big.
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Prophet Without Honour
He gazed at his robed reflection in the artificially darkened glass.
He was taller than most men; grey, chiselled, trim, he possessed the right
combination of charisma, maturity, and virility for a person in his posi-
tion. He was not vain, but he knew the power of appearance.
Philip Ross was not one to neglect even the smallest of details.
He turned away from the window. His enhanced vision adjusted
to the deepening gloom as the sun finally yielded to the escalating storms.
There wasn’t much in the way of furniture in the office. The one
indulgence in an otherwise prudent arrangement was a mahogany desk
imported from Earth and built from some of the last remaining trees of
the ancient replanted rainforests. There were only three chairs, imitation
leather but comfortable. Unlike many of his associates, he had no need
for expensive bronto-hide to impress visitors. There was a single console,
not the latest model, but a stable and functional one, more than good
enough for his purposes. A corporate-sized screen was tuned to the live
Omni-Tek news broadcast when not in use, which was most of the time.
There was even a potted plant, a genetically uncontaminated cactus,
painstakingly transported from the European desert to an alien world
where, against all odds, it seemed to thrive.
Last, and most certainly least, the security droid standing to rigid
mechanical attention near the elevator doors. The Omni-Pol agents who
had installed the defence systems in his office had insisted on this final
piece of personal protection, though of course he’d objected. Vociferously.
The lethal contraption was obscenely brutal looking, kitted out with
energy shielding and what appeared to be a portable cannon. It stood
unmoving, awaiting the arrival of something, someone, to destroy.
To expect violence was to invite violence, Ross knew. And though
he’d never shied from violence, he wanted none of it here in his own
home.
Home. Now there was a foreign word.
This wasn’t officially his home. He had one of those, a home, a
fully furnished penthouse apartment with personal attendants and room
upon useless room, elsewhere in the city. But Ross spent the lion’s share
of his life in this Colosseum, like a jaded emperor, making decisions based
on the acts of brutality and stupidity he was witness to on the screen.
Running Omni-Tek’s operations on Rubi-Ka was not something done
between breakfast and supper. His work was the entirety of his existence,
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Prophet Without Honour
the sum of his life. It was a life truly worth living, there was no doubt
about that, but even Philip Ross could get tired.
And right now he was very tired. He wanted nothing more than
to go back to his grand home and fall asleep in a proper bed, soothed by
the cool, clean sheets and the scent of the rose gardens below. He was
tired and disappointed, and he wished that the day had brought some-
thing to ease the pain brought on by the news of that morning. But it
hadn’t. The news had only gotten worse.
I extend a conciliatory hand, he thought, I get down on my knees
and beg them for peace, for understanding, for a chance to negotiate an
accord. And all they do is turn on me and stab me in the back.
There were reports of new skirmishes outside the immediate juris-
diction of the city, between Omni-Tek’s pacifying troops and clan-affiliat-
ed rebels. People had died, tensions were strained, and both sides were
now tugging at their leashes for a chance to go to war again. And while
these unfortunate incidents weren’t entirely unexpected, it still angered and
saddened him to think of the wastefulness of it all, for both sides involved.
Ross knew that he’d made an error in judgement early on. He’d
completely underestimated how the disgruntled few could affect the
complex machinery of progress. That lesson had been taught a million
times over, most effectively a good seventeen millennia past, when, like a
latter-day Moses, David Marlin had risen up and brought his people out
of slavery, destroying the Omega in the process. The ensuing era had
given birth to Omni-Tek, and Ross guessed he owed the man a silent
prayer of thanks. But the example he had set…
To have imprinted on humanity the virtue of rising up against
authority, against government, against corporate dominion, at any and all
costs – and to have brazenly professed this to be a good thing, an hon-
ourable thing…
No, the man had done more to damage mankind than to heal it.
David Marlin ought to have laid down his sword after destroying the last
of the Omega. The freed slaves, the Solitus, the inheritors of Earth,
should have been allowed to decide their own fate.
There was no room for gods in the kingdom of man.
Now grand but meaningless words were being flaunted as truth in
the face of reason; words like “freedom”, “liberty”, and “justice for all”.
Justice for whom exactly? Freedom and liberty from what?
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Prophet Without Honour
Perhaps those words appeared to resonate with truth when
chanted by sign-bearing demonstrators – because in principle they were
worthy and important words – but when the ideologies behind those
words were applied to the real world, at least a world as precariously bal-
anced as Rubi-Ka, they spelled only disaster: Disaster for him, disaster for
Omni-Tek, and disaster for the millions who depended on the corpora-
tion to protect them and to provide for them.
The only thing the clans were accomplishing by their misguided
resistance was to disrupt that balance and cause untold pain for the very
people they sought to liberate.
Not that Omni-Tek would immediately crumble if they lost
Rubi-Ka and their steady supply of notum. No, the company was too vast
for that to happen, too entwined in every imaginable industry and trade.
But there were other corporations encroaching on Omni-Tek’s turf, and
notum was the only thing that could possibly guarantee Omni-Tek’s
supremacy for the foreseeable future.
Without notum, Omni-Tek might be nothing more than another
hyper-corporation.
The thought unsettled Ross, made him fidgety and nervous. He
clenched and unclenched his fist and thought about the war he didn’t
want, the war that disturbed the balance of his world, and about the spar-
rows that fell to the ground on the screen in his Colosseum.
Now, with the gloom grown deeper, the suns absent, and his
office darkened to a satin black – only the thousands of glittering lights in
the city below provided any kind of illumination – Philip Ross suddenly
felt desperately and achingly alone.
If they would only understand,he thought. If they could see what I see,
if they could only know the truth, that there is no future for this world without
us, without me, perhaps then we would know true peace and prosperity.
He stood gazing out at his city, his world, for a few more minutes
in silent contemplation. From this height, life was abstracted into flick-
ering lights and bursts of energy from moving vehicles. He couldn’t see
the people he knew were there, but they were there, somewhere, living,
sleeping, dreaming.
Philip Ross turned away and headed for the comfort of a home
rarely visited, a bed rarely slept in, and, he prayed, a long night’s sleep
without dreams, a dark and restful abyss.
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Prophet Without Honour
Between the stars, 28911 AD
The dust-red globe, covered with a patchwork of real-time
sensory data in all colours of the rainbow, was slowly beginning to solidi-
fy at the heart of the increasingly complex diagram of interstellar bodies
that orbited David’s field-of-view, updated continuously by his neural
interface link.
It wasn’t a particularly big planet, a bit smaller than Earth, but
compared with its gas-giant siblings – dim, hulking monstrosities,
mottled with fierce storms the size of continents, encircled by glittering
belts of ice asteroids – it looked tiny, almost dainty, like a baby planet
taking a walk with her older brothers. The system had twin suns: the
smaller one red, the larger one yellow. The two suns orbited each other
like graceful ballerinas engaged in an epic recital spanning light-years and
aeons. Because of this, the trajectories of the system’s planetary bodies
were more complex than they would have been in a single-star system.
Of course, the mathematics of this astral performance weren’t
much of a challenge to the onboard systems, not with lifetimes to spare.
Even David, given a few months and some assistance from his interface,
ought to have been able to plot the course of the ship towards her desti-
nation.
David blinked, and plugged out.
The experience was akin to watching a bathtub being drained in
fast-motion; the water – or in this case visual data containing information
about his journey, past and present, and his current position and status in
relation to the ever-changing gravitational forces surrounding him –
swirling down an invisible hole, pulling him down with it.
The effect still made him feel queasy. He tried not to spend too
much time linked up. There was something to be said for the quaint
pleasures of seeing things with your own eyes, hearing them with your
own ears: to read books and watch films, to study prints of art from
Earth’s long-lost past, to listen to the musical recordings contained in the
ship’s core – Bach, Mozart, Martinez, the Beatles – and to gaze at the stars.
The stars were always, always changing as his journey took him
farther and farther away from home. Back on Earth, all those long years
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