Citizen Pariah (Unreal Universe Book 3)

by Lee

  “As I know you well, I am certain you have just attempted to remove the Suit, learning in the process that subroutines specific to Suit removal are permanently disabled. There is nothing and there is no one in this entire Existence capable of repairing those particular processes, Griffin. Other than Myself.” Trinity paused. “I misspeak. There is one being capable of it. Garth N’Chalez. He could repair your Suit. Reveal yourself to him and he will –as we all know- gladly help you. He would bend his considerable intellect to freeing you from my service without hesitation. He would do this, and ask no questions, lay no blame. He would accept you into the fold with a smile. Go to him and be … free.”

  Griffin fell to his knees. “Mother … motherfucker.” He whispered feebly, elation a thing of the far, dim past.

  Trinity chuckled, a chilling, mechanical sound devoid of emotion. “But you won’t, will you, my little Kin’kithal warrior? You won’t because you hate him more than you could ever hate me. In five days’ time, Griffin Jones, this Suit will have repaired enough functionality to return you to Me. It is a certainty you will not enjoy the punishments I have in store for you. Enjoy your temporary freedoms, Enforcer. You will need something to hold onto while what passes for your soul is flayed from your bones.”

  The recording stopped.

  Griffin knelt there, in the impact crater, weeping silently, raging at the entire universe. If he could but reach his power, he would burn entire worlds to show his displeasure. He was a Kin’kithal warrior of the highest order. Vast and ancient Kinsmen, pure scions to the M’Zahdi Hesh and filled with earth-shaking, ex-dee wrought power, had bowed to him. He’d killed the beautiful and wild Kith Shikosi in a dangerous dance that’d left him breathless. He’d slaughtered thousands of Harmony Soldiers bearing advanced Heshii weaponry. He was a living, breathing reflection of the End Game, he was homo superioris, and he was a god.

  He was trapped inside his own skin. Shielded by armor. Forever.

  An angry mooing sound filled his ears. Griffin looked up. He looked over his shoulder and his stomach sank even further than his own sorrow could’ve managed; in his –now foolish and premature- joy at achieving the illusionary goal of freedom, Griffin had neglected to examine his surroundings.

  His route had brought him damn near to the other side of the planet, to crash, unceremoniously, into one of Hospitalis’ largest shubin farms.

  Griffin stared at the genetically modified super-bull, making some rough estimations. He wanted to weep bitterly. The shubin bull making angry moo noises at him easily weighed thirty thousand pounds. It’s horns were fucking immense. If there was anything on the planet that was born to kill God soldiers, it was a shubin.

  “Well, shit.” Griffin jammed his helmet on and readied himself for bull wrasslin’. He gestured for the damn thing to come at him. “C’mon, Bessie, let’s fuckin’ do this thang!”

  The bull let loose with a bellow that reverberated through the clearing. Griffin flexed his shoulders and braced for impact.

  A Chairwoman’s … Obsession

  The list of things crowding her prote for immediate resolution grew ever larger. Alyssa gloomily imagined that everyone clambering for her attention, every miniscule situation needing her approval, every single iota of everything would eventually overload her Prometheus Device. At last count there was somewhere near a hundred thousand different requests, each of which apparently required her strictest attention. Alyssa always imagined her prote cracking under the pressure, spilling sparks and smoke into the air. She imagined that and smiled. Let the people make their own way in the world, see how long they lasted without her devoted guidance and love.

  Alyssa Doans, Chairwoman for the Mighty Latelian Regime, lover to the most powerful military commander in the solar system, scriptwriter for an upcoming systemic blitzkrieg that would wrest hundreds, if not thousands, of systems from Trinity’s control sat there, staring out the window.

  Aides came. They went after only a few seconds, their ears ringing with threats against the lives of every man, woman and child they personally knew. Ministers or representatives for Ministers appeared for meetings and were met with barely hospitable grace, but the result was the same; they left feeling as though they’d barely escaped.

  Alyssa stared out the window, watching the sunrise, and thought about the First Main. It’s resolute refusal to accept any of the few command codes she knew following screen after screen of ‘superuser access’ had stolen her mind away. She could think of nothing else, and for simple reasons.

  It was a historical –and well-known one, at that- fact every Chair who, for one reason or another, lost access to the First Main eventually also lost the Chair. The events culminating in that … deposition generally happened very quickly. Chairman Stone McGregor, for example, had lost access to the Main on a Monday. By Tuesday, his head had been removed from his body and planted on the steps of his personal residence.

  It wasn’t even about the unfettered power that the Sigma provided, really: some Chairs had used Sigma but once or twice in their entire lives and still, towards the gloomy end of their careers, had done something to irritate that most ancient computer to the point where they could no longer use it. Alyssa snorted at the accidental anthropomorphizing. Irritated. The Main didn’t get irritated.

  It just … it just didn’t like her anymore.

  No, it was more that the people could somehow sense that that ultimate reprisal was no longer in the grasp of someone who could use it.

  Alyssa didn’t want to use Sigma any more than she had to, but she did need it all the same.

  Especially now. Particularly now.

  Her revelatory speech, being called –as endearingly uninspiring as any reporter had ever made anything- ‘The Test of Ages Speech’, had done wonders to soothe the conscience of the savage beast that was her people, but only just. Barely just. That was the problem with a society teetering on the edge of collapse. Everything she did … anything she did … all of it was ultimately nothing more than a temporary stopgap. The problems her people were briefly blinded to hadn’t vanished. They would only stop caring for so long before they noticed –again- ex-God soldiers dying in back alleys, either from overdoses or for from lack of ‘medication’. They would only ignore the ever-growing paucity of money, the shocking lack of food, the endless avalanche of debt for so long before they started baying for her blood.

  And those problems had all existed before Garth Nickels.

  Alyssa tried to find warmth from the rising sun, and failed.

  With Garth Nickels came the destruction of Hospitalis’ backbone. There was a report somewhere on her prote that they had enough food on the planet to support life for –at best- another six months. After that, it was anyone’s guess what would happen. Shipping a million or so God soldiers off-planet was a ‘fix’, but only for Hospitalis.

  Densen and Penzengraaf weren’t set up to handle the nearly continuous shipments of food from the other worlds. Similarly, the worlds that were ‘donating’ food to Hospitalis weren’t set up to either handle a sudden boom in God soldier population, the increased flights of grain and livestock vessels …

  Alyssa slammed a hand on her desk, ignoring the stinging pain.

  No.

  Hospitalis was the only planet designed to handle all that. The only workable plan was to store virtually every soldier they could, lock them up in stasis and hope for the best; sometimes the monstrous men took to storage well, sometimes they died immediately, sometimes they woke up … different.

  It was the ones who woke ‘different’ that Alyssa worried over. It was the only reason why she hadn’t forced Vasily into sending the behemoths to sleep; was it better to deal with a starving population or to gamble on soldiers rising … disloyal?

  She’d directed Hollyoak to look into better, more efficient ways of putting the God soldiers under, but the mad scientist hadn’t gotten back to her.

  With Garth Nickels came the ferretting out of the Great Traitor, Ashok G
uillfoyle. Mastermind in no small part to the absolutely enormous financial duress the entire solar system was under, that bastard had also spent liberal amounts of the Regime’s money on discovering better methods of killing God soldiers. The Guillfoyle Empire had stretched into hundreds –if not thousands- of other businesses spread throughout the entire system and there was still no knowing if they’d managed to catch all of the surprises left behind by that man’s abrupt departure. Avatars and their real-life counterparts were crawling through the data at a snails’ pace. After Gametime, they could speed the process up, but only by a little bit. They’d never had to do anything like this, had never even contemplated someone being so cancerous to everyday life.

  In her weakest moments, Alyssa wished she hadn’t ordered the man shoved out the back of the plane as they’d flown him back to The Peak.

  With Garth Nickels came chaos, confusion, disorder. Her people loved him. They idolized him. They wanted him in their lives. Her prote was tracking every single flash, every bit of data with his name, and the flood was endless. Even as they talked about the future –a future she’d designed- they talked more about Garth Nickels. They wondered where he was, what he was doing, what he planned to do next. Hundreds of thousands of men were walking around wearing shirts with their own attempts at slogans, brazenly declaring ‘World’s Best Programmer’ or ‘I Have Big Fists’ for everyone to see.

  It was bizarre.

  It was pathetic and it was irritating. Words and phrases the man used, strange lingo from thirty thousand years in the past, cropped up everywhere and disgustingly, they were sticking. Her educated fools were calling each other ‘bro’ and shouting ‘fuck me sideways’ left, right and center. There were incidences of more young people showing up in hospital with bruises and sprains and broken bones than ever. Reports had the fools saying they’d injured themselves ‘fighting like Nickels’. Nauseating. All of it.

  It was almost as if her beautiful world had been programmed to turn itself into Garth Nickels’ own playground and there was nothing she could do about it.

  And now foodstuffs were flowing forth from The Palazzo. Foods that the masterclass Chef Charbo insisted were modeled after ideas given to him by none other than Garth Nickels. Food that was outlawed. Food that was unhealthy.

  Food –as she herself knew from firsthand experience- that was delicious. It was unthinkable. She stared at the half-finished plate of ‘onion rings’ and resisted the nearly obsessive desire to stuff more of the cold food in her mouth. She started salivating. What made the food so good? Charbo didn’t know, though he claimed Garth Nickels had said that ‘Humanity was genetically programmed to love it’.

  “Garth Nickels.” Alyssa fought the urge to howl. The name came out as an accusatory growl instead.

  If she stood in the corner of her offices and bent her head at an odd angle to stare out the window, she could just barely see the towering edifice that was The Palazzo. She imagined him lounging around, being insufferably handsome and aggravatingly charming, spawning a hundred million ideas from that ancient, impossible-to-imagine time from long ago for a horde of disciples who lived for no other reason than to make them all come true.

  There was an entire branch of the Ministry of Examination working ceaselessly to predict the impact the man’s presence was having. Would have. Enormous netLINK arrays churned data through a hundred thousand filters, trying to determine the devil’s actions. Her agents were quietly demanding access to AI, rightfully frustrated that their machines were no match for Nickels. There was no other way. She needed to know what was going to happen before it happened. Alyssa Doans needed to know the future and she would kill every technician working on the problem if they failed to produce results.

  The Offworlder was untouchable. If anything happened to him, if anything remotely resembling the hand of the Regime fell on Nickels, her people would –in the man’s own parlance- lose their shit and go bugnut crazy. There was nothing Alyssa could do now except wait and hope and … and pray that whoever he fought in the Qualifying Round tore his bloody head off and –because there was no other way to be certain of the man’s death- ate it in front of the watching worlds. A wicked smile curled Alyssa’s lips. She’d offer money to whoever did that. Yes, yes. That seemed like a good idea.

  “Garth Nickels!” Alyssa howled the man’s name.

  Alyssa looked from the sun –now fully up- and reread the missive written quaintly in hand, on actual paper. It bore the names of the three interchangeable Trinity Representatives who seemed to do nothing but watch Latelian television. It was almost impossible to read thanks to the ponderous cursive writing style they used.

  In the letter, they expressed their deep sorrow at the destruction of the Spaceport, commented idly on the insanity of the night before and congratulated her on her openness with her people in regards to finally admitting to those very same people her long-term plans with Trinity. They went on to say they were very proud of her for doing so, implying that such actions showed a maturity and wisdom that Trinity, when they communicated with It, would find most illuminating, for It was most reluctant to merely ‘hand over’ solar systems to anyone, even though there were numerous ones with no important populations to speak of.

  Then, almost as an afterthought, one of the Representatives had furtively scrawled –no doubt seconds before being stuffed into the envelope- a request; one of them would very much like to meet Garth Nickels at his soonest possible convenience and could she, as Chairwoman for the Regime, arrange this?

  Alyssa set fire to the document and watched it burn in the replica ashtray. Garth Nickels had to die. Everywhere she turned, he was suborning her power, sometimes with nothing more than one of his insufferably smug –and overwhelmingly handsome- grins.

  He had to die. When he died, the First Main would surely respond to her touch. Then she wouldn’t have to worry about losing control of her system. Then she could focus once more on the impossibly difficult task of organizing a Dark Ages War against system-locked populations.

  The Chairwoman flinched and nearly fell off her chair when every Screen and Sheet in her office flared to life simultaneously.

  She watched in silence for a few minutes. “Are you fucking serious?” Alyssa demanded angrily, watching the insane antics of an Enforcer draw more and more resources out of the hidden warrens of The Peak.

  There was an Enforcer in the system! For the first time in five thousand years, one of Trinity’s most powerful guardians was in Latelyspace, and it was directly engaging her forces in open warfare. More to the point, more worrisome and terrifying, was that he –or she- was attacking the one place in the entire system were the threads of her actual plans for the upcoming Dark Age could be woven together. The Box was there as well, and if Garth Nickels wanted The Box, then surely Trinity finally realized It’s error in being disinterested.

  Alyssa stared, aghast, as the Enforcer withstood a bombardment of weapons’ fire intense enough to vaporize a city. No, an armada. The Enforcer withstood that punishment easily, responding with such a pathetic amount of reprisal that Alyssa frowned.

  What was going on? Did the Representatives know about this Enforcer? Were they guiding his or her actions? Was this some kind of test, to see if there was anything that the Latelian Regime could do to harm Trinity’s stranglehold on It's domain?

  Alyssa grinned; if that was what they were after, they’d be disappointed. The plan relied on a Dark Age, a time when it was categorically proven that nothing in Trinityspace worked properly, if at all. A rampaging horde of Onesies could dominate a world in a day, a system in a week, a galaxy in a month. Threes and Fours could do it quicker, and with less manpower. They didn’t need overwhelming firepower. They just needed what they already had: survivability.

  After that, it was just a matter of time. The shortest Age had been a few hundred years, the longest just over a thousand. The Chairwoman’s mind blazed with a map of Trinityspace slowly but inevitably dominated by the Regime and its tec
h, a tech immune to a savage weakness. In a thousand years, Trinity would arise to find … nothing.

  The sound of the Old Gun firing filled the world and everyone stopped moving for a second, heads tilted to the sky, wondering what was happening. When no other sounds filled the heavens, they went back to their lives.

  Alyssa Doans wiped the Enforcer’s antics from her Screens and Sheets. That was a military matter and in her mind, OverCommander Vasily had executed the mandate of his office with exemplary control and wisdom.

  Garth Nickels appeared on her systems. She watched him fight, she watched him talk.

  Garth Nickels.

  He had to die.

  Hollyoak Wants a Body and doesn’t Care Who Knows It

  Having a man like Hollyoak on your side was easier than you imagined, once you got past his … foibles; put simply, either Hollyoak was on your side, turning that feverish imagination and devilishly inventive genius to your needs, your goals or you woke up one morning to find your planet invaded by genetically altered rats with teeth that could gnaw through duronium.

  That had actually happened, though on a smaller scale. It’d been a single rat, chewing its way madly through duronium-shielded walls in order to make room for a different modified rat with hands. Hollyoak’s earliest attempts –grotesquely successful for their clumsiness- had been part of a menagerie designed to rob banks. The … the handed rat had tripped an alarm and –unequipped to burrow its way out of the resulting cage dropped around the inside of the targeted vault- that had, as they say, been that. A flurry of investigations, a few disappearances of bank employees who’d seen things they shouldn’t’ve seen, the tracking of genetic resources … in less than two days, a polite and discreet visit to the home of James and Gerta Hollyoak, parents to Sam Hollyoak.

  Vasily remembered that first encounter as if it was yesterday. Some days, like today, he wished that they hadn’t arrived when they had, that they hadn’t prevented the young man from killing himself. There was little doubt their world would be simpler. Well, maybe not simpler. Perhaps … perhaps less twisted.