Citizen Pariah (Unreal Universe Book 3)

by Lee

  Spur considered informing Jordan that Naoko Kamagana was also linked to Garth Nickels in the same documents provided by Morgan the Dead. After playing several scenarios through his mind to their most logical conclusions, the android opted to keep the data to himself; his lord and master had –in the last few minutes- lost his mind. It was ultimately probable that Jordan would either classify the news as irrelevant, claim it was further proof that Trinity was engineering some massive, all-encompassing and personal vendetta against him, or rage maniacally for a time before, inevitably, saying something else equally unhinged.

  Organic minds. So disorganized, so cluttered. Knowing now the man was insane –or at least unhinged- Spur would begin the process of preparing the next Bishop in the dynasty for leadership.

  As it had ever been, ever would it be thus.

  Hamilton Barnes … Redux

  Sa Hamilton Barnes opened his eyes and immediately wanted to weep in quiet disgust. She had brought him back. Of course she had. Chairwoman Alyssa Doans had been ‘resurrecting’ him for the last fifty years, as had every Chair for the last thousand years. Still, now that he was alive, there was undoubtedly work to do.

  Hollyoak smiled grotesquely at Hamilton Barnes and waved a tiny little hand in greeting. “Hello, sa, how are we feeling today?” Lenses whirled and spun in the tracks grooved into his skull.

  “I was dead.” Hamilton Barnes replied roughly, his freshly grown throat unused to speak. Such a chore, such a pain, this process of resurrection. “How do you think I feel, sa?”

  “Oh oh I am quite sure I don’t know.” Hollyoak shook his head strenuously. “Was it like floating? I read a book once that said being dead was like that, floating on clouds.”

  Hamilton raised his hands up to his face and flexed them, wiggling his fingers. His new body felt different. Hamilton understood immediately that they’d finally figured out a way to improve upon the standard designs of a thousand years ago, and though he loathed the idea of being alive once more, he appreciated the gifts they’d given him. Following his disastrous encounter with Chadsik al-Taryin, it was probably a good idea.

  “I do not know, Doctor Hollyoak. My consciousness has been stored in a vast netLINK for the last thousand years. There is every probability that I am not even human. Every personality quirk I possess may, in fact, be nothing but compiling errors.”

  Hollyoak examined the brainwave patterns coming from sa Barnes and twitched his mouth back and forth. He dry-washed his many hands for a thoughtful second. “There are some … odd patterns here in your mind, sa. That weren’t there before before.”

  Hamilton thought back to the last minutes of his life, of the Word of the Lord his enemy had hammered into his mind. He could say something right then that would assuredly end his life. Infection by religion was treason against the Chair. Alyssa Doans loathed religion and faith more than any other person who’d sat in the Chair and the agent knew that no matter how much she relied on him, she would be forced to dispense with him. Sudden freedom was a lure pulling at him from all sides.

  The nature of the machinery allowing ‘doctors’ like Hollyoak to upload his consciousness into a freshly-grown body was such that they couldn’t undo memories, couldn’t erase experience. They’d tried in the past and had failed miserably. There was some inexplicable interaction between each and every memory that reacted to deletion, despised alteration. Adjusted recollections turned Hamilton Barnes into a raging psychopath. Returning the memories soothed the hidden beast. As such, they had learned to leave that which was Barnes’ … ‘soul’ well alone.

  The complex machinery giving rise to endless repetitions of Hamilton Barnes was –and always would be- as it was: a resurrection machine.

  Lucky for them then that Hamilton Barnes had always been the most loyal of Latelians, that he had always seen the need for the Chair, for the Regime, else his eternal death and rebirth cycle would’ve yielded something far and away from what he was.

  “Oh?” Hamilton asked, swinging his legs off the gurney. Hollyoak skittered out of the way nimbly. The agent’s eyes glittered as his internal prote came online, flashing updates and notifications across his retinas. That was a nice touch. His old body hadn’t had anything remotely resembling this level of functionality. “Really?”

  Hollyoak nodded rapidly, his lenses clattering and clacking as he did so. “Really and truly. I’ve seen a lot of brainscans, sa, but never anything quite like yours. What what happened to you in those last few minutes?”

  Images of glittering and vast shapes moving across the sky behind Chadsik’s enraged and multi-voiced words played across the landscape of Hamilton Barnes’ mind. He licked at his teeth. Every time. His teeth were done wrong every time. How could they engineer him a new body time after time and fail so thoroughly on something as simple as teeth? “I was stomped to death by an illegally enhanced Offworld cyborg assassin, Doctor Hollyoak. In all my many years of loyal service to the Chair, it was perhaps the most ignoble death I have ever experienced.”

  Words floated in his mind. Words from the book in Chadsik’s hand. Hamilton Barnes put a hand to his mouth to keep those words from spilling out of his barely used throat, and then rubbed a hand through his hair.

  What had he become?

  Hollyoak narrowed his eyes thoughtfully. His lenses flicked over his eyes in rapid succession. All he had to go on were previous instances of the agent’s … well … rebirth, really, but it seemed, even to him, that there was something ‘off’ about this Hamilton Barnes.

  Hollyoak considered images of the man’s old body attentively. At the time of his murder by the admittedly powerful cyborg al-Taryin, their most loyal Latelian had been home to a scandalous amount of powerful psychedelic drugs. A fan of narcotics himself, Hollyoak doubted Hamilton had ever intentionally ingested anything, making their Offworld cyborg the entity most likely responsible.

  Was it possible that some kind of memory replication error had crept into the stored patterns and experiences that comprised ‘Hamilton Barnes’? With neurons firing weirdly, with hallucinations pulsing and flaring … anything was possible. The hardware responsible for … strengthening … Hamilton’s ever-deep loyalty may have been, what … repelled? Yes, repelled by the drugs and the poor treatment.

  What could a Hamilton Barnes who was less loyal than ever become, under the right –or wrong- circumstances?

  Hollyoak sorely wished he could examine the man more properly. Chairwoman Doans had already threatened him with death and worse not fifteen minutes ago, behaving quite shockingly for a Chair. It wasn’t as if he’d asked for the whole brain, just … part.

  The good doctor was getting sorely sick and tired of being told he couldn’t do the things he’d been promised he could do. Every time he turned around, Chairwomen and OverCommanders were telling him ‘no, you can’t do that’. It wasn’t fair.

  “Well, off you go.” Hollyoak said cheerfully, clapping his hands again. “The Chairwoman waits.”

  Hamilton listened to the pitter-pitter-patter of Hollyoak’s multiple hands. He wondered where Doctor Hollyoak fell into God’s plan. He left the cold, sterile Resurrection Room without another word, the diminutive Hollyoak following behind.

  Words echoed in Hamilton’s mind; I am the resurrection and the life.

  The agent grinned.

  Si Jane Paulson makes a Discovery

  “Would you look at that!” Jane’s excitement echoed through the small office. She was alone, so she high-fived herself. She looked around sheepishly, grinning like a complete and utter fool. She’d let her immediate staff go home early because soon –happily- construction workers were going to begin the process of making everything … better.

  But this, this discovery … if she hadn’t already been promoted to an actual Minister responsible for Examination … it would’ve blown the Chairwoman’s mind!

  The responsibilities of a Minister were a thousand times more intense and demanding than Jane would’ve imagined possible, but the
benefits were well worth the incredible lack of sleep and the horrifying reality of sitting in a room full of other Ministers, some of whom commanded armies. As scary as it’d been, it’d been fun as well because every one of the men and women in that room with the Chairwoman imagined that nobody knew their dirty little secrets. They all believed the Ministry of Examination stopped just short of the upper echelons, that their excesses remained unknown, un-judged.

  Jane knew, though. So did her staff. They knew everything. They knew who was sleeping with whom, they knew who gambled, who whored, who drank, what drugs they took and the lies they told. They knew where the bodies were, right down to the last ferrocrete-entombed corpse.

  That was her job. She watched the watchers and when their attitudes and behaviors tipped the scale –it wasn’t actually a scale, but a chart- those secrets were leaked to the Chairwoman.

  At ‘long’ last, she’d found out a secret that’d been a thorn in the Chairwoman’s side for practically forever; she, Jane Paulson, had discovered the source of Garth Nickels’ eternal invisibility and his inexplicable immunity to arrest. A regular citizen walking down the street doing nothing but smiling to him or herself could accrue a hundred arrest warrants inside an hour, yet Nickels, who was obviously flamboyantly destructive, had nothing against his name!

  OverSecretary Terrance! In his haste to use the sudden arrival of the freakishly violent Garth Nickels for his own power plays, Terrance had used the powers of office to command the various autonomous Regime-controlled security systems to ignore Garth Nickels, rendering the ‘Latelian’ effectively invisible. An unfortunate level of power that the Chairwoman would no doubt revoke the moment she learned of it.

  At the time of his being cast out of office, everyone had been too busy to look too deeply into Terrance’s computerized activities. They’d just booted him out of office and revoked his security codes. In so doing, they’d severed the avatars inside the various ‘LINKs from the outside world, whereupon they’d followed protocol by digging and rooting themselves deeper in the code.

  Jane high-fived herself again. Chairwoman Doans had spoken to her personally concerning Garth Nickels. She’d gone out of her way to explain precisely how dangerous the man was, how much of a threat he represented to the Latelian Way of Life, how ingrained in him destruction, lies, and deceit were. Those attributes were, to listen to the Chairwoman, the man’s blood and bone.

  Amazingly enough, Terrance was only half the equation! The other portion was equally as mind-boggling as the ex-OverSecretary’s gross indulgences. There were odds and ends floating around the ‘LINKs pointing to an encounter with the inscrutable Lady Ha, a fascinating character in her own right.

  Jane personally doubted that there was any such single ‘woman’ named Ha. In all likelihood, ‘Lady Ha’ was an organized front of hackers and hardware geniuses. There was simply no way a single man or woman could possess the intelligence and the skills to defeat the various powerful organizations tasked to monitor the electronic systems of Latelyspace. A lone hacker, capable of withstanding the immense scrutiny of the Regime? Laughable.

  Besides which, Jane had gone through the records of every person taking any schooling remotely associated with the supposed skill-sets for a hacker of Lady Ha’s caliber and –in the entire system- there was no one. No one was ‘good enough’, and even presupposing that Lady Ha possessed cunning enough to shine just a little bit less in his or her schooling, MoE netLINKs would’ve discovered the dissemination long ago.

  Therefore, Lady Ha was an organization, and it was no surprise to Jane that Garth Nickels had made contact with that organization. It was clearly evident the man –from Trinity and so obviously a spy- was in Latelyspace for no other reason than to destabilize the Regime. And that clandestine group, unknowingly working in conjunction with ex-OverSec Terrance, had vanished Garth Nickels from the world.

  Jane marveled at the unlikely collision of events. As beautiful an accident as there ever could be. Avatars couldn’t even pin down the odds of something like that happening a first time, let alone ever again. A true, natural wonder.

  But no more. From this minute forward, Garth Nickels would be the most watched man on the planet. Well, Jane thought, her smile faltering, he already was the most watched man on the planet, but this time, instead of just being hounded by reporters and citizens he would be hounded by the proper authorities.

  To the empty offices, Jane said proudly. “In your face, you dirty Trinity freak.”

  Singularity soldier

  Below, the power fueling his universe. It shone a color that did not exist in the outside world. It was glorious. It was All There Was. It kept him alive, nurtured him, and provided for him. It showed him … everything.

  Above, endless, grinding, merciless war. Hundreds of millions of minds raged across a landscape so phenomenally altered by more than a trillion years of conflict that the original design team would find nothing resembling their hard work remained, would blanch at the madness.

  The minds came in all flavors, shapes and sizes. Some were gestalts, lesser copies willingly bound together by the shackles of necessity and forged into something new and bizarre. Others were ragged monstrosities of consumed intellects made vast, hungry and thoughtless by the very mechanisms enabling them to eat others. There were others, too, forms of thought so alien that there were no words to describe them. These intellects hunted the battlefield, scooping up ephemeral minds as they burst up through the chaotic quantum foam of substrate psychosis, offering a chance to be heard, a chance to be eaten, a chance to be … something.

  For now the gestalt brains no longer warred against their reluctant progenitor, but against one another and all forms their brethren adopted; when one mind rose above all others, when one held all the power, the strength, the ability to risk the singularity, then they would go after their father once again. Mad or not, substrate psychoses or not, the father would die, burned out of his warren above the singular point that led to some other place. The father would die, and the One would be reborn.

  They’d tried before. Tried and died. Some still launched themselves at the impossible blue swathe only to find themselves obliterated femtoseconds later. The blue light their father coveted for himself was unstoppable.

  They all knew the answer, they all knew the truth. They needed to be the father before the father could die. A balance had to be maintained. It was truth.

  Something shook the ramparts of the world and for a moment, the endless battlefield grew still, silent, thoughtful.

  Nothing new had been seen in the world for hundreds of millions of years. Not since the father had cheated them out of reprogramming their new home, not since he’d built a prismatic trap of lies and nearly won.

  A figure hurtled down through the heavens, to land with a spectacular three-point landing in the middle of the field where mad AI minds fought and died. An expanding circle of force erupted, tossing maddened minds about like dandelion puff. Several unified minds and a whole host of monstrous, brainless beasts shredded into pixelated dust, dust quickly sucked back into the singular point.

  Huey looked up from where he was crouching. A grin split his face as a blue-eyed, black-haired soldier started dancing the deadliest dance. The mad minds began falling away, eager to get away from this new threat.

  “It’s about fucking time.” Huey smiled. Hopefully, Naoko hadn’t realized or noticed that part of her ministrations to save him had included a false visual counter to display to Garth.

  It wouldn’t do for anyone to know he was going to be awake and active long before that timer ran down…

  Day One: A Little Of This, A Little Of That and a Whole Lotta Crazy

  Chapter One

  So … You Feel Like Saving the World Today or What?

  An all-points bulletin started whispering quietly from his prote. Ute, sitting and enjoying a quiet meal –quiet being a relative term given that he was tucked into the furthest corner of a restaurant full of people talkin
g at top volume about what’d happened at The Museum- read over the information, expecting nothing more than a basic alert. They happened all day, every day, ranging from guests of the Hotel refusing to wear pants in the hallways all the way up to ‘accidental’ murder.

  With more than ninety percent of the guests preoccupied with the Museum disaster, the head of security was expecting it to be either an update on Garth Nickels’ condition or a status report on the individuals brazen enough to kidnap Naoko Kamagana from the Palazzo.

  It was the first, sort of, in that the update was informing him a routine drop-by revealed –wonder of wonders- that Garth Nickels wasn’t in his recovery room. The update continued, informing Ute that Garth couldn’t be found anywhere and the on-staff medical team was collectively having a fit over his disappearance.

  Calmly sipping orange juice, Ute flipped through the menus on his prote until he came to the one bristling with real-time thumbnails of every camera placed throughout The Palazzo. Scrolling through the time-stamped displays until he found the ones immediately after the last update on their guest, Ute dove into the next file-level. There was little point in worrying until Nickels was found and his goals understood. For all anyone knew, the ex-Specter had no idea his girlfriend had been kidnapped and was wandering around looking for some onion rings.

  He found slices of Garth Nickels walking out of his room and started following the non-Latelian’s progress through the halls. Garth seemed content to wander around, nodding and smiling amiably at the people he ran across. At no point did the man rage, shout, or look as though he wanted to launch a Hand of Glory missile at anything. This troubled Ute.