Citizen Pariah (Unreal Universe Book 3)

by Lee

  If he hadn’t viewed the carnage himself, Vasily would’ve insisted the man signing off on that report go for drug testing. See it he had, though, and damned if Nickels hadn’t done precisely that. Gutted, everything cruelly destroyed, the hulking remnants had collapsed inwards on all sides at which time the sub-basement generators had finally gone critical, shattering any remaining evidence of his stupid genius.

  A virtuoso performance. A building destroyed with purity and perfection, a masterpiece of destruction the likes of which the world had never seen.

  It was why Vasily thought Nickels wasn’t out to ruin Latelyspace. A man capable of such wondrous annihilation wouldn’t do as he’d been doing, not really. Easier, less time-consuming methods of wholesale destruction had and always would be available to an ex-Specter like Nickels.

  “The people from Protean Tech must be livid.” Alyssa intentionally understated the gravity of the situation. She was intelligent but understood little of what they’d been fussing about for days. All she needed to know was that someone had been responsible for manipulating a PCU in ways that no one had ever seen before. Based on the man’s track record with world-shattering technology, Alyssa firmly believed with every bone in her body that Nickels was responsible.

  Yet, still, after everything that’d happened, it still fell down to proof. They couldn’t prove anything. Which reminded her; she hoped poor Jane Paulson was doing all right in the next room, sitting as she was next to a freshly reborn Hamilton Barnes. The Minister claimed to have answers about the … the man’s continued activities.

  “They are, Chairwoman.” That was an understatement. One of the younger tech masters from Protean had needed to be restrained scant seconds from flinging herself bodily into the remains of the building in search of something, anything, that remained of the impossible machine.

  Alyssa tapped her lip thoughtfully. “Nickels. Can we still fine him for possession of an illegal machine?”

  “Not my area, I’m afraid, si.” Vasily chuckled at the look on Alyssa’s face before continuing. “Unlikely. Since the tech under that roof was supposed to have been impossible, all his lawyer … Geppig?”

  “Herrig.”

  “Herrig will have to say is that the evidence against his client has been doctored. Since the claims Protean are making have never been possible, no one anywhere is likely to believe them. Judicial avatars will find for Garth based on historical documentation alone. A trial-by-jury would cost us millions, possibly billions. Still,” Vasily offered, “the destruction cost the man billions and we’ve lost a Q-Comm, which –after Guillfoyle- is more a boon than anything else.”

  She’d been afraid of that. The massive payout from suing Garth Nickels into the poorhouse would’ve been very welcome indeed. At the same time, she rather doubted the man had any qualms about losing the sum he’d spent, if his recklessly disjointed purchase history thus far was indication.

  Privately, the loss of the Q-Comm was disappointing; there were only two of the devices on Hospitalis now and she’d been looking forward to repurposing the ‘privately owned’ Quantum Communicator to a pay-to-use machine like the others. Her citizens –whether they realized it or not- were accessing Trinityspace data more than ever before. She rather suspected the sudden surge in cross-system perusal had much to do with attempted searches to learn more about Garth Nickels, but as with any search, hundreds, if not thousands, of different things would show up. Interested parties could go in looking for Garth Nickels but wind up reading about … well, anything at all.

  Vasily’s prote burst to life with a klaxon alarm and a flaring red light that startled both the OverCommander and the Chairwoman out of their respective reveries. Curious as to what the problem might be, Vasily looked at the screen, pretending Alyssa wasn’t aching to ask.

  His eyebrows nearly shot right off his head. OverCommander Vasily looked to Alyssa, who caught his expression and immediately looked worried. “I … I must go. A personal crisis needs attending to. Right now. I apologize, Si Chairwoman.”

  That the man was telling the truth wasn’t an issue. She’d been with Vasily –both as just Chair and OverCommander and lovers- long enough to read the man’s body language with ease. Something or someone very near and dear to his heart was in trouble. Next to his idiot son who wanted to be an actor, though, there was –or had been- only her. Vasily looked impatiently at the door. “By all means, OverCommander. Attend to your problems. Ensure, though, that my problems are also dealt with. Nickels, al-Taryin, Bosch. My very own, personal Trinity.”

  At the door, Vasily said over his shoulder, “By your command, Chairwoman.”

  xxx

  Vasily had only a second to spare for the two people sitting calmly in the outer foyer for their one-to-one meetings with Chairwoman Doans. He recognized Jane Paulson, a fresh new Minister looking positively nauseous at the reality of a private meeting with her Chairwoman.

  At first, he couldn’t identify the man sitting next to the Minister of Examination, but as Vasily passed through the second door, he placed the face: Hamilton Barnes.

  The OverCommander wanted to turn on his heel and brace Hamilton, warn him, threaten him, reaffirm their long-standing agreement about what was and was not acceptable on Hospitalis, but there was no time.

  He needed to get to The Palazzo and find out what in the hell had happened to Naoko Kamagana. He needed to find out why he was only learning of this now, hours after the fact. More importantly, he needed to stop Garth Nickels from destroying the Hotel itself. The flash he’d received had come from an avatar he’d placed on the Hotel’s ‘LINKs a few minutes after their most illuminating meeting, and while –as always- the data wasn’t nearly as explicit as you could get from AI observation, it wasn’t difficult to fill in the blanks.

  Vasily put on speed, barking orders into his prote en route, terrifying the Chairwoman’s staff.

  xxx

  Chairwoman Doans rose smoothly and gestured to the chair directly opposite her, smiling at Minister Jane Paulson with all the warmth and kindness of a grandmother meeting a relative. It was getting easier, the woman supposed, being nice and kind to people. Thankfully, it wasn’t going to last. “Minister Paulson. Thank you for meeting with me. I know your time is limited.”

  Jane bowed respectfully from the waist down, more in an effort to hide the apparently permanent tremble in her lower lip. She was terrified. Rationally, she knew there was no reason to worry. Doans wasn’t the sort of ruler who called someone in to the office to kill them; she dispatched assassins and that was the end of it. Nevertheless, Jane racked her brain, trying to remember if she’d said or done anything stupid in the meeting they’d had during the Museum Crisis.

  She almost laughed. No one had done anything more stupid than the Minister of Offense, and he was still alive.

  “Thank … thank you for meeting with me, Chairwoman Doans.” Jane sat after the Chairwoman resumed her own seat. “I … my time is yours, si.”

  “Wonderful.” Alyssa gazed critically at her newest Minister. Of course, she knew everything there was to know about young Jane Paulson. One of the few descendants of the NorthAMC crop of men and women originally seeding the system, Jane was practically an immigrant in how she looked; other than her impressive eight foot frame, Minister Paulson’s blond hair, blue eyes and pearly white teeth made her indistinguishable from anything you’d find in the NorthAMC continent on Trinity Prime. Alyssa smiled warmly again. “How are you finding your responsibilities?

  Jane paused before answering. She’d never been terribly good at politics; most of her brain was preoccupied in keeping her mouth shut at dinner parties and with lovers. A direct and –many men had said- unfortunate side effect of that preoccupation was a very unladylike bluntness. “It is a lot, Chairwoman. But I’m confident that I can do the job.”

  Alyssa knew that very well. She wouldn’t’ve transformed the girl from Director to Minister otherwise. “Is there anything I should be aware of? Some new, juicy sec
ret people would rather I not know?”

  There were always secrets people would prefer the Chairwoman not know. It was the way of life. The trick was to know which ones their leader liked to know. Unfortunately, there was a veritable dearth of anything worthwhile. Everything that’d been happening to their poor planet had people behaving. Well, that was, excluding the hostage taking, the murdering, the explosion of the Spaceport, and a few other related items. Jane told the Chairwoman this, adding, “There is an interesting bit about Morgan Vasco, though.”

  “Oh?” Doans knew Morgan ‘the Dead’ Vasco rather well. She didn’t particularly care for the man –or his ravenous, disgusting appetites- but politics made for strange bedfellows. Money was a part of the machine, and he’d been free enough with his money that she’d been obliged to ignore certain aspects of his life.

  “Earlier yesterday morning, his ‘LINKs hemorrhaged every last dollar he owned into a handful of charities, Chairwoman. Avatars put everything the man owned up for auction for pennies, all of it being snapped up in a matter of seconds. Several horrific secrets were released to various Ministries and Departments, things … things no one was meant to see. In some of them, very powerful members of the aristocracy and political leaders were implicated. I believe most of Morgan’s possessions were purchased by those people.” Jane cleared her throat nervously. The Chairwoman’s gaze had gone from friendly to predator, her eyes shining like bright buttons in her head. “I’ve … I’ve locked that data away, Chairwoman. No one … no one will be reading or seeing what is there unless you wish it.”

  “I rather doubt that.” Chairwoman Doans replied wryly. A second, devastating attack on a hitherto ‘righteous but corrupt’ citizen. It had to be the work of Lady Ha, regardless of Bosch’s claims of personally ruining Ashok. “And Vasco himself?”

  “We … we found him. Early this morning, Chairwoman. Stuffed into a transport locker. Quite dead.” Jane recalled the photos and wondered if she should flash them to the Chairwoman’s Screens. She shook her head, albeit minutely.

  “Have you alerted his father?” Alyssa had tolerated Morgan, but loathed the man’s father; Petros Vasco wielded considerable political power in his own right, but was petty, childish and churlish. It was sadly very likely that the man would mount an unprecedented campaign of violence in an attempt to find those responsible for his son’s destruction and murder. The thought of that weak-chinned fool arriving in her offices –all full of pomp and circumstance-, of him pretending to know nothing about Morgan’s despicable vices … it was overwhelming.

  “Not yet.” Jane admitted. She knew as much about the father as she did the son, and didn’t relish the idea.

  “Sit on it for a time, would you, Minister Paulson? This world has suffered enough for now.” Alyssa resumed her friendly aspect. “But, come, this is not why I asked you to my offices. I invited you to here to congratulate you on a job very well done. None of my own investigators, avatars, or special … taskforces were capable of doing as you have. How, pray tell, did you discover Garth Nickels’ accidental invisibility?”

  Alyssa watched Jane smile at the pleasure of her victory.

  “Bank records, Chairwoman.” At the Chairwoman’s raised eyebrow, Jane rushed to explain. “The man buys things at the drop of a hat, si. Wherever he goes. There were several random purchases for food in both Port and Central, positively locating him at the time. I looked at surveillance footage for a few of the eateries, but, as you are no doubt already aware, cameras seemed to not record him. Well, I compared footage from before and after Nickels’ purchases and the angles were different. That got me to thinking about OverSecretary Terrance, Chairwoman. Ultimately, he was responsible for ordering his black ops surveillance teams from watching Garth Nickels, and in an effort to pursue an underhanded coup against you, he used his authorization codes to manipulate the security systems worldwide.”

  Alyssa blinked. She hadn’t known that the post of OverSecretary carried with it such power. That was something that was going to have to be corrected, post haste. “Continue.” The story was remarkable in its own right. Jane must’ve been awake for days to figure out the solution. “Because, correct me if I’m wrong, when the man was deposed, we undid everything perpetrated by him simply by deactivating his ‘LINKs.”

  Jane nodded again. “Ordinarily, yes. Had Nickels been a citizen during this time, that would’ve proven effective, Chairwoman. Garth’s arrival into this system occurred several hours following the first batch of Offworld contestants. As such, he wasn’t properly coded into our ‘LINKs. Investigation reveals he was listed as ‘tourist’ and someone in Central never bothered to change that. Terrance’s orders went through; the cameras shut down or looked the other way whenever they detected Garth’s presence. When his citizenship was granted, Terrance’s … ah … ‘ignore him’ orders became a part of Garth’s status. Th-that is to say …”

  “I follow you, Minister Paulson.” What a catastrophe!

  Jane continued. “Following Garth Nickels’ successful lobbying to receive the same reduced electronic scrutiny as any Conglomerate owner, the situation compounded itself, Chairwoman, basically making him the most invisible man on the planet. For the past several days I doubt there is any footage of him anywhere, doing anything. Quite a remarkable series of events.”

  “Remarkable indeed.” Alyssa said frostily. She was going to have Terrance killed. Then the bureaucrat who’d failed to make the proper changes to Garth’s status once he’d landed would be dealt with. That was a terrible mistake and his or her death would serve as warning. Now that she thought about it, anyone who mentioned the Offworlder-turned-citizen’s name with anything other than intense disgust in his or her voice. “You and your teams have corrected the problem?”

  “Y-yes … well, Ch-chairwoman, we … we are working on it.” Jane swallowed loudly. “Following the … the blackouts and the involuntary LINK-shutdowns that occurred as a result, there are snippets of avatar code out there. Many of them are self-repairing, si. When they determine they are damaged, they contact their libraries, request reboot and resume blocking surveillance. Absolute top-notch coding. Going through the OverSecretary’s black ops files is taking time. Terrance was linked to every major intelligence agency in Latelyspace, Chairwoman. Even with the new powers at our disposal, the paperwork required to gain access to the various ‘LINKs is time consuming.”

  Alyssa fumed quietly. She grasped quite readily the hurdles her newest Minister was facing, finding herself with a conundrum. Authorizing the MoE to do as they needed to get Garth Nickels under proper –and total- observation would mean putting them above every other agency in the system. And while the Ministry of Examination was –in many ways- already at that level with their ability to examine every shred of data passing through all the ‘LINKs, it was quite another thing altogether for them to be able to manipulate those records.

  Theoretically, she could task one of her other organizations to do the revisionist work, but it was a sad fact that corruption was rife everywhere you cared to look. During their time together, Jane Paulson and her team had proven themselves implicitly capable of keeping their mouths shut.

  The intelligence community would become aware of the Minister’s expanded and enhanced powers almost immediately. They would come at Jane Paulson with everything they had to bear and they would certainly come to these offices with complaints.

  No matter. It needed to be done. She needed to watch Nickels.

  “By the time you return to your offices, Minister Paulson, you will be able to do as you need.” Alyssa held up a hand, immediately stilling the suddenly over-excited young woman. “Prepare yourself, Jane Paulson. Your peers will now be your antagonists. They will most assuredly not like your newfound scope of office and will seek to undermine you in ways you cannot imagine. Be strong, Jane Paulson, weather the storms. I speak from experience when I say that most will assume you weak because you are a woman. Do not let them beat you because of your gender. I
f they attack and win, let it be because they are better, smarter, more prepared. But you will not let them, will you?”

  Jane wondered if the Chairwoman knew that –as Director of Examinations- she’d personally read very nearly every single electronic document coming out of every single ‘intelligence agency’ on the planet. She wondered if the Chairwoman knew that a shocking percentage of the ‘best and brightest covert minds’ on Hospitalis could barely string a coherent sentence together, and that was with avatars assisting. “I will, Chairwoman.”

  “Excellent.” Alyssa gestured, indicating the meeting was at an end.

  Jane rose, suffused with excitement and –dare she think it- a little arousal at the abrupt expansion of her role. “Chairwoman, if … if I may ask a question?”

  “If you are quick with it.” Alyssa said, eager to move on to the next meeting.

  “The … the man outside … he is not wearing a proteus, yet …” Jane stammered. The Chairwoman’s eyes had gone back to being bright, bright buttons. “My prote detected several ‘LINK feeds streaming … through … him.”

  “There is no man.” Alyssa said blackly, well aware of how she looked to young Jane Paulson. “There is no man and if you wish to leave these offices alive, you will apply that surprisingly formidable intellect to the unspoken results if you are to even think there is a man, let alone mention it to anyone person ever again. Go. Leave. Work in peace and quiet for fifteen days, Jane Paulson. The only communication I will accept from you in that time is confirmation that Garth Nickels is on camera.”

  Jane nodded, saluted, nodded again, burst into tears and fled from the office.

  xxx

  “That was unkind of you, Hamilton.” Alyssa said teasingly as her attack dog glided into the office.

  “I am unaware of what you mean, Chairwoman.” Hamilton sat down without being bidden. The length of his service to the Chair gave him … many … freedoms.