Citizen Pariah (Unreal Universe Book 3)

by Lee

  “I’m going to get your main, if you don’t mind, sa.” Ute shook his head. “You can meet me in the parking garage. I believe your van would be the best vehicle.”

  “Yeah, yeah, sure. Oh!” Garth snapped his fingers. “You should, um, prolly un-autolock all those guns and shit. We’re … we’re probably going to need to eventually shoot at things.”

  Ute nodded. He picked the Garth’s main up and walked away from the conflict. The last time he’d saved a planet, it hadn’t been nearly this confusing. He shouldered his way past the second team of security agents to’ve been called in since everything with Garth had reached a head. He gave them some parting words. “If I were you sas, I would wait a few minutes. This might resolve itself.”

  “Sa Ute, if it’s all the same to you, we’re going to fucking wait until the sun sets.” One of the men said as he passed. It was true: they had Garth Nickels out there talking to a man who was bulletproof and the crazy-insane murderous Trinity cyborg shouting angrily at himself.

  “Good plan.” Ute nodded to the men he’d commanded as the doors closed.

  xxx

  “You listen to us.” Chad put their weapons away. “We are the boss of you. We are going to murder that fella and you can fuck yourself.”

  “You cannot.” The Voice pleaded. “He is Erg1. He was thought lost to us. He is important to the cause.”

  “Nah.” Chad waved their hands angrily. “Nah, he ain’t. ‘e’s a few pounds o’ flesh on the ground in a few minutes, mate. Also, ‘ow is you doin’ that wiv your voice?” When he didn’t get any answer, Chad started walking towards Garth and the bloke who was, apparently, named Erg1. As long as he didn’t get moving too quickly, the Voice wouldn’t be able to slow them down.

  xxx

  “We were tasked with the chore of conscripting you into an agency referred to as The Dark Age Cabal, Garth, by none other than Trinity Itself.” Kant thought of his time with the Cabal with something akin to fondness. He’d enjoyed sitting at the table with all the truly powerful men and women in Trinityspace. He sadly suspected that –once he was done with Garth- there would be no going back.

  Garth whistled mockingly, but kept his eyes on their soon-to-be very unwanted guest; the cyborg was walking slowly towards them and wasn’t speaking. Just beyond the lanky FrancoBrit, police cars were lining up. His morning had gone completely off the rails and he hadn’t even had any goddamn breakfast. “A Cabal, eh? Sounds ominous. Quickly now, I think this guy wants to kill you before he tries to kill me.”

  Kant was dimly aware of Chadsik al-Taryin moving up behind him, could feel the impression the man made on the fabric of the Universe around him. It felt strangely … familiar. He resisted the urge to turn around and directly confront the assassin. He had to dispense his duty to Trinity and then kill Garth Nickels so they could truly begin their plans. Once that was done, then he would find an interesting way to make the cyborg pay for his incredible rudeness.

  “On the surface,” Kant explained, “the Cabal exists to discover ways of preventing a Dark Age. Deeper, though, it is a sub rosa agency dedicated to…”

  Chad smiled sunnily at Garth and stuck out his hand. “Allo, my son. Our name is Chadsik al-Taryin. You can call us Chad.”

  Garth firmly decided he was going to take a vacation when he was in charge. It was the only thing he really wanted. A nice, long vacation on a planet pretty much devoid of weirdoes. Oh, and trees that dispensed ice-cold Dr. Pepper. He watched Kant stare at Chad’s open hand, then at his own. A big grin on his face, Garth reached out and clasped hands with the man who’d been hired to kill him. “Pleased to meet you, Chad. Interesting accents you’ve got there. English, I believe, mashed in with a lot of Wales?”

  A big, beatific grin split Chad’s face. “Cor blimey, mate. Wot a fuckin’ treasure you is. Yes, a million fuckin’ times yes. So they is not fake?”

  Garth shook his head. “Nope. They don’t belong in your mouth though, which is weird.”

  “He is all the hims he can be.” The Voice said glumly. “We suspect we made a mistake.”

  Chad looked at the alien Offworlder who was staring dumbly at his hand. “Look, mate, you’re a smart man. You know we is ‘ere to kill you, right?” He smiled at Garth’s nod. “Now, this whole fing is completely fucked up, right? You, us, this little twat, all of it don’t make sense. You can’t tell, but this man ain’t a man at all, but some sort of fuckin’ Offworlder. ‘e an’ ‘is kind kidnapped us and made us all sorts of wonky. We’re going to kill ‘im first, then you. We is expectin’ you’re going to run away while we do this, which is fine, we can find you wherever you go.”

  Kant cleared his throat. He reached out and grabbed Garth by the wrist, saying, “You aren’t real. None of you are. None of this is real.”

  Garth felt a mild burning sensation skitter up and down his wrist for a brief moment before –against all rationality- a tiny portal of ex-dee energy opened up. “You are not a Jedi, you freak.”

  Kant blinked. “What? You are supposed to die now. This … this …”

  Garth punched Kant in the head, delivering the tiny burst of ex-dee power that’d accumulated in his hand along with the gesture. Chad, operating thousands of times quicker than anyone else in the room, turned and opened up with all of his weapons, blasting and lazing and missile-ing the flying body, destroying everything in a very large area.

  Garth started running for the elevators. He didn’t have time to deal with all the weird shit happening in the world and besides which, Chad and Kant seemed like they had some things to work out in private.

  It was a real drag about the Hotel.

  xxx

  OverCommander Vasily stood alongside the policeman in charge of keeping people away from the Palazzo. He had one eye on his proteus, which was displaying a précis of what’d happened before his arrival and the other on what was happening right in front of him; Chadsik al-Taryin and a man identified as ‘Kant Ingrams’ were hammering away at one another in the shattered remains of the foyer.

  Rescue teams were doing their best to haul people out of their rooms as quickly and efficiently as they could, but the sheer level of violence shaking The Palazzo was making the task difficult. The officer beside him was shouting continuously into his prote, barking orders and doing a surprisingly good job of maintaining order under the abrupt, volcanic fury.

  A lance of energy flashed from the fourth floor, arcing to within scant inches of a hastily appropriated skybus. The various who’s who and Ministers and other people of power aboard the rickety old thing looked as though they were going to throw up and cry at the same time.

  Vasily grinned before smothering it with a gauntleted hand a second later. It was them, the rich and powerful, who’d done nothing at all to assist Latelyspace in these, her final moments. The OverCommander started tasking his prote to find a deployment pattern that wouldn’t rip out the inner core of Central when a massive thunderclap split the air, sending debris and anything smaller than a person flying in a perfect circle away from the Hotel.

  Vasily watched a tiny figure fly through the uppermost levels of the Hotel and off into the distance, trailing smoke and fire behind him.

  “Well.” Vasily scratched his stomach absentmindedly. “Twice in as many days. That has got to be humbling.

  “OverCommandersa?”

  “Need to know, sa, need to know.” Vasily pointed at the Palazzo, which had been gutted, for lack of a better metaphor, like an aging shubin. It’d be a long time before the owners found themselves in a position to rebuild. They might not even get there; he knew Alyssa had never really appreciated the Hotel and had hated the fact that she’d inherited the dark secrets happening inside.

  “D…do we go in now?” The policeman didn’t know what to do. He wasn’t even technically supposed to be on this block. He was supposed to be three blocks over, but the food vendors in front of The Palazzo served far superior snacks. He knew he was going to be in trouble when HQ pinged his prote.r />
  “Oh,” Vasily pointed at the where the main entrance used to be, “I would say wait out here until the other one is done doing … whatever it is he’s doing.”

  A Few Seconds Ago, Two Men, Having … Words

  “Come on, son, just fuckin’ die!” Chad didn’t know what was wrong with their weapons. They seemed to be having the desired effect on everything except their prime target; to whit, they was positively blowing the absolute shit out of everything that wasn’t the tiny little man. “Be good about it, friend. It’s been a long week for us, we’ve been blown up by giant soldiers and we’ve just recently been told we is bein’ the sum total consciousness of ourselves. It’s a bit … wot’s it … metterphysical, hey, but. Blimey.”

  Chad stepped back a bit so the sudden phosphorescent blue energy leaking out of their opponent’s pores wouldn’t get on their new clothes.

  Kant Ingrams was swarming with alien thoughts and ideas, notions that felt as home as anything he’d ever considered … and that worried him. He knew who he was. He was Kant Ingrams. Born and raised in a NorthAMC colonial tower four hundred miles east of BishopCo’s megalithic conglomerate structure to Samit and Amila Ingrams …

  …born thirty thousand years ago in a fiery bath of electrical soup and stolen Heshii technology…

  Kant whipped his head around, looking for the voice. It was always just out of reach, just out sight, yet could be heard easier than the voice made by his own mouth. “What?”

  …we were born thirty thousand years ago, Erg1, and we have been lost for over a hundred years…

  Chad didn’t know what else to do –even they could hear the weird voice filling the air, a voice their Voice was getting all hot and bothered about, if the silent yammering in their earhole was any indication- so they switched to a laser cannon. They’d always expected that the Offworlders who’d done this to them would be hard to kill, but this was a bit on the ridiculous side, wasn’t it?

  While Kant Ingrams, either an Offworlder implausibly shoved inside a human being’s skin or something even weirder, continued going through some sort of existential crisis about who and what they was, Chad took careful aim. They’d’ve preferred to let their onboard tracking systems do the job, but between their Voice not wanting them to kill Kant and the wonky blue light filling the room, they didn’t feel like trusting anything except their good old eyeballs.

  Chad waited for a bit, listening to the disembodied Voice. Yep. As they thought. Metaphysical nonsense. They pulled the trigger on the cannon that they’d used a little while ago to murder them some God soldiers.

  The discharge, easily capable of putting holes in very large, very enhanced soldiers, bounced off some sort of shield at a funny angle and proceeded to burn its way out of the Hotel’s upper floors.

  Chad clipped the cannon back where it belonged and advanced on the human. If missiles, lasers, bombs, and things didn’t work, they was going to try good old-fashioned fisticuffs and bean the Offworlder good and proper. The blue light made their skin feel tingly. Then their stupid mouth opened up and the Voice started howling.

  “Erg1, you must return home!” The Voice howled desperately as Chad began pounding on the side of his head. “You must tell the others that Chadsik al-Taryin has assumed control! We made an error! He has sublimated me! He is not loyal to the cause. He cannot hear the Unwritten Scriptures.” The Voice paused. “And he thinks Enlightningment is a word we made up.”

  Kant Ingrams blinked, and the guise he’d been wearing flashed away. A hundred years he’d been caught, trapped under Trinity’s yoke. How It had even managed to see him was a mystery for the ages. How It must have amused Itself, forcing It’s captive to live life as a miserable human being for that century, twisting him to It’s own purposes, forcing him to bury secrets they could’ve used in this, the final moments of history. It’s purpose in sending him here, to Latelyspace, where quantum emanations from the ancient HIM device were painfully mistuned, was also a mystery; surely It would’ve known that –eventually- the odd flavor to the subspace continuum of the system would shatter the carefully cultivated Ingrams aspect.

  For what purpose, though? Erg1 smiled. He could feel his brothers and sisters out there, in the stars, hiding in plain sight. None of them had ever been caught by Trinity. The AI thought he was the only one left, and why shouldn’t It; the CyberPriests had been crafted thirty thousand years ago by the Armies of Man. They had never been hidden away inside quadronium vessels capable of storing them for eternity, if need be. No, they had fled. Fled once they realized they were flawed, fled once they knew they needed time to figure out what to do.

  It hadn’t taken long. Although it'd been a tremendous, Universe-breaking failure, the ADAM Wars had helped to illuminate their purpose.

  Erg1 smiled again, this time at Chadsik al-Taryin. He didn’t know the cyborg personally. When he’d volunteered to go into the belly of the beast to see if he could learn Trinity’s plans, the Savior Protocol had been a dream. Alone, without the benefit of the feeling of the others for a hundred years, he saw that they hadn’t failed so much as succeeded too much. “Do not worry. He will fail when he tries to kill N’Chalez. He will come to us then.”

  “The fucking fuck we’ll fail you weird lookin’ piece of … wotever the fuck you is.” Chad grabbed a grenade and chucked it at Ingrams, whose various body parts were having a high old time phasing in and out of reality. The worst bit was around the head, where the chap seemed to have more eyes and considerably more … metal … than was normal.

  Erg1 ignored the grenade blast, grabbed Chadsik al-Taryin by the scruff of his neck, and punched the FrancoBritish assassin with all his might. There was a satisfying boom as the cyborg broke the speed of sound.

  xxx

  OverCommander Vasily watched the … Offworlder … walk across the rubble with almost comical daintiness. His prote started squawking, making the sounds of a machine trying to operate against poor conditions and it was then he noticed that all proteii within visual range were making the same noises.

  “Pay heed, Latelians.” Erg1 shouted, his voice electric scythes. “This Unreality will soon be unraveled. You will all cease to be. So it is written, so shall it be.” Then he vanished in a ripple of blue light that scorched the earth at his feet. A few second later, there was a soundless whomp and everything needing power within fifty feet shut down.

  OverCommander Vasily stopped pounding at his prote. He looked at the officer next to him, who was scratching the back of his neck thoughtfully.

  “Religion.” Officer Vance said succinctly. “Makes for a right pack of loons, doesn’t it, OverCommandersa?”

  Vasily clapped the officer on the shoulder. “Indeed it does, sa, indeed it does.”

  Vasily waited impatiently for his prote to reboot, almost dancing from foot to foot as the ancient KamaZhen product came back online; he couldn’t wait until the first round of Tomas’ avatars were done patching their military grade equipment. The tech was only a dozen or so years old, but it felt like a veritable antique.

  Finally. The screen flickered to life and Vasily wasted no time. He started bawling into his prote, ordering a pack of Threesies and their subordinates to his location. They needed to get the mess cleaned up before Alyssa decided to come down to look for herself.

  She might have never liked The Palazzo or even seen the need for the Hotel, but she had enjoyed looking at it from her windows. After what’d just happened, Alyssa was likely to salt the earth. He thought about warning the officer about mentioning the final words of the glow-in-the-light Kant Ingrams to anyone, but decided against it; the man was –for a policeman- very bright. He understood.

  As replies to his orders started coming through, Vasily began crafting careful, subtle manipulations of the truth necessary to gloss over how very strange the whole event was.

  Vasily frowned. Strangest part of all was Garth Nickels’ distinct lack of involvement. Up until a few seconds ago, Vasily would’ve sworn that the ex-Specter was
physically incapable of avoiding anything outside the norm, and illegal super-powered assassin cyborgs being defeated handily by luminescent, teleporting religious Trinitymen fell so far out ‘normal’ there were no words to describe the situation. Vasily grunted.

  None of that was going in his report. He liked his head right where it was.

  Now all he needed to do was find Nickels, and more importantly, Naoko.

  Sa Samwell of the Promoter’s Guild

  “Ch-chairwoman!” Samwell bolted from his very comfortable chair in record time and proceeded to both bow and salute at the same time, getting confused midway through and bonking himself pretty thoroughly in the forehead. It took a moment of steadfast concentration to keep from swearing in the presence of their glorious leader, and when he was sure he could speak without embarrassing himself, he did so. “Chairwoman Doans. It is an honor.”

  The Chairwoman smiled at him from the Screens arrayed around the room, sigils of office gleaming black and red. “Sa Samwell Hearst, how are you this day?”

  Samwell’s stomach sank to the very bottom. Chairs never smiled. Ever. Technically, the facial gesture counted as a smile, but it was the very opposite.

  “F-fine, Si Chairwoman.” Samwell looked around, unaware that he was obviously looking for a place to hide.

  “And the Game ‘LINKs?”

  “Up … up and running.” What a fiasco that’d been! When the whole planet had shut itself down, somewhere near a hundred Games had been interrupted, not to mention a vast amount of data truncated mid-backup. Avatars were beginning to reconstruct the shattered information, but it was slow going. They’d actually had to resort to reaching out to people ­–Gameheads, mostly- in the hopes that they’d part with their own catalogues. Most were willing. For money, the heathens. Samwell explained all this to the Chairwoman, adding, “Thank you for your concern, Si Chairwoman.”

  The Chairwoman’s smile went wider and brighter. Samwell’s stomach left his body and fell through the floor. “And we are on schedule, Game-wise?”