Citizen Pariah (Unreal Universe Book 3)

by Lee

  Samwell narrowed his eyes, realized he was squinting thoughtfully at the ultimate expression of power in the solar system, and then bit his tongue in a blind panic. He bowed and nodded again. “Almost down to the wire, Si Chairwoman. Barring any more hiccups, we should be hosting the Final Game sometime in the next week and a half.”

  The Chairwoman gestured almost regally. “Wonderful, Sa Samwell. In these most trying times, we rely upon the Game to provide the citizens of Latelyspace momentary respite from their own lives.”

  Samwell, who’d read through very nearly every scrap of data concerning the Game –from old-time propaganda to personal journals of ancient Promoters-, knew very well that the Games did more than just give citizens ‘momentary respite’; it confused and muddied the fact that their system was a rotten apple through and through. However, he smiled and nodded like a puppet on a string.

  Chairwoman Doans paused for a moment, distracted by something on her proteus. When she spoke, there was an iron edge to her voice. “That being said, Sa Samwell, the Chair has … a need.”

  Samwell’s stomach, which was in the basement of the Promoter’s Guild Building, fell into the sewers, never to be seen nor heard from again. The last time the Chairwoman had had a need, it’d involved that Offworlder turned citizen, the wildly impossible Garth Nickels. Forbidden to do so, they’d nevertheless turned footage of that fight over to Bettor and Bettor across the Q-Tunnel in the hopes that the AI machines in Trinityspace could make better sense of what they’d all witnessed. They hadn’t gotten a response, which probably meant bad news.

  “O-oh?” He stammered. Favors for the Chair weren’t favors. They were orders wrapped up inside false advertising. Samwell knew all about false advertising. He was a promoter for the Game, for crying out loud.

  The Chairwoman’s eyes flicked up from her prote. “Unless you have been living under a rock, Sa Samwell, you are aware –just as I- my worlds groan under the mighty strain of recent events. Our homeworld, Hospitalis, is under attack from all corners. Spaceport bombings, terrorist attacks … an endless parade of villainy and death.”

  Samwell wasn’t likely to forget the terrorist attack. His sister had been in The Museum with her boyfriend. She’d made it out alive, but her man hadn’t. Then, of course, there was the footage. Samwell would sell his theoretically nonexistent soul to get either that foreign cyborg or Harry Bosch into the ring. The money they could make! “Yes, Si Chairwoman. These are the worst times in living memory. What can the Promoters Guild do for the Chair?”

  “I feel it is necessary for the people to feel fulfilled now rather than later, Sa Samwell. How many Games remain before the Finals?”

  Samwell consulted his prote. She couldn’t be asking for that. It hadn’t been done in millennia and it hadn’t gone over terribly well the last time. Bad enough she’d asked for Nickels to be booted to the head of the line with a single fight standing between him and the Final Game. “Err, one thousand two hundred fourteen. Si. Si Chairwoman.” His tongue hurt and he suspected he was bleeding.

  Chairwoman Doans steepled her hands thoughtfully. “It is said, Sa Samwell, that the statistical avatars for the Promoters are second to none. That, if necessary, the Promoters themselves can –with astonishing accuracy- determine the outcome of each Game once a certain … threshold has been reached. After all,” the Chairwoman said dryly, “it boils down to statistics sooner or later, yes?”

  Samwell nodded. She was going to do it. He took a deep breath and tried not to vomit in front of The Chairwoman.

  “Has that threshold been reached, sa?” Chairwoman Doans asked politely.

  Samwell nodded again. He could lie, but then, she probably already knew the truth.

  The Chairwoman clapped her hands. “Wonderful. In very short order, then, you will announce the winners of each division. Shortly thereafter, you will broadcast a stunning, new and exciting twist to the Game. One that will surely revolutionize things.”

  Shortening the Game was … doable. They’d had to, before, during terrible times of civil war. The repercussions weren’t ‘terrible’ in that the Game had survived, but announcing any kind of reduction to the length of their most cherished pastime had a distinctly weird effect on the more passionate Gameheads. Weird as in mouth-breathing basement dwellers coming out into the light ready to firebomb Promoter-owned buildings weird.

  This new thing the Chairwoman was suggesting… Samwell couldn’t even possibly imagine what it was. They’d done everything you could do with the Game down through history. Every permutation, every twist, every … everything. “Wh-what is it?”

  Chairwoman Doans ignored the man’s lack of decorum. After all, she was destroying the Game. “You will announce that Garth Nickels will fight the victor of each class. At the same time. On the same day.”

  Samwell’s mind blanked. Long used to assembling Game stats in his head, he was a dab hand at guessing the winner of individual matches with nearly one hundred percent accuracy. Naturally, as a Promoter, he wasn’t allowed to bet or make Trees or anything like that, but he was well compensated for that loss. Well compensated.

  To have anyone fight more than one of the grueling and gruesome Final matches in a single day was … unthinkable. No one, not even Sa Gurant himself, could manage that. Each match was Armageddon. Each match was the End of Days. Sometimes, victors needed a week or more to recuperate before they could even feed themselves. There wasn’t a being alive that could handle a one versus two match, let alone eight on one. And then the Final Game?

  Impossible. Not even Bosch could do that.

  “That,” Samwell felt his mouth move of its own accord, “is a travesty. Er. What? Ch-ch-chairwoman, please … please forgive me. Please.” He added, caring little whether he was begging or not. His friends might make fun of him –if he bothered to relay this part of the story to them later on- but until you were being stared at by the most powerful woman in the system after calling her a complete moron, you just couldn’t know how obviously little she cared about individual lives. If the way the Chairwoman’s eyes were burning like cold stars in her head, the answer was ‘extremely little’. She probably fretted over stains on her shoes more than she did over people.

  Doans narrowed her eyes for the briefest of moments, distracted by the news feeds on her prote. Then she refocused on Sa Samwell. “How long will it take for you to discern the victors in each class?”

  Samwell saw his career flying out the window. “T-two days to set everything up. Is … is Sa Gurant going to fight? He … looked quite hurt.”

  “I have it on good authority that Sa Gurant is as able-bodied as ever, Sa Samwell. Rest assured that our champion will be in the ring, and should the impossible happen and the Eight actually lose, our Foursie will pull Nickels’ head from his shoulders and eat the offending skull like a child’s candy.”

  The thought of that happening put a positively ghoulish smile on the Chairwoman’s face. She opened her mouth to say something encouraging and vaguely congratulatory for navigating the waters of political discourse with only a few bumps along the way. What came out of her mouth was something different entirely.

  “Fuck me sideways! Chadsik al-Taryin has just blown up the Palazzo!” The Chairwoman blinked, her face turning a deep, mottled red. Her eyes glistened with rage. She pointed a finger at Samwell through her prote. “You did not hear that.” She snapped.

  “Hear what, Si Chairwoman?” Samwell tapped his prote. “I was, er, in the process of figuring out how best to achieve your … er … our goals of shortening the Game.”

  “See that it happens.” The Chairwoman’s enraged countenance disappeared from the Screens.

  Sa Samwell let out a half-dozen panicky –no, terrified- breaths before throwing up in the trashcan by his feet. There was going to be mayhem in the streets and blood on the ground over this. He knew history. If the people didn’t riot, the excised Gamers would; each and every one of them imagined –however bloody improbable it was- that they coul
d really win. There were deluded Twoesies out there who somehow had it in their heads that Gurant would be a pushover. They were honor-bound lunatics. Being cut from a Game that had so plainly become televised assassination would have them howling for blood. Samwell wondered if Goddies were capable of rioting, then wanted to bang his head on the desk. A God soldier riot would destroy the planet.

  Wiping sick from the corners of his mouth, Sa Samwell rose from his chair and went to the windows. By straining a bit, he could make out The Palazzo. It’d been a dream of his to stay there one day, but if it’d just been blown up, he rather doubted anyone would bother to rebuild.

  The Senior Promoter for the Game watched, nonplussed, as a pale man in tattered army clothes fly by his window, a very cross look on his face. Samwell blinked, convinced he’d heard the man shouting at himself.

  Samwell tapped his prote. “Si Mary, I’m going to need a large bottle of alcohol. I do not want to be disturbed.”

  Then he sat back down at his desk and began the process of gutting the Game to appease one woman’s vendetta against a man who’d done no wrong to anyone.

  Of Texas, and of Things Being Bigger and Better There

  Griffin belched and stretched as best he could within the confines of his Suit. He belched again and nodded cordially at his … host. “Ya’ll put down a mighty fine spread, sir, let me tell ya.”

  Sa Orin nodded before taking a long swallow of beer. He’d lived on the farm, man and boy, and had seen some interesting things. A considerable amount of time ago he’d found the remains of what he figured to this day had been the corpse of one of those BCU men that worked for the Chairwoman. Horrible, disfigured corpse way out in the trees past the last of his grazing lands. He’d buried the poor thing under one of those trees, shedding a tear or two at the thought of a life as like someone who didn’t look like any one person must’ve led. He went out there every now and then to stand under that tree, which had grown to be the biggest in that particular area and well, Orin didn’t know much, but he felt something settle inside when he made the trip.

  Why, once the OverCommander had even come out this way to thank him and his for their efforts in keeping the God soldier Army fed and that was no small effort. Each of the lumbering behemoths could eat their own body mass in food a day.

  But he had never seen anyone wrestle one of his bulls. Wrestle one of his bulls and win.

  After the initial shock of seeing a massive slug of duronium flying over his farmstead with a trajectory that’d said as sure as anything ‘I am going to land on your property and will most certainly destroy something of value’, Orin had hopped in his old truck and gone out to survey the damages. Naturally, his ‘LINKed camera systems and sensors –including the blacked out trackers for a solid dozen of his best cows, a devilish loss if there’d ever been one on his farms-had already relayed an extensive list of destruction, but a man needed to look on things with his own two eyes to get a proper feel for things. That was something he’d learned from his dad.

  Cresting the ‘divot’ –an impact crater four hundred feet wide and easily the same depth- Orin had gazed speculatively at the ruins of somewhere in the neighborhood of three hundred tons of meat and hooves splattered around like paint. A fantastic waste. It wouldn’t break his farms, but some of those cows had been grade-A meat, and now they were blood and flesh mixed with dirt. Not even God soldiers would eat that, not unless they were starving.

  Consigned to the loss, Orin remembered turning to leave when he’d heard the sound of a maddened bull in the middle of a fight.

  Shubin fought a lot, to the point where you could indeed judge the duration of a fight by the noises the giant-horned monsters made. Shubin bulls were –to put it mildly- crazy insane at the best of times. Perversely territorial, they got worse during mating season or when something happened to the herd they were running alpha on. Orin’d never gotten close to a pissed-off bull before because tail to tip the smallest of his males weighed near enough to eight tons apiece and he’d seen one of his hands get trampled flat.

  Reason enough to let his bulls do what they wanted, short of destroying his homestead. It’d take fear, desperation and rage in massive supply to push his bulls to come at the house; sonic emitters would slam needles of sound into their tiny little brains until they stopped. Nevertheless, out there, in the wilderness, the alpha bulls were king.

  Certain he was going to die, Orin had turned back just in time to see the redheaded man in the metal Suit sitting across from him, picking his teeth over the remains of a meal, going, well, toe-to-toe wasn’t strictly the right way of things, but near enough, with that mad bull.

  Orin had seen a lot in his life. It was how things were on a farm. You appreciated the cycle of life and death and everything in between in ways that someone living in the Cities just plain old couldn’t. He’d seen calves that should’ve died become monsters of hoof and tooth and horn and fully healthy ones drop dead after a day. He’d buried two brothers and a sister on his land, squashed flat by bulls, and like as not, killing poachers was a thing that happened all the time. There were many, many unmarked graves out the back end of his property.

  But he’d never seen someone wrestle a bull. That had deserved a meal.

  “You’re welcome, sa.” Orin said kindly. He pushed a bottle of beer across the table to his guest. “So you say you’re an Enforcer.”

  Griffin swallowed a mouthful of beer. It was good. “That Ah am, sa, that Ah am.”

  “What’s that like, then?” Orin knew about Enforcers in the way that he knew some people had pillows that cost a thousand dollars. They existed, but he’d never expected to see one.

  “Oh,” Griffin leaned back in his chair, which creaked and groaned alarmingly, “it’s a fair piece of business, let me tell ya’ll. Flyin’ all over the place doin’ Trinity’s work. It ain’t lahk Ah had a choice or nothin’, mind. Ah was more or less coerced into the job from the get-go.”

  “We hear about that all the time.” Orin admitted. “From the Ministry of Pride. They tell us about how the Trinity AI forces people to do things against their will. It’s wrong.”

  Griffin –who only played a cornpone on television- wanted to point out that his host lived in the last true Regime in essentially all of space and time but chose to keep his mouth shut out of politeness. Even systems across the Cordon using a totalitarian model for the government style weren’t as hardcore about it as the Latelians. He wanted to suggest that the only viable, sustainable governmental model was one like Trinity, but again, he kept his yapper clamped. You needed to respect your elders. Aloud, he said, “Speakin’ o’ wrong, ya’ll should contact someone over in the gummint over the loss of them there animals of yours.”

  Orin leaned forward. “Oh?”

  “Shit, son, ya’ll lost a great big pile o’ cattle right there, now, din’t ya? Th’ owner o’ that great big ole duronium slug is responsible fer the damages, right?” Griffin belched politely and continued. “Ya’ll should call ‘em up an’ say, now lookee here, ya’ll flattened tons o’ mah meat an’ put a big ole divot on mah front lawn. Who’s gonna pay up?”

  “Where are you from?” Orin demanded curiously. Never in his wildest dreams would he have thought to demand reparation from the government, but now that the strange-talking foreigner had brought it up, the idea burned like fire. The Enforcer wasn’t wrong. They had shot that missile or bullet or whatever and it had destroyed his cattle and had put a hole in his land. Someone had to pay for that and it wasn’t going to be him, no sa.

  Griffin chuckled. “Little place called Texas, son. Home of the Longhorn.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder, towards where all the dead animals were. “Hell, back where I’m from, that cow I wrassled would be jus’ a little bitty thang. Got ourselves a famous ox, named Blue. Big as a mountain! ‘Course,” Griffin added slyly, “Everything is bigger in Texas.”

  “And this … Texas …” Orin tried to imagine an animal bigger than the bull the Enforcer had wrest
led to the death and failed, “Texas. It’s in Trinityspace?”

  Griffin smiled a little wistfully. He didn’t miss much, but he missed his home from time to time and having an actual conversation about the place with someone who seemed genuinely interested was making him homesick. “Oh, it’s long gone, sa, long gone indeed. Swallowed up by time itself.”

  Wouldn’t’ve been if Garth N’Chalez had told him the goddamn truth, that he was some kind of motherfucking super powered Kin’kithal, that he could kill Kith and Kin with a gesture. No, if N’Chalez had told them that, they could’ve tromped their parents, the Heshii, and the goddamn Armies of Man flat inside a week or two. Their ‘commander’ wouldn’t have even needed to do most of the dirty work; he could’ve just hung out watching movies until one of the Kith or Kin rolled in, done his mojo-trick, then gone right back to sitting around recreating television shows and shit.

  But no. He’d lied. He’d gotten Lisa to fuck with his memories, blotting out the moment when Garth N’Chalez had shredded a Kith Warrior. Then he’d gone inside to sit with the rest of the squad like nothing had ever happened.

  The world was wrong. Everything was all wrong. Earth was gone. Texas was gone. He was jammed up inside a Suit that could repair itself fully at any minute and then he’d be teleported back to Trinity and he’d be punished. Like a dog for the temerity to want what was his by right.

  All because of Garth N’Chalez.

  “Well,” Griffin drawled, “I reckon I should mosey on away, sa. Army men’ll be comin’ along soon enough.”

  “You … ya’ll could stay and tell me more about this Texas.” Orin’s head rang with the drawn out vowels and the distinct way the younger man spoke. His mind was full of fuzzy images, like half-remembered pictures from a long time ago. “We could hide you from the army.”

  Griffin smiled, this time a genuine one. The old man –easily a hundred and fifty by Latelian standards- did a fine Texan accent and his offer was sincere. It’d felt a lot like home, sitting in this old man’s kitchen, eating barbecued shubin and reminiscing about old times. At the moment, Griffin reflected, he was probably the happiest he’d been since waking up in this godforsaken future. Even if every other room adjacent to the kitchen was stuffed full of the old man’s remarkably well armed security teams. “Ah’d love to, Sa Orin, but Ah cain’t. Ah’m on a mission, y’see.”