Citizen Pariah (Unreal Universe Book 3)

by Lee

  Bravo’s … operating system … was furious, that much was apparent from the footage of those last few minutes of The Museum event. Furious at Garth for having lied, for having deceived and manipulated the Armies of Man so very long ago, and as It had predicted, that ancient machine had punished Garth. Whatever mechanisms existed inside the ancient machine was undoubtedly capable of defeating the Heshii. That was all that really mattered.

  Bravo would kill Garth and then –as the quadronium vessel had proven with wild abandon- it would continue onward without organic assistance.

  Or, Bravo would try. Inasmuch as It had lost It’s Representatives, there was still Griffin Jones. Griffin was It’s puppet, and he would do as he was told. Too much was at stake to let the moods of a spoiled Kin’kithal child get in the way.

  Griffin was temporarily free. The Enforcer’s maniacal attempt at destroying the Suit was … understandable: a combination of Jones’ own rage at being denied the luxury of killing N’Chalez and being under the bizarre effects of the elder Kin’kithal’s manifestation had driven the man to true desperation.

  No matter, though.

  The Enforcer Suit was as indestructible as a thing could be without being forged from quadronium. It knew the Suit hadn’t been destroyed simply because Hospitalis still existed. Soon or late, the Suit would repair itself and Griffin Jones would be back where he needed to be.

  And then Griffin would either locate the HIM as ordered, or he would locate Bravo. It was in the mood to give the poor man choices to maintain the illusion of free will. Truthfully, locating either one would reveal the other.

  The Trinity AI, the vast, intergalactic machine mind considered everything and was pleased. There were some bumps on the road, but overall, It’s efforts had not been wasted. Soon enough It would be able to confront the Great Enemy and then the War to end all Wars would commence, with It as victor.

  Naturally.

  Chapter Three

  UltraMegaDynamaTron’s Nerd

  Oscar Sabellik couldn’t believe the job he’d landed. Not only was he working for probably the richest Conglomerate in the entire solar system, he was working for Garth Nickels. That was amazing! None of his friends believed him when he said it, and he supposed he understood why. Immigrants didn’t usually have this kind of money or show any interest in anything that was … interesting.

  Oscar checked his figures again, squinting against the bright lights in the room, boggling at the immensity and … strangeness … of the project he’d been asked to oversee. It’d been no small task, getting fifteen hundred programmable construction robots up and running and working on the same set of even more mind-bogglingly complex diagrams in what had to be some kind of record time.

  Oscar was certain he’d invented a new kind of avatar to netLINK all the different robots together. He couldn’t check though, because what the large army of robots was working on had created a bandwidth black hole for the entire facility.

  It was thrilling, watching the people-shaped machines work with pristine efficiency, every one of the main constructors moving with poetic synchronicity while other robots –labeled ‘feeders’ on his avatar schematic because they were constantly ferrying parts to the builder-bots- were in constant, balletic motion on the warehouse floor.

  Oscar couldn’t understand why people didn’t like robots. He squinted at the machines as they worked, wondering as he did so why it was so bright. They did as they were told and they kept doing it until you told them to stop. Not like God soldiers. Oscar remembered reading a story about how God soldiers had been told to build an apartment building only they’d gotten bored halfway through and wandered away.

  His prote rang. Oscar answered quickly. “OCP Central, Sa Sabellik, how may I help you?”

  “Hey, uh, hey. What’s your first name?”

  Oscar looked at the blue-eyed man on the other end. “Oscar. Who are you?”

  “Garth. Garth Nickels. I’m your boss.”

  On-screen, Oscar watched his employer turn his head to start shouting crazily for what seemed forever, using curse words in a surprising collision of poetic filth. When the man turned his focus back, Oscar did the only thing he could think of; he saluted. “Pleased to meet you, sa. Was … was that … an explosion?”

  Garth shook his head. “Nah. Well. Yes. Goddamnit Ute, these aren’t innocent people, they’re fucking gangsters! Drill those bitches in their foreheads!” Garth blinked, shook his head again, and refocused. “So. How’re you finding things?”

  “Wonderful, sa, wonderful!” Oscar found himself shouting to be heard above the din coming through his tiny prote speakers. Every few seconds he could hear curse words pouring out of someone off-Screen. “Why … are you being chased by gangsters?”

  Garth whooped and hollered and everything on the prote went sideways for a long moment as whatever vehicle his insanely rich and powerful employer was driving went into a power slide that sent the Sheet he was using skittering through the cab. Everything righted itself. “Oh, you know. Usual day for me. Anyways, listen. Construction robots, highly technical blueprints and schematics for a never-before-seen technology, building them. How’s that all working out for you over there at –heheh- OCP?”

  Oscar looked over his shoulder at the robots. He’d rigged one of the Screens set into the roof above the main construction area to count how many of the spherical devices were complete. “Fifteen done, sa. This facility has enough raw materials to complete approximately one thousand.”

  “Don’t shoot at the God soldiers, Ute!” Garth bellowed, yanking the steering wheel roughly to the right, sending everything in the cab clattering all over everywhere again. A big, fiery explosion rattled the truck. “Okay, maybe shoot at the God soldiers, but, like, just … wing them. Um, use your bullets to convince them that they should fly away or something. I … I really didn’t think this through.”

  “G-g-g-god soldiers, sa?”

  Garth grinned, his blue eyes shining like neon sapphires through the prote. “Heheh, yeah. God soldiers and gangsters. Regular old day. A thousand, hey? That’s a pretty good number. You … you look at the specs? Do you know what you’re building for me?”

  Oscar summoned up the diagrams again and gazed thoughtfully at the device. Roughly spherical, around a foot in diameter, it was as non-descript a machine as anything Oscar had ever seen. From the outside. Inside, there was such a bewildering array of technological advances. He squinted. He was going to have to turn the lights down. Robots didn’t need light to work. “I … it looks like some kind of power distribution node, sa. Very complex. I … there’s nothing like this on Hospitalis, sa.”

  “Yeah, um. It’s called a gravnetic shield generator, kiddo. Not seen this side of the Quantum Tunnel and so incredibly illegal to build that if Trinity or your Chairwoman were to find out what you were building … yeah. So, keep it hushed.” Garth pinched the bridge of his nose and grimaced at the blood on his fingers.

  “Are you injured, sa?” If you asked Oscar, it was amazing that his employer wasn’t already dead, what with him apparently being chased by both gangsters and God soldiers. If being attacked by people with the wherewithal to cause explosions was a ‘regular old day’ for Garth Nickels, Oscar wondered what a ‘hectic day at the office’ would be like.

  Garth rubbed the blood off on his shirt. “Nah. It’s a thing I do. I … bleed. From the eyes and stuff. I’m hoping it’ll catch on. Gravnetic shield generators. They … make, well, they make shields, Oscar. Powerful, impenetrable shields of energy using the planet’s own gravitational forces as a power source. With one of those running, anything inside the shield would be safe from, let’s say, an apocalypse.”

  Oscar opened his mouth then closed it. He opened it again and, for no reason, sneezed. He wiped his nose, saying, “That’s amazing, sa. And you were just calling to see how things were going?”

  “Yes and … well, no. Yes … dammit Ute I am not fucking around you shoot that fucking fighter right in the ass and
make sure it stays down and no. Maybe?” Garth sighed. “Look, yes in that me and my buddy Ute are going to be coming in … hot … and are going to need to make sure that when we get there, the God soldiers on our tail aren’t going to just carpet bomb my facility into smithereens the moment we get there. I was calling to see if you’d had any finished and if you were smart enough to figure out how to get one working in time to shield OCP…” Garth trailed off.

  Oscar found it was easier to just squint the whole time. He was going to have to do something about the bright light, he really, really was. Just as soon as he was done talking to Garth. “I can assure you, Sa Nickels, I am absolutely able to get these things working. The assembly code avatars have already started on the operating tables.” He blinked. “There is a but.”

  Garth rolled his head around his shoulders. “There is, but it’s, um, a weird but. How long have you been squinting?”

  “Sa?” Oscar frowned. He’d already gotten used to his employer being shot at and the unending stream of voluble cursing coming off-Screen, but he wasn’t able to get a handle on Garth. “Squinting?”

  “Yeah.” Garth squinted until his eyes were almost shut. Shocking blue ellipses gleamed through the slits, casting their own light. “Squinting. How long?”

  Oscar hadn’t considered that. He checked the time, did some rough calculations in his head, then answered. “No more than half an hour, sa. It’s fine, though, it really is, I just need to turn the lights down and everything will be fine.” To prove his point, Oscar reached over to the main console, found the light controls, and turned them off. “See? There. All …”

  Oscar turned around. The lights for the entire facility were off, but the warehouse floor, indeed, everything as far as he could see, was bathed in a light so bright and hard he was certain that if he threw something at the far wall, the object would bounce off one of those beams before it got too far.

  Oscar looked at Garth through his prote. His employer’s eyes were burning sapphires, impossibly bright beacons that drew him in. “S…sa? What is going on?”

  “Accelerated decomposition, probably.” Garth muttered, face contorted with sorrow. “Everything around the planet is thin. I … I need you to get one of those gravny-gens up and running as soon as possible, Sa Oscar. I need a shield covering everything I own. And quickly. I don’t know the footage of what belongs to UltraMegaDynamaTron, so you’re going to need to contact Sa Herrig for a map. And …”

  Oscar considered what his boss wanted. It didn’t seem like it was such a bad thing, figuring out how to work one of the gravnetic shield generators, but Garth was acting as if it was the worst thing in the world. “And? Sa? Why do you look so sad all of a sudden?”

  “I’m sorry, man. I … I hope you make it through. Fuck me where did the gangsters get a fucking tank! The only tough gang was the fucking Portside Boys and I blew them all up! Shit! Uh, yeah. Oscar. Good luck, pal.”

  As he stared at the light, Oscar tilted his head from side to side. Then he placed a call to Sa Herrig.

  xxx

  Herrig was pleased with everyone’s progress; now that they’d fully realized the desperate situation the entire planet was about to be in, they’d pulled themselves together and were hitting grocery stores and supermarkets two or three employees at a time. The more enterprising amongst UltraMegaDynamaTron staffers were visiting soon-to-be abandoned restaurants and cafes and offering jobs. Those that agreed to work for UltraMegaDynamaTron were officially hired as personal chefs and nutritional experts, neatly incising any legal worries they might have over being mobile.

  Frankly, Herrig was more than pleased. He was downright thrilled. He’d never even thought about hiring cooks, much less a way to employ them without gaining the interest of the Chairwoman’s legal avatars.

  A call came through. It was Sa Oscar Sabellik, the ‘nerd’ hired to oversee Garth’s … project. Inordinately intelligent, Oscar had been perfect for the job if for no other reason than his personality quirks –all available for anyone looking to hire him right there on his public CV- kept him on the lean side of work. Someone hovering on the brink of poverty on Hospitalis rarely asked questions. Luckily, Oscar was smart enough to know he who was keeping things that way.

  “Sa Oscar how … are you okay, sa?” Herrig felt an immediate stab of concern. The young man had a, well, crazed look in his eyes, was really the only way to put it.

  “I’ve just had the most interesting conversation, Sa DuPont.” Oscar realized he was shouting to be heard above the music, which was strictly unnecessary; filters on their proteii made a whisper a shout. He tried to lower his voice. “With a man claiming to be my employer, sa.”

  Herrig chose to ignore two of the most frightening facts coming through the Screens in order to better focus on the potentially damning talk he and Garth Nickels had had. If only there was a way to prevent Garth –charming and friendly and extravagantly differently-minded- from talking to the people who worked for him. “And how did that go, Sa Oscar?”

  Oscar sneezed. “He … he did a lot of shouting at a man off-Screen, Sa. Kept telling him to shoot things out of the sky. And there were more explosions aimed at a man worth that much than I would’ve expected. And he swore a lot.”

  Herrig discreetly set an avatar to start hunting through the news channels. He wasn’t expecting much; with Martial Law in effect, every channel on the planet had hardly any access to the ‘LINKs. Certainly not enough to have live news coverage. It was one of the Chairwoman’s control mechanisms, and –relatively speaking- it was better than being Sigma’d later on. “Another regular day for Sa Nickels, I’m afraid.”

  “It’s funny!” Oscar shouted. He couldn’t believe how loud the music was. Once he was finished with Sa Herrig and was doubly sure the machinery was being built on time and he figured out how the … gravnetic shield generators worked, he was going to head outside and see who was holding a concert on OCP property. “He said the same thing. And then boom! Another big explosion. Also, he was bleeding out the eyes.”

  “He was hurt?” Herrig sat bolt upright. “Badly?”

  “No sa!” Oscar gave up trying to talk normally. The music was filling his head and his eyes were starting to hurt from the bright light. “He said it was something he did now. Ordinarily I don’t ask questions, sa, because people take me the wrong way and I usually use the wrong words and sound like an asshole, sa, but what is going on here? Why is my employer being shot at by gangsters and God soldiers? Why am I building so many gravnetic shield generators? Are we doing something illegal?”

  Herrig sank into his chair, sighing all the way down until his chin rest on his chest. There was a method to Garth’s madness, to be sure, but sometimes that madness didn’t consider everything. The portly man wondered how it was that Garth had become such a legendary Special Services operative under those conditions, then realized it was precisely because things escalated to the point of insanity that he’d become so feared. Garth Nickels was a walking black hole. An honorable one, one with intentions and desires to save people, but the simple act of waking up in the morning almost guaranteed that by the end of the day, someone or something would be trying to kill him and it’d go through whatever was in the way to achieve that goal.

  Herrig looked surreptitiously at Oscar, who was busy hammering away on his prote. Through the Screenfeed, he saw that the younger man was muttering frantically to himself as he tried to comprehend mathematical equations that his avatars kept providing. Over it all, a faint, warbling sound filled the air, an almost musical tone that was no doubt the cause behind Oscar’s sudden need to shout at the top of his voice. Beyond that, everything inside the OCP warehouse appeared to be bathed in a hard blue light.

  Tragedy. Pure, unfair, unremorseful tragedy. Herrig’s heart went out to the young man, but didn’t say anything.

  Herrig took a deep breath and answered Oscar’s question with another question. “If the world is in danger, sa, and the only way to prevent its destruction i
s to violate a few laws … is that illegal?”

  “Sa?” The technical brilliance going into the shield generators was … was magical. There was no other word for what he was seeing. By tilting his head and squinting one eye, Oscar was almost positive he could see something deeper inside the mechanism. It was on the tip of his tongue. It felt like the generators wouldn’t just generate shields … but that was impossible. The machines the robots were making with ceaseless perfection were already an impossible thing.

  Oscar was certain that if the changes that danced just out of his reach could be made, the generators could manipulate a whole host of energy states. Even as the intellectual saw this, he saw that there wasn’t a source in existence to power a single gravny-gen to do that for more than a microsecond.

  Oscar blinked, realizing that he’d ignored the man who’d been kind enough to hire him. “Sa?” he blinked again. “Is that what we are doing, Sa Herrig? Saving the world?”

  “Sadly, yes, young man.” Herrig thought about sending Oscar footage of the pile that was frenetically decomposing about a mile away from where OCP stood then changed his mind. It would do the lad no good. Perhaps the only thing keeping him from disintegrating like the other workers was the space between the pile and the OCP building. Stepping outside could very well turn Oscar Sabellik into a fountain of light. “It … it is something that appears to happen quite regularly with Sa Nickels.”

  “Oh.” Oscar grinned, the smile splitting his face. “Neat. And these shields will help?”

  Herrig nodded. They would help. The theft of Trinity materiel inside Latelyspace was not something that would go missed for long. Herrig shook his head irately. The man took such damnable risks! He understood the reasons behind stealing the chunk of metal, perhaps far better than any other man on the planet save Garth, but in a short time, he was going to lead the Army forces and criminal organizations right to their doorstep.