Citizen Pariah (Unreal Universe Book 3)

by Lee

  S a Gurant Rises

  When alarms in The Peak go off, everyone panics. No longer just a storage facility for men and women that the Chair couldn’t or wouldn’t Sigma into oblivion or just kill outright –for any number of reasons, most of them centering around punishment and … more punishment- The Peak was home to Hollyoak and his inventions, other Army testing facilities …

  In short, there wasn’t a more dangerous place on all of Hospitalis, with the distinct possibility of UltraMegaDynamaTron’s holdings in Port City, though Hollyoak –who was shrieking loudly, almost subconsciously- along with the alarms ripping through the lowest levels of his laboratories, augmented throat warbling a dozen different sounds at once, didn’t know that. Yet.

  The maddened doctor, eye lenses spinning so fast in their grooves that he worried about friction burns, answered his prote hurriedly. It was the OverCommander, and for a wonder, their most powerful leader looked … irritated. “Yesyes.”

  “Brief, Hollyoak. What is going on?”

  Hollyoak rubbed a wizened hand nervously across his forehead, one of his cyber-hands getting whacked quite hard by one of the spinning lenses. He yelped, cursed, and commanded his brain to get the lenses under control. “Yes yes, the … soldier, OverCommander Vasilysa. He has oh my woken up and is so dangerous. He is angry, OverCommandersa.”

  His hands rustled restlessly in lieu of his eye lenses spinning madly. Gurant was –hopefully still was- being nicely contained in the Gunboys’ birthing chambers. Arguably one of the most secure vaults in creation, the quintuply-thick duronium walls and spiraling high chamber ceiling would prove to be insurmountable for their newest, strangest mystery. Hollyoak chirruped and his Screens pulled images from the cameras in that massive chamber.

  “About what?” Vasily shook his head. “No matter. What is he capable of?”

  Hollyoak clasped his hands thoughtfully and the fingers started tip-tapping. The lenses around his head started up again, flicking and clacking across his eyes, loading information about what they were seeing directly into his brain where it could be analyzed. “Probably anything, OverCommandersa, yes oh my yes yes. Never seen anything like him before. Conversion chambers from the past would be nice to look a…”

  “They were destroyed, Hollyoak. They do not exist.” OverCommander Vasily snapped violently. “Ask again and you will find out how. Are we clear?”

  Hollyoak bit back a scream of fear. The lenses flicked to upright positions arrayed around his head and started trying to collect light to defend themselves. Nervously, tongue poking out of his mouth like a fish, Hollyoak manually adjusted them. “Clear, clear, clear. OverCommandersa. Like sunlight through a window.”

  “Answer the question.”

  “Oh oh yes. Yes.” Hollyoak hummed deep in his throat. “Anything. As a Foursie, a sane Foursie, the only thing keeping him from destroying everything in his path was loyalty, OverCommander. Four thousand years plus of eternal servitude and and war with enemies across a hundred thousand fronts, OverCommander. Four millennia of stomping and flag waving and believing in the Regime kept him from eating a city. As as as what he is now, well. Well. If you’d let me take more samples …”

  “Doctor…” Vasily’s warning rumbled low.

  Hollyoak shrieked, hands –all of them- flying to his mouth. His lenses, his extra eyes giving him clearer vision, pointed straight up and started collecting light once more. “He he he has jumped, sa. Up. Straight up. Through the viewing chamber atop the Gunboy birthing room.”

  “Fuck me sideways.” Vasily hissed. “How high is that again?”

  “Eight hundred feet. We should all run run run away fast as fast. Eep.”

  The doors to his personal labs erupted into splinters of wood and metal, filling the entire space with debris. Through the haze, Sa Gurant came charging in.

  Independent of conscious control, Hollyoak’s data gathering ‘eyes’ flicked and clacked into an array of lenses and the energy they’d been collecting for the last few minutes was released in a beam of coherent light catching Gurant right in the head.

  Vasily, watching this from thousands and thousands of miles away, started cursing a blue streak, both at the horrific insanity of the truly crazy doctor walking around with some kind of laser cannon grafted to his head and to the sight of that powerful beam bouncing off the … the resurrected Sa Gurant’s skull and into the very Screens he’d been watching all this from. Vasily’s outraged visage disappeared in a flare of sparks and smoke.

  The diminutive Hollyoak, never feeling smaller or more helpless in his entire life, cowered where he stood, heedless of the stink of urine filling his senses. The lenses tried to collect more energy for another blast, but before they could even generate enough power to turn on a light bulb, Sa Gurant was reaching out with one massive hand and twisting.

  Hollyoak wailed again, his modified throat filling the room with a coruscating crescendo of noise that would’ve driven other men mad, blind, and mute.

  Gurant poked the doctor in the chest with a finger as delicately as he could. “Stop that.”

  Hollyoak closed his mouth for a second before opening it for another scream. His frail chest was already bruising.

  Gurant poked the doctor again. “Open your mouth and your freakish … voice box … for another scream, Doctor Hollyoak, and I will push my finger through your chest.”

  Hollyoak clamped his throat holes shut. “You you broke my eyes, yes yes you did.”

  Gurant looked at the mangled multicolored lenses trying desperately to whirl around actual metal grooves set directly into the freak’s massive head. There were some things that shouldn’t be done to a human body, and as he stood there, onboard systems bursting with a nearly endless litany of upgrades and augmentations, Gurant knew that he was looking at a man who was a literal storehouse of violations. “How long have I been unconscious?”

  “Unconscious?” Hollyoak scoffed. “You were dead, sa, yes yes oh my yes, dead as road kill.”

  The last thing Gurant remembered –and this was burned permanently into his mind- was falling, falling forever with ‘Harry Bosch’ above him, some kind of brilliance flowing around them, and the man who’d delivered enduring punishment to thousands of his brothers and sisters transforming into Garth Nickels. Then, an explosion that’d rattled his bones.

  Then nothing.

  “How long.”

  “A a a a little over a day, sa.” Hollyoak tottered over to one of his mechanical chairs and hopped in. Extra hands deftly manipulating the controls, the good doctor was soon back at Gurant’s side, seat gliding upwards until he was looking the modified God soldier in the eye. “Tell me,” he said soothingly, “how do you feel?”

  “I feel,” Gurant considered the diagnostic tests flashing against his retinas, “I feel different. What has happened to me?”

  “We don’t know.” Hollyoak stared deep into Gurant’s gigantic eye. He could see machinery whirling and spinning inside the cornea. “But whatever you are, it has never been seen before.”

  Gurant’s proteus announced a call. He accepted, saluting when OverCommander Vasily’s face flickered into life, replacing the analytical reports. “OverCommander.”

  “Would you be so kind as to explain what it is you are doing?”

  Gurant admired Vasily. Of all the OverCommanders he’d served throughout the long haul of service to the Regime, Vasily Tizhen was the absolute best at what he did. It was a tragedy that the man hadn’t been born in a previous century, when they’d warred and raged and destroyed entire solar systems. That’d been the time to be alive, yes sa, a time of death and destruction. They’d had blood on their feet for hundreds of years at a time.

  OverCommander Vasily not only commanded the respect of his men, he deserved it. Gurant could scarcely remember the first thousand years of his life, buried as it had been under the mind-numbing stupidity of being a Onesie; he could remember, though, a singular, aching sorrow seeded throughout that vacuous existence, and Vasily �
�� sympathized with the stupid Onesies. He did what he could for them, made their lives now –empty of the one thing they existed for- as easy as possible. Millions of Onesies were asleep, locked into OIP canisters in orbit around every world in their solar system, dreaming of nothing at all. Those that were awake were kept occupied with tasks their limited brains could process.

  “I did not like my room, OverCommandersa.” Gurant looked at Hollyoak, who was surreptitiously trying to take a tissue sample. “And I had a question to ask my physician.”

  “Has it been answered to your satisfaction?” Vasily asked, distracted by something off-Screen.

  “It has, OverCommandersa.” Gurant grinned mirthlessly when the blade wielded by the doctor failed to cut through his skin. Oh my, he was indeed something new and terrible in Latelyspace.

  “What now?”

  “Does Garth Nickels still live?” Rage burned in Gurant at the thought of that smug Offworlder and his powerful alien science. He’d claimed during those scandalous interviews aired on News4You to be loyal to Latelyspace, to love the world he lived on, but that was a lie; no man who loved where he lived would use the almost impossible science of hard holograms to fight God soldiers. It didn’t matter that he hadn’t killed intentionally. What mattered was that he’d fought at all. What mattered was what he represented; chaos. Whatever manner of science Garth Nickels used, it was clearly the most powerful thing around. It had to be rooted out, destroyed, and removed from Latelyspace.

  At all costs.

  “He does, Sa Gurant.”

  “Where is he, OverCommander?” Gurant shifted slightly, moving his head so that Hollyoak –aiming the scalpel at his cornea- nearly fell from the chair he was dangling precariously upon. “Tell me where he is so that I can kill him.”

  “Permission denied, Sa.” Vasily kept staring off-Screen, turning to confront the God soldier when some inner instinct suggested that the soldier was going to resist. He locked eyes and continued. “Permission denied, soldier. Now is not the time. The situation concerning Garth Nickels will resolve itself in a matter of days, and, Regime willing, you will be that resolution.”

  “The Game.” In his haste, the all-consuming, blackened rage to destroy Garth Nickels, Gurant had quite forgotten about The Game. A wicked grin curled his lips. It would be most fitting to destroy the man live, in front of every single citizen of the Regime. They would witness the glory and spectacle and learn that the man who they believed they loved was nothing but a weakling, a puny Offworlder who pretended to be Latelian.

  Vasily nodded, eyes returning to what he was looking at. “Indeed. Are you capable of defeating him?”

  It didn’t take a genius to realize that the OverCommander knew more about Garth Nickels than he was letting on. Hollyoak, determined to acquire some kind of a tissue sample, missed the inflection in the OverCommander’s voice, but Gurant -four thousand years old and brimming with paradoxically-derived energies- understood in an instant.

  Gurant considered what was uncoiling inside him. He was conscious that the internal mechanisms comprising the four thousand year long metamorphosis he’d been enduring were changing in some indefinable way, making him even stronger, even faster. Beyond that, though, there was more; it was as though he’d become deeper somehow. Gurant struggled to find terms that would apply to what he was experiencing and failed.

  “Where I was a stream, I am now an ocean.” Gurant reflected on the words; the implication inherent in the phrase resounded within. On his retina, Vasily blinked, then stared back, an incomprehensible look on his face. The God soldier shrugged. “That is to say, OverCommander, that yes, I am able to defeat him.”

  Vasily narrowed his eyes, leading Gurant to wonder precisely what the leader of the God Army knew about Garth Nickels. Clearly, it was a great deal more than what the Chairwoman was aware of. Gurant was fine with that. He was and always had been loyal to the Army.

  The Chair, and the fools who sat upon it, always got in the way.

  Vasily cleared his throat. “The Chairwoman has made some alterations to the mechanics of The Game, Sa Gurant. I urge you to familiarize yourself with them and prepare yourself accordingly.”

  Gurant saluted as OverCommander Vasily’s face disappeared. The God soldier looked down at Hollyoak, who was currently trying to dig a hole into a finger, muttering a nearly impenetrable and dense litany of scientific suppositions. “Are we done, Doctor Hollyoak?”

  “You bent my eyes, you horrible man.” Hollyoak griped angrily, stabbing at Gurant’s arm repetitively, desperately wishing for a skin sample he knew he’d never get; whatever changes were happening to the God soldier, they’d bypassed Latelian science altogether. “Without them I’m I’m I’m blind, oh yes. I can barely see with the ones inside my own head, no no, can’t see at all. Who can see anything with fleshy eyeballs? Practically two-dimensional! Not worth looking and now and now I must build new ones! No, we aren’t done. Go away and come back when I have new eyes.”

  A vast rumbling groaned out of Gurant’s stomach. He was hungry enough for a hundred lifetimes. “I will be in the cafeteria.”

  “For for for how long?” Hollyoak stammered, driving his chair towards his personal operation equipment. One eye –less damaged than the rest- tried to swivel towards the God soldier and got caught up in the snarl that was the remainder of his lenses. There was a brief but intensely high-pitched whine and then a smattering of sparks.

  “I will be in the cafeteria.” Gurant repeated. The hunger inside him suggested it would be best if he not move from there.

  Hollyoak opened his throat and started singing to his machines, Gurant gone but not forgotten.

  Chad Hates Being Naked and Has a Chat with Himself

  “Honestly.” Chad asked himselves. “Is there summink out there that ‘as got it against us bein’ fully clothed like a human fuckin’ bein’?”

  The Voice whispered. “We keep being attacked by very destructive forces. Clothing is not a resilient as us.”

  “Well,” Chad looked at the skyline and determined that they’d been thrown nearly eighty thousand kilometers by the last punch thrown by that weird alien bastard, “we is sick an’ fuckin’ tired of it, orl right, my son?”

  Chad looked down and contemplated their genitals for a moment. A man’s twig and berries weren’t meant to be bandied about in public. They were meant to be hidden behind layers of clothing.

  “We … I would agree.”

  Chad sniffed. This world. This … fucking world was getting on their tits and they was sick and bloody tired of everyone being stronger or weirder or more powerful than them. It was a goddamn insult to their uniqueness. They well understood why Jordan Bishop Hisself wanted Garth Nickels out of the way. Had done since the crazy bastard had transformed himself into a solid hologram hilariously named Harry Bosch. Taking the life of that man only made sense.

  “We mean, really, right? Wot is up wiv that man?” Chad dropped themselves onto a rock and started calling for their ship, the Hungryfish.

  “He is the most real thing in this Universe.” The Voice commented placidly. “We … I … we … it is what has been said before. And you shouldn’t be calling your ship. The Latelians have it under extreme scrutiny. They will follow it right to you.”

  “We is not carin’.” Chad crossed their arms huffily across their chest. “We is sick and tired of being naked. We is not going to walk a single step.”

  “You are capable of flight.”

  Chad snorted derisively. For a disembodied voice that was allegedly a representative of an alien species that’d discovered a way to rip all the theoretically possible iterations of their psyche from wherever the fuck they existed and bundle them into one coterie of insanity, it was as stupid as worms. They gestured to the sky, then to their meat and two veg. “If we is not wantin’ to walk anywhere, you stupid twat, wot is makin’ you fink we is willin’ to fly?”

  “We suppose we should have thought of that.”

  “Cor blim
ey.” Chad repeated the Voice’s stupidity in a child’s voice. The Hungryfish’s protocols came online and they told the ship’s programs to orient on their position and make all due haste. They didn’t relish sitting around in the middle of a mountain range completely naked talking to themselves. If God soldiers came upon them, it would be very, intensely embarrassing.

  “God soldiers will most certainly arrive, Chadsik.”

  Chad beaned themselves in the side of the head, good and proper-like. “We is tellin’ you already we is Chad. Chadsik is a crazy person who likes to dip his fingers in innocent people’s brains and draw limericks on the walls wiv what is pulled out.”

  “Nothing is real.” The Voice intoned, hopeful that Chad could be swayed to follow the Path of Enlightningment. Stuck in the middle of nowhere with nothing but silence and his own mind for company, it was possible.

  “Look, mate,” Chad scratched their stomach thoughtfully, “you can stop tryin’ a get us to lissen to the load of crap, orl right? We is not buyin’ wot you is tryin’ a sell.”

  “If you would just listen to us. To me. To me.” The Voice wailed loudly and a flock of birds pecking at trees arrayed some fifty feet away took nervously to the sky. When the shout stopped echoing, the Voice continued. “Please. Please listen. You were made to fight a war.”

  “Reckon we don’t care.” Chad leaned against a rock. Since they was commando at the moment, they was going to get some sun. Hungryfish would be about a half an hour, possibly a bit longer, depending on whether or not the Army decided they’d try to blow it out of the air. “You made us crazy.”

  “Untrue. You were already crazy.”

  “Ah!” Chad raised a finger. “I was mad. ‘Course we was. You been knockin’ about in our skull for quite some time, we is knowin’ you ‘as been lookin’ at our memories. Arcade City, right? Fuckin’ maddest place in about six ‘undred galaxies, yeah? Mad Goth King Blake? Ring a bell? You know what we did to get out, right? Uvver lads and lasses from that shithole get to leave as and when they choose, yeah? But not us, oh no, not us, dear old Kingy-wingy liked us right where we was.” Chad shivered, repulsed at the memories of what they’d done to break free of the Mad King’s iron gripped rule. “An’ when we was getting’ out, you was kidnappin’ us and tinkerin’ around wiv our brains. And our bodies. Er, that is to say, we is only ‘avin’ the one. Cor, wouldn’t that be strange, ‘avin’ more than one body. You made us crazy.”