Citizen Pariah (Unreal Universe Book 3)

by Lee

  “It bothers me,” Ute said simply, “that you do not seem disturbed by this, young Oscar Sabellik.”

  “Cut him some slack, Ute.” Garth sighed. There was an option. There was always an option. He’d always been the sort of guy to believe in multiple solutions. He was particularly fond of plan ‘A’ which generally read ‘this is the easiest fucking way to do this thing and everyone will spontaneously receive a thousand dollars and a piece of cake’.

  Sadly, Plan Z was usually the one that he wound up being forced into using. Plan Z was ‘oh, for fuck’s sake, are you fucking serious?’ and was the worst possible version of anything. Ever.

  “I got this.” Garth strode forward.

  Ute bellowed and tried to grab Garth’s elbow, but the man twisted and flickered fifty feet forward, well past the ‘barrier’ of robots. The massive Latelian turned to the scientist beside him, “What is he doing? How does he ‘have this’?”

  Oscar looked up from his prote. “He’s going to do the same thing he did with the generators, sa. He’s going to make it safe to cap.”

  “But … but won’t that use the last bit of power he has?” Ute understood very little of Garth’s nature, but understood a great deal about the nature of power. Sooner or later, you’d run out, and Garth had been burning his most precious resource all day.

  “Almost all of it, sa.” Oscar shook his head sadly. “When he’s done, there will be one tiny little flicker of True Reality inside him. Oh, look at that! Wow.”

  Ute’s head swiveled just in time to see Garth Nickels … transformed.

  xxx

  Garth went to work. As light spilled out of his eyes, blood fell from every pore. As his skin turned transparent and the power of paradox -given to him by his time in Reality- flared out to grab hold of the decaying pile, Garth felt hope burn out of him.

  This was it. Once he was done saving Hospitalis, there would be nothing left in him to defeat the Heshii. Garth prayed most fervently as the pile buckled and struggled beneath him like an interdimensional bronco that Bravo had something inside capable of destroying the M’Zahdi Hesh.

  “Go-go gadget beams.” He whispered weakly, the power of godhood nearly tearing him to pieces.

  Crystal Blue Tears

  Lisa Laughlin, hovering on the far edge of Unreality, wept. Unable to read Garth’s mind because of his exposure to Reality, now she saw cleanly and clearly. She saw the plan he had built for himself, saw the trap he’d set, and wept.

  He didn’t know what waited, but he soon would, and she hated him. Hated him for being so bold and … and glorious as to allow himself to suffer so much, to take upon himself the burden when she … when she would’ve …

  When she would’ve fled into the dark. No one person should take that risk, live that life, play those games. Not with their own soul. No one man should devise such a perplexing trap stretching so far through time. She’d accepted his need for her to be awake, had known what would happen, had extracted a promise from him in exchange for thirty thousand years of conscious thought trapped inside frozen time, had imagined that he would use the kernel of paradox burning through him to eviscerate the Heshii.

  Garth N’Chalez had let her think that.

  Crystal blue tears fell from her eyes.

  That was nowhere near the plan.

  Respite from Madness

  That night, most of the people of Hospitalis slept as they’d never slept before; pulled thin, drawn taught, stretched out by the frenzy of the last few months, they slept deeply, and were grateful for the respite from madness.

  Not everyone slept peacefully, or at all. Chairwoman Alyssa Doans stared out over Hospitalis from her aerie, daring Garth Nickels to try anything. Her agents were combing through archives and footage trying to find a glimpse of him.

  Jane Paulson did not sleep well, mind tumbling over the curiously handsome grey eyes of the World’s Most Loyal Man, of his quiet voice, of his iron determination. She worried she’d done the wrong thing by giving him the feeds but couldn’t undo anything now; he’d severed MoE’s control over those specific ‘LINKs. Jane couldn’t even hand additional access to Chairwoman Doans.

  Hamilton Barnes, Hamilton Barnes never slept. He was a tireless functionary, a ceaseless, endless cog in the Latelian Regime that Would Be Eternal. Back on the planet after meddling with the Orbital Cannons, in one of a hundred safe houses, he examined data ripped from a satellite purchased that very morning by Garth Nickels. A slow, weary smile crossed his lips. He had chosen right.

  OverCommander Vasily Tizhen couldn’t sleep but sorely wanted to; a world under Martial Law required continual fiddling to get everything to work properly and following the disastrous missile launch at Port City, Vasily was … was damned if he was going to let Alyssa do anything like that again. His intelligence agent in the stars was finding no passage of the ship that’d stolen Naoko Kamagana away and the asset he’d ordered to inveigle himself into the Nickels compound had died helping with the fresh hell that was Alyssa’s ‘logical reprisal’.

  Chadsik al-Taryin vowed never to close their eyes again, at least, not on Hospitalis. There was danger around every corner, madness lurking in the shadows, insanity floating on the wind. They’d drawn the images of Kant Ingrams out of their mind and pasted them up on Hungryfish’s monitors so –between long, drawn out conversations with themselves- they could hopefully learn something about their greatest enemy. When they weren’t doing that, they were watching where they assumed Garth would be. Local air police and the Army had decided to ignore their presence.

  Ute couldn’t sleep. Conversations with Garth throughout the day kept playing in his ear every time he tried to close his eyes. The Engines of Creation. An enigmatic utterance that put a pain in his left temple. None of them were real. Too impossible to believe yet remembering how his … ‘employer’ … had lifted and moved things with his mind, how he’d blacked out Central City –at no small expense to his health, at that- it seemed all too real. The M’Zahdi Hesh … beings from another plane of existence apparently hell-bent on destroying all of … a day ago he would’ve used the word ‘existence’ to describe everything, but that … that didn’t work. Ute turned on his massive bed, slammed a pillow over his head and willed himself to sleep using implants he’d long since abandoned in favor of being as much a man as possible. Better the fitful rest of a soldier than the comfortless sleep of a man.

  Herrig DuPont slept four hours and considered himself lucky; rising in the wee hours of the morning, he made his way through the silent warrens of the communal sleeping area to where construction workers had created Hospitalis’ first soup kitchen. Converted from a warehouse floor, the area was large enough to serve a thousand people. He looked through the windows nearest him, contemplating what else would need to be done should the Chairwoman’s siege against her own people continue, or Heaven forfend, grow worse.

  Oscar Sabellik would never sleep again. Kissed by the hard light of truth, his mind, his body, his soul burned with a passion experienced only by one other man. Unlike that man, he wasn’t built to survive the passion, the flame, the … life. After seeing a pyre of infinite blue light piercing the heavens with his employer standing in the middle, globs of strident red blood being pulled from his skin up and up and up …

  It was the most exhilarating thing he’d ever seen. Oscar suspected it was the most stupendous thing anyone had ever seen, anywhere, anywhen. Nothing else could compare. Oscar knew more than any man save Garth Nickels. He knew that once upon a time, he’d known more, but that was okay. There was a thing he needed to do, his own … special project. The idea wouldn’t leave him alone. It was insisting it be built, which Oscar found somewhat funny given that he’d never thought anything could demand to be built, and it needed to be done before he died.

  So build it he would, with his last breath going into the final turn of the last screw.

  Garth ‘Nickels’ N’Chalez sat on the roof of one of his buildings, watching everything he could
see. He saw the Hungryfish floating high in the sky, a deadly lure, and knew that the FrancoBritish assassin wasn’t fucking around anymore, knew that sooner or later, the impossible cyborg was going to come for him. He didn’t know how the fight was going to go. Severed from the paradox, everything was out of reach, even his own inborn speed and strength.

  He saw Herrig DuPont turn on a light in his office, watched the pudgy man start work, sipping occasionally from a cup of coffee. Garth wished he could articulate to Herrig how much his help meant, how integral one lawyer-turned-banker-turned-whatever was to the eternal war against the Heshii.

  He couldn’t see Ute, but he knew the man suffered, imagined he could feel the giant’s confused thoughts whirling around like leaves in a tornado. Besides Lisa Laughlin and Trinity Itself, no one else alive across a hundred trillion light years of space knew so much about the state of ‘existence’. It was remarkable that Ute hadn’t walked away after that last conversation. Being told you weren’t real, that nothing you imagined as real was real … when he’d found out thirty-some-odd thousand years ago that same truth … Garth chuckled. He’d pitched a big fucking fit, that was for sure.

  He saw Oscar Sabellik working feverishly in the labs at OCP, and the stab of regret piercing him took his breath away.

  Poor Oscar Sabellik.

  Remembering that he had considered –even for a second- tossing the man onto the mistuned and decaying pile made him sick to his stomach. It also filled him with a painful woe. The Heshii might not be overtly visible in their actions any longer, but they were out there. Their plans to destroy everything may have changed, but they probably hadn’t. You didn’t devote the resources they had, you didn’t commit the atrocities they had, you didn’t reveal yourselves as they had, only to walk away. Unfortunately, without the connection to that richer life that’d brought him this far into the future, he couldn’t imagine a way to defeat them. Everything in the Unreality was tainted by them, known by them, created by them in some way, shape or form. The whole purpose was to’ve used something that they knew nothing about.

  Garth N’Chalez shrugged, blowing warm air into cupped hands. Without the sheathes making him inhuman, it was cold on the roof. There was nothing to do but –as someone had once put it- keep calm and carry on. He’d had enough foresight to plan this far. Maybe he’d planned for contingencies.

  “Either way,” Garth spoke into the darkness, eyes turning again to the blaze that still fought fitfully on the other side of the gravnetic shields protecting him and his, “I’ve got some fighting to keep me occupied. It’s all I’m really good for.”

  Signal Detected, Again

  Five beings piloting five ships from the most remote corners of Latelyspace detected the signal at the same time. Data streaming in from machines as old as the system recorded the time/space anomaly as a matter of course, relaying information to the pilots quickly and efficiently.

  “This is not good.” One of the voices said.

  “It is not.” Another one agreed.

  “Garth N’Chalez must be attended to.”

  “Replay the images again. Construct point-of-view models. What, precisely, happened?” This came from the one who’d come first, the one who’d woken first.

  The machines obeyed, and promptly began displaying a mocked-up image of the man they all hastened to, standing in the midst of a coruscating tower of energy. They watched, in silence, as he pulled forth a staggering amount of power, energy gleaming so brilliantly blue that each of the five was surprised that every man and woman and child on Hospitalis hadn’t been struck blind.

  The five watched the decaying duronium bridge –caught halfway between the transformation to quadronium- buckle, shiver, shudder. They watched Garth N’Chalez pummel and hammer and bend a partly formed section of another Universe, another dimension, to his will. They watched him burn away the chance for easy success to save the life of a human. He really did seem to be fond of the hard path.

  “The second stage has been reached.” The one who’d come first intoned. “One remains.”

  “As I said. Garth N’Chalez requires attending. We must assemble the others.”

  Day Two: Calm, Before the Storm

  Chapter One

  You Gotta Fight, For Your Right

  Ute looked at Herrig. Herrig looked at Ute. The factual controller of utterly ill-defined UltraMegaDynamaTron had tried to do a little digging earlier this morning on the man Garth had saved the world with, essentially to no avail. Beyond long-term employment with The Palazzo, Ute –no last name- seemed to have sprung forth from Hospitalian soil about a hundred years ago.

  Herrig knew that he could trust Garth’s natural instincts, but it was hard to accept that trust, especially in light of how paranoid and supremely untrusting the Chairwoman had become.

  “How was working for The Palazzo?” Herrig asked at last. A camera watching the cafeteria showed it was still early morning yet; the only people down there eating were employees.

  “Well enough, sa.” Ute sat back easily in his chair. A job interview. He could do those. Had been doing them for a long time, in fact. Then he grinned wryly at himself; never once during any of those other jobs had he fired an automatic sniper cannon from the back end of a stolen heavy lifter. Never once had he seen a man pour his essence –an essence that no Latelian anywhere believed in- into a pile of duronium that was trying –and failing- to turn itself into a solidified extrusion of matter from another Universe.

  He … might have to tell the truth. Ute reflected on that while Herrig worked out his next question.

  Ute made a mental note to ask Garth about the two men who’d destroyed half The Palazzo as they had been making their ‘escape’: in the hubbub of protecting the planet, he’d forgotten all about them.

  Herrig pursed his lips. “The events …” he hung his head for a moment, “I want to say that the events of yesterday are atypical of what you will find working with UltraMegaDynamaTron and Garth Nickels, but …”

  “You cannot.” Ute laughed, then laughed again at the hangdog look on Herrig’s face; as he understood it, the poor man had been with Nickels since almost the very beginning.

  Herrig made a face before laughing as well. “Working for Garth … it’s … it’s insane, sa. The man … the things … but I wouldn’t have it any other way.” He shook his head. Working for Garth Nickels was like being caught in a hurricane. You strapped in and waited for stuff to stop shaking around. Then you went out and cleaned everything up for next time.

  “I can well imagine, Sa DuPont.”

  Herrig motioned. “Please, Herrig.”

  “As you wish.” Ute gestured to the cafeteria downstairs. “An amazing thing, that. How are you getting around the loitering conditions of the Law?”

  Herrig accepted the congratulations with humility. “This particular warehouse has enough modifications to the blueprints to qualify as a residence. I applied for –and automatically received, thanks to avatars- permission to rezone it, as well as the rights to operate UltraMegaDynamaTron ‘from home’.”

  Thinking of home brought memories of his newly –and hardly slept in- house in Northon. He pouted for a moment. He hadn’t even bought furniture yet.

  “Genius, Sa Herrig.” It wasn’t an idle compliment, either; few people thought quicker or faster than Alyssa Doans, fewer people still had the wherewithal to implement those ideas. “And people? How will they get here? How will they know to come?”

  “Oh, that.” Herrig waved a hand at his computers. “Mailing lists are available for a fee, sa, and if there is one thing you need to know about UltraMegaDynamaTron, it is that we do not lack funding. I purchased the private ‘LINK addresses of somewhere in the neighborhood of 99% of every adult man and woman in Port City and sent them messages yesterday afternoon, telling them to come here if they were hungry. For those we could not reach, or for those who cannot or will not come here, well, I –we- have trucks, sa. Since Garth hasn’t yet told us what we will be doing
as a Conglomerate, many of the fine sis and sas I hired to assist have nothing to do, so they drive around the city delivering food.”

  “Ah, this isn’t why I called you here. Er. I, er… I do apologize if I woke you.”

  “Had a lot on my mind, sa.” Ute muttered. Engines of Creation. The Real vs. the Unreal. “What did you need?”

  “As you know,” Herrig began, throwing the ‘LINK-page for Landmark Reclaimers on the Sheets behind his head, “Garth decided to acquire both the … the plate and the duronium ‘bullet’ fired from the Old Gun.”

  “I do.” Ute approved of using Landmark for the reclamation project. “I am sensing there is a problem?”

  “There … there is.” Herrig sighed. He was always sighing. He had to figure out something else to do in lieu of sighing. “Do you know of Landmark? Are they honest? Would they try to steal something they’d been asked to barter for?”

  Ute didn’t know the current crop of Landmark ‘associates’, but in his time before The Palazzo, he’d encountered a few of the men, most notably the founder. Sixty years wasn’t long enough for an organization to change its tune. “Yes. If you –we’re- paying them enough, they wouldn’t even consider stealing the bullet or negotiating another price or anything like that. There are too many groups like … there were too many groups like that.”

  Images of missiles raining down, obliterating half a dozen assault teams flashed through his mind. Ute sincerely hoped that Garth was right, that with him no longer ‘full of real stuff’, everyone would calm down.

  “Ah.” Herrig nodded, pleased. While his instincts weren’t as finely honed as Garth’s, he nevertheless prided himself on being able to tell a good man from a bad man. Quite rough around the edges, Sa Candall had still seemed honorable enough for the job. “Good.”