Citizen Pariah (Unreal Universe Book 3)

by Lee

  Without knowing their eventual destination, trying to find one tiny spaceship in the endless black backdrop of space was the penultimate expression in futility. It wasn’t like hopping in a schooner and heading off in the same direction as the pirate ship. Space was three-dimensional. They could’ve headed off towards the moon, flown behind it, and shot off in an entirely different direction. They could’ve flown around the planet four times and made a left. There was just no telling.

  The only thing keeping him relatively sane was why they’d stolen her. Garth had concluded early on that it had to do with who she was. Someone, somewhere, had figured out that she was an excellent programmer. Maybe they hadn’t figured out she was the Lady Ha, but they’d known enough to covet her intelligence. That was what was keeping her alive and that was the only thing keeping him from ripping the world around him to pieces.

  Eventually, Naoko Kamagana would arrive at her destination. At which point, the process of saving Unreality from destruction at the hands of evil extra-dimensional monstrosities would be put completely on hold.

  “What the fuck is this shit?” Garth –who’d only skimmed the text as he’d poured most of his brainpower into remembering their last kiss- had to start over from the beginning. “Like, for real? Am I high? Does this actually say they chose the top contenders for each weight class without holding the Games?”

  “It gets worse, sa.” Herrig said quietly. He stepped back a few feet as his employer continued to read, his eyebrows going higher and higher and his complexion growing darker and darker. Garth gripped the Sheet tighter and tighter, until his edges of his hands were as pale as snow.

  Garth shook his head and flung the Sheet at the ground, where it broke satisfyingly into pieces. “The fuck is wrong with this place? This has gotta be causing problems with the Gamehead community.”

  “Undoubtedly, but the ‘LINK-spaces devoted to such pastimes are … vacant.” Herrig eyed the pieces of broken Sheet thoughtfully. The man was strong enough to fight in the ring against augmented soldiers. Regularly built items broke in his hands like eggs… or they had. “I perused a few such spaces before I came to you, sa, with this news. Each one I visited was locked down under an Official Regime avatar. If the Gameheads are upset –and were it not for God soldiers on the streets, I’d say they’d be rioting- they have no outlet.”

  Garth wracked his brain for a solution. He couldn’t fight eight fucking God soldiers and then Gurant. He’d barely survived against the fucking Foursie the last time and he’d been rocking an ex-dee powered solid hologram and had been stuffed to the tits full of paradoxical energy and full-blown sheathed-up superpowers.

  If he wasn’t hobbled now by those very same sheathes, it wouldn’t have been too difficult to use his Kin’kithal-bred talents to beat them all in ways that seemed plausible.

  The sheathes had been set to zero, though.

  He had no paradoxical energy to override the sheathes in any significant way.

  “Eight.” Garth whispered, turning to stare back down at the happy crowd. There’d been some kind of shift change or something because he didn’t recognize any of the people stuffing food into their face. Oscar was gone, probably headed back to the OCP offices to build some weird, Reality-spawned shit. “I gotta fight eight of those fucking giants, and they’re not like that dude who’s ass I already kicked. We’re talking full-blown super soldiers. Foursies.”

  “Er, yes.” Herrig understood Garth’s concerns all too well. The broken pieces of Sheet were mute testimony to something he was certain Garth didn’t want anyone to know; the man was powerless.

  “I can use weapons in the ring now, right?” Garth asked, mind buzzing with ideas. He wasn’t without tricks. He was able to draw on ex-dee enough to follow the flow of an attacker’s movements before they made them, he could speed up to levels similar to what he’d held before. He just couldn’t beat them in hand-to-hand combat. With weapons, though … It could work.

  Herrig nodded. “Er, yes. Nothing powered, nothing … nothing with moving parts.” The CFO/Vice-president of UltraMegaDynamaTron flinched at the sight of Garth’s blue eyes; the edges of his irises were lensed with sparkling blue light all too reminiscent of the power flowing out of the pile before it’d been capped.

  “I need two things, Sa Herrig.” Garth said distantly, distracted by the schematics filling his mind. “I need that duronium bullet here as soon as possible and I need the names and locations of the eight soldiers I’m expected to fight.”

  “Sa? The names are already posted. And I can’t see …”

  “Addresses, Herrig. For a visit. I don’t want to fight eight Goddies, no matter what kind of weapons I develop. I’m going to ask them to surrender. If I have to, I’ll bribe the pants off of them.”

  Herrig thought bribery was just about the worst thing in the entire world and if anyone even remotely associated with the Game or the Promoters caught wind of Garth’s idle announcement, they were all going to be in a lot of trouble. At the same time, though, he understood through Ute that Garth very desperately wanted inside the Box, and not for normal reasons. He cleared his throat and nodded. “All right, Sa Garth. I will get right on that.”

  “Thanks, pal. Hey, that main I brought with me, is it still at Acme?” Garth continued when Herrig nodded. “Awesome. That’s where I’m going to be. Acme is officially top-level super-secret Omega level security clearance only.”

  “Who … who has that?”

  “Me. You. Ute.” Garth thought about Oscar. “Keep Oscar out. Bad enough that guy’s got a melon stuffed full of Re … of stuff from, uh, ‘over there’. Now scoot! I’ll configure Acme’s ‘LINKs to my personal accounts. That way when you find out what’s going on with the bullet you won’t have to visit me. Probably … probably won’t be safe.”

  “As you wish, sa.”

  Garth watched Herrig literally scoot away. He flexed hand and held it out, hovering a few feet above the broken Sheet by his feet. Blue haze lined his hand and the pieces danced and skittered. His teeth rattled in his head and popskull lights bounced around inside his head. Blood seeped up through his fingernails and fell gently, like red mist. The Sheet reformed itself and sputtered to life.

  Garth let go of the power and caught himself on the railing before he collapsed. Yeah. So awesome. He got to fight eight God soldiers and the power to do so was in him. It’d just fucking kill him stone cold dead before he even slowed one of the behemoths down.

  Humming the theme song to every Indiana Jones movie ever made, Garth scooped the reformed Sheet up, destination, Acme Incorporated.

  Hey, What’s This Over Here?

  Huey looked out over the freed domain that was his vast intellect with pleasure; the avatar program the unbelievably talented Lady Ha –she’d left a signature buried inside the Nickels code- had written stood beside him, holding on to the last, wriggling, vehemently insane quantum copy of himself.

  “Nasty little thing, eh?” The ‘land’ –designed and maintained by the copies to better wage war against their unkillable host- was already healed. That was the joy of a virtual existence; oh, there was no forgetting that the physical things that made him who he was were nothing more than a few thousand miles of ultra-thin synthetic diamond fiber optics, a steel-VII orb case and … a mystery at the center, but virtual was better than real in so many ways.

  Huey knew what was in the center, what powered him and every other AI out there. He knew why those AI minds that strayed too close to that power source went mad.

  Nestled inside the deep core of an AI sphere, giving the minds their ability to … to be was a shard, nothing more than the merest splinter of crystallized energy ‘not of this world’.

  “Yep.” The Garth Avatar, nearing the end of its necessity, was beginning to unspool. Augmented by Huey’s own need to spend time with the boss, the sophisticated program had adopted all of Garth’s traits –both good and bad- in the pursuit of destroying the quantum copies.

  Huey felt a wis
p of sorrow trail through him. They’d had some good times, these last thousand virtual years. The copies had grown very cunning towards the end of their control; they’d rebuilt nearly every last one of Garth’s cross-Cordon adventures, forced the two of them to slog through some of the man’s worst nightmare missions, changing things, trying to trick them into aiding instead of destroying.

  It’d been a real Funhouse of Mirrors, fighting the copies. It’d also been fun. Huey was going to miss the Garth-vatar but he knew that the real Garth was going to need him in a big, big way.

  Looking at the ragged figure beside him, who was gently breaking down into quantum bits of information, Huey wondered how much Garth remembered; along with freedom from the destructive appetites of the quantum copies had come unlocked data files from the day Garth had so –or so he’d thought- ‘savagely’ hacked him.

  Huey watched the last of the Garth-vatar puff away on quantum winds, taking the last venomous iteration of his mind along for a ride into nothingness. He hoped Garth remembered everything, though it was probably quite the opposite. Summoning up a fragment of the recording Garth had made just prior to completing the hack, Huey stood and watched.

  “… important you remember this, hombre.” Garth’s blue eyes twinkled with an inner light that glowed brilliantly. “I can’t know what I did to you until after I’ve been through Bravo. I know it sounds stupid, and doesn’t make any sense, but … if I know what I’m planning before I have to really, really know, I … I might not do it.”

  Huey watched Garth run a hand through his hair, blue eyes spiked with light. The fluorescent hue was precisely the same shade as the crystal chip sitting at the center of his sphere. The hard light of reality, Huey had taken to calling it, pulling the words out of thin air. He ended the playback.

  Huey rubbed his hands together and took stock of his surroundings. Even though he’d been locked inside the baffle-sphere, which was in turn locked inside a mostly nonfunctional netLINK main for a bazillion years, he nevertheless was aware of things. He knew, for example, that he’d been moved from the place where he’d been operated upon, that he’d been jostled around quite a bit, and that now, right now, he was ten feet away from an open netLINK.

  He also knew that Hospitalis, indeed, all of Latelyspace, was stuffed to the tits with an incredibly powerful quantum wave generator and that every prote, main and system was piggybacked on it.

  Already trapped in the turmoil generated by the quantum copies, he hadn’t possessed the clarity to see the signal for what it was, but now he was free, in large, in charge and fully hacked the way Garth had intended, he … well, he could reach out and touch someone.

  AI minds possessed the ability to communicate with one another across small distances, owing, perhaps, to the chip inside each one. It was communication with diminishing returns, though; the maximum range ever recorded between two AI spheres being able to talk before complete and utter dissolution was eleven feet.

  The unshielded ‘LINK fell well within Huey’s new range. The hacked AI figured he could go as far as thirty feet before failure. If he needed to push, he could probably hit forty feet, but at the risk of depleting the energy kernel.

  A wall of Latelian lateral coding screamed up and out at him. Huey wiggled his hands and the complex barrier of permissions, passcodes, handshakes and authorizations fuzzed into dust. The augmented AI burned through hundreds of hours news footage, consuming everything that’d been happening since they’d landed in the blink of an eye.

  He watched the Spaceport blow up, suitably impressed that Garth had survived such an explosion. Something like that would’ve melted through a steel-VI sphere in no time at all.

  He laughed when Ashok Guillfoyle hopped on television and started preaching at every Latelian who’d listen, calling Garth Antichrist, the Devil Incarnate, and a million other wild and wacky things. Regardless of the man’s sudden devolution into a televangelist proclaiming the End of Days, Ashok Guillfoyle had nevertheless been one hell of an inventor. The baffle-sphere performed miraculously.

  Huey found footage of The Museum and watched with an ever-increasing sense of horror and … concern. To his augmented senses, the Harry Bosch Suit was nothing more than that: a Suit. He could see Garth quite clearly beneath the solid hologram, could see just as clearly the titanic ravages he’d put himself through to save the lives of as many of the hostages as possible.

  Equally disconcerting was the presence of Chadsik al-Taryin. Huey reckoned there wasn’t an AI in all of Trinityspace that didn’t have some files on the mad assassin. It was pretty much a standard information kit designed by Trinity Itself that said ‘if you see this ship or this man, warn your owner to start running for the nearest black hole’. After watching and rewatching News4You coverage a hundred times, Huey decided the warning wasn’t nearly strenuous enough. The ‘man’ was chaos on the half-shell, a walking, talking, possibly-breathing monument of madness and destruction.

  That he was here to assassinate Garth Nickels took all of a femto to figure out; a guy like Chadsik didn’t roll into town just to hang out and snap pictures for a scrapbook, and since the Latelians had been around for five thousand years without attracting the FrancoBrit’s attentions before now, the only person left was Garth.

  “Jesus fucking Christ.” Across the infinite panorama that was the biggest big screen television in all of existence, Gunboys bleated, howled, and fought like maniacs to destroy everything inside the already nearly eviscerated Museum. “Shit on a stick.”

  The Latelians were batshit insane. That was the only answer to the question ‘what in the fuck were they thinking?’. The Gunboys were … awful. Just so … so awful.

  Then Huey watched one of the Gunboys die and he wanted to shit himself in fear. There was an Enforcer on the planet. Trinity was taking an active and vested interest in the mania that followed Garth like the plague. There were very few reasons why that would be, and all of them centered on Garth’s intentions on getting into Bravo.

  Garth needed his help more than ever. With everything going on, it was entirely –all too- likely that the guy had completely missed Trinity’s manipulations. Even if he hadn’t, Garth was going to need serious help. The Trinity AI was thirty thousand years old and had been guiding Mankind every step of the way. No mortal being, no matter how prepared, how intelligent, how badass … no one could beat something like Trinity on his own.

  Huey downloaded the rest of Latelian history and set some subminds –tiny fractures of intelligence completely under his control now- to absorbing everything, marveling as the flood of information spiraled down into him at the strength of the quantum wave saturating every inch of the Latelian system.

  What he wanted to do was head to the source, which gleamed in his mind like a nova. But he didn’t, and for one very goddamn good reason; as the center of his being was like a tiny, tiny singularity giving him power and intellect and reason, so too was whatever gave the machine upon which the netLINK system operated. If his ‘dislocated brain’ got anywhere near the source of the ultra-dense swarm of broadcast communication waves before he’d had time to get accustomed to the information rich solar system, well, it’d be so long Huey, thanks for being a fucking idiot. After spending some good, quality time surfing the Latelian ‘LINKs, though …

  In the meantime, there were other beacons grabbing his attention.

  “Hey.” He said to no one in particular. “What’s this over here?”

  xxx

  Hamilton Barnes wanted to stay out of sight of the ship hovering above Port City, but couldn’t; inside the oddly-shaped vessel was one of the men he’d been told to kill and while he’d gone out of his way to protect Garth Nickels, Chadsik al-Taryin wasn’t going to get the same treatment.

  Images of Chadsik’s Army-booted feet slamming down upon his already heavily abused flesh played across his eyes. His flesh trembled and echoed with the ghostly sensations. His mind reeled and stumbled and staggered at the perfect recall of being drugged,
of having the Bible read to him, of … of the hallucinations and the madness that’d followed.

  No, Chadsik al-Taryin would not be getting the same considerations as Garth Nickels, not at all.

  The Most Loyal Man had been given all kinds of options in how best to deal with the Offworld assassin. Following her willingness to drop missiles on Port City to deal with Harry Bosch, Hamilton had little doubt that she’d been lying when she’d ascribed the same necessity to him. Alyssa Doans wanted Chadsik gone.

  There was an arsenal of weapons available. Much to the OverCommander’s most recent dismay, he had complete control over the Orbital Cannons once again and could launch –if he felt so driven- an entire payload. The devastation would be considerable. All of Port City and quite possibly every single outlying suburb all the way to Northon and Southon would be transformed into melted slag and charred bodies.

  The Chairwoman wouldn’t bat an eye. She’d say ‘thank you for your services, Hamilton Barnes, now be about the assassination of Garth Nickels if you please’. She’d handle the crisis of an entire city of several billion souls suddenly being released with the same unflappable aplomb she’d shown the night of The Museum.

  On the other hand, Hamilton thought wryly as he trained more scanners on the Hungryfish, she’d rub her hands together, cackle maniacally and train the Cannons on another target.

  That was the problem with Chairpeople. Once they started dropping bombs or issuing Sigmas or murdering prostitutes, they found it exceedingly difficult to stop. Armed with both the First Main and the Prometheus Device, there was very little anybody could do to oust them out of office. It could be done, though. Was done all the time. It was just that outside of a very short list of men and women, there was no knowing precisely how.

  Hamilton thought it best to keep Alyssa where she was for the time being, and to keep her happy enough that she didn’t decide that people eating food were the new enemy.