Citizen Pariah (Unreal Universe Book 3)

by Lee

  Chadsik al-Taryin. Hamilton wanted to kill him quite badly. There was a black rage boiling beneath his skin that threatened to overwhelm him every time he thought about the pale assassin and his odd accents. The man needed to die. It was an order given to him by the Chairwoman, an order that he couldn’t refuse.

  An order he couldn’t carry through with, not unless he wanted to be responsible for millions of deaths.

  An order that might not even work, not in that ship; as fast as the missiles could be launched from the Cannons above their heads, the Hungryfish was faster. Since Chadsik was almost entirely cybernetic, he had very little –if any- need to pay attention to safety when it came to speed. He was already on record for having traversed the distance between the Quantum Tunnel and Hospitalis in a few days.

  Moving out of the way of a rain of missiles would be child’s play.

  Then, of course, there were the Hungryfish’s armaments. Hand of Glory missiles. Laser cannons. Other sorts of missiles, other sorts of cannons. How, where, and why the man felt the need to have a battleship’s worth of armaments in a ship 1/10th the size was beyond Hamilton’s paltry attempts to understand, but have them Chadsik al-Taryin did. Any attack would fail, and the retaliation –if the ‘man’s’ reaction to being attacked in The Museum was any indication- would be swift, vengeful and all-encompassing.

  Another request from the Chairwoman flicked through his eyes. Hamilton pushed it off. The woman was understandably upset at the diamond-shaped vessel hovering above Port. It was a punctuation mark to their inability to deal with the assassin.

  Hamilton read a command from the OverCommander as it appeared on one of the public spaces he used for people other than the Chairwoman. For once, an order coming from the most high military commander was entirely congruent with The Most Loyal Man’s decisions; Vasily was demanding –if you read carefully enough, it was obvious it was a plea- that no action be taken against either the cybernetic assassin or his equally weird spaceship.

  “For once, we are in agreement.” Hamilton parsed a reply and sent it off, secure in the knowledge that the OverCommander wouldn’t be able to find him, or –as the man had always wanted- to kill him.

  It had always been thus between the Army and The Most Loyal Man. There had never been an OverCommander pleased with the Chair’s decision to have a man like Hamilton Barnes with control over so much, a man invisible to their scanners, a man able to go where he wanted, when he wanted. A man who had followed –until very recently- the commands of Chairpeople who usually went delusional the first chance they got.

  An icon flashed in his retina. It was one Hamilton recognized as a ‘check-up’ request from his resurrection chambers; the avatars running the equipment would continue to do so until a full month passed. If none of his systems failed in that time, he’d be ‘free’ to continue on doing the good and charitable works of Chairwoman Alyssa Doans.

  If –and it happened from time to time- there’d been replication errors or some modification Hollyoak had grafted onto the machinery failed, Hamilton would begrudgingly return to the chambers, climb in, and have his essence transferred to another body.

  How he hated the scientist who’d developed both the memory transference protocols and the cloning machine. If it were possible for him to remember the name of the man responsible, Hamilton knew he’d visit terrible and inspirational revenge upon the descendants of that … bastard.

  Hamilton sent back a green signal. He was fine. None of his body parts or new enhancements were failing. His loyalty, though, that was being sorely tested. That was something beyond the Chairwoman’s control and he’d be damned if he was going to climb back into the claustrophobic resurrection chambers again so soon.

  If he had his way, Hamilton thought forlornly as he continued to stare at the Hungryfish, he’d destroy the chamber and be done with it. Then he’d live this, his last life, doing something good.

  “Are you serious about that?” a disembodied voice asked in his ear.

  Hamilton whirled around, guns drawn, ready to shoot at anything and everything. The last time he’d been snuck up on, it’d been Chadsik, and that had gone as disastrously as anything in his entire thousand-year life had.

  The rooftop was empty. Hamilton regarded his previous incarnations. He hadn’t once heard voices.

  “I’ll ask again.” The voice spoke patiently. “Are you serious about wanting to destroy the machine that gave you life, and of your desire to do something worthwhile, something good?”

  Hamilton said nothing, choosing instead to deftly track the signal through the ‘LINKs. It wasn’t something he was terribly good at, but with the gear packed into his body, the difficulty wasn’t insurmountable. As he worked at isolating the source of the feed that’d hacked into his brain, Hamilton felt a stab of loss at Bolobo’s death. That man would’ve been an excellent replacement.

  There was a discernible moment of silence along the feed. “No shit.” The voice commented, sounding impressed. “That guy was good. He would’ve been a great choice.”

  Hamilton’s efforts hit a dead end much quicker than expected. Armed with the most powerful hardware –equipment designed by the deranged yet genius Hollyoak- the only thing on the planet that should prove impossible to find was …

  “Wait for iiiiiiiiit.” The voice drawled.

  The First Main.

  “Impossible.” Hamilton whispered, dropping into a crouch; his head swooned with the thought. “No one can hack the First Main.”

  “Meh.” Huey said with casual aplomb. “Technically I’m not a ‘one’. I mean, that sounded dumb. I’m not a one. Hey, you’ll have to accept my apologies. I haven’t really talked to anyone except myself for, like, a hundred berjillion years. Well, when I say myself, I mean evil, substrate psychoses-infected copies of myself. Oh, and I didn’t ‘hack’ the First Main. It, uh, was wide open for business. Like a hooker at a Spaceport during shore leave. Besides, I’m just kinda surfing right now more than anything. Not … not ready to dig into that beast just yet.”

  Hamilton sat down, heedless of his own safety. He was mad. He had to be. He knew he hadn’t been feeling right since being deposited into this new body, but he’d assumed it’d just been a case of complex anger and rage directed at Chadsik al-Taryin and existential crisis; it wouldn’t be the first time he’d woken up feeling like a moody, self-absorbed teenager.

  “Hah! That’s hilarious. The Most Loyal Man skulking around Hospitalis, wearing dark mascara under his eyes and writing bad poetry while he murders people Chairwoman Doans doesn’t like.”

  “I … I never wrote poetry.” Hamilton said defensively. He’d come close, though, but had never gone all the way; his ‘first life’ had been one of numbers and money. Not necessarily the kind of existence that led to poetry. It’d been easy enough to translate the demands of Chairpeople into simple math, though. Frighteningly easy. “What are you then, if you’re not a particularly vocal bout of insanity or a hacker who somehow hacked the impossible?”

  “I,” Huey said regally, “am a level 11 artificial intelligence. Now,” he said quickly, “now, don’t say it’s impossible, because it isn’t. You know it isn’t because you know my boss, Garth Nickels. You know, or suspect that he can do some pretty fucked up shit. Accept that I am an AI, that I am on Hospitalis, that I am talking to your brain through God’s Own Wi-Fi and we can get on to the next bit, which is where you answer me.”

  Hamilton closed his eyes and remembered who he’d been at the very beginning. A ‘simple’ Regimist accountant following money around the system, trying to trap fraudsters and conmen who kept bilking the Regime for hundreds of thousands of dollars, that’s who he’d been. An easy, quiet, boring life.

  Until he’d come across money paid to an assassin, an assassin hired to take the life of Chairman Peters. Not a particularly exciting or dramatic Chairman, or even one who’d gone off the rails like the previous administration, but –and Hamilton remembered thinking this thought with absolut
e, pristine clarity- their leader was their leader. He’d done his best to warn the proper authorities, but he’d been told they got a million death threats a day. Sometimes they got that many in an hour.

  Hamilton-as-he’d-been had done the only thing he could’ve done; he’d used his intellect, had discovered that the payment codes unlocked a cipher hidden in an online magazine, had read the directives.

  A smile quirked Barnes’ lips at the memory of that moment. Now, a thousand years later, it seemed like such a small, quick thing, but in truth, discovering the identity of the assassin, the route he’d take, the moment planned for Peters’ death … doing all of that had taken months of tireless research.

  Then he’d done the only thing he could’ve done, since no one anywhere had been interested in hearing the ramblings of a forensic accountant; he’d saved Chairman Peters’ life at the cost of his own.

  And then he’d woken up in a cloned body, a body bristling with then-cutting edge tech and been offered the chance to do it all over again. He’d leaped at the chance.

  A thousand years had passed. An enduring cycle of blood and violence, of lies burned and truths buried.

  “Yes.” With the answer came such a release that Hamilton thought he’d pass out. “Yes. I am tired of this life and yes, I would do something good.”

  “Awesome.” Huey paused, puzzled by Hamilton’s most recent actions. “Why’d you warn Garth about the missile strike? I mean, I get that you’re sick and tired of doing all this, but … that’s, like, a direct contravention.”

  Hamilton stared at his hands. The funny thing was, he wasn’t even sure if they were his hands. So long had passed since that original body, there was just no telling if they’d figured out a way to manipulate his DNA to make changes to how he looked or not. “It’s all in how you choose to define your loyalties, Sa AI.”

  “Huey. My name is Huey.”

  “As I said, Huey. It’s how you look at things.” Hamilton leaned back and looked at the skies above Port. “I decided that –more important than my loyalty to the Chair- was the Chair’s loyalty to the people. Without them, no Regime could exist. I doubt any person to sit on the Chair has ever realized how precarious their position truly is. I suppose that is why Trinity Itself does not allow Regimes, or dictatorships. Other than It’s own, of course.”

  “Of course.” Huey agreed humorously. If any Trinityfolk knew that particular truth, they were keeping it to themselves.

  “Why do my desires, my … weariness … matter to you, Huey the AI?”

  Huey coughed. “Here’s … here’s the thing. Your, uh, yeah. Your body … is basically one giant wireless receiver. You can, um, control a very significant portion of broadcast communications. And I am … can be … shit. This sounded way better and less creepy in my head.” The AI sighed. Talking to real people was a lot harder than he remembered. “Look, I can totally take over your body and drive you around like you were a car. This is totally important because the boss needs all the help he can get and he really can’t know I’m helping him out.”

  “Will I die?”

  “Probably, yeah.” Huey admitted this last hesitantly. “For definitely if I blow your resurrection chamber up.”

  “You can do that?” Hamilton stood up, wiped rooftop dust off his hands. “You can destroy the chambers?”

  “Oh yeah, no, totally. I found this place when I was wandering around the ‘LINKs. You’re beaming your experiences back here on a continual basis. The bandwidth you’re eating is gigantic. ‘s what drew me here.”

  “If you can ensure that I cease to exist, Huey the AI, I will gladly give you my body.” Hamilton bowed his head. It would be his last loyal act to Latelyspace, a swansong to save the people he should’ve been loyal to; the future of the system rest with Garth Nickels, not with Alyssa Doans. He didn’t know how he knew this, or why he felt it so keenly, but it was an indomitable truth.

  “Okay.” Huey took a deep breath. “Here goes. I want you to know, Hamilton Barnes, that what you’re doing here, today, right now … every man, woman and child that will soon be born thanks you for your sacrifice.”

  “What do you mean?” Hamilton had to grab hold of the roof ledge; something was stirring deep inside him. A hollowness was rising, and beneath that, profoundly alien and complex ideas bubbled.

  Huey couldn’t find the words, so he did his best to show Hamilton what he meant, how important his actions were.

  “Hah.” Hamilton titled his head back to the sky and laughed even as his soul faded. “That’s a good one! Thank you, Huey, for my freedom and good luck.”

  Huey stood and shook his hands. “Wow. Meatsuit. This is …” He tried to take a step and tripped, bonking his head on a knee on the way down. Huey stared up at the sky with –mostly- organic eyes. “Whoah. Sky is … really up there. This … this is going to take … a little while.”

  Chad’s Phone Convo

  “’allo?” Chad hit the receive button without thinking; they was far more involved in watching what was happening down in the center of the UltraMegaDynamaTron complex. Robots had formed a ring around a very mysterious, metallic object sitting roughly in the center of an area that’d –right up until yesterday- had its very own building. Chad knew this because apparently one of him was very good with computers and had downloaded architectural designs for the expanse that UltraMegaDynamaTron now owned, going so far as to look at then and now pictures for comparison.

  What’d the man done with an entire building? Hungryfish’s scanners were powerful enough to scour the earth beneath the robots’ feet in search of tool marks and there were none. The entire building had been whisked away clean as a whistle. How could The Job have managed that, they wondered.

  “Chadsik al-Taryin, this is Chairwoman Doans.”

  Chad belched and looked at the tiny monitor off by a knee. True enough, there was a harridan staring accusatorily up at them. They decided she very well could be the Chairwoman. “We prefer to be called Chad. The Chad, actually, but we suspect that’s asking too much.”

  Alyssa blinked at the royal pronoun, but let it slide. The man was an insane cyborg. He could refer to himself however he wanted. Looking at the man through the feed made her claustrophobic and filled her with the urge to go stand on a rooftop somewhere, or possibly in the middle of a field; their second-most unwanted individual had stuffed himself inside a literal coffin, surrounded on all sides by an endless assortment of machines and equipment, all of which beeped or flashed or made other quiet noises. She shuddered. “Fine, then, Chad.”

  Chad looked back to the cameras trained on the UltraMegaDynamaTron compound. The black metal half-dome the robots were standing around was intriguing; the men-shaped machines stood arrayed around it –no doubt- to protect Latelians who were wandering around like idiots, which made that dome very interesting indeed. Anything The Job felt needed protecting was ... the Chairwoman sighed and Chad retrained their eyes on the horrible woman’s pinched up face and mad, button-bright eyes. “Wot you want then? We is busy doin’ fings, in’t we? Welsh. Fuck me, we is hatin’ it when we is soundin’ Welsh. We can’t be ‘avin’ wiv Welsh-us.”

  Alyssa looked nervously around, unsure of what she was doing. You couldn’t barter or bargain or even threaten an insane person, not with any level of efficiency or guarantee. You give that maniac world-busting missiles and the situation grew infinitely more volatile. Oh how she wished she’d not been so enamored of Vasily’s plans to use al-Taryin to rid them all of Nickels. What a disaster. “What are you doing?”

  Chad flicked through the feeds until they came up with a scanner that read the compounds the metal half-dome was made out of and –just in time- remembered that they was ‘in the presence’ of the Chairwoman. They kept their mouth shut and stared in absolute wide-eyed wonder at the fact that Garth Nickels had somehow managed to bend and fold steel-VII Conquistador-class armor like taffy.

  “Good Christ Almighty.” One of them said aloud.

  “You’
ll have to forgive Chads.” The Voice said apologetically. “They’re very indelicate.”

  Chad punched themselves in the side of the head until the Voice retreated –it only took two solid whacks this time- and locked eyes with the Chairwoman. “We is doin’ stuff. Now fuck off.”

  Alyssa sat straighter in her chair, cheeks blazing. “Now see here, al-Taryin. You are in my solar system, on my planet. I am the ultimate authority here …”

  “Yeah, well, see, that’s the fing, innit?” Chad heaved a sigh. Back to regular old mangled and tortured English. If they could figure out a way to get rid of Welsh them, they’d do it. Even Welsh-them hated how they sounded. “We don’t give two rat’s arses in a silk ‘andbag who the fuck you is, right? We is not ‘ere for you. We is ‘ere to …”

  “Assassinate Garth Nickels, yes, yes, I know.” Alyssa smiled as warmly as she could. The man changed accents like Indra Sahari changed lovers. “Why haven’t you done it yet? Our satellites and spEyes indicate you are hovering above his base of operations. Use a Hand of Glory missile if you must, but … just be about your job.”

  Incandescent rage boiled through their body at the temerity of a silly little bitch who sat on a chair passing orders to them like they were some kind of lapdog.

  “You shouldn’t have said that, Chairwoman Doans.” The Voice whispered in between bouts of inarticulate shouting and general frothing of the mouth. “We … they are very sensitive. Artists.”

  Chad hit some switches and ducked their head low as parts of the Hungryfish clicked and clacked and moved to take on a new form. The bank of small monitors in front of them pulled aside to allow a much bigger screen to come up from the depths of the ship; targeting and tracking signals flooded the monitor as the Hungryfish’s incredibly complex Offworld machinery followed Chairwoman Doan’s communication wave back to the source.