Citizen Pariah (Unreal Universe Book 3)

by Lee

  “Why would I do that?” Mari asked, leaning forward, pointing a finger at the dwarf’s chest. “What makes you think you can ask me that?”

  Garth blew air out of his mouth as he stared at the finger. She could crease his spine with that finger. It wasn’t just a finger: it was Finger, the Mighty Poker. Good Christ. “You should quit because if you don’t, I’ll have to kill you. Like, badly. Everyone will see you die.” He cocked his head to one side. “If you don’t quit, I’ll kill you … one minute in. And I can ask that because I am who I am. I’m Garth Nickels.”

  Mari snorted. She’d seen the fight between this little man and the scout and wasn’t impressed. None of the higher numbers were; they’d come across the occasional being during their wartime phase capable of similar feats. It was only impressive because citizens had never seen a Goddie beaten. “You won’t kill me little man, not at all. I am a Foursie …”

  Garth cut in, waving a hand in the air, “Blah blah blah. Heard it all before. You used to stomp heathens flat across the stars, yeah yeah. I get it. You’re big and tough. You see the new rules?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re gonna be in there with me and seven other Goddies, each one wanting to win so they can have their asses handed to them by Gurant.” Garth resisted the urge to look over his shoulder; his Spidey Sense, dormant these days –because hey, he was always in trouble, why go to the effort of pointing it out- was telling him the other God soldiers in the vast training room were getting antsy.

  “Gurant isn’t all that.” Mari commented.

  “Actually…” Garth trailed off. He’d almost mentioned that he’d fought the bastard. “Look, fine, whatever. You wanna kill me. I get that. Let’s be reasonable. We team up, we kick all seven other asses, then we square off. Sound good?”

  Mari laughed and the tension vanished. Garth stuck a finger in his ear and wiggled it back and forth. A Goddie laughing at full volume was like sticking your ear against a volcano.

  Garth hung his head. Time to fall on other tactics. “Okay, I can clearly see you’re totally stoked to murder me and all you Goddies have decided to band together to make that happen. I’m spending billions of dollars on helping this planet. Getting people employed, making Hospitalis strong again. Stronger than it’s ever been. You kill me, all that goes away.”

  Mari considered the man’s words briefly. Very briefly. “When you die, the Chairwoman will rip open your bank accounts and take your money. That’s all we need from you, sa. The money. We don’t need your Trinity-poisoned brain spewing toxic inventions into our system.”

  Garth hung his head. He smiled sadly at Mari and made his way out of the building, ignoring the shouted jibes and outright, blasphemous curses flung his way. The death of eight God soldiers wasn’t going to play very well.

  Not at all.

  xxx

  Mari the Foursie looked Gurant up and down. He seemed different somehow. More … present. It was quite exhilarating. She felt the urge to bed him right there on the spot, heedless of the Ones and Twos clustering around the gigantic, system-renowned Foursie. She felt the urge, true, but the words coming out of his mouth had her so enraged she wanted to rip the lower half of his jaw from his head and shove it directly up his ass.

  “Is this Insane Day?” Mari shouted, the volume of her words driving the Ones and Twos scurrying away. “Has the world and everyone in it gone mad?”

  Gurant scowled. He was a Four. No, he was … he was something new. No one spoke to him that way. He opened his mouth to correct the bitch but she interrupted him with a finger to the chest.

  “The puny Offworlder was here not fifteen minutes ago, Foursie Gurant. First, he asks me to bow out, to surrender my chance to fight you in honorable combat. Then he tells me he will kill me within a minute. Then, when that doesn’t work, he suggests that it would be in my best interests if we join forces to beat the other seven. And then…”

  “And then?” Gurant growled, subsonic rage driving the other God soldiers out of the building altogether. The only ones who remained were the non-augmented soldiers and various support staff.

  “And then he reminded me he is spending billions on the upkeep of this system!” Mari jammed her finger into Gurant’s chest again, a part of her marveling at how impassive the man’s flesh felt.

  “What did you tell him?”

  “I told him I am going to kill him and I will tell you the same thing, Foursie Gurant.” Mari took her finger away from his chest. “If you suggest again that I bow out, I will tell on you.”

  Gurant’s bellowed laughter shook the roof. Some things never changed. Except him. He had changed. Was changing.

  xxx

  Garth couldn’t get a hold of these God soldiers. They weren’t fazed by the abrupt bastardization of a Game they’d all –more or less- been playing since the dawn of Latelian society. They didn’t seem to care at all that the ‘honor’ inherent in the Game had been stripped down to a one-on-eight fuckfest, nor were they looking beyond the moment when they separated his head and limbs from his body; suddenly divest of a puny Offworlder to play with, there were going to be eight God soldiers with nothing to do.

  One on one Goddie scraps was like watching ogres hammer it out over the One True Ring. One on One times eight would shatter the arena and probably kill spectators by accident.

  While he was on the subject of God soldiers not making any sense, this was the second –no, third, if you counted his Battle Royale with Gurant as his first encounter- meeting with a top level solider and … none of it made any sense. Fours –and undoubtedly Threes as well- were just like real people. You could talk to them and they talked back, making all the normal sounds of conversation. They didn’t have any problem with numbers or high concepts like ‘don’t step on me please, I am a tiny little person’.

  Twos were … ok. Rough around the edges. Super crusty. They had their definite conversation limits but you could go almost fifteen minutes without seeing that blank, petrified look on their mugs.

  Ones were the worst. They were like five year olds that’d been homeschooled by Peewee Herman. Bright colors amused the ever-loving shit outta them. Loud noises had them running for cover so they could blow something up. Numbers were a mystery all their own and they forgot things even before you’d finished talking to them. It was a goddamn conundrum and he, Garth Nickels, was wasting precious time trying to figure that out while shouting at the next Gamer.

  Sa Foursie Holmes wasn’t seeing the wisdom of backing down, either. “Who do you people think you are?” Holmes shouted angrily, the volume of his voice rattling the windows and forcing his standard Latelian companion to cover his ears and wince.

  “I think I’m the very model of a modern major general.” Garth quipped lightly. “No? No one? Jesus. Look, I’m Garth Nickels. Ex-Specter. I survived having a Spaceport blow up on me. I made it through the Museum Gauntlet completely unharmed. I knocked the shit outta that guy whose name I suspect I will never ever remember. I’m me, man.”

  Garth blinked. “Wait. What? You people?”

  Holmes grunted that he was calm enough to proceed without violating any of the Game’s rules and the Onesies holding him back let go immediately. “Sa Gurant was here an hour ago demanding the same thing, puny worm.”

  “That’s hurtful.” Garth feigned indignity. “I can’t help the way I was born. Lemme get this straight. The winner of the last Game came here and told you to quit.”

  Sa Terrin nodded. “Incredible, isn’t it?”

  “The fuck.” Garth shook his head, disgusted. “This was totally my idea. And the motherfucker is probably way ahead of me on account of how he didn’t have to buy your names, I bet. Sonofabitch!”

  “If you weren’t you,” Holmes countered boldly, walking up to the midget, “and Gurant wasn’t Champion, I would call the Promoters on both of you. You’d both be kicked out of the Game and the eight of us are evenly matched.”

  “Ahah!” Garth seized this rallying point for all
it was worth. “So you admit that Gurant will boot your ass to the moon! You don’t wanna die.”

  Terrin laughed. “There is a very good chance that even if Sa Holmes doesn’t win, he will live. His audience approval ratings are quite high. And … he could win.”

  “No.” Garth grimaced. Gurant was tough. The toughest he’d ever seen, next to Chadsik and his old self. Hell, even Zurich –the most heavily modified cyborg Specter of all time- would blink twice, shit himself, and run away. “No, he won’t.”

  Holmes narrowed his eyes. “What makes you think you’ll win, then, midget?”

  A smile full of confidence he didn’t feel playing on his lips, Garth shrugged. “I don’t have a choice, dude. And, because you called me worm and midget, both of which are offensive terms, I’m going to kill you in … oh …” he wiggled a hand, “three or four seconds after the bell sounds. Make an example of you. Si Mari was way lots politer. She gets a whole minute. Also, cos she’s a girl.”

  That was a threat even the Onesies could understand. They laughed their heavy, guttural laughs. Terrin snickered politely behind a hand and Holmes just stood there, vastly amused. When the hilarity died down, Sa Holmes made a counter-offer. “If you quit, I’ll keep the others from killing you long enough for you to run away.”

  The only place to quit without being penalized or possibly get the death penalty handed to you was in the Ring, which was why he was going around making these offers to everyone a day in advance. Garth genuinely hoped some –there was no way more than half would even consider it, not now that Gurant was doing the same goddam thing- of the Goddies came to their senses.

  “I can’t.” Garth said sadly, leaving the Goddies confused. “I don’t have a choice. Life depends on me winning.”

  xxx

  Sitting in his car, Garth considered his options.

  He could continue visiting the other soldiers on the list. There was even a chance he’d get to the remaining Goddies before Gurant, but by now, they’d probably called each other up and gossiped like thirteen year old girls.

  He looked at his reflection in the rear-view mirror, watched his eyes lens blue for a fraction of a second. It happened a lot, now. Probably a side-effect of his standing on top of the decaying pile of duronium and using almost all of his strength to transform it into a safe, useable energy source; violating the whacky laws of physics that held sway in this Unreality with nothing more than his own willpower had surely broken some kind of dam inside his brain. As long as it was relegated to his eyes, that was fine. He’d been using that particular talent since waking up, even with the sheathes running at full strength. There shouldn’t be any problems with hemorrhages or awesomely fantastic eye-bleeding, so long as he didn’t do anything but ‘look’.

  He could go ‘home’. He could return to UltraMegaDynamaTron HQ, hole up, and start working properly on the designs for the weapons he was going to need to survive tomorrow. He’d gotten a brief and highly amusing call from Ute, who had succeeded in gaining the God Army’s spent duronium bullet simply by being an incredibly honest looking guy and by being able to eat almost an entire shubin on his own. All that duronium would be on property in a few hours.

  He could talk to Oscar, who’d stolen the remaining enhanced gravnetic generators sometime after he’d buggered off on his fool’s errand of trying to convince Goddies to quit. Herrig had called, in a frantic panic. Four of the original fifty Reality-augmented gravny-gens he’d used to carve and then fold all that steel-VII into a metallic dome were all that they had left –the others were inside the dome, corralling the untamed energy within until he could find a use for it- and they were powerful enough to rip the planet in half. By accident.

  Tainted by Reality, destined to die of a broken heart, Garth wondered what in the world Oscar Sabellik would need four gravnetic shield generators for; the man’s skill in manipulating the fields far outstripped his own by about a million miles. Coming up with that crown of generators to evenly distribute the quantum effects over a very wide area had been inspired genius, and that’d been with ‘regular’ generators. The ones he’d stolen had been revved up by an ex-dee super-boost. They could do anything, up to and including stopping time inside the field.

  Herrig wanted him to do something about Oscar. The man hadn’t said what, though. The dude was plainly terrified of the tech, and justifiably so. Unable to understand the differences between the Real and the Unreal, Herrig was no doubt petrified that their newest savant would accidentally destroy everything because Oscar was as weird a talking rock these days.

  It was theoretically possible for that to happen. Quantum field emitters –the granddaddy of hy-tech design- could very easily rip the fabric of Unreality to pieces. Probably in a few seconds. If you had enough. Sabellik only had four, and they weren’t proper quantum emitters.

  “Shit.” Garth muttered as he threw his car into drive. He was gonna go home, work on the weapons. It was the only thing he had any real control over.

  Mind = Blown

  Huey couldn’t get over how insanely weird it was to be in a human body. He wanted to ask people if this was how they felt all the time, but the only ‘people’ he had ‘access’ to were the God soldiers on every corner, and they barely even counted as alive.

  Okay, so, technically, he wasn’t in a human body, he was driving the Hamilton Barnes’ meatsuit around like it was a remote controlled racecar, but there was enough of his consciousness inside the heavily augmented skin that it counted.

  The two biggest mindfucks were vision and feeling. As an AI, he’d relied exclusively on cameras and sensors to deliver a veritable ton of information existence to the data processing centers of his brain. Every second of every day for his entire existence, he’d been a blind man with a Seeing Eye dog; there was a depth of richness, a … a … an orgasmic flux of brilliance. The simple act of looking at a wall nearly took his breath away.

  Inexplicably, the meatsuit reacted to things that it saw all on its own, somehow interpreting his concerns –stay away from God soldiers, walk slowly, don’t fall over- automatically. He’d finally gotten his twitch responses under control, but those first few times when he’d been quietly panicking about first encounters with God soldiers, his augmented remote-controlled body had damn near twitched him right into their grasp.

  Hearing. Hearing was also crazy. Huey had no idea at all why people weren’t shouting all the time. How anyone could hear anything important with all the noise going on around them was a goddamn miracle. Did they know that electricity practically screamed out of wall sockets? Were they aware that when they breathed, they sounded like they were doing their best to shoot fire out of their mouths? God soldiers were the worst for that. To a one, they were gargantuan mouth breathers. Between fears that the air around their cavernous jaws would catch fire and being poisoned by radioactive halitosis, Huey had decided he was going to have to do his absolute best to stay away from God soldiers altogether.

  A single human body –remote-controlled or otherwise- was friggin’ miraculous, easily blowing the doors off anything else. Except maybe the HIM. The HIM was … impressive.

  Huey found himself thanking God again that the Latelians had never figured out what they had at their disposal, and he’d only just finished hacking the heavily –extra-dimensionally heavily- encrypted data files. If anyone, anyone, had come up with a way to decrypt the keyboards and OS running the Heuristic Intelligence Model, everything Garth was planning would’ve been fucked. Luckily, fear and mistrust of artificial intelligence had kept the one tool capable of helping them with that at a solar system’s distance.

  Huey/Barnes came to a halt in the middle of an empty street, rapped a knuckle against empty space in front of him, and whistled low when his hand encountered resistance. He rapped a little harder, then harder still. He wasn’t about to hit the shield as hard as Hamilton Barnes’ meatsuit was capable; not quite in Garth or Chadsik’s arena, the body was nevertheless quite, quite surprising. From what he’d ri
pped out of the resurrection chamber files, there were –had been- three basic body types designed by the long-dead designer of the nasty clone machine, and the form Huey was wearing now was a combination of all three, plus some frankly inspired add-ons from the lunatic Hollyoak.

  “I can’t believe it came to this.” Huey muttered, tapping his fingers against the invisible shield. ‘Seeing’ the shield that had –more or less- sent Garth on the path that he was on was … impressive. Using the powerful quantum com-field generated by the HIM as a kind of dowsing rod, Huey stared at the shield with an AI’s sight and blinked against the sudden, intense brilliance.

  The gravnetic shield generator’s ability to defend against all attacks was precisely as stated; there was nothing, anywhere this side of The Cordon capable of puncturing the clear field of bent energy surrounding Garth’s property. Huey plucked at a lip, doing his best not to imagine the kind of weapons needed to beat back such protective measures. Even the HIM’s pervasive field –spilling out from the ex-dee powered machine to fill the entirety of Latelyspace plus about eighty light years on either side of the solar system- was only just getting through.

  It was one thing to be aware of what Garth was planning on doing.

  It was another thing entirely to be confronted with the technology he intended on using.

  Huey slumped against the invisible wall, powerful AI mind unable to process the reality that a mortal human being with a flesh-brain had come up with the plan it’d come up with and then gone about designing –thirty thousand years ago- the equipment necessary to do it.

  With tools like these, a man could reorder the stars.

  “Fuck me sideways.” Huey whispered, staring off into the sky. “He might be able to do it.”

  Garth definitely needed help. The man’s insistence on working alone, on subjecting himself to needless solitude, would only make the journey that much more difficult, that much more painful.