Citizen Pariah (Unreal Universe Book 3)

by Lee

  Still, before Garth got that help, Oscar Sabellik needed a nudge in the right direction.

  Huey opened a holographic command screen and started typing. It wasn’t hard to find the avatars running the flying shield generators, nor was it difficult to hack into their language structure. Oscar had become many things, but security-prone wasn’t one of them. Huey told the shield generators that he wanted in, then watched in absolute awe as four latticed orbs skated along the surface of the impenetrable shield they were generating.

  It was amazing. Absolutely wonderful. Scrutinizing the scene intently, with every sense the Barnes meatsuit possessed plus those augmented by the HIM’s endless sea of connectivity, Huey failed to see anything happen at all. He reached out to rap knuckles in the same spot he had before and, when he met no resistance, walked on through.

  The orbs closed up the hole and went back to their programmed spots on the crown.

  Huey oriented himself according to publicly available maps and went off in search of Oscar Sabellik.

  xxx

  “Where are you?”

  “Uh.” Huey looked nervously around, found an out of the way doorway and sort of hunkered in. There were a few locals wandering around, lookee-looing their way through UltraMegaDynamaTron’s vast holdings as they made their way to whichever side of the shield wall they’d come through; Sa Herrig’s impressively altruistic ‘feed the people’ policy had just finished the lunch rush and about a thousand men, women and children had yet to get gone. A quick glance at UltraMegaDynamaTron protocol on the matter told him that they had robots running all over the place and that if the guests didn’t vacate soon, they would be politely escorted to the nearest exit with all applicable haste.

  Huey appreciated that. Garth had returned from some undisclosed trip about twenty minutes ago and video surveillance from Acme cameras had shown his boss to be thoroughly pissed. UltraMegaDynamaTron property would not be safe once the sun set.

  “Uh.” Huey repeated again. He’d missed the hardline allowing Chairwoman Doans pretty much unfettered comm access to Hamilton Barnes and now she was talking directly into his head. It wasn’t cool. If this was what telepathy felt like, no wonder psychics went batshit. It was a total invasion of his privacy.

  Spawning a submind that dwindled his physical control over the meatsuit to a thin whisper, Huey rallied to keep control; if he was bounced out of the body here, while it was under the gravnetic dome, he wouldn’t be able to get back in until or unless the shield was shut down.

  “I’m …” Huey felt like he was shouting down a long tunnel, “I’m somewhere.”

  There was just no way he was going to tell Chairwoman Doans where he was, and unfortunately, he hadn’t had the foresight to save any of Hamilton’s … identity … on the off chance that his boss would call him up. He’d kind of dropped the ball on that.

  “Hamilton Barnes!” Chairwoman Doans snapped. “I have given you a drastic amount of leeway over your behavior since you … since you woke up owing to the manner of your death, but this impertinence is beyond acceptable.”

  Huey went to shrug and felt the meatsuit respond in absurd slow motion. The submind was having a tough time isolating the specific avatar commands that operated the hardware for the Chairwoman’s calls. “I can’t help myself, Chairwoman.”

  “I suppose some of the blame rest with myself.” Chairwoman Doans admitted readily, if hesitantly. It was obvious from her tone that the woman was rarely capable of admitting wrongdoing. “We … I … I needed you back, and in a hurry. My world is falling to pieces, Hamilton, and you, my most loyal subject … you were my only choice. I know that your death was a difficult one.”

  Huey snorted. Difficult didn’t describe what’d been done to Barnes. Chadsik al-Taryin –the AI-driven meatsuit looked up to the ship hovering over all their heads- was a bona fide nutcase and he’d tortured the ever-loving shit out of Hamilton Barnes before stomping him flat, but not before stuffing drugs designed to mess with God soldiers into his system and reading scripture from an ancient Bible.

  To a man who’d never done drugs, that was like forcing the Rapture down your throat.

  A bitter grimace flicked across Huey Barnes’ mouth and the AI longed to smile again; the meatsuit was devoid of Hamilton’s consciousness, but it, too, had things to say. Some memories were burned into the DNA. Flesh, bone, and blood were the most amazing thing.

  Irately, Huey turned on the Chairwoman, parroting the thoughts that’d bounced around inside his skull, finishing up with, “You’re lucky I don’t go to the news stations about what I am, about what I know. Chairwoman.”

  “How dare you!” Chairwoman Doans screeched, her fury burning with enough ferocity to light the skies. “Who do you think you are? We gave you life! We brought you back, time and again, so you might serve your Chair. The Army has their ridiculous God soldiers with their honor and their righteous mentalities, but we have you, Hamilton Barnes, the Most Loyal Man. You gave your life to the Chair. Who do you think you are?”

  Finally, the submind found the tricky little scrap of code that controlled the hardware giving the Chairwoman what amounted to free pay-per-view and futzed it out.

  Huey beamed a big grin as he felt control of the body swell. “I’m Hamilton Barnes, Si Chairwoman, and I’m sick and tired of working for you.” And it was true. Hamilton Barnes, may his soul find peace, had felt the same. He hadn’t been able to articulate it, but his willingness to help Garth, his attempts to understand whom he was being loyal to, who deserved his loyalty … that was dissatisfaction 101. Voluntarily surrendering his life to preserve what was right in the Regime was the ultimate proof of that loyalty.

  Huey continued, shouting over Chairwoman Doan’s incoherent, apoplectic shouting fit. He was certain he could hear things being thrown against various walls. “And before you … Hey, Chairwoman, listen up … and before you get it into your mind to track me down or to coerce me into coming back to you, remember that I’ve been the Chair’s lapdog for a thousand years. I’ve cleaned up a lot of bloody messes and buried a lot of secrets. Make a move against me and I’ll know and I’ll burn your career to ashes before you even finish typing. Understand?”

  The screaming fit continued. Huey ended the conversation then monitored the body he wore for signs of external tampering. There was none.

  Humming softly to himself, Huey broke into OCP and continued on his way in search of Oscar Sabellik.

  xxx

  Oscar twisted his head and stared at the design from another angle, hoping that a change in perspective would give him a better idea of … of … of what the blasted thing was supposed to do. Then, because he didn’t like not knowing what his brain was doing, he turned to look at the modified gravnetic field generators that he’d basically stolen from his boss.

  They were amazing. They were nothing short of a miracle. Oscar looked around ashamedly. No one was around to see him treat the latticed orbs with such reverence.

  The entire technical design of the machine was very nearly perfect. If he closed his eyes and thought hard enough, he could just barely make out that there were a few more modifications that could be made, mods that would transform a single gravnetic generator into something … unbelievable. Except those were Garth’s adjustments and now, on the other side of the … of whatever had really happened, Oscar knew he wouldn’t be able to do as Nickels had done.

  Besides, every time he thought about the gravny gens, his ears swelled with music. It was a tune he’d heard before, a tune he felt like he’d listened to for his entire life and had somehow just recently managed to forget the name of; he’d wasted an hour this morning running through every ‘LINK he could find that had music on it, but to no avail.

  This was a tune inside his head. The tune that was telling him –Oscar knew exactly how weird and unreal that sounded- to build what was on the Screen before him.

  Oscar turned back to the Screens. Technical data concerning the precise alterations Garth had made to
the generators he’d used to split the Conquistador armor up and then to melt it like butter into the half-dome spilled alongside a wireframe design that was … a … cube. He reached out with a hand, wishing he could touch the cube. It could be done. The generators responded to wirelessly transmitted ‘LINK commands like they’d been built to do so, even though all his instincts said that no other society –especially not the one Garth came from- had ever had anything like the netLINK system. He could command the spheres to form the cube, with him inside, but that was it. Whatever else it was supposed to do remained … uncertain.

  It was harrowing that in these, his last few days on Hospitalis, an entire universe of mysteries should open up to him.

  “Looks like you’re trying to build a ship.” A gravelly voice said right behind him.

  Oscar whirled, alarm commands ready to spill from his lips. He stopped after the first syllable. A man he didn’t recognize was standing there, juggling the gravnetic spheres in his hands. And ... and they were on. “I … what … you … what?”

  Huey couldn’t believe the power contained in the four spheres. In his desperation to cap the mistuned chunk of possible-Reality into something less completely destructive to their maybe-Universe, Garth had altered the physical composition of fifty spheres into something slightly more congruent with the extra-dimensionality. Not too much, nothing at all like what’d been done for Alpha, Bravo, or the HIMs, but enough to form a bridge between here and there. More than enough to give each sphere the power to drill a hole through the planet. Beyond that … given the right modifications and the time to do them, well, Garth N’Chalez could do something so much more wonderful than a simple hole.

  This was about Oscar, though, a poor man who’d been witness to a Reality that was still nothing more than a base assumption. That was the problem with where they all lived; since nothing was ‘real’, everything was possible, including the thing that they were destined to become. It was all very paradoxical and fully explained the irritating enigma that was Garth.

  Oscar turned back to the designs, dreadful concerns over a man who’d somehow managed to activate the spheres without his knowledge gone. “A … ship?”

  Huey turned the spheres off. The bridges brought into existence by Garth’s will made manifest weren’t perfect; left on, they’d decay and then Oscar wouldn’t be able to do what his subconscious demanded.

  Oscar's ... liberation was something that needed to happen. It was something that not even Garth knew. Huey didn’t know how or why he knew that Oscar needed to succeed in his endeavor, just that he did. It was as imperative as Garth’s impending triumph against the Heshii.

  “Yeah.” Huey wiggled his hands and started sculpting the designs differently. He felt Oscar’s awe grow, mounting with each level of complexity that was added. As he worked, he explained, “You see, it’s like this … duronium is transformed into quadronium using a complex pattern of harmonics. It only works on account of how this place only seems like it has constant physical laws. Quadronium is an impossible extrusion of another Universe, which is why it is impossibly indestructible. You’d literally be banging away at the concentrated weight of the mass of an entire Universe.”

  “But that isn’t what happened.” Oscar mused. “At the Museum.”

  “No.” Huey shuddered again at the footage of what’d happened that night. The whole entire planet had gone mad. “Not at all. The duronium walls and everything of the Museum got very, very close to being tuned properly. Except my man Garth did his hoodoo all over everywhere and started chucking Reality-based paradox power all over the place like some kind of mindfucked Jedi knight. There was a huge explosion of ex-dee energy laced with the remainder of that power, and it whammied its way through the duronium pile. It stopped trying to shape itself from inert matter, jumping tracks to organic matter.”

  “Garth N’Chalez.” Oscar flushed at the sideways look the still unnamed man gave him. “I’m sorry. He doesn’t like it when I say his name properly.”

  “It’s not a name.” Huey replied. “It’s a title. In an alien language from aliens that don’t exist yet.” Then he nodded. “But you’re right. The quadronium was trying to … pull … the essence of Garth N’Chalez out of the Real Universe and into itself, trying to complete the process of alteration. And that’s where you …” Huey pointed to the design on the Screens, “and this come into play. You were dosed. With Garth’s brain juice. Haha. That is actually pretty gross.”

  Oscar grimaced. “You talk weird.”

  “Occupational hazard. I was hacked by Garth a while ago, and some of him rubbed off. Plus I spent a trillion years … haha, oops, pretend that I didn’t say any of that.” Huey wiggled his fingers. “I am not the droid you’re looking for.”

  Oscar waved his hands in the air, frustrated that he was so confused. “So what is this? Why am I trying to build it? What’s this music I keep hearing?”

  “The music you’re hearing is what Garth would call the Music of the Celestial Spheres. I ain’t gonna go into what that fully entails on account of how we don’t have a hundred years, but that’s what it is. You are hearing the literal sound of Universes chiming. It doesn’t exist here because we aren’t a part of the Spheres. It’s … wonderful.”

  Oscar nodded. It was wonderful. Heartbreaking in its purity.

  “You are,” Huey continued affably, wanting to pull Oscar out of his suddenly grim mood, “trying to build a ship because Garth needs the ship to be built. Or, he thinks he does. Thought he did. He has a plan. The wrong plan, but a plan.”

  “Huh?” Oscar felt his forehead wrinkle. Everything was all so confusing.

  “Long story. Just trust me. Your head is full of Garth Nickels’ desperate desire to return to the one place that felt like home, so yeah.” Huey clapped a hand on Oscar’s shoulder by way of apology. “Just suck it up. You’re building the ship because you accidentally got brain-napped by Garth.”

  “Where would a ship like this go?”

  “Haven’t you figured that out yet, man?” Huey shook his head chidingly. “And here you are, stuffed full of the universe’s greatest tactician?”

  Oscar stared long and hard at the new designs tacked on by the man standing next to him, head tilting one way then the next. He saw he’d been making a mistake in dismissing fundamental truths about the Universe in which they all lived. “Seriously?” he demanded after another few minutes of absolute silence. “Seriously?”

  “Oh yeah, baby. That’s where you’re gonna go.”

  “There isn’t enough power!” Oscar pointed at the spheres. “Whatever he did won’t last long enough. And besides … that’s … impossible.”

  “Well, see, the funny thing about that is this … it is, until it ain’t.” Huey nodded, tapping the side of his nose mysteriously. “Garth Nickels will provide.” Huey left the stunned, involuntarily brain-napped scientist to his own … devices.

  Oscar out of the way, Huey decided to do something he didn’t necessarily want to do: visit Sa Gurant the Champion. The ‘man’ had been briefly exposed to Garth’s inner power source. There was no telling what that could do to someone so heavily modified as a Foursie.

  Chapter Two

  Flight of the Zhivago

  Naoko looked at the diagrams her avatars had finished compiling with interest; the Zhivago was a hybrid ship in that it operated comfortably with either Trinity or Latelian tech and was, whether the Captain and everyone else knew it, a treasure trove of information. Though her talents traveled in other directions, Naoko saw as she gazed thoughtfully at the third set of diagrams that Trinity tech –while not better- was, in many ways, more advanced.

  Oh, it came as no surprise, not really. One had to think no further than Artificial Intelligence to know that Trinity had a technological superiority over very nearly everything else in the Universe; the Trinity AI’s powerbase was predicated upon It’s ability to keep undesirables out with the power of It’s Cordon, or, failing that, to demolish them utterly w
ith It’s weapons of mass destruction.

  The Zhivago was powered by Trinity tech, but run on Latelian avatars and as she sat and watched the various autonomous systems work, it was apparent that the star-faring vessel would do much better under the guidance of an AI mind. The avatars were doing a fine job, but only just. In order to make the ship work anywhere near the levels of efficiency equal to an AI powering the helm, Greuz had –no doubt with Jordan’s money or resources- needed to install no less than five mains.

  It was distressing, to say the least. And more than a little confusing.

  If a basic Trinity ship already modified to run on Latelian technology required a minimum of five times the amount of processing power as an identical but Latelian-design spacecraft, what did Jordan Bishop need so many programmers for? His acquisition list should be comprised almost entirely of engineers, but instead, it was almost all coders.

  Naoko was no fool; if she’d found working with the amazing intelligence structures inside Garth’s AI simple enough, then others of her kind had had similar experiences. For all she knew, some small percentage of her peers was better at it. Therefore, it was obvious to her that BishopCo was using Latelians –at least some of those he kidnapped- to work on coding for AI minds. Knowing as all Latelian programmers did that Trinityfolk were conditioned to be terrified at the thought of allowing AI spheres other than Trinity Itself ultimate control over any scrap of hardware having any kind of effect on human lives, there was a booming industry throughout Trinityspace on squeezing as much efficiency out of the enforced restrictions as possible.

  Jordan Bishop couldn’t need three thousand Latelian programmers for that. It was a mindboggling waste of resources and –more importantly- unnecessary. If there was one thing Naoko knew –or assumed to be true- about Jordan Bishop, it was that the man abhorred waste for waste’s sake. You didn’t stay leader of a Conglomerate spanning galaxies if you squandered resources.