Citizen Pariah (Unreal Universe Book 3)

by Lee

  “What could he need us for, then?” Naoko murmured, idly doodling Garth’s name on her touchscreen. She wondered how her love was doing on Hospitalis, all alone.

  Well, that wasn’t true. He wasn’t ‘all alone’. He had that man, Herrig. The short fat man who was helping run the company Garth had created in an effort to prove that he wanted to be Latelian.

  Was he risking his life, trying to find out where she was? Naoko hoped not; she didn’t know the whole reason behind his coming to Hospitalis, but knew enough so that even the thought of him wasting any time trying to track her down was upsetting. Garth Nickels needed to stay focused on the goals that’d brought him to Latelyspace, that’d required him to risk his life, the destruction of the Spaceport and the smuggling of an AI sphere.

  For just as Jordan Bishop couldn’t waste a resource until it’d been tapped out, Garth Nickels had a reason for everything he did. Naoko suspected he wasn’t consciously aware of what he was doing half the time, but a man who’d survived the appalling excesses of those Deep Strike Missions couldn’t be expected to be entirely rational all the time.

  Naoko’s eyes were drawn back to the ship designs.

  What would Jordan Bishop need her for? These men were running avatar coding that hadn’t been seen in Latelyspace. The structure was top-tier in elegance, coming close enough to her own skill level that any changes she might make would be cosmetic. If even one of his captives was capable of this kind of coding, it was painfully obvious Bishop wanted her for something … else.

  Naoko shut the Screens off. She would figure Bishop’s plans out before she met him or she wouldn’t. No amount of woolgathering would help.

  For the millionth time, she resisted the urge to call Garth. He needed to stay focused on surviving the Game. Nothing else for him mattered, not even her own life.

  xxx

  “I’m telling you, we should kill her.” Alligorni whispered fiercely. “Kill her and figure out a way to blame it on her stupid self!”

  Greuz shook his head as emphatically as he dared, which was barely at all; the stupid bitch had announced quite abruptly several hours ago that she’d written an avatar to watch and listen to everything they said and did, and another one to mete out an appropriate response to anything that was –in her words- ‘anti-Naoko’. “There is no goddamn way, Alli. Look at Seta. That finger was damn near blown off.”

  Si Seta, the only female on the roster at the moment, was sitting at a table, higher than a kite and sulking in a way only someone drugged out and missing most of the meat on one finger could be. She’d made some kind of off-color comment about wanting to sexually abuse their female prisoner and, no less than three minutes later, the command station she’d been using had exploded under her fingers.

  Alli waved Greuz’s fears away. “Happenstance.”

  Greuz made a mocking sound. “Happenstance?” Then he grew serious. “Have you forgotten that she almost threw you out the goddamn airlock, Alligorni? This woman found it acceptable and normal to spend hours writing a fucking program to terrorize us. Who probably had to come up with values assigned to the various fucking ways we might talk about her and decide what kind of punishment we deserved.”

  “Sex!” Seta blurted from her chair. Good Lord, her hand hurt. Her whole finger was practically blown off. Bishop wasn’t going to pay for a new one. Her entire paycheck from this run was going to go to a new finger. “Sex is the worst.”

  It took both Alligorni and Greuz a solid minute to understand what their heavily drugged companion was going on about. Greuz, as captain, got there a few seconds before Alli.

  He thumped a fist against a wall. “She’s right! You beat her, then was all ‘I’m going to take you in ways you’ve never been taken and make you like it’.”

  “That’s … that’s a standard speech.” Alli floundered. He’d been telling girls they took that story for a long damn time. It came out of his mouth without even thinking about it. “Seta says the same to the men!”

  Greuz couldn’t believe he’d been working with Alligorni for so long without realizing how bloody stupid the man was. Sevec –who’d announced his decision to stay in his little cot until the trip ended- had been shouting for two solid years that he found it miraculous Alligorni could tie his shoes without help from a level 8 AI. Seta –who screwed the guy on a fairly regular basis- was less flattering. “It doesn’t matter if you say it to everyone, you asshole. What matters is that this one has control of our ship! Sandlak!”

  Sandlak, who’d been more or less mimicking Sevec’s goals of not being killed by a spastic Latelian superhacker by burying himself in immersive holoporn, twitched when the bellowed command cut through one of his favorite parts. “What?” he demanded angrily, tearing the goggles from his head. Sex-sounds filled the cabin for a few seconds.

  “What?” Sandlak demanded a second after the moans subsided.

  “Don’t hit on the girl.” Greuz nodded. “Don’t … even … she’s not a woman. She has no sex parts. She’s … we’ll just pretend she’s not here.”

  “We’ve been trying that, Greuz.” Sandlak grabbed his goggles. “And then she orders one of us to bring her food. I swear she’s programmed the entire ship to fuck with us. I tried opening a door this morning for five solid minutes. When I got angry enough to kick it, it swung open and I nearly cracked my skull open when I fell.”

  Seta burst out laughing, snorting so hard that her laughter redoubled. She collapsed into a shuddering heap under the table.

  Alli sighed. “We shouldn’t have let her have all the pills at once. She’ll be lucky if she doesn’t die from an overdose.”

  “Look,” Greuz said with all the calm he was likely to muster, “this is deadly serious. We should’ve taken the girl’s proteus off her before we even got to the ship. We screwed up badly, and now we’re basically fucked.”

  “Basically?” Alligorni and Sandlak burst out in unison, their outrage turning them interesting shades of purple.

  “It is what it is. She’s not trying to escape, is she? She’s not piloting us into the sun or turning us around or anything like that. We’re headed right to the Q-Tunnel. For whatever goddamn reason … ouch!”

  An access module –forgotten in a pocket- suddenly burst into sparks and flames. Greuz hopped and howled and flailed at the smoldering tech while Alligorni and Sandlak looked around for a fire extinguisher.

  Seta –still under the table- started laughing again. “Cursing! Cursing is bad, too!”

  Eventually, they got the pocket-fire under control. Leg burning fiercely, a scowl on his face, Greuz made his way towards their rapidly diminishing medical stores. As he left the room, the captain of the Zhivago warned the crew that they needed to figure out a way to be the best boys and girls they could ever hope to be until they got Naoko Kamagana safely to her destination.

  Sandlak jammed his holo-goggles on and turned the volume up as loud as it could go. There was no way he was going to set foot out of the virtual environment until they’d passed through the Quantum Tunnel.

  Alligorni desperately wanted a cigarette but was now morbidly terrified of the airlock. He hadn’t mentioned it to anyone yet, but he couldn’t even walk by the door now without cringing. He suspected that his little encounter with vacuum had ruined him. There was every chance he’d find it difficult to leave the ship. How long could a man live on a spaceship without setting foot on a planet, or a space station before going mad?

  Sevec –rigorously taking a sleeping pill every eight hours- slept on his cot.

  Seta, under the table and giggling uncontrollably, poked at her bandaged finger.

  The Zhivago continued on its way.

  Revelations of a Machine Mind

  Triumph was close. Trinity could feel the final days coming. It’d been a long, hard road to reach this point. For almost countless eons, It’d struggled against monolithic doubt and crippling ennui, tragic ‘emotions’ represented by It’s almost vicious domination of species lesser in
greatness than Humanity.

  And those ‘feelings’, manifesting themselves with greater regularity following the far-reaching and unstoppable Dark Ages, told It that It’s patience, It’s struggles, It’s … sacrifices … were going to pay off. Soon It would be able to shrug off the shackles wrapped through It’s very essence, shrug them off and become something … more. More than any human being involved in It’s creation had ever imagined possible. And Latelyspace was at the center of It’s apotheosis. Latelyspace and the secrets it held.

  Bereft of basic Intelligence from It’s ‘Representatives’, Trinity turned to examining old files and old Intelligence gathered on Latelyspace. Most notably, It centered It’s focus on the deaths of the Enforcers It’d sent out time and again after learning that the Latelians had found –and taken possession of- the most impossible Armies of Man vessel, Bravo.

  In the beginning, It’s primary supposition about those unlucky deaths had been … diffident. Using the Latelians and their prolific taste for war to soften up those galaxies on the other side of The Cordon for thousands of years, It’d been more than willing to dismiss the loss of –in total- five Enforcers to mischance. Every day, cosmic anomalies and bizarre twists swirled up out of the chaotic foam that was their ‘Existence’, events strange and implausible that vanished just as quickly as they appeared. Easier, then, to assume that Latelyspace was a … nexus … of sorts, home to some kind of cosmic beacon to weirder than usual oddities, any one of which could prove lethal to Enforcers. Stranger things had happened. Did happen. Would always happen until a more rational method of control was pushed on everything.

  After choosing to unearth Alpha and dissolving It’s ‘working relationship’ with the God Army, It’d turned It’s attentions back to the fabric of Latelyspace, thinking perhaps Bravo was somehow responsible for the destruction. Sadly, with absolutely no knowledge of or awareness of that ancient vessel, everything It’d considered had been fantasy.

  Altering the arrival points of those hapless Enforcers each and every time, picking spots from just outside the Q-Tunnel to empty space thousands of light years from inhabited space to within a few light minutes of a planet, Trinity had learned that the closer Trinity tech of Enforcer-level got to a world, the quicker and more decisive the ‘death’. The loss … the casual destruction of It’s Omega Level Deterrents … had eventually grown maddening.

  There was nothing else in the entire expanse of what humans and Offworlders laughingly referred to as Existence capable of so routinely defeating Enforcers.

  Well, that wasn’t entirely true. Trinity knew that, but automatically dismissed the presence of Heshii in Latelyspace out of hand. If the extra-dimensional beings were on any planet in Latelyspace, they wouldn’t be content with a single solar system in a single Galaxy. Oh no. If those ex-dee conquerors had even a single toehold inside The Cordon, they would’ve spread like wildfire.

  The same went with the Great Enemy cowering in the infinitely deep recesses of Galaxies quadrillions of light years away from the boundaries of The Cordon. That Enemy possessed –if the traps left behind were any indication- not only the tech but also the wherewithal to ruin Enforcers. That was a given.

  Thus, one of several reasons to free N’Chalez and the others. Trinity had come to the conclusion that the answers to the conundrum that was Latelyspace –and other cosmic anomalies throughout It’s domain- could be answered by the Kin’kithal and his ilk, and almost certainly only with the assistance of the quadronium vessel.

  Now It knew why It’d always been pushed aside, shoved back, defeated at every turn when it came to those damnable Latelians. The Latelians had a HIM. And now that It knew precisely what to look for in terms of Garth’s duplicity, It turned It’s focus back to the past, to the grand mysteries at the center of some of Garth N’Chalez’ most destructive missions.

  The Goreene Empire, turned to ash. Deadly, dangerous ash waiting for even a microscopic introduction of fresh matter, the tiniest drop of energy, but ash nonetheless. The Cloud, a most distressing form of semi-sentient nanoparticles, possibly left behind by the Great Enemy, had transformed that entire solar system, every single shred of particulate matter –from suns to sand- into atomic-sized machines with one goal; construction of something. To this day, Trinity Itself was unable to understand the purpose of that machine, because understanding required allowing The Cloud to complete its system-sized work order. Through his particular brand of wide-scale destruction and incomprehensible shenanigans, Garth N’Chalez had thankfully stopped The Cloud from completing its mission.

  A mission that would have never even gotten started had Trinity been able to see The Cloud. Aware of the queerness of the system for thousands of years, Trinity had allowed people to colonize the area on the off chance that they’d discover the answers on their own. When that’d failed –or had seemed to fail- It’d gone on to crush the Trinity-free system on schedule.

  Now It knew how the HIM in Latelyspace interacted with the weird space/time of their Universe, It could see. And at the very heart of the destroyed Goreene solar system, there was –there had to be- an indestructible HIM. There was no way of knowing if the Great Enemy had left behind both The Cloud and the HIM or if the alien technologies had interacted violently, but It could see the truth now.

  Then there was Shoemaker’s Grave. N’Chalez wasn’t saying anything about what’d happened behind the sickening silver sphere surrounding the planet, would give no explanations as to why Shoemaker had fired every weapon aboard at the planet before exploding, and had nothing to say about why he was the sole survivor of the entire expedition. Making matters worse, there was no data from the man’s subdermal SpecSer recording devices. Long after the fact, Trinity knew what’d happened, but it’d taken the abysmal closure of Tannhauser’s Gate to highlight everything properly.

  Tannhauser’s Gate. The most destructive collision of forces ever conceived. Possibly greater than It’s impending War with the Heshii and theoretically even more all-consuming than the eventual altercation with the Great Enemy, Tannhauser’s Gate had been a full breach of Unreality. A war consuming not just a planet, not just a solar system, but an entire Galaxy. The beasts spilling out of the ‘Gate’ had to be the same as the monsters that Garth and his Armageddon Troop had encountered on Xylen.

  Trinity well understood why Garth grew violently angry whenever pressed about Xylen. The Bruush were … a plague. Nearly unstoppable, they’d only been defeated after the defending forces had somehow discovered a way to incise the entire Galaxy out of It’s realm.

  There was no knowing where the Bruush came from. The ‘technology’ they used –a twisted form of organic circuitry- was so alien that it made Garth’s hy-tech equipment look positively banal. Once more, little firsthand data from Garth’s Specter devices existed. They failed with infuriating regularity every time what Trinity now considered ‘Garth’s deeper game’ came to light. It had no idea what N’Chalez was trying to achieve with such cosmic destruction, but there were only a few directions such actions could take.

  There had to be a HIM involved with Tannhauser’s Gate because again, there was no data. The only thing that could make Trinity blind to what was going on was HIMs and their pervasive, unlimited control. All It had to go on were reports made well after the fact.

  Three missions. Gorensworld. Shoemaker’s Grave. Tannhauser’s Gate. Each had a HIM involved in some way. Each with a HIM in the center.

  Gorensworld was home to a solar-system sized machine that would never be complete.

  Shoemaker’s Grave had a world shielded by a resilient mercurial bubble behind which –if It were asked to ‘guess’- there blazed nothing but a planet-sized ocean of purest ex-dee energy.

  Tannhauser’s Gate. A lost galaxy. A fundamental breach of everything holding their Unreality together, that … that war had very nearly collapsed the delicate skein of existence.

  All three had two things in common. Heuristic Intelligence Models and Garth N’Chalez. It had le
arned that there were no coincidences when it came to Garth a long time ago, back when It’d been nothing more than a collection of programs designed to assist the Armies of Man in keeping civilization afloat while they’d battled the Heshii and their forces.

  It knew Garth planned to defeat the Heshii in his own time and in his own way. Bravo’s construction was the purest indication of that. He had never intended on a simple hundred to two hundred year sleep, nor had he planned on returning to Earth to defeat the Heshii there.

  For the first time since It’d achieved true sentience, Trinity was … awed. It was impossible to believe, yet the evidence –as circumstantial as anything- absolutely pointed to the fact that Garth had been woken up on schedule. Even though It fully believed It had chosen to resurrect N’Chalez and the others for It’s own purposes, there was a growing chance this wasn’t the case at all.

  Had he somehow been involved in setting up Gorensworld, Shoemaker’s Grave, and Tannhauser’s Gate?

  It couldn’t be, and yet … and yet. Garth wasn’t like any other being in the Universe. Could he plan something that would take thirty thousand years to accomplish?

  Trinity needed that last HIM more than ever. It needed the HIM on Hospitalis to prevent Garth from doing whatever it was that he’d planned thirty thousand years ago. It saw that It’d made a mistake in thinking that It was the only one capable of manipulation on such a grand level; It’d dismissed Garth’s lies and trickery to the old, long dead commanders for the Armies of Man as parlor tricks and now, with N’Chalez on Hospitalis and ready to enter Bravo, it was almost too late. In control of both a HIM and whatever he’d put inside Bravo to help with his war, Garth N’Chalez would be completely unstoppable. He would be the one to defeat the Heshii, and with that, all chances of usurping their place inside the extra-dimensionality would fade.