Citizen Pariah (Unreal Universe Book 3)

by Lee

  “Was that last part supposed to happen?” Ute asked, toeing the whip cautiously, half-expecting the thing to strike on its own. “I don’t think it was, was it? If you did that with a God soldier’s head, it might terrify the rest of them. If it didn’t scare them half to death, you could certainly toss the head back at them. Supposing you could even lift it.”

  “Ha-fucking-ha-ha.” Garth rubbed his chest before lifting his shirt up. A lovely square-shaped dark purple bruise right smack dab in the middle of his manly chest was already in full bloom. He poked the darkest part. “Ouch.”

  Ute cleared his throat. He’d done some thinking on the ‘nanobox’ upstairs and had decided that he needed … answers. “How is it, sa, that you can design something like your nanobox, a device of marvelous ingenuity and power, a device is similar to our own protean creation units. I know we did not invent the original device, but I know from you that you spent thirty thousand years asleep.”

  “Tell ya what,” Garth offered honestly as he coiled the whip around his shoulder, “I’ll tell you about that if you tell me the truth about the God Army.”

  “Sa?” Ute asked slowly, blushing at the bland look on Garth’s face. The ex-soldier sighed. It was only fair. The man had already told him so much. Yes, much of what Garth talked about bordered on the metaphysical and the mystical, topics that made Ute drastically uncomfortable, but still, fair was fair.

  Ute cleared his throat and stood up as straight as he could. “The first thing you should know, sa, is that the designation Onesie through Foursie is not a rank, but a category. Of age. Onesies are a thousand years old, sa. Foursies are …”

  “Are you fucking shitting me?” Garth’s mind rebelled at the thought. “Foursies are four fucking thousand years old? What the fuck!”

  Because he couldn’t think of anything else to do that didn’t involve inventing new swear words and because he trying not to freak out, Garth started popping the whip against the wall, allowing the loud sounds to drown out the sudden resurgence of deep, deep fears; he’d be fighting in the Ring against soldiers who’d fought for one of the most ruthlessly xenophobic Human cultures out there for thousands of years. That more than explained Gurant’s unbelievable skills.

  No wonder his Spidey Sense –actually better defined as ‘ex-dee sense’- had started going batshit the moment he’d flown into the system. He was surrounded by nearly immortal Gods of War!

  “Are you done, sa?” Ute indicated the wall. “It is done fighting back. You have beaten it senseless.”

  Garth took a few deep ragged breaths and did his best to calm down. It wasn’t Ute’s fault that Latelyspace was stuffed to the tits with soldiers thousands of years old. How had they kept this a secret from the rest of the Universe? Someone, somewhere, would’ve blabbed. All you had to do was look at the Onesies. They couldn’t keep their mouths shut.

  “Wait…” Garth mused aloud. The Onesies babbled a lot, but they were idiots. He shook his head. “I would like for you to very much explain this to me. From … from the beginning.”

  Ute consulted the time on his prote. “We do not have that much time, sa. You are scheduled to die in just over a day.”

  Garth howled with laughter then abruptly shot Ute the dirtiest look his poor, beleaguered mind could muster; he’d missed Gallows humor. Towards the end of his misbegotten existence, Zurich had been a master at it. “Just give me the Cliffs notes version. I’m sure that’ll suffice.”

  Ute nodded, though he wasn’t precisely comfortable with the admission. He’d come close to telling a few people through the long years, but loyalty and fear had always kept him from revealing everything. Closest yet had been to the Management of The Palazzo, and only then because he’d been caught defending Indra Sahari in ways that hadn’t been mentioned on his resume. He’d balked at the last minute, throwing out a lie that he’d doctored his history to exclude some time spent in a very grey area mercenary group and that he’d had some very expensive enhancements installed. They'd pretended to believe him, he’d pretended to believe the poor lie because it was getting harder and harder for the only ex-Foursie in the solar system to create and maintain identities.

  “It is almost breakfast time, sa. Will these … ‘Cliffs Notes’ suffice over food?”

  Garth looked over his shoulder at Ute. “Who you talkin’ to? I once fought an entire army of Tribbles over breakfast.”

  “And what,” Ute asked as he mounted the steps, “are Tribbles?”

  “Oh, terrible beasts. Massive. With sixty foot fangs and a hundred eyes…”

  xxx

  Chad looked on, pursuing their lips thoughtfully. The parts of him that wanted to kill Garth Nickels and be off about their business wanted to jump down right then and cut the man’s head off; they were convinced –though they’d never admit it to themselves- that even then they weren’t entirely certain the man would actually die.

  A few of the Chads got distracted by notions of being expected to fight a headless Garth Nickels, which was equally humorous and disturbing. Disturbing, as it posed the question: if you cut a bloke’s head off and he didn’t have the decency to die, what would have to do to get him to stop?

  “Toss ‘im in concrete, we reckon.” Chad said aloud. “Fling the bugger into a star? Crikey.”

  Those that wanted to hew to their long-standing belief in artistic merit were amongst the lowest numbers; every time they looked on the man with Hungryfish’s extensive scanners and cameras, they saw things they didn’t like. Of late, they were most distressed by the weapons Garth had spent all night making. Of lesser interest was the method, but … Egads, the man was a virtuoso weaponsmith.

  The main Chad –defined here as the one who possessed the ability to punch himself in the head or to ram his skull against a bulkhead if any one of themselves got out of line- was fascinated by Garth. They regretted their decision to accept money in payment for the man’s life.

  The Voice, growing ever more diminutive and increasingly less in control of pronouns, wouldn’t let up about dropping all of their Hand of Glory missiles before returning to someplace it called ‘Home’.

  Chad checked the weather reports and smiled. Not only was it going to be a full moon tonight, it looked like Port City was going to play out another of those massive storms that’d been brewing ever since the Spaceport had blown itself up.

  “Cor, imagine that, hey, my sons? Fightin’ in the lightnin’ under a full moon?” Chad swung their arms around the small cabin, imagining a sword fight with Garth Nickels under those conditions. They even made small sword-on-sword noises to compliment the illusion. “Only fing missin’ then would be a dragon or some uvver sort of awesomeness. Wotcha fink, lads? Get some sleep before we start killin’ this most amazin’ fella?”

  A thousand, a hundred thousand … all of them echoed agreement. Sleep was just the ticket. They’d arise refreshed and capable of slaughter.

  Do You hear That?

  Only recently ‘quit’ from a job position that didn’t technically exist, wandering around The Peak was probably one of the worst ideas he’d ever come up with. But The Peak was where Gurant was, and Huey’s decision to examine the Foursie was one that wouldn’t shake loose, no matter how likely it was he’d wind up running into the demented Doctor Hollyoak or any one of a hundred other people who knew about the resurrection chamber.

  Huey bit back a surge of bile at the thought of Hollyoak. Only seen through Hamilton’s memory files and from hacked data out of Peak ‘LINKs, that tiny little freakazoid was … completely fucked up. In every possible way. No dude should ever look like that … and those extra, tiny little hands that he could clip on or off or those bizarre light-lens-data-things spinning around his head like some kind of bizarro carousel …

  Huey shook his head. Too much time, too much crazy and an unlimited budget wasn’t always a good idea.

  As Huey walked the halls to where Sa Gurant was being … held, he toyed with the idea of taking a peek at Bravo. The location of th
e ancient quadronium ship had been easy to find. Had, in fact, pretty much popped out of the ‘LINKs the moment he’d hacked into the servers, along with several other hair-raising things the crazy Latelians kept stored in the uber-remote mountain fastness.

  But no, he couldn’t. Shouldn’t. Wouldn’t. Physically seeing Bravo would make him want to tell Garth where it was, and things needed to happen in a very, very specific way if any of them were to have a chance. Seeing Bravo would make him want to tell Garth that for the last few thousand years, there’d been no way at all for the metallic vessel to leave the confines of the room it was stored in, not without taking down half The Peak in the effort.

  Because if Garth learned the truth, he’d immediately stop working towards winning the Final Game, devoting every ounce of his intelligence and resources into breaking into The Peak. Things needed to happen precisely the way they were going to happen. Garth had told him so. Sort of.

  His … reincarnation … a reincarnation thanks wholly to Garth Nickels, had transformed him into something new, some different kind of AI. Embedded deep –deep enough to imply his quantum substrate madness wasn’t accidental but instrumental- inside his memory cores was a video file, a file shaken loose at the end of the Garth-vatar’s deadly rampage through his mindscape.

  The video was why Huey hadn’t immediately rushed to his only friend in the entire Universe; in it, Garth explained everything. He talked about the nature of the Universe, the truth behind his plans, what was happening and why things needed to be allowed to happen as he’d described, even though the majority of those ... momentous occasions … were distinctly anti-Garth.

  Garth, his eyes gleaming the harsh blue light of Creation –or the sapphire of the extra-dimensionality- had insisted upon this, saying that the closer the end grew, the less able he’d be able to ferret out what was coming next. According to the file, nearly everything was accounted for, and that he –Huey- needed to keep his eyes peeled for ragged edges.

  Sa Gurant was a ragged edge for sure. Electric blue-eyed Garth hadn’t brought up any particular ‘ragged edges’, hadn’t said ‘on, like, the fifth day of my second month there I am totally going to lose my shit and use a fuckton of ex-dee energy to blow the top of a building off and I am also going to irradiate a level Four God soldier with Reality-juice’. But it’d happened, and Huey –who’d seen all the footage recorded from Naoko’s legendary New4You hack- had recognized the furious energy immediately.

  Chadsik al-Taryin was also a ragged edge. The pale assassin was on his to-do list. If he had to choose between visiting both Sa Gurant and the FrancoBritish cybernetic assassin on the same day, Huey reckoned he’d rather teabag a solar flare with his freshly acquired human balls.

  Right now was all about Gurant. Chadsik wasn’t doing anything interesting or threatening, so he could damn well float in the sky like a maniacal super-villain for a little while longer.

  Huey was immensely glad that everyone else in the amphitheater had either been dead or completely tech-less; some few Latelian survivors of that night might find themselves having some particularly weird dreams, but other than that, they were probably going to be safe enough.

  “Could you imagine that?” Huey asked himself as he walked around a corner. If even a single percent of Latelians hammered unconscious by that last ostentatious ex-dee explosion were to wake up one morning influenced by the residual energy, the whole solar system would be in massive trouble.

  Human flesh was a breeding ground for ex-dee inspired weirdness.

  Huey sighed. He wrote a handful of avatars and assigned them a superior level of the HIM’s communication band to use; he didn’t have the resources to look after the survivors and after thinking that last thought, they needed watching. Any one of them could theoretically wake up tomorrow morning or two years from now asking about the music no one else could hear or … lifting buildings or whatever.

  Or, even worse, they could start talking Heshii.

  Huey swallowed and hated his meatsuit for a moment; feeling nauseous when confronted with a shitty problem wasn’t a good way to get things sorted out. It made you want to not think about that problem. Huey looked at a regular soldier as they passed in the hall. “It’s a-fucking-mazing you people get anything done when every time you turn around your goddamn body is doing weird shit. Have a massive problem? Hey, let’s make your stomach feel like it’s trying to come out your nose! Sound great? Awesome.”

  xxx

  “Well.” Huey pursed his lips together as tightly as they could go; his rebellious and entirely autonomous barf reflex was trying to get him to puke his stomach out onto his lap and that wasn’t something that would go over well.

  At the moment, Huey was seated in a hastily designed miniature amphitheater along with about two hundred of The Peak’s staff. Terribly, terribly close to them all, Sa Gurant was busy murdering his way through a whole pile of Onesies. The ‘Foursie’ was doing horrible things to his comrades and so quickly, so efficiently, it wasn’t even funny.

  Everyone around Huey was shouting and cheering their damn-fool asses off, so the AI told himself to do the same; with every man and woman losing their shit over the carnivorous antics of the gigantic God soldier, the last thing you wanted to be was the odd man out.

  Arms flailing, mouth shouting nonsensical obscenities and supportive statements ripped from the mouths around him, Huey hacked into The Peaks surveillance systems in the cavernous room and started applying filters.

  He was looking for a very precise set of signatures that he prayed wouldn’t show up; the curious nature of a God soldier’s existence essentially made for a very dramatic difference from one Foursie to the next, so it was entirely possible that what they were all seeing now was just Gurant’s ‘inborn’ abilities.

  As Huey watched and waited for those filters to gather data, he wondered how Garth was doing. With the fight only a day away and an impending assassination attempt literally hanging over his head and an almost complete inability to access ex-dee, Garth could certainly use someone to talk to. Hopefully, that person was Ute, and hopefully –since he knew that Garth had told the ex-soldier a goodly portion of what was coming for them- the ex-Foursie was telling Garth all he needed to know about how God soldiers were made.

  It was a fucking hair-raising situation, that was for sure, and it was a goddamn good thing that the original conversion chambers had been destroyed by the five men coming out all those thousands of years ago.

  The Latelians were idiots. Highly talented, incredibly intelligent idiots. Who in their right minds looked at a thing they found in what’d amounted to an evil villain’s secret underground lair and thought ‘hey, this looks like we can stick people in here, let’s do that, it’s probably totally okay, right?’. At least they’d had the wisdom to crawl through the guts of the machinery before doing so, making adjustments before throwing five absolutely retarded volunteers inside, otherwise …

  Harmony soldiers. Five absurdly powerful Harmony soldiers loyal only to the M’Zahdi Hesh and their desires to rip the Universe asunder would’ve crawled out, and that would’ve been catastrophic; just about the only thing keeping any theoretical Heshii soldiers out of Trinityspace was The Cordon.

  Instead, those ancient Latelians had gotten themselves five absurdly powerful regular guys who wanted nothing to do with the nascent Latelian Regime. Five guys who’d fucked off for the hills, but not before ripping their conversion chambers to pieces and destroying three-quarters of the small city that would eventually metamorphose into Central. Not strictly Harmony soldiers but still capable of hearing the Music of the Spheres, those five men could still possibly be alive, could be anywhere in Trinityspace or they could still be in Latelyspace; one of the consistent things ex-dee did to mortal beings was bestow them with –barring mishap- legendary lifespans.

  Standard God soldier conversion chambers were built with the same principles as a Harmony Chamber. Not knowing how to replicate the power source of the original machin
es, Latelian scientists had simply used regular energy. At about the same time that they got a working prototype to keep from simply turning volunteers inside out, they’d also discovered –no accident, no fluke- the first stage of duronium. This had, at base, a tiny, weak bridge to ex-dee.

  Which was why, when all was said and done, Onesies eventually grew –if they survived the madness of the event- from their imbecilic selves to Foursies. Long-term exposure to low levels of ex-dee radiation leaking into their DNA, slowly but inevitably transforming them into a paltry, shadowy version of what Harmony soldiers were from the moment they were born.

  Huey fervently prayed that Gurant was just an absurdly powerful Foursie. Garth had a better chance of fighting a Foursie than he did what a Foursie could become when exposed to the Harmony.

  The filters finished and Huey stared in wonder at the marvel that was a level one God soldier. The raw fury burning under their skin, the nearly limitless strength that sheared off from their bodies, each movement a sword cut against the skin of the universe. Clouds of colored light spilled out of their mouths as they breathed, trying desperately to beat Gurant, who … who … burned like a dark quasar. Huey looked elsewhere in the room, hoping to find other Foursies and was rewarded a few moments later when his eyes fell upon a Foursie leaning casually against the wall.

  Same thing, more or less. Huey split his mind in two and examined both the female Foursie along the wall and Gurant –who’d stopped his simple punch and kick-fest and was now actually biting a Onesie’s head off- side by side.

  Not good enough. The avatars and the filters were mimicking hardware solutions designed thirty thousand years ago during the height of the Heshii War, when the Kith and Kin were sending their damned Harmony soldiers into the civilian cities, and no matter how good he was, how powerful his new AI mind was, some things were best done with machines.

  “Shit.” Huey muttered angrily. He dropped the split screen and continued watching Gurant mow through dozens of his counterparts. He really wanted to spill the beans on the lifespan of a God soldier to the public. And while he was at it, the idea of explaining why Onesies were so fucking moronic on News4You felt like a brilliant idea as well. Fucking Latelians.