Citizen Pariah (Unreal Universe Book 3)

by Lee

  “Stop!” Gurant bellowed, the strength of the shout stunning those Onesies nearest him. A few of the giant warriors –unable to stop- collided with Gurant as he stood there, head tilted to one side. The crowd gasped in shock when the massive Foursie ignored the damage altogether. Amazed, they started talking loudly about what they were seeing.

  Gurant cursed silently, then stamped a tremendous foot on the duronium-coated floor hard enough for it to buckle. The racket shook the room and rattled the people. “Silence! I command it!”

  Then he tilted his head to one side. “Do you hear that? Who is playing … who is playing bells while I fight?”

  A cold fist of dread seized Huey by the heart. Another unwanted meatsuit reaction. How did people go about their day when every few seconds their heart stopped or their stomach went wonky or their ears got hot? It was a fucking nightmare.

  Gurant growled, a low, heavy jungle cat sound that lapped against the walls. “If I find the person who is playing bells, they will suffer. Leave me.”

  Huey watched everyone in the room, including the female Foursie, filter out of the mini-amphitheater as quickly and as quietly as they could, eyes shifting nervously between the pile of Goddie corpses and Gurant himself, who still stood with his head tilted to one side. Huey strained his ears.

  “Fuck me sideways.” The AI-Latelian hybrid wanted to weep.

  Sa Gurant was humming a part of the Harmony that could be heard everywhere inside the extra-dimensionality, if you but knew how to listen. Huey recognized it immediately; hunkered above the glistening power core that fueled his physical AI brain for a trillion years, he’d had little else to listen to until he’d figured out how to look through the other side.

  The Harmony of the Spheres. Gurant’s recitation wasn’t perfect. It wasn’t complete and it was off-tune, but it was more than enough.

  A Harmony soldier had come to Hospitalis.

  Huey stood and hurriedly ran out of the room, leaving Gurant to his corpses and his music; he needed to ‘talk’ to Chadsik al-Taryin and then find out what kind of fucking solutions Garth had to fight this monster.

  His blood ran cold.

  A real and true Harmony soldier. The more Gurant listened, the more he’d hear. Thank God the fight was tomorrow.

  Vasily’s Little Secret

  “S-sa.” Harredad swallowed nervously as he looked at OverCommander Vasily. Their commanding officer hadn’t been … hadn’t been right for a few days. Ever since the Museum Incident, in point of fact, but then again, it was fair to say that no one was in their right minds anymore. Add to that his ‘hidden’ relationship with a Chairwoman who seemed ever intent to go all the way off the rails and it was, in Harredad’s opinion, a miracle the man wasn’t foaming at the mouth and bleeding out of his ears.

  Harredad took a calming breath. It wasn’t bad. His news wasn’t bad. It was just … news. An interesting tidbit.

  “Yes, Colonel?” Vasily didn’t shift his eyes away from the mountainous pile of data on his Screens. There was so much to do; one of the Screens relayed data concerning possible flight paths a smuggler’s vessel like the Zhivago could take and still arrive at the Quantum Tunnel. The results were daunting. Kitted out with Trinity masking tech, the damned thing could be right outside Smash All Infidels that moment and it’d be missed.

  The other Screen was replaying the last few minutes of Gurant’s most recent destruction of Army property. It was appalling that the God soldier saw nothing wrong in ripping the arms and legs off so many of his brothers and sisters. Even more appalling was the man’s sudden interest in overt cannibalism, and in front of people who had no clue about the immediate and violent demands a God soldier’s body went through.

  It was the ‘bell question’ that had Vasily nearly pissing in his pants. It was eerily similar to what –as legend had it- the original Five had asked upon waking up. When no one present at the time of their awakening had been able to answer, they’d nearly turned Hospitalis into a graveyard.

  Vasily erased the last few minutes and doctored in an avatar failure code to hide the disappearance. If Doans even heard a whisper of anything involving music, or bells or even someone humming right now, she’d blow the planet up to save it.

  “I have some news.” Harredad didn’t even wonder why Vasily deleted the data. His own personal point of view on Gurant was that the beast should be launched at the nearest Trinity world and told to have some fun. It’d be a long time –if at all- before the Foursie was stopped. “Nothing overly important.”

  Vasily rubbed the back of his neck. He’d been under pressure and stressed out for so long now that it was entirely likely the whole of his neck would turn into one solid block for the rest of his life. “Do you have a toothbrush on you?”

  “S-sa?” Harredad stammered. “A t-toothbrush?

  Vasily waved a hand. “Never mind. I never seem to brush my teeth properly these days. It’s infuriating. The news?”

  “Well, OverCommander, it’s about those, ah, oxygen replicators you … acquired. From Trinity? The ones that are always on?”

  Vasily turned the Screens off and swiveled in his chair until he was gazing imperiously at Harredad. The young Colonel flinched and looked like he’d much prefer to be in the ring with Gurant; though it was obvious the man thought the news was nothing big, it was also painfully obvious that his OverCommander was now about a hairs’ breadth away from a monstrous screaming fit.

  “What about them?” Vasily asked after a long moment of awkward silence.

  “The … the oxygen levels haven’t … haven’t depleted.” Harredad spluttered, feeling awkward down to his toes. He hadn’t done this much stuttering since he’d been fifteen and trying to ask a girl on his block out on a date. He’d always thought it weird that Vasily would want him –a colonel- watching what amounted to a science experiment. Yes, these particular oxygen replicators were of Trinity design and therefore illegal throughout the system, but Vasily was OverCommander. He had privileges.

  And now … and now Vasily looked like he was going to throw up and then go on his own murderous.

  “Leave me.” Vasily ordered. He rose and shoved Harredad roughly when the colonel didn’t move quickly enough. The OverCommander raised his voice and told everyone in the command center to leave and to stay away until ordered back.

  The command unit –some hundred sis and sas strong- ran. They’d never seen their OverCommander so enraged, so … terrified. Not once, not even during both the Spaceport Disaster and the Museum Incident. Whatever it was that had him bothered had to be … awful.

  OverCommander Vasily Tizhen sat wearily back in his chair, the reinforced frame groaning under the abrupt pressure. He took a deep breath and tried to compose his thoughts, but they were a whirling pool of despair.

  There was no way to track or monitor a Sigma. Once removed from the system, the system refused to see them or to pay any attention to anything they were doing. It sounded like the perfect solution for assassins, and indeed, they’d tried once upon a time, Sigma-ing volunteers as a test. It worked, for a time. But, in a civilization heavily reliant on technology, that … invisibility … meant doors would not open, food could not be purchased … there was a shocking list of things that every day Latelians took for granted, things they assumed happened because they were alive.

  The truth was far different. If some part of the almost-living structure of their society couldn’t identify you, sooner or later, you just … died.

  Chairpeople loved the Sigma. They used it all the time. Alyssa had been the best at avoiding it, but in the end, Chairs found ample reason to use the Sigma. You could use it to hide crimes, political screw-ups …

  Military failures. Many Chairs over the last four thousand years had used the Sigma Protocol to hide the God Army’s failures, and it’d made perfect sense until someone had noticed that, unlike regular people Sigma’d out, God soldiers didn’t quite die. Some weird quirk in their converted bodies prevented them from starving t
o death. They wound up not doing much and thus were easily captured, but loyalty to those who were loyal unto death had meant that no Chair and no OverCommander had ever been capable of killing those slumbering giants.

  And thus had been born the Secret of the Sigmas. A whisper passed down through the ranks of OverCommander, one man to another, one promise cast in the very fiber of their beings. They were loyal, they were buried, those ancient soldiers, they deserved their rest.

  Vasily had acquired the Trinity oxygen replicators because they wouldn’t be a part of the ‘LINK system; every other OverCommander had used the Latelian version, but they’d never had to contend with Alyssa Doans, a woman who could find a secret just by staring at a blank wall for an hour.

  He tapped his chin. The Sigmas were awake and on the move.

  The question was, though, who had woken them up?

  And these would be no Onesies. The evolutionary process that transformed Ones into Twos and so on continued regardless of consciousness, irrespective of inactivity. There were –at last, secret, count- around a hundred thousand God soldiers hidden in five spots throughout the solar system. Most of them had been Sigma’d out at the beginning of their Sovereignty Agreement with Trinity.

  Most of the missing Goddies would be Threes. At minimum.

  How was he going to put Hospitalis on a war footing without Alyssa finding out? Vasily slumped in his chair and wished he’d stayed a Tech Specialist.

  Chad’s Second Phone Convo

  “Is we on some sort of phone list or summink?” Chad mused, their face turning to complete shock and awe when they looked at who’d called. “Wot the fuckin’ ‘ell, mate? We is stompin’ you flat and killin’ you quite well.”

  Huey shrugged his shoulders. “Didn’t take.” He loosed a few avatars through the vid feed; without better access to Chadsik’s online systems, he wouldn’t be able to scan the cyborg effectively. Already well known as the most impossible thing in a hundred galaxies, that wasn’t good enough for Huey. It wasn’t enough to know that the ‘man’ on the other end of the line was stuffed to the gills with all manner of Offworld and bizarre implants and augments. He had the Regime’s own military reports for all that.

  He needed to know if –and if yes, then how badly- Chadsik al-Taryin had been bombarded by Reality poisoning. He watched his avatars die.

  Chad wiggled a finger like a scornful schoolmarm. “Now that is quite impressive, ‘amilton. Those codes were quite complicated.”

  “You pick up a few things.” Huey wasn’t daunted. Chadsik was a Trinity man with a Trinity ship. Presumably nestled somewhere in the rat’s warren of insanity that comprised the vessel there was some kind of artificial intelligence. Hell, there could be Offworlder superbrains crammed in a closet running interference on any hacking.

  He unleashed a few more avatars, these ones a step up in terms of complexity. Realistically, he could just whammy the bastard with a flood of replicative sub-minds and override everything inside the ship which was –whether Chad was aware of it or not- a part of the HIM’s quantum channels simply by being in the system, but he wasn’t going to, not unless it became very important; Garth had charged him with absolute non-interference.

  It was why Gurant was still walking around. Ninety percent machine and suffused with hundreds of thousands of sub-sapient avatars controlling a vast majority of internal systems, Sa Gurant had a major flaw that any AI operating along the HIM’s channels could exploit.

  Unhappily, that was why –unless Chad decided to launch his Glory payload- that the freaky-deaky FrancoBritish assassin got to stay alive as well. Huey was willing to bet his brand shiny new meatsuit when he’d hacked a lowly level 8 AI named Hubert and warned him of what was coming –and of what was being done to said AI, and why- Garth hadn’t had a single fucking clue about Gurant and Chad being in the picture.

  Alas, promises were promises and hardcoded commands were hardcoded commands. Huey couldn’t intervene unless the shit hit the fan.

  Chad leaned back in their chair, putting their hands behind their head. They whacked an elbow on a bulkhead and cursed. “Wot we find innerestin’ is, is there ain’t no clonin’ program ‘ere in Latelyspace, is there? There ain’t. So we is wantin’ to know wot you is?”

  An alarm went ‘blirp’. Chad tsked. “Really, my son, this is quite innerestin’. Where is you getting’ these programs? We weren’t expectin’ to see anyfing like this around these parts.”

  Huey worried at a lip. Those had been some very good avatars. The best in the system and they’d been designed to hack through an AI firewall. Ordinarily something like that wouldn’t be possible, but with the HIM giving the constructs back-up support, they should’ve made short work of Chad’s on-board systems.

  Chad continued with his head tilted to one side. “You is not seemin’ like yourself, ‘amilton. Wot is it?”

  “We don’t think he is Hamilton Barnes.” The Voice announced neutrally. It had consigned itself to being absorbed by the bizarre and freakish Hive Mind that The Chad represented. They had made a horrible mistake in excising every iteration of Chadsik al-Taryin from previous Unrealities and stitching them into one being’s mind. Exposure to the strange nature of space inside Latelyspace and further irradiation by N’Chalez had transformed Chadsik al-Taryin into something no one could control.

  “Who was that?” Suddenly no longer interested in hacking Chad’s ship, Huey turned his attention to the abrupt strangeness of the conversation.

  “A fookin’ pain in the arse, is wot.” Chads looked around for something to punch. They were tired of hitting themselves in the head. It didn’t matter that The Voice had given up all hope of being the one to drive the bus. What mattered was that if your name wasn’t Chad, you didn’t get to talk.

  Huey narrowed his eyes suspiciously. Chadsik was a restless sea of jittering, twitches, tweaks, finger-tapping and general levels of spasticated motion. His accent –originally thought to be an affectation by anything and everyone who’d ever come into contact with the assassin- was as mercurial as a five year olds’ whimsy. Thousands of years ago, he would’ve been diagnosed with Tourette’s or some other mental issue, stuffed full of drugs and stuck in a room to drool out the remainder of his years.

  Huey replayed every conversation that Chad had ever had with anyone inside Latelyspace, absorbing the data in the blink of an eye. “I count fourteen different accents and personality traits, minimum. Analysis suggests that there could be many, many more. How many are you?”

  “All of them, my sonny Jim.” Chad replied merrily, clapping their hands. “All of us are in here. If we was really innerested in bein’ religious, as some stupid Voices still want, we would say we was Legion, but really, that’s for twats. We is Chad.”

  “What do you mean, all of you?” Huey demanded, his vast intellect having a difficult time piercing the logic behind Chad’s statement. Some instinct was telling him that this wasn’t merely a case of a complete fucking lunatic with an absolutely shattered id running around with a squad of illnesses. That other voice, the one who’d spoken without an accent at all … that’d been another mind telling Chad something.

  “They mean all of them.” The Voice replied tonelessly. “They are the summation of all the Chadsik al-Taryins that would have been.”

  Ready to head-butt themselves unconscious over the interference again, Chad stopped themselves mid-butt. “’ere, wot you fuckin’ mean, woulda been?”

  Huey nodded in agreement. For the moment, the … the two of them were on the same page.

  “Ripped out of the possible Reality that sits at the far end of this Unreality, torn from the bosom of the Celestial Sphere That Will Never Be, broken loose from the myriad and impossible sheaves of dimensions that comprise the Stack, you are no longer potentially real. If we all fail and this shattered domain of possibilities becomes the True and the Real, you, Chadsik al-Taryin, will never be. You cannot be. You are paradox. Every thing in this vast collection of galaxies exists as pote
ntial, and thus, in the impossible Possibility that waits, they will have a chance to be.” The Voice cackled. “We ripped all of you out. Made you the realest thing save one man in this Unreality. If we lose, if everyone loses, if all the forces arrayed and aligned against The N’Chalez lose and he manages to succeed, then Reality shall be born. You no longer exist as potential because you have achieved it already. If everything is born, you shall die, never to be. The hundred thousand and more of you that sit idly inside this stupid fucking skull of yours will become nothing. All the joy and wisdom and wonder and whatever else it is that normal humans seek and hunger for will be lost.”

  “What the fuck?” Chadsik and Huey shouted together.

  Huey took advantage of Chadsik’s absolute and utter brain melt. “How can you know these things? You are talking about events and concepts that only Garth N’Chalez and possibly Trinity should know about.”

  The Voice smiled a most chilling smile. “We are a representative of the CyberPriests of Watt. We are from the era of your master, The N’Chalez. We seek to break the Harmony.”

  “A religious order surviving thirty thousand years?” Huey mused. It was possible. Back in the beginning, Trinity had had enough on It’s plate, struggling with repairing the damages caused by ADAM and then the ravages of that first Dark Age. Attempting to weed out a batshit insane cult built up around the Heshii and the information they’d obviously shared with someone human would’ve been damned near impossible.

  “You misunderstand us. I am thirty thousand years old. My body lies in secret. My mind was burned into this nightmare made flesh so we could guide him to become the antithesis to N’Chalez. He was constructed to combat your master.” The Voice sighed. “We made a mistake. There are too many iterations of Chadsik in here. Too many of them are self-centered and suffer from paranoia, megalomania, superiority complexes. They love themselves so thoroughly that they mutated into one supreme identity. And then …”