Citizen Pariah (Unreal Universe Book 3)

by Lee

  Huey watched on as Chad tried to fight whatever crippling ennui had infected him. He clearly didn’t like what the Voice was saying. “And then he … they … got slammed by some of Garth’s special sauce.”

  These CyberPriests, their mission … it was … awful. If they knew everything –and it seemed they did, if the Voice’s smugness was any indication- about Unreality and Reality and the Harmony … then they had an awful lot of power. The concept of digging through the extra-dimensionality to rip loose actual, physical, Real ideations of Chadsik al-Taryin and then hauling those metaphysical brains back was mad. Huey didn’t know where in the hell the fucking Heshii were, but if they were still inside the ex-dee, any such interference could’ve brought them wholly and physically inside The Cordon.

  There was really only one person capable of fighting the Heshii, and that guy wasn’t nearly ready yet.

  If these CyberPriests possessed the power and will to create a paradox like Chad, then they were a Cosmic Level Threat. Huey ran the concept of the ‘Priests against the criteria that Garth had embedded in his consciousness and grunted irritably. As it stood right then, the ‘Priests weren’t a problem. Garth already knew about Chad and was probably capable of beating the cybernetic assassin. Assuming he did defeat Chad, this new threat wasn’t even second or third on the list of things that needed dealing with; surviving Gurant and getting into Bravo was way ahead of some whacky shadow-church who got up to supremely fucked up things like removing the chance of a person ever being real.

  “It was enough, yes, enough to give that final bit of a push past our control.”

  “We fink that is quite fucking enough.” Chad shouted, at last gaining control of their body. “So we is not ever gonna be real, hey? Is that wot you fucking bitches did? We is not likin’ that at-fuckin’-all. When we die, that is it, game over?”

  Huey chuckled. “It sounds like you’ve got yourself a Southern England Chad there, Voice-y McVoicerton. Good luck. They’re probably going to try and scoop you out with a spoon.”

  Chad looked at the screen. “You fink that’d fuckin’ work? Like wiv a spoon and all?”

  Huey considered his options. Chadsik al-Taryin was mad. Of that, there was little doubt. The man was also –and the term applied beautifully- possessed by a holy nutjob who wanted nothing more than to destroy the whole of everything. If he said ‘yes, go ahead and root around in your own skull with a spoon’ it was entirely likely the weirdo would go ahead and do just that. But it would be interfering. Garth had told him to let things happen precisely as they were going to happen, an implication that said his boss had either known in advance that things were going to get abso-fucking-lutely bizarre or that he was going to be totally prepared for anything insane that did crop up, regardless.

  “No. I don’t think it would.” Huey answered apologetically.

  Chad frowned. “Shit.” They looked at Huey. “Don’t fink we ain’t missin’ the fact that you is knowing an awful lot more about what this fuckin’ Voice inside our ‘ead keeps talkin’ about, mate. We is not stupid. Some of us is actually quite fuckin’ intelligent, yeah? Real brain-burners inside our skull. We is like, the smartest fuckin’ fing in several thousand fuckin’ galaxies. We is knowin’ you ain’t ‘amilton Barnes as we killed that guy. A few monfs ago we woulda just ignored you altogevver, but we is seein’ a lot of strange shit lately and so, when we is done killin’ Garth Nickels for Jordan Bishop, we is going to ‘unt you down and we is gonna kill you all over again. First, though, we is going to torture the absolute shit out of you to find out wot you know. Then … then we kill you.”

  Huey nodded. It was the sort of threat people were expected to make when they were crazy, truly multiply personality afflicted and possessed. “Neat. Good luck tonight.”

  Chad looked suspiciously at Huey. “’ere, mate, ‘ow is you knowin’ when we is gonna stab your boss to death?”

  “Duh?” Huey rapped the side of his head. “Tomorrow is the Final Game.” He put on a thick accent of his own, mimicking Chad’s own voice. “You is not wantin’ some uvver lad or lass to do the job as you was ‘ired to do, is ya? ‘ow would that look, hey? The mighty Chadsik al-Taryin failin’?”

  Chad held up a finger and struggled not to throw up. Listening to their own voice come out of some other fella’s head made them doubt their own existence. “Oh,” they wailed miserably as hot bile tried to surge its way out of somewhere inside their body, “you is going to fuckin’ pay for that, you is.”

  Huey ended the call before Chad threw up all over himself, though he did wonder where the vomit was coming from and how long it would take to clean up the mess in that tiny cockpit.

  Chapter Three

  Well, Shit

  Garth rubbed his eyes with the heels of his palms. His mind still hurt over the conversation he’d had with Ute, and that had ended hours ago.

  The ramifications were mind-boggling. Daunting as fuck. Several times throughout what’d turned out to be a four hour long conversation, he’d had to bite his tongue, knowing the whole while that a man who was four thousand years old would have every clue that there were secrets being kept, but what could he have done? Telling Ute that it sounded like the technology behind converting regular old Latelians into God soldiers had come from old Harmony tech would’ve been a terrible thing.

  That was chilling. Harmony tech on Hospitalis.

  Theoretically, it shouldn’t surprise him. In theory, it was a miracle that they hadn’t run into pockets of Heshii technology before now…

  Garth snapped his fingers, a light suddenly turning on inside his abysmally stupid brain. Historical Adjutants. Fuckfaces like Kant. Well, not like Kant. That guy was some kind of other fuckface altogether, especially if he could go toe to toe with that goddamn assassin.

  The Kin’kithal nodded appreciatively at Trinity’s foresight. He might hate the multi-systemic mind –moreso now than ever, now that he understood how manipulative It had actually been- but It’d done the right thing in finally getting around to destroying anything and everything resembling Heshii tech. There were no indicators where the M’Zahdi Hesh or their ‘human’ counterparts might be, but that didn’t really matter; their technology was rooted directly to ex-dee and over time, exposure to the radiant energy infected a human being, inevitably turning them into the first stage of a Harmony soldier.

  But the Adjutancy post was a ‘recent’ creation of the Trinity AI. Garth couldn’t recall how fresh an idea the program was, but he knew that men and women such as Kant hadn’t been doing their jobs for the entirety of Trinity’s reign.

  Garth wrinkled his nose. There was so much he didn’t know. Or –as he suspected- he couldn’t remember. Being knocked right the fuck out by that rifle butt had done wonders for him in terms of data retrieval. Garth sometimes found himself wishing that it’d never happened, that he was still in the dark about everything. Back when the only thing on his mind had been getting into Bravo, well, his life had been miserable as hell, but he hadn’t been plagued with notions of Reality versus Unreality and the whole brain-melting ball of wax that represented.

  Garth shifted in his chair and refocused on Ute’s reluctant admissions, desperately wishing the Latelian Regime had kept some kind of records on the ancient conversion chambers. Oh, he understood why the Chairperson at the time had decided to destroy any data remotely associated with that first God soldier conversion project; the five full-fledged Harmony soldiers crawling out of those pods had been walking apocalypses for unprepared Latelians.

  Except they hadn’t been ‘full-fledged’ Harmony soldiers, at least, not in the strictest of senses; according to Ute, one of the scientists tasked with comprehending the vastly alien technology had located the circuitry responsible for embedding in the ‘chosen’ an unbreakable loyalty. Loyalty to what they hadn’t been able to discern. About the only thing they had been able to figure out was that whatever else the chambers did, whatever or whoever would crawl out would be absurdly powerful and …
not gaga over the embryonic Regime they were all trying to build. So they’d tried to re-engineer those ‘loyalty circuits’ into something more in alignment with the Latelian worldview.

  They’d failed. The soldiers –bombarded with Harmony tech and wired with ex-dee circuitry far in advance of anything anyone had seen since the Fall of Man - hadn’t risen with a boner for the M’Zahdi Hesh, which was really quite a nice bonus, but neither had they come to with an overriding desire to enforce the totalitarian concepts of a Regime-in-waiting. They’d awoken with a loyalty to something, but what that was had been lost to history and a natural fear of the complete and utter stupidity displayed by those old Latelians getting out.

  Thankfully, the converted soldiers had destroyed the ever-loving shit out of the Harmony Chambers on their way out. Garth felt sick at the thought of the Latelians, way too crafty for their own good, even five thousand years ago, having those things in their possession for any longer. They would’ve eventually figured out how to work the chambers properly.

  It was bad enough they’d come up with a way to build God soldier conversion chambers. Garth didn’t want to imagine a Universe where the Latelians had themselves Harmony Soldiers loyal to the Regime.

  Still, knowing how the Latelians had come up with the template for their God soldiers went a long ways towards explaining his rampant fear of the ogrish warriors from the very moment he’d stepped inside Latelyspace. Somewhere deep inside the self-induced amnesia that he still couldn’t explain to his full satisfaction, he’d intuitively recognized the idea behind God soldiers.

  Presumably the converted soldiers were dead, either through mishap or through some other means; lacking loyalty to the Heshii might’ve curbed some of their more nihilistic tendencies, but the term ‘absolute power corrupts absolutely’ was one that applied perfectly. Relatively speaking, the only things in the Universe capable of going toe-to-toe with Harmonized soldiers were Enforcers, and so, with that much power at their fingertips, anyone would be tempted to do whatever the hell they wanted.

  Garth cleared his throat and stretched so hard every single vertebra in his back popped. He kept stretching until every joint in his body did the same.

  Ute was four thousand years old. Reborn in a chamber based on Heshii-tech, he and his ilk slowly but surely evolving across the millennia, growing closer and closer to the ex-dee through the accidental bond forged by the duronium inside their skin. It was an overwhelming thing to consider. The God Army –those forged in the chambers, at any rate- fell somewhere between Harmony soldiers and actual Kith and Kin, a fact which shrank Garth’s balls to the size of peas.

  Garth didn’t even want to think about what would happen if any of the bastards made it past the fourth tier. Gurant’s intense levels of power and skill made more sense than ever when the full explanation of how Goddies were born was taken into consideration. That man was as close to Kith as any being outside Heshii influence had ever gotten and Garth was even less interested in fighting the fucking guy now than ever before.

  Yet, he had no choice. The Latelian Regime was still denying his claims for access to Bravo. If he bailed on the Final Fight altogether, the entire God Army would be knocking on his door before nightfall.

  Sa Gurant worried Garth down his toenails.

  Garth wasn’t entirely certain that the impending implantation of incredibly complex q-circuitry would be enough or, if he was being brutally honest, if the goddamn idea would even work. Every time he stared at the plans –and he was up to three hundred times now- to see if he could ‘see’ his way through the maze presented by the neural sheathes, he failed. His tech-savantism couldn’t tell what would happen when the quadronium circuits attempted to connect to the extra-dimensionality through the sheathes.

  It was disturbing, to say the least. Over the years, he’d gotten accustomed to the fugue that came alongside his subconscious mind’s engineering requirements. He’d come to enjoy the weird things he did while in that mode, rising up out of the autonomous darkness to stare in wonder at whatever the hell his brain had needed badly enough to ride roughshod over conscious control.

  That was nothing compared to using that same ex-dee powered creativity while fully conscious. Working on the enhanced PCU had been one of the happiest moments of his life since waking up. Never in his career as a SpecSer had he so thoroughly enjoyed something that had nothing to do with blowing anything up. Designing the quantum field emitters, building the nanobox that was eerily similar to a Harmony Chamber, working on the weapons he intended on using against the Goddies, all of those moments had been acts of purest creation, and again, they were amongst some of the happiest times of his life.

  But now, when he needed to know and with absolute desperation if something he was going to need to survive would work, the answers eluded him like that rabbit en route to Wonderland. The q-circuits themselves would work on any regular human being. He could stuff Oscar Sabellik into the fucking nanobox and the weird guy would come out like a goddamn superman. It’d even work on Herrig, though the chances of convincing the portly man to ‘check the insides on account of how it’s cool in there’ fell into the ‘not ever in a zillion years’ category.

  “Well, shit.” Garth shut the displays off. There was no point. Staring at the designs was only making him angry now.

  It just … it just … sucked, is what it did. Sucked hard. The worst part was, he knew precisely why his ex-dee enhanced creativity was failing. He’d done it to himself. The excesses of his battle with Gurant, using the weird conflict of his ex-dee powers and the dampening effect of the sheathes to shut Central down, powering up those gravny-gens to cut the Conquistador plate, and finally, stupidly, using the sum total of his Reality gift and his Kin’kith heritage to warp the decaying quadronium pile had burned him out.

  He had finally found the limits of what a Kin’kithal –even one such as he- could reach and here, at what was probably the last few days of his life, he’d discovered that they probably weren’t even good enough to’ve ever fought the M’Zahdi Hesh properly.

  There was enough ‘Reality Juice’ left in him to do as he’d promised for Lisa. Even though he hated to imagine what sort of promise she’d extracted, there was no way in hell he was going to back out; out of everything in the Universe, Lisa Laughlin was the only fully evolved Kith’kineen ever. She had powers and abilities that –moreso now because he was on his way to being feeble- made his brain hurt.

  He had enough of an ex-dee connection left in him to ‘see’ his way through the fight with the Eight without too many … difficulties. The edge of being able to sense his opponents’ moves a fraction of a second before they made them was almost imperceptible in terms of ex-dee manipulation. Augmented by the possibly-not-functional q-circuits, he’d be fast and strong enough to use that slight advantage to win. Though it was a dollars-to-donuts bet that doing so would very nearly kill him; without the inherent buffer his Reality exposure provided between the sheathes and his heritage, the sheathes’ blocking powers grew more and more entrenched every time he grasped at the link. By the end of that legendary fight, he’d be bleeding from every pore in his body. He’d almost certainly be powerless at that point, too. Even if he played it low-level the whole time.

  The battle against Gurant was going to be the death of him.

  “Holy fuck am I a gloomy prick.” Garth muttered into his chest. Everything was going to be fine. His subconscious self had been guiding him from the moment he’d woken up on Pluto. He loved himself a lot, so he was pretty sure he wasn’t the sort of guy to get this close to the end without some kind of a plan.

  “Erm, is this fing on? Alloo? Is anyone there? Fuck me, this is a dodgy piece of shit, in’t it?”

  Garth looked up and saw a nearly colorless eyeball staring at him from the screens, screens he distinctly remembered turning off. “And what the fuck is this?” he demanded angrily.

  The scene swam out until Garth saw that the man who’d hacked into his system while he’d bee
n a moody bitch was Chadsik al-Taryin, the cyborg assassin.

  “Fuck me sideways.” Naturally. The one being in the entire solar system he’d been psychically trying to murder since forever would choose now to reappear. He’d kind of been hoping the weirdo would just float above UltraMegaDynamaTron’s home base until the end of time. “Are you fucking serious?”

  “Oh, we is totally serious.” Chad grinned. They’d had a good long chat with The Voice concerning their tenuous grasp in the known Universe and they were in a wonderful mood; to whit, It, the Voice, would now and forever keep it’s fucking mouth shut or they, The Chads, really would try to dig it’s nasty metaphysical Voice out of their brains with a spoon. They was still having a bit of trouble dealing with the whole Real versus Unreal thing as well as what the Voice meant by ‘destroying everything’ thing, but it was all about baby steps.

  “Could you, like, wait a bit? Like, say, a hundred million years?” Garth wasn’t whining. Or wheedling. He was … brokering a temporary ceasefire. “I’ve kind of got a lot of shit on my plate.”

  “We should fuckin’ fink so, mate. You is the busiest bloke we is ever seein’. All this buildin’ and shootin’ and all. Plus,” they added darkly, “wotever else it is you got planned.”

  “So … that’s a no, then? You really are going to try to kill me. Soon.”

  Chad nodded. “Yeah, we is. We is sick to effing death of this place. It’s all weird and sparkly and jangly and wotnot. Besides which, you was in the ‘otel. You was seein’ that fuckin’ prick. We is got to find that guy and kill the absolute shit out of ‘im. We is makin’ up fresh ways to murder, special-like.”