Citizen Pariah (Unreal Universe Book 3)

by Lee

  Chad was instantly –if distantly- aware that a minute change had fallen over his Job. Some sort of … extra little bit that hadn’t been there a second ago may have leveled the playing field somehow. They didn’t like it, but then again, if the Job was bringing stupid swords and admittedly awesome looking axes to the fight instead of building a massive, building-sized super cannon to shoot him with, then whatever he was doing was probably not ever going to be enough anyway.

  “No need to be hurtful, my son.” Chad charged. “Sarcasm is a weapon, you know.”

  “No,” Garth muttered, already well into a downward swing with the sword by the time Chad actually got moving, “this is a weapon.”

  Chad felt the suddenly white-hot gleaming sword bite into their arm at the socket with enough heat and strength to cleave through the outer layers of their skin and vibrate nastily against metallic bone. They watched in awe as Garth danced out of the way, the length of six-foot sword burning like an actual sun. They tried to lash out with one of their feet to catch Garth unawares, but again, impossibly, the man’s stupid sword was in the way, tip burning a neat incision through the rooftop and leaving a cauterized gash up their calf muscle in the process.

  “You is not fast.” Chad grunted, stepping back. “You isn’t. What is wiv that sword?” The wound in their shoulder was already sealing up, onboard machinery knitting it shut; they overrode a request for downtime to correct the wound to the actual joint because the fight would be over long before the damage became serious.

  “Quantum state technology, asshat.” Garth squinted, ignoring the blood welling up in the corners of his eyes. “I’m a fucking genius and you … hey!”

  Chad charged again, this time moving a bit faster than before. They hadn’t expected the first cut to even happen and they were miffed they’d underestimated The Job after all. This time they got a kick in before that sword flicked out, digging a groove through their chest and cutting their jacket right off their body. They watched in pure satisfaction as Garth slammed in –and through- the door, sword bending nearly in half from the momentum.

  They fingered the burned groove in their chest. They decided –at least for the moment- to keep the scar. They had a dim recollection of hearing or reading somewhere that ladies liked scars and bad boys and while they had an admittedly poor understanding of the fairer sex, they’d decided that they were going to do their best to learn more about women.

  xxx

  Garth lay at the top of the stairwell, rubbing his much-abused chest. Body armor. He should’ve made body armor. Who forgets to do that? Hell, he probably could’ve just sidled up to Ute and asked the giant for, like, a chest plate designed for extraordinarily violent teenagers and that would’ve been that.

  “If I,” he groaned as he struggled to his feet, “was any more off my game, I’d be playing fucking Parcheesi. Jesus.”

  In his second-sight, the wavering, rippling ex-dee extrusion that represented Chad grew more defined. Garth grunted angrily. It was to be expected; since the cyborg had definitely been made by someone aware of what the extra-dimensionality was, it only made sense that the assassin –consciously or unconsciously- drew on that plane for power.

  Garth unlimbered three of the darts, cupped them in one hand, drew the fire ax and leaped…

  xxx

  Chad twisted and turned, narrowly avoiding two of the three buzzing, metallic hornets that sizzled out of the doorway in wide, impossible arcs. The third one caught them in the middle of their ribcage and started burrowing in. The sudden, unexpected pain drew their full attention, during which time, Garth landed a grisly blow with his wicked ax, right on their opposite shoulder.

  “Wot the fuck,” Chad demanded, their voice howling against the wind and rain and lightning, “is wiv you and fucking fire?” They kicked up with both their feet this time, pushing with considerable strength.

  Garth went airborne, bellowing with surprise.

  Moving much faster, deciding to forego any reasonable portrayal of artistic nuance, Chad yanked the ax out of their shoulder and howled as all the sensors and equipment told them that the arm was down for the count. From a glowing ax. In a Universe where Man could build black hole cannons and travel from galaxy to galaxy, their arm had been nearly chopped off by an ax that actually shed fire. If it didn’t hurt so fucking much, they’d find the whole scenario fascinating.

  The dart had finally stopped trying to dig its way through their body and came to a halt just by where their spleen would be if they had one. A host of error messages popped up, and they ignored each one.

  They were not going to beaten by a man with some fancy tricks. This was not going to happen. They told the ones who wanted Garth to live that they’d better get on fucking board with ending the Job’s life or they’d find themselves alongside the Voice vis a vis scooping out brains with a spoon. The horde of pro-Garth Chads agreed that living was better than dying.

  They jumped, swinging the ax, noticing with a petulant frown that the fucking thing wasn’t burning for them. When they killed The Job, they were going to spend a considerable amount of their spare time hacking at random things until they got it to working properly.

  xxx

  Garth, sailing through the air, weeping blood and pretending that every single one of his ribs weren’t cracked or broken, threw three more heavy metal darts he had on him at where his eyes said Chad would be. They arced just as lightning cracked right overhead.

  “I should’ve built a building-sized death ray and shot your ship from the sky.” Garth lamented woefully.

  xxx

  Chad wielded the ax with vicious and brutal precision, deflecting two of the three and slamming the third with enough force to send it right through the roof ten feet below them. Still moving upwards, the FrancoBritish assassin scored a direct hit on The Job, wedging three tines from the brutal-toothed ax into the meaty portion of The Job’s leg.

  “Take that, you fucking twat.” Chad shouted gleefully. It might not be art, but at least it was a path to job satisfaction. They grabbed hold of Garth’s t-shirt as the Job started to plummet back to the earth, making a conscientious effort to ensure that the barely aware man knew that –when they did hit the roof- it was going to be with the full weight of an immensely augmented cyborg standing on his chest.

  xxx

  They landed. Garth felt those ribs not broken by the previous two kicks to the chest shatter and poke into very precious and wonderful organs that had done a bang up job of keeping him alive for a pretty decent stretch. The ax buried in his leg was a dim, distant thing, hardly even worrying about. He watched Chad clamber handily away through a blurry haze of blood, pain and ex-dee light, marveling even as he bled out all over everywhere at the sophistication of the machine that was his assassin. Having completely abandoned ‘their’ decision to fight ‘just above’ his own skill level, Chad’s ex-dee echo was now a fully formed image, a kind of … indent on the almost liquid-like foundation of the extra-dimensionality’s base.

  It was almost like looking at a Harmony soldier’s impact, except there was something wrong with the interaction, almost as if the underlying mods to the FrancoBritish hit man’s cybernetic frame were out of tune. Laughter tried to escape, but he succeeded only in spitting blood all over himself. Whoever or whatever had built Chadsik al-Taryin could hear the Harmony all right. They could hear it, but poorly, and that was actually even more dangerous.

  Chad stepped up and wiped hair out of their eyes. They looked down on the man they’d come hundreds of trillions of miles to kill, gazed intently at the spluttering blue light crackling across Garth’s already very blue eyes.

  “Wot is so fuckin’ funny, mate?” Chad resisted the urge to pummel Garth’s skull into a fine paste. They wanted to, all of them. Even the ones who had, just a moment ago, pretended to agree that killing Garth N’Chalez was for the best. This last bit of jocularity wasn't sitting well with any of them. The blue lightning in the man’s peepers was disconcerting to say the l
east, especially because somewhere in the dim recesses of their mind, they remembered being electrocuted by lightning just like that.

  The Voice tried to interject, tried to howl that they were wasting time, that The N’Chalez couldn’t be trusted, not even this close to death, but they punched themselves in the head. They were in charge, not the disembodied Voice.

  “You ever … you ever …” Garth cleared his mind of everything as best he could, using the last vestiges of self-control to move the tiny glowing ember of ex-dee fire burning in his eyes to his hand, “you ever get a tune stuck in your head that you can’t quite … quite … remember?” He coughed, and blood spattered on Chad’s neon alabaster chest. Then he laughed at Chad’s moue of disgust. “Like … fuck me … like it’s right there on the tip of your tongue and you know it’s going to drive you batshit insane if you don’t figure it out?”

  “Mate,” Chad responded with wholehearted earnestness, “we is already so fucking insane you is not even comprehendin’ ‘ow mad we is. ‘ere, where’d that funny blue light go? You is tellin’ us what that means, and you is doin’ it right fuckin’ now.”

  This close to death, the rampaging, titanic side effects of using the extra-dimensionality didn’t matter. There was no possible way he could climb down the stairs, hike himself into the q-circuit chamber and turn everything on. He was going to die, on a rooftop, amidst a really quite lovely storm, under a full moon. As far as death scenes went, it was terribly Blade Runner, but that was, Garth decided with a wicked grin, all Chad’s fault; the mad assassin could’ve just as easily picked the middle of the goddamn afternoon, but he –they’d- wanted to fight against the backdrop of the storm for artistic reasons. He tried to laugh again, this time at Chad’s inexplicable fear of the disappearing light.

  All he did was cough more blood. Awesome. A fierce, unstintingly agonizing and soul-bearing pain sheared through him as the power reached his hand. Or, more specifically, the index finger on his right hand. Once he did this, he would never again be able to use the ultra-small aperture through to ex-dee for anything in the external world again.

  The Voice started shrieking in a language completely foreign to Chad, the terror inherent in whatever it was perceiving so overwhelmingly grave it’s warnings ripped their way out Chad’s mouth just as the finger gently tapped their body in the chest.

  Several things happened all at once, then. Some of them were expected, and two were quite surprising.

  One was … impossible.

  Garth watched a hole the size of his head tear itself through Chad’s chest, and, while that was happening, smiled merrily as the assassin was swiftly launched towards the Moon. Second, his hand blew itself to smithereens, ripped apart by the sheathes losing their semi-intelligent shit over what’d happened. That was cool, he was almost dead anyway. A corpse with a missing hand only made sense on a corpse that already had all its major organs pierced with broken bones. Oh yeah, Garth thought muzzily, and with an ax stuck in its leg.

  His corpse was going to be corpsiest corpse ever.

  So far, everything was falling into the ‘normal’ range of completely fucked up weirdness.

  Then, in a blinding corona of light that lit the entire sky from horizon to horizon, a very surprised Chadsik al-Taryin disappeared with a squawk. A split-second later, another, smaller, weirder burst of light, a kind of wonky purple afterimage, pulsed low and slow at the point of Chad’s enigmatic departure, leaving a fading arc that looked exactly like a warp drive engaging, if he were living in the Star Trek Universe. Oscar. Garth didn’t know for certain, but … it fit.

  “Well.” Garth said. Well, he didn’t actually say anything since he was pretty much just a functioning head. Damn Kin’kith survival instincts. His body didn’t even have the decency to realize that it was dead. “That was weird.”

  Then the impossible thing happened. “That ain’t weird, boss, weird is what happens next.”

  A tall, grey-eyed man with a crooked grin hove into Garth’s blood-spattered view of the world, cruelly blocking out the last fading image of the purple arc. Garth instantly recognized the body as belonging to Hamilton Barnes, but the voice … the voice was someone else’s entirely.

  “How in the fuck did you get a meatsuit?” The words came out as mostly burbles and gurgles of blood-soaked vowels, but he knew Huey would understand.

  “Long story.” Huey bent and yanked the ax unceremoniously out of Garth’s leg. He looked at it and whistled. “And you’ve only got, like, six minutes left before your head dies.”

  “I’m done for, pal.” Garth tried to move and couldn’t. His eyelids decided to close. “I’m like that head from that movie that one time.”

  “You ain’t dead.” Huey picked his boss up and cradled him gently. The man had been through so much and it honestly pained his meatsuit heart to have to do what came next, but there was no choice. The boss –whether he knew it or not- wanted this to happen. “You got some fights to win.”

  During Garth’s fight with Chad, Huey’d broken all the rules of non-interference by being down in the labs, looking on in horrified wonder at the ex-Specter’s ‘master plan’ for surviving The Final Game.

  Garth tried to say something, but the effort was too much. The only thing keeping him from dying was that irascible Kin’kith gene, that tiny bit of remorseless resistance.

  Even more frightening, Huey thought, was that, as he’d stared at Garth’s eerily magnificent quadronium circuitry, internal files deeply buried in parts of his AI mind filled his consciousness. Modifications. Augments. A veritable plethora of bits and pieces transforming Garth’s q-circuits into something … something … Huey didn’t even know the words. Standing there, staring uncomprehendingly, the quadronium circuitry had transformed itself into something … something beyond anything a level 11 could understand.

  “Fuckin’ weird, all right.” Huey whispered dubiously to himself as they left the stairwell.

  The conversion chamber loomed.

  Let’s Make A Deal…

  “Well, at least we’ve got our fuckin’ clothes on this time.” Chad remarked as they put their fingers around the edges of the great big hole that’d been blown through their chest. “That’s somethin’, innit?”

  “Ever the optimist.” The Voice commented wryly.

  “Well, it’s a strange ole world, innit, our son?” Chad stuck one of their fists all the way through the hole and grabbed hold on the other side. They laughed.

  “This is a fatal wound, Chad. You will die from this.”

  “But you won’t, yeah? You is like, a disembodied brain or summat, right?”

  “Precisely.”

  Chad sucked at a tooth. “We is not likin’ the idea of dyin’, especially cos when we die, that is it. If,” they added darkly, “you is not lyin’ about that.”

  “You know we aren’t.” The Voice added, not minding the loss of personal pronouns. Now, here, at the end of Chad’s life, it would prove to be a temporary thing. “We can get you out of here, bring you safely back to Ground Zero. All it would take is …”

  “Mate, if you is sayin’ that fuckin’ stupid word before we is dyin’, we is figure out a way to come back and haunt you, cos if you is sayin’ that word, we is not agreein’ to your terms, no matter what.” The wind hurtling through their open chest wound felt … interesting and they wondered if anyone else in the entirety of Life had ever felt the same thing.

  “As you say, Chad. As you say. Agree, and we will take you home, where you will apply yourself to the purpose for which you were … recreated.”

  They thought about it. They missed Ground Zero a great deal. All the drugs, scabrous whores, pointless gunfights and back-alley murders a fella could ask for and then more on top of that. They imagined days and days and days of idle time in that dark pit of despair and shrugged.

  “Orl right then, mate, be about it, then. We agree.” Chad paused thoughtfully. “No muckin’ about wiv our clothes, though, yeah? If we is showin’ up ne
kkid in Ground Zero, we is gonna be pissed.”

  “Have no fear, Chadsik al-Taryin.” The Voice assured smoothly. “It wouldn’t do for the Savior to be seen with their meat and two veg exposed.”

  “An’ no callin us that, either. Makes us sound pretentious.” Chad watched a hole in the fabric of Unreality open just ahead of where they were. On the other side, Ground Zero beckoned. “Crikey, that’s a way to travel! Oy! Wot about my ship?”

  “You won’t need it.” The Voice said.

  “Bollocks.” Chad grumped as they shot through the wormhole. “We liked that ship.”

  Oscar Sabellik’s Big Adventure

  “This doesn’t seem like such a good idea anymore.” Oscar whispered nervously.

  Three hundred feet below where he hovered nervously, Garth N’Chalez and Chadsik al-Taryin were having a conversation, completely oblivious to his presence. This, the Latelian scientist decided, was a good thing.

  He would have a hard time explaining why he was inside a machine that, for all intents and purposes, had been designed to travel through probable Realities. Oscar expected that Garth would be very upset that the machine had been built without his permission or involvement and the thought of something like Chadsik al-Taryin getting hold of the Improbability Device made Oscar sick to his stomach in ways he’d never even imagined.

  One of the very few good things to come from putting the finishing touches on the machine was a complete absence of Garth’s own memories; it’d been difficult, feeling Garth’s emotional distress at losing touch with the pre-Reality combined with his own despair. The only thing keeping him from going mad and shouting at everyone had been finishing the machine, and now that it was done, Oscar was mightily glad; if he was right, the Improbability Device was –somehow, magically, improbably- going to take him there anyways.