Citizen Pariah (Unreal Universe Book 3)

by Lee

  Something was happening. He needed to get Huey alone so the two of them could talk about what in the goddamn hell’d happened to the original design for the q-form, but the AI was doing a superbly masterful job of avoiding that scenario.

  Grabbing a knife from Ute’s plate, Garth tossed it straight up in the air and waited. When the knife came plunging down, he grabbed it –a bit clumsily- and threw it towards the wall directly opposite him. The thinly coated duronium knife seemed to sizzle through the air before sinking into the sturdy partition.

  “Sweet.” Garth eyed Huey, who played innocent with all the skill of a five year old trying to steal cookies.

  “And,” Charbo drank some water, “you are capable of building God soldier … conversion chambers? In your basement.”

  Herrig put a hand on Charbo’s arm. “Sa Nickels is … capable.”

  “Yep.” Garth raised a glass, toasted his own awesomeness, an awesomeness that was likely to not mean a good goddamn thing until or unless the q-circuits got their damned asses in gear, and turned him into a super-soldier in the next … three … hours.

  “So why are you doing things like stabbing yourself with knives and forks?” Charbo took off his hat. “I’m sorry if I sound like an idiot, sas, but this … this is all so very confusing to me.”

  Herrig, who remembered his very first encounter with Garth, laughed. The man had radiated such hostility and rage that it’d been like sitting in a cage with a mad beast, but then he’d relayed the story about how he’d saved those men from the Gamma Plateau. Whether or not Garth knew it, when he talked about the things he did, some … quirk … in his voice, in the method he told stories, transported the listener there. You grew accustomed to it over time, but only just.

  “Because,” Garth looked at Huey again, leveling mock-rage broadside, “something was wrong with my design. And he,” the ex-Specter pointed a finger at Huey’s meatsuit, “did some weird shit to it.”

  “Hey!” A hand flew defensively up and Huey stared at it for a long second. Meatsuits. How weird. “We’ll totally talk about that! Ot-nay in ront-fay of the ormal-nay eople-pay.”

  Ute decided enough was enough. He wanted some answers. “Are you going to be able to survive in the arena against the Eight or not?”

  Nothing else had been on his mind more than that, and it had been on his mind since the moment he’d fallen out of the chamber into Ute’s arms. Theoretically, even with the flaws inherent in his design, he should already be at least half as strong as he’d been before setting foot on Hospitalis. Half as strong and just as fast, if not faster. He’d specifically gone out of his way to design the augments and circuitry around the conundrum of surviving eight-to-one odds.

  Designing things that way meant going defensive more than offensive, an okay compromise: he’d quite honestly grown sick to death of always wading in and cracking skulls open.

  But the q-form was barely even functional! He was a bit faster, a bit stronger, and not at all armor plated; that last had been somewhat difficult to work up, and was one of the areas in which he suspected he’d failed completely. He’d been forced to write coding for the non-existent operating system to tell the circuits to ‘make him not die’, which, when working with the paradoxical ‘not-metal’ quadronium, meant … whatever it meant.

  The problem was the holes in the original design. During the design phase, his ex-dee connection had worked only intermittently, sparking and futzing out when the dizzying spectacle of the atomic-sized circuitry had grown too complicated for an organic mind to hold in place. Now … that connection was completely gone.

  He’d used the last bit of it to punch a hole through Chad’s chest and now he was effectively sealed off from ever reaching into the extra-dimensionality again by the very tools he’d designed.

  There was a solution, but it violated a sacrosanct promise; inside him, burning softly like the last embers on a piece of coal, was a smidgeon of paradox. There was enough power left to speed things along to where it’d take less than ten minutes for everything to come online. He could get up, take a piss, and blam! Ready to fight in the Arena against the Eight and Gurant. Ready to win and gain entrance into Bravo, ready to find out the last –and only- secret he was intentionally keeping from himself.

  Ready to fight the War against the M’Zahdi Hesh.

  It was appealing. It was more than that, it was demanding.

  Eager to answer the call, that ember started burning brighter, made itself a bit more noticeable.

  Garth shook his head angrily. No. He’d made a promise to Lisa, a promise that needed that last bit of Reality. What had he promised her, though? It was on the tip of his tongue, and it filled him with dread to the point where he could barely stand it.

  A cold, worried silence washed across the table and Garth realized that his subconscious denial seemed an answer to Ute’s question.

  Garth raised a hand and shook his head again, this time laughingly. “No, no, that was for another thing. I was like, ‘should I eat more food’ and I was all ‘I am a huge fat-ass who is going to be bench-pressing God soldiers in like, three hours’. Can I win?”

  The ex-Specter ultra-trillionaire considered the slow, almost lazy progression the q-circuits were taking towards total operational control, firmly disregarding the fact that the first thing that should’ve come up was the retinal display allowing him to willfully control the various gewgaws and whizz-bang toys he’d built in to the system. Only it hadn’t, leading him to worry what was going on inside his body. There was no telling what condition he’d be in by the time they got to the arena.

  “Oh yeah, no, totally.” The lie sounded nearly believable. “I’m gonna kick ass. Huey, walk with me.”

  Garth pushed away from the table, so Herrig, Ute and Charbo could talk quietly amongst themselves. The three men had an awful lot to discuss. It was probably an unfair burden to dump on Herrig, but there were things on his mind.

  Huey followed his friend out of the room, forcing the meatsuit into behaving; organic, purely chemical reactions had the vast AI mind so damned worried that the actual wireless connection allowing him to operate Hamilton’s mindless body threatened to drop out altogether.

  When they were outside and out of earshot, Garth turned to Huey. “You have got some fucking explaining to do, pal. A meatsuit? And what the fuck is up with the chamber, man? Everything about these augments is all the way wrong. I need answers, because, pal, I totally lied in there. If I had a week to prepare, a week to let what’s going on continue uninterrupted, yeah, I could win. Maybe. If a star goat fell on the auditorium. What is going on?”

  Huey sighed, deflated. He’d been waiting for this moment. Just as equally, he’d been preparing himself to give answers that his best friend was not likely to be particularly fond of, disliking them to the point of maybe killing him.

  He had, after all, violated the non-interference rule in a pretty damn flagrant manner.

  The First Rule of Fight Club Applies

  “Sooooo.” Huey leaned up against the wall nearest him and stuck his hands in his pockets. It was the best way to ensure that he didn’t fight back should Garth lose his shit; the meatsuit was stuffed full of combat tactics and an arsenal. Automatic responses were shrieking for control and the subminds were barely keeping pace. “I can, uh, tell you, uh, some stuff? But not everything. There’s … stuff … I’m not allowed to talk about.”

  “Are you fucking with me?” Garth bit back a shout. “Are you seriously Fight Clubbing me right now?”

  Huey shrugged sheepishly. “Yeah, basically. Sorry.”

  Garth rubbed the back of his neck and made a truly exasperated sound. He rubbed the holes in his arm. What kind of super-soldier got hurt by a fork? He missed the sheathes, precisely as the assholes running Bravo had expected. He’d give almost anything to have that power back and the hunger sickened him. Worse still was the desperation that’d caused him to build a fucking DIY-God soldier conversion chamber. “Can you explain that
bit of bullshit or is that Rule Two?”

  “Yeah.” Huey pursed his lips trying to work out the answer. On the Latelian ‘LINKs there were hundreds of millions of different examples of how best to answer difficult questions. Thousands of years of Latelian television offered up a few thousand more. Historical documents resulted in a dozen.

  Experience gave him one.

  “You.” Huey jammed his hands further into his pockets and fought to keep them there; Garth’s automatic response was to whirl suddenly, hands up. His response was to try and Kung-Fu the man who would save Reality. “You.” The AI repeated, more strenuously. “Right in the middle of the hack, you left a recording which I will not ever play you, not in a hundred berjillion years, not even if you threaten to kill me and EMP my brainbox.”

  “You’d rather risk death than tell me what I told you not to tell me?” Garth asked wonderingly. He was surprised that he wasn’t as pissed as he thought he’d be, and rather suspected it was because he’d already done the same thing with Lisa Laughlin.

  It seemed he was quite fond of running around behind his own fucking back doing things when he was ex-dee savant-ing all over the place. Which begged the question: what other random weirdnesses had he perpetrated while under that creative fugue? It was evident now, on the far side of everything, that his ‘amnesia’ was an artfully prepared sham, that there’d been some part of … well, the ‘real’ Garth N’Chalez peeping out every now and then, taking stock of the Universe, determining the best way to get out from under the ton of shit he’d woken up into, manipulating events so that when it came time to fight the Heshii properly, everything would be on track.

  It was a profound moment, and Garth hated thinking about the kind of mind capable of doing that.

  Huey nodded. On one of the many, many Screens in his mind, Latelians everywhere were looking up how to build Molotov cocktails and other homemade bits of fun. The Chairwoman had definitely screwed up. “Yup.”

  “Cool.” Garth could tell by Huey’s expression that the AI was surprised. That meant the artificial mind either didn’t know about Lisa, or didn’t know everything about Lisa. “So. Meatsuit.”

  “Briefly, about a thousand years ago, some random Latelian scientist invented a cloning machine. Some other guy, Hamilton Barnes, did a thing that saved the life of the Chairman.” Huey replayed the scene in his mind, wondering sadly how in the hell Barnes had survived a thousand years with all those deaths in there. “Everyone decided that the most loyal man of the time deserved to live again. And so he did. Over time, Hamilton Barnes became a … fixer. For the Regime. He kept dying; they kept shoving his brain into a new body.”

  “Which you stole.” The one time they’d spoken, Barnes had impressed Garth, had struck him as being very … honorable. The Latelian had displayed an uncharacteristically deep understanding of true loyalty.

  “What!” Huey took a step forward. “What! No, no fucking way.” He waved his hands around, exasperated. “Barnes got bootstomped to death by Chad. The Chads. Whoever. Doans slammed the guy back into a new body right away, which was … unwise. The dude was going all the way off the rails, boss. Probably would’ve wound up assassinating the crazy bitch.”

  Garth smiled wistfully at ‘boss’. It was so good to be talking to Huey. “So you made an offer he couldn’t refuse.”

  “Basically.” Huey settled back against the wall. “Believe me, boss, he was happy to go. This world, this Latelyspace, isn’t the one he remembered. His fight with Chadsik broke something in him. He was dying, rotting from the inside out from doubt. Hospitalis would’ve suffered because of his pain.”

  Having pored over the history books during his temporary incarceration in that hospital, Garth knew perhaps as much as any professor about how much the worlds had changed. Huey’s recollection of Barnes’ feelings on the present were as accurate as anything could be, and unlike God soldiers –who were kept stupefied for their entire lives, until or unless they started displaying signs of evolution- the fixer had lived through each moment, had experienced the inexorable crawl towards a different kind of Regime.

  Garth reflected on this, then squatted. Time to try a jump. He laughed self-consciously at the look on Huey’s face as he got up to a pathetic four foot jump. Once he landed, he asked his next question. “How are you running that meatsuit? I’m assuming you’re still in the baffle-sphere?”

  “Oh yeah. Totally. This meatsuit,” Huey broke down into a passable display of robot breakdancing, “is being operated by remote control. Uh. Yeah. There’s a thing here calling itself a HIM.”

  “Do you know where it is?” Garth interrupted quickly. If he could access the HIM, he could open the controls and use the processing power to examine the q-circuits to see what was wrong. Since Huey was either incapable of or unwilling to help him, the only thing this side of Latelyspace able to do the job properly was the HIM.

  “Rule One.” Huey flinched at the flicker of anger on Garth’s face. He apologized.

  “Dammit.” Garth kicked at a stray pebble and watched it shoot eighty feet. Excited, he looked around for another one and tried to repeat what’d happened. This rock went about ten. He glowered. Something was weird, all right. “I’m guessing then you’re connected to the quantum comm signal emitted by the HIM through the ambient protocols in the sphere, yeah? And Barnes, who is probably a walking encyclopedia of crazy shit, is a part of that net?”

  “Yep.”

  There was a wealth of information about Huey’s possession of Hamilton Barnes that Garth wanted to know, but assumed the AI would either lie outright or claim it fell into spheres of knowledge unsafe to know.

  “Well, can you tell me what you did to my circuits at least? Maybe I can figure out what’s going on if I hear the process explained.”

  Huey reflected on those last minute changes he’d been forced to make. Garth wasn’t going to like it, but he deserved to know. He started talking. “Well, there’s a recording. I can show you that.”

  xxx

  “Seriously?” Garth couldn’t stop his forehead from wrinkling in astonishment at the holographic display. “You seriously did this?”

  “Uh.” Huey stalled. “Part? I did the last bit, to the sheathes, with the stabby stuff. There were … there was a lot of stuff going on. The ideas just sort of …”

  “That hurt.” Garth rubbed his chest. It’d hurt more than he could properly remember, for which he was eternally grateful. Any being not Kin’kith would’ve probably torn themselves to bits rather than even attempt survival.

  He pointed to the whirling bits that Huey had plugged into the diagrams, shaking his head. “Are those what I think they are?”

  “Uh.” Huey scratched his nose. “It depends on what you think they are.”

  “I think they’re fucking QFE emitters that mesh perfectly into the fucking holes in the fucking schematics that I only goddam wrote up bloody damn well yesterday.” Garth groused. He wanted to take a page from Chad’s playbook and bean himself proper in the head. Instead, he pointed scathingly at the hovering designs. “To make matters fucking worse and even more fucking ludicrous, they are sitting where chakras go, and that is fucking stupid.”

  Huey threw his hands wide. “Look, boss, all I can say is that when I snuck in here yesterday to take a peak what you were doing while you were upstairs getting your ass handed …”

  “Hey, man! I was doing all right.” Garth interjected hotly, if weakly.

  “… to you, all this shit just sort of uploaded itself.” Huey wiggled his fingers for effect. “Like magic. You must’ve put all this crap in my brain when you stuck that rod thing in there or something. I dunno. You’re the one … were … the one with the weird connection to the extra-dimensionality, not me.”

  Garth figured that was a balls-out lie on Huey’s part, but let it slide; the AI was under an awful lot of pressure. Push against the hardwired commands –commands he’d damn well plugged in- and there was no telling what would happen. “Why would I do thi
s? Quantum Field Emitters inside the body? That’s bonkers. The stresses of a single one being fully operation will be … immense. Way more worse than fighting against the sheathes. This is insane, Huey. If I use this version of the q-form, I’ll die! Using even one of the QFE’s will turn me into confetti!”

  “Maybe before, sure, but, um …” Huey shrugged. “But now? You’re stuffed to the tits with quadronium circuitry. You’re a walking extrusion of Reality. You could survive that, I think. And think of them as … as batteries, it’s easier.”

  The meatsuit wearing AI was grateful Garth wasn’t pushing for clarification on exactly how he’d come up with the modifications; parts of the enhancements truly had originated from that long ago hack, but the QFE’s and a whole slew of other upgrades came from … nowhere. There wasn’t a single submind accepting responsibility.

  Huey knew –and would never admit- that Garth had had nothing to do with the new additions.

  The artificial intelligence swallowed to hide his nervousness.

  “If I do that, then it looks like these sons of bitches are built to turn on one at a time.” He had to admit, the design was beautiful. Batshit crazy insane. Like if Batman and the Joker had a sexy lovechild and it built a way to make someone insane enough to do something like this crazy insane, but beautiful nevertheless. “This actually goes a long way to explaining why I’m not where I thought I’d be. I don’t got the juice yet. And the stabby bits? Where you, uh, stabbed each sheathe? What’s that about?”

  “Dunno.” Huey hated not knowing the answer to that. “The sheathes are/were atomic-sized machines that performed basically the same function as what your own body did by creating miniature bridges into the extra-dimensionality. But they were controlled by a neural network obeying the directives of Bravo. I can’t hack into that OS because … because I can’t. Maybe something will happen when all the … heheheh … chakras boot up.”