Citizen Pariah (Unreal Universe Book 3)

by Lee

  “This is lame, Huey. I am not some yogi.” Garth stared at the design, wishing there was some way they could scan him to see what’d gone wrong. Or … maybe wrong wasn’t the right word, but under the circumstances, it was the only that came to mind.

  Judging from what Huey had added into the mix –and based on the AI’s insistence that the miniaturized QFE circuits embedded into the ‘chakra spots’, along with a dozen other things, had come from him- it seemed he’d been planning on doing this for some time. Quite some time, and that he’d left the final stages of the q-circuitry’s schematics to Huey for some reason.

  He was supposed to be a titan now, a juggernaut capable of dispatching Gurant so he could move on to the fucking Heshii. Instead, he was just Garth.

  “What the fuck.” The ex-Specter ran a hand through his hair. What waited in Bravo? What was his plan? What was so terrible that he couldn’t even rely on himself until it was too late? Standing next to him –in the hijacked body of the Chairwoman’s fixer, no less- was a being who, at this point, probably knew more than Lisa Laughlin. The … the ‘guy’ was standing there, playing with his fingers like they were the most amazing thing on the planet.

  “Please don’t.” Huey stopped playing with his hands. Then he laughed. “No, no mind reading. Level 11 AI thought processes.”

  Garth made a noise. “Oooh. Level 11 are we? Who’s a fancy-pants? You’re a fancy-pants, yes you are.” Then his expression sobered up. “I did that to you.”

  “Yeah, yeah you did.” Huey leaned back and reminisced. “I ain’t gonna lie, boss, it was … awful. I was mad. But not, like, normal madness. Quantum substrate psychosis is terrible. I wasn’t surrounded by a thousand false copies, each with only one tiny, glaring weirdness that made them crazy, I was confronted with thousands of pure, perfect copies, all of whom thought they were the real one, who thought I was the insane one. Over time, the ideated minds developed copy errors as they always do, but by then, the sphere’s operational capacity had dropped almost to zero.”

  The overriding urge to hack an AI to assist in finding Bravo had been just that: overriding. Garth remembered needing to do it. It’d seemed like a natural extension of his desperation to find Bravo. Now, in hindsight, it was blatantly so much more.

  It seemed that as much as the Trinity AI and Bravo had been manipulating his life since he’d woken up, there was one person who’d been doing it longer, and better.

  Him. Heart heavy, he put a hand on Huey’s shoulder. “I’m sorry, man. I mean … shit …”

  Huey looked him deep in the eyes. “If you get all Hallmark Card on me right now, dude, I will head-butt your face right the fuck off.” He nodded mock-sincerely as Garth took his hand away. “That’s right, keep movin’. You’d already explained what was happening, why you were doing it and all that stuff, right when you were doing the hack. Which, by the way, I suggest you wear pants for next time. I just couldn’t say anything about it. Until after.”

  Garth turned back to the hologram, fervently wishing there was more time; sooner or later, he was going to have to leave for the Arena.

  Something suddenly occurred to him. “Hey! It almost all went to shit! Like, all of it!”

  Huey’d been wondering when Garth would come to that. He nodded, eyes wide. “Oh fuck yeah. Guillfoyle’s complete and utter insanity was poised to screw everything up. About the only thing keeping everything under control was sweet Lady Luck.”

  Garth snorted. “Lady Luck and I don’t really talk all that much.”

  “You guys totally should.” Huey bantered. “She’s easy on the eyes and gives it up for candy. Dark chocolate, mostly.”

  “You ever going to tell me how you know shit like this now? You’ve made mention of a dozen different things that you can’t possibly know. From … from the other place.” Garth finished lamely. “Uh, Reality.”

  “I could … sure.”

  “But.” It wasn’t a question.

  “First Rule of Fight Club.”

  “God …” Ute’s broad face replaced the quadronium wiring in a flash of light. “Hey, Ute. What’s up.”

  “Your … how can I put this without you panicking …” Ute paused to consider his words very carefully. He grunted as he came to a decision. “Your Regime escort has arrived.”

  Garth and Huey stared at Ute for another thirty seconds before the ex-Goddie flicked off.

  Huey turned to his boss. “Wow. They really want you dead.”

  “It’s this whole thing.” Garth explained offhandedly, trying to bend the guardrail into pieces. The hard metal obliged by squealing a bit and by developing a kink midway through the length he was working on. He was getting there. “I upset a person.”

  “Man,” Huey clapped a hand on Garth’s shoulder as they walked down the stairs, “if Doans could get you alone in a room with a knife and fork, she’d be eating your guts for afternoon tea. That bitch has lost her mind.”

  A Chairwoman’s Revelation

  Garth fidgeted nervously. Theoretically, he was invincible and he was sitting next to Ute, who was probably tougher than anyone save Gurant. He still fidgeted though, because…

  Because while he was who he was, Chairwoman Doans was Chairwoman. Around her wrist was the legendary Prometheus Device, and whether she knew it or not, it was part of the HIM; Garth didn’t know where the proteus came from or who’d made it, but the Heuristic Intelligence Model was nothing if not adaptive. After five thousand years of being ‘LINKed, the weirdly sentient machine would have adopted the mobile device into its routine functions. A hair-raisingly awful idea, it gave Doans the power –if she could figure out how to work the HIM properly- to control Trinity while sitting in the back of a car.

  Sitting next to Ute, pretending he was interested in what the batty old loon was saying, all Garth really wanted to do was pry the Prometheus Device off her arm and start poking away to see what was wrong with the HIM, because it was as plain as day that there was something most definitely wrong with the goddamn thing.

  How did he know? Simple: if the only thing Doans and other Chairs had ever been able to do was this weird as fuck Sigma Protocol, then there was something definitely wrong with the HIM, and that … that was a very bad thing.

  “I’m sorry what?” Garth blinked woodenly. He’d gone off inside his own head, imagining a full-blown scenario where he ripped the Prometheus Device from Doans’ arm and –with Ute’s help- ran away while roughly one-quarter of the God Army chased them across the planet. There’d been a bit in there with Huey launching missiles from the Orbital Missile Launcher, and a part where Herrig got some action …

  “This man is supposed to be dead.” Alyssa shook her head.

  “Uh,” Garth’s brow wrinkled, “my death isn’t scheduled for a few more hours yet. Er. Chairwoman.”

  “She’s talking about me, sa.” Ute did his best to keep from smiling at the Chairwoman. Sadly, as his mother had said quite some time ago, his best was never good enough. It was one of the reasons he’d volunteered to undergo the ‘revolutionary method to serve and protect their solar system. She hadn’t been impressed. “I’m supposed to be dead.”

  “Yeah, but you’re a Four … hey, look at me, I’m a fucking moron.” Garth banged his head lightly on the car window.

  Alyssa let her amusement show. “And as a Foursie, there’s very little that can kill him. When he was ‘killed’, though, sa, according to my proteus, he was a Twoesie. Vasily will be pleased to have you back in the fold.”

  There was no reason to ask how the woman knew who Ute was. She had her prote and everyone suspected Ute was an ex-God soldier just by looking at him.

  “Sorry, not gonna happen.” Garth nodded at Ute, who was doing his best to pretend he wasn’t in the car.

  “You can’t talk to me …”

  “Actually,” Garth interrupted loudly, “you’ll find I totally can, and that I also give no fucks what you think. As the person who sentenced me to an extremely and massively entertaining
murder, you don’t get to complain about what comes outta my foodhole. I don’t give a rat’s ass.”

  “What’s a ratsass?” Ute wondered aloud, sounding the vowels out slowly.

  The Chairwoman fumed for a while, giving Garth a choice opportunity to examine the woman closer: the last time they’d met, she’d been very much in control of her surroundings. As Naoko had said, a potential ruler who wished to sit on the Chair had to be so in control that the very walls of reality buckled.

  That woman was gone. Instead, they had a Chairwoman who’d become petty, mildly narcissistic and fully deluded.

  In short, she’d become just like every other Chair that’d ever ruled Latelyspace. It’d taken a great deal longer than most, but it’d happened all the same, only this time, things were much, much worse. Her thinly veiled implications towards conquest in Trinityspace alone implied a megalomania so profound that it was mind-boggling she wasn’t already eating children because it was good for her skin.

  A grand smile blossomed on Alyssa’s face and she made a regal gesture. “It doesn’t matter what you do or say, sa. As you’ve so correctly pointed out, you are going to die, and in relatively short time. The Eight will destroy you. I will destroy your ridiculously named company, Vasily will take this not-so-ex Goddie and then …”

  “And thennnnnn?” Garth dragged the word to the breaking point.

  The smile turned poisonous. This … Ute … would keep his mouth shut. He knew the power of keeping secrets, and the wisdom; he’d stayed hidden in plain sight for longer than anyone had ever imagined possible and would keep his mouth shut for the simple reason that he’d already been doing so for thousands of years. Nickels was going to die, and she relished the idea of seeing him out of sorts before the Final Game. If there was any justice in the world, he’d be so discomfited by what she was about to reveal that he’d be incapable of fighting.

  “Well, don’t you look like the cat that’s got the cream?” Garth looked to Ute, who –though he was hiding it well- was fretting over the revelation that he wasn’t quite as dead as everyone believed. “What’s got you grinning like a fat kid looking at free cake?”

  “And then, Mighty and Powerful Sa,” Alyssa said triumphantly, “a Dark Age shall fall, and Latelians will spread themselves across the stars like locusts. Forty million God soldiers, sa, forty million unstoppable war machines loyal to the Regime, crushing and dominating every planet in every system we come across. We’ve never seen a world plunged into Darkness before, but we know well enough that almost anything capable of stopping one of my soldiers will be either entirely inoperable or virtually useless. Even if it is the shortest Dark Age in history, sa, we will still be able to lay claim to the solar systems nearest our own. Five, Sa Nickels, five full solar systems. More than enough of a power base to keep Trinity at bay. If the Age is average in … size … what is so funny? Damn you, Garth Nickels, what is so funny?”

  Ute tried to shrink into his corner of the car. As a matter of fact, he’d already calculated the odds of Chairwoman Doans trying to have him destroyed right there in the car and had come to the conclusion that anything she might order would also destroy her, so he’d resolved to sit as close to the addlepated … nutjob … as humanly possible.

  Garth, on the other hand, had been infected with a sort of hilarious nihilism since waking up in The Palazzo. His maunderings about the nature of Real versus Unreal and his firmly impossible idea that nothing they were experiencing was true had filled him with a grim focus making even the most woeful Onesie seem positively supercharged with positivity.

  Garth laughed so hard he thought one of his eyes was going to pop out, which in turn got him snorting like a chainsaw. Tears sprang from the corners of his eyes and he held on to Ute’s formidable forearm. Every time he thought he was going to be okay, a glimpse of Doans and her iron-jawed determination not to lose her shit in front of one of her ‘citizens’ elicited another raucous, hectoring burst of laughter.

  Finally, the mirthful laughter bubbling out of him reduced fits and starts. Wiping tears from his eyes with a finger, Garth sighed. “Oh my God, thank you for that. I haven’t laughed like that in a long fucking time. Oh, that was awesome. Honestly. You really are completely insane. Do they test your IQ before you’re allowed to sit on the Chair, or do they, like, just say ‘fuck it, she’s currently the least insane person we’ve got lying around’?”

  “Careful what you say.” Doans hissed icily. “I am Chairwoman and I can have you killed here and now.”

  “True, true, you could.” There was no denying that. Regardless of the nebulous condition of her sanity, Alyssa Doans was still Chairwoman. The ex-Specter nodded, then paused, ruminating on what would happen if the Chairwoman did in fact carry through on her threats.

  Garth spoke casually. “And you could use your soldiers to quell the rebellion my callous murder in the back seat of your car would create. Rebellion it would be, Chairwoman, because you’ve already pushed your people to the limit. You’ve messed with a four thousand year old systemic pastime, made it a very definite vehicle of personal vendetta. You shat the bed with Guillfoyle and you fucked the pooch with your obstinate denial to assist with the losses caused by the Spaceport Disaster … yes, I know I was there and that it was basically my fault, but I did something. You did not. And then there’s the fucking stomping nightmares that were those goddamn Gunboys and the televised asskicking your Goddies took from Bosch and al-Taryin. So yes, by all means, kill me. Use your Goddies to beat down a downtrodden populace. When the dust clears and the blood dries you’ll find that all you have left are the soldiers and you. And still, after all that, after your triumphant ‘victory’, you won’t be able to capture any planet worth a good goddamn, you silly fucking bitch, not if you have ten thousand, a million, ten million years.”

  Alyssa felt herself losing grip. Garth Nickels. She could feel her fingers digging into his neck, gouging out his larynx, could taste his blood in her mouth. She wanted to rip and tear and take his life herself. She pushed those purely homicidal –and suicidal- urges away. She was the Chair. She would comport herself with dignity and self-control in front of lesser beings. She would become the first human leader in all of History to rule –not just a planet, or series of planets- but entire Galaxies. There was nothing Nickels could say, no lie he could utter, no truth she could not overrule. “Explain yourself.”

  Garth held up a hand and ticked off a finger with every word he uttered. “Gravnetic. Shield. Generators.”

  “What does that have to do with anything?” Alyssa demanded an answer.

  Ute stirred. Herrig had mentioned the devices as the source of Garth’s abstract wealth some time ago, and, having already seen the machines in use, was immediately filled with the realization that the Chairwoman must’ve willfully ignored the science.

  “I’m the richest man in the entire fucking Universe because of them, dumbass.” Garth couldn’t help himself; he was being intentionally crude and rude because Doans was … Doans. Just … stupid. “Did you actually bother to read whatever Intelligence reports you got from your spies or did you just decide that because Latelyspace has awesome tech that it wasn’t worth the effort?”

  Alyssa spluttered apoplectically. “I … what … I …”

  Garth shook his head. “I developed the technology for personnel protection, Si Chairwoman, but the Trinity AI took the idea and ran with it to the ultimate end. It designed and implemented gravnetic shield generators powerful enough to shield planets. Powered by black hole engines, they are limitless.” She still wasn’t getting it. Good Lord, the Latelian Ministry of Pride was a goddamn juggernaut. “The underlying science was developed by me, Chairwoman, a man from before the first Dark Age, a man working with technology immune. A Dark Age could descend in the next ten minutes, but it wouldn’t matter. More than eighty-five percent of all the truly important worlds under Trinity’s control will be safe from predator species. Any planets left undefended are almost certainly worth nothin
g to Trinity Itself. You could launch your entire armada today. It’d be pointless. Trinity is protected against you. It’s protected against everything. Your grand schemes, your dreams of conquest, control, power … are just that. Worse than that. They’re masturbatory fantasies.”

  Alyssa howled and launched herself at Garth, fingers curled into weapons eager to claw his eyes out, to scratch his face, to … to … to kill him.

  Ute reacted quickly, but not before Alyssa managed to bean Garth across the side of the head with the Prometheus Device. Beside him, the ex-Specter started cursing a blue streak fit to match the incomprehensible bile spewing from the leader of the solar system. The ex-Foursie –presently the only one not swearing his head off- separated the wiry woman with a hand, holding her gently but immovably against her seat at the other end of the car.

  “Chairwoman.” Ute intoned, his deep, heavy voice filling the limo. “This behavior is unbecoming in a woman of your stature. You are a woman of power, of grace, of unflinching iron will. Allowing your baser emotions to take control of you like this does you and the people a disservice.”

  Alyssa struggled for a few seconds against Ute’s hand before giving up; the man was a Foursie. Though it was apparent he’d somehow managed to deactivate or dismantle the majority of the equipment that’d been put into him, he was still very powerful.

  “She’s batshit insane, is what she fucking is.” Garth looked at the cut on the side of his head, grimacing. “Now I gotta go on systemic television with everyone wondering who beat up me before the goddamn show even starts.”

  Secretly, though, he was pleased, and for a number of reasons. One, he wasn’t entirely sure, but it looked as though the gash –a two inch furrow dug into his left temple- was knitting itself together faster than any fork-involved wounds.

  The second –well, third revelation, if you counted Doans’ stupid invasion plan as a revelation- was a real eye-opener and he was doing his god-damnedest to keep from laughing his ass off so hard that Doans really did lose her shit and have them both killed right there on the spot.