Citizen Pariah (Unreal Universe Book 3)

by Lee

  The Prometheus Device was made from quadronium. It was the funniest thing he’d ever imagined in his entire life. Chair after Chair had been carting the answer to systemic –galactic- superiority on their wrists, and for five thousand years! It was … mind-boggling, and probably the only thing keeping Latelian scientists from ever discovering the truth behind the ‘metal’ was the extremely covetous nature of the person who wore it.

  “When you guys landed here,” Garth nodded, satisfied. The cut was sealing itself up, literally being pulled shut and stitched by impossibly thin, nearly invisible wisps of quadronium circuitry. “Did you, like, look at all the cool shit lying around and even bother to wonder where it all came from?”

  Alyssa smoothed her hair and straightened her jacket, eyeing Nickels coolly. “We are Latelian. We do not wonder. We take, and we improve. Anything left behind was from a civilization that had obviously failed.”

  Garth opened his mouth to point out that this was such a blatant lie that somewhere a child started crying because of it, but Ute interjected. “Si Chairwoman, I think … I feel that owing to the nature of the … the … incident of a few minutes ago it would perhaps be best if we arrived at the Arena in a different vehicle. An associate of ours has been following behind us.”

  “By all means.” Chairwoman Alyssa Doans gestured for the limousine to stop. It did so almost immediately. She smiled at Garth on the way out. “Enjoy these last few minutes of life, Sa Nickels, and remember, if you attempt to flee or if you choose not to fight, the repercussions will be … disastrous. For you and everyone you might even think you know. We will reach beyond our small system and strike at friends in Trinityspace, too.”

  As soon as Ute was out of the car and waving Huey down, Garth stuck his head back into the limo. “You can suck on my balls, you batshit insane fucktard. Not only am I going to bootstomp the ever-loving shit out of the Eight, I am going to murder Gurant. You had better hope that the Box you give me in that goddamn Arena is the one I built, or I will shatter this planet. I will tear Central and all the cities down around your ears and I will rain devastation like you’ve never imagined down upon your head. I came here for a single, simple purpose and I’ve been fucking impeded at every turn, Chairwoman. All of this could’ve been avoided. All of it. You could’ve let me into the Box without anyone being the wiser. Doing so wouldn’t have affected a single person in any way, especially since no one knows you’ve been showing the world fakes for thousands of years. And you know that. Instead, you’ve lost your mind and have gotten yourself into a pissing contest with a guy who destroys solar systems for a hobby. It’s going to take about an hour to get to the Arena from here, Chairwoman. Consider your options. Wisely. Then, after you’re done fulfilling your revenge fantasies, make bloody sure the Box I want is the one that’s there at the end for me. Have a safe journey, and don’t forget to buckle up.”

  Garth left the Chairwoman to sit in silence. A fitful smirk flitted across her lips as she motioned for the car to begin driving. Nickels was right. He was, it seemed, always right. He’d entered the system big, loud, and brash, a glaring warning light of danger and trouble. He’d never pretended to be anything other than a man who owned their Box, had never tried to disguise his skills as a world-class destroyer.

  They’d mismanaged Nickels from the beginning. If they had let him into the Box, well, odds are that whatever answers the man was looking for would’ve been learned and he almost undoubtedly would’ve gone on his way. The Spaceport wouldn’t have blown up, Guillfoyle wouldn’t’ve been outed as a maniac, Gualf wouldn’t’ve taken the Museum hostage, and she wouldn’t be afflicted with Chair Crazies.

  Still and all, Alyssa decided she couldn’t be that badly stricken; she knew that somewhere along the line she’d lost her mind, which meant that she wasn’t that insane.

  Garth’s warning echoed in her ears and she laughed loudly, mirth echoing in her ears. If he did survive both the Eight and Gurant, he’d learn in a relatively short amount of time that you never fucked with the Chair.

  Ordinarily, This is Illegal, But I’ll Allow It

  Every ship flying in or through Latelyspace received regular updates from the Regime through the ‘LINKs. Typically, this contained a list of rules and regulations –of which there were many, which changed more often, according to Greuz, than a woman’s mind- as well as flash updates from each world were another common feature.

  These data parcels were upheld and maintained by the Regime, and were generated and uploaded by heavily automated avatars every four days, giving the crew of the Zhivago a massive amount of surprising data to digest in relatively short time.

  Greuz pointed at the Screen. “That is the man we knocked out in your room?”

  Naoko nodded, fussing with some coding. She was distracted by Garth’s visage on the Screen and even more distracted by the fact that, relatively speaking, she’d barely spent any time with the man and missed him so. “Mmhmm.” She mumbled, chewing on a lip.

  What she planned on doing was technically illegal. She was justifying it by deciding that since she –or, more accurately, her father- paid for access to this kind of thing, hacking into the universally present comm-channel for a real-time look at the Final Game was … acceptable.

  “My God.” Greuz shook his head.

  Sevec –disappointed he’d discovered the maximum amount of pornography a man could watch was actually a great deal less then he’d ever imagined- mimicked the ex-Captain’s woeful expression. “We’re lucky.”

  Naoko nodded and entered in another command. After reading through the news packets uploaded into the Zhivago’s twin system, she’d trolled for anything that had Garth’s fingerprints all over them. To a hundred million other people, the Guillfoyle Building’s destruction would be precisely as all the stations were reporting; a last ditch, desperate attempt by Guillfoyle cohorts to hide their own wrongdoing.

  Naoko had seen the modified PCU. She knew better.

  “I think,” Naoko told the avatar to test itself against the virtual encryption she’d mocked up, “I think you do not know how lucky you are. There is a very good chance the only reason you managed to knock him out at all is because he had a building blow up on top of him.”

  Alli snorted derisively at that before flinching under Naoko’s steady, unwavering gaze. “That’s crazy.”

  Naturally, the fake encryption wasn’t nearly as good as what the avatar would be facing, but it was going to have to do; busting into the Game ‘LINKs would be no small feat, quadruply so since she was doing it in a spaceship hurtling towards a Q-Tunnel. There was one feature of their flight that she could use to their advantage, though, and that was the space station Smash All Infidels; left to their own devices for a standard year or longer, everyone who served on the station had access to a dedicated ‘LINK-line. Zhivago’s state-of-the-art sensors had already located that feed and Naoko’s long experience with data transmission was telling her that Smash All Infidels was already enjoying the pre-Game show.

  And what a Game it was going to be. Naoko was both excited and filled with sorrow over what awaited the citizens of Hospitalis. Just as equally, she was disgusted at what the Chairwoman had done and genuinely hoped that –at his soonest possible convenience- the new OverSecretary did everything in his power to oust the terrible woman.

  A shortened Game! Automatically selected winners based on statistics! Eight against One! It was a perversion of a historical legacy spanning thousands of years. What was the point of fighting if you could just easily rely on avatars to decide who was more likely to win? Avatars –no matter how complex- couldn’t calculate spirit, couldn’t divine hope.

  “Travesty.” Naoko muttered, unaware that she did so. She hit a button and unleashed the hack program into the wilds, as it were.

  Seta, a closet Gamehead, nodded. “Eight against one. That’s complete and utter bullshit.”

  “You watch this?” Greuz scoffed. “It’s fake.”

  Naoko’s eyes
widened as wide as they could possibly go and she was barely mindful of the screech that erupted out of her mouth. “It is not fake, sa!”

  “Five years ago I saw a man get his head pulled off in that arena.” Greuz snickered. “No rational society would do that. They let kids watch that thing. No way any government, even a Regime, allows children to see a man get his head pulled off. That’d be irresponsible.”

  “Says the man who kidnaps people from their homes.” Naoko countered hotly. “You wouldn’t know responsible if it bit your face off. Death in the Arena during the Games is a noble death and surviving members of the family receive a yearly stipend based on his or her performance. I was at that Game, live, sa, and I can assure you. Sa Sillit had his head pulled off. It was very real.”

  Greuz opened his mouth to tease the girl more about the obvious holes in her argument when he realized that –though she hardly seemed it right now- Naoko Kamagana was holding them hostage. He imagined he could feel the million eyes of her deadly avatars watching them all through the cameras, watching, calculating, assessing, ready to protect their mistress. He closed his mouth and went back to watching the already days-old announcements about what was happening in Latelyspace. He couldn’t stop thinking about Naoko, though, and the weird levels of perseverance it would take to imagine all the ways you could harm someone on a ship and calculate an actual threat level for each, then assign a random but terrifying bit of reprisal for each.

  Seta, quietly deciding she quite liked Naoko, jerked her chin at the console. “What are you doing?”

  “I,” Naoko pushed a lock of hair out of her face, “am trying to hack into the space station Smash All Infidels ‘LINK-feed so we can watch the Final Game live. It is difficult.” The avatar came back, defeated but carrying along with its ruptured coding information on the level of security; it was a trick she’d developed that so many other hackers had failed to understand.

  Avatars were the pinnacle of programming sciences until you got to the ultra-complex 3D coding of artificial intelligence. If you built your hack avatar properly, it wouldn’t disintegrate under the withering fire of security programs, it would assess the strengths and return, if possible. It took patience to do properly, which was something many of her peers lacked. They all believed it was far easier to fling brute force avatars at a target in an attempt to overwhelm the system than to slide your way in, and to a degree, that assumption was correct; with enough attacks from a wide array of locations, any main could be overridden, any tracking system could be fooled.

  By the time she’d gotten to the point where Lady Ha had become eponymous with flawless, pristine hacks, her skills required no more than three attempts. Her avatars were the best thing out there.

  “Oh!” Seta said, clapping her hands and shooting burning fire at all the other men in the room when it looked like they were going to start teasing her. “That’s exciting.”

  “Ordinarily,” Naoko let her refigured avatar loose, “it is illegal, but since it is my boyfriend fighting, I’ll allow it.”

  Are You Serious?

  OverCommander Vasily stared through the hi-res window Screens at the gathering crowd. Even though Alyssa’s declaration of the Law and the tone of that declaration had run roughshod over hundreds of millions of citizens, the turnout was quite surprising.

  The OverCommander couldn’t help but feel that the thousand people he’d displaced were the lucky ones.

  Roughly half the hundred thousand seats were already full and the pre-Game antics –hosted by Uncle Sa and his partner, Granger- had yet to even appear. At his wrist, the OverCommander’s proteus contained a growing list of homemade weapons and other implements of destruction his soldiers were accumulating. The list was extensive and innovative and it hadn’t gone amiss that it was all too likely that they were getting but a percent or two.

  To that end, Vasily ordered U-Ito, Salms and Harredad to see about increasing their chances of preventing a full-scale riot; with Alyssa’s mood as it was these days, should even a single citizen act out, her reaction would be unthinkably irresponsible.

  Vasily checked a sub-feed on his prote for about the thousandth time. The seats he’d set aside for the Five and their minions –there was no other describe the re-awakened God soldiers- had been picked up, but the legends themselves had yet to sit down. The OverCommander wondered if the Sigma Fives were being overly cautious or fashionably late; surely, they realized he wasn’t stupid enough to try anything, that he’d resigned himself to allowing them relatively unfettered reign while they were on Hospitalis, weak as a lamb before lions.

  His reasoning, as morbid and dark as it was, made perfect sense. If five men rising up out of the chamber five thousand years ago had been capable of such terrific displays of strength and avid destruction, what would time have given them? They were lucky that the Fives hadn’t moved on them before now, doubly so that they seemed to be interested only in Garth Nickels.

  Vasily tapped at his prote, and the smart glass windows split into a dozen different displays, each showing the chairs. The Screen windows weren’t outfitted with the full scanning capabilities of his prote and Vasily was reluctant to connect the two together, and for the same reasons that he wasn’t being more overt in trying to get a glimpse of the Fives or their God soldiers; the Fives themselves.

  Vasily looked at the readouts, lips pursed, hands crossed against his chest. There was no mistaking the men seating themselves as anything but God soldiers; their girth, their gait … several sported some of the lesser seen external augmentations that had first caused serious consternation in the military but had later proven to be non-threatening. They were as big as any of the Foursies currently alive –minus Gurant, who was … no longer a Four- but each of the men Vasily watched intently displayed none of the aggression, none of the arrogance, none of the swagger that so infused his Fours.

  Even from a distance, even through cameras, these ex-soldiers seemed … at peace.

  Vasily opened heavily encrypted medical files on his prote and began reading about the emotional and psychological traits displayed by Threes and Fours and the typical explanations for them; he knew what he was looking for, and so found the passage easily. The OverCommander read quickly and quietly, looking up every few seconds. Alyssa was due to arrive any minute and the last thing he wanted was her Prometheus Device twinning his.

  The reason, the real reason why there were so few Threes and Fours in the system, was that most of them went stark raving mad. Completely, incoherently, foaming at the mouth, howling at the moon, eating their comrades insane. They shouted and shrieked and gibbered and frothed, screaming about music no one could hear and whispers in the dark and as they raged, they tried to kill or destroy everyone and everything around them. Extensive –extensive- testing spanning hundreds of years and hundreds of thousands of patients had revealed no truths, no inkling as to the true cause of the madness, but it was the same with every man or woman who evolved into a Three.

  Those passing from Three to Four had even less of a chance of holding onto their sanity. Whatever genetic quirk allowing a God soldier to evolve from a thunderous human battle-tank of flesh and duronium into further and further sophisticated killing machines simply drove them mad in the end.

  Vasily had seen the transformation of God soldiers before, had witnessed firsthand Twos becoming Threes and Threes becoming Fours. It wasn’t pretty. Sometimes screams for the music to stop started right away, sometimes they tried to hide it, sometimes it took months or even years for the side effects to show, but in the end, they always did. The moment the psychosis showed was the moment that the Goddie in question had to die. Previous OverCommanders had made the mistake of allowing the men and women thusly affected to ‘work through the madness’, a kindness invariably costing millions of dollars in damage and even more in lives.

  Of those that evolved, perhaps a single percent kept their sanity. Having achieved something that a rare –rare to the point of being impossible- few did, Thre
es and Fours were, in their very heart of hearts, smug to an incredulous degree, arrogant beyond all comprehension and filled with a sense of personal satisfaction that radiated from them in waves.

  As a seasoned veteran and OverCommander, Vasily could spot a Goddie from a hundred miles away and could identify the length of their existence to within a single digit of years.

  So far, six hundred Sigma’d God soldiers were sitting in his arena, watching the massive Screens and laughing alongside regular citizens as if it was something they did every day, displaying in the process none of the characteristics of his God soldiers.

  What he wouldn’t give to have Foursies like that under his command. His Foursies were an almighty pain in the ass.

  Immediately embarrassed by his thoughts, Vasily dropped the displays back into one and idly stared at the rippling chaos of a thousand thumbnails. Seats were filling rapidly now, and the effect was mesmerizing. The warrior in him couldn’t keep from doing the math of destruction, mapping out the waves of obliteration that could rise from the beings he’d unwillingly brought into intimate contact with the people of Hospitalis. There were millions of God soldiers on standby. Every Goddie originally assigned to watch the streets and alleys of Hospitalis were still where they’d been told to stand. Vasily was no fool. He’d looked at the ‘LINK stats, he knew the general mood of the people, and if the level of weaponry people were attempting to smuggle into the arena was indicative, they could be looking at a total-world uprising.

  He’d need his own men in place around the world to squash any rebellion, any riot, any mob, but if the thousand chose to rise, none of it would matter. He’d drop missiles from the Cannons in the sky down on their heads.

  Something on the Screen tweaked his interest and he tapped the thumbnail. The glass immediately swelled with the image of a … a regular looking Latelian.