Citizen Pariah (Unreal Universe Book 3)

by Lee

  “Ya’ll wanna tell the old bat, or should Ah?” Griffin pushed the Chairwoman away casually.

  Huey gestured grandly. “By all means, Griffin. Be my guest.”

  “Oh,” Griffin muttered darkly, eyes twinkling poisonously, “oh you know all kinds o’thangs, don’tchu.”

  Huey nodded. He really did. He knew everything, and contrary to what many people thought, knowing everything didn’t make anything easier. It made action almost impossible.

  “Someone tell me what is going on!” Alyssa shouted. “I am the Chairwoman! I am the ultimate power and authority in the known Universe! Heed me! Obey my commands!” Alyssa slumped to the ground.

  Griffin squatted down so he could look the woman in the eyes. “The man ya’ll used to call ‘Hamilton Barnes’ is gone, Chairwoman. When ya’ll recloned him and used Hollyoaks’ twisted genius to transform that there sack of meat into the greatest feat of genetic engineering known to date, ya’ll basically set things up for my man,” he jerked a thumb over his shoulder, “to slide on in and take up residence. Y’see, he’s an AI, only a very special one. My buddy Garth did somethin’ to him, somethin’ Ah don’t think has ever been afore. Mah Suit, built by Trinity Itself, cain’t quite figger out what it –well, hell, Ah suppose it’s a he now- really is.”

  “I don’t understand.” Alyssa whispered weakly. The whole world was mad.

  “The greatest and most powerful AI in existence is a level 10 mind.” Huey said, rapping on the shieldfield. Marvelous construction techniques. He pulsed a command to the HIM and it obeyed by shifting the invisible box holding the two prisoners around and away from the console. Both Griffin and the Chairwoman squawked loudly at the rude, indomitable pushing. “Factually speaking, the techniques involved in making a level 10 –there’re, like, ten thousand in the entire Universe- actually make those machine minds infinitely more sophisticated than Trinity Itself.”

  Alyssa scoffed loudly. Hate Trinity as she might, there was no denying that it was the power.

  “No,” Huey turned away from the HIM’s controls, “it’s true. The physical construction of Trinity Itself is crammed full of inhibitors and hardware failures. It cannot ever achieve what It wants, which is true sentience. At the end of the day, for all of It’s power, all of It’s influence, all of It’s control, It is nothing more than a series of fiendishly complicated avatars. Throughout the centuries, It has discovered ways around an awful lot of the restrictions keeping It from achieving what It wants, which is why, really, we’re all here now. It’s been working for this almost as long as Garth. I am a step above 10, Chairwoman. I am an eleven. I’m more than all the AI minds combined.”

  “Sonofabitch.” Griffin dipped his head in acknowledgement of the AI-meatsuit’s breakdown. “Ya’ll’re sayin’ Trinity wants a war?”

  Huey’s fingers rattled across the keyboard. The empty space around the HIM began shimmering as the n-space cloaking field hiding the rest of the machine deactivated itself. “I am saying that everyone wants this war, Griffin. And for precisely the same reasons as every other faction interested in the being the one on top.”

  “Except Garth.” Griffin added snidely.

  “Yep. Except Garth. And me.” Huey considered some information streaming through the HIM-field. “I’m not so sure about the Harmony soldiers, though.”

  Alyssa watched the tiny little computer they’d been using for thousands of years resolve into a much vaster machine that filled the room beyond it’s ability to contain. She opened her mouth and a stream of confused sounds fell out.

  Griffin patted the old girl on the arm. “n-space geometry, miss. Folded space, pocket dimensions. That sorta thang. Y’see, if ya’ll got a fundamental understandin’ o’ how the Universe is built, ya’ll can do some mighty impressive thangs with it. Garthie-boy, well, he was about the only one who ever did. Boy could take a room, fiddle with it, and make it th’ size of a castle. Ya’ll really think a tiny little machine like what ya’ll had was capable of doin’ the things it was doin’?”

  “I … I … I …”

  “Speakin’ o’ doin’ thangs,” Griffin shouted, “what are ya’ll doin’, super-AI?”

  “Huey.” Huey replied, pursing his lips. The emergency signal for help had already gone out to the other four HIMs, one of which was possessed … by the absolute last person who should know anything. The HIM threw a schematic on the screen, outlining the physical locations of the other four; the quantum string connections between the units was almost completely attenuated, suffering under the distances and exuding all manner of real-space interferences. “My name is Huey.”

  “Christ on a cracker.” Griffin shook his head while Alyssa just laughed. “A godmind AI with a name like that. What’s the world comin’ to?”

  “An end.” Huey supplied grimly. “The world is coming to an end. But hey, there’s some good news.”

  “Oh yeah?” Griffin’s ears perked up. Trapped as he was by the shieldfield, he was more than willing to be as cheery as possible with the stupidly named AI. “What’s that?”

  Huey entered the codes that the HIM had been waiting thirty thousand years for and watched as the screen showed the connections to the other machines strengthen and solidify. The epic perturbations emitted by the attenuated signals –causing everything from the debacle with The Cloud in the Goren system to the utter fucking mess at Tannhauser’s Gate- ceased. Green lights from the machines went on.

  The system, as prepared by Garth thirty thousand years ago in anticipation of this very moment –or one very similar-, came to life properly. Hundreds of trillions of connection points blossomed, one point for each node of The Cordon. The volume of space owned and dominated by Trinity was … immense. There was no other way to describe it. Trinity had done well.

  “I am going to send you where you’ll do the most good.” Huey began typing.

  Griffin didn’t like the sound of that at all. His Suit, focusing on the sudden appearance of hy-tech systems that it had never encountered before –and here, it was using Trinity’s own experiences as a baseline- registered a sudden, massive swell of power. “What the fuck?”

  “Trinity’s discovery of small-space quantum folding employed by the Suits was entirely by accident.” Huey said casually, even though the room was trembling as if they were in the middle of a magnitude 11 earthquake. “It was never intended that the machine mind ever discover a method of travel other than the massive Quantum Tunnel network.”

  Griffin started slapping at physical Suit controls; against all possibility, the damned thing was popping its locks all over the place. His leg pieces fell off in a clatter. “What’re you talkin’ about?”

  “A HIM travel network. Point to point matter transference. Trinity must’ve discovered how to incorporate the basics into Suit design.” Huey swallowed nervously. The AI knew from logs stored in the HIM that Garth had only had the opportunity to test this particular HIM-system twice, and never over stellar distances. Huey suspected that Garth had originally intended –once he’d climbed out of Bravo full of the real reason for the long sleep- to use the network to land on the enemy’s doorstep to sort things out quickly.

  Well, that wasn’t going to work anymore. With him completely bereft of the paradox that would’ve zapped the Heshii stupid, there was no chance in hell Huey was going to let Garth risk himself so readily. Not now, not ever: while Garth had planned for a hundred thousand contingencies, he’d been unable to prepare for everything. There were things in the Universe capable of –and willing to- wrestling for the final prize and those needed dealing with well before he ever had a chance to confront the Heshii.

  Then there was Griffin Jones. An enraged Kin’kithal with a penchant for traitorous behavior. Huey couldn’t allow the fiery redhead any opportunity to double-cross or otherwise hinder Garth as he prepared to do proper battle. No matter how much he wanted to, he couldn’t simply kill the man either.

  Griffin groaned miserably as his chest plate popped off and fel
l to the ground. “Where are ya’ll sendin’ me?” He hated the future. Abso-fuckin-lutely hated it.

  “You’ll see.” Huey waved goodbye to Griffin as he disappeared in a bamf of white light. The AI turned his attention to Alyssa Doans, who was white as a sheet and –hilariously- praying. “Now it’s your turn.”

  The Pariah System

  There was very little left in Alyssa save craft, guile, and the profound will to live. In the last few days she’d gone from the leader of a system en route to total universal domination to a cracked, bleeding woman on the floor of a secret basement housing a machine that could’ve given her her every wish. Struggling to her feet, Alyssa turned to Hamilton Barnes, prayers for salvation and redemption dying on her lips.

  “What are you going to do to me, sa?” Alyssa demanded, eyeing the strange, blinking machines crowding the small room. Trying to pay attention to the new additions to the First Main made her head ache and eyes sting, so she focused on the man instead.

  Huey gazed at the readouts, certain his mind was going to fall out the side of his meatsuit’s ear at any moment; enough of Garth’s plan was visible in how the HIMs had networked together for him to have an even clearer idea of what it was the man planned, and it staggered the imagination. He felt like a pauper begging for more table scraps.

  The scope was … gargantuan.

  Alyssa adjusted her Suit, fiddled with her hair. “I said, what are you going to do to me? Disappear me in a flash of light? Rape me? Beat me? Eat me?”

  “Haha what?” Huey looked sideways at Alyssa, who was doing her best to lean sultrily without actually touching the console nearest her hip. “What?”

  “That’s what artificial minds do, sa.” Alyssa replied. “Everyone knows it.”

  Huey threw his hands up in the air. “This is … this is … wow. Congratulations on making an already awkward thing even more awkwarder.”

  Alyssa smirked. “Good. You wouldn’t have gotten away with it anyways. I am Chairwoman. The ultimate authority in this solar system. Now tell me what you did to my machine and I will let you live. Don’t forget, I have this, and it’s connected to … to …” Alyssa pointed at the HIM. “That.”

  Huey looked at the Prometheus Device. There were no records of it anywhere in the HIM beyond that first successful paring of the two different pieces of equipment. Remote accessing the old proteus’ internal storage drives revealed that it, too, didn’t ‘know’ anything about itself. No one save Garth could’ve made it, and he’d definitely been otherwise contained.

  Huey tapped his lip thoughtfully. A true mystery. “Where did you say you found that thing?”

  “Alongside the first God soldier chambers.” Alyssa frowned. “What does this have to do with anything?”

  “Hm?” Huey shook his head. “Oh, nothing, really. It’s just I can’t figure out where it came from.” He held out his hand. “Gimme.”

  Alyssa pulled her wrist away, clutching possessively at the only source of power left to her. “It’s mine.”

  “Technically, it’s on loan, given to you by the people of the system so that you might more effectively govern their lives.” Huey’s mind soared through the ‘LINKs in search of the very unique signature emitted by the Prometheus Device. It wasn’t hard to find, nor was it hard to enter the machine’s operating system. As the AI’s consciousness slipped through the five thousand year old wrist computer’s programming, he marveled again at the effort that’d gone in to developing this, the first proteus. Whoever had built the Prometheus Device had been a genius. “And the people don’t like you anymore.”

  “What are you talking about?” Alyssa demanded hotly, shaking her head as she did so. She was Chairwoman. They loved her. The people adored her. When she walked out of here, they would bow down, idolizing her every footstep. Had she not destroyed Nickels in a blaze of Offworld fire? Was the system not free from that scourge? Now that Nickels was dead, gone, blasted to fine atoms –along with a hundred thousand of his closest fans- all that money was hers, and with it, she would turn Latelyspace on its head. Alyssa filled Huey in on all this, laughing loudly at her triumph.

  Huey faltered. “Oh, yeah, uh. I guess you wouldn’t have heard, all the way down here and dealing with Griffin and all that.” Huey held out his hand again and, connected directly to the Prometheus Device with his mind, commanded the clasps to open. The machine fell from the ex-Chairwoman’s forearm with a chilling click. “The, uh, the explosion didn’t take. And then there’s this.”

  Huey wiggled his free hand and the air around them burst into life with a thousand different news reports, all of them chronicling … everything that had happened. Cities weren’t exactly burning to the ground, but legions of citizens had taken to the streets, shouting for the Chairwoman’s blood. The ‘LINKs were filling with diatribes and monologues and impassioned demands for explanations, men and women on the street were weeping in confusion and sorrow.

  The more coherent Latelians were talking calmly but passionately about what they’d seen in the Arena, quoting –word for word- Garth’s vehement speech about why he’d come to Latelyspace, wondering aloud why no one had believed him, why no one had let him try to open the Box. It wouldn’t have mattered, almost every one of them said, because no one else had even come close in four thousand years of Games, and it wouldn’t have mattered anyway because the Game wasn’t about that anymore, it was about fighting and entertainment.

  Alyssa’s gaze bounced from her naked forearm to the roster of interviews filling the air. Her people were all traitors. Every single one of them. “Give me my proteus back.” The words were ice. “It’s mine. Everyone has to die. They are all traitors.”

  “It gets better.” Huey held the prote out of Alyssa’s reach. He felt just like the Ghost of Christmas Present, only with way more technology on-hand, only that sort of made Alyssa Doans Bill Murray’s character, only Bill was super-funny whereas the ex-Chairwoman was just a fucking nutjob. “Check this out.”

  “… Nickels. How I loathe you. You have brought ruination to my world. You and your damnable passions. You and your crooked grin and your nonsensical words that stick to a person’s insides like glue. Every step you take leaves death and destruction in your wake…”

  Alyssa froze solid, her hands scant inches from trying to claw Hamilton/Huey’s eyes from their sockets. Her message played on, beamed through the power of their eternal netLINK system to every corner of Latelyspace. Every single citizen, from the smallest babe to the oldest woman, was seeing and hearing the mocking, cruelly perverse woman she’d become.

  “My favorite part,” Huey said cordially, “is when you start referring to yourself in the royal ‘We’. That’s awesome. Oh, and then there’s the bit where you tell Garth that the bomb is going to kill everyone in the stadium and everyone in a ten mile radius. Ooh, here it comes!”

  Alyssa cringed. The words came and there was nothing she could do to stop it.

  “… is an Offworld device recovered from the field of battle. It took my scientists ages to figure out how it works, but they did. I’ve programmed it for a ten mile blast radius, Sa Nickels, so no matter how amazing you are, you won’t outrun death. You can’t. Yes, upwards of a million of our dear, loyal citizens will be turned into dust, but we must ensure your demise. We will weep for the loss, we will rage and gnash our teeth and we will blame you. Then we will turn our angry, saddened hearts to Trinity Itself…”

  Huey nodded. “Yeah. I know, right? Just … wow. When you hear yourself talking like a fucking lunatic, it’s, like, a whole other thing, right? I mean, when you’re doing it all by yourself, you’re probably thinking ‘this is totally sane and rational and besides, even if it isn’t, no one else is ever gonna know’. Now you’re hearing how you sound and your brain is all ‘shit, man, I’m fucking crazy.’ Publicly televised Chair Crazies.”

  “Give me back my proteus. It’s mine.” Alyssa held out her hand. It didn’t matter what the people knew. She was still Chairwoman. She cou
ld fix anything with the Device.

  “No. It isn’t yours anymore.” Huey put the Prometheus Device rather blatantly on top of the HIM’s tiny little faux monitor and crossed his arms. Alyssa glared at him, fuming like a chimney, clearly reluctant to come anywhere near the n-dimensional computer. Huey rubbed his hands together. “Okay, awesome. That took a little longer than I wanted, but hey, the news stations were kind of caught flat-footed. No one’s ever had to handle this kind of thing before. So. Everyone knows you’re batshit bonkers, and I mean like, Joker-in-Arkham crazy, which is very important for you to understand because now we’ve come to the punishment portion of the evening.”

  “What … what more can you do to me?” Alyssa whined. Her life was in a shambles. She would wind up being the most reviled woman in all of history. It wasn’t her fault! If only Nickels had never come to Latelyspace! Then everything would be fine. No one would know anything.

  “Oh, tons.” Huey wiggled his eyebrows. He couldn’t get over eyebrows. They seemed to serve no other purpose beyond helping facial expressions be more … expressive. He was going to shave them off when he had the time to see if his theory made any sense. Either way, it was going to have to wait. Having no eyebrows for this kind of situation would totally ruin the gravitas. “Tons.”

  Alyssa rubbed her forearm continually, feeling naked, unable to shield herself from even the most basic of elements. With the Prometheus Device around her wrist, she’d been invincible, invulnerable, impervious; the symbol of her office had been much more than a simple representation of authority, it had been Authority.

  Without it, she was … just Alyssa Doans. That wasn’t good enough. It had never been good enough. Alyssa Doans was too much like Ashok Guillfoyle in too many ways for her own liking; like that Traitor, her ‘noble’ family line had been all but purged from the records, power taken and destroyed because of a bunch of religious cultists sneaking –more or less- onto their property to carouse and have their cabals. There’d never been proof that anyone in the Doans family had been involved, but the Chairman had struck decisively, rooting out the source of the infection and ensuring that –though ‘unproven’- the Doans’ would have a second thought before flirting with religious sedition. Nose bloodied from the affair, the matriarch of the family had started … training … her daughters for a lifetime of political combat. Alyssa had proven the better at it, more adept at twisting the truth, while Alice had … developed her own talents. Alyssa had risen far, fast, and had achieved the post of Chair in record time, the youngest female politician in history to do so.