Citizen Pariah (Unreal Universe Book 3)

by Lee

  Bunkmates for thirty thousand years, none of the five had ever noticed the difference, or they would’ve lost their shit in a most spectacular way. That was the problem with virtual minds. They had all the limitations of their original hosts, and if they didn’t have enough, why, you could just program more in.

  Which is what he’d done.

  Stupid asses.

  Every single coherent member of the Bravo Command Team shouted angrily when one entire wall of their miniscule prison broke into a rippling wall of squares that clicked and clacked into a hallway leading to another door.

  Garth walked on towards the door to the real and proper door, looking over his shoulder. “Smaller on the inside. Now why would I do that to for a bunch of traitorous, power-hungry asshats? Hmmm….”

  Bravo’s guests, the last true representatives of the Armies of Man –minus Chun, who would bang his head against the wall time stopped- followed Garth, shouting loudly.

  A Traitor Says What?

  The four ‘men’ stared, stupefied and confounded at … at Bravo. The rooms looked as though they’d been ripped out of a magazine devoted to luxury and relaxation; everywhere the lightbodies turned, there was some instance of pure tomfoolery. Here, a cluster of video games, there, a pool table. A swimming pool. A basketball court. An actual theater-sized movie screen with a single chair parked fifteen feet away. A full kitchen with a massive walk-in freezer and an equally gigantic cooler.

  There were fifteen doors leading off to who knew where.

  It wasn’t the size and scope of the internal rooms that amazed the men. They’d seen n­-dimensional physics at work before. Out of all the things that Garth N’Chalez could create, the science capable of turning a small room the size of a building was the most spectacular because it was the most instantly experienced.

  No, it was the contents of the room. They shared silent, circumspect looks.

  “You guys smell that?” Garth asked, reveling in his home-away-from home. He’d put a lot of thought and attention to detail into the rooms, especially after coming to the crashing realization that the flavor of the War against the Heshii had changed some time during the last, oh, say, fifteen years. Distracted by actually fighting against the Kith and Kin and their devious plans, he and the others had missed a very real, surprisingly non-Heshii poison burning through the veins of the men who commanded the Armies. It’d behooved him, then, to make Bravo what it was, a safe haven for when shit got too rough.

  Then he grinned. “Nah, of course you don’t. You’re not even real.”

  “What is this?” Stark demanded, throwing his hands wide. “A swimming pool? Where are the weapons, commander, the blueprints, the raw materials? Where are the hy-tech machines to battle the M’Zahdi Hesh?”

  Garth ignored the major general. The others were doing the same; though they couldn’t interact with any of the items in any of the rooms, they were nevertheless taking a moment to revel in the freedom of the space provided. While they looked over relics from the past, Garth wandered into the kitchen, humming merrily to himself.

  Simes couldn’t help it; he followed N’Chalez into the kitchen after only a cursory glance at the wonders of the main room. He’d come to grips with the fact that they weren’t nearly in the kind of control they’d imagined. The British Colonel was beginning to share Sullivan’s grave concerns over what appeared to be critical, mortal wounds and Garth’s utter dismissal of them.

  “So.” Garth started, trying the taps. It took a second, but water came streaming out. Construction had gotten a bit hasty at the end, when the men who he would later digitize –at their demand- had started asking the wrong sorts of questions. Not that they’d remember, of course. They remembered a lot, but not … not everything. “What do you think of my place?”

  “I think,” Simes replied judiciously, “that nothing is as it appears to be.”

  “You got that right.” Garth wiggled his eyebrows and waved his fingers like a stage magician. He made some mystical sounds and then pointed a finger at a spot on the counter. One of many ‘invisibility fields’ turned off.

  Simes stared at what had been hidden from view. “A hamburger? French fries? A … a … what is that, a beverage?”

  “Not just a hamburger, Simes. Not just any old French fries. Nor a plain old beverage.” Garth inhaled deeply. Fresh as the day he’d slapped the food on the counter and directed a QFE to both freeze a moment in time and to turn everything inside invisible. A waste of resources, but whatever. Out of all the things he’d been able to kinda sorta manipulate into being around long after face of Humanity had changed so drastically, ensuring that original fast food remained had been exceptionally impossible. “This is a Slappy Burger Extreme with extra banana peppers. These are Slap-Slap Super fries with some kind of special ingredient that the stoner dude who worked at the Slappy Burger used for dudes he liked. And the drink … the drink is an honest-to-God Rootbeer Slurpee.”

  Garth inhaled again. His mouth was watering so much he’d be embarrassed if he were around other people. He ate a French fry. The explosion of flavor almost blew the top of his head off. He popped a few more in his mouth and took a healthy sip of icy cold Rootbeer. Amazing. Charbo was close, really close, but nothing beat Slappy’s food.

  Umbigwe walked over, dark features darkening even more. The last scion of the Kith and Kin was treating the entire affair like a joke. “Your commanding officer asked you a question. You will answer him.”

  “Mm.” Garth scooped up his food and walked over to the only chair in the room. He plopped down on the leather Lazy Boy, put the amazing foodstuffs atop the mini-fridge he’d thoughtfully put there an hour before incarceration in Alpha, and stretched.

  Sullivan and the others were forced to sit there and watch Garth shovel food thirty thousand years old into his mouth. It seemed to them that the man was going out of his way to enjoy the food as spitefully as possible.

  Midway through the meal, Stark decided he’d had enough. He barked at Sullivan, who flinched; the doctor looked around guiltily, embarrassed that he’d lost himself in a memory of the last meal he’d eaten. “Enough of this bullshit. Activate the sheathes. N’Chalez wants to play games, he’ll play our games.”

  Sullivan did as he was told. He reached out into Bravo’s command sphere with the practiced ease of someone who’d had enough time to learn everything there was to know about the systems. On the other hand, the doctor wondered moodily, had he? N’Chalez had proved in the last fifteen minute that everything they’d believed to be true wasn’t. Who was to … “Th… they’re … what?”

  Unable to form the revelation into words, Sullivan gestured and a holographic image of Garth N’Chalez resolved between the men. There was nothing there. Nothing … nothing at all. Saturated on a genetic level with hy-tech neural sheathes, Bravo’s powerful networks should’ve been able to display for them anything they required, from the pulsing of his blood to the firing of neurons in the Kin’kithal’s brain and everything in between.

  All they saw … all they could see were vague, shadowy smudges.

  “Your machines are in error.” Umbigwe called up an image of Garth from moments prior to the inversion.

  The new images pulsed and shone with a ridiculous amount of activity. Each sheathe gleamed like the hottest star in existence, every atom, every iota of Garth N’Chalez’ body transformed into a titanic storehouse of power. This was what they’d expected to find when they’d began suspecting the leader of the Scions had been lying.

  Garth continued eating the best meal he’d had since the whole damned thing had begun. He dug around underneath him until a hand closed on a remote control. He pushed the ‘on’ button and started navigating his way through every movie, television show and music video he'd painstakingly recreated before jumping thirty thousand years into the future. Another massive waste of resources in the eyes of the Men arrayed behind him.

  They’d never understood his … fascination … with Real culture.

/>   He settled on ‘random’ and waited for Bravo to pick something ‘Suitable’. A few heartbeats later, he was watching the pilot episode for ‘Perfect Strangers’.

  He looked over a shoulder at his ‘commanders’. They were bickering like schoolchildren over the various impossibilities of what they were seeing. It’d be awhile before they their attention back to him. The leg rest went up, he stretched his legs out, and he relaxed, sipping merrily on his Slurpee.

  xxx

  “No.” Sullivan shook his head, flatly refusing to accept the possibility posited to him by no less than Simes, a man who’d taken a distinctly disinterested view of hy-tech anything.

  The good doctor had always believed the Brit’s inclusion into their little cabal had been last-ditch political maneuvering by a failing Monarchy; in comparison to the others, about the only thing that Simes could offer in the way of containment or control of N’Chalez or the furtherance of their goals was that his accent was amusing.

  Even Umbigwe looked down on the man, which was ironic, because if everything went their way, the last thing they’d need to concern themselves with was societal modes. “That is not possible.” It was the tenth time he’d said so, and repetition was only making it truer.

  Stark shook his head. It’d always been aggravating that out of all humanity, only Sullivan had gotten close enough to understanding Garth’s wizardry so that he could, over time, puzzle out the mechanics underlying any one hy-tech device. It was the only reason the ‘doctor’ was present in Bravo. The Heshii Oversight Committee had tried for years to train more trustworthy, more militarily minded men and women, into the particular mindset required to fathom hybridized technology.

  Tried and failed. And so, for thirty thousand years, they’d had to sit with Sullivan, who –other than Chun- had been the first to discover how to generate a lightbody, the first to step outside, the first to realize that Latelians everywhere were turning into Harmony soldiers. The first to figure out how to generate lightbodies for semi-sentient programs instead of being forced to wander out amidst that maddened world. Without the doctor’s advances, they would’ve been even more ill prepared to deal with N’Chalez.

  Galling in the extreme.

  Stark opened his mouth. “It’s the only thing that makes any sense.”

  Umbigwe sighed. They were continuing to ignore the one salient point in anything that was going on; Garth N’Chalez wasn’t cowed at all. Wasn’t begging for the sheathes to be reactivated. Wasn’t eager to continue the war against the M’Zahdi Hesh. Wasn’t paying them, the men he’d sworn to follow blindly, the slightest bit of attention. Right now, the man was in the kitchen, making himself a fried baloney sandwich and laughing at what was on the theater-sized television screen.

  Why, he was certain Simes, Sullivan and Stark had missed the fact that Garth was healing from the very wounds that’d sparked this hours-long argument. Umbigwe cast a thoughtful look at N’Chalez, eyes roving over flesh where there should be no flesh. Garth was … Garth was so much more than he’d been before. For what purpose?

  “Gentlemen.” Umbigwe put his best ‘moderator voice’ on as he addressed men he loathed with every fiber of his being. In life, he’d been a great proponent for peaceful solutions, and after thirty millennia of being treated to Stark’s rapacious future, Simes’ melodramatic monarchic prattling and Sullivan’s surgical dissection scenarios, he was even and ever more certain their new future would absolutely require a sane mind, a non-violent mind. “Please, look. N’Chalez is healing and is visible. Simes’ novel concept appears to be the only one that makes any real sense.”

  Garth checked an imaginary watch. He’d been in Bravo for nearly three hours now. His sacrificed eye was healing up nicely, the fibrous lace of quadronium knitting together to form a silvery orb. In that time, the minds had spent more time disintegrating into petty arguments and pointless grandstanding than considering the few explanations considering his ‘predicament’.

  “Three hours and fifteen minutes.” Garth said around a mouthful of fried baloney sandwich. “That’s how long it took for you asshats to decide on something that has no real need for explanation.”

  “I still say it’s impossible.” Sullivan tucked his hands under his armpits.

  “It’s true, though, isn’t it?” Simes demanded, eyes gleaming weirdly. “You did it. You discovered a way to infuse your body with quadronium. Didn’t you?”

  “Yup.” Shocked, appalled silence emanated from the lightbodies. Garth spoke into that void. “And now that I’ve had some real food, watched some real television instead of remembering everything inside my own head, I’m going to bootfuck you assholes so hard you’ll wish you never agreed to climb inside this ship. And then I’m gonna leave.”

  The lightbodies exchanged a glance that said he’d missed something, but either it was too late to do anything about right now or he’d have plenty of time to handle whatever it was they’d done. Either way, there were some things that he needed to get off his chest and some things that needed saying.

  “Now,” Garth spread his hands wide, including all four men in the gesture, “when did it go from ‘saving the universe from destruction at the hands of the M’Zahdi Hesh’ to ‘stealing the powers of the Heshii for ourselves and becoming them’?

  “What?” Stark jumped. Everyone else failed miserably to look offended at the suggestion. The Major General shook his head in disgust. They’d had themselves for company for so long that they’d lost all ability to hide what was on their minds.

  Garth sneered in disgust. As expected. “Was it when I let slip to Sullivan here about the nature of our Unreality, or before?”

  “I can …” Sullivan stopped short when Stark and Simes both shouted. Umbigwe started trying to smooth the situation over. They were definitely not in the position of power they’d imagined.

  Garth raised a hand. A command prompt appeared at his fingertips and he started typing. “All this time, all the opportunities you had to scan this Unreal Existence, to plumb the depths of what we were really trying to accomplish … and you never bothered. You sat in your tiny little room on the other side of the door and you feverishly worked and reworked plans to destroy the Heshii but preserve their power. You tested me and monitored me and forced me into doing truly heinous shit, just to see if I was who I claimed to be or if I was worse.”

  The four lightbodied men stood there, urgently trying to decipher the text N’Chalez was entering into Bravo’s computers. Inexplicably, they couldn’t. Each of them in turn tried to open their mouths to explain, to denounce, and each time, their mouths closed of their own volition.

  As he entered the long, long codes, Garth continued talking. “I am much, much worse than you imagined, gentlemen, infinitely so, abundantly. I realized my mistake almost instantly, but I was … young. I trusted Sullivan because of the compassion he displayed after the last of the neural sheathing tests. I looked at him and I saw a man who could understand the depth of the illusion we live in, a man who could understand it and not be frightened. My own foolishness in trusting a man made all … all of this necessary.”

  “That compassion was real!” Sullivan shouted, feeling the need to defend himself. Of all the things they’d done to the Kith’kin and Kin’kith over the years, that lingered in his artificial mind the most. Never before had they seen such frailty, such profound mortality displayed by beings that –frankly- terrified normal people every waking and dreaming moment. Oh, they’d justified the torture, the tests, the … lies to themselves by saying they needed to understand the enemy, by claiming that they best way to do that was by seeing how their progeny reacted, but the sheathes … the sheathes had … had damaged their souls.

  Those poor Kin’kith and Kith’kin had come out of the tests changed. Grimmer, humbler, more dedicated to destroying their parents and Heshii than even imaginable. It was almost as if the pain had forged them anew. Not long after that, N’Chalez had come to them with the news –and the proof- that no matter
how hard they fought, how hard they struggled, the Heshii would win.

  Of course, by that time, the Armies of Man had decoded the truth behind N’Chalez’ one honest moment, had already known that the war ‘for the Earth’ was going to be lost. Had known. Hadn’t cared.

  “And that, Doctor Sullivan,” Garth finished entering in the string of M’Tai codes that would eliminate four out of the five lightbody minds currently occupying Bravo’s network, “is why you get to stay … operational … for a little while longer. These other fuckers get to go back in the box.”

  Simes, Stark and Umbigwe charged Garth. It was pointless; of all of them, the only being inside Bravo theoretically able to interact with the internal environment had surrendered consciousness a long, long time ago. Their forms shivered through N’Chalez. As they passed, they faded, directed by the powerful Bravo computers to return to their storage units.

  Silence filled the … Sullivan supposed it was best to think of it as a staging area. With the large theater screen, it was apropos that the last moments of their drama be played out here.

  “I trusted you, doc.” Garth looked at the baloney sandwich in his hand. Cold, he’d rather eat a raw fish. He went to the trash compactor, the doctor trailing miserably behind. “I trusted you above every other human. And you broke that trust!”

  Sullivan sighed wearily, a thin exhalation of air. “And that’s why things happened the way they did, I suppose. You think of us as ‘just humans’.”

  Garth snorted. “You started it, doc, with your steadfast refusal to consider us as anything but inhuman. Stark called me and mine freaks or worse in his time. Oh, he claimed it was to toughen us up, that he treated all his soldiers that way, but there was a hidden current of true disgust.”

  Sullivan changed the topic; both points were valid, both points were true. Stark and a hundred million others had looked upon their supposed saviors as anything but human and their saviors had looked –almost to a one- upon the people they were protecting as weak. There was no point in trying to determine which undercurrent of hatred had risen to the surface first. It was better to admit that each side had loathed one another with an almost zealot-like brilliance and move on.