Citizen Pariah (Unreal Universe Book 3)

by Lee

  “Did you honestly think that I’d react any other way to your admission that nothing was real? The absolutely truthful look on your face shocked me to the very essence of who I am, Garth. You sat there on that examination table and you said ‘nothing is real here, doc, none of it. The Heshii aren’t trying to eradicate Humanity, but the whole entirety of this Unreal existence’. Then you went on to explain how they planned to do it, and The Spheres of Existence? The Harmony? A … a true Reality floating across the void of the extra-dimensionality? You weren’t explaining things. You were destroying things. You gutted me, N’Chalez, ripped me from my life. Then … oh, and then you tell me you suspected that everything in this Unreality as nothing more than a … a blueprint? That we were nothing more than … than … templates, archetypes destined to maybe be real if only we could get rid of the M’Zahdi Hesh … what did you think would happen?”

  If time travel were possible, Garth would change that one thing. He’d made a hundred, a thousand … a … a million mistakes during that War, but that one moment of weakness, that split-second where he’d imagined a regular Man could handle the gravity and succinct truth of what was and what needed to be … that was the worst by far. It’d changed the scope of the war overnight, though he’d been too busy trying to figure out what to do about the real objectives to notice until it’d been far too late. He’d told a bunch of people about Unreality lately, but … things were different. This close to the end, it was a benefit.

  “I know.” Garth hung his head. “I know, and I’m sorry. So, so very sorry.”

  Sullivan saw the honesty, but didn’t care. “It’s too late for apologies, N’Chalez. Too late by thirty thousand years.”

  “You guys could’ve changed your minds.” Garth proffered calmly.

  “What?” Sullivan laughed wholeheartedly. “Surrender the opportunity to steal the very power of creation from the Heshii? Ignore the fact that they are literal gods? Dismiss the truth that your so-called extra-dimensionality is actually an infinite reservoir of energy formed from the destruction of other Unrealities? Once we learned the truth of that, N’Chalez … who could ignore it? Who would even try? No, no, with the Heshii dead and gone and men sitting in their stead, with human hands on the controls of the ‘Engines of Creation’ … no.” The doctor shook his head, repeating his denial. “No. Too much glory, too much to even pretend we didn’t want it. Thirty thousand years trapped in our tiny little box only made it more imperative that we achieve our goals. All you succeeded in doing was making our hunger for total power more fervent. And now?”

  “Yes, Doctor Sullivan?”

  “And now it doesn’t even matter.” Sullivan waved his hands, attempting to bring up the information they’d begun accumulating from the moment Garth had stepped out of Alpha. When it didn’t come, the doctor glowered sullenly at the ex-Specter. “Really?”

  “Yes, doctor, really.” Garth gestured grandly for the lightbody to continue. “You were saying? Why doesn’t it matter?”

  Sullivan couldn’t escape the feeling that N’Chalez already knew what he was going to say. “It doesn’t matter because it’s broken. All of it. The growth of this Unreality is a thousand times greater than any other Unreality consumed by the Heshii. There ‘exists’ somewhere in the neighborhood of a thousand billion Galaxies, Garth. The Engines did not stop manufacturing iterations on its grand scheme, and the fabric in which we live is stretched to the very limit. The Heshii have continually tried to demolish what is, tried and failed. Soon, with or without the Heshii, it will all collapse. The cyclic phenomenon … what do they call it?”

  “The Dark Ages.” Garth supplied helpfully, a slow, goofy grin spreading across his face. “Haha. That’s excellent. It totally worked.”

  “Yes, the Dark Ages. The Heshii have been trying to shut down this … domain for millennia.” Sullivan narrowed his eyes at Garth. “What,” he hissed, “do you mean, it worked.”

  “This,” Garth declared, “is fucking awesome. Hah! The Dark Ages. Trinity would shit a brick if, you know, it had an ass. Oh, it’s gonna be rough, and hard, and I don’t think I really like the ending very much anymore, but there’s gotta be a way I can fix that, before, uh, yeah. Awesome.”

  “What are you talking about, N’Chalez?” Sullivan tried to keep calm, but couldn’t. Hysteria was rising. “Are you implying this is all part of some plan? All of this?”

  “Totally. Hundred percent. Well,” Garth seesawed a hand, “okay, it’s honestly more like eighty percent, and only because I’m feeling generous, but yeah.”

  “Explain yourself. Or do to me as you did to the others.”

  “Oh, I’m for sure going to tell you, and then you can go tell the others.” Garth headed back to the comfortable Lazy Boy and sat his ass down. “Know how I told you I’ve been to Reality? Well, as it turns out, it’s a paradoxical possibility of Reality. I left that bit out of my recalled memories so the hunger would drive me into Bravo, so I would remain desperately eager to return. The damn place I went is an echo of what might actually be. Oh, right, I did. Anyways, that’s what this is about, doc. True Reality.”

  “True Reality? I’m afraid I don’t understand.” Sullivan shook his head. N’Chalez was talking gibberish.

  “If you take the Heshii out of the picture, remove them and their behaviors from the equation, what we have left is an Engine attempting to find some kind of Paradigm of Life. An Engine devoted entirely to trying out different forms of organic life, sentient thought, whatever. Presumably, if the Engine had been left to its own creative devices, it would’ve happened upon some aesthetic that matched its unknowable criteria and wham, from the drawing board to the real world, so to speak. It’s somewhat metaphysical. But …”

  “The Heshii have been destroying iterations.” Sullivan wanted Garth to get to the point. “We know this.”

  “Yep. They’ve been sitting in the extra-dimensionality for trillions upon trillions of years, feeding off the destruction of potential life the whole time. Who knows what their ultimate goal is? But it isn’t right, it isn’t fair.”

  “Right for who? Fair to whom?” Sullivan interjected.

  Garth looked sorrowfully at Sullivan. He’d destroyed this man. Everything was his fault. “Right for the people who should exist, should be real. I was there, doc, in a place that was closer to real than anything we’ve ever seen. I can’t explain it. It’s trite to say that the words don’t exist, but they really don’t. Asking me to explain the difference between what could be real and the life we are currently experiencing is impossible. Nothing that is happening should be happening. Never should have happened. We, humanity, and the berjillion other types of sentient life out there … only five or six types of sentient life should ever have been created, and of those, maybe three or four would’ve been … right. Proper. Equal to the demands of the Engine. Our Engine should’ve been allowed to let that happen. The longer we exist, the more the Heshii feed, the … look…

  Reality needs to be born. The true purpose of the Engine needs to be reasserted. The very moment the idea of humanity proved itself viable, the Engine should’ve … given birth. To us. To the Galaxy in which we live. Maybe three or four more Galaxies for added flavor, something for everyone to reach for, a goal that would take hundreds of thousands of years to reach. Right now? Right now, there are, as you pointed out, a thousand billion Galaxies out there. You know what that does? That makes people feel small, weak, insignificant. It makes them feel like they’ll never accomplish anything in their lives because they know that right that second, there are things out there that they will never see, things that could be miraculous and amazing. To be fair, there are things that're just as equally terrifying and awful. No Engine, no … no creator would want that for his children.”

  “You are anthropomorphizing. There is no creator, no deity. You proved that.”

  “Trivial.” Garth dismissed Sullivan’s conjecture. “The fact remains. The fabric is overburdened, strained to the breaking
point, filled to the brim with an intensely greater number of Galaxies than even an unthinking machine would consider wise. The Heshii started it by deciding to see how much power they could siphon, how big a destruction they could safely manufacture, for their inscrutable purpose. I merely pushed it into the redline, because doc, I gotta tell, ya, a Reality based on what I experienced on the other side of the looking glass is going to be born. All it’s gonna take is …”

  Sullivan leaned forward. “Yes?”

  “All it’s gonna take is the destruction of this Unreality, the paradoxical Reality waiting to be born, and the extra-dimensionality between the two.”

  Sullivan stared at Garth. “What?”

  “Yep. Then I can totally build a new Reality. Better than the one I visited, anyway. I … I broke the Engine’s dreams of Reality by being there. I mean, also, calling it Real is kind of a lie. More Real, sure. That’s where the paradox comes into play. How could I go to anything based on a series of iterations that have never -would never- even get close to being created properly? Fucked if I know. So, yeah. New Reality. Better than the old. Reality 2.0, doc. It’s gonna be awesome.”

  Seconds passed to minutes, minutes became an hour. Sullivan looked blankly at Garth. “What?”

  No, Seriously …

  “You are insane.” Sullivan didn’t know if it was because the others were back in their storage units, but he found he was able to think much more clearly. “That’s … impossible. You’re mad and … that’s insane.”

  Garth spread his hands, a serene look on his face. “I am willing to accept that that is entirely true, doc. I probably totally am. Do you remember those cat pictures that were insanely popular in the 20th century? There’s this one where it’s a cat, and it looks really hassled, and there’s a caption underneath saying ‘you don’t have to be crazy to work here, but it sure helps’. Well, that’s this place.”

  “You are talking about Universal matters as if they’re,” Sullivan struggled for the right words, “simple.”

  “Oh!” Garth shook his head. “Anything but simple. Anything.”

  Sullivan pressed his lips together until they were thin lines. They’d asked him to come along on the journey as a digitized consciousness because out of every human being on the planet, he had shown some skill at not only ‘handling’ Garth N’Chalez, but of understanding him.

  This man was similar, but not the same. Not by a long, long way. And unless he was tallying things in his head wrong, this incarnation of Garth N’Chalez had been wandering around Old Earth helping them deal with the Heshii and their various threats for nearly three solid years before Alpha and Bravo were launched, all while pretending to be the same Devil-May-Care screw-up. The skill, the … the effort of seeming to be a … a … a loser while orchestrating everything so masterfully behind their backs. It was daunting.

  “You are taking an incredibly nihilistic point of view here.” Sullivan wished desperately for a chair. Rather than stand, he sat at Garth’s feet, fuming at the surrender inherent in the move. “As you’ve already planned for and dealt with our paltry attempt to replace the Heshii, why not explain why you feel it is necessary to destroy everything. Surely, the embryonic Reality you fell into is what the Engines of Creation wants. How else would it even exist, if only in … what would you call it? A preparatory state, a … a kind of foreshadowed Existence?”

  “Me.” The answer tripped off his lips easily. It’d taken him nearly an entire year to realize that he was the problem, and longer still to figure out a way to rectify the situation. It … hurt. “Me. I’m why everything needs to be destroyed.”

  “I always imagined,” Sullivan said humorously, “that the Scions were immune to the epic hubris of their forefathers. I see I was wrong.”

  “If anything,” Garth countered moodily, “that, too, is exponentially stronger, doc. As our gifts with mayhem and destruction, so our moods, our hungers, our desires. Our fears. Our doubts. I’m not kidding. I did a lot of research, a lot of historical spelunking. The problems Old Earth suffered through, and then the rest of the Universe, all of it can be traced back to a single moment, one point in time where something happened that could not have, should not have been. My birth. If I had never been born, none of this would’ve happened.”

  “Oh, well, now, this I have to hear.” It was unbearable, this grandiosity. N’Chalez had always been somewhat insufferable, what with his boundless energy, his mercurial whims, and his odd sense of humor. This sudden elevation to the most rarefied heights of megalomania, this proud donning of a narcissistic deity complex shroud … it was all too much.

  “How much do you know, truthfully, about Kith and Kin genetics?” Garth asked suddenly. He’d dealt with the lunacy of his plans. He knew how it sounded. The look of bemused irritation on Sullivan’s mug, the vibe that he was simply going along with the conversation because there was absolutely nothing else to do and no one else to talk to ripe with condescension, made no difference. The truth was the truth, no matter how implausible.

  “Not, er, not much.” They’d never been able to examine a live Kith or Kin, and by the time either male or female of the enhanced species was brought down, there typically wasn’t much left to examine. N’Chalez had always brought them the least, usually nothing more than a steaming kidney or a jumble of bones. For a time they’d assumed it was intentional, until regular soldiers had begun bracing the living juggernauts.

  Then they’d seen. Then they’d understood. Kith and Kin were difficult to kill.

  “Bring me up to speed.”

  “Essentially, they owe the majority of their skills … ah, skipping across the skein of ex-dee for quick travel, strength, agility, speed … a heightened intellect … all of that is due to actual, crystalized extra-dimensionality implanted somewhere in their bodies, typically deep inside their skulls, though in some instances, notably in Kin Shikosi, there were minute granules throughout her bloodstream.” Sullivan paused, racking his brains. “Over time, some of the Kith and Kin began experimenting with physical modifications for further enhancements, no doubt propelled by their masters, who were eager for a resolution to the war. This, I believe, is where you learned the basics for your hy-tech designs?”

  “Yep. Anything else about the Kith and Kin?”

  “That … that is it, really.” Sullivan admitted slowly, almost sadly. They’d never really had the time or the corpses to get even close to understanding their enemies. Once Harmony Soldiers started popping up … the entire scope of the war flashed into overdrive.

  “The M’Zahdi Hesh,” Garth said, wishing his Rootbeer Slurpee wasn’t gone and that the nearest, hidden QFE zone wasn’t in one of the rooms behind him, “were suspicious of humanity, mistrustful of the speed and rapidity with which that first Kith took to the seedling inside.”

  “Your father.” Sullivan interrupted, clarifying, wanting to smack himself in the head a second later; Garth’s look of dark murder suggested that he’d stepped close to having his brain shoved into a garbage compactor. He shook his head apologetically.

  Garth smiled frostily. “Yeah, dad. They didn’t like it. His then-human body soaked up tremendous amounts of extra-dimensional energy, quicker and with more direct suffusion, it’s rumored, than their ancient carcasses ever had. To protect their investment … monkeyed with his DNA. And the DNA of every man and woman they transformed over the next several thousand years. They engineered the Kith and Kin to first loathe the sight of one another and, knowing full well that they did not know everything about Humanity, ensured that if the precarious balance between love and hate still resulted in mutual attraction and about a zillion other flavors of lust went wonky, that no matter what, no Kith, no Kin could ever sire or conceive a child.”

  “But…” Sullivan trailed off. He’d spoken with Kith Antal. He’d seen the … the possessiveness in his glittering blue eyes, felt the unshakeable bond of parent and child. It’d been a fundamental moment in his life, a shocking reminder that, at one point,
the terrors and nightmares in the world had once been human themselves, that they were still capable of love. Adoration. “But…”

  “You’re getting there.” This story had never been told. Not to anyone. Hell, he barely ever thought of it himself, because in a Universe of paradoxes, the nature of his conception and birth were overwhelming. “Now you’re wondering about genetics. You’re trying to think your way out of this conundrum. Maybe you’re thinking that, suffused with a miniscule amount of creation energy, the bodies of these monsters maybe somehow spontaneously evolved over the chromosomal mandates left there by the Heshii. It’s happened before, you think. In nature. I forget the term.”

  “P-parthenogenesis. The … the female gives birth without, ah, input, from a male.”

  “Which would make my ‘father’ a conceit, right? A … a lie to tell humanity, to explain my presence and, after a while, the existence of the other Kith’kin and Kin’kith. To put a semi-palatable spin on things.”

  Sullivan caught Garth’s tone. “But that’s not the truth either, is it, Garth?”

  “Hah. Yeah, no, that’s a lie, too.” Garth took a deep breath. “It’d be so much more awesome if that bit of fucked up was the truth. When I was born, it was in secret. Had to be. The others would’ve gone into a frenzy. They would’ve lost against dear old dad. The Heshii would’ve noticed the severe murderation of their soldiers. Eventually they’d’ve found the reason.

  It was a miracle. That’s what Dad and Mom kept saying. A miracle of unknown proportions. Born in the latter half of the 1800’s, mom was kind of prone to mysticism and even though they called her Black Mary on account of she was a holy fucking terror to an entire goddamn continent during that time, she still believed in God. She believed the Hesh were devils, and that’s … fucked up. Dad was more, um, circumspect. Anyway. Miracle Garth. Hooray. Do you know what a miracle really is, at least here, in this Unreality?”