Citizen Pariah (Unreal Universe Book 3)

by Lee

  “No.” Sullivan didn’t trust himself to say anything else. As a doctor, he was captivated. No one had heard these things before.

  “A paradox. A thing that cannot happen but has happened. My birth wasn’t even an issue then because no one, anywhere, understood what this all really is. It definitely wasn’t a paradox. Years later, when I fell through ex-dee and into the nascent Reality on the other side, I assumed that was the paradox. If not that moment, then the moment I was assisted in returning by an agent of the Ushbet M’Tai. For about twenty seconds, anyway.”

  “I don’t, I’m not, not following.”

  “Antal believed my return was the paradox. I never disabused him of that belief. For all his brutishness, all his viciousness, the death and destruction and mayhem he sowed across the skin of the earth for thousands and thousands of years, he, too, believed in the miracle of my birth. In his own mind, full of the Heshii Paradigm and truly colossal egotism, it made sense that his own magnificence spawned me. A miracle of the righteous and the just, he called it. That belief also gave him reason to find disillusionment with his overlords. Without it, none of this would’ve happened. When I explained where I’d been, what I’d done, how I’d returned, he called that paradox. How could I have gone to a place that didn’t exist, a place based on a series of … well, at base, all of this is nothing more than a three-dimensional schematic … schematics that, Heshii willing, would be destroyed at their soonest possible convenience? Makes sense, right? It makes sense because anything else is too impossible to believe.”

  Sullivan nodded assiduously. It made all the sense in the world. Except when laid against the groundwork N’Chalez had already laid. Compared to the impossibility of his birth, the paradoxical return was nothing more than … regular. “Wh-where is this all headed?”

  “I’m gettin’ there.” Garth stretched his legs. “Okay, so I was born to parents who could have no child. They saw it as awesome. Dad in particular saw me as a way to combat the Heshii, suddenly –and briefly- seeing the light, as it were. He started training me up in the ways of combat and I fell through the ex-dee into another place. Not ‘better’ than this one. Just … better. I came back, aided by the possibly-real equivalent to the Hesh, a fella probably more benign than any one of the guys over here. The war, which had been relatively quiet for a few thousand years, suddenly went apeshit. How well do you know your military history, doc?”

  “Not terribly well.” Sullivan admitted. He’d been fresh out of school when he’d been inducted into the war, almost literally press-ganged into service and thrown to an entirely different type of medicine shortly thereafter.

  “What do you know about the Heshii?”

  “Nothing. No one does.” Sullivan gestured, and Bravo responded by displaying an enormous list of supposed traits possessed by the beings that threatened all of Existence. It read like a do-it-yourself villain kit. “And what does this have to do with you seriously thinking you can destroy everything?”

  Sullivan was like a dog with a bone. He’d keep chewing on that corner of the puzzle until it was worn smooth.

  Garth really didn’t want to talk about it, but was necessary. “All right. I need to backtrack a bit, give you a brief summary. I know, I know. You with me?”

  Garth waited for Sullivan to indicate he was listening. “Cool. Okay. Now. This is a regular old fake Universe full of maybe a couple million Galaxies stuffed full of humans and proto-humans and talking sponges all driving to work and boning the shit out of each other and all that normal goodness. What none of them know is that out there in between the stars or wherever is a race of bastards just waiting for the dimensional turkey timer to go bing, at which time, they destroy the Universe. Call it heat death, entropy, whatever, but suddenly, irrevocably, everything that the Engine created is destroyed. Most of the energy spills back to the Engine because that’s how the system is designed. Waste not, want not. But some, an appalling amount, really, is sucked up by the Heshii, who are more like ticks than anything. They get fatter. The Engine starts up again. Round and round she goes, where will she stop, nobody knows. That’s what the Heshii are used to, doc. An eternal growth-destruction-feeding cycle. Maybe the Engine dies, maybe it doesn’t. It’s all they know. But…” he trailed off meaningfully.

  “But that’s not what happened at all, not here.” Sullivan had no choice but to take Garth’s storytelling at face value; the Heshii either had or had not been destroying nascent Realities for as long as they’d been around. There was no way to prove otherwise. The same went with the implied simplicity with which they achieved their nihilistic goals.

  “Precisely.” Garth shook his head. “Something happened. Something that’d never happened before, not ever. Something impossible.” The ex-Specter held up a hand, cutting Sullivan short; the doctor had finally gotten there, but it was important –if for no other reason than the lightbody act as a final sounding board for the lunacy of the plan- for the digitized human to hear the whole story now. “The extra-dimensional plane they live in is, essentially, atemporal. Existing outside of this frame of reference as it does, anyone looking in could spy on any point of history. And I mean any point. From the Big Bang to the Heshii’s predestined consummation of destruction. Hah. That’d make a great speed metal band name. Consummation of Destruction.”

  “Time travel.” Sullivan rolled his eyes against his better judgment. “Impossible.”

  “Physically, sure. But if all you are doing is viewing time, it’s like watching a sitcom.” Garth waited for Sullivan to digest that little nugget of wisdom. “You there? Awesome. Here we have the Heshii sitting around watching a hundred trillion channels on their dimensionally gigantic 3D television with existential surround sound, enjoying the shit out of themselves. They like tinkering, doc. Every being in existence, Unreal or not, has some kind of plan, some sort of motive, an ultimate goal. The M’Zahdi Hesh are no different. They look at the end of the Universe, maybe they see a few Galactic clusters that aren’t ripe enough. They jiggle back down the line, reach out with their godly powers –given to them by their creational feast- and fistfuck a Galaxy until what they’re looking for happens. They zip back up, and voila, hey presto, it’s dinnertime. They destroy everything, they sit back and wait for the next course.”

  “How long does this take?”

  Garth shrugged. “A few trillion years at a pop. I have no idea how the Heshii experience time. I don’t think they’re living at the same rate as Unreality. That’d be fucking crazy. I say the point is moot. They’ve been doin’ it long enough so that, even if they aren’t trillions of years old, they are still the oldest goddamn things around. Excluding the Engines.”

  “Of course.” Sullivan stifled a smile. They had no actual proof that the Engines existed. The entire concept was one espoused by N’Chalez at the very beginning. About the only things they knew to be true were the Heshii and the very unreal truth of their existence. As far as it went, the Engines were as workable an idea as anything. “Do go on.”

  “This Unreality, this time around, everything was going on just as it’d always gone on, as it always would go on. Until … everything changed. Perched on their atemporal chairs, rooting and hooraying for the end of Unreality, the end … stopped. Their Universe buckled. Grew. Expanded exponentially out of control. Hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands more Galaxies, for them, literally burst into being. They looked everywhere to find the source of this change, this revolution. But … but the Heshii cannot see what shouldn’t have ever been.”

  “You’re talking about you again.” Sullivan said this accusatorily, but only just. He wanted to believe N’Chalez was Universally delusional but couldn’t. The Kith’kin’s story was compelling and most of the facts he kept bringing up were undeniably true and not slanted towards self-aggrandizement. Kith Antal was his father. Garth N’Chalez had engineered some truly amazing things in his life, he had survived a 400% neural sheathe inundation. All this was true. The Universe wasn’t real, the
Heshii did want them destroyed. They’d never understood why. They knew now the Hesh had been doing it for a long time.

  From all their examinations of the last thirty thousand years –mostly through data scoured from Latelian ‘LINKs- it seemed that the gruesome War on Earth had ended. Quite abruptly. Almost as if the threat they’d been reacting to had left.

  Sullivan shook his head. It was impossible.

  Garth continued, wondering at what Sullivan had concluded. “Unable to see the cause of this sudden flowering of Galaxies, the Heshii were nevertheless able to pinpoint the location. Like a drop of water on a still pond, you can track the ripples back to the source. They found Earth, an insignificant planet. Maybe it was like a hundred gazillion other worlds they’d seen throughout the epochs, maybe not. I dunno. They found Earth. They looked. They watched. They decided that –as bountiful a harvest as the new, suddenly massive Universe was- it wasn’t what they really wanted.

  Physical interaction with this plane is difficult for the Heshii. In those few previous instances where they needed to manipulate things on a corporeal level, they operated through agents. Whispers in the dark. Without knowing when on Earth that one paradoxical moment happened, they picked a time far enough back in history so that their agent would have enough time to ensure the eventual, ultimate destruction of the Earth. Their reasoning was sound, yes? Give a man a few thousand years, give him the basic idea of what to look for, and let him loose. Give him enough power, enough strength to ensure that it got done, and all behind the scenes.”

  “You … you … can’t be serious.” Sullivan refused to accept the idea. He strode away from Garth angrily only to find himself rounding on the Kin’kithal a few seconds later. “Do you mean to sit there and tell me that the M’Zahdi Hesh, in their attempts to undo the paradoxical expansion of Unreality, chose as their agent the very man who would later become your father?”

  “Ironic, right? If they had done nothing, if they had ignored the spasms, if they’d just trucked on into that eternal night, none of this would’ve happened.” Garth laughed hollowly. “There isn’t a being in existence that can leave well enough alone, doc. It’s the nature of life to try to improve, to meddle, to enhance, augment. To rewrite. But they picked a man, a not terribly bright man, and gave him the powers of, well, if not a God, a demi-God and they said ‘hey, something weird is gonna happen, fuck that shit up for us whenever it happens and we’ll, like, buy you a cookie. Oh, and bee-tee-dubs, it might be, like, a super, super long time’. Give a simple man enough power and he turns into, well, he turns into the Legendary Kith Antal, destroyer of continents.”

  “This is insane.” Sullivan wailed.

  “This is the Unreality, doc. In a Real Universe, I guarantee nothing like this would ever happen.” Garth commiserated with the doc. No matter how much you accepted that everything around you was bananas, eventually you’d find something else that set the bar so goddamn high not even a pole-vaulting specialist could get over it. And then something else showed up, weirder and more fucked up. “Ok. We’re getting there, doc. So … the things that happened to me happened to me. My dad is training me to do battle. Meanwhile, the Hesh are losing their minds; back up the line, temporally speaking, shit is completely fucked up. They’re detecting more and more symptoms of paradox. Each passing moment, they are losing control of their precious Universe, they are falling away quicker from their optimal buffet size than ever before.

  They reason, not unintelligently, that their one agent is having a hard time. They conscript more soldiers into their ranks and thus, the Kith and Kin are born. War is announced, the Armies of Man are formed. Battle begins. Kith Antal either is coerced into rejoining the ranks or succumbs to the darkness that’s been in his soul longer than man has been illegally downloading mp3’s. From their end-state perspective, the M’Zahdi Hesh witness things getting worse instead of better. Their soldiers are outfitted with the latest in extra-dimensional technologies. The Kith and Kin are faster, smarter, more powerful, nearly invulnerable and almost definitely immortal. They are losing. The paradoxes pushing the envelope of Existence outward multiply. Existence is stretching wildly out of shape.”

  Garth was describing the natural progression of war, with an added temporal twist. If you accepted that the Heshii could indeed witness the end results of their war against an unseen, unknowable threat –a feat that wasn’t terribly difficult, given the … state of things- then you could just as easily imagine them losing their collective wits when everything they did, every angle they manipulated, only wound up creating a scenario worse than the previous one.

  Sullivan knew enough about Garth’s service record during the war to know that he’d been extremely active. Each moment, each triumph –maybe even each loss- turning into an indelible stain on the Heshii Blueprint for Universal Gorging. It must’ve driven those ancient locusts insane with confusion and rage.

  The doctor narrowed his eyes. “But what about the others? If you are a paradox, then …”

  “Then my brothers and sisters are also paradox. But who,” Garth asked sarcastically, “could’ve brought them into the world? If no Kith, no Kin could stand the sight of one another, if all were sterile, if all Kith and Kin were waging war against Humanity, who could’ve done it? How could Griffin Jones, Lisa Laughlin … how could they have been born? Except, they’re not fully paradox. Not entirely. Just enough. Enough to muddy the waters.”

  “Are. You. Serious?” Sullivan was … was sick to his stomach.

  Garth N’Chalez was more like his father than anyone had ever imagined. They should’ve seen it, should’ve understood. Or ... maybe it was the other way around? Maybe Kith Antal was more like his son; if the Heshii were driven to ever-dizzying heights of reciprocation, would not their foot soldiers be forced into the same patterns? Was it not plausible that Kith Antal’s bloody-minded violence, Kin Shikosi’s wanton destruction … a response to Garth’s own force? Could not Antal, alive for thousands of years before N’Chalez’ birth, been preparing the whole time for that momentous arrival?

  “Why would you … why would you do that? Why would you … you let what happened to them happen?”

  “In war, there are casualties, Doctor Sullivan.”

  Sullivan stared at Garth, mouth open, aghast.

  “In my desperation to secure the birth of Reality, I accepted the grim truth that whatever could be done must be done. With the aid of the Ushbet M’Tai Aäl, I’d already learned how to … manipulate the Kith and Kin genome on a molecular level. From a genetic point of view, Kith Antal and Kin Elisa are my parents, but their, uh, input was … infused with … Reality. It wasn’t that much harder to manipulate others. War is hell, and the Kith and Kin experienced the appetites of their ancestry at a heightened level. Um, collisions were bound to happen. So I …” Garth wiggled his hands around. “Helped things along.”

  “They’re your children.”

  “Not genetically.” Garth cleared his throat and tried to don the armor he’d worn so long ago. The decision to do as the Heshii had done, only more intricately and with a far more benign purpose, had been easier back then. Although the War proper had only just begun, he’d already seen how things were going to go. The Heshii would continue to respond to his presence, spiraling upwards and more violently with each passing year as they grew desperate to track him down.

  Almost from the start, it’d gone wrong. With Antal’s help, he’d managed to … remove the embryos from the Kin before they’d begun to suspect what was wrong. They’d built artificial wombs, the very first of the hy-tech devices built on Earth, and the fifteen boys and girls had been put inside. ‘Born’ nine months later, they’d been put into the system and tracked down nearly two decades later.

  By that time, Antal had followed the Siren’s Song back into the crushing embrace of the Heshii. Garth had been forced to tell the Armies of Man that he suspected the War on Earth was causing genetic mutation and that he was ‘building’ a device to track down ‘pote
ntial threats or aid’ that would surely develop as a result.

  Then he’d just gone and written the names of his ‘children’ down and given them over.

  The memory of that necessity, of that loneliness still burned in him. Garth remembered feeling so very different from every other being in Existence that he’d almost called it quits, walked off into the sunset. With others like him, a bit … diluted … but like him nevertheless, he’d felt better about what’d have to happen down the line.

  Against his will, it’d gone wrong. They’d wound up being so much more than a means to an end. All they’d been born and bred to do was be a smoke screen, to provide cover. They’d turned into friends. Loved ones. He’d sat across from them for years, knowing every second that, soon or late, they would die. Would need to die. He’d let it happen. That, too, was his burden.

  “Not genetically.” Garth repeated woodenly, tears spilling down his face. “I drew from all the playbooks I could, doc. The potential Reality I’d experienced … the … the … rightness of that other place … is overpowering. That was what mattered, that was the goal. The Engines either can't protect themselves or are being prevented from doing so by the Heshii. Reality needed to be born. Needs to be born. Because the other option is letting the M’Zahdi Hesh continue on as they’ve been doing and that isn’t really an option at all.”

  “Why? Why is this other Reality –which you know claim you want to destroy and make anew- so important? What possible reason could you have to do all of this? The Heshii only raged because of you. Had you done nothing, none of this suffering, none of this turmoil would’ve happened. Granted,” Sullivan paused, savoring a particularly unpleasant thought, “all of this would’ve been destroyed, but, Unreal or not, countless billions of lives have endured agony.”