Citizen Pariah (Unreal Universe Book 3)

by Lee

  “Because…”

  “Why?” Sullivan’s shout rang loud in his own ears. He’d thought Antal insufferable. He’d hated Griffin Jones on sight. He’d found the Kith and Kin to be little more than incarnations of evil and disgust. Garth N’Chalez was worse than they all were. He’d engineered everything. All the misery, all the suffering. Part of some plan. He said it was to allow Reality a chance.

  “Because,” Garth shouted back, on his feet and in the lightbody’s horrified face, “because the new Reality won’t have people like me in it. Ever. The Reality I envision will never have Kith, never have Kin. My … my fucking children won’t ever be born, either. I won’t be. The possibility of beings like me and mine will be removed from the template. The Heshii will only ever be a nightmare, a nameless dread seeping up in dreams. My presence, my illogical, impossible, unlikely existence broke everything.

  From the moment I stepped through the extra-dimensionality and into that pre-Reality, everything went wrong. The flow of time snapped like a stretched rubber band. The Universe itself tried to kill me, identifying me –quite correctly- as something that did not belong. Suddenly, whatever plan the Engines had been developing for its eventual child was shat on. The responses to my presence rose to the level of my ability, and I was so very able, Doctor Sullivan. Same as here. The landscape of Reality wound up brutally altered. I wasn’t helped back here, doctor. I was thrown back. The Ushbet M’Tai found me, corralled me. Threw me back through the pinhole I’d fallen through at great risk to their personal lives. ‘Go,’ Aäl said, ‘go and fix your mess. Find a way to make things right, no matter the cost, no matter the pain, no matter your own desires, your own mortal needs. As we are now, we can never be. This Real is shattered. You like to build? Build. Or as the Spheres are our witness, we will break you’. Lemme tell ya, doc … you think the Heshii are bad? The M’Tai, living in a broken domain, a plane just as fucked as this one, are worse. They draw their powers from the potentiality given to them by the Engines alone.”

  “They … these … these M’Tai. They’re real? And they … they want you to … destroy themselves?”

  Garth took a deep, trembling breath and looked at his hands. Even stuffed full of quadronium, he’d clenched his fists hard enough to draw momentary blood. “They take an extraordinarily resilient view of life and existence, Sullivan. Their philosophy is ‘once risen, risen again’. The actual form of that existence doesn’t matter to them. They know, or believe they know, that they will be in some way. You know what? They’re not wrong. Almost everything that was over there will be again. They believe in the Engines and the Spheres. For them, anything that comes because of those two things is the right thing.”

  “Just not you. Just not the Kith’kin or the Kin’kith.”

  “Oh,” Garth replied slyly, “more or less.”

  It was overwhelming. On a rational level, Sullivan accepted the fact that a true paradox, one physically represented by Garth N’Chalez, could indeed cause so much damage merely by being. Something as simple as going to the store to buy milk could cause irreparable harm to the flow of time. To beings capable of viewing the whole of Unreality as a television show, the damage must’ve been incomprehensible. To protect themselves, they’d struck, with commensurate retaliation. Two fighters in the ring, each an unstoppable foe, trading blow after blow until the end of time, growing in violence, swelling with rage, forever unable to understand what was happening, only that the enemy must be stopped, and at all costs, any cost.

  Sullivan tried to imagine what it felt like to be the ‘young’ man in front of him. Aware that at any moment, some nebulous enemy was actually trying –literally, not figuratively- to kill you. It was the sort of feeling every man and woman felt throughout the course of their lives. Manifestations of doubt, insecurity, fear. It was natural. It was also … untrue.

  Except not where N’Chalez was concerned. Oh no, not for him. A paradox many times over, his very presence was anathema to the great design. He was literally the one thing in an Unreal Universe that should never have been, and from him, from his miraculous birth, everything had gone wrong.

  “And you’re trying to fix it.” The words came out quietly, little more than a whisper.

  “Not trying, bub.” Garth grinned. The worst of it was over. The pain and anguish he’d felt for decades had been spoken aloud to someone else. Someone not Lisa, who’d never truly understood until the last little while. “Gonna.”

  “From what you’ve just told me, you’re going to ensure someone like you can never be. If … if the Engines of Creation are using this Unreality as a … a guide to how the flow of proper time will be and you’re engineering things to prevent the inclusion of things like the Kith, like the Kin in this ‘newer, better Reality’ … the … the …”

  “Schematics.”

  Sullivan accepted the suggestion with a nod. “The schematics have to be rewritten. The entire history of this plane would need to be reworked. I can’t … I can’t … Look, I can just barely comprehend the possibility that you have figured out a way to rebuild an entire Universe.”

  “It’s like a car factory. Only with Galaxies instead of Buicks. And, like, a really big warehouse.”

  Sullivan repeated Garth’s answer, ending with a strangled choke of laughter. He imagined a factory floor, with N’Chalez running around shouting ‘we need to go faster, boys, more neutrinos in that one, please!’. “Agreed. A gross simplification if I ever heard one, but agreed. I imagine the plan is to use what is here, what is there and … and … fabricate a framework for that new Universe to follow. A timeline.”

  “Yup.”

  “How?”

  “I got a guy.” Garth rubbed his hands together. He was feeling better. He’d been sitting on that secret for a really long fucking time. It got a fella down. Even worse had been running around knowing the secret but unable to access it, to realize why he’d been doing the things he’d been doing. Now that he knew what his purpose was, and the reasons, things were looking up. More or less. He still needed to figure out a way to follow Naoko through to the other side, but the answer would come to him eventually. They always did.

  “You’ve got a guy.” Sullivan looked flatly at Garth. “A guy. Who knows the whole history of everything.”

  “Yep.” Garth caught Sullivan’s expression. “No, seriously. I got a guy.”

  “Well,” Sullivan cleared his throat, “you’ve certainly explained the why. I have nowhere to go except back in the braincase and I find myself drawn into this madness of birth, rebirth and your colossal ego like a moth to a flame. Care to fill me in on the how?”

  “Oh yeah, that’s next. But first, I need another Slappy burger.” Garth left Sullivan standing there, reflecting on … everything.

  The Biggest Bang. Ever.

  Sullivan gazed at Garth as he worked on some sort of display or other; in the background, a band he claimed was called ‘Black Label Society’ thundered loudly, filling Bravo with heavy guitar and nearly –to him- incomprehensible lyrics. Yet another reflection of the Near Reality Garth had experienced, the band had never written or sang a single song on war-torn Earth. No, this band, as with virtually every bit of music the man listened to, was an exact reproduction tirelessly manufactured over the course of years.

  “Is all this necessary?” Sullivan asked, plugging his ears to blot out some of the sound.

  “Yeah!” Garth hollered. “The sound helps me think! Awesome, right?”

  The guitar reached a crescendo. Sullivan tried to shout overtop the noise, saw Garth’s mirthful smirk, then decided to wait patiently for the music to dwindle. When silence ensued, the doctor spoke hurriedly. “I meant this … whatever it is you’re working on. Is it necessary?”

  “The primary function of Bravo,” Garth answered seriously, turning the music off, “is to collect, correlate, and assimilate data gathered by a series of machines seeded throughout the Galaxies, random samplings of the base state of Unreality across a vast s
tretch of time. The secondary function of Bravo is to assist in the assemblage of the mechanism that will pry open the hood on Engines of Creation. The tertiary function of Bravo is to coordinate and control the Galaxies as they are strung through whatever passes for a birth canal in this place.”

  “Machines?” Was it possible that Garth’s plans had started so early? “Are you referring to the HIMs?”

  Garth grinned from ear to ear, enjoying the doctor’s suffering even as it filled him with sorrow; as they’d sought to manipulate him, he’d been manipulating them. The happiest moments of his life had happened thirty thousand years after he’d been born, and even then, there’d been that whole hostage taking, God soldier swarm thing going on around them; before that, he’d been all about the mission, all about ensuring that he followed through with Aäl’s imperative.

  “The Heuristic Intelligence Models were designed with multiple uses in mind, doc.” Garth resumed working at the virtual keyboard. “First and foremost, a method of control for the fledgling AI you guys developed to marshal civilian forces. Ever learning but incapable of achieving sentience, the HIMs were tasked with determining which demands the programs could handle, which required human input. That’s what I put in the manual.”

  “And what didn’t make it into the manual?”

  “I needed to take … sonar readings? Yeah. That works. Each HIM generates a colossal quantum field, Sullivan. Large enough to blanket a solar system. The higher functions of the HIM were, while being absurdly complex in formulation, simple in execution. Dig through the Universe’s layers. Find the edges. Find the corners. Find out what’s beneath.”

  “Similar to what we did.”

  “Yeah,” Garth countered bluntly, “but what you guys did was behind my back and for jerkface reasons. Don’t. Don’t argue, don’t try to get me to see your point of view. The moment you asshats decided you’d rather be where the Heshii are was the moment you willingly surrendered the right to make excuses for your behavior. Humans fuck up all the time. Humans can say ‘hey, wow, that was totally fucked, am I right? Can we pretend I didn’t do that?’. Fuckers who want to translate themselves into Gods and then revise things until they are the pinnacle of Existence have to stand there and be shat on. By me. Anyways, yes. Like you guys did, only better, and with a different purpose in mind.”

  Reeling from the assault, Sullivan raised an eyebrow and chose to say nothing.

  “Ever have balloon fights as a kid, doc?” Garth asked. “You know, you get balloons, you fill ‘em up and proceed to terrorize your best friends for a couple of hours? There’s always the one kid who’s not as good at it and you just dummy him … okay, yeah, metaphor off the rails. Balloon fights. Have any?”

  “My parents didn’t believe in that sort of thing.”

  “The fuck? My parents were the physical embodiment of evil incarnate in the world and responsible for more war and horror than any single human being in all of history and they still let me have balloon fights, man. That’s … that’s fucked up.” Garth waved a hand. “Whatever. You understand the basics, right? Fill a balloon up with the right amount of water and then you run around like a maniac until you see a friend of yours and then you soak the shit out of him.”

  “What does this have to do with destroying everything that exists?” Sullivan demanded tiredly.

  “If,” Garth replied patiently, “you consider the Unreality as a fucking balloon, and water as Galaxies, it has everything to do with everything. Fuck. Prior to me showing up and ruining the shit out of everyone’s awesome plans, the destruction of this Universe happened like clockwork, by whatever apparatus the M’Zahdi Hesh utilize, right?”

  “If you say so.” It wasn’t as though he hadn’t wanted to have balloon fights. He’d wanted to. Very badly. Unfairly, when your parents are wealthy, and they have decided they want you to become a famous and even wealthier doctor, you suddenly find you can’t do anything strenuous or even remotely athletic. You might break a vital bone in a hand, ruining a career in surgery; you might knock yourself unconscious and destroy valuable brain cells.

  “I do.” Garth nodded. “I totally do. Now, the bad guys never let the Engines do much more than create a couple hundred Galaxies. In terms of capacity, that’s not a lot. The volume of the Engines’ workspace is a lot bigger than that.”

  “How do you know?”

  Garth flickered a brief smile and plugged in some more data; with the q-form running interface protocols, the model he was building was growing in intricacy. “Other side. They have dimensions. Actual dimensions, not the ‘extra-dimensionality’ we get. The physical configuration of the broken Reality worked out to be something like six hundred Galaxies. Sounds small, right? Six hundred. It ain’t a lot, until you consider the number of stars in each. The average is 200-400 billion stars, with at least a comparable number of planets. In each Galaxy. Suddenly, shit gets daunting. Aäl told me there were hundreds of levels to their planar existence, and that each possessed approximately the same number of Galaxies.”

  “So,” Sullivan said, warming up to the puzzle, “if the place you visited was a kind of sketched out composite drawn up by the Engines to test the actual viability of what was going on here, then it’s reasonable for you to assume the number of Galaxies needed for that comparison.”

  “Look at you,” Garth said warmly, “thinking and shit.” He blithely ignored Sullivan’s venomous look. “So yeah. I needed to find out the actual size of our Unreal Universe. And in the course of my investigations, I discovered we weren’t anywhere near even a best-guess approximate to what that other place was being modeled on.”

  “Thirty thousand years.” The words came out before Sullivan had even had time to consider the implications. “That’s where you got that number from. The duration the Engines need to accomplish the job as it was described to you.”

  “Yup. Thirty thousand years would give the Engines enough time to generate a very nearly maximum number of Galaxies that would, in turn, populate the dimensional array as explained to me by the Ushbet M’Tai herald. Or, near enough. Aäl had been kinda vague on the totals. So.” Garth put the finishing touches on his model. “There you have it. A goal, a duration of time to complete the goal and the success of that goal. We have more than enough existential matter to render the blueprints for proper Existence on hand. What are we missing?”

  “Tools.” Sullivan knew about tools. Every profession had them. “But … tools to work on an Existence? Built by a man? Sorry. By a Kin’kithal?”

  “The tertiary function of the HIMs required their being moved to various spots around the Unreality, a chore handled quite nicely. Once in place, the HIMs would anchor themselves into what you could totally consider the bedrock of Existence. Think of a boat dropping an anchor that suddenly fuses itself to the ocean floor and you won’t be far off.” Garth turned to Sullivan. “With the HIMs in place and everything more or less locked down, all that waits is, uh, moving everything.”

  “You … you approach these problems as if they’re simple.” Sullivan pointed out. “Making an impossible chore sound possible is a lie. You make all this sound like it can happen, and all I can do is agree. There is no proof that you can do any of this, and now you’re telling me you plan on moving everything? I’m assuming you mean the Galaxies themselves.” The doctor crossed his arms on his chest. “How, pray tell, do you plan on that?”

  Garth pointed at the virtual keyboard, and hit enter. A black oblate spheroid appeared. While the doctor stared at it, Garth began speaking. “This is what led you all to believe I was filling this place with an endless array of quadronium-constructed hy-tech weapons. I never really came up with a name for it. People today, and for the last umpty-thousand years have been calling it something different.”

  “What does it do? And how big is it?” Sullivan –all of the lightbodies, in fact- had the tonnage of quadronium used by N’Chalez prior to climbing into Alpha. A thousand tons of the Universal element had been crafted by t
he Kin’kith. To the military minds involved in the last-ditch attempt project to ‘rescue Earth’ some few hundred years later, that quantity of ‘metal’ had implied a massive amount of firepower. More than enough to take the planet back from a pack of petty, squabbling tyrants.

  By then, of course, they’d learned the truth, and had more or less sacrificed the planet in favor of gaining the Universe. Their plan had undergone changes as well; if they hadn’t been outmaneuvered by N’Chalez right from the start, the ex-Specter and … and … and his children would’ve found themselves in a vastly different sort of war, yoked to their masters’ goals through their leader. Alas, that was never to be.

  “Big.” Garth grinned. “The spheroid is, end to end, one thousand kilometers. Top to bottom …”

  “A thousand kilometers!” Sullivan shook his head. “How could you have built something like that without us noticing? We were always watching.”

  “I’m the world’s first Jedi Ninja.” Garth nodded assiduously. “Also, I didn’t build it on the planet. I built it in space. When we were all working on the prototypes for the data buoys and all that other stuff. Easy. The team helped. Anyway. It’s gigantic. Biggest thing built by Man.”

  Sullivan snorted. Garth’s thoughtful gaze slid right off. He didn’t care. “What does it do?”

  “The spheroid … that really sucks. I can’t keep calling it that.” Garth pursed his lips, weighing out a few dozen nicknames that popped into his head. “Agh. Nothing sounds cool enough. I’d call it Tinman, except I never made that show and you wouldn’t be impressed. Okay, fine. No cool techno-jargon-y name for this thing. Bummer. Technically, it’s a quantum field emitter with added bells and whistles.”

  Sullivan tried to work out the field of effect something that massive could generate. A handheld-sized device comparable to the ones currently powering the n-space fields inside Bravo could be pushed to create an envelope of nearly a mile before distortion effects kicked in. An idea crashed into his head and it sent him for a loop. “The Cordon?”