Citizen Pariah (Unreal Universe Book 3)

by Lee

  “Bingo.” Garth gave Sullivan a thumbs up. It was a real shame the doctor’d gone along with the rest of the idiots from the Armies of Man. He really was one of the few people who’d been capable of thinking like a Kin’kith. It took a lot of handholding and explaining with very tiny words, but eventually, Sullivan got their on his own. The man’s peers sometimes didn’t even get close, even with diagrams, small words, pretty pictures and a bucket full of LSD.

  Garth held out a fist for Sullivan to bump. After the doctor stared at the fist for ten seconds, the ex-Specter sighed. “Okay. Simultaneous occurrences happening now. Get all of this in your head. Alpha is built. Bravo is built. The first of the Cordon nodes is built. The HIMs are assisting baby Trinity in running Humanity while everybody else hammers away at the enemy.”

  “No … not yet. I estimate that there are hundreds of millions of these nodes. You’ve been asleep for thirty thousand bloody years. No one and nothing, least of all Trinity, has been capable of reproducing hy-tech. The AI can’t even see quadronium and even if it could, without a direct connection to ex-dee fueling the creativity process … how?”

  “Self-replication. Took me a while to solve that myself. Really burned me out. As I said, the nodes have added bells and whistles. Inside each there’s a HIM. Not as complex as the ones running boss on Trinity, mind, but … yeah. Necessary. An n-space generator. And, um, a … uh. Atomic assembler. Thing. Sifts space for atoms and molecules and things and then builds the elements it needs to create the ingredients for duronium. Then there’s the Harmony device to whang away at all that duronium. You see where this is headed. I just thank Tuxedo Wearing Baby Jesus that no one else invented variable space pocket dimensions. Could you imagine? Just … bonkers. Everyone … ugh. Well, it’d certainly solve overcrowding on a lot of planets…” Garth shook his head. “I’m sidetracking. I left a bunch of raw materials in that first node, so creation of the second one took hardly any time at all. Natural accumulation of raw ingredients takes around about one hundred years or so. From there, it’s exponential expanse. Two becomes four becomes eight, so on and so forth. Happy?”

  Sullivan allowed as how he was, though he did warn his host that everything coming out of his mouth was only purely theoretical as far as he was concerned. Granted, there was proof that The Cordon existed, but as they had all learned in a very painful manner, virtually everything coming out of Garth’s mouth was half-lie, half-innuendo and all bullshit. “So….”

  “So,” Garth said enthusiastically, “while there aren’t enough nodes to have one for each Galaxy, there are enough for a whole goddamn lot. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 billion of them.”

  With a flourish, Garth hit ‘go’ and commented on what Sullivan was watching, the lightbody’s face pensive and thoughtful. “If I had more time, I’d’ve rendered this properly, you know, with like, shaders and bump maps and things, but hey, this works.”

  Sullivan nodded. On the massive screen, a wireframe map of the entire Universe –or near enough as to make no difference- burst into existence. It was daunting in size, and the doctor well understood Garth’s side rant concerning how miniscule something as eternal as their Unreality could make a person. What creator, sentient or otherwise, would make something so massive, so glorious, then not give the people within a chance to revel in all the wondrousness? Hundreds of billions of Galaxies, with hundreds of billions of stars, with an approximate number of planets in each spiral, elliptical, whorl, double …

  The potential for life was staggering.

  “Here,” Garth began, putting on his best announcer’s hat, “we have the Unreality. It is bursting at the seams with so many different variations of life that it would seem to be a madhouse of conscious thought to anyone viewing it from the outside. It is chaotic, and insane. It is also stuffed with love and need, friendship and hatred.”

  A brilliant red shell began absorbing Galaxies in the wireframe Unreality, and as the two men watched, a stupendous volume of space, literally thousands of Galaxies and then hundreds of thousands of Galaxies was eventually ‘consumed’.

  “This is The Cordon.” Garth was impressed with Trinity’s singular adherence to It’s orders. Sure, it was a computer, and even the most sophisticated computer has to follow it’s programming, but something weird had happened to Trinity down through the years, some … hiccup … that’d given it more freedoms than was ideal. “A stellar dominion incorporating more planets, more life, more … everything … than anyone imagined possible. Well, except me.”

  “Insufferable arrogance.” Sullivan said, only half-aware he’d spoken. Then, more consciously, “We saw traces of it in your peers, but never in you, not really. Griffin was the worst. Or so we thought.”

  Garth ignored the dig. “The Cordon has a dual purpose. The first … chase away the M’Zahdi Hesh.”

  “You could do that?” Sullivan broke his thoughtful gaze from the endlessly whirling fractal that was their existence. Unreal or not, it was wondrous. “You could do that?”

  Garth pointed at Sullivan’s balled fists. “You’re a lightbody, doc, you’re not gonna do any damage with those at all. To answer to your unasked question, I couldn’t do it from the very beginning. Not by a long shot. It wasn’t until after the early stage of HIM testing, when I began to see how the Universe was constructed, that the idea came to me. By then, you guys had already come to your own dark epiphany and I wasn’t in the mood to share.”

  “This … node … pushes the Heshii away? Their servants, their technology, everything?” Sullivan turned back to the Unreality. Too many intense revelations in too short a time was hurting his brain.

  “Yup.” An easy grin split Garth’s homely face. “Once I realized I could, uh, tune a quadrant of space in a way … it’s like those sonic things for mosquitos. Same deal. The solar system, hey, did you know that our home is the only system that doesn’t have a proper name, never did? That’s kind of dumb. I mean, okay, sure, the Latelians call theirs ‘Latelyspace’, which is dumb, and Trinityspace actually refers to It’s dominion and not the home system … yeah. I just thought of that. So dumb.”

  “You were saying?”

  Garth blinked, nonplussed by Sullivan’s lack of interest in damned near everything. “Yeah. The ‘sound’ emitted by the node actually happens at the lowest levels of the quantum structure of the Universe, and it drives the Hesh and their goons batshit. They did the only thing they could. They fled the solar system. A few years later, the signal doubled in size, so they moved again. And so on and so on until we’re thirty thousand years in the future. They were literally chased across the heavens. The awesome thing is, they can’t get through The Cordon, no matter how hard they try. The whole of Trinityspace has been free from Heshii attacks for this whole time. Well,” he added darkly, “sort of. The bastards left enough traps and shit to make Wile E. Coyote jealous.”

  “I cannot believe this. This is …” Sullivan floundered around, looking for the right words.

  “I know, right?” Garth flexed his muscles and made cheering sounds with his mouth. “Way more awesome is the unexpected side benefit of The Cordon.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah. The Heshii have been trying to destroy the Unreality nonstop since they realized something was shoving their heralds across space like a bunch of unruly school kids on a day pass. They never stopped. The moment they realized they were no longer in control, they decided to forgo hunting for me. My … ripples … had stopped and they couldn’t see The Cordon to save their lives, so they just went back to their, like, consoles or whatever and kept hammering away at the delete button. Pretty consistently, too. The Cordon’s nodes, built out of quadronium and emitting a modulated Harmony, kept everything … stable. Ish. Stable-ish.”

  “You’re talking about The Dark Ages.” Down through the millennia, the lightbodied minds of the men had witnessed more than their fair share of the inexplicable ‘powering down’ of everything technological. Once they’d figured out how t
o generate a powerful enough scan wave, they’d also witnessed what happened to a society –any society- when everything stopped working.

  The violence, the chaos, the predation, all of it had only ever served to cement their decision to elevate themselves to … M’Zahdi T’rran. Terran Gods.

  “I am indeed. The protection wasn’t perfect, obviously. I don’t know how or why their pulse or bomb or whatever affects complex technology the way it does, but I suppose it doesn’t really matter. All that matters is that it kept them from getting away with it. I would’ve been really pissed otherwise.”

  Sullivan watched Garth fiddle with the controls on his display. The man was a continued mystery, even after watching him day in and day out for ten solid years. The doctor couldn’t think of another man who’d engineered a completely non-violent, absolutely one hundred percent effective solution to The Heshii and a method to destroy everything. He was both protector and demolisher. “You said that this … field was the first of the nodes’ tasks.”

  “Hm? Oh. Yeah. Cosmic landscape renovation is the second, more important, super gnarly task for these bad boys.” Garth hit the button.

  On-screen, The Cordon disintegrated. Red dots swarmed outward, making beelines for the center of every Galaxy the eye could see. The outermost regions of Unreality didn’t get their own node, but overlapping circles of influence from those that did enveloped most of those unlucky enough to have gone over the ‘magic number’. The red shell switched to blue.

  “What?” Sullivan gestured futilely. “What is this?”

  “Everything I build has more than one purpose, more than one function. I’m a multi-tool guy, doc. You should know that by now.” Another push of a button, and the Galaxies started moving. Sullivan made an exasperated sound and started walking around the room, clearly distraught but unable to take his eyes off what he was being shown.

  The Galaxies danced, hauled through the heavens, encapsulated by the node’s ponderous, impenetrable shield, ripped from their universal mooring and towed until as many of the billions of Galaxies as was possible had been aligned.

  “As you can see,” Garth commented, enjoying himself, proud to see –at the very least- a display of what he was planning come to life, “not every Galaxy gets a node, but that works. Once ‘created’, once made real, the dimensional sheaf will have an untold number of pages, with a random number of Galaxies per instance. I constructed the … realignment with this in mind; not every Galaxy will be moved. Enough to form a straight enough line and that’s it. The nodular emanations are powerful enough to form clusters, and when everything starts moving, the unaffected Galaxies will get pulled along with the rest. Once on the other side, they’ll start stacking, like pages in a book. Or leaves on a tree.”

  “Anything can look elegant on a computer screen, Garth.” Sullivan couldn’t help but be churlish. No matter what they’d seen, no matter what they’d all endured, regardless of the man’s unique insights and abilities, it bothered the doctor immensely that a single man –human or not- should have the arrogance, the … vanity to presume he could do better.

  Minus the predation of the Heshii, there was nothing wrong with how the Universe was being constructed by the purported Engines of Creation. Even that didn’t matter. It was a fact, perhaps the only unalterable, undeniable, plainly evident fact in all of Existence. Something was creating everything and whether it was some undefinable Natural Law that had every Galaxy doing as it was or some unknowable uber-deity or … or … computer churning things out, there was nothing wrong with what was being done.

  Garth’s vision of a Reality where whatever form of consciousness arose could enjoy the Universe in which they lived was … poetic. Lovely. Uncharacteristically sentimental. His obvious dislike of humanity’s feelings of insignificance when confronted by the vastness of the Universe was misplaced, unimportant. Humanity was already a holy terror, falsely labeling their various hungers as ‘curiosity’, ‘interest’, ‘self-preservation’ when in fact, they just wanted things that didn’t belong to them. Humility was the only thing keeping the Human race from being completely insane.

  Of course, that meekness hadn’t stopped the leaders of Humanity from choosing as they had.

  About the only thing in Garth’s entire near-monologue that made any sense at all was his desire to remove himself from the picture. If, as he claimed, he truly was paradox, then it made further sense that the Natural Laws of the Universe would seek to remove him. In so doing, everything around him would stretch out of shape, warp and buckle until things started breaking.

  Being paradox, though, meant that –in all likelihood- nothing could destroy him. Not completely, not truly: having no true connection to the … the state of things … he was, however minutely, out of phase. Not entirely untouchable, just enough to make the blind, automatic responses of the body-that-is-Universe flood with the existential equivalent of white blood cells. Here, in this Unreality, that wound up being things like Chadsik al-Taryin, Sa Gurant, others.

  “What ya thinkin’ about, doc?”

  “How mad you sound.” Sullivan answered promptly. “How you sound full of self-loathing and regret. How you’ve wrapped an entire Universal War up into a pretty little box and labeled it ‘all my fault’. You are the most narcissistic entity I’ve ever encountered, and I’ve spent thirty millennia trapped in a shoebox with Stark. How dare you sit there and tell me that all this suffering, all this madness, everything is because of you, and then go on to explain that you and you alone can make it all better? Human beings aren’t merely a side effect of your existence, N’Chalez. With or without your presence, with or without the Heshii response to your un-locatable paradox ripple through time and space, we could’ve …”

  “No.” Garth cut in. “No. You couldn’t have. Weren’t you listening? The Heshii have been doing this for a very long time. They’re the best at what they do, and what they do is cultivate and then farm entire Universes. You tell me I’m arrogant, narcissistic? The Heshii came first. The Engines decided a species that was born fully evolved, fully sentient, fully capable was the absolute wrong thing. It destroyed that Universe itself, almost immediately. With nothing to strive for, nothing to … bleed for, there’s no point to anything. Each iteration of its plans involved a decrease in early sentience, brain capacity, ingenuity, creativity. The goal of this Engine’s creativity is to see its forms of life achieve wonder on their own, over time, and with great struggle.

  Do you honestly believe Humanity is better, smarter, faster, wiser, more powerful than any of the life that came before? Jesus wept! We’re the last ditch attempt, Sullivan, and we still weren’t good enough. Without me, the Heshii would’ve won. Would’ve destroyed everything. Engines gone, the other Spheres under assault.”

  “So now you’re saying the paradox that gave you life was generated by the Engines.” Sullivan snorted, shaking his head ruefully. “Good Lord, man. Listen to yourself.”

  “I don’t know what allowed things to collide until I came to be.” Garth muttered angrily. “The Engines, maybe, the Ushbet M’Tai, almost certainly. The point is, doc, if I hadn’t muddied the waters, driven the Heshii insane with worry and fear merely by walking around singing the lyrics to ‘Walk this Way’ by Aerosmith, this would’ve all been destroyed ages ago.”

  “And so, this.” Sullivan gestured dramatically at the screen. “The colossal conceit that you and you alone can repair things, make things better, improve upon the plans of whatever. I’ll allow as how the celestial mechanics appear realistic. The nodes you developed undoubtedly have the power to move Galaxies, if for no other reason than they’ve formed an impenetrable shell around more than fifty percent of the Universe for thousands of years. The stellar distances are phenomenal. At the end of the day, with the proper tools and enough power, I imagine shifting a Galaxy with hundreds of billions of stars and planets would be no more difficult than uprooting a plant and moving it to a different part of your garden.

  But destroyi
ng everything and then using the power generated to create something new? The mind boggles. How do you intend on doing that? How on earth can you sit there and say that you have in place a mechanism to raze all of Existence to ashes with such casual grace?”

  “It all goes back to the balloon, Doc Sullivan.” Garth hit the button on his glowing virtual keyboard. The screen started moving again. Various points along the shaft of Galaxies began flaring brightly. “Like I said, I wish I’d had time to do this properly, but. The workspace of the Engines is nearly full to capacity, yes?”

  Sullivan nodded but said nothing. He wondered if the bright spots on Garth’s animation were representative of the HIMs. If they were, and if he applied what he already knew about the Universe, then one of the machine was well outside Trinity’s domain. Well outside.

  “Ever try to pop a water balloon that’s only partly full of water?” Garth asked, answering before Sullivan had a chance to reply. “Stuff just sorta dribbles out. It’s kinda funny, but not the explosion you want. There’s a trick to getting the balloon just full enough so you can move it around, chasing after your dumbass friends, without it bursting and getting you all wet. If you get it right, all it needs is the slightest pressure and kablaam. Biggest. Bang. Ever.”

  A … shape … solidified along the string of Galaxies, a hard-edged … Sullivan rolled his eyes. This whole time he’d imagined N’Chalez to be speaking figuratively with all his talk of balloons, but apparently not; the wireframe animation had turned the celestial string into –more or less- a Universe-sized needle, and as he watched, it slammed into some unseen thing, a feat which then caused everything to explode. In the midst of the furious destruction, the string of Galaxies was being fed through an entirely hypothetical puncture in the fabric of absolute nothing, whereupon –according to Garth- it would be transformed into Reality.