Citizen Pariah (Unreal Universe Book 3)

by Lee

  “And how, precisely,” Sullivan started, doing his best not to laugh, “Do you intend on turning this whole … this whole ‘thing’ into a cosmic pin?”

  “Do your ears actually work, or are you just high?” Garth demanded. “The HIMs, man, the HIMs. Nothing I build has one function. Fuck. It’s like talking to a mouth breather in grade five.”

  Gorensworld, Other Tales of Horror and No, For Serious, I Had a Guy for that as well… and a Girl. Also, Betrayal.

  Sullivan bristled at being spoken to like that, but unsurprisingly, he got over it quickly. Between being needled incessantly by Stark, spoken down to by Umbigwe, and sniped at by Simes, there was very little in the way of hurtful insults that even Garth could come up with that he hadn’t heard worse, and for longer. Stark, in particular, had shown surprising vindictiveness, hanging on to a single insult for a record-breaking three thousand two hundred and fifteen years.

  “Do go on.” Sullivan answered blandly.

  “Once in a Suitable location, the HIMs, like I said when you weren’t listening, locked themselves into the very bedrock of existence, anchors in this sea of Unreality. Then they began emitting, well, mistuned Harmony.” Garth didn’t exactly blush, but he was not pleased at having to rely on using enemy tactics.

  “Oh,” Sullivan clapped slowly, mouth twisted, “that is rich. The high and mighty N’Chalez, spoiling the Music of the Spheres for his own noble, grand ends. At least you were doing it for the ‘right’ reasons.”

  “Dude, no one uses air quotes anymore. They do this wiggling thing with their pinky fingers down by their hips.” Garth snickered when Sullivan paused to stare at his little fingers, then burst out laughing when it seemed the doctor was about to try it out. “Anyways. Yes, I did it. I’m not proud. But in order to … soften … the matter up for reformation, it needed to be done.”

  “Reformation. Of solar matter.”

  “Doc.” Garth wanted to whap the doctor upside the head. “Hy-tech is the only tech. I don’t know why you have this stumbling block when it comes to this stuff. Hybridized technology is built using concepts stemming from Heshii interference and my own paradoxical brain and powered by the goddamn energy of life. With it, you can do goddamn anything so long as you have the vision, the time, and the patience. Oh, and an absolutely iron-clad will.”

  “We were terribly short-sighted.” Sullivan admitted at last. They’d asked for weapons and weapons they’d received. Wondrous, powerful weapons. Tools of tremendous destruction and duronium and a hundred other things that they used to battle the Kith and the Kin. Sullivan pummeled his brain, trying to come up with a time when they’d asked for a method of ending the war. All he could recall were requests –then demands- that they be given tools to destroy the Heshii.

  Same intended result, infinitely different course to that result.

  “Hey, if it makes you feel any better, it’s all gone shitty. Well, not shitty, but … fucked up? No,” Garth shook his head, “no that actually makes it sounds worse.” He shrugged. “Yeah, no, it’s all gone wrong.”

  Sullivan could barely keep the morbid pleasure out of his eyes. “Oh? Do tell.”

  The ex-Specter ignored the doctor’s ghoulish joy at his failures, at the flaws in his plan and how they’d been exploited. “I never considered that something would eventually be able to detect the signals. I knew no one and nothing would be able to decipher what was going on, but I never once anticipated that the anomalous readings would be detected. Or what happened next.”

  “Oh!” Sullivan blurted, unable to control himself. “Oh my God! You’re talking about … about Gorensworld and the others!”

  Naturally, Sullivan and the others would know about Gorensworld, Shoemaker’s Grave and Tannhauser’s Gate. The sheathes were recording devices, after a fashion, and while Bravo might not have been able to receive data across massively stellar distances, they’d undoubtedly downloaded all of the ‘footage’ the moment he’d set foot on Hospitalis. Downloaded his experiences and then absorbed everything he’d undergone with zealous ferocity; their ‘last best hope’ at conquering the Universe for themselves had been –through their eyes- a wild, dangerous animal. From that understanding of what he’d become, they’d designed and implanted the hellacious tests and gauntlets he’d endured from Day One.

  “Yeah, I’m talking about Gorensworld and the others.” Garth thought back to those instances with disgust intermingled with horror and a profound sense of ‘what the fuck?’ “Gorensworld was my fault. Gorensystem was my fault. Hands down. I should’ve picked a solar system further out, way, way, way beyond the furthest remote edges of Trinity’s preprogrammed expansion plans.”

  “Preprogrammed.”

  “Yep. Trinity’s bizarre and severe OCD dreams of having humanity spread across the Unreality is my doing. Most of what Trinity’s been up to is because of me. But more on that after the commercial break.” Garth shuddered. Gorensworld. Good Lord that’d been fucked up. “The single most important part of the entire celestial machine was the, uh … piston, I guess you could call it. Yeah. Piston. I needed something truly massive. Like, all of the weight ever. Heavy enough to puncture the fabric of Reality. To that end, and with a lot of help, I developed The Cloud.”

  “You came up with that.” Sullivan was actually, physically sickened and he didn’t even have a real body. So profound was his revulsion that his lightbody shuddered and spat static. “My God, N’Chalez. You are a madman.”

  “That system was supposed to have never been populated!” Garth howled, slamming his hands on his legs. “Never. Never ever would I have wanted that. I programmed Trinity to avoid quantum-level disturbances like the ones coming from Gorensystem like they were the fucking plague.”

  “The Cloud turned them into … into …”

  “Zombies.” Garth nodded blackly. His skin still crawled at the thought of those people, infested and infected on a cellular level with Cloud particulate.

  How wonderful they’d found it, at the beginning, when they’d discovered that –so long as they were patient and waited- all their physical ailments, no matter how grievous, would be restored. Every ten years like clockwork. Broken arms, shattered legs, decapitation. All of it, restored in the twinkling of an eye. Never knowing, never realizing or even caring that what they were was caught, trapped in cycle of matter being replaced by machines, the matter stolen being … repurposed just behind sight, just on the other side of detection.

  Garth continued. “Trinity wanted everyone to believe that Gorensystem was populated sometime during one of the myriad Exoduses Humanity experienced, but that just isn’t true. There was evidence that the machine mind intentionally catapulted a few colonial ships past the edge of It’s Cordon, knowing full well that in a few thousand years, It would find reason to hammer away at the risen civilization to make room for It’s more … tractable citizens. It wanted humans to be exposed to whatever … anomaly … It’d detected, and then reason to wander around blowing shit up to see if It could uncover the mystery. The only problem…”

  “Is that Trinitytech doesn’t work properly in these mistuned systems.” Sullivan made a face.

  “Bingo. Instead of discovering what was weird in the system, all It did was exacerbate The Cloud. It was bad enough The Cloud had started co-opting organic life into its matrix. That could’ve been fixed. In theory, someone could’ve reapportioned stolen matter back into the people. Trinity’s reclamation of the system damaged the HIM years before I got there. That’s when the people started waking up relatively immortal. That is one of the reasons why It woke us up after so long asleep. Trinity realized It’d fucked up, surmised quite intelligently that one or all of us were responsible for the absolutely bizarre fucked-upedness that was going on in that solar system and arranged a reason to have me fucking well go there. Trinity'd waited too long. There was nothing I could do except temporarily halt the final stages of transformation. The matter stolen from the men and women of that system, even the worlds ben
eath their feet, had been consumed, spirited away through The Cloud to the deeper parts of the solar system, awaiting final cohesion. Only two things remain in that system, Doctor Sullivan. The HIM and the zombified, coopted body of Shyla Sin, one of Trinity’s oldest Enforcers. Everything else is partially realized machinery, vast, hundreds of thousands of kilometers long machinery just this side of built. She and it await a command to resume construction. At that command, any planets that remain, suspended in glittering Cloud, will erupt and those explosions will push everything into place. Instant solar system-sized piston to drive a needle large enough to pierce Unreality like a balloon. My greatest creation, built out of billions of people. I sometimes wish I’d never been born.”

  Garth’s genius, the things he was willing to do in order to achieve his goals of defeating the Heshii and ensuring Reality was created, was growing irritating. Hearing over and over again how masterfully they’d been outplayed, how skillfully they’d been conned ­–even with their absolute doubts about his sincerity- was making Sullivan feel like a child.

  They’d severely underestimated –not only N’Chalez- but the Heshii as well. They’d completely failed to consider time. Time to plan. Time to act. Time to wait. How could they have ever imagined that a few hundred years would give them enough time to control the Kin’kithal, to force him into using that intellect of his for their own purposes?

  “But Goren isn’t home to the only HIM out there.” Sullivan pointed out, moodily brooding over their shortsightedness.

  “No.” Garth held up two fingers, ticked them off as he named the last two. “Shoemaker’s Grave and Tannhauser’s Gate. Both were … incursions. The first was a breach, the second an invasion.”

  “What purpose did you give to those two HIMs?”

  “Basically, they were to form the shaft of the pin.” Garth snickered at his choice of words and Sullivan promptly made him feel like an idiot with a simple look. “These two HIMs were networked together, working in conjunction, digging through this plane and the extra-dimensionality, preparing the physical, uh, construction of the cosmos to accept realignment of the Galaxies into the pin itself. Sorta like … the things that go on the ends of shoelaces. What are those things called?”

  “Aglets, I think. Yes. Aglets.”

  “How do you know this stuff? Also, stupid word.” Garth continued. “When commanded, these HIMs’ll create a corridor through everything, and then the Galaxies, hauled by their nodes, will rush in. But … shit went wrong.”

  “You said that already.” Rapt in the storytelling as he might be, Sullivan couldn’t help but dig at N’Chalez whenever he had the chance. The doctor knew he’d picked up some terrible habits from his enforced roommates, and found he didn’t care.

  “I did indeed.” Garth got up and headed towards the kitchen. Telling all your secrets and plans to an angry lightbody was thirsty work. He dug a Coke out of the fridge, opened it, took a swallow, and grimaced. “I should’ve packed Pepsi.”

  He belched loudly before picking up where he’d left off. “Shoemaker’s Grave was, like I said, a breach. An interdimensional one. Now, I know what I said, and for all intents and purposes, it’s true. There are no other dimensions. But it’s also not true when it isn’t.”

  “You lost me, I’m afraid.”

  “I lost myself, at first.” Here, now, on the far side of that moment, Garth remembered that, during his involvement with Shoemaker’s Grave, he’d been in full possession of his wits and, more importantly, his abilities. It’d still been a goddamn close thing. “I should’ve known from the moment I came back from proto-Reality that things weren’t as clear cut as I’d imagined, that the workspace for the Engines had, if not different levels, different … spaces. Proto-Reality existed … exists … on the far side of the extra-dimensionality, a template of our template. The Heshii exist inside ex-dee itself. That right there is a bunch of different places. And … well, the simplest way to explain it is to pose you a question.”

  Sullivan gestured. “Go ahead, commander, the floor is yours.”

  “Do you really think that the Heshii was the only species in the entirety of Historical Existence capable of protecting themselves from the destruction of their false reality?”

  Sullivan opened his mouth to say ‘of course’ when he realized the notion was ridiculous, especially when you took into consideration that –as powerful as they’d been to survive their own destruction- the Heshii hadn’t been born knowing how to destroy existences efficiently. Combine that with the very real possibility that the so-called Engines had obviously started out with wholly sentient beings and had chosen to downgrade that sentience with each iteration … the odds were overwhelming that the second or third or even later ‘reboots’ featured one or more unworkable yet immensely resilient species. “I … see.”

  “I totally fucked that up.” Garth closed his eyes, and images of the species that’d accidentally happened on the HIMs quantum tunneling frequency spilled across his memory. The Bruush. The horrifying, unstoppable Bruush. Matter masters, the Bruush could command the very atoms of a thing to split, change, rearrange. They themselves were … precursors to dinosaurs, and while able to make themselves over into whatever they could imagine, they’d stuck with the bipedal form they’d evolved to. The similarities between the saurian conquerors and the lumbering, plodding beasts of ancient epochs were too analogous to be anything but. “Shoemaker’s Grave, like I said, was a breach. The Bruush found the HIM’s signal and investigated. They … fell through the HIM’s tunnel and found themselves on some random planet. I never did get the proper name. By the time my team and I had arrived, the planet had already gone to shit.”

  “Bruush.”

  “That’s what they called themselves, yeah. Think ‘dinosaur people’ and add ‘vicious, bloodthirsty, unstoppable’ and, oh, right, ‘capable of manipulating matter like fucking whacked out magicians’ and you’ll get close.” Garth shivered.

  “Matter manipulation?”

  “Yup.” Garth had seen one of their wizards do just that. A female Bruush, ordered by her pack leader Tr’ss T’aa Nihaaq S’strss to demonstrate the power they held, had touched a human slave and … that’d been that. The woman had collapsed into a fleshy bag of organic goop, from which had eventually emerged a scurrying thing meant to represent how the Bruush viewed humanity. The Tr’ss T’aa had then stomped that insect-like creation flat. Object lesson given.

  “My best guess is they developed the ability to survive their own destruction. If you’re in tune enough with the cosmos around you, there are imminent signs that the end is coming. Because of their raptorial focus and their innate will to conquer, they altered themselves enough so that when the end came at the hands of the Heshii, they just sort of … skipped out.”

  “And these beasts found a way through to here?” Sullivan blanched. He couldn’t make up his mind about which was worse, the Bruush or the M’Zahdi Hesh. He finally settled on giving both species equal footing right at the pinnacle of nightmares made real.

  “A single pack, yeah. A few thousand soldiers, a couple of gene masters, a Tr’ss T’aa … that’s ‘leader’ in their tongue. We were ‘lucky’ that it was just a pack. They came through, saw what was what and set about creating a beachhead. They sealed the world off behind a quicksilver curtain that acted as a barrier/quantum decompiler. They were trying to widen the breach, turn the world into a fucking super highway, but they weren’t successful. They couldn’t find the HIM and wouldn’t have even known how to work it if they had. When that became evident, the Tr’ss decided on forming an army. My team and I rolled in about then, sent there by Trinity. It went … badly.”

  And how. Garth refused to think about it. He’d been happier without the full details and frankly wished they were still buried under the fog of self-induced amnesia. The Tr’ss and his witches had discovered that their variant of Harmony could do terribly bizarre things to their human stock and they’d begun experimenting with reckless abandon
.

  “You won, though.” Sullivan almost phrased it as a question. After all, if Garth hadn’t been successful, he wouldn’t be in Bravo.

  “In the most relative of terms, sure. The planet wasn’t named Shoemaker. That was the name of the Conquistador-class destroyer sent by Trinity to see what the hell had happened to one of the most unstoppable Specter teams in existence.” Garth took a deep breath and let it out. “I … I was the only one that made it out. Just … just barely. Some weird fluctuation in the competing Harmonies of an older, shattered realm and our own let me operate fully while on the planet, and I was almost killed anyway. Older remnants, Sullivan, are tough. Tough. The Engines liked to build nearly invulnerable beasts back in the day. I engineered an escape that nearly killed me. As I passed through the barrier, I, um, ‘devolved’ back into my normal operating state, knowing only one thing: a massive barrage of firepower needed to be slammed into the silver barrier. The captain … refused.”

  “Oh no.” Sullivan knew firsthand what happened when amnesiac Garth was prevented from following through on orders dictated by his subconscious.

  Garth made a face. Oh no, indeed. “A Conquistador-class destroyer ‘only’ has around about a thousand organic life forms. A vast majority of shipboard functions are maintained by level 9 AI. I couldn’t allow the captain’s interest in what he was seeing compromise -not just my own mission- but the entire Universe. Thus, Shoemaker’s Grave. I overloaded the engines, reprogrammed the AI, stole a lifepod, and took the hell off. The destroyer opened up with all cannons and weapons, hammered away at the planet, and then exploded just to make sure. Breach sealed, HIM programmed to avoid particular flavors of unreal space.”

  Trinity had questioned him most carefully after that mission. Displaying frustration at his inability to remember anything beyond ‘soul-tearing fear’ and ‘massive threat to everything every-fucking-where’, the machine mind had inevitably accepted Garth’s substantial terror as real and justified.