Citizen Pariah (Unreal Universe Book 3)

by Lee

  At the time, Garth had accepted the AI’s acceptance as normal, and natural. After so many thousands of years, the machine mind had to have encountered things like that before.

  “These changes you made to the HIM, I assume since it was networked with an identical unit charged with the same task, it, too, stopped digging so deep.”

  “I assumed so as well.” Tannhauser’s Gate. Holy crap that’d gone all the way wrong. “Where Shoemaker had been a breach, Tannhauser’s Gate had been an actual incursion. Best guess scenario says good old Nihaaq sent his buddies a heads up about what he was gonna do before taking the plunge. When he didn’t return, whoever was in command of the Bruush went looking. Maybe they found the blob of superheated death energy I sent through the tear, maybe not. All I know is that they also found traces of the HIM’s signal. Found it, went looking for more, found the second. Didn’t matter that I’d reprogrammed them not to dig so deep. They’d both found the Bruush’s realm at the same time, and while HIM #2 had pulled it’s tendrils out of that place, things are always left behind. The Bruush devoted the resources of their entire existence to digging through.”

  Sullivan swallowed. “How … how bad?”

  “The Bruush Dominion is approximately the size of a Galaxy. Not much when compared against our own. They … they transformed their plane of existence in ways that are eerily similar to what I’m planning, doc. They turned the whole fucking thing into a fucking Galaxy-sized … vehicle. A … a … fucking vessel of ultimate destruction and literally rammed our Unreality from the other side. A full-on absolute and utter interdimensional breach. Around about six hundred miles of Bruush madness punched through into our side. More than enough. Hundreds of millions of Bruush warriors, great and small and bred for every conceivable form of conflict, swarmed through the gate. But … and I can’t believe I’m saying this, Trinity was ready. It might not be able to see my HIMs, but It went back to Shoemaker’s Grave and sifted through the ashes and found subspace echoes originating from Bruush communication devices.

  It was ready, willing, and able to defend It’s property. The single greatest accumulation of soldiers met head-on with the Bruush. We are talking, not just Trinity’s Army, Special Services and the Enforcers here, doc. We are talking the Sillex, Traveen, Gor-lec … others. Monsters from The Cordon, given leave to cavort in the infested Galaxy, bastards like Kelvin the Sick and his army of plague bearers, an army that grew and swelled like poisoned mushrooms, Waking Life and her coterie of temptresses, the mindblank hive calling itself the Entirety of Common… It had storehouses of Dark Age nightmares that not even Historical Adjutants knew about, too; things like The Spectacled Myriad, Darkened Zion, and Embrasure of Silence. Trinity even unveiled horrors from my own past: Cloud-enriched zombies that ate planets. Bruush-enhanced entities that put Kin’kithal and Kith’kineen to shame. It was a goddamn onslaught, Sullivan. You cannot even comprehend the nightmare.”

  “I … I … I cannot.” The data in Garth’s sheathes from that period made no sense. There was nothing but conflicting reports, static, noise, maddened howling. It was as if the sheathes themselves had been affected. “How did you win?”

  “Win? What is it with you and ‘winning’? You sound like Charlie Sheen. Next you’ll be asking me if I have tiger’s blood. Things like this aren’t about winning, doc. It’s about surviving. Praying that you survive long enough to do some other fucking batshit insane craziness that lets you continue for another day. Rinse, repeat.” Garth drank more of his Coke. “On the eve of the final sortie, when all that we’d brought to bear against the Bruush was floundering, I awoke. I … I guess that the subconscious me had calculated the odds in favor of Trinity and It’s mad assortment would win the day, whereas at Shoemaker’s Grave, the only chance had been me. I awoke, and could see that the Bruush Extrusion had materialized –intentionally or accidentally- around the HIM. The only chance to keep the Bruush from dominating that Galaxy, cementing an actual, permanent presence in our Unreality was to get inside. To get in, reprogram the HIM, summon a node, and break the Galaxy off.”

  “Oh my God.” Sullivan’s mind swirled. He feared he was in the process of losing his mind.

  “This,” Garth said nastily, “is the kind of shit you have to deal with when you want to play with the big boys, doc. Did you really think stealing Unreality from the Hesh would happen planet by planet, life by life? Fuck that. Idiot. Moron. These are celestial wars, Doctor Sullivan, engagements spanning hundreds of millions of lightyears and swallowing entire civilizations whole. Combat that makes the fabric of existence shudder. Dogfights around galactic cores, where whole stars are blown out like candles with our passage.”

  Garth took an angry swig from his bottle. “Yes, I won. Trinity Itself was on hand for that final push, operating from a battle-augmented Quantum Tunnel, channeling energy from stars and quasars and black holes and every other destructive stellar phenomenon you care to name, burning back the beasts that never. Stopped. Coming. Oh, we danced, doc, we danced in the fires of hell that day. Millions died so I could have a chance. I blazed in the skies, a brilliant burst of hard truth, just as Lisa had feared would happen. I reached my objective. Thankfully, there was a fucking HIM at the center of all this or that would’ve been my last day. Trinity’s rage at seeing me as I am was … considerable. It had seen me, doc, seen me dance across the cosmos. Before I broke the Galaxy, I rewrote Trinity. I revised It’s vision of events and sent It on It’s merry way. The rest happened more or less the way I said it. The remaining warriors fled through the Quantum Battle Tunnel, the essence of the Galaxy was hammered by the HIM, the node arrived, everything inside was sealed up tight.”

  “That is amazing. That you survived all that. That … that it happened.” Sullivan paused, a slow realization coming to him. “You don’t have access to that HIM any longer, do you?”

  “Nope.” It was a bittersweet success, to be sure. A Pyrrhic victory to say the least. Garth ran his hands across a virtual keyboard and the large display changed. “The revised model suggests a loss of twenty-two percent of Universal matter. I still have enough nodes to pull in virtually every Galaxy in existence, but the overlapping frequencies of the HIMs isn’t strong enough. The resultant Reality won’t be perfect. There won’t be nearly as many leaves on the tree. It is a major bummer.”

  Sullivan wanted to slap Garth silly. Major bummer. Every time the man opened his mouth -when he wasn’t explaining something, at least- was to be asked to endure intentional stupidity. “And the remaining HIMs? The one here? The last one? Their functions?”

  “Coordination, mostly.” There was no point in mentioning that he’d intended on using the quantum string connections between the HIMs to arrive on the doorstep of the Heshii. Without the power to battle them head-to-head, bracing the demons as he was now was completely and utterly foolhardy. Not even the might assembled to combat the Bruush Extrusion would’ve been enough. Garth continued. “Coordination and control. The nodes themselves aren’t complex enough to do everything. If I’d had more time, I might’ve figured out a way to make them more comprehensive, but it all got away from me.”

  Silence hung in the air for a moment before Sullivan took the opportunity.

  “There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you.” Sullivan confessed, glad that Garth’s tale had almost drawn to a close. “Several things, really. Things that you may not see the need to explain, things I should like to understand before you push me away into the dark.”

  “Shoot. You’ve been a relatively captive audience.” Garth waved his bottle of Coke around. “Ask away.”

  “This. All of … all of Latelyspace. Why is it this way?”

  Garth understood what Sullivan was asking. Why was Latelyspace so like Earth could’ve been? Why had the people accepted him? Why was the technology so similar, so easily molded into hy-tech variants? Why was there an army of giants ready to do his bidding? The answer was simple. “Lisa Laughlin.”

  “Ah.” They had,
of course, proof that the girl had been conscious during her ‘slumber’. Unable to do anything, the assembled lightbodied men had watched Lisa Laughlin’s transformation –her ascension- into what was tantamount to Godhood. They’d spent thousands of years discussing the scope of her powers, trying to determine just what would happen to ‘garden variety telepathy over such a profound amount of time. “I assume, then, that Lisa knew of your plans. The true plans.”

  “Yeah.” Garth’s heart still ached at the thought of Lisa’s request being fulfilled. Now that he understood the reasons behind her need to die before the end, it hurt even more; she had never been –never could’ve been- a paradoxical plague on life. Not to the extent he was. The inbound new Reality wouldn’t have viewed her or the others as anything more than something interesting, possibly going to the extent of ‘using’ them to repair chaotic moments. “Yeah. She did. Mostly.” He said again, lamely.

  “So Lisa … what, engineered this civilization for you? Ensured that you’d have a base of operations from which to wage your war? That is a dedication bordering on the supernatural.”

  “You’re telling me. Lisa understood the reasons, though. Saw why it was important, agreed that I should’ve never been born and, once that came out in the open, all but demanded that we all sacrificed ourselves. ‘Reality,’ she said in her wonderful British accent, ‘deserves a better chance than we gave it’. Wish granted.”

  “The HIMs. How did you move them around? You were temporally frozen. Trinity Itself wouldn’t have done it, couldn’t’ve. How? How did you get those HIMs anywhere near the places you needed them?” It was the one thing in Garth’s whole tale that’d been bothering him this whole time.

  “Oh,” Garth drawled, “I had a guy for that, too.”

  Sullivan considered Garth’s ironic smile for some time. His mind raced. He considered everything he understood, everything he’d been told, everything that he and the others had recorded, sampled, and encountered during their thirty thousand year journey. The doctor contemplated the depths N’Chalez was willing to steep to in order to effect the birth of Reality, the … brutality of some choices he’d made, the deceit, the cunning, the manipulation.

  “You cannot be serious.” The accusation hung in the air.

  “Oh, yeah, no, for serious.” Garth nodded. “For absolute serious.”

  “That’s … appalling.”

  Garth tossed the empty bottle over his shoulder as he made his way towards the exit. “Meh. Everything that is happening to everyone involved is stuff that everyone deserves. Him most of all.”

  “Where are you headed?” Sullivan asked, his voice growing sly.

  “Oh, I only came here to unlock the final piece, to run through the simulation one last time.” Garth admitted. He passed through the tiny apartment-sized area he’d left for Bravo’s minds. “To issue the remaining HIMs their final orders. Oh, and to have some fucking awesome hamburgers.”

  Sullivan watched Garth leave, a triumphant, wicked gleam in his lightbodied eyes. Garth came back a few seconds later.

  “What the fuck did you do?” Garth hollered, veins in his neck and forehead popping. “What the fuck?”

  “You’ll have all the time in the Universe to contemplate your amazingness now, N’Chalez. You’ll be able to examine just how you could’ve done things differently, how you could’ve done them better. Together, we might even have a chance to discover if a quadronium vessel will survive the destruction of Unreality.” Sullivan crowed. He did a little dance. They might not have defeated the Heshii, but they’d done the next best thing. They’d never been capable, Sullivan understood that now, but at least they’d gotten one over on Garth N’Chalez, their eternal jailer. Sullivan continued, full of mockery.

  “The eye scan. The one that obliterated your eye. Enough genetic material was torn from you –voluntarily, which I personally find excruciatingly ironic and hilarious- to … repurpose. While you were being smug and showing off your n-space rooms, we were rewriting the protocols on board this ship, using your DNA to convince your very own programs we were you. Why do you think the others were so quiet? They were busy, N’Chalez, busy trapping you in here. Time dilation fields emitted by unused QFEs, you fool. We didn’t have time to set them to the limit, but I’m sure it doesn’t matter, not really. An hour here is a few hours out there, but the piece de resistance is the hard locks. The doors will never open, N’Chalez. We erased the opening protocols with the last of your DNA. No one, not even someone cloned from any material you may’ve left behind, will be able to open those doors. As far as Bravo is concerned, there are no doors.”

  The look on Garth’s face drove Sullivan to nearly orgasmic delight. “And as you yourself are fond of pointing out, nothing can destroy quadronium. As like to try destroying a Universe with a twig. You are trapped. Never to be free. Never to invoke your astounding plans, never to see Reality born. The Heshii will eventually destroy this Unreality and possibly discover a way to move on to the other Spheres. But you, sir, you maladjusted, paradoxical freak, will never see it happen.”

  “Why?” Garth asked when he was able to find his voice. “Why would you do that? Why?”

  “Because fuck you, N’Chalez, that’s why.” Sullivan danced his triumphant jig one more time. “Because if we can’t be the gods we wanted to be, no one gets anything.”

  Garth gestured and the virtual keyboard appeared. He entered the commands that would send Sullivan back to his storage device. Sullivan shouted. He paused over the ‘enter’ button, curious to see what the good doctor would have to say.

  The lightbody doctor grinned madly. “Oh, send me back, by all means. Give me silence for a time. A long time, even, if you please. Hundreds of years, if you wish. But … you will call on us, N’Chalez. You may have all of those songs, all of those movies and shows, painstakingly recreated from a proto-Reality that will never be to keep you occupied, but sooner or later, you will grow lonely. You will thirst for conversation. You will wake one or more of us up. Oh, and then the talks we will have.”

  “Fuck you.” Garth’s finger hovered over the ‘enter’ button. A glimmer of amusement rippled across Sullivan’s lightbody face, forcing the Kin’kithal to stop and stare. He grinned at Sullivan’s belief that there could be any secrets. “Tell me what’s so funny.”

  Doctor Sullivan felt the command worm its way through his thoughts. He didn’t even have a chance to struggle, to fight against the directive and he realized, right then, right there, that N’Chalez really had fooled them all. “You have enemies great and wide, N’Chalez, beasts and monstrosities slavering in the dark, hungering for a power they cannot name, but there are three that –without you- will destroy this Unreality in an attempt to usurp the M’Zahdi Hesh.”

  Well, that was no fucking surprise. “Spill.” Garth laughed outright at the sour look on Sullivan’s face. Who in their right mind trusted someone they obviously hated to turn them into virtual copies of themselves?

  Sullivan smiled. He thought he was himself, felt that way, but … he wasn’t. Either way, whatever he was, he was enjoying thoughts of N’Chalez trapped here forever, with them, while outside the walls, his precious plans to give birth to a new, better Reality, were burned to ashes. “Over the course of our interment, mighty N’Chalez, we tracked and monitored many things. As I said, three great enemies. I’ll tell you their names, and not at all because you’re forcing me to. The entity calling itself Emperor-for-Life Etienne Marseilles, one of Trinity’s trapped curios is one. A dire threat. An eternal monarch with dreams of placid domination and the actual wherewithal to succeed. Another is a failed Army experiment, our own attempts at Harmonized Soldiers. Truly terrible, beyond comprehension. They are few, but … their power is legendary. They seek an end to all Harmonies, even those beyond the one that waits. Nihilists in the purest sense, the CyberPriests are deadly. And …”

  Garth absorbed the information. It wasn’t terribly surprising about the Emperor, but having the ‘Eternal Monarch�
�� on a list of enemies capable of defeating the Hesh was disconcerting. Neither was it surprising that the Army had tried their own Harmonic Conversion; any group of people who decided they wanted to be Gods would do anything to see that happen. “And the third?”

  “Why, your own brainchild, of course, the shepherd of Humanity, Trinity Itself.” Sullivan laughed and clapped at the distinctly upset N’Chalez. What a wonderful going away present. “Something happened to your precious AI, N’Chalez. Something opened It’s eyes and It began hungering for apotheosis. Even as It diligently worked at providing you with the framework for your success, It strived to assure It’s own place at the top.” The doctor laughed again. “Which of the three will be successful, I wonder? Trapped in the box, dear old friend, you can spend eternity watching. I do hope you’ll pull us out so we can all watch the end of Unreality together like one of your precious television shows.”

  Angrily, Garth hit ‘enter’ and the doctor disappeared. He whispered thinly, black rage struggling to consume him. “I’ll never call on you.”

  The Kin’kithal warrior headed back into the foyer and stared at the walls. There were no seams, no signs that there was any way to open anything. Garth slumped against the hard surface of another Universe, and wept.

  What the hell was he going to do?

  And So…

  Herrig stared thoughtfully at the proteus Huey had left on his desk not moments ago. He knew what it was. Every citizen in the solar system could recognize the Prometheus Device. The AI’s parting words rang in his ears…

  “You think Chairman was just a different way of saying ‘political leader’? I don’t think so. The original colonists weren’t political refugees fleeing Trinity’s rule, they were part of a Conglomerate out hunting for riches. Don’t forget, Herrig, this system used to be on the edge of The Cordon. There’s always wealth to be found in the form of lost machines, buried technologies. Regimes and tyranny and all that shit didn’t start until later. Run this system like a business. It’s set up for it. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve gotta find a way to cut through a Universe.”