Citizen Pariah (Unreal Universe Book 3)

by Lee

  Voss_Uderhell sent another query concerning the state of their most precious cargo. Emile Voss and Analise Uderhell were the worst of those in the Cabal; Tynedale and Fujihara kept to themselves nearly every minute of every day. They practically had to be dragged into the heavily encrypted virtual meeting space. The other members were strictly low-rent losers who had practically nothing to offer in terms of materiel, money, personnel… groups like Titchmara and Grownly/Secre, Vannel&Dorren were fodder should Trinity fall upon them.

  But the fat man and his shrewish wife stomped and tromped across Bishop’s frayed and frazzled nerves like drug-addled fiends, demanding constant updates and ever-increasing proof that everything was going according to plan.

  Jordan snorted. Of course everything was going to plan. He had Spur down there overseeing the final handover, did he not? He had nearly every FrancoBritish soldier and mercenary in his employ covering every single inch of the spot, yes? Massive AI intellects watching everything from the flow of atoms through space to the encrypted chatter from a hundred million data points across the sickened planet they lived on?

  The only thing he wasn’t certain of was Trinity Itself. When it came down to the thirty thousand year old machine mind, you might as well just shrug your shoulders and find some deity or other to pray to; the mercurial inorganic mind either would, or would not, involve Itself in your plans. If It didn’t, all the better.

  If it did … well. Jordan didn’t think Trinity would react too badly to what was happening, but then again, there was no way to reliably predict what Trinity would do. Proof of that was Latelyspace. Every single member of the Cabal agreed that the madness that’d gone on there made no sense to anyone. An entire solar system filled with the most dangerous and skilled cyborg soldiers anyone had ever seen anywhere before or since, each with the most impressive hatred for anything not them. A sane ruler wouldn’t’ve allowed that to happen at all.

  Emile Voss sent another request for data. Jordan directed an AI to block all further communications from Voss_Uderhell and everyone else; his monitors had just shown him the first sneak peak of The Zhivago.

  Naoko Kamagana would soon be his! After that, he would be King of the Universe!

  It was good to be alive.

  ***

  If Trinity had hands, and eyes, and a face and all the things required for it to all work together properly, It would be rubbing It’s eyes miserably; it seemed that the whole of Unreality was unspooling around It, and the Final Battle hadn’t even happened yet!

  It’d been so hard to determine the cause and effect of releasing the Kin’kithal and the Kith’kineen from their time-locked prison aboard Alpha. For all It’s intellect, for all the power It held, for all the mysteries contained within It’s nearly infinite realm, being able to definitively determine precisely what the outcome from Garth N’Chalez and the others being loose would be had escaped It.

  The Unreality was a prison, and the prisoners were rattling the bars of their cells with increasing vigor.

  Offworld species normally placid and content to live within the confines of their own solar systems were pushing at the limits of Its patience, demanding more space, more room to grow, and in some cases, outright attacking It’s bases and attempting to dismantle the barricades that kept them in.

  Peaceful human systems were starting to bark and bay at one another, an inexplicable bloodlust boiling up from deep inside. They, too, wanted more space, their neighbors gone, lands that weren’t theirs under their control.

  It was almost as if the Unreality itself was somehow getting everyone ready for the War to End All Wars. For that was surely what it would be. Once Trinity defeated the Great Enemy that was even now coming this way, alerted to N’Chalez’ scent, the next step was to either defeat or take control of the Engines of Creation. And then it would be time to redo everything, to make the whole of everything better, more … practical.

  And yet, as Trinity sat and watched the hundreds of quadrillions of men, women, aliens, robots, cyborgs, sentient sponges and talking blobs of light, It knew that simply defeating the Great Enemy wouldn’t nearly be enough.

  There were others out there, others who’d sat by and done nothing for thousands and thousands of years.

  Emperor-for-Life Etienne Marseilles, who truly was and had been an Emperor for life. Data concerning the first EuroJapanese man was sparse, but Trinity knew, oh yes, It knew that Etienne Marseilles had been on Earth for as long as It had been growing into what It was now. There was no way to know how a mortal man had contrived to live as long as he had, but it was a truth that I’s own databanks couldn’t deny.

  Etienne Marseilles was thirty thousand years old. And were it not for the integral part that the damnable immortal played in Its own plans for existential domination, Trinity would’ve devoted considerable time and resources into piercing the Emperor’s unbreakable dome of silence and slaughtering everything inside without hesitation, without remorse, without feeling.

  The only thing that made any sense as to Etienne’s rise to power was timing. Etienne had been alive during the war with the Armies of Man and the Kith, the Kin and their Harmony Soldiers. Never before or since had there been such an unfettered explosion of science, of risk, of reward. It was entirely possible that the accursed immortal hiding behind the pristine sapphire shield was some kind of hytech wizard, possessed of machinery that outstripped Garth’s own equipment.

  Emperor-for-Life Etienne Marseilles was an integer that factored into the equation for total domination, but one that made no sense. The EuroJapanese Monarch wouldn’t make a move until the deadly Enemy beyond The Cordon was demolished. That made perfect sense. It was what It would do were the situation reversed.

  And then, there was the Mad Goth King. Another being that defied reason, escaped logic, spat in the face of rationality. There was no knowing how old the King was, either, and for relatively the same reasons as the Emperor; King Blake could’ve been alive since the beginning of the War against the Heshii or he could’ve popped up some time after the first few Dark Ages. Until It’d figured out a way to protect data from what was now revealed to be attempts by the M’Zahdi Hesh to destroy the Unreality, everything had been lost in those purges.

  In the end, it truly didn’t matter if Blake, the Mad Goth King and unsurpassed ruler of Arcade City, was thirty thousand years old or ten thousand.

  What mattered was that, again, maddeningly, frustratingly, like the Emperor, the other self-proclaimed ruler on Earth had played and would continue to play an important, nay, crucial role in Its own plans.

  Trinity howled and somewhere in the dark, Offworlders sensitive to Its galactic webs of thought and control shivered.

  Mad Goth King Blake was even more important than the Emperor, even more powerful in his own way than the laconic EuroJapanese imperator, at least in this late stage of the game, and were that not so, It would launch everything It had under Its control at the insane clockwork dome that shielded the citizens of Arcade City from the rest of Unreality.

  But it couldn’t. First, it wouldn’t work. The Dome of Gears, the TikTok Shield, whatever you wanted to call it, was almost magically impervious to harm. At least the Emperor’s dome made a kind of sense; while it wasn’t exactly like the energy shields recently created by Garth N’Chalez, the principles remained the same. The King’s metalwork dome was just that: metal. An apparently random, haphazard collision of clockwork gears and nonsensical madness that clicked, clacked and whirred, defying damage just as readily as the most powerful shields in existence.

  Beyond that, there were the … denizens. The FrancoBritish men and women inside. Bred to be unstoppable, challenged by the never-ending forge of the King’s insane trials, those that won freedom and were permitted to pass beyond the Dome of Gears were … soldiers with no equal. If they bothered to kit themselves up like Latelian God soldiers, those mechanical monstrosities from Latelyspace would meet their maker.

  And those were the ‘sane’ ones. If
The Dome came down and the mad FrancoBritish wardogs were unleashed … Trinity wasn’t terribly prone to exaggeration, but it was all too likely that Trinity Prime would rupture under the pressure. If only… if only the King of Arcade City hadn’t abruptly cut all ties a hundred years ago! There was no way of knowing what was going on inside The Dome any longer, and with that monarch’s power being nearly unrivaled, Trinity couldn’t help but worry that Barnabas was –or soon would be- making his play for The End.

  At least The Emperor was content to sit and wait, as he had been doing –more or less- for the last thirty thousand years.

  So, both monarchs would remain free. Or, not free, but perhaps unbothered… yes. For now. The moment either side showed an interest beyond their own borders, It would swing into decisive action and show them –no matter how powerful they were, no matter how … beneficial their own powers and technologies could be to Its own plans- precisely who was boss.

  If only It could find a way to reach It’s contact inside Arcade City! The usual percentage of wardogs were still making their way Outside to spread the word –so to speak- but for the last hundred years, there’d been nothing at all from…

  “Are you serious?” It demanded, consciousness zooming through a hundred million different points of view to focus in on something that Its somehow managed to miss. Other portions of Its mind began rustling through the truly never-ending flow of data It accumulated in search of how this had been missed.

  “Fuck me sideways.” Trinity whispered to Itself. “Naoko Kamagana is on Trinity Prime.”

  The woman so obviously destined to assist Garth N’Chalez in doing to the Unreality whatever it was the man intended on was here, on Trinity Prime, and was about to be handed over to the one man who definitely possessed the resources to create another godmind AI.

  That … that couldn’t happen.

  Trinity opened Its communication ports. “Enforcers. Make haste to Trinity Prime. Details follow.”

  It would rather lose the planet and risk freeing Mad Goth King Blake and the Emperor-for-Life than allow Jordan Bishop and his Dark Age Cabal have Naoko Kamagana for one minute. She’d been exposed to N’Chalez and the weird extra-dimensional energies boiling off him for an uncomfortably long time. There was no telling what she was like now, or what she could become. Ex-dee … ex-dee changed people.

  Trinity paused, reflecting on the damages that could be done, weighing Its desperation to keep Naoko out of Jordan’s hands versus ensuring the survival of It’s other appallingly important assets. “Maybe … maybe only one of you should go. Whoever is closest.”

  ***

  To say that all the worlds in all the solar systems in all the galaxies in the Unreality kept vigilant watch on the skies for the presence of Enforcers is to diminish the amount of effort expended by those who had cause to fear the machine mind’s relentless and veritably godlike ‘employees’.

  Even across The Cordon, where Enforcers rarely went until things had been suitably softened up by Deep Strike teams sent in by Special Services, the strange and the weird versions of Man that lived out there kept their various forms of eye peeled for deadly men and women in combat armor unlike anything ever dreamed of before.

  Trinity Itself insisted to the men and women and Offworlders under It’s dominion that those who had nothing to fear, those who did the right thing –or, at the very least, were doings things It didn’t really care about one way or the other- had no reason to worry that an Enforcer would fall on them. Enforcers, It said in that special tone of voice It used when It was talking to people It thought were stupid, were Omega-Level Deterrents. They were used to send messages to entire galaxies. They were used to burn away enemies so powerful, so dark, so evil, that all of Existence trembled at their presence.

  Enforcers, It insisted, weren’t flung around willy-nilly. They were too precious a resource to use for things better left to Its normal agencies.

  Trinity’s staunchest human supporters, and there were many, trillions upon trillions of Men who believed that the machine mind was doing the right thing by them and would always continue to do so, nodded at their ruler’s statements and then quietly continued keeping watch anyways, knowing in their heart of hearts that they had a very small basis for comparison on what Trinity would and would not do.

  Old Earth, Trinity Prime, Zanzibar … the birthplace of Humanity had been told time and again by Trinity and others that this one world, abused and bruised and aging badly, would never see the face of an Enforcer, that It would find other means to punish and enforce It’s Laws, if for no other reason than it would take little in the way of damage to shove the ailing planet right over the edge.

  With people like Jordan Bishop, Mad Goth King Blake, Emperor-for-Life Etienne Marseilles and others living there, though … Enforcer-sensing tech had been taken to levels not seen anywhere else in the Unreality.

  To those tasked with watching the ether for Enforcer-sign, it was like the sun had gone nova.

  Then they began quietly freaking out, then loudly freaking out, sending emergency messages to anyone and everyone who’d hired or conscripted them into keeping watch for Enforcers. The message was simple:

  ‘Stop fucking around and go hide, Gwyleh Ronn is here.’

  ***

  Gwyleh Ronn, Legendary Offworld Enforcer, the only one of his kind, didn’t like Humanity. He –for he was certainly a he- hated the plague that was Mankind, hated their rapacious hunger for land, food, equipment, everything. He, and all his kind –the Empator-Tyrene- had tried to wipe Humanity out several times, always being stopped in the end by Mankind’s ruthless proctor, Trinity Itself. Eventually, they’d all died out, as all things must.

  Gwyleh Ronn respected the machine mind. All the Empator had. The artificial intelligence was the closest thing to a God they’d ever encountered, and they were one of the oldest Offworld species in existence. If there was a God, they’d’ve run into Him, Her or It in the passage of time. At least until Trinity had shut them into their own collection of solar systems with the flip of an electronic switch.

  Unlike his brothers and sisters of the Empator-Tyrene, though, Gwyleh Ronn had also hated his own people, which was saying something because the E-T’s were a social hivemind. Telepathic to a surprising degree, empathic even more, living on an Empator-Tyrene world had meant being surrounded by love, security, knowledge, and complete assurance that what you were doing was the right thing, all the time, every day, day in, day out, until the end of your life. They hadn’t been peaceful, mind, just … supremely arrogant that they were better, smarter … more.

  Gwyleh was an aberration. He hadn’t liked feeling warm, had hated being loved, hated …

  Yes. Gwyleh Ronn hated everything. Decades ago, when he’d gotten bored with life and had needed an outlet, he’d visited Empator-Tyrene to scare the living shit out of his race by moving moons out of orbit for a few hours, making lakes disappear, turning off their telepathy, reversing their empathy.

  Just because you were an Enforcer didn’t mean you couldn’t let off some steam.

  Enforcer Gwyleh Ronn of the Empator-Tyrene looked down at the birthplace of the scourge that was Mankind and nodded, his pincers clicking and clacking as Trinity’s data flooded into his mind. This would be fun, this would be easy.

  Jordan Bishop was finally going to get what was coming; if there was one thing that the Enforcer hated more than regular people, it was beings like Jordan Bishop, who thought they were God. Gwyleh headed on down, ready to start blowing stuff up and killing folks.

  ***

  Chad was fond of leaning against things. It added to his … what’sit … nonchalance. Yes, that was the word. He was fond of seeming nonchalant these days. Chad hummed thoughtfully to himself as Naoko’s vessel descended ever so gently to the landing pad some few hundred feet below where he leaned.

  The air shifted a bit and one of the ‘Priests stood beside him, holding precariously to the side of the exhaust tower that he’d teleported to.
“Why,”Secant279 demanded with his metallic, static voice, “are you all the way up here? The woman is going to be down there.”

  “Oi,” Chad flicked his cigarette over the edge and watched it disappear, “mate. I is not askin’ you why you is soundin’ like a telly wot is on channel zero, yeah? ‘sides,” the assassin straightened non-existence collars on an imaginary shirt, “this is wot fellas as is doin’ wot I is goin’ to do before they is properly doin’ what they is about to do. ‘s called … well, I is not knowin’ the proper word for it, orl right, but it’s a fing that I do. If my life was a movie an’ people were watchin’ right this moment, they’d be all ‘cor blimey, ‘e’s pretty cool, yeah?’. All up high and wotnot, wiv the smoke from this here stack billowin’ up, the spaceship wiv all it’s twinkly lights floatin’ down. ‘s very … spectacular.”

  “Yes, well.” Secant279 dismissed virtually everything Chad said. “There’s been a development.”

  “Yep.” Chad nodded. “Enforcer.”

  “What…” The CyberPriest’s mouth twitched in confusion.

  Chad rolled his eyes. “You is creatin’ me and you is finkin’ I ain’t gonna pick up on the same fings as you lot? Lord ‘ave mercy.”

  “We…” Chad had never showed much interest in, or even awareness of, the deeper levels of operational software available to the ‘Priests; unlike the man’s own abilities, which were fantastic, there were some functions only available when directly accessing their version of the Harmony. “You…”

  “Yep. Look. You silly twats are just goin’ ter ‘ave ter get used to the fact that we … hah, sorry mate, it ‘appens from time to time. Anyways, er. Wot? Yeah. Right. Look. I is not likin’ you twats, nor is I likin’ this Harmony bullshit very much at all, but I will use wot I can when I need, yeah? Only fing I is not doin’ is runnin’ around like you lot. So. Yeah. Enforcer. The nasty Offworld one. Glad you came. Call the others. I is needin’ distractions.”