Citizen Pariah (Unreal Universe Book 3)

by Lee

  Chad opened his mouth to deliver a quick retort, but snapped it shut. “You is right. But ‘ow in the great fuck is your man gonna do it?”

  Huey smiled shiftily. “Trade secret.”

  Chad scratched his nose thoughtfully. “’ow is I knowin’ you isn’t lying to me right now?”

  “Because, Chad, there’s a really good chance we’re going to need someone to come along and blow the absolute shit out of stuff and I figure if I lie to you now, you’ll just join the other side out of spite.” Huey contained the urge to jump and shout and high five himself. Chad was on board. “And frankly, I’d rather drink hot lava than fight you.”

  “I is ‘avin’ one more question.”

  Huey’s expanded mind, roving to and fro through Bishop’s remaining AI networks, went on full alert. He hung his head, if only momentarily. Trinity had figured out that something was desperately wrong with Gwyleh Ronn’s Suit and had decided to take further action. The space around poor old Zanzibar was alive with the signature arrivals of ten … fifty … no.

  A hundred Enforcers had come to Zanzibar. The AI turned man knew he and Chad could count on the cataclysm boiling beneath their feet and the scavengers raiding Bishop’s storehouses to obfuscate things, but not much, and not … not for long. “Make it fast, Chad, we got company.”

  Fear trickled through the cyborg assassin’s neural networks. Many thought him immune to the sensation, but he wasn’t. It was that he was usually too high and busy being insane to let his feelings show. “Why is everyfing be destroyed in the first place?”

  Huey rolled his eyes. “Holy fuck, Chad, you could’ve asked anything else in the entire Universe, but you pick the one question that has, like, a seventeen hour discussion involving slides, charts, diagrams, and a monologue on the True History of Everything.”

  Chad tapped a temple. “I is always cuttin’ right to the chase.”

  Huey considered the approaching Enforcers. There was Kallam Singh, Deven Tryi, the Scourge … Trinity was pissed. He hoped he could get the answer out briefly, but succinctly enough. “Because, Chad, there is no other choice. The … mechanism that created this place is on the verge of collapse. If Garth doesn’t assist in the birth of this Unreal Universe so that things go, heh, smoothly, then it will break. That birth involves destruction, but guided, ordered, orchestrated. And then there will be no more chances at life for anything anywhere and there will only ever be six Spheres. And I’m pretty sure the dudes who live out there in those other Universes won’t like that. I dunno what they’d be able to do about it, but Reality has a way of being able to do whatever the hell it wants. So it’s a big bang and all our deaths so maybe everyone has a chance to live again in some form or other or nothing. Nothing but the Heshii.”

  Chad stuck out a hand. He gripped Huey’s hand tightly. As far as answers went, it was technically pretty piss-poor, but he wasn’t in the mood to push for a better one. “Let’s us be clear on summink, mate, just so there is no confusion later on. I is willing to try and ‘elp you wiv your little problem, but I ‘as been a psychotic nutbag for a very long time, and unfortunately, even in more lucid moments, I is still really enjoyin’ killin’ fings for no real reason. So yeah, I might be around to ‘elp out later on as well, but wot I is not wantin’ to see is anyone comin’ around to stop me from doin’ fings wot I is enjoyin’, all right?”

  At this point, Huey was willing to promise the man a gold-plated pony that shot rocket-powered unicorns out of its nose just as long as Chad got Garth out of Bravo. “Good. Now. Take a deep breath.”

  “Why is that? I is not breathin’.” Chad pursed his lips. Huey was breathing deeply and standing like he was about to lift something very, very heavy.

  “It’s not to keep you from asphyxiating.” Huey answered somberly. “It’s to help you scream when we get to the other side.”

  “Wot in the fuck is you talkin’ about?” Chad looked around. The atmosphere above his noble head was alive with a hundred star-bright pinpricks. The Enforcers were coming right this way, and they were in a hurry.

  “You …” Huey reached out with his mind and hopscotched at the speed of Unreal thought to the other end of the link he’d been maintaining since leaving Latelyspace and gave the order. “You ever … jump through a Quantum Tunnel Chadsik al-Taryin? It’s … it’s the ultimate in extreme sports.”

  “Wot …”

  Chadsik al-Taryin, Savior of the CyberPriests, FrancoBritish cyborg assassin, culmination and physical manifestation of every iteration of himself that could’ve ever been, had no time to ask his question one final time.

  A brilliant and starry shaft of light five kilometers wide and gleaming the colors of the stretch of space between here and there sliced through the heavens to bathe Huey Barnes and Chadsik and poor Gwyleh Ronn in a radiance unlike anything anyone on Old Earth, Trinity Prime, Zanzibar, had ever seen before or since. The effulgent shard slammed into what remained of the true heart of BishopCo with an accidental fury, ripping through the hundreds upon hundreds of floors between the two men and the ground so very far away.

  The blaze, a seemingly endless and violent incandescence set about by Chad’s unspoken desire to frighten the CyberPriests away from harassing him further and propagated by those trying to steal from Jordan Bishop, whooshed out as though a God had clapped His hands together. Powered machines faltered and crashed. AI minds were snuffed out.

  The very world from which all Humanity had sprung to spread across the stars seemed to tremble and quake.

  The light winked out. Chadsik al-Taryin, master assassin and impossible cyborg had left in a manner befitting one of his stature, temporarily bound to the service of the one who would one day, if everything worked out all right, become a God in truth.

  But between here and there, well, there was a great big pile of stuff to do.

  There

  Very nearly a year had passed since Huey had last spoken to him, and in all that time, Herrig couldn’t help but worry. Worry that the powerful AI turned man had met his demise. Worry that Garth Nickels was going to be trapped inside Bravo until the Universe was destroyed. Worry that Fenris and his minions were going to overrun the system. Worry that Admiral Politoyov and the assembled might of Trinity’s very nearly endless military would find a way through the shield.

  Worry. His constant companion. It shook him loose out of bed and put him to sleep at night with gentle promises that it would be there the next morning. Herrig loathed Worry and vowed often that he’d find a way to throttle the smug bitch before too much longer, but Worry was a crafty cohort and always found a way back.

  Twice a day, Herrig was free from his concerns over the state of Existence, and he struggled to keep those moments as brief as possible, lest his unwanted babysitter figure out a way to steal those remaining freedoms from him.

  The first was when he visited the site of Huey’s Grand Departure. The ‘LINKs still burned with the epic moment and Herrig also found time once or twice a week to revisit the footage. Someone else’s achievements had finally outstripped Garth’s … at least when it came to viewership numbers.

  In a solar system where Gods ran rampant and the most amazing things still seemed to be happening on a regular basis, it was awe-inspiring to imagine that there was room left for surprise. And what a surprise!

  Huey had originally intended for his departure to be a secret, but when one of the inner ring of members responsible for ‘new’ Latelyspace plans on leaving, very little stays secret for long. OverCommander Vasily had learned of the man’s departure in the usual way that the military leader learned of everything; through spies, cameras, cheating and lying. Where Herrig had tried a simple ‘please don’t leave’ approach, Vasily had used the full might of God soldiers and tanks to prevent Huey’s departure.

  And thus they’d all learned precisely how powerful an AI could be, though there was some argument that this particular AI was as he was because of his connection to the Sigma Engine; everything that Vasily
had brought to bear had frozen in their tracks. Some few machines still remained inoperative, Huey’s ire at his goal being threatened breaking them permanently.

  No matter what the case, Herrig remembered the look on Vasily’s face when everything surrounding Huey T. Roboticus had shut down, to be replaced by a grinning smiley face. Herrig remembered that, and the roaring approval from Fenris and his brethren.

  And then he remembered the scintillating shaft of light piercing the heavens, a burning bright pyre of illumination cast in colors no man had ever seen with the naked eye before, a shifting column of brightness a mile wide.

  All Herrig had to do was close his eyes and he could see, clean as day, Huey’s donated body shimmering like a desert mirage a heartbeat before a thunderclap of noise and a burst of light that’d turned everyone blind for a second.

  And then nothing. The … Fenris was calling it a ‘teleportation beam’ … the beam had scoured everything beneath Huey’s feet and for the entire radius of the shaft, obliterating everything to leave behind bedrock so smooth it was almost glass.

  The area was off limits. It had a permanent, rotating shift of God soldiers that’d already passed through the rigors of Fenris’ Harmony training. There was a death toll associated with Huey’s Debarkation Point, but thankfully, reporters and citizens alike were growing less curious day by day. They were content to revisit old footage or to waste their hard-earned money purchasing spEyes that got no closer than two miles.

  Herrig came by every day and did his job at a small desk for a few hours, looking up every few minutes on the off chance that he’d somehow become so absorbed in the minutiae of running a solar system that he’d missed a heavenly beam of light depositing one of his friends back to earth. He came because they all needed Huey’s help with Politoyov and the others, he came because, at the end of the day, he wasn’t entirely certain that the Harmony-trained Goddies would let Huey leave the area alive.

  A timer beeped on Herrig’s proteus. Two hours had passed in the blink of an eye. The Chairman looked up from the Sheets on his desk to gaze speculatively at the mirror-smooth surface of rock not fifty feet from where he sat, then turned his eyes on the half-dozen God soldiers standing at attention. “No sign?”

  “No sign, sa.” All of them answered, precisely three milliseconds behind the other. They were practicing their Harmony. It was something all the new Goddies did. It was, as Huey would put it, eerie as fuck and could he put an end to it, Herrig would do so.

  “If he arrives, you will contact me before anyone, yes?” Herrig bundled up the Sheets he’d been working on and handed them to his valet, an abundantly quiet and pensive Foursie who took her job with fanatic levels of enthusiasm. Thus far she’d nearly killed the same tea girl fifteen times for coming into his private offices unannounced.

  If the world found out a tea girl was making very nearly as much as a CEO of a multi-planet business, they’d shit bricks, but dammit, she seemed to be the only one on the planet who knew how to make a proper cup of tea and death by accidental head removal seemed to finally be off the table.

  The God soldiers saluted. “Yes, sa. You above all others.”

  Herrig nodded, and turned away, certain that if he could hear the Harmony, that sentence would be ‘You above all others, until it is time’. He’d heard his last Foursie say it once under his breath after nearly dismembering the tea girl, and twenty minutes later he’d been gifted with Sidra, a far more stable companion.

  ***

  The second place he visited, and stayed longer at, was Bravo. Previous Chairs had avoided both it and, honestly, The Peak altogether; The Peak was –had been- a most singular concentration of everything that the Regime did that was awful and horrific. As far as Herrig could tell, Chairwoman Doans had never set foot inside the epic mountain fortress until the last few months in office, and with everything she’d done to advance her dreams of Universal Conquest by cover of Darkness, he couldn’t help but commiserate.

  For some, The Peak held nothing but darkness and misery.

  These days –and at his command- most of the political prisoners had been set free. Those few that’d been actually legitimately guilty of some infraction or were genuinely insane had been mercifully and gently put down. Not the most palatable of decisions, and Herrig still got a bit queasy in the stomach at the mere thought of arriving at them –mostly because Fenris had made an off-handed comment about how he, Herrig, was beginning to see the world very clearly indeed- but … they had no need of mad prisoners.

  There was only one prisoner in The Peak now, and unlike those olden day detainees, this one wasn’t under any guard at all. The insane genius Hollyoak had the ‘run’ of the entire ‘Peak’ facility all to himself. God soldiers, even ones repaired with Harmony, were forbidden to go within one hundred meters of the place, and that included simply walking by a wall that separated one area from another; the bizarrely modified pint-sized madman was capable of singing in machine code, machine code that had untoward effects on any God soldier within earshot.

  Herrig wanted the monstrosity dead. Dead for creating the Gunboys, dead for allowing Gurant to transform into a corrupt Harmony Soldier that –according to Solgun- could’ve conquered the entire Universe on his own, dead for a hundred million different reasons. It was the first time that the chubby ex-Trinityman had ever truly wanted anyone dead. He didn’t even need to think about it, or deliberate. There’d been no hand-wringing, no hemming, no hawing. Following Hollyoak’s destructive and thankfully aborted attempt to override God soldier controls, Herrig had had the paperwork signed, sealed and delivered to OverCommander Vasily before the sirens had been turned off.

  Fenris wanted the freak alive. Fenris didn’t understand what Hollyoak was, and that was … distressing. Fenris examined Hollyoak on a daily basis. Sometimes with the assistance of one of his brothers, but most often alone. About the only ‘good’ to come from Fenris’ ‘examination’ was that it was most often done with the diminutive freak bound to a gurney.

  Herrig wasn’t certain how much longer he was going to be able to allow that to continue. As Chairman for Latelyspace, a living Hollyoak represented a threat just as bad as the Army currently trying to hammer its way through the shield surrounding their system.

  The Chairman turned his mind from Hollyoak. The monstrous midget was at the other end of the Peak, currently –he surmised- being poked and prodded by a gruesomely curious Fenris.

  Bravo was within reach. If he wanted –and he probably would before his time in the room was over- he could stretch out one hand and touch the curious metal hull that held Garth inside. It felt like nothing except, possibly, wet.

  Latelian scientists said it felt like nothing, that the sensation some small number of people privileged to touch Bravo claimed they felt was, in fact, the human mind and body attempting to fabricate a feeling that should be there. Quadronium was extra-Universal matter. It didn’t interact with their Universe in any way.

  Except when it did. The metal –everyone still called it metal, though Garth insisted that it wasn’t metal at all but extruded and reformed energy from a pocket Universe inside their own ‘pocket’ Universe- was impervious and untouchable and mysterious and would remain that way forever. There wasn’t a single scientist attached to Bravo that thought otherwise, and after lengthy discussions with Huey prior to his departure, they’d even given up hope that artificial intelligence would assist.

  Instead of trying to figure Bravo out, they were now trying to reverse-engineer duronium; they weren’t admitting to it, but Herrig believed that everyone including the scientists themselves had fallen prey to Regimist propaganda concerning the discovery of duronium, and Garth’s revelation about what Bravo was actually comprised of had thrown many of them into a days’ long stupor.

  If Bravo was absolutely and utterly impregnable because it was the physical extrusion of another semi-Reality, how, then, could that long-ago brilliant scientist have carved a sliver of metal from the hull? That was
the question they were asking one another. Forbidden by Regime policy to physically interact with The Box, they’d never once had the opportunity to search for where the shard had come from. They’d taken proof of creation on faith.

  So now they were trying to figure out if that scientist had miraculously happened on the formula for duronium on his own or if he’d been helped along the way by Bravo itself.

  Either way, Herrig was more than content to sit and pretend to do work with the ancient vessel less than arms’ length away while scientists shouted and hollered and sometimes came to blows over popular theories.

  The most cherished icon of Latelian society made Sidra nervous, so she stood a ‘respectful’ distance away, for which Herrig was grateful; female Foursies were inexplicably statuesque. He rather feared he was going to have to requisition another bodyguard because … because.

  He was Chairman. He had other things to think about.

  Somewhere in the background, a scientist squawked loudly. Sidra virtually materialized at his shoulder, already scooping his Sheets up in one hand and him in the other. She hauled him as gently back to the observation area as possible.

  “What, er, is the meaning of this?” Herrig demanded as he put his glasses back on his head properly.

  Sa Verton pointed at the Screen bank they were all staring at with an admixture of ghastly excitement and nervous terror. “Spike. In the … foundation.”

  “Foundation of what?” Herrig took his Sheets from Sidra and tucked them into their carry-all.

  “Of the Everything.” Another scientist answered.

  Herrig turned to look at Bravo. “It’s not doing anything. It’s still just sitting there.”