Citizen Pariah (Unreal Universe Book 3)

by Lee

  There was no way Huey was going to do anything but continue attempting to sneak into Latelyspace.

  “So, mate, erm, wot’s the, er, wot’s the plan, then?”

  Huey put his face in his hands and massaged his weary flesh, feeling a small twinge of happiness that his eyebrows had finally grown back. It was amazing how people responded to someone missing that one tiny little and seemingly insignificant feature. Strangers on strange worlds had been more inclined to talk to the obviously insane and blatantly murder-hungry Chadsik al-Taryin than one pleasant looking yet eyebrowless man. “I haven’t got one fucking idea that doesn’t include destroying an Army that Garth will eventually need. Fuck me sidew… oh Jesus wept on a bicycle built for two.”

  “Oi, is that not one of them fella-me-lads as wot ‘angs out pretendin’ to breathe space and frighten the crew an’ all that?” Chad cocked an eye at the face that’d just appeared on the monitor.

  “Chad, Fenris. Fenris, Chad.”

  “You shouldn’t be with that abomination, Huey.” Fenris curled a lip at Chad.

  “You can be suckin’ my cybernetic ballsack.” Chad smiled pleasantly. “I ‘asn’t manscaped in a while. It are a fuckin’ jungle down there. It will take some time to get where you need to be, my son.”

  Fenris’ electronic disgust filled the cockpit. “Pleasant.”

  Huey looked over his shoulder at Chad and bulged his eyeballs as if to say ‘shut the fuck up’. His companion waved a hand and pretended to go to sleep. “Yes, well, I need him. He’s the only who might have a chance of busting through quadronium.”

  “Not necessary.”

  Chad bolted upright and was beside Huey in a heartbeat. “He fuckin’ escaped on his own?”

  Huey shook his head. “Not possible. Bravo’s dénouement is unbeatable. There is simply no way Garth could’ve defeated that trap. The intellects inside had access to everything the man knew. In the end, it was the kind of con Garth himself would’ve played.”

  Fenris gestured with a hand, allowing that this was very true. “Nevertheless, you no longer need the assistance of one Chadsik al-Taryin to affect the freedom of Garth N’Chalez. He is … on his way to finding his own way out.”

  The AI stopped. He shut down more than eighty percent of the subminds running interference against the probing threat of the Army’s Beowulfed AI minds. He cut them loose and let them come up with their own ideas, allowed them access to branching theory-threads fanning upwards out of the HIM’s own deep reservoir of power. They pulsed and shone and gleamed like the sun.

  Chad sidled away from Huey; the processing power spilling up and out of his … dare he think the word ‘friend’ was … daunting. Physical space began to buckle under the pressure of such data and onscreen, Fenris’ eyes glittered with dark, hungry analysis. “Oh,” the assassin whispered so Huey wouldn’t get distracted, “oh I is not likin’ you at all, mate.”

  “Be that as it may, Chadsik al-Taryin, I am in here and we will not meet for many years to come.” Fenris pointed at Huey. “He has come to the only possible conclusion. I bid you good day, Huey. We shall met in the flesh soon.”

  The screen went blank.

  “Wot is ‘e talkin’ about?” Chad demanded, heaving a sigh of relief when the power burning out of Huey dissipated.

  “I …” Huey took a deep, ragged, breath, “I … I don’t know how he managed it … but … but … he did. Bravo,” Huey reached out with his mind and asked for access to the Quantum Tunnel’s operating system, “Bravo is … a ship, Chad. Bravo … he … he … they didn’t think he’d risk flying blind so they didn’t fully deactivate those systems. Who … who in their right mind would even try, and besides, to what … what point? Only they forgot one thing.”

  Chad worked out what had Huey in such a panic. “Christ, mate, holy fuckin’ Christ! I hope you is getting’ ready to shut that shield down! If ‘e is ‘ittin’ that unbreakable wossname of yours wiv an unstoppable ship, there’s gonna be all sort of fuckin’ awful fings ‘appenin’!”

  “I am, Chad, trust me. Just a minute or five longer. I want to time this properly so when Bravo comes zipping through the shield will only be down for a few seconds.”

  Chad narrowed his eyes as he did some of this own thinking. “Wait a minute. Two fings. One, if ‘e is blastin’ ‘is way out of Latelyspace in ‘is ship, wot in the fuck is I doin’ ‘ere still? And two, where in the fuckin’ ‘ell is ‘e ‘eaded, then?”

  Huey slumped in his chair. “There’s no need for you to be here anymore, Chad. I’m sorry for wasting your time. What Garth has decided to do is, quite literally, the definition of insanity. Even if he survives, he probably won’t survive. I didn’t even consider it because, well because it’s so damn insane.”

  “Oh, I isn’t sayin’ you is wastin’ our … my … time, sonny Jim. It were well excitin’ and were a lot of fun. An’ you is teachin’ us the meanin’ o’ friendship.”

  Huey burst out laughing. “That’s a load of crap. You tried to blow my face off less than three weeks ago.”

  “That is well true, mate, but I was only usin’ local guns and not, like, other-Universe-me guns or nuffink.” Chad sighed at that. He had a friend. It was weird. “Now, wot is your mentor an’ supergenius doin’ that is all sorts of mennal?”

  “There is a world out there, Chad, a world surrounded in a quicksilver shield that is the physical manifestation of a shattered realm not properly consumed by the Heshii. Behind that shield rests the last outpost of monsters known as the Bruush. They’re … they’re sort of like you. They’re other-Universe. Old. Garth … Garth is going to try and bounce Bravo off the quicksilver shield. Blind. If it works, parts of his ship will be absorbed and he’ll be free. Then he has to survive deep space, and being scooped up by whichever team has been assigned by Trinity to keep watch.”

  “Crikey.” That was about the only thing Chad could think of to say. “That is well bonkers. Wot about you? You is finkin’ of followin’ along?”

  Huey shook his head. There was less than two minutes left before he needed to shut the shield down. “The moment I shut the shield down, approximately thirty thousand troops will enter Latelyspace. Some of those will be Deep Strike. Even with all the Goddies and the Five, they’ll need proper assistance. That means me. And you.”

  “Nah, mate.” Chad rose to his full height and stretched his shoulders out. “I reckon it’s time for me to be ‘eadin’ back to Ground Zero, see if I can be about rescuin’ that bim as wot the ‘Priests kidnapped, yeah? I bet your pal Garth would be finkin’ mighty ‘ighly of me, yeah?”

  “What?” Huey blinked slowly. Thirty seconds.

  “Oh yeah, no, it’s this whole fing I picked up from the bruvvers. Coulda fucked off at any time, but, like I said, I was ‘avin’ fun.” Chad clapped his hands and disappeared in a flash of fractured Harmony.

  Utterly nonplussed, Huey commanded the Quantum Tunnel to shut down, cut his ship’s black hole engines loose and lurched forward with the rest of the invading force. His powerful connection to the underpinnings of the Unreality let him feel Bravo hurtle past at never-before-imagined speeds.

  Huey prayed to God that his best friend’s plan worked.

  Back Again

  “Careful, brother.”

  “I am being careful. This part is delicate. With you breathing on my neck like that, it makes it more difficult as well. It does not help that Enforcers are still looking for us.”

  “They will never find this place.” Anode221 said boldly, his electric voice buzzing and crackling with surety. “Erg1 is leading them on a merry chase away from Ground Zero once more.”

  Faraday901 paused in the cautious application of the next layer of receptors. What they were doing was, even in an Unreal Universe, perverse. But there was nothing else they could do, no other options. Their Savior was gone, ripped from the heights of Jordan Bishop’s complex by something many were calling the Fist of God; what other reason, those foolish mortals suddenly afflicted
with the Holy Spirit after thousands of years of freedom from such notions, what other reason would such a glorious shaft of light scour Bishop to the ground?

  Trinity was offering and had offered no explanations, choosing instead to send Its Enforcers down into the one place they’d never gone before. Ground Zero was not technically apart from Its Domain, but It’d long known that mortals, especially those trapped on the rotten planet from which all life had oozed forth, needed a place to cut loose and go absolutely wild. But with the Fist –actually a Quantum Tunnel, though no one would believe it- came Enforcers, and thus their newly returned CyberPriest comrade, Erg1 had rediscovered reason to live.

  He was out there now, doing things no ‘Priest of Watt had ever been able to do. He wasn’t strictly waging war with any Enforcer he came across, but he was attacking them, he was leaving some of them damaged in the streets to be attacked by the random predators that wore human skin. Erg claimed he was exacting revenge on Trinity for imprisoning him all those years, for forcing him to destroy the very sorts of things they, the ‘Priests, could’ve used in their upcoming war against the Heshii’s Harbinger.

  That’s what he claimed. The truth, everyone save Erg feared, was simpler and much more complex all the same; Erg1 was crazy. Insane. Driven mad by being trapped in the psyche of a normal mortal human being, he was more than willing to go toe to toe and head to head with the worst Enforcers that Trinity could muster.

  At the moment, ‘Priest tracking modules had Erg fighting Govurl Toman somewhere out near the blasted wastelands surrounding Arcade City. The two were flinging around terrible amounts of lethal energy, and, Faraday was certain of this, pissing Trinity Itself off even further.

  “Still,” Faraday said aloud, “at least he is keeping Trinity’s focus on him instead of us.”

  Anode scratched at his forearm. Recent upgrades to his armature weren’t taking as well as projected and the open wound along that arm wasn’t healing properly. It was no big thing, not really. Some of their self-divined upgrades took upwards of fifty years to heal properly. It was just … aggravating. “You are almost done, Faraday, why are you wasting time now?”

  Faraday put down his tools and turned to confront Anode. The other ‘Priests had moved back to their old hiding spots across Trinityspace once it’d been determined that Erg was more than capable of protecting the two others while they worked on their … project. Faraday would’ve preferred nearly anyone to Anode221, up to and including the disembodied and vaguely maniacal ‘Priest who’d cohabited Chadsik al-Taryin’s brain.

  The ‘Priest cleared his throat. “The last time we did something like this, we wound up with Chadsik al-Taryin, who quite literally ripped a brother’s psyche out of his body along with the Unwritten Scriptures. That nearly splintered our thirty thousand year old group into two or more camps, and we barely have enough ‘members’ to be considered a ‘group’ in the first place.”

  “Yes, well.” Anode stepped back. ‘Priests capable of engineering feats like this were … sensitive. It had something to do with the particular type of connection they had to their personal Harmony. “We were honestly working with damaged goods, were we not, brother? Surely this one will be different.”

  Faraday looked over his shoulder at the slumbering woman with something akin to fondness on his cybernetic face. She should be different. She had to be different. Beyond the peculiarities of her DNA structure –nothing like it had been seen in a very long time- there were the … changes.

  “Naoko Kamagana’s long-term, presumably intimate, exposure to Garth N’Chalez has indeed wrought miraculous changes. It is theoretically probable that, had she been left to her own devices, this young woman would’ve come to his version of Harmony, making her formidable. Likely, this has something to do with the low-levels of extra-dimensional saturation everyone in Latelyspace has endured for the last four thousand years or so. Their overuse of duronium quite literally primed every person, at least on Hospitalis, to accept the nascent Reality’s Harmony at the genetic level.”

  Anode pointed at the woman. “Then why are you wasting time? Once you complete the connections, it’s likely she’ll be more powerful than Chadsik al-Taryin! We need her if we are to get off this planet safely, we need her if we are going to figure out how to destroy The Cordon. We need her now!”

  “She could indeed winding up more powerful than Chadsik. History tells us that proper connection to either the Heshii’s version of the Harmony or the Kin’kithal’s variety yields results that border on the miraculous.” Faraday sensed Anode’s disgust at the truth and held up a hand in apology. “I am sorry, but it is true. We are indeed capable of amazing feats, of moving mountains, of unraveling worlds, but … our path, the path of total nothingness is the inverse of everything. And this is why I pause. I pause because though Naoko Kamagana’s body has been seeded on the atomic level with CyberPriest technology, that her brain has been upgraded and spun to our mandates, that there is no reason on this earth for her to become anything other than Savior Protocol 2.0, still things could go wrong. We are not in total control. We exist, we persist, because somewhere, somehow, the Engines of Creation have need of us. It is the paradox at the very core of our philosophy. We seek to destroy the very thing that permitted us to come into being in the first place. How can we reconcile that paradox? How can I know that what we’re doing right now is for our benefit, or for the Engines?”

  “You’ve been talking to Erg.” Anode shouted scathingly. “He is a madman.”

  “What if I have?” Faraday jutted his chin out pugnaciously. "And we are all mad, Anode221.”

  “Madness is relative, Faraday. When all the Spheres of Existence are burned, charred wrecks beneath our feet, when we evoke utter silence and the pure blackness of true nothing, when all is peace and quiet, when we ourselves are emptied into that Great Void, nothing will be. The concept of madness will vanish. There will be nothing but nothing, and it will be good.” Anode stepped forward. “Now, finish the damn upgrades so we can get started on that. I’m sick to death of all this everything.”

  Faraday looked from Anode to Naoko and back again. Without the Unwritten Scriptures guiding them, it was so hard. Few of the brothers understood that better than Faraday; he’d been the principle translator of the Enlightninged words, and had been since the beginning. The others believed that everything they were doing now was in service to those Scriptures, that whatever or whoever –Watt or otherwise- that was beaming the chain of events leading to the eventual dissolution or Unreality would simply … adjust … what was being sent back down to compensate for their actions now.

  The ‘Priest didn’t think it worked that way. He believed –and fretted- that the Scriptures were not only set in stone, that they were grooved into the very fabric of Unreality. Without patterning their behaviors after the Scriptures … they could be so far off the Path now that nothing they did would matter.

  And if the Scriptures could so easily be ripped from them by one of their own creations once, who was to say it couldn’t happen again? And what did that even mean?

  “Faraday. Finish. Now. Or I call Erg.” Anode would rather dial Trinity up and discuss the relative merits of a high-protein diet than see Erg’s weird face, but he’d do it. Remodelling Naoko Kamagana into Savior 2.0 had taken nearly a year of solid work by their resident genius and he’d be damned if he was going to let Faraday stop when there was literally a single microchip left to stick in.

  “Fine.” Faraday sighed miserably. This wasn’t going to end well. He just knew it. He reached out and dropped the microchip into Naoko’s eye.

  The result was instantaneous. And just as awful as Faraday had feared.

  Naoko opened her eyes. And saw something wondrous hovering on the edges of Unreality. She could see it all now, all of everything that Garth had tried to explain before and had failed to find the proper words. She could see hints and signs of the Engines of Creation in the fibers of the simple jumpsuit she wore, she could feel ec
hoes of the Harmony that Garth strove to replicate in a newer, better version of Reality in the micro-circuitry entwined around her very atoms, she could taste the Heshii on her tongue.

  But most of all, Naoko Kamagana could see the code of the Unreality hovering in front of her and nearly wept with joy. So simple, the mechanisms holding everything together. Everyone thought the math behind Existence was complex, strings of equations light years long with numbers that bounced and juddered between the real and the unreal, with formulas that were more color than integer, more sound than proof.

  Naoko Kamagana reached out with a hand, each finger trailing blazing blue fractals that splintered into nothing. She started sketching a formula in the air, ignoring all the while the CyberPriests. Oh, she could see their history stretching out behind them like twisted sine waves. She could even see where they thought they were headed.

  One hand continued sketching the math to get her out of this place, the other began rewriting the protocols for who had access to their so-called ‘Unwritten Scriptures’.

  “What … what is she … what is happening?” Anode could barely find the words. The math spilling out of Savior 2.0’s fingertips was sublime. She was perfect. She was the Goddess of the Dark that they’d been hoping for.

  Faraday shook his head in disgust. “I’m beginning to think we can’t get anything right because we want darkness. I mean, look at her, Anode. She’s solving teleportation equations with one hand and stealing our fucking Unwritten Scriptures out of Chadsik al-Taryin’s head with other. And she’s only been awake for fifteen seconds.”

  Naoko turned and looked at Faraday. “Language.” She said politely.

  “What?” Faraday laughed as he brought his ‘Priestly shields online. Nothing in the Universe could dent the shields. Anode followed suit.