Citizen Pariah (Unreal Universe Book 3)

by Lee

  After all, he only had six hours, forty-two minutes. No sense in wasting time. His trip could be over at any moment.

  ***

  Chad didn’t mind traveling via teleportation when it were done proper; the one time he’d gone along with Huey there at the beginning of their odyssey, well, that had been quite painful. Being hauled through a Quantum Tunnel was like being dragged, one of them told him, down a wobbly hallway by your short and curlies. Chad Himself didn’t know much about that, but the one of him insisted quite arduously that it was well painful.

  No, the only proper way to travel from one place to another that wasn’t inside a spaceship was via the CyberPriest route. Erg and Faraday and the few other fellas as had taught him how to do it in the vain hopes he’d come ‘round an’ be their buddy claimed that the passageway or pathway or whatever it was was actually a quick nip outside the Unreality.

  Outside the Unreality was a fancy way of saying it, but Chad knew the truth; you couldn’t very well leave the thing you was a part of. That were crazy. No, what they were doing was skimming just on the other side of the skin of the Unreality, close as possible to the Nothingness.

  It weren’t as quick as instant, but that were okay by Chad as well. He liked the silence of the void and the other hims didn’t, so they were even more inclined to keep their yappers shut.

  Chad’s cybernetic systems started squawking, warning him of an impending collision. The ex-assassin turned CyberPriest Savior turned … layabout looked around with his own two eyes, trying to see what could be seen. There was nothing. Just the weird, sort-of-colorless backdrop that there always was.

  “’s quite enough of that, mind.” Chad told his systems to shut up. Even if other ‘Priests were wandering through the void en route to whatever weirdness they had planned, there couldn’t be any collisions. Technically speaking with him inside the nothing, with a particular road ‘plotted’ as it were, his origin point, the path he was taking and the exit point weren’t a part of the void. The nothing had become sort-of-something on account of he were in it. It were off limits. When he got out again, then it was back to the nothing it’d been before. Well simple idea. Gobs of people thought it were impossible.

  His systems alerted him once more to the impending collision then shut off. Chad nodded smugly at himself. He was still in charge, yes he was.

  And then a great big shining cube housing a very apologetic looking Latelian beaned him good and proper on the side of the head.

  Emergency protocols came on. Chad felt one of his many other hims reach for the nearest place that they knew like the back of their own hand. The original exit point, twenty feet outside his favorite watering hole in Ground Zero –even though it probably wasn’t there anymore thanks to Huey, Chad wanted to see with his own eyes-, shifted to the last place in the Unreal Universe he wanted to go.

  “NO!” Chadsik al-Taryin howled, his terror sluicing through the void. The cube filled with an apologetic-looking Latelian disappeared. The emergency exit opened. Chad fell through.

  ***

  “Rise. And. Shine.” Chirped a merry electronic voice. “Rise. And. Shine.”

  Chadsik refused. He hadn’t heard that voice for decades and its false bonhomie filled him with toe-curdling dread.

  “Rise. And. Shine, Lord al-Taryin.”

  Chadsik al-Taryin, master assassin and galaxies-wide terror, refused, going so far as to pull the scratchy cotton blanket over his head. He didn’t need to open his eyes, he didn’t need to rise and shine to know where he was. It was all too much. “Fuck off, wouldja?”

  “Language, Lord al-Taryin.” The merry voice hissed with scathing indignation. “What would your father think?”

  “My father,” Chad shouted beneath the blanket, “is a fuckin’ twat ‘how can fuck ‘imself sideways wiv a fuckin’ nuclear-fuckin’ powered fuck-stick.”

  He could feel where he was. The endless ticking. The unsubtle thunk thunk thunk of the massive, city-spanning gears and cogs whirring to new formations.

  The nanny-AI, the machine mind ‘given’ to him by his father, hissed again in disapproval then proceeded to shock the ever-loving shit out of him with an extended cattle prod. “When you are in your father’s domain, young Lord al-Taryin, you will abide by his rules.”

  Chad held tightly to the blanket covering his eyes. If he didn’t see where he was, if he didn’t see Mistress Taint, then he wasn’t in Arcade City. “I is a grown man, Mistress. I is allowed to swear if I is wantin’.”

  “Be that as it may.” Mistress Taint replied primly, retracting her cattle prod. “Your father is older than you, and is king, and has forbidden you from cursing. Come. There is work to be done.”

  “No.” Chad scrunched the blanket over his face even tighter. “No. I don’t want to.”

  “But you must.” Taint hummed sweetly to herself. “There is a dreadful backorder. Supply and demand, dear boy, is the meat and potato of our survival. Our client has been most … agreeable until late. Something has been happening on the other side of our wonderful dome, something that has seen a sharp rise in orders.”

  The thought of returning … of returning to his workshop so very high above the world that was Arcade City, the notion of … Chad shook his head. He’d escaped Arcade City for a reason, and that reason was the endless, ceaseless demand for machines that only he could create.

  “No. I won’t make that climb.” Chad shook his head. He reached for his weaponry and found that he could find none. The voices in his head, the myriad connections to the hims who’d never been and never were, were gone. The silence inside his own skull was insufferable. The assassin wanted to weep.

  He was already there. He was already in his workshop, and the dreaded machine built by his mad fucking father had already grabbed the fuel that made it work. Chad pulled the blanket off his eyes.

  Mad Mistress Taint, Nanny AI to the Royal Scion Chadsik al-Taryin smiled wildly, the clockwork gears of her clockwork face click-clacking into a reasonable facsimile of a pleasant greeting. She gestured broadly, arms whirring and buzzing with the perpetual motion of trillions of gears, some of them no bigger than an atom.

  The lights went on, revealing a laboratory out of an Olde Age science fiction magazine. Chad knew every inch of the place. He’d been in this series of rooms from the moment he’d been birthed to the very moment he’d devised a way to escape. He’d created his first wondrous machine at three, and the second his father had learned that his bonny son could talk to versions of himself that had never existed had been the last moment of ‘freedom’.

  Naturally, that first creation had been someone to talk to, someone to play with, because at three, when your only companion is a cracked and addle-pated artificial intelligence that thought it was a 19th century mistress of household, that’s all you want. When your entire Universe was a room above a city that seethed with warfare and madness all hours of the day and night in an eternal wave of sound, smell and sorrow, you want someone to connect with, and that’s what Chadsik al-Taryin had done.

  Because his father was who he was, Chad had always been … special. Special enough to dig through the layers of Unreality all on his own, to seek out friends. Friends who could spare him the loneliness.

  Chad’s eyes roved over the toys and tools with a shameful hunger. He’d enjoyed working in the labs, once he’d gotten over the shock and horror of watching that first friend destroyed to make room for more. He’d loved the challenge even as he’d hated the hot, almost sultry hungry oozing from dear old dad’s lamp-like eyes, the covetous gleam, the … nasty pleasure. The ex-assassin looked at Mistress Taint, who’d busied herself tidying up. “I don’t want to do this. I really fu… I really don’t.”

  Mistress Taint nodded and smiled an empty, vacuous smile. “I know dear, just as you don’t want your dear old dad coming up here to have a few words. Which, I wonder, is worse? Tinkering away at something you find fun or feeling the hot pressure of your dear old father’s hands around you
r throat, the painful whip of his dark iron lash as it bites into your skin? It’s been a long number of years since you’ve been home, you wandering lad you, and your dad has been so sad and lonely without you. Why, he’s been gone so long now, people believe him dead!”

  Chad licked his lips, running his hands over a brass gyroscope. “The whole time? Wot’s ‘e been doin’, then?”

  Mistress Taint shrugged. “No one knows, Chadsik, none at all, Our King speaks to no one. Not me, not the Matrons, not his Gearmen, no one and no thing knows where he is. All we know is were he dead, The Dome would’ve fallen ages ago.”

  Chad snickered petulantly, mind whirling with ways to free himself. The old method was surely barricaded.

  Mistress Taint puttered about the room, preparing her charge’s things. “No matter, though, no matter at all. You are back now, and once your father learns of this joyous moment, why, that horrible moniker they call him on the Outside shall disappear, and all shall learn to tremble at the Dark Iron King’s true purpose. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? Why you came back? To put things aright and to get the family business back up to speed?”

  Chad didn’t say anything. Mistress Taint believed –as did everyone in Arcade City- that the whole Universe knew of his father’s ironworks, of the tools and weapons built by their regent.

  Were they to know the truth, that naught of what their King had done for those many thousands of years had been credited to him, well… Chadsik figured their brains would explode into runny pudding.

  And were they to learn that when they spoke of the Mad Goth King Blake, that they did so with dripping irony and awful sarcasm? Chad shook his head.

  Some things weren’t worth bringing up, especially since doing so would … aggravate certain mad Nannies.

  Chad strode over to a heavily curtained window and flung it wide. Light poured in and he blinked the tears away until he was able to see the faint traces of the massive Dome hanging over all their heads. A small sigh escaped his lips. Still there. Still a bizarre, endless, impossible collection of gears and crank shafts and cogs and wheels, a mammoth stretch of metal filling the horizon in all directions. He remembered staring up at it as a wee lad, trying to figure out why, if his dad could create that, he couldn’t fill the orders himself, why his son was doing all the work.

  Chad also remembered the lessons, some administered by his dad but most taught by Taint herself, as to why it was best to remember one’s station in life and why one should never seek to rise above it, or to ask questions about one’s betters.

  Chadsik’s fingers twitched. He plastered a grin on his face. How long could he pretend, this time, before he truly lost himself again? How long before the madness resurfaced? How many of him were left before he could make no more? What would happen then?

  Chad opened his mouth to agree, but the thought of fishing the hims from that deep ocean of the Unreality curdled the words before they were formed.

  He couldn’t do it. He just couldn’t. Them as were left were the only ones left, as it were, and he’d grown accustomed to them bein’ there. To throw them into the machine, to see them warped and altered by it…

  Chad did the only thing he could think of besides escape; he eyed the unbreakable glass windows of the Armory thoughtfully, crafted a careful and meticulous path to his destination and then rammed his head as hard as he could against the nearest pane.

  Chadsik al-Taryin flashed Nanny Taint a blood-spittled, drooling grin, tossed her the bird and rammed again. And again. And again. And one more time for good measure. He went to give his warden another nasty grin but he felt his peepers go cross-eyed in his melon. He pissed his pants as he fell unconscious because fuck that old robotic twat.

  Nanny eyed the damage Chad had done to himself and tsked. Always so headstrong.

  Somewhere Else Entirely

  Lieutenant General Leftbridge Stewart was, to say the least, ecstatic. Why, he was happy enough for three whole people and was more than inclined to give everyone an extra day off. Should they manage to complete the duties that would be required of them for the coming day, that is. Happiness and success and extra days to relax were all well and good, of course, but only if everyone’s work was done.

  Mm. Perhaps not a day off then. Lefty knew his staff could barely tie their own shoes without several hours’ notice. Expecting them to be able to complete their chores for the next day in addition to that which they were already expected to do would be to incite interoffice warfare. Across a whole planet …

  Lefty shook his head. His betters tended to notice things like burning planets.

  Perhaps a parade, then. Lefty’s shoulders, slumped over the notion of his world burning, straightened. Yes, a parade. With floats and marching bands and those humorously sized balloons of favorite characters floating by. Nothing too cheerful, though; there’d have to a bit in there where the recently deceased were dealt with, and that’d have to be handled very carefully indeed, because there were so very many of them…

  Lefty tsked angrily. No, they couldn’t do a parade either. “I guess,” he said through his laborious handlebar moustache, “I guess it’s rather just going to have to be an execution alone.”

  The assembled officers in the room, present to oversee this final interrogation, grumped and murmured to themselves. They, too, had been looking forward to some sort of celebration after the fact. Public execution barely counted as afternoon entertainment, and the fellow they’d caught had run them through the ringer. Had been running them through the ringer for upwards of two years.

  A serving girl bustled through and refreshed everyone’s tea, leaving in her wake a scattering of gingersnap cookies and one buttered scone.

  Lefty perused the files on the man they’d taken to calling ‘Scourge’, to get more of a handle on things before the guards ushered him in to his last proper conversation. It was the gentlemanly thing to do, of course; they might be getting ready to kill him, and he’d done such terrific damage that many considered him an animal, but there were ways of doing things.

  Lefty looked over his shoulder at his long-time chum, Shorty, who was busy relating the Improbable Story of the Lusty Serving Girl. “I say, Shorty, is all of this the work of one man?”

  Shorty nodded. “Indeed, sah, indeed. Well, towards the end there was a kind of despicable network of ruffians and ne’er-do-wells, to be true, but in the beginning, ‘twas just Scourge himself.”

  “A one-man demolition team, if these records are correct. Egads, I’d plum forgotten about Knotworth Station. What a blow, that.”

  Two hundred thirty-five dead, a space station worth eighty million … quite a blow indeed. But then there were also seventy raided space ships, fourteen planet-based military installations destroyed, a Quantum Tunnel shut down for two solid months … the list read like an anarchist’s cookbook on how to make a man look like he couldn’t handle command.

  “Seven jailbreaks?” Lefty shook the paper he held irately. “When did escapes six and seven happen and why hadn’t anyone told me?”

  Snotty, or Major Johnson Nottingham, saluted crisply, then cursed as he spilled tea down the front of his uniform. Ignoring the chuckles from his comrades, Snotty answered. “Sah, six was not so much a jailbreak as a break in, sah. One of the rogue’s own main hands, as it were, got himself incarcerated for singing ‘The Ballad of Bawdy Jane’ on the street. Set to be flogged in the am. Scourge heard about it and broke the scurrilous lad out. Took out half the division and three local pubs. I hear tell Scourge swung back ‘round and blew up a statue of the King for good measure.”

  “The devil you say!” Lefty cleared his throat to keep from saying more. No wonder no one had mentioned anything to him. Blowing up a statue of the King indeed. What a villain. “And the seventh?”

  “No one made mention of that one, sah, as the desperado made his break in, ah, in the altogether, sah.” Snotty shook his head at that. Such an embarrassment!

  “My word!” Lefty put the papers
down. “Escaped incarceration in the buff! What a cad! This is most … disturbing!”

  “As you say, sah, as you say. It seems our Scourge was most upset at having to break free in the nudd himself, as the first thing he did, rather than flee for the hills like the blaggard he is, was nip ‘round to a shop and steal some clothes. Then he…”

  Lefty held up a hand. “I’ve heard and read enough, Snotty. Bring the reprobate in. Let us see what he has to say for himself before he swings from the gibbet.”

  Shorty cleared his throat politely, then waited for Lefty to address him with a curt nod. “I feel we should warn you, sah, the scum is in the altogether.”

  “What is this all about, hey? Nude again?” Lefty stared suspiciously at his commanding officers and friends. What happened at boarding school was supposed to stay at boarding school. If he suspected they were using this Scourge to have one over on him, why, they’d all find their beds short-sheeted before dawn!

  “It seems, sah, that … that he has used articles of clothing to variously destructive degrees in the past. There was the explosive tie pin, the laser cufflinks, the … remote-controlled predator drone shoes. Am I forgetting anything?” Shorty looked around the room.

  “Garrote shoe-laces. Holographic trousers. The regrettable incident of the Flying Pants of Doom.” Someone supplied without stepping forward.

  “By the heavens!” Lefty roared. “Flying Pants! This man knows no sense of decorum or shame! By all means, kill as many as you like, we’ve got loads of citizens, but … flying pants! What did they do, by the by, these aerial undergarments?”

  “They, er, they stuck themselves after a goodly flight through a square directly upon the forehead of a City Matron, sah. Matron Champrese, to be exact. It took four Square Guards and a great deal of … pulling and … jostling. The Matron’s own clothing may have been … disarrayed towards the end.” Shorty hid a smirk and was unsurprised to see Lefty hiding one of his own; even though Matrons kept the cities nice and tidy and under organized control at all times, they could be sticky wickets in their own right. The thought of a Matron being manhandled by Square Guards in an attempt to free her from Flying Pants was equally disturbing and tremendously hilarious.