Citizen Pariah (Unreal Universe Book 3)

by Lee

  And because of that, I’m gonna lead you, hand in hand, through an adventure that will quite probably melt your brain from the awesome.

  Lucky you, right? When I was living it, it was all seriously weird, but you get to armchair your way through it. I am not responsible for actual brain-melting. I should poin that out.

  Now, on to the second secret. Or, more accurately, the secret. Truth be told, there’s a bunch of secrets, but because I am an excellent teller of tales, these will be doled out bit by bit like really expensive cheeses you get at fancy parties.

  Everyone knows that the world we live in now is a grab bag of weirdness, right?

  And we all accept it as moot that from the moment Morty Zeigler invented time travel we all pretty much started living in some kind of Boy’s Own Adventure story as dictated by a super-nerd with Godlike levels of Asperger’s and a willingness to do whatever it took to make sure that things came out the way he wanted, right?

  Of course we do. It’s why we have things like zeppelins flying in the skies and cyborgs working for the military. It’s why we have three hundred different flavors of ice cream, one of them named ‘Solace of Respite’ (tastes like blueberries to me) and why we have people living quite comfortably on the moon. It’s even why there are dinosaurs roaming the earth (no joke, not even a little bit) and mostly why the deep seas aren’t terribly safe to travel for any length of time (for serious … deep sea oceaning isn’t practical).

  It’s also why the ‘free world’ is split into several thousand different political agendas. The first two and most foremost amongst that grab bag of oligarchies, gynarchies, regimes, communist blocs and hippie communes being the DemReps (short for Democratically Republican) and the Golden Rulers (not necessarily a kind phrase, but since people who follow this party adhere to, well, ‘The Golden Rules’ … you see where I’m going).

  But we know all this. You know all this. Even if you live in a DemRep city, even if you’re bombarded by anti-Morty propaganda and even more strenuous anti-Golden Rulers rhetoric day in and day out for the entirety of your sheep-like life, you know all this. You can’t help it. Our world is weird and it is as plain as the nose on your face.

  Most of what you think you know about the reformation of our universe is wrong.

  Wait, I can hear you shouting, what? Morty Ziegler altered our history and no one else. If there’d been anyone else, you holler, there’d’ve been more than one person landing at the Eyesteen-Rosinburger Bridge!

  Well, that’s true. But it is also true that Morty wasn’t alone.

  It can’t be proven, no one who knows isn’t saying anything and never will (except me, but I’m … exempt). Once upon a time before Morty took that first, inevitable trip through time and space and began monkeying with History to make certain that things like the Beverly Hills Cop movie (the first one, at any rate) actually happened just like it did in the movie, there were three of us.

  I’ll let that sink in for a minute. I can hear you thinking ‘is he saying that Morty didn’t invent time travel on his lonesome, ‘cuz Morty is saying he did, and I don’t think it’s wise to piss off the one guy who we know can do it.’.

  True story. Once upon a time there were three of us, though in the rewritten version of history that every else knows and (mostly) loves, it was always and only ever been Morty Ziegler who crossed that final threshold. Morty’s responsible for that adjustment just as surely as you can look to him for introducing cellular technology to people in the 1900’s.

  But I digress. I could sit here all day and tell you about all the awesome things Morty did (does, is doing), but this story isn’t about him. Not really, not yet and not for a long while.

  The three of us, then.

  There was me (natch). James Mallory Murphy. In the old world, I was … just me. Not terribly smart, kind of athletic, more or less addicted to video games and preoccupied with breasts. A far cry away from the me I am today, but closer to the me you’re going to be introduced to once the story gets rolling properly (don’t worry if that doesn’t make any sense, things will become clear, I pinky swear). I was awkward and weird in about thirty different ways, turning a guy who should’ve been a part of the ‘In Crowd’ into a guy who could quote The Adventures of Ford Fairlane word for word and who was capable of running two hundred meters in twenty-five seconds. I wanted desperately to be popular. I failed every time I opened my mouth. I was too All-American, I suppose, which makes me laugh my ass off now.

  Why do I find this funny? Because, in this, the really for real world, I’m too ‘Golden Rulerish’. Some things never change, not even if you fold space and time around itself until it cries ‘Uncle’.

  There was Johnson ‘Maxxie’ Maxter. Sort of a pre-Batman Bruce Wayne, except instead of becoming a costumed superhero after his parents died (no joke, they died in a car accident), he turned into a colossal douche. Even moreso when their living wills indicated that he needed to go to a ‘regular old school’ if he wanted to get any of that awesome super-money. He showed up at my school midway through grade 7 and was such a horrible shit to everyone that the paste-eating mouth-breather Vinnie Shlots tried dunking the kid’s head in the toilet. Nobody liked Maxxie, not even Maxxie himself; rich, wealthy, spoiled, he was like that kid from that Richard Pryor movie except he never really learned how to get along with people until I had to rescue his ass from being beaten by a bunch of twelfth graders. I got what my dad referred to as the ‘Double Shiner Badge of Honor’ for my efforts, and the friendship of a guy almost universally loathed … which was fine, because like I said, Maxxie was loaded. We weren’t really friends. It was more of a ‘us against everyone else’ kind of thing, but it was the closest we could get.

  And then there was Morton ‘Morty’ Ziegler. So damned smart, even in that otherverse that he made particle physicists scream in the middle of the night, dear old Morty could barely string a sentence together without lapsing into arcane math to get his point across. And I mean smart across the board. Every aspect, every branch. It was like someone bashed the kid across the head with the Celestial Omnibus of Everything and then cut him loose in middle school to see how a super-genius would do with regular people Answer: very, very badly.

  Even the other nerdlings shunned him, which is quite something to witness firsthand (ever see a pack of fantasy-dressed geeks turn their shoulders on anyone? I have, and it’s bizarre enough to shatter history without our meddling).

  Morty didn’t bother to try and fit in because roughly nine-tenths of the time he wasn’t even aware that there were other people in the room. It wasn’t until Maxxie and I happened across Morty crying in a bathroom stall (someone had knotted his shoelaces together and he couldn’t untie them on his own) that the guy began to realize that the world outside his own head was even really real.

  So. There you have it. Three kids (well, teenagers, really) that should’ve been immensely popular or at least marginally successful in their respective peer groups trapped in the hell that is high school and hated on all sides. Maxxie had money, Morty had brains and I … had creativity, because when I wasn’t busy running around the track, I was reading everything that was ever written that had the words ‘science fiction and/or fantasy’ in the description.

  If you think it sounds like the beginnings of a movie, well, you wouldn’t be far off. We did get the idea from a movie (except we wanted to do more than build a cyberspace genie with a nice rack). Where the movie kids worked their mojo on what was essentially a fancy Speak-and-Spell, we had access to actual supercomputers. Morty built a shit-ton of stuff he swore could refold the fabric of time and space itself, I fleshed out a new universe of fun and cool stuff with input from my two buddies, and Maxxie just spent his money on everything we needed.

  It didn’t take long for our efforts to go from the ‘Idly Bored and Vaguely Amusing’ stage to the ‘Jesus, This Could Really Work Guys’ stage.

  Once we’d leaped off the deep end of sanity into super crazy town, it developed
that there was one thing Morty couldn’t invent on his own and Maxxie couldn’t afford to build. It was something we needed pretty badly, and luckily for us, regular super geniuses had already gone ahead and built it: the LHC. Don’t worry if you’ve never heard of the Large Hadron Collider, it’s one of those things that Morty worked very diligently at not being inventible in the new universe. Since no one has ever heard of the LHC (even those people in the position to be exposed to materials that could contain information on the collider) I will do my best to explain what the heck the thing is (point of interest: I’m not a scientist, so … yeah).

  I would also like to say (Spoiler Alert) that monkeying with the physical laws of the universe like that causes … problems. Problems that will be addressed. I promise.

  In the otherverse, the Large Hadron Collider was a thing scientists had built to plumb the furthest corners of Reality. They were looking for the Higgs-Boson particle, or, if you prefer, the God Particle. The plan was to accelerate atoms and smash them together and then sift through the resultant mess for this tiny little thing. A thing which would theoretically give us all the answers to everything, ever. And terrifyingly enough, they were doing this on the planet. Not out in space, not a hundred berjillion miles away from everything. They were doing it in someone’s backyard. I guarantee if you walk out into the backyard and light a Roman candle, you’re going to be visited by the cops or a group of Concerned Citizens almost immediately. Chances are they might ask if they could light a few, but still. Someone would notice.

  Hair-raising stuff, right? Insane to degrees that make your teeth ache and your brain want to crawl away. How happy are you that the LHC was never (could never) be built in the world we all call home? I bet the answer is very very.

  Around about the time Maxxie was trying to buy our way into Sweden or Switzerland or wherever so we could use the unlimited power of the LHC for our, uh, ‘project’ (don’t forget, this is still otherverse we’re talking about here), I bumped into Maggie Horsenfelger and fell so stupidly in love I’m surprised I still managed to maintain any friendships at all.

  She was (then and now, forever and for always) a luminous beauty that outshone the sun and had a voice that made the crystal spheres of existence jealous. She made me stupid, which turned out to be a good thing, because when I was around her, I was somehow tolerable to other people. I started having friends who said ‘dude’ and ‘bro’ and instead of sitting in Morty’s sweaty, paranoia-filled basement surrounded on all sides by funky science projects, I went out to movies and parties and had a good time and saw people for what they really were; generally decent if occasionally stupid.

  Maggie didn’t particularly care for Maxxie and Morty, but for the longest time they’d been my only friends, so when Maxxie finally managed to get us permission to ‘tour’ the LHC facility, I had no choice. We did just that. We hopped a private plane (carrying with us all the stuff that we’d built for the express purpose of rewriting history), got into the facility and, to make a long story frustratingly brief (remember, this story is not about what happened before time travel, but after), we did what we’d set out to do.

  As you can see, we succeeded. We rewrote the whole of everything. Only once the time-travel dust settled, it was only Morty Ziegler who’d done it, and he continued (continues) rewriting for a very, very long time.

  I’m not gonna batter your brains with paradoxes and all that because honestly, my brain starts to hurt when I think about it. Let’s just say that in the final moments, Morty decided he wanted to be the only one with the power to do whatever he wanted to do and had the wherewithal and ability to ensure it fell out that way.

  In payment for his ‘crime’, Morty ensured that me and Maxxie existed exactly as we had in that old universe, right down to the irritating sisters on my side and the ridiculous wealth on Maxxie’s. Fair is fair, right? I mean, if he’s got the patience to ensure that there is a real Axle Foley and he got to go on an awesome adventure filled with laughter and gunfire, then the least he could do is ‘do us’ properly.

  Good ole Morty even made sure I met and fell in love with Maggie Horsenfelger all over again. What a guy, right?

  Except Morty’s only one guy. Not omnipotent, not by a long shot. Sure he made it possible for me to be the me he remembered, but, and this is massively important, the me he remembered wasn’t terribly social until he met Maggie Horsenfelger.

  Maybe in that other universe I would’ve married Maggie and become, like, a bank manager or something.

  But that was then, in a place that only exists in movies and books and comics that Morty unveils on the internet (we call them cross-cycle paraphernalia and virtually every instance of them is illegal for reasons you’ll eventually learn).

  In the here and now, the really for real world, things are different. Oh sure, I still met Maggie, and we both fell in love just like the star-crossed lovers we were supposed to be. I was still friends with Maxxie and Morty (though I’m pretty confident that the Morty we all went to school with sort of became … absorbed or something ... by the paradoxical otherverse Morty).

  And that’s where the similarities end.

  Close to the end of our final year in this real world of ours, Morty went all secretive and wonky and then he disappeared for a bit. Then he showed up in a painting of The Last Supper and roughly fifteen people planet-wide had a good chuckle and kept their lips zipped. Then he brazenly started doing the weird stuff that we’ve all sort of become used to.

  When I turned eighteen (and Maxxie and Morty too, by the by), my life changed. In ways that I’m certain Morty couldn’t have prepared himself for and couldn’t have possibly ever anticipated (don’t forget, I was the creative one).

  From macro to micro, then. Three of us worked to change history, we succeeded; Morty cheated us and became the only one to’ve done it. He made sure we were the way were supposed to be and proceeded to turn the whole of the world into (mostly) a better place.

  Did Morty intend on me becoming what I eventually became? He never answered me and now it’s too late to find out. Even here, at the far end of the adventure, it’s hard to tell. Some secrets that are meant to be kept, I suppose. I need to apologize again; I’m talking about future events. I remember Morty doing that and it pissing me off, so let’s get back to the story proper. I believe, once I finished telling you the truth behind some of the greatest secrets in the world, that I was going to tell you a bit about myself.

  At the time of the story to follow, I am James Mallory Murphy. I live at home with my parents and my younger sister Janey. My twin sister Amily lives in The City proper with her awesome boyfriend who is so totally awesome that it makes me want to head-butt him unconscious.

  I am also, for lack of a better phrase, completely and undeniably an utter washout of a human being.

  How can this be, you ask?

  A few paragraphs ago, I mentioned that when I turned eighteen, my life changed. And it did. Oh boy did it ever.

  Picture the scene; I’m dating Maggie Horsenfelger (destined to become Miggy Mellons, the world’s greatest and most amazingly talented rock and roll superstar, and all over a broken heart), I’ve just completed a legitimate industrial espionage job (part of a job application for my business magnate buddy Maxxie) and I’m in my local Hinky Jinks arcade playing Face Blaster 2000, on WTF ARE YOU THINKING mode and kicking ass.

  Right then, right at that moment, my life was perfect. That most perfect moment lasted twenty, twenty-five minutes. It could’ve gone three different directions, just like those lame Choose Your Own Adventures, except in this case, I can’t flip back to a choice and go another way.

  Even in a world where time travel exists, once a choice is made, you’re stuck.

  I beat Face Blaster 2000. The next morning, I was visited by some people who asked me if I’d like to be a Writman. I said yes. I dumped Maggie Horsenfelger (who, like I said, went on to become Miggy Mellons, a woman who rewrote what it was to make music). I called Maxxie up a
nd said I’d failed to steal the blueprints he’d wanted (transforming him into the bitterest, angriest quadrillionaire ever). Then I went to work for Writ Off, delivering Writs.

  For those of you who aren’t up to speed on The Golden Rules and the unique post of Writman, I will break it down for you:

  Writ System (and Writmen): A system of checks and balances, wherein an aggrieved individual or company can make an appeal to the Writ Committee for the issuance of a Writ. A Writ is a legal document wherein the terms of punishment (up to and including death) are described. It is the Writman’s job to deliver this document, along with any corrective actions, as specified in the Writ.

  It’s way more complicated than that, but at base, that’s what it means to be a Writman. It’s legalized death, sponsored by the government and ratified by the Global Oversight Committee (who do their best to keep the whole planet from going up in smoke, partly because of Morty, partly because of us, and partly because the whole damn world is weirder and more dangerous than a frat house keg party with free dynamite handed out at the door).

  The post exists as a pressure-release valve. Final Deliverances keep the need for prisons at an all-time low, the criminally-minded are continually reminded that if they go too far they’ll find themselves with a Writ and … that’s it. The Writ System is an integral part of The Golden Rules and it is why adherents to the Rules are happier, wealthier, more enthusiastic about life and generally just way more awesome than DemRep sheep.

  I’m guilty of oversimplification here, but I hate repeating myself and in a bit you’re going to be reading the beginning adventures of Me, and I ramble on about damn near anything that strikes my mind while I’m working and I figure it’s better to just hold on for the ride rather than dump it all on you.

  Anyway, I became a Writman working for Writ Off in the biggest Golden Rules city on the planet. In due course and through the diligent application of finally being good at something that wasn’t video games, I managed to get one step away from becoming the greatest Writman in the history of the job. It took five years to get to that point, and much of what I did was amazingly super-awesome in ways you can’t imagine.