Dark Iron King II: Arcadia Falls (Unreal Universe Book 5)

by Lee Bond

  Anything that might aid him in the creation nestled in the whorls and furls of his broken mind.

  And there’d been so much in those heavily encrypted computers, weapons and defensive systems and all manner of things so powerful or strange or frightening that the Armies of Man had grown reluctant to even imagine using them, but…

  Nothing in those files fit the illuminate schematic coursing through him. Nothing.

  The King remembered the despair flowing through him, remembered thinking that he was going to have to reveal himself to his foolish brothers, who’d fled the scene of their lightning-fled rebirth –on foot, of all things- within seconds of his tumultuous suicide. They each of them had absconded off to the furthest corners of the world, and then, when machinery permitted, to the corners of the system, and then further, and further and further…

  Barnabas blinked his eyes. He was glad he’d been spared having to reveal themselves to those fools. Scarcely imaginable, asking them for help!

  But then … ahhh, then. One final last look, one last late night sortie through one remaining block of data. He’d fallen upon secret files hidden in a partitioned drive and his mind had literally exploded from joy and what he’d found and that, as they said, had been that. A nearly complete set of schematics and blueprints, replete with hy-tech wizardry of nearly arcane proportions, a thing of such dizzying complexity and majesty that the first CyberPriest had nodded knowingly at the fact that the plans had been incomplete; surely if anything in the rotten Unreality could prove too much for a single crazed genius to complete, it’d been Cloud. No mention had been made of the originator of those wondrous plans, leaving the ‘Priest to believe him or her dead and broken from the effort.

  Not such a challenge for a CyberPriest, though. Not at all. A scattering of decades, no more, no less, to work through the math and science, carefully and artfully unlocking the final steps to create the first machine capable of producing the nanoparticulate he’d decided to call ‘King’s Will’.

  From there and for the last thirty thousand –or so- years, King and King’s Will had reigned supreme ‘neath The Dome, clunking and chunking inexorably towards that far-flung moment when everything was powered up and the multitude of worlds spread throughout the diseased reflection called the Unreal Universe was destroyed in a brilliant flash of righteousness.

  “What a change a hundred years can bring, hey?” Barnabas muttered bitterly, running a bare hand across the exposed section of void stuff.

  The meniscus separating the real from the unreal, that kept the abomination that was the Unreal Universe from spoiling the pristine, harmonious and all-too- magnificent Spheres of Existence rippled beneath the King’s hand, an undulating, shifting ribbon of greasy sickness that reflected everything as it truly was.

  Barnabas knew he shouldn’t be touching the membrane, shouldn’t even be looking at it; the gross reflection of his true form generally put him in a horrifically foul-tempered mood. To this day, even with the consumed memories of his brothers of the electronic flesh, Barnabas had no idea how they’d managed to live for thirty thousand years walking around looking like … like … broken-down toys. His own true visage, a strange, queer looking collision of a human body poorly put back together after having been ripped to pieces was bad enough, but those fools…

  It was one thing to know everything was false, a hollow mockery of a grand ideal. It was another thing entirely to do as those blighted buffoons had done!

  The One and Only King shivered with revulsion. How they’d embraced their faulty nature! Willfully grafting on weirder and stranger and intentionally malfunctioning machinery, digging themselves deeper and deeper and pushing themselves further and further away, almost as if they were trying to imbalance the Unreal Universe by becoming the physical incarnation of error.

  A snickering whisper filled the King’s senses for a moment. He knew that thin, reedy, aggravating voice. Kant Ingrams, once known as Erg1, who’d also been known as Kent Ungerman, was laughing. At him. King Barnabas Blake the One and Only, He Who would Destroy Everything.

  Barnabas took a deep breath and tried to calm himself. It worked, but only just. He hadn’t been this angry since Chadsik al-Taryin had fallen through one of his own fucking portals. The Kingly CyberPriest took another deep breath and listened to the disembodied voice of Kant Ingrams. “What is so funny, you intangible sprite?”

  “Everything, my lord, everything is funny to me, now.” Erg’s voice whispered through King’s aerie, electric snow lapping against The Dome’s curve.

  Barnabas resisted the urge to shout, to throw clustered Enforcer Suits about the room. He’d already done both things twice now; first, when he’d arrived properly in his Domed workshop to find that –as he’d feared all along- the disembodied CyberPriest had well and truly inveigled himself deep, deep, deep into sensitive systems and again when the ambulatory whisper had proven absolutely impossible to root out and destroy without doing for those selfsame sensitive systems.

  King Barnabas Blake the One and Only was well and truly stuck with a court jester that was also a ghost in his machine, a dual role that Erg was taking quite, quite seriously.

  Blake gave the Enforcer Suit nearest him a hearty thump. It thunked hollowly and he nodded absentmindedly. No need for messy biological components, hey? Them as had driven the Suits had been plucked forth as they’d traveled through the Walls.

  “Aye, surely,” King said slowly, “but in this particular instance, what is it you find so uproarious?”

  ‘Uproarious’ barely covered it! Since returning to the roost to pick and peck and pluck through systems aboard Suits to see how they’d fare when plugged into the Dome’s mechanics, the wispy witless ghost had been sniggering and chuckling like a kettle on a stove.

  “Back in your Dome, milord, hours as it’s been now and still you’ve missed it.” Erg chided mockingly, dancing invisibly out of the way of King’s probing senses. “It almost makes me want to spill those beans, as your traveling companion would say.”

  Blake looked up from the readout, eyes narrowing. He gazed over a shoulder at where he imagined Erg to be hiding. “What say you? What possible thing could you have to reveal unto me?”

  “A lot.” Erg answered darkly. “More than you can possibly imagine. Enough to drive you mad as we were on the outsider. Madness, it seems, as was forged by you and your lies.”

  Barnabas shrugged and went back to the readout. “Couldn’t be helped, Erg, couldn’t be helped. There was no room for you lot ‘til now. I…”

  “You were a part of us.” Erg hissed like an angry steam engine. “Not ‘you lot’ but us.”

  Barnabas thought he sensed the floating electrical patterns forming Erg’s body hovering just over yonder, but did nowt about it; ‘ere now, the thing that the ‘Priest had become had been irritatingly silent but this new chattiness could very well be the thing to lead an angered King to the rock beneath which the worm turned. “As you like, as you say. I assume, then, that there is more to what you imply than your childish distractions in my head whilst I were downstairs?”

  Erg cackled and the walls shivered with electrified madness. “Childish? Hardly. Look at all that came from that ‘childishness’. Your one true, great enemy, grown so steeped in Will-manipulation he is soon to be your equal! All from outer Wall nearly right into the heart of Arcadia itself shattered, damaged, gone. The Great Clamoring! Me! I did that. As punishment for your Book of Lies! For the foul things your siren song did to me a hundred years ago! Oh, the suffering I end…”

  “Be silent!” Barnabas snapped violently. It were well difficult to understand the raging psychopath when he got worked up, plain and simple. The cracking and fizzing spawned by their broken Harmony turned Erg’s ranting voice into nowt by an over-amplified buzzblade’s chuckling call.

  The King worked through what Erg had shouted so madly. One true great enemy? “Who’s that, then? Agnethea? Trinity? The outsider? If you think it him, then I encourage you to r
ecall I have a plan in mind for that bastard, hey? I have no great enemies ‘neath my Dome, not now, not never! Soon enough two of three you may consider my only proper opposition will be done for and in grand fashion. As to the third? When The Dome goes live, mighty Trinity won’t know what hit It! And if not them as I’ve mentioned, who, then, oh sagacious spirit in the machine? Who?”

  “Oh mighty King!” Erg laughed again. “Oh great and powerful King ‘neath the Dome of Gears, my distractions were done too well, weren’t they? For even now, separated by great distance, you still have no interest in seeing things as they are.”

  “Nowt to see.” Barnabas muttered into his beard. “Things are as I say they are.”

  Erg grunted. “You do know how to ruin a man’s fun.” He sighed, white noise through empty space. “So be it. Your great enemy is the same man you seek to destroy in Ickford, milord. The man you know as Garth Nickels.”

  Barnabas Blake flashed an indulgent smile at the mad thing his old brother had become before turning once more back to the Suits. “Already told you, spirited sprite, Nickels is Trinity’s tool. The ancient AI did somehow intuit what goes on down here and gave the man a leg up. ‘tween that and you… what now?”

  “As Adjutant in the service of the great machine mind Trinity Itself, king of mine, I traveled across the length and scope of the known and unknown Universe. I saw entire worlds and sometimes even solar systems ravaged by stuff similar to Will.” Erg whispered his tale seductively. “And in all that time, never once, never once was a stable variant found. Unstable ones everywhere it seemed you cared to look, but none such as yours. Well, except for a single time, and in recent years, towards the end of my … employ. A solar system, milord, infected with Cloud, set to some inscrutable task, eating the whole of everything within in the pursuit of that unknowable goal. An endless cloud, milord, rewriting all matter for a single purpose as dictated by none other than the legendary Kin’kithal Garth N’Chalez.”

  Erg’s words, delivered with squirming, febrile excitement slithered through Barnabas Blake’s brain, wreaking havoc wherever they traveled. One eye began twitching spasmodically and a hand snatched itself into the air, clenched into a fist so tight that blackened flecks of Will began dancing.

  “Im-impossible!” Barnabas whispered raggedly. “They are… they are gone. Disappeared on that fool’s quest years before Man pushed Harmony away! Lost in space or destroyed by the Kith and Kin. Or simply gone! And e’en if one were to live, nonesuch would be so foolish as to walk through my gates!”

  “Barnabas narrowed his eyes. There was so much he didn’t know about the Kin’kithal, and it wasn’t for a lack of trying. Back in the beginning, he’d tried uncovering as much as possible about the strange extra-dimensionally spawned beings, and all in an effort to understand the harrowing complexity of Cloud’s design. Barnabas remembered thinking it a shame that the Kin’kith and Kith’kin were lost, imagining in those early days that had they been around he would’ve given them leave to aid him in his Grand Design.

  Hunting and searching for the truth of those weird extra-dimensional soldiers had revealed a starkness that was abnormal for Armies of Man dossiers. No birth dates. No age. No height, no weight. No pictures. Not even much in the way of completed missions or accreditations. By way of comparison, the full identities and histories of every man involved in ‘Project Songbird’ had been recorded.

  Near about the only thing of import on the Scions of the Kith and Kin had been their epic departure from the Earth, and the only reason for that was because you could hardly hide something to drastically important, now could you?

  Other than that one tidbit, nowt of import. Kin’kithal Garth N’Chalez? Impossible. Mayhap some pretender, some crafty lad as found some nifty high-tech gewgaw out there in the inky outsider, one as had transformed him.

  Barnabas nodded once, firmly. Aye. That were it. If he could find the specs for Cloud and bring The Dome into being with it, then this lad Garth Nickels could find summat to somehow turn himself into a poor man’s version of a Kin’kithal, hey?

  “Impossible.” King Barnabas stated again, though this time his denial was built upon a shore of rational thought.

  Erg snickered. “Anything but, milord. The tale as you know it is that they were destined to return after a smattering of years, yes? To return to Earth and dish out pure vengeance ‘gainst overlords grown fat and sluggish with their comforts?” The disembodied voice resumed when Barnabas nodded, albeit guardedly. “Untrue. The plan had always been for them to be here, now, at the far end of history, to do battle with M’Zahdi Hesh in an Unreal Universe swollen to perverse proportions. A plan wrought by none other than the man you’ve left in a city as makes him invisible to your prying eyes. Moreover, milord, Kin’kithal Garth N’Chalez isn’t merely a champion for defeating thine enemies, he is the champion. I wonder what he will get up to down there, Ickford way?”

  Barnabas snorted derisively. He had better things to do than listen to ghost stories told to him by an even weirder ghost. “A single man? ‘gainst them and all else as has risen up to sniff the scent of power? Beyond ridiculous.”

  It were ridiculous, and yet … he were just a single man. Well. King. Well, CyberPriest as well. And now he were thinking on prime numbers, Trinity were just one. As was Emperor-for-Life.

  King Barnabas pressed his lips together and turned towards where he felt Erg’s mind hovered. “Why, pray tell, are you spilling these beans now? To what end? You already succeeded in driving me near mad with your fluttering up here like some kind of diseased electronic butterfly and in keeping me distracted long enough for your alleged…” Here, he paused, waiting for the spirit to decry the statement, resuming with a smile when nowt was whispered against him, “Kin’kithal to grow in power and stature? If it is as you say and he is the man who wrote them long ago formulas down and my lovely Will has found in him some connection, why, when the time comes, I will have my work cut out for me and that’s all. Why would you give me this edge, I wonder, when you are paying me back for thirty thousand years of deceit? Wi’out knowing his true identity, mayhap I’d’ve gone another way in doing for him. Now I know, I shall have no choice but to reconfigure Ickford’s demise properly.”

  “I tell you, milord,” Erg responded primly, “so you may know the futility of it. There is so much still you do not know about his kind, King Barnabas Blake the One and Only, things like his adaptive morphology, twisting and spinning all around him as though it were a living breathing typhoon, throwing all that is against him at the walls while pulling all that is for him into the Eye for safekeeping. I tell you so that whilst you fight, whilst you try and come up with something fresh and new to do for your enemy fail each and every time, I can remind you over the only time you could’ve done for him. Over and over and over again until you crack as wide and as rough as we did under the weight of your lies.”

  Barnabas stared off into the middle distance, Erg’s words weighing on him. It was well too late to do anything at all about he’d treated the brothers and it were far too late in the game to care one way or t’other as well. “What’s done is done. I did as I saw fit, as was my right as first through the Enlightningment. ‘twas my call and besides all that, as I seen from your properly digested brethren, wi’out chad or this lass Naoko to guide you properly, you lot were nowt but a sad collection of misfits slapping numbers on t’the end of your names to count how many times you made yourself weirder still. Better to be here, performing a service towards that which you always dreamed of than out there, flailing about, hey?”

  Erg said nothing.

  “Now,” Barnabas crooned, “fill a King with anger and rage again, hey, and tell me when the only time I could’ve done for this man was?”

  “’tween the Walls, King.” Erg supplied quickly, waiting as he had been for the question this whole time. “When he tromped through The Walls, surrounded on all sides by eager entropy, when the veil of the Unreal Universe was shoved off to one side. In th
ere, he’d truly been nothing but a man. Now? Now you shall have your work cut out for you indeed. You bring your best, and his best shall rise above. Do your worst and his worst shall make you believe in the Devil. There is nothing you can do.”

  “Ah!” Barnabas crowed, waggling a finger in the air. “But you have not seen what I plan, hey? My method for doing for that city and all within is unlike anything I ever dreamed up ‘ere now. Garth Nickels won’t have a chance to adapt, if he ever did in the first place. Now as you can see, you are keeping me from my work, so kindly fuck off to the ether until you have summat new to tell me.”

  “As you command, my King.” Erg’s voice buzzed and spat and then a curious absence filled the room.

  The King nodded.

  All was good, all was well.

  Barnabas bent and picked the heavy Enforcer Suit up easily, then started lugging it over to the slot in the wall it was destined to go into. All about the King, massive gears and gyroscopic devices and devilishly complex mechanisms waited to spring into life. The majestic beauty of the antiquated designs never failed to take Blake’s breath away, but if he was going to be honest with himself, there were times –even still, even so close to the end- that he wished he’d been far less whimsical in his youth. The massive redesign he’d undertaken some twelve thousand years ago was and always would be a grand and wondrous thing, but there were times when dealing with the high-tech yet-antiquated machinery became a right pain in the arse.