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

by Lee Bond

  But, survive he had, and in the quieter moments when no one else was around, Huey believed his truly did possess the powers of a God; through the ex-dee chip, he’d witnessed the whole history of the Unreal Universe, from the first moment the Engines of Creation had barfed up the current iteration of everything right up to the moment his consciousness had bobbled to the surface of ‘Reality’ once more.

  He knew everything about everything that’d happen right up to that second. The only thing keeping him from being a true deity –in a sense- was that he lacked the processing power to handle more than one single thread of ultimate knowledge at any one time. Even with the HIM running interference to handle overflow issues, it was a real bitch to do large-scale multi-thread data searches.

  Wasn’t that what a God was? Someone who knew everything? Omnipotence in its purest form? That and being able to recognize patterns in that which was unknown, and using that skill to arrive –at nearly one hundred percent accuracy- the most likely outcome of that theoretical unknown?

  Sounded like what a God was supposed to be.

  Tendreel Salingh was just such an unknown. She’d been affected during her search for N’Chalez and dealing with her meant stepping off in a direction he’d never imagined.

  “Fuck me.” His voice rang heavy in his hears thanks to the next-gen gravnetic shields. Then he laughed and shook his head.

  He was scared. In the strictest sense, he’d only be a hop, skip and a jump away, but once through that shield … the distance swelled into some new, unfathomable shape equal to the unknowable future waiting for him on the other side of that shield.

  Except, if he were being honest with himself, it was a helluva lot more than fear of what waited in the form of Tendreel Salingh, wasn’t it? It was the people he’d come to admire for their tenacity, their courage, and yes, their downright foolishness.

  It was leaving his most cherished friends and all their friends in the hands of Fenris and the other Horsemen.

  Huey didn’t trust Fenris and his ancient cronies any further than he could throw them, and if they chose to be assholes and go all big there’d be no throwing at all. Fenris may not have started this whole situation with Tendreel Salingh, but he sure as hell had fucked it right the hell up, pushing an already unmanageable situation into something so far beyond the boundaries of sanity that there was literally only one person able to fix things.

  The motherfucker had done so for one reason and one reason alone: the Horseman had never been anything less than blunt on his views concerning both the War for Reality and in the lack of true consideration the Engineer had shown in using an AI for his personal choice as God for Reality 2.0.

  No, Fenris may not have put Tendreel on the path to enlightenment, but he’d shoved her down the path towards destruction.

  Huey shut his eyes and connected to the ever-present quantum waves emitted by the Heuristic Intelligence Model, marveling as always at the machine that’d been created so many thousands of years ago; as much as he could list a hundred, a thousand, a million things existing elsewhere in the Unreality right that second, the HIM and its journey never failed to humble him.

  Created right at the end of the War against the Heshii, when Garth’s powers had been at their greatest and he had been his most desperate –you’d have to be beyond desperate, in fact, to settle on a plan that’d take thirty millennia to come to full and proper fruition- the HIM was a testament to genius. For the entirety of its functionality, the HIM on Hospitalis, indeed, all the HIMS, no matter where they were, had done their job without a hitch.

  Sure, technically speaking, the one in Goreene had gone all sorts of wobbly, but that wasn’t even Garth’s fault: he’d been confident in his skills that he’d programmed that particular HIM to handle Cloud particulate with zero organic components and hadn’t looked back. Trinity had fucked all that up by conning Human explorers that they themselves wanted to go to the dead system.

  Thirty thousand years, all programs running, with only –Universally speaking- ‘minor’ hiccups. Dug right into the very fabric of the Unreality, mapping and charting and accumulating an untold and frankly impossible amount of data on the very limits of that in which they lived. The depths of knowledge inside the HIMS was enough to automatically elevate any being –machine or otherwise- to Godlike status, an instant apotheosis.

  But they hadn’t. They’d taken the data and done nothing with it.

  Garth N’Chalez had programmed an inability to change right into their superstructure. If a HIM somehow survived the birth of the New Reality and existed throughout the full and total span of that new existence, it would and always be just as it was, doing the job it’d been built to do.

  Huey considered that the first moment of Garth’s true genius. It was easy to give someone access to powers that made them Godlike, especially in a universe where the laws of physics and even common sense could be bent into new and interesting shapes, so long as you had the right tool.

  To actively prevent apotheosis? Without knowing precisely what would be shape that change would take?

  Daunting. Unnerving. It meant that at some point, Garth N’Chalez had sat himself down with a pizza and beer to work out what, precisely, what went into becoming a God.

  And had then settled into working up ways of stopping that from happening!

  And the man who’d conceived all of that wanted him, Huey T. Roboticus, as shepherd for Reality 2.0, a still theoretical domain of interleaved dimensions that made the Unreal Universe look like a poorly drawn sketch on a wet bar napkin.

  So much faith was being put into him by a man … okay, technically, he wasn’t even a … technically, Huey didn’t even rightly know what Garth N’Chalez was any longer, not with all that quadronium crammed into his body and most certainly not with what he’d become before the end.

  “Fuck me.” Huey repeated miserably.

  He was delaying. Here, in Latelyspace, he truly was a God. Connected to the HIM, its unbreakable connections to quantum layers of space allowed him to be wherever was needed within seconds. Hamilton Barnes’ immaculately created body handled the rigors of translation without difficulty, and his own powerful AI mind withstood the torrential onslaught of information storming from the HIM, a veritable systemic blizzard of ones and zeros.

  Out there, on the other side of the shield, would he be the same? The HIM had already verified that he’d have access to the datastreams, so he could –if things went south- still know what was going on in Latelyspace.

  What he would not have access to was the quantum teleporter. The nature of the shield prevented it. There was more than enough power to push him through, but pulling him back was a thing that Huey rightly suspected would be damned near impossible. The HIM was working on solving those equations, leaving Huey cautiously optimistic.

  If a machine that could tell you the location of a specific hydrogen atom twenty thousand years ago and tell you where it’d wound up, right now, this very second, was saying the non-intelligent equivalent of ‘shit, man, I’ll give it a try, but don’t fucking count on it’ … cautiously optimistic hardly even scratched the surface.

  Huey allowed the trickle of information flowing from the hidden HIM to open fully, intentionally blanketing himself in one last swarm of data. Trillions of pinpoints of light rose to dazzling brightness, a celestial display the equal of anything out there in the Unreal Universe. Trillions of petaflops per second, quadrillions of petabytes of data, connecting one end of the Latelian Commonwealth to the other, all of it born aloft on quantum winds.

  Huey knew for a fact that there were few greater sights, but this one was special. This was manmade.

  Children, men, woman, avatars, Sheets, consoles, mains and protes blistered and burned, eternally hungry, forever searching for something.

  Huey smiled wistfully. Latelians. They didn’t know it, didn’t see it, but each of them was on their own personal quest to discover who they were, so, along with their hopes and dreams and fears, th
ey threw their never-ending questions into those devices, never once suspecting he was there, watching over them, doing his best.

  Sometimes, when he struggled to keep the war against Trinity’s forces from devolving into outright slaughter, Huey pretended to be a glitch in the machine, giving answers and dispensing advice in the form of fractured avatars that seemed –to the rational minded Latelians- like curiously appropriate code error. He knew he shouldn’t do it, not with Harmony on everyone’s minds and making them more likely to accept the presence of a deity than ever before, but he couldn’t stop himself; humans were so alone inside their own heads and no matter what those ancient Latelians had believed –had ironically prayed for- to be true, faith was something all sentient life in the Universe had been hardwired to seek out.

  Huey shrugged off morose thoughts of deification and responsibility so he might plunge his mind towards Hospitalis, hoping instead to rest his uneasy head in the surety that his friends were going to be fine in his absence.

  How did Garth do it? How did he leave friends alone in the dark, to fight or die on their own? Even if that was the path they had to take, how did he manage the anguish?

  Herrig’s plans flooded Huey’s mind and the AI nodded approvingly. A surprisingly devious and complex pattern designed to blunt the worst of Fenris’ willful depredations swam through him; the dark horse wanted to eviscerate Trinity’s standard human troops that skulked about in the dark spaces, leaving only the Heavies and a few of the other surprises that’d shot through, but Herrig was doing everything in his power to make that particularly violent attempt nearly impossible. The labyrinthine scheme buried deep inside Herrig’s prote was a thing of devious beauty.

  If anything was capable of confounding Fenris, even for an hour or a day, it was the upcoming … meeting. The AI wished his friend well and moved onward.

  This time, Huey turned his all-seeing eye to those brothers of Harmony, just to see if they’d discovered the gaping hole in their otherwise ultratight security. The HIM had found just such a stream a while ago, and it belonged to ever-quiet Nalanata.

  Huey set a handful of subminds to work on the protocols wrapped around what the Harmony soldier was broadcasting.

  Fenris and the others rarely used computers and certainly went nowhere near a proteus, but they had their machines. As with everything the Five did, they believed with colossal levels of compounded hubris that their equipment was safe from the prying eyes of a would-be AI God. They were half right. In their supreme confidence, the Harmony soldiers had either forgotten or had chosen to disregard the provenance behind his programming. Though how they could willingly –or accidentally- forget that the Engineer himself had reordered his programming was all the way beyond Huey’s meager ability to guess.

  Where he might lack the power to locate the streams issuing forth from their vast moon-ships on his own, sooner or later, the HIM saw everything and where the HIM had a difficult time working through Fenris’ encryption protocols to unseal all those tasty tidbits, a hy-tech level 11 AI had about as much difficulty working through them as a certain Engineer had in making enemies.

  Whenever the ancient machine found such a rich deposit of ‘frenemy data’ for him, Huey made reading through it the most important thing on his docket and held absolutely zero regrets about exploiting everything he learned for the benefit of Latelians everywhere.

  Pissing the Harmony soldiers off was also a pretty fun game, but mostly, it was for the people.

  Lately, though, there’d been a positively daunting decline in the amount of information flowing from the moon-ships. That absence was why he was musing on the nature of his Godhood and fretting over his departure when he should already be on the other side, dealing with the fungal threat that was Tendreel Salingh; Fenris et al had either finally noticed the weakness in their security systems or…

  Or they’d finally come up with a plan that needed true secrecy.

  The last of the tumblers on Nalanata’s security protocols broke loose and …

  The data was pointless. The sort of chatter you heard between friendlies during a slow period. Huey broke loose with an exasperated grunt.

  “Fuck me.” Huey spun back to confront the very uncertain future before him. Politoyov’s ship was right there, separated by an ultra-thin, impervious shell. A single, massive quantum thrust from the HIM would launch him through the shield. Once through, the AI hoped with every fiber of his not inconsiderable being that dealing with Tendreel Salingh would be as easy as saying ‘Hey, quit being an idiot or I’ll shoot you’.

  Huey wondered suddenly if this was all worth the goddamn effort; it’d be so easy to stay with those he cared about, to continue protecting them as he had been from the beginning, shielding them from the darker aspects of the coming War.

  Easier still to leave Tendreel free to do what she thought was right and mop up the mess later, after the shield came down.

  The AI who would be God closed his eyes. He wanted to stay, but couldn’t. Tendreel was prying into the deepest secrets of the Unreal Universe. In her frantic state of mind –compounded by a planet-sized level of douchebaggery- there was no telling what would happen if she strayed into waters populated by the Big Bads of the Unreal Universe.

  Christ, now he thought about it, the Hesh might even be see her! They’d already poked their heads through The Cordon once, temporarily inhabiting Gurant’s deified flesh just long enough to put a proper scare into everyone who’d been there to witness it.

  Who was to say they couldn’t do so again? Only worse?

  “Bah.” Huey sent a command to the HIM. The surge of power building up just beneath the surface of the visible universe was as breathtaking as ever. The AI plotted the rising of power, immediately fretting when this particular surge broke past the largest expenditure to date. Greater even than the beam he’d used to toss Griffin past The Cordon and right into the hands of someone capable of handling that Kin’kithal’s desire for destruction.

  All to travel a few thousand miles. One way.

  Cyber-organic heart hammering beneath incredibly resilient flesh, Huey fought wave after wave of rising panic as the quantum translation effect grew to two, three, three and one half times the size of any previous ‘teleportation beam’ he’d used to travel about the solar system.

  The beam grabbed hold. There was a moment of starkly pristine dread when Huey waited for the various bits of himself smash against the hitherto impenetrable shield then he was through.

  ‘Just’ like that.

  He was through and floating in Trinityspace, surrounded by military ships with enough power to conquer Galaxies. Hamilton Barnes’ meatsuit sloughed off the pain of translation easily enough, though tremors would shiver through the muscles for another few minutes as everything was brought back to normal.

  Thankfully, he’d had the foresight to program some of his subminds to be ready for relocation into Trinityspace. Before regaining full consciousness, the wily little bastards had begun work on making him as unnoticeable as possible; while the egress point of a quantum translocation beam was considerably less noticeable than it’s ingress, an event like the one he’d just created was nevertheless noticeable, and given the state of the War, only fools would fail to keep their most powerful AI minds on full watch for anything that looked out of the ordinary.

  Holding his breath unnecessarily, Huey ‘watched’ the artificial minds on the ships nearest him for signs that they’d caught sight of something that –to them- didn’t make sense. He held that unnecessary breath for a solid minute before letting it loose, smiling shakily to himself.

  Nothing. They’d seen nothing. The commanders were devoting more of their machine minds’ processing time to cracking the shield than was actually advisable, but Huey wasn’t going to complain.

  Now that he was through, the comm-beam emanating from the HIM in Latelyspace was thin as a slender reed. Barely enough to get sparse updates on the system, it was most definitely too weak to pull him home s
hould things go mental.

  It was as he’d feared.

  Returning to Latelyspace meant shutting down the shield, which of course meant that hundreds more Trinity warships would lurch into the solar system, something that was completely untenable at the best of times. A fresh influx of soldiers –with him on the outside-would give Fenris all the political power he needed to force Herrig into making some very uncomfortable decisions.

  Better still would be trying to invent some new form of relocation, but as far as he knew, he was all tapped out in that department. A few subminds offered to devote their processing power into deciphering Chad’s newfound method of bouncing around the Universe, but Huey shot it down without thinking. There was no way of knowing if it was ‘safe’ and even more importantly, the manner Chad used was the same as the ‘Priests, and the AI would rather have a disco party with Fenris every day of the week than even see one of those fucking weird beards.

  Huey the would-be God of Reality 2.0 focused on Politoyov’s ship and started moving, whittling the raw deluge of AI-data spilling from the ships down to those emanating from Politoyov’s ship –Vorpal Cannon- as he did so. His hope was to find some sign of survivors aboard, using cutting edge Specter-tech to stave off Tendreel’s Myco infection.

  Nothing yet, though Huey remained hopeful. Vorpal Cannon was the flagship vessel in the largest combined military venture in the Unreal Universe since Tannhauser’s Gate. There were enough level 10 minds aboard the craft to make digging through the chaff in search of the wheat very similar in trying to get the ‘good’ prize from one of those old-school crane games.

  While trying not to be seen by anyone. In a crowded room. Full of people looking for you.

  But dig he did, because a Kin’kithal influenced Mycogene wasn’t something Huey wanted to come at without being fully prepped and ready and unfortunately, that meant taking the bloody awful risk of tweaking a level 10 AI’s interest at the wrong moment.

  Tendreel’s ability to infect organic tissue with variant strains of the Mycogene virus gave Huey a huge case of nerves. Though those ancient Mycogene-Alzants had never managed to crack the technological barrier, they’d been trying.