by Lee Bond
“Don’t give a hot damn sandwich what you think or want.” Garth flexed and lashed out with his single sticks. The hit the King and passed through with no sign of damage. “I ain’t moving from this woman’s side.”
The King smiled that over-wide smile of Theirs, face stretching eerily out proportion. “Luckily for Us, We have an incentive to get thee gone from this place, as We wish to deal with Our greatest error in privacy.”
“Incentive?” Garth laughed, eyes back on Agnethea once more. The Obsidian Golem didn’t look well and it gutted him; whatever changes he’d wrought in her back in Sliver Hills were or had already taken full effect and the dark, bitter self-loathing lancing through was a roughshod beast clamoring over his soul.
The end had never seemed more enticing.
“Incentive?” Garth demanded, this time seriously. “Nothing under this Dome can pry me from this woman’s side.”
Agnethea, struggling with the furnace of numbers burning into her grey matter, smiled wanly but said nothing.
“Ah, but there truly is!” King rolled a hand towards the Armory, deep, deep in the center of Arcadia. “There lies the Armory, and within it, the imprisoned Chad Sikkmund, unwilling architect of all that exists within Arcade City lo these many long millennia. The King in his heaven, who even now rushes down to do battle with you aboard his most ancient and wondrous wooden airship, believes quite wrongly that Chad is his son. Progeny of the First Brigadier aside, you do require his assistance in doing –as they say- for your enemy, yes? Without it, you shall fail. Now, ranged throughout the empty warrens of Arcadia, a … menagerie of twisted beasts unlike anything you can imagine awaits, for as with the ruler Outside, so too Our King turned to collecting the strange and bizarre.”
“”Get on with it, asshat.” Garth finished his words with a frustrated growl as the Platinum King filled the empty courtyard with mocking laughter once more. He was missing something. Always missing something. ”What the fuck is the point of all this?”
“We both of us know Chad is the only one who knows how to do for the One and Only, Kin’kithal. He is the only one. Now, the King asked Us to awaken his Menagerie to slow you down so that he would have the honor of doing for you himself, as he has dreamed of for many days now, but We have … different needs, as We’ve stated. The various members of the Menagerie will soon hasten to do for Chad. If they are successful, if you choose to stay and fight with your would-be paramour, alas alack, you shall never know the method of stopping the mad King. While We would much prefer you learn from Chad the secret of enduring the misbegotten King’s execrable life, there are always other avenues, yes? Your talent for rising to the challenge can be –We believe- manipulated under the right circumstances. Given time and opportunity, the thing you’ve become may very well spontaneously develop a method, but We would prefer to do things the quick way, for obvious reasons.” The Platinum King made a sad face as understanding flitted fitfully into the poor Kin’kithal’s brain.
“So you see,” They finished with a gloating, greedy look, “while gaining insight from imprisoned Chad Sikkmund is most beneficial, it is by no means the only solution to Our problem. We are flexible. No matter which way this moment turns, We assure you, Queen Agnethea the Vile dies.”
“Go.” Agnethea whispered. The exorbitant, fiery pain ‘tween her ears was finally dwindling and the white-hot numbers incised into every inch of her brain were slowing to a crawl. Listening to the Platinum King now was torture. Whether it was instinct or something arising because of the digits, the Golem could see the end, knew what needed to happen. “Go.”
Her bosom ached as Master Nickels flinched as though he’d been shot. She bent her head in a specific way, praying for all she was worth that her friend saw in the gesture that this was the moment he’d prepared her for, that his goal was the only thing as mattered any longer.
“Fuck that.” Garth threw his mind into Will, demanded changes be made to the singlesticks, sensing even as Cloud adhered to his demands that the Platinum King was either letting the alterations be made or that they wouldn’t make any difference whatsoever.
Didn’t matter. Nothing else mattered. Agnethea would live. The matte black weapons caught afire with the eldritch-lit runes that belonged on a Bolt-Neck’s blistering fulgurite staff.
Garth brandished the reformed weapons, filling the air with crackling, spitting lightning. “We stay together. The two of us can do for this sci-fi reject in a fucking heartbeat.”
King sighed miserably. “You would sincerely risk your plan for a single Golem? The eldest and worst of them all? The chance to build Reality 2.0, all thrown away for her, when she herself is telling you to flee? To save Chad Sikkmund so you might have a chance at doing for the GodKing Barnabas Blake the One and Only? There is no time for this! We shall sweeten the pot, then, with an offering. One that will do you good, should you survive to make it outside once more.”
Garth circled quickly around the King until he stood beside Agnethea. There was no way he was going to be separated from her and being on the opposite side of the Platinum King was a goddamn invitation for walls or whatever to spring up out of nowhere. “Tell me whatever you want, asshat, I’m not going anywhere. Because yes, I’ll risk everything for Agnethea because there’s no fucking risk. We’ll do for you, find these creepy Menagerie fucks you mentioned, save Chad, kill the King, destroy The Dome and then do … stuff.”
Agnethea’s heart grew warm at Garth’s valiant words even as she exchanged a silent conversation with the Platinum King. She knew Master Nickels was going to be right pissed in a few minutes, but as it’d been with Davram, so too was it with her. She was a creature of The Dome, a pawn in the machinations of Will made Manifest and though it did seem to her that the King imagined she would be an easy foe, it also struck her that it didn’t know all she’d been through in the last few days, else it would be more concerned.
Adopting a plucky attitude similar to Garth’s, she spoke, “And make it quick, you paltry excuse for a King. We have better things to be about this day.”
Garth laughed. Everything was working out. The second-to-last person in Arcade City was on-board. “Attagirl!”
The King held his hands apart and a long string of numbers appeared before his silvery fingertips. “Remember these coordinates, Master Nickels. Should you survive against all-comers, this will lead you to the key for entering the Emperor’s hidden domain.”
“What the … how the fuck?” The coordinates were locked in memory, but that didn’t mean…
Gentle hands grabbed grooves in his armor with the implacable strength of an ancient Golem that’d been mercilessly changed yet again by the brutal-yet-necessary needs of the Kin’kithal Engineer Garth N’Chalez. Still bamboozled by the Platinum King’s awareness of the next step in the plan, there was nothing he could do except drop his singlesticks.
That, and wonder why Agnethea –who’d only just agreed that the two of them would battle the T-1000 Kingbot head on- had suddenly decided to betray him after all.
***
Queen Agnethea of the Dark Golems curtseyed to the Platinum King once she was certain that Master Nickels wouldn’t simply run back. The liquid metal monarch returned her gesture of civility with one of his own. “Part of some overreaching plan, am I? Were we all?”
The King nodded assiduously. “Aye, Queen, indeed. ‘ere now, you and yours were to’ve swarmed Arcadia, a united front of soldiers immune to all but the most excessive displays of Will. Soon or late, then, you’d’ve done for the King himself.”
Agnethea scooped Garth’s fallen singlesticks up and swung them through the air. They spat and sparked. “To what end? If you worked so long and hard these last hundred years to free yourself, and you are, what, a pure manifestation of Will intent on doing for the King, why go to this much effort? Why not do the deed yourself?”
The Platinum King eyed the Golem Queen’s weapons circumspectly. Forged from the Kin’kithal’s own Will, they should’ve ei
ther dissipated or caused Agnethea discomfort to even touch them. Had they missed something? They reached out with Their freed Will, intent on digging through the layers of miasma surrounding their foe only to encounter … to encounter an implacable wall of the same stuff that’d forced Them to treat N’Chalez with such caution.
He had done something to her.
They grinned slyly. The battle would be more difficult than anticipated, but no matter.
They were unstoppable, They were Will made manifest and set free in the world. There was no thing under The Dome that could do for Them.
“In response to your question, Queen,” They prepared themselves for mêlée, “We truly cannot do for the King ourselves. Matters not that We are pure Will made flesh, We are still Will. There are orders, if you will, buried deep within that prevents us from outright action. Thus, Chad, you, and all the other ghosts in the machine that’ve plagued our mad monarch these many thousands of years. Your Master Nickels will survive The Menagerie and he will learn what it is Chad uncovered whilst fighting the King. From there, he will do for the King. Then We, as We are a true God, will do for him. And so on and so forth”
Agnethea nodded once, perfunctorily. “You do seem to have put rather a lot of thought into things. ‘tis a shame it will prove to have been for naught. That man is more than your equal. He will win. You will lose. There is no other outcome.”
The King smiled frostily. “Come, let us end this. We don’t want to miss the Kin’kithal’s progress through the city. We are most interested to see how he deals with the Menagerie.”
“Yes.” Agnethea swung Garth’s singlesticks through empty air once more, then charged the being who had –at base- stolen her life away by turning her into a snippet of self-replicating error-laden Cloud particulate who’d dreamed she was a woman. “Let’s.”
22 Heeeeeere I Come to Save the Day!
Nanotech. What was wrong with his version, or any version based off his original designs?
As he ran through ruined Arcadia, turning a blind eye to the mounds of bodies piled high against walls, at corpses impaled on shimmering clockwork trees, at rivers of blood congealing in gutters and at streaks of the same forming odd diagrams that bore no meaning, Garth desperately wanted to know. What was wrong with his design?
On paper, the Cloud had been flawless. A thing of virtuous beauty. Supposedly.
When it came to the Cordon nodes, it was just that and no more: flawless. Each one of the indestructible black lozenges floating through the unknowable depths of the Universe had performed their primary function flawlessly for thirty thousand years. There were no deaths, no accidentally absorbed suns, no cackling, maniacal, totally crazed … Orb Dudes winging around the place talking about how they were gonna wreck shit with their Colossal Space Cannons or anything.
Couldn’t be the simplicity of the design, because there was nothing simple about the stuff.
Was it scale?
Could be. Garth nodded as he ran. Scale. Each node was alone, held to a fantastically rigid and precisely laid out timetable of absorption and replication, right down to the nanosecond.
But The Cloud was different.
Goren-Cloud had been designed to reorder the physical matter of the entire solar system, leaving too many variables and too much space for things to get hinky. Toss a sentient machine mind intent on breaking free of hardwired commands and you got Matter Eating zombies running around the place looking to suck fresh matter from your face.
Garth thanked Tuxedo Wearing Baby Jesus on a daily basis he’d managed to avoid making planetfall on another of the other afflicted worlds. The horror on Goren had been more than enough to last several hundred reincarnations.
Had been, anyways, until the truth of Arcade City had been revealed. He would’ve sworn a stack of blueprints that nothing, anywhere, could’ve ever matched –much less beaten- Matter Eating zombies in the ‘Jesus Fucking Christ This is a Goddamn Nightmare’ category.
“Well,” Garth huffed as he vaulted over a blood-soaked copper wall, “you couldn’t be more wrong. Wronger? Whatever. You is as wrong as wrong can be. Captain Wrong of the starship Wrong-as-fuck.”
Arcade City was worse. Here the machines were conscious. Alive. Self-aware.
Garth hurdled over a low fence, shaking his head at the artfully posed corpses. Two young lovers, caught unawares by a vicious and uncompromising liquid metal monarch intent on doing for a whole city before it’s guests arrived; the King had taken time out to ensure that the young man and woman would forever be together by using it’s control over Will to fuse them together into one grotesque being.
Sentient and totally fucking bonkers.
Garth banked left and shot through a narrow alley. He prayed Agnethea was holding her own against the King, and that she managed to stand her ground long enough for him to accomplish his task. The physical manifestation of freed nanotech intelligence imagined it was smarter than he was, and maybe it was right. He didn’t have the luxury of being comprised of billions of microscopic machines, each one capable of independent thought, nor did he have access to the accumulated information and wisdom of thirty thousand years of existence to draw upon.
No, what Garth N’Chalez had was a frantic need to save Agnethea, Queen of the Golems, and because of that, because he was –kind of- a human being thrust into desperation by an uncaring and psychotic machine intellect …
”Don’t give a guy like me an ultimatum, asshat.” Garth hollered the jeering taunt and it echoed back to him through the empty city. “We go Omega Level response first time, every time.”
Garth examined the Armory floating high above the city, that inwardly illuminated, glittering diamond chip of a workshop, where Chad Sikkmund was allegedly being held prisoner. After hearing the tale of the First Platinum Brigadier and how the brave and valiant soldier had done battle against an arrogant, swaggering King and comparing it to the vicious assassin known Universe-wide as Chadsik al-Taryin, Garth … understood the FrancoBrit’s tortured life a little bit better. As evinced by poor Meechy’s last few moments aboard the prison ship Baskerville, Arcade City did horrible, awful things to you. Being held prisoner against your will by a crazed CyberPriest intent on destroying an entire Reality inside that place would almost certainly fuck you up in ways that hadn’t even been discovered yet.
Unspoken yet undoubtedly true of Chad’s precious incarceration by King Blake was the presence of torture and cruelty in nearly unfathomable quantities, because happy guys tinkering away on cool stuff didn’t turn out like Chadsik al-Taryin.
So maybe Chad wasn’t entirely responsible for his career path or his life choices on The Outsider.
“Everyone’s got parental issues.” Garth gave unseen Chad a brisk nod. He understood the tidal forces of having a truly fucked up parent better than anyone.
Garth turned his attention back to the path he was on, narrowly avoiding a large pile of corpses arranged into a particularly grisly depiction of a buckyball and raged. Agnethea was back there, fighting a monstrosity that’d gone out of it’s way to not only murder an entire city, but to do so in the most heinous of ways possible.
“Hang in, Agnethea. I’m coming back for you.” Garth’s carbon fiber skin detected the unmistakable energy signature of the disintegration cylinder he –as Giant MechaGarth- had launched out of Ickford and tightened his course up.
The Platinum King probably wasn’t lying about Chad being the only one under The Dome either capable of doing Barnabas Blake in or knowing how to do it; trapped as it simply had to be by command codes wired directly into the very deepest parts of the nanotech coding that made it King’s Will, the freed scion of the entire Cloud would probably be forced to lay it’s head meekly on the ground and await destruction, should King Barnabas Blake so demand.
“Tricky.” An involuntary curl of disgust reached Garth’s lips. He’d come full circle. “I do the King, you do me. Only … it ain’t gonna work out that way, you sonofabitch.”
Nanotech. There was no real way to know how long King’s Will had been working behind the scenes to oust control of itself for itself, but it had to be quite some time. The length of time to engineer a scenario like this one wasn’t something that you could do overnight. Similarly, the comprehensively subtle manipulation of not only the King Himself but one very handsome and ordinarily not that easily fooled Engineer was a trick that had to’ve been put in motion either from the moment he’d shuffled through the endless hallway or sooner still, when he’d first put his hand on the external walls of The Dome.
The gentle vibrations of the annihilation disc turned from gentle whispers washing through the air into an insistent prickling sensation that made Garth’s skin itch furiously.
Garth grinned. The Platinum King thought he was going to fuck around getting involved in a series of repetitious hand-to-hand battles with a bunch of souped-up gearhead freaks and nanotech weirdoes, but at base, that King was still nothing more than a machine.
Machines didn’t understand desperation, recklessness, didn’t appreciate balls-to-the-wall gonzo insanity. And what he planned on doing? The method he intended on using to free Chad Sikkmund from his Armory-prison and the way the majority of the King’s Menagerie was going to be done for met and surpassed all previously recorded instances of a Specter’s particular brand of mayhem, didn’t it just?
The difference this time, though, was that he wasn’t reckless, desperate or insane.
He was just plain old angry and fed up.
That made all the difference.
Garth zipped around a corner. The ultimate edge of the disintegration disc brushed up against his impenetrable armor with a sharp keening buzz that had his teeth aching like he was chewing aluminum bubblegum.
Waste time fighting a handful of goofballs, neatly giving the Platinum Asshole time to do for Agnethea? When there was a perfectly useful weapon just laying around, one that’d turn the tables on everyone almost instantly? With Arcadia empty of life save for whatever odd things the King’d collected during his reign, he was going to do as they’d already done once before, because fuck it. He was done.
