by Lee Bond
“Nowt different ‘tween what I do and what the ‘Priests did.” Barnabas said defensively; Garth hadn’t yet revealed what it was that had him so bent out of shape, and though he were putting a good face on things, the worry the King felt was growing. “Nor even what Chad gets up to, hey?”
“There is everything different between them!” Garth hollered, finally losing his temper. “My god, man. Teleportation in the manner you use simply is not possible. Not for sentient life. In a very real sense, actual, proper ‘Beam me up, Scotty’ teleportation from point A to point B is nothing more than a form of particulate manipulation. Objects are torn apart inside the chamber and are seamlessly replicated somewhere else. You could do it all damn day long with apples and oranges and tanks and even fucking airplanes, but anything with a goddamn mind … a … a … a … soul? How in fucking hell do you replicate a soul, using nanotech?”
“What you’re…”
Garth threw his hands up in the air and jumped to his feet. “Quantum Tunnels dig holes through space, Barnabas, but the very first thing they do when construction of a second Tunnel is required is, they teleport an AI sphere to the coordinates they want. That sphere is specially designed to emit a tremendously powerful quantum communication signal, which the Tunnel AI tracks. When the proper connections are made, the Quantum Tunnel, uh … tunnels. All the material to build a new device is sent through. The tiny sphere that was sent through first is destroyed in the process, because the kind of AI initially teleported is sentient enough to begin wondering, like any fucking sane, rational person would, if they’re real anymore. From then on, it’s two gi-fucking-gantic Tunnel arrays burrowing through the Universe, using positively ridiculous amounts of energy to generate, maintain and control stable wormholes. That’s how that works. What you’re doing … did do … wasn’t anything like that!”
Barnabas frowned. “But what about …”
Garth booted a chunk of crystal away. “Those fuckers were crazy enough to use their broken Harmony to create a massive but thankfully local entropic field that literally caused this Unreality to go ‘fuck this shit’. At which point they fucking bounced themselves out of the Universe so they could hop-skip-and-jump across the skin of the Void. Then they did the inverse. Far-less immaculate-soul-destroying than fucking teleportation, but off the goddamn charts in terms of absolute insanity. It’s a miracle they didn’t rupture anything. Since you fucking locked yourself away here in Arcade City, you never learned how to do it!”
Barnabas stared off into the middle distance, pummeling his brain for answers; how his brethren had traveled across the Universe was one of those things that he should know, not only because he was one of them, but because he –theoretically- possessed all their knowledge. It didn’t matter he’d never had cause to use their method of travel. He was first! Everything they knew should be his!
There was nothing save emptiness. As far as his own memories were concerned, the CyberPriests of Watt had never once done anything as amazing as rip a hole through space to skate across the deadly barren emptiness between their Unreal Universe and Creation.
“And Chad?” Barnabas asked quietly, knitting together everything Garth had been lecturing him on since regaining consciousness. It was leading him down a very worrisome path, oh yes. “How did he do as he did both a hundred years ago and just a short while ago?”
Garth took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “You aren’t going to like it.”
“Laddie, you’ve got me chained down tight, there hain’t nothing left of my City save a broken airship and a collection of shattered chunks of crystal, and you’re telling me things in my City hain’t all what I thought. Like and dislike hain’t in the cards no more.”
Garth clenched his jaw. It was go time. Barnabas was no fool; it was easy enough to see that –though he was fighting it- he was or already had put together enough of the puzzle to see where things were headed. Revelations about Chad’s inexplicable ability to leave the hitherto unescapable world of Arcade City would surely nail it all down for the King.
“Will.” Garth said simply into the silence. “Will allowed Chad to leave. Just as Will has been manipulating you since that very first moment you voluntarily disassembled yourself into chunks of nanoparticulate.”
“What of it?” The King demanded wearily, deflated more than angry at Chad’s method of freedom. “Aye, sure, fine, it’s as you said. I tore myself apart and had myself restructured elsewhere, time and time again. I know myself and who I am well enough to know that I am the same man I was thirty seconds ago as I was thirty thousand years ago. Mayhap teleportation for a normal man or woman might leave them wondering who they were, might even have destroyed this thing you call a soul, but I? I am the same!”
“You aren’t.” Garth said stonily, clenching his fists. He could end it so quickly. He could show Barnabas how wrong he was, but … there was the chance that the man’s brain would shatter into a million pieces, and … he needed the access codes to the guts of Will’s machinery. Without that access, shutting down King’s Will and getting free of Arcade City would be a fucking nightmare. “You are, and you aren’t.”
“Explain yourself, boy. And while you’re at it, get ready to free me so we might duke it out, hey? I’ve grown all sorts of weary with all this chin-wagging. I’ve got plans to rebuild everything, plans that are best served by getting to it soon as.” Barnabas gestured impatiently for the distressed Kin’kithal to hurry it along. “How am I and am I not the same man I was?”
Garth shut his eyes. “You are no ordinary man. I know very little about the true oddities laying behind the weird façade of what it means to be a CyberPriest, but I do know that you and the others were an experiment in achieving directed Harmony. A last ditch effort to corral some of the unlimited power that the M’Zahdi Hesh’s foot soldiers possessed. Right?”
“Aye.” Barnabas dipped his head. “We were.”
“So somewhere inside you, metaphysically and, uh, quantum mechanically, there’s some kind of … bit. That’s the broken Harmony. Because that’s the other thing I know about your breed. Is that the experiment failed.”
“’tis true as well.” Barnabas saw no harm in admitting it. He knew more now than he ever had about the Kin’kithal race, so it were only fair. “And it was that shattered bit of majestic discordance that led us all to dream of destroying the Unreal Universe.”
Garth nodded once. Firmly. “That’s all that remains of you. The real you. Everything else, the fleshy bits and pieces that made up the body of Barnabas Blake … that’s been replaced, slowly but surely, over the last eleven, twelve thousand years. Every single atom in your body, Barnabas, is particulate. Your … your soul is made of stronger stuff than ordinary mortals. It was the only thing your Will couldn’t subvert.”
Barnabas laughed so hard he thought he’d burst a gasket. Of all the things! Why, there weren’t no thing funnier than all that! Him, nanoparticulate? He were the King. While Garth’s evidence of Willful tampering of events was hard to ignore, the one thing he knew for certain and for true was that he was who he’d been since the beginning of Time itself.
He laughed so hard tears began pouring down his face. “Im…im…impossible, you great fool! I’m the King. I possess all the codes and commands in my noggin that keeps all that stuff at bay. I’ve used Will my entire long life, yet never once did I ingest it, or let it in. I am and always shall be it’s master. Now quit this foolishness and let me free.”
“I can’t.” Garth admitted sadly. “I didn’t tie you up for your own safety. Now…” he held up a hand to stifle the King’s hot retort, “now, I … I’ll show you what I mean, but first, I need … I need a favor.”
Not tied up? What kind of trickery was N’Chalez up to? It were a definite fact he could barely move. All he could move were his hands and his head, and e’en then, it were lucky if he could twitch his noggin more than an inch or two to the left and right. Barnabas tried reaching in to where Harmony lay, to …
what … to convince the curiously silent part of himself that Garth’s lies about his bondage counted as conflict, but there was nowt but stillness.
That did not bode well.
“What possible favor could you ask of me?” Barnabas seethed. This was all wrong, somehow. He were still missing something. Something as had nowt to do at all with what N’Chalez had already revealed.
Garth held out an open hand and willed some free-floating nanoparticulate to coalesce into a simple data storage cube. A few simple Kingly-inspired steampunk flourishes here and there across the basic shape gleamed with golden fire. He held up in front of the King’s eyes. “Place your command codes in here, please. The … the ones for access to the Cloud machines.”
“And why,” the King hissed, unable to take his eyes off the cube, “should I even attempt such a thing? You’ll simply take the cube and flee. And with those, you shall be the equal of me. I would never.”
“Be reasonable.” Garth moved the box with glowing golden lines this way and that, watching the King’s reaction; Barnabas eyes tracked the motion with restless attention.
Of course. The data cube was perfect, and so unlike anything ordinarily permissible ‘neath The Dome that it was a firefly floating in front of a five year old. Garth had built it that way on purpose, to prove that in all areas save one, the Gauntlet of Arcade City had transformed him into the King’s equal.
Garth confronted Barnabas as earnestly as he could. “One or the other of us is going to walk away from here the victor, right? You want a big huge fight, two titans? To the winner goes the chance to destroy the whole of the Universe. Can you honestly, uh, sit there and tell me you’re okay with me beating you but then have me trapped under your Dome? That in your Kingly absence, you’d prefer Trinity or the M’Zahdi Hesh to be the Great Destroyer? Or Trinity? Those guys over someone you know? Sure you hate me, but c’mon man. Be reasonable.”
Barnabas couldn’t take his eyes off the data cube. It’s simplicity was breathtaking. Never in his life had he made something so basic, so … rudimentary with such inherent rightness. Even the adherence to his Kingly fascination with steampunk –oh, how he’d fallen in love with that alternate style of technology, from the very first second Chad Sikkmund had told him of it- was so clean, so pure, so scintillating.
“Oh,” Barnabas said with a cruel nod at the fiery box, “you’ll have no chance at all of winning over me, Master N’Chalez, e’en with your unfairly granted access to Will. But aye, you have the right of it. If things do go your way, which they will not, I would much rather have you, a man I have learned to properly hate and admire, at the helm of destruction than any other being. Come. Put your cube in my hands.”
Garth did as he was bade, and stepped back. No sense in giving the King the chance to do something unexpected. He stood and watched as King Barnabas Blake the One and Only grasped the cube. The transfer of command codes and protocol overrides rushed into the glittering box, turning the golden fire of the gears and Baroque patterns into the familiar glistening black stain that was Vicious Elixir.
Barnabas held the cube aloft. It floated out of his outstretched hand and rose to a height of fifteen feet. He looked triumphantly at Garth. “There. ‘tis done. The cube is coded to my demise. Should I somehow die, ‘twill return to you, all unlocked and ready to grant you access to the machines Domewards. But be warned, lad. Try to grab hold before then, you’ll, well, you may not die, being as tough as you are, but that foolishness will give me an unfair advantage. Now. Tell me to my face. What does all you’ve talked about have anything to do with me? Why all this chatter about complex and simple systems, the loss of the soul, and your ridiculous claims I am not who I am?”
“I can’t tell you.” Garth said, raising both hands in a calming gesture the second Barnabas started to get hot under the collar. “But I can show you.”
Kin’kithal Garth N’Chalez, would-be Engineer for Reality 2.0, commanded a very large mirror to rise up out of the earth, a slender, shining reflective surface for the King to see what he’d become.
King Barnabas Blake the One and Only took a single look and howled.
26 Arcadia Falls
“You’ve done summat to me, summat awful, you …” King Barnabas Blake the One and Only couldn’t … couldn’t look at himself in the vast, shimmer mirror that Nickels had brought up from the ground.
He couldn’t. Barnabas shut his eyes in abject terror.
He had too many pieces, now. Too many pieces that were all over the place! Through the unkind and unbiased reflection in the mirror, one of his very own legs had swollen to ten times the size, so long and bent backwards over the broken remains of Flying Monkey’s cabin that it barely seemed real. His other leg was normal-sized, though … it weren’t e’en attached to his Kingly body. No, that appendage had relocated itself to be closer to the command console, quite literally attaching itself to the wooden machine! From the top of the hip, strange, Kingly things grew, a bouquet of spinning gears that flung Kingsblood with every gyration.
He couldn’t look, yet … he had to. To catalogue the grotesqueries perpetrated upon his august being so that when he reformed himself properly –which could be done, it would mayhap just take time- he could do the same for N’Chalez!
“You done summat to me.” Barnabas wailed again, eyeing the other legs; these had grown from the sides of his wonderful steamship, massive, gargantuan things better suited to ferrying a summoned Big King about, as they were replete with thick iron girders and heavy steel plates. But form and function soon fell off and back into the demented playground where Garth evidently hid a streak just as nasty as anything Specter himself might come up with, for one of those giant metal legs was literally festooned with a sea of arms, all wiggling and waggling as if each one were trying to get the attention of the other.
A nauseating sea of fluttering motion waved to get his attention, others occupied themselves with rude gestures, others still conversed with another through complicated gestures.
Foul! Wretched! Unclean transmogrification! A hale and hearty N’Chalez, content wi’ who he was as Specter were crueler than them ancient commanders who’d conned earnest fighting men into believing Project Songbird were the way to go in defeating their unstoppable foes.
Garth shook his head sadly. The sickened revulsion that’d bowled him over upon first seeing King Barnabas Blake thusly afflicted was as strong as ever. "I didn’t do anything to you, Barnabas. This is replication failure. The particulate in you lacked … guidance. Each one of your gearheads had a … I guess you could call it a template that was uploaded to the Cloud generators that very first time they took a sippy-sip. Every time after that, whenever they got hurt or nearly dead or whatever, the Kingsblood in them worked to follow that original design. It was how you designed the system, after all, right? Trying to replicate the perfection inherent in Chad? Every further step down Kingsblood road, each drop was better than the last until they stood at last at the Gates of Arcadia, ready to sip that last drip? Communication between the Kingsblood in the gearhead and the Vicious Elixir to be delivered through defeating a King ensured a purer … strain. The wounds begin to carry less obvious flaws, less … mockery of their forms. But as you said…”
“I never once took ‘sblood into me.” Barnabas gnashed his teeth. “Why should I have? I own the system. Me. My brain. You did this to me, whilst I was unconscious.”
“Barnabas.” Garth’s voice rose. “You are a head. And arms. Attached to a fucking broken airship. With four legs, two of which belong to a Big’Un. You were more than fucking unconscious. You were dead. The nearest thing the Kingsblood in you could call a template was the design for the Big Kings, man. Only … there wasn’t enough free matter readily available to restore you properly. Your ship was made from denatured nanotech, making it completely real. You burned so much fresh material in your desire to push me here. There’s only about ten tons left. If …” Garth shook his head sadly, unable to believe he felt anything o
ther than rage at the man that’d intentionally tried to evoke Specter in his fullest, “if … you’d had a proper template, something for the Kingsblood to work with, you’d’ve come back to life just as you’d been. But …
Barnabas thrashed and struggled and flailed about so powerfully that eventually one of the giant legs on the outside of the ship began to move, slowly at first, but with more vigor as the King found the proper way to think about the unwanted addition. In tragicomic support of the valiant effort, the arms running about and down the massive metal leg began flexing their replicated muscles.
“You did this to me.” Barnabas felt the power in the leg. It was impressive. If he could but figure out some way to con Nickels closer, he would stomp the man flat. Or if he could somehow manage to get him to the other leg, the one with all them hands, why, they were already fluttering and grabbing at the air. Were one of them to grab hold, well, N’Chalez would be held tight, hey? Long enough for a mutated King to figure out how best to work this new, unwanted and ungainly form? Long enough to do for an outsider. Then … then he could find that unused ten tons of pure particulate and seek a way to undo what’d been done.
“Dude. If I do something to someone, it’s usually the equivalent of a bullet to the fucking head. I don’t have time to sit around and turn you a fucking steampunk Dali-boat.” Garth said matter-of-factly. “You’ve seen me in action. You really think I’m going to sit around and be like, ‘yeah, I’m gonna give him a bunch of giant legs with arms and hands! That’ll be super fucking awesome!’ That’s fucking gross. You are how they wanted you to be. Well, okay, I bet solid money that the particulate had no idea this was going to happen, but they were banking on something similar.”
“Why,” the King demanded weakly, unable to raise his voice beyond a whisper; moving the King’s leg as he had seemed to’ve drained him of all motivation, “why should my own creation treat me thus?”
