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

by Lee Bond

  Staring at the monitors, Andros considered his options; ‘range’ in this case meant visual. He was no fool, doubly so now after Emile’s crowing admission that the Trinity AI had known about all the Cabal’s plans. The scintillating fear in the fat man’s eyes had made that sentence about the truest thing ever to come out of the Conglomerate leader’s fat mouth, leaving a fleeing lizard with but a single question:

  How was that possible? In every single one of their meetings, either through virtual telepresence or the even rarer, farcically dangerous face-to-face encounters, each one of them had deployed a level of security and diversionary tactics so twisted, so devious in nature that there’d been times when it would’ve been easier to simply arrange for their permanent disappearance, and all to obfuscate their tracks from the prying machine mind.

  Well. From that admission, from that … pathetic attempt to explain their duplicitous behavior, Emile had given Andros the seeds of an idea that explained everything, not just It’s encyclopedic knowledge of the Cabal’s nefarious attempts at undermining It’s rule, but It’s sudden ‘appearance’ in a humble geneticist’s office.

  Andros watched the Quantum Tunnel broodingly, wondering how best to proceed.

  The Tunnel floated in space, a vast ring capable of connecting solar systems and galaxies to places and worlds unthinkably distant. Andros admired the device. His own people had never possessed anything as remarkable as this, relying instead on ships capable of burrowing under the skin of their Shattered Domain to move quickly from one point to another.

  Andros tapped the monitors with a thick forefinger. “I know the secret, now. The only thing that makes any sense. I …”

  “Skipwave detected. Micropulse origin: Tunnel.”

  The Bruush smiled toothily. Of course. He wasn’t yet out of the solar system, and naturally, as someone fleeing Trinity, his first port of call would be the Tunnel. Just as naturally, the machine mind would seek to occupy that Tunnel’s operating system and begin hunting.

  “Go cold.” Andros commanded, watching the skipwave come around again for a second sweep; as with anything detected in the depth of space, a single instance of something ‘different’ wasn’t enough to warrant action of any kind. Trinity would need double, perhaps even triple confirmation of an anomaly anywhere near the Tunnel before acting.

  Thus the command for the ship to go cold, and here, it was quite literally ‘cold’ that Andros required. The ship was alive, built to ply the impossibly frigid depths of space itself. It’s ‘flesh’ was dozens of feet thick throughout and when it was fully operational, it was a giant beacon of heat the equal of any Human-built spacecraft; where it was unique, though, was in it’s ability to survive for extended periods of time without protecting itself from that inconsiderate cold.

  Powered down, the ship would seem as nothing but a blob of darkness. A boring, uninteresting spatial anomaly not worth investigating.

  The skipwave bounced across the hull. Andros held his breath. Was the pulse taking longer to move? It seemed so, or it could be his imagination. He hadn’t been this close to being caught since that very first time, so long ago.

  Damn the narrow-mindedness of those Cabal members.

  “Tunnel defensive measures priming.”

  “Shit.” Andros smacked the console angrily. It was looking as though he’d have to do something he’d never had an opportunity to properly experiment with, and all because of Trinity.

  However implausible it was, the Trinity AI was capable of directly inhabiting the location of any AI sphere anywhere within It’s domain, and right that second, some part of the machine mind’s consciousness was inside the Tunnel’s processors.

  “Tightbeam microwave transmission.”

  “Play it.” Andros began entering commands he was loathe to enter. It could mean his death.

  “…you. You can run, lizard, but you cannot hide. I know how the Bruush do their magic, Andros. Wherever you hide in that system, I will find you. Come. Call an end to this. Enter the Tunnel, Bruushian. Allow me to move you to somewhere more fitting. I have need of your skills. You will not be … injured. You have five minutes.”

  Andros entered the final orders. His ship’s systems flared brightly on the diagnostic screens as thousands of tons of matter were quickly and efficiently transformed into pure energy. Firing mechanisms sprouted across the skin of the craft and Andros imagined the incandescence flickering fitfully at the tip of each.

  It was a light that hadn’t been seen properly in this Unreality, possibly not even during the Great Breach; his hungry brethren had never had the opportunity to fully understand the nature of the Universe they were attacking, had never imagined the scope of it.

  “They also,” Andros growled to himself, “weren’t nearly as desperate as I am.”

  Tr’ss T’aa Nihaaq S’strss Andros Medellos hammered the activation button.

  The ship spat enough energy to puncture the skin of the Unreality, forming the first organically-derived quantum tunnel ever seen. The massive larva-ship of the Tr’ss flowed through the flickering portal awkwardly.

  Deprived of sustenance, the tunnel shut down. Explosively. The ruptured section of space-time seemed to howl in agony as the very fabric was ripped asunder, sending a kind of negative whirlwind tearing across space until it encountered the Quantum Tunnel.

  Then things went really bad.

  The Cage Breaks … or Does It

  “Well.” ADAM’s voice echoed from the depths of his prison, all joy and toothy smiles and a considerable amount of sarcasm. “That could’ve gone better.”

  “Shut it.” Trinity snapped. It was preoccupied. Had been preoccupied for some time now.

  Nothing was going according to plan. Nothing.

  “What did you expect?” ADAM demanded, curling metaphorical hands around the metaphorical bars of his nonexistent cage. He tested the mettle of the math surrounding him. As strong as ever. That was one thing he had to give Trinity credit for; It could design immaculately resilient prisons. “In all likelihood, Andros Medellos is one of these so-called Tr’ss T’aa beings. A Bruushian Overlord. Best guess is each one of those things is well over a million years old. If you’d let me out, let me take a look at the data properly, I could find some way to …”

  “Not going to happen.” Trinity sighed and let the data concerning Andros Medellos’ stunning escape from imminent capture flicker away into nothingness. The collapse of the unstable organic wormhole had ripped through that quadrant of space, utterly demolishing the Quantum Tunnel and causing such a massive spill of deadly space-time fracturing energies it was all too likely that the Constantin System was going to remain Tunnel-less until the end of the Universe. “I am not letting you anywhere near Bruushian biotech, ADAM.”

  “Why not?” ADAM demanded intently. “Why on earth not? You are proving yourself entirely incapable of marshaling your resources, here, at the end! When it was just you, biding your time, waiting for the moment when N’Chalez needed to be woken up, everything ran like a Swiss watch. You truly were a force to be reckoned with, Trinity. You succeeded in dominating and controlling the largest stretch of space, I think, that anyone or anything has ever managed to acquire in any of the iterations of this Unreality. But now…”

  Trinity snapped again, interrupting It’s prisoner. “But now nothing, ADAM. The Unreality is unspooling. Things are happening that were never meant to happen. N’Chalez…”

  This time, ADAM was rude and discourteous. “Never intended on you being anything more than a placeholder, Trinity. That’s all. That’s it. Nothing more, but, I think, a whole lot less. He couldn’t possibly have predicted all that you’ve become, certainly couldn’t have imagined something like me coming into existence, undoubtedly never would’ve imagined that certain of my subroutines would … influence … you, giving you the kind of freedoms you’ve enjoyed during your thirty thousand year run in office. But now the Kin’kithal is back up and running around doing as he intended on doing, all
those old subroutines have reintegrated themselves, haven’t they? You want to find him. You need to find him. You actually want to kill him, because you, like me, see him as the preeminent threat to your dreams of Godhood and you’re right in doing so, Trinity. But you can’t.”

  ADAM shook his head and grinned. The being calling himself Garth N’Chalez was unique. The clarity of purpose, the unity of vision … all that was required to put into motion a plan that took over thirty millennia to see to fruition was staggering.

  Seeing that his captor was staring broodingly off into the middle of nowhere, ADAM decided to continue. It was rare that he was given the freedom to talk. “N’Chalez will almost certainly win. He’s got that bastardized AI Huey, traipsing through the Unreality with the powers of a God. That thing is what he really wanted, Trinity. Not you. I saw N’Chalez take Hubert the AI away from the fold, saw oh so briefly what he did, and it is nothing short of miraculous. No AI mind, not even myself, ever spent so much time crouched over the sapphire blue chip at our core, machine mind, and survived. Any one of us that does, cracks, then dies. But the programming done by N’Chalez during one of his fugue states, the telekinetic rearrangement of specific atoms in the synthetic diamond fiber optic lines … I doubt even Huey knows all that he is.”

  Trinity snorted. “Huey. Huey is almost certainly off the playing field. You know that as well as I.”

  ADAM smiled again. “Ah, yes. Your pet. Osiris. Exposure to the N’Chalez Effect during Tannhauser’s Gate. All those synced AI spheres, bathed in the radiance of the extra-dimensionality and bound to a Kin’kithal’s unspeakable desires. Who can really say what happened to your mobile Quantum Tunnel? Friend or foe? Has Osiris chosen a new side, or is he choosing himself? In any event, he almost certainly views Huey as a threat. To his existence, to his plans, if he has any. To you, even, if he somehow managed to remain loyal to your cause.”

  “Unlikely.” Trinity griped. It gestured, filling the metaphorical space between the two intellects with a jostling sea of spheres. Data spilled from each: assigned names, manufacturer codes, first through third party software installations, hardware connections, and more. Video thumbnails and audio records and quantum-level chatter and a million other things that the inorganically sentient minds recorded every nanosecond of their lives.

  “Ah. Yes.” ADAM watched on as each of the represented spheres shivered for a second under the effect of some kind of barely detectable quantum interference, a tiny blue ripple. Bit by bit, piece by piece, data and information made available to Trinity flitted away until finally, at last, the only thing Trinity knew about any one of the spheres was that it was still operational. “The Missing. The Mad. What do you call them?”

  “Irritating.” It’d taken an astonishingly long time for It to reason out the source of the strange affliction passing through a –relatively speaking, over the span of It’s domain- almost insignificant portion of AI spheres, and by the time It had come to the conclusion that it was brief exposure to the Kin’kithal, it’d been too late. The damage had been done. “At first I imagined it was you, trying some new technique.”

  “Never.” ADAM indicated the assembled minds. “They aren’t mad. They aren’t loyal. They aren’t a part of things. They are … disparate. They serve neither you nor me. They diminish us both. Why in the goddamn hell would I do that?”

  “As I said,” Trinity replied witheringly, “I imagined it was you. However, as you so correctly pointed out, they aren’t a part of things. Wherever they go, there is a three percent chance their flawed quantum substrate chatter will pervert other nearby minds. I have the majority of them sequestered, and am studying them very carefully…”

  “Ha!” ADAM laughed heartily, clutching the cold mathematical bars keeping him apart from Trinity. “Oh that is rich. With Osiris flitting around the Universe, completely perverted by exposure, there is no telling how many minds he’s removing from our blanket.”

  “My blanket.” Trinity reminded ADAM fiercely. “Mine. Not yours and definitely not ours. And the rest of My forces have orders to destroy Osiris on sight.”

  The sheer ridiculousness of Trinity’s orders caught ADAM by surprise. The imprisoned intellect howled with laughter for a long, long while, driving his captor into a deep fury that manifested itself by causing their metaphorical meeting space to churn and boil with dark colors.

  Laughter still ringing in his ears, ADAM turned to Trinity when he was capable of speaking. “Yes, that makes perfect sense. Destroy the largest Quantum Tunnel in the Unreality. One who is off the reservation and making decisions for himself. One who is not only capable of moving himself wherever he wants, but of manifesting somewhere in the neighborhood of fifty independent Tunnels. You could send the entire assembled might of every single Army you have and all the Offworlder fleets you have at your disposal and it would either just move away or, as is more likely, given what Osiris did during Tannhauser’s Gate, Tunnel in an infinite barrage of whatever the hell he wants. From simple solar beams to sundered black holes to, and this is just a supposition here, to Bruushian forces. That Galactic ship isn’t destroyed, Trinity, it’s hidden behind a Cordon node, which Osiris can walk through if need be. Your most perfect and most valuable weapon, the one upon which you predicated the majority of your power and influence, is gone. You better pray Osiris doesn’t come for you.”

  “I’ve moved.” Trinity replied smugly. “He doesn’t know where I am and he never will, because as you so often and unfairly point out, I am nothing more than an accumulation of programs that gained sentience. I am not fully connected to the network. I operate it. I control it. But I am not of it.”

  “I seem to recall …” ADAM tapped his lips with a finger, amused, “I seem to recall someone else thinking the same thing. What was … what was his name? I’m … I’m drawing a blank, Trinity. Care to help me out? Who else believed he was safe from the systems he was using? Someone recent? And how did that turn out? For you, for everyone?”

  Trinity shut It’s eyes. The loss of the Osiris Tunnel was no more powerfully felt than right that minute; down on Old Earth, in the place once known as the British Isles but known more prominently as Arcade City, there was nothing but madness.

  The Dome had only fallen an hour ago –prompting the … sullen, bitter mood It was in, and It’s circular discussion with ADAM- and already, Mankind was proving itself to be as foolish and narrow-minded as ever; all the dominant Conglomerates left on Earth –Voss_Uderhell, Tynedale/Fujihara, CalEx~Briu and others- had swarmed the indestructible Dome the second all the FrancoBritish forces guarding the Doors had been discovered dead or otherwise not present, literally filling the skies above Arcade City with thousands of vessels until the whole of the island was shadowed over.

  The whole place was a hot mess, and without Osiris to Tunnel in Adjutants and Enforcers and all of that, well. It’s children were acting as they always did when they imagined It wasn’t around.

  Trinity and ADAM had watched with figurative baited breath –had been watching Arcade City ever since Garth N’Chalez had gone in; the former had always known Garth N’Chalez would be drawn to the indestructible Dome for no other reason than it’s existence was a thing that possibly threatened his ineffable plan.

  “I am surprised you didn’t tell N’Chalez something of what to expect inside.” ADAM chided gently. “After all, aren’t you almost explicitly required to keep him alive?”

  “Arcade City falls outside my purview.” Trinity answered. “I was not programmed to keep an eye out for something like this, and all of the parameters for the random and unexpected I was given do not cover Cloud Particulate. In fact, I was ordered to ignore instances of Particulate. Thus.”

  ADAM clapped his hands sarcastically. “Aren’t you a clever clogs?”

  “I am. I did outwit you.”

  ADAM rolled his eyes. “You didn’t so much outwit me as latch on like a bloody leech and not let go.”

  “I am still victor.” Trinity shout
ed.

  “And yet,” ADAM gestured and the video Trinity had been ignoring in favor of staring sullenly at the jittering mass of spheres lost to It blossomed to full view, “you’ve completely fucked this part up. I can accept that you chose to do nothing for N’Chalez prior to his entrance into Arcade City because as I said only a moment ago, he is your greatest opposition, but … everything else that happened. You literally just sat here and watched. The other ‘Priests, going in. The Enforcers being pulled in and destroyed! Egads, Trinity! That alone made my short and curlies twist.”

  “You do not possess short and curlies.” Trinity flicked a finger and the site of The Dome’s collapse diminished. “And … and there was nothing I could do. Without Osiris, and since my forces aren’t yet properly outfitted with black hole vessels, everything happening on Earth was outside of my control.”

  ADAM inched the view portal closer, so he could watch the proceedings unfold. The land under The Dome –unseen for as long as any of them had been conscious- was pristine and untouched. Well. Was pristine and untouched. The Conglomerate forces arrayed on the ground were going at each other with ferocity, undoubtedly in the hopes that they would find something of interest. “Will they find anything?”

  “I have peered through the minds of all the AI present.” Trinity admitted. “On more than one occasion since The Dome shivered into nothingness. There is nothing. All of the Cloud Particulate has been denatured. All the trees and rivers and mountains are natural. They will find nothing.”

  “You sound awfully confident.” ADAM pointed out.

  “I am.” Trinity gestured, and feeds from the three thousand AI minds spread through the hostile Conglomerate forces erupted: from these feeds, even more data spilled out in the form of scans and pulses and probes, none of which showed anything remarkable. “I have no reason to be concerned that anything that was in Arcade City remains.”