Foreign Devil (Unreal Universe Book 1)

by Lee Bond

  “No.” The decisive tone rattled through the office. “Garth Nickels is an unknown quantity. His invention has drastically altered the face of planetary protection, making your original assessment of him and the others more correct than anticipated. At the time of his Decanting, he may not have been aware of who or what he is; this may no longer be true. Forcing him to join the Cabal may succeed but his would be a philosophy very different than your own; it is not so much that you loathe being ruled by an AI, but that I am secretive, and keep the ‘good stuff’ from you all. Angry and given access to resources that people like Jordan Bishop can offer, Garth Nickels would work at cross-purposes to my reign. Unlike you all, he would be successful. His is a singular talent, and I regret dismissing your concerns. Unfortunately, he is now a free citizen, nominally outside My reach, and, owing to the paramount work he undertook for Me across the Cordon, I am inclined to try a softly, softly approach; psychological profiles run on him during his employment with Special Services indicates he has no love for me. Less for you. When you meet with him, do so carefully. Familiarize yourself with all of his activities while with Services, understand his unique nature fully before you broach his confidence. No matter how prepared you are, it cannot be enough. Understand that I am aware this is far outside your purview, Kant Ingrams, but also understand that your extracurricular allegiances allow me discretionary actions that may seem to violate your free will. This is not the case. You exist at my sufferance.”

  “Sir?” Kant licked his lips nervously.

  “Speak.”

  “In… in order for me to adequately prepare myself to achieve your goals, I feel it imperative I understand Nickels as he is now. It is apparent to me that he is very different from the man I met. This … this will require intimate knowledge of his doings in Special Services.”

  “Agreed.” Trinity paused for effect. “The data will be made available only during the course of your journey to Latelyspace. Failure to fully utilize this time will rest on your head, Kant Ingrams. Attempts to record or otherwise reproduce Garth Nickels’ service records will result in immediate corrective actions. Do you understand?”

  “As … as you command, sir.” Kant waited a few minutes, then began filling out the necessary paperwork for an extended leave for personal reasons. Of course, the request would be granted, because it would pass up the food chain of governmental bureaucracy until it reached one of Trinity’s primary representatives, where it’d be rubber-stamped. Under normal circumstances, a vacation request would take months to process; a Historical Adjutant asking for personal time off was like the commander of a nuclear silo leaving the base with the keys to missiles in his pocket, and as such, required serious consideration.

  Kant quelled the foreboding feelings in his gut. He had little choice. Collusion with any Cabal that spoke out, however quietly or behind however many doors, was an offense against Trinity punishable by awful, hideous death.

  How was he going to meet with Nickels and survive, though, that was the rub.

  Caveman from the Dawn of Time?

  There are three things required to run any civilization effectively; a government, a military, and commerce –religion in all its forms could come and go in the blink of an eye and held no real control, not in the long term- but that trio, they were mandatory.

  With Its profound control over government and military, Trinity saw little need to restrict the growth of Man as Entrepreneur. Allowing Its charges to feel good about something kept them occupied and out of the way. It encouraged the growth and realization of dreams, knowing that at the center of Man’s soul there was a powerful need to consume: land, food, products. They needed to feel in control of their lives, even if it was fallacy. The best way to do that was to let them buy and sell anything and everything they could get their greedy little hands on.

  Thus, down through the vast span of time, planet-spanning companies known as Conglomerates were born, powerful, influential, grotesquely rich and lacking in even the most basic forms of human decency. Government may keep a civilization ticking over, but money made it worthwhile.

  Trinity controlled the systems and the people, Conglomerates controlled everything else and if you think for one second ephemeral layers like greed weren’t game-changing factors, you’d be dead wrong. Conglomerates held power, real and true power. Entire planets, entire systems were held in the grip of a single Conglomerate and so long as the leaders of that business followed Trinity’s rules, you could be a king, an emperor, a god.

  And the greatest granddaddy of them all was BishopCo.

  The underpinnings of BishopCo’s vigilant supremacy had their beginnings in the literal dawn of Time; thousands of years ago, the then earthbound company had provided instrumental assistance to the Offworld race who’d introduced Humanity to Quantum Tunnel technology. The founders of ancient BishopCo had parlayed that support into undreamed of power, setting themselves onto a path of economic and commercial success powerful enough to survive Dark Ages.

  Being in control of events at the onset of the Original Exodus … that’d given BishopCo ringside seats to the full expansion of Man throughout the Universe and they’d used that cachet to spread their products across hundreds of millions of light years. No one, no one, had been able to reproduce that power base, and no one would ever again have the chance…

  Building on that solid foundation, the rapacious BishopCo principle of ‘power at all costs, screw the little guy’ had heralded a true revolution in the concept of commerce and industry: systemic business. Representatives from that newborn Conglomerate had been on the first thousand pilgrim ships heading for the stars in search of new homes. Visionaries in the extreme, they’d be proud to see what their sacrifices had brought to the world; BishopCo was so mighty and so vast that the employees alone could populate whole star systems. Forget standing armies, forget an eternity of wealth. If civilization was to reboot tomorrow, BishopCo could provide the bodies.

  Twenty-nine thousand years later, BishopCo was still a power, still dynamic. The Conglomerate was older than some religions, was worshipped as a religion in some systems, and the mind of this most ancient God was Jordan Bishop, direct descendant of Adrian Bishop himself.

  But if money meant power, then more money went into Jordan Bishop’s pockets than any other Conglomerate head. The decisions he made dictated the lives and deaths of billions. He was a power unto himself, answerable only to Trinity.

  And that was just fine.

  Like all the Elder Conglomerates in Trinityspace, headquarters were on Trinity Prime –once known as Earth. This was one of the few unbreakable mandates stipulated by Trinity Itself; It was known to say that Mankind must never forget their origins, and if the Conglomerates departed for the depth of space, that would surely happen. Earth needed preserving, until the heat of stars faded.

  Unlike other systemic corporations, though, BishopCo’s home base couldn’t depart even if Trinity were to allow it, not until the earth itself died and that, sadly, was still a long way off. Pending that day, Jordan Bishop would rule from his roost in Zanzibar, the modern day equivalent to. All roads led to Jordan Bishop.

  Before Jordan, earlier Bishops rulers had grown quickly weary of their onus to the Conglomerate, sometimes abdicating after a meager handful of years. It was the way of things and didn’t matter so long as a genetic heir sat on the throne. That was key. Jordan, though, was a dynamo of energy and ideas; the current king of commerce had just celebrated his three hundred and fifty-sixth year of steadfast domination on an ever-expanding market, and planned on going for as long as he could. Rapidly approaching the end of legal rejuvenation, Jordan planned on continuing onward with or without the aid of illegal Black Market rejuves and Devil take the hindmost. After thousands of years of selective breeding, Jordan Bishop was genetically predestined to be the perfect businessman. He was fearless in the boardroom, ruthless at the negotiating table and utterly implacable in the eye of the storm. He was not cold or emotionless, because l
ack of the latter meant no imagination, no drive, and without those bountiful traits, no business could thrive.

  In his three hundred plus years, Jordan had weathered more tempests than a dozen other men, and he reveled in the chaos. And why not? His closest competitors were Tynedale/Fujihara, and after them, Voss_Uderhell, but the distance between the triumvirate of Conglomerate power was so great that entire civilizations would have to fall for that gap to shorten. The only institution to have more power, more wealth, more control, was the Trinity AI itself, but again, it was about measurable tangents. Through BishopCo, Jordan Bishop was King of the Universe, and he liked it that way.

  The only way to survive the expansion of Mankind was by diversifying as steadily as any organism interested in survival would. It was not merely enough to survive. The fiat was conquer. All Conglomerates designed, constructed, and sold merchandise from flower seeds to generation ships. They all dabbled in genetics and computer programming, terraforming and strip-mining. After more than twenty-eight millennia of expansion, competition was fiercer than ever, leaving some planets pounded into submission by dreadful Conglomerate wars. And with Trinity forever opening up new worlds by widening It’s Cordon, there was always fresh meat.

  But business was business, and Trinity believed in strife and mayhem as balm for the Human soul, so It allowed things to happen as they would, interfering only when the death toll reached unacceptable levels. Pre-Exodus warlords had nothing on modern day Conglomerate heads when it came down it.

  After all the lies, insinuations, and secrets were thrown by the wayside the simplest of reasons could explain BishopCo’s ability to stay afloat in a sea of turmoil populated not only by other Conglomerate-pirates eager to see him sink forever beneath the waves, but by horrific storms that plunged the world into Darkness.

  Willpower.

  Simply put, Jordan had a preternatural ability to do what the next person couldn’t, and in an arena where the competition was best described as gluttonous and maniacal, that was really saying something. Knowing that there would always be an endless stream of people willing to take work under any conditions freed Bishop to routinely exterminate people who didn’t meet his exacting standards of business excellence. He demolished his own buildings then built them back up again, twice as high and twice as big. He paid well and delivered substantial rewards, extracting punishment three times as painful when failure reared its ugly head.

  Jordan Bishop lived to make money because made power, and that was that.

  With endless coffers, Bishop bought small starter companies moments before they reached brand recognition. He ripped owners from assets, gave them entry-level positions thousands of light-years away from their homes, sold useless and outdated equipment, perfected technologies. Those that wouldn’t sell -or, rarely, merge- found themselves buried under lawsuits and nightmarish visits from PatenzWare affiliates until they collapsed. Or they just as easily found themselves ground under the mighty Conglomerate heel. Data was torn out of dead AI systems. Legal troubles vanished with a flick of the wrist, Conglomerate responsibility whitewashed with a broad stroke of a revised policy.

  Other Conglomerates tried to do the same, but couldn’t muster the same passion.

  Yes, Jordan was powerful, and only partly because he’d been born into the greatest ‘glom in Trinityspace. Yes, he was the end result of thousands of years of selective breeding. Yes, he was greedy, arrogant, egotistical, narcissistic and at least partially insane. Had to be, with the way things were. Amidst all these shining attributes and limitless power, there was one advantage Jordan Bishop had over the competition that was irreplaceable, a never-to-be-reproduced miracle.

  It was a powerful one, and Jordan would use it until the stars in the heavens died and Reality called it a day.

  Spur. The android. A one-of-a-kind, bona fide edge.

  An artificially intelligent android, Spur was the only Trinity recognized and approved autonomous AI system in all of Trinityspace. Machine minds of any other flavor discovered across the Cordon, created within Trinityspace or those that spontaneously arose were terminated out of hand, without consideration, without pause. Spur’s near-mythical provenance was the only thing keeping him ‘alive’ and kicking; the AI-android began life in illegal experimentation chambers owned and operated by Emperor-for-Life Etienne Marseilles two thousand years prior, going through endless iterations of both consciousness and form until Spur-as-he-is stepped forth into the real world.

  A vast artificially intelligent mind housed in a perfect android body, his existence was extraordinary as well as deadly. Extraordinary because of what he was, deadly because although the ADAM Wars had happened shortly after First Exodus, the terror of unstoppable machine minds would never fade.

  Trinity saw to that. And yet, something in Spur was too … wondrous, perhaps, to let fade.

  Spur was the creation of the EuroJapanese Emperor-for-Life and was the man’s prized possession, but it was one the ruler would never see again, and all thanks to the legendary man-god’s hubris; prone to grandiose gestures and over-the-top displays of his wealth and prosperity, Emperor-for-Life Marseilles had dispatched Spur to treat with Julian Bishop over an insignificant matter. Passing out of the shield-locked domain of the EuroJapanese supreme Emperor, Spur was in BishopCo’s main towers before Trinity passed judgment on this most egregious violation of Its Paramount Laws. The EuroJapanese invention was to remain confined within BishopCo until such a time as it, Trinity, made a formal decision. Failure to comprehend, attempts to escape, all would bring instant death.

  With powerful, armor-clad entities like Enforcers and the rampaging, self-aware, non-corporeal Turing Regulators at Its beck and call, Trinity’s proclamation was met with ‘full’ cooperation: Spur might be a machine, but he was alive, and appreciated his life for what it was. He chose to await judgment. It took hundreds of years for Trinity to reach a conclusion.

  Rather than merely tell the AI-android the rules of its eternal imprisonment, Trinity devised trips and pitfalls for the thinking machine, curious to see how well it would do, how quickly it could learn. There were many such, and with the dogged persistence only a mind such as Spur’s could summon forth, the thinking machine learned them all. Trinity, impressed both with the technical triumphs displayed by the Emperor-for-Life’s scientific teams and interested to see how such a … masterpiece … would find use in the petty machinations of Humanity, chose to allow Spur life.

  Given a gift of insurmountable wisdom and calculation, each successor to the BishopCo crown used Spur as any person would use a tool in their hands. They used Spur’s incessant thirst for knowledge and his crippling servitude protocols to bolster their already formidable Conglomerate to unparalleled heights.

  Over the course of History other Conglomerates pointed out the unfair advantage, attempting to force Trinity to change the rules in a hundred different ways. Trinity’s answer was always the same;

  ‘Adapt or Die.’

  xxx

  “My Lord.”

  Jordan Bishop took a bite of sausage from his plate, chewing thoughtfully, ignoring the immaculately dressed alabaster android as he always did. “This meat comes from one of many Offworld planets within Trinityspace, a world called Skr. The natives of this world hunt the animal for days on end, and because of its size, must cure the meats right there at the kill site; the natives themselves, though tenacious as ticks, could never hope to carry the carcass home in time to process the flesh properly. Then it they package it for sale and shipped Offworld by an incredibly minor Conglomerate. Roughly ninety-nine percent of the people who consume this meat have no concept of the trials involved in bringing it to their plates. The assumption is that if one consumes this meat without sicking up immediately they are truly elite, and in some circles, it is considered the height of wealth and panache to pretend the meat is edible. There is, of course, a simpler method to get the meat, yet the Skrrans prefer to do the way they have done for however long they’ve been doing
it. Custom, you see.”

  Spur bowed deeply, forelock sweeping the ground. “My Lord.”

  Jordan wiped his mouth carefully with a silk napkin. “The meat is absolutely foul, naturally. The animal, indeed everything on Skr, is inimical to humans. It is only through luck and the myriad of genetic treatments most men rely on that keeps the rancid flesh from turning their bowels to water for the rest of their natural born lives. Nevertheless, the Skrrans have the decency to hold fast and true to tradition. You bring news?”

  “I do, my Lord.” Spur, who had long since grown accustomed to Jordan’s particular brand of humor, was confident that Jordan already knew of the … situation. The man merely wanted to have it explained so he could get angry. Of all his BishopCo owners, Jordan was the most passionate. It made him fiendish. Brilliant, but fiendish.

  “Very well.” Jordan examined the screens in front of him critically. After hundreds of years of watching his business grow, mutate, evolve, he’d become a master at sensing the rhythm of his various concerns, of intuiting the shape of things. It was as easy as checking his pulse, and took no more effort. This morning the shape of his fortune had changed. More to the point, a portion of his empire that was supposed to generate a near-limitless supply of liquid cash was gone. “What have you learned?”

  “There has been,” Spur intoned, “a change in technologies.”

  Jordan quirked his eyebrows. “An Offworld patent?” Strictly speaking, it wasn’t unheard of, it just hadn’t happened in hundreds of years. Their ruling AI was an expression of opposites; it wouldn’t go out of It’s way to be ‘friendly’ to It’s subjects yet it was so absurdly pro-Human that it could be say Trinity was, actually, quite xenophobic.