by Lee Bond
Nothing there, either.
“That’s not how it happened.” Garth muttered at long last. His strength was gone. A few pulsed thoughts to the ‘airspace’ inside his skull where the OS most frequently lurked revealed … emptiness. A sense of concern bloomed in his guts. This was no good. He … he … remembered something before waking up in the cab but it was … was … buried. Under … he blinked and the memory was gone. “Not at all.”
“Ah.” The voice rumbled. “You are right. What you just experienced wasn’t what happened. It’s what would’ve had the so-called Lords of the Dream not scripted every single moment of your life since landing in their backyard.”
Garth shook his belfry to clear it of bats. The top of his brain sloshed precariously around inside his skull, so … that was off limits until some far-flung day. “Dunno what in the hell you’re talking about, Emperor. You are the Emperor, right? Come on down here! Let’s have a conversation like two normal people.”
“We the both of us are hardly normal, N’Chalez. Not in any way.” The Emperor’s voice lost some of it’s scorn and almost all of it’s derision. “I won’t show myself to you just yet. I am Emperor.”
“What is this place?” Garth turned his head this way and that, trying to get a better lay of the land, but what he saw wasn’t encouraging; he was in the middle of a very ornate, very Baroque Grand Hall of sorts. Every few feet along the walls there hung a humungous, floor-to-ceiling painting of a patrician-looking Monarch, glaring off into the distance, staring directly at the viewer, appearing to be amused by something, looking quite seriously angry … Garth lost count of the number of paintings, and the styles.
He presumed there'd be somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty thousand or so Baroque indulgences to one man's ego, and he wasn't far off.
The rest of the Hall was something straight out of a Kenneth Branagh Period Piece movie, probably staring Kiera Knightley. Didn’t take much imagination to picture her running through the long, heavily ornamented hallways, or to have Tom Hulce running around pretending to be Amadeus and making hideous fart jokes.
Garth trained his eyes on where he imagined the Emperor was hiding. “What’s the point of tying me down like this when I’m a room this frickin’ big? 's not like I'm, uh, gonna run away or anything."
“Common sense, I’m afraid.” The Emperor paused for a moment, choosing his words carefully. “Towards the end of their time with me, those who come closest to failing their trials seek to do themselves harm outside of their world. Beyond that, you’ve been through so much in the last few years, and your mind is such a dark, hollow place. There were concerns you might try something … unfortunate.”
“Pal, I ain't gonna off myself. I guarantee it. I’m too pretty.”
“Garth, you lasted six minutes in a Universe where, if you ever arrive at the point in space and time where things truly begin happening, you would last six seconds. When … if … you get there, you would die over and over and over again, endlessly, until the end of time. Much like the titular character of this film, Groundhog Day. It resonates with your trial very nicely. You are perhaps the strongest man to ever come through my shield, but after having witnessed what you endured, I cannot imagine your mental health will remain intact.”
“You’ve read my mind?” Garth didn’t like the thought of that, not at all. He’d come to the Emperor to see if he was a threat against the End of Days.
Prior to this very moment, the Specter had been more than willing to leave the mostly-ruler of the EuroJapanese people to his own devices because until now, he'd been a mostly behind the scenes kind of dude which was … surprising; armed with the incongruity, it was a rare man who wouldn't wake up one morning, foaming at the mouth, talking about ‘kill all the people everywhere and wear their skins for clothing’.
But this?
This poking around inside the mind of a guy who was planning on destroying the Universe? It was a bad road to travel, because there was a lot more in there than that, and none of it belonged in the hands of any Emperor.
“Yes.” The Emperor’s voice carried a nod along with the word. “Yes I have, and what I discovered is most interesting.”
“What’s that, then?” Garth demanded irately. He could win this. He could. He just had to stay at the top of his game. If he was being Groundhog Day’d, it was only a matter of finding the right combination of events to set himself free. “What’s so interesting in my mind? How I plan on ending the Universe? How the new one will be formed? What?”
“Those things are interesting, in that they are both elegant and crass at the same time. Never once did I imagine that the death of an entire Universe could be brought about so simply, but the moments leading up to that are so wondrously complex! I see the lines of your deceit, N’Chalez, shining there against the backdrop of space, and just as I am appalled at the depths you've descended, I am amazed. No one, anywhere, knows you. But no. That isn’t what interests me. What interests me is what happened in the Engine’s sandbox. It’s Ideal Vision of what Reality should look like, the so-called Dream. That, and what you remember of it.”
“I remember everything.” The words came tumbling out his mouth before he could stop them. It was true though. He did remember everything.
“As brief as you can, then, outline for yourself what occurred. You can skip over the cab ride. We know how that went, do we not?”
Garth ground his teeth together. Grumblingly, he acquiesced. “Fine. Okay. Whatever. Dorm room. Intro to Drake Bishop and Sparks Dangerously. They help me fit in, like one of those fish out of water comedies.”
“Except you were no fish out of water, were you?” The Emperor interrupted bluntly. “You were a Kin’kithal warrior fallen through a crack in Unreality. You were watching them, assessing the lay of the land, looking for weaknesses to exploit, hunting for enemies.”
Garth wanted to deny it, but the Emperor spoke the truth. “At first, yes. Absolutely. My world, this Universe, is full of war and death. A broken mirror of that Dream. I couldn’t believe the Kith and Kin didn’t exist. I thought it had to be some kind of joke, a trick, some new ploy by the M’Zahdi Hesh. But … it wasn’t. They weren’t there. And believe me, I looked.”
“Yessss. You certainly did.” The Emperor commented enthusiastically. “Before events got out of control, you absorbed the history of the entire world. Almost everything. From very close to the dawn of time itself until the moment you … went elsewhere.”
“I was looking for the Hesh. Or something like them. I couldn’t believe in a world free of their depredations.” Garth still couldn’t believe it. An entire world, never once knowing what true war could look like. Yes, that other place had had its fair share of global conflicts, but those wars had been brought into being by men.
Nothing more than simple men with simple needs.
“And once you realized you were safe? You were the only one of your kind, that neither the M’Zahdi Hesh nor their lapdogs would come looking for you? What then?”
“I relaxed. I sought to fit in. And it was great until…”
“Until?”
Garth knew the Emperor knew everything about his time there. It was evident in the disembodied ruler’s tone, but he played along because there really weren't any other options, and because -according to the Emperor- he really hadn't understood anything that'd happened over there. “Until I met Lissande Amour, Drake’s girlfriend. Then it all went to shit. From there, since you already know and you ask for brevity, we have, in relatively short order, involving one of my best friends in an escapade he hadn’t been ready for in any way, shape or form, soul-weakened time-traveling almost-zombies, the discovery of how strong the Baron’s grip on the United States was, accidental time travel into the future, a self-replicating, decreasing time skip resulting in, well, all kinds of horrific shit, until there was a showdown with the Baron. Before things were finished, the Ushbet M’Tai arrived and sent me packing. I could go into more detail, if you like. I could
talk about the fight in the Lear Jet over Vegas, or traveling through the wastelands between Vegas and Frisco, five hundred years into the future…”
“Let’s talk about the Ushbet, for a moment. Your personal Universe needs proper calibration, still.”
A moment –just a moment- of tiny, unreasoning panic filled Garth, but he smoothly squashed it. Fear and concern over who and what the Ushbet M’Tai were was a rational response to beings that were infinitely more powerful than anything he’d ever encountered.
And that included the M’Zahdi Hesh. Where the Heshii were locusts, interested only in their own power and what it could bring for them, the M’Tai were … similar, but in different ways. They’d turned their power outwards into their own pocket Universe.
And as a result, they'd each had a fundamental grasp on the underlying rules and laws of that Universe, bestowing unto them ultimate control.
Of everything.
Where the Heshii had to batter and hammer away at something they wanted changed, the M’Tai merely had to will their desires into being.
They were the truest definition of Godhood.
“Why would you want to talk about them?” Garth demanded. He struggled with his arms again. “Shouldn’t we be busy Groundhogging me to death?”
The Emperor’s smile was again evident by his tone. “There is plenty of time for that, Mister N’Chalez. As I said, your personal Universe needs proper calibration. There is quite a bit more going on for you than for anyone else I’ve ever dealt with. It requires precision. Now. The Ushbet. The Universal equivalent of angels, more or less, if we’re to consider the Engines of Creation as God Itself. Does that sound right to you?”
“Yeah. Yeah.” Garth shut his eyes and recalled the first and only time he’d met them, five hundred years into the future, in the Amazon Basin.
He’d been so close, there. So close to rooting out the Baron forever, for putting an end to his DeadShop. It’d taken so long, and such effort, to finagle that bastard’s arrival at that particular location, forcing him to ‘land’ the tremendous pyramid he sailed through time in at the one spot on the entire planet could contain it’s destruction without causing everything to fold in on itself.
Baron Samiel’s pyramid-base, the vast, towering structure he shifted across the world on a regular basis to avoid the attention of men like Jim Seeker, a lost and lonely soldier trying desperately to wage a war with his ragtag band of misfits, cybernetic losers and stolen BishopCo experiments… It loomed in Garth’s mind’s eye, a literal fortress.
Garth shook his head. His mouth tasted of ash. He’d been a true Kin’kithal, there. Given the freedom to act as he’d needed to in a world teetering on the brink of collapse –mostly under the weight of the Baron’s predations, but partially because of his own actions- it’d been so easy to move pieces around that global board. Jim Seeker, DeShawn, Tezzy. Others.
And then, there, on the dawn of the final sortie against the Baron’s external defenses, when the stupid Conglomerates had gotten their heads out of their asses and realized that they needed to band together against Baron Samiel instead of accepting his phenomenal bribes or cowering beneath the weight of his unwavering, mad gaze, the Ushbet had arrived.
Cold, impervious, distanced.
As unconcerned with the overall state of the homeworld of Mankind as they were with the final disposition of the Baron and his all-too-powerful temporal incongruity. Standing there, blistering the air with their presence alone, they’d broken poor Jim Seeker’s already beleaguered mind, had sent Tezzy –poor, organic-derived computational machine- into fits that’d broken her down into nothing more than lumps of flesh and organic wiring.
They’d been so tall, so austere. The fabric of the space around the Amazon Basin had shivered in their presence and even Samiel, hidden high and far at the top of his pyramid, well, he too must’ve paused for thought, for their auras had cloaked the vicious battlefield surrounding his massive stony ziggurat in bleak white shadows so strong that the sun itself had become nothing more than an afterthought.
“Such clarity.” The Emperor whispered. “You recall everything with such uncompromising perfection! Other beings seek to undo the terror or the loneliness or the confusion, to unwind the harsh truths surrounding them until all becomes … certain degrees of acceptability. But not you.”
“No.” Garth admitted, still remembering the M’Tai. Of thirteen present, only one, Aäl, had spoken, the thin slit of his mouth moving either too slow or too fast for the words tumbling through the air like blocks of Arctic ice. “Not me. A tactically unsound decision. Better to remember things as they were. Less chance of forgetting, or of making mistakes.”
“This being, this M’Tai calling himself Aäl, he … thanked you for your services.” The Emperor sounded almost mystified. “For bringing Baron Samiel to a place where he could be dealt with properly, but they refused you the right of finishing the job. How did that make you feel?”
“Relieved.” Garth admitted readily. Was that right? Had he actually been relieved to surrender the battle to someone else? Garth shrugged mentally. It felt right. Felt like he'd been happy to let go, to let someone else deal with some shit for a change.
“Kin’kithal I may’ve been, in control of most of the world’s resources, sure, but … the Baron held such power, and he was capable of drawing resources from any point in the world’s history where he’d already been. I had doubts that I’d ever even really meet the bastard in the first place. There was no real proof that Samiel himself was even inside the pyramid; there were hints and rumors that he was operating from a point even further in time, making the whole thing a possibly colossal waste of time. So no matter how terrifying the M’Tai were, how undermined my efforts became, I was relieved I wouldn’t have to fight Samiel. I just wasn’t up to the task.”
“That hardly sounds like the man I see before me.”
“Believe what you want, Emperor.” Garth snapped. It was clear to him now. He had been tired, unsure of himself, eager to go home. “I’d trained my entire life to do battle with things I understood, beasts like the Kith and Kin, and their horrible masters, the M’Zahdi Hesh. I know about them, about their masters. I know where their powers come from, I know what their desires are. I never even fucking found out why the Baron was doing as he was, and unlike the Heshii, who do exist outside of our timeframe and can therefore act precipitously against things that fall outside their favor, they did so glacially. I could see the changes happening, and strike. The Baron … the Baron struck like a snake. A viper in the temporal long grass. So yes. When the Ushbet M’Tai Aäl spoke, thanked me for my efforts, and told me that I was good to go, I was fucking relieved.”
Garth listened to his voice ringing off the far walls. “But what they did next… they forced me to break my promise.”
“Ahh, yes, that looms most brilliantly.” The Emperor chuckled a tiny bit. “I see a person’s regrets as diamonds floating through a sea of dark velvet, Mister N’Chalez, tiny stars, each one a perfect representation of guilt over something they’d done, or not done. Most adults have a handful, depending on how they’ve lived their lives. I’ve had Yellow Dog Elders arrive at my gates, and such vicious men, too, men like Elder Kanawa-Sio-Terret, from eighteen thousand years ago. He held his domain through rancorous reprisals and murder, and for so very long. When he walked through and I beheld his deepest regrets, he had no more than six. By comparison, a shop keeper from Kowlon-Seti-Seventeen, an old, wise man who’d lived a good life and treated everyone around him with great respect and honor … a tapestry of regret the rival of the heavens. But you?”
The Emperor paused, waiting to see if Garth had anything to say. When the imprisoned Kin’kithal said nothing in his defense, he continued. “A sheet of white light, Mister N’Chalez, a never-ending river of regret. There are no shadows in you. Only a blistering vista of brilliant silver remorse. I haven’t dug deep enough yet, but it seems that much of it stems from things that haven’t happe
ned yet. You hold yourself accountable for death and tragedy not yet born, you flog yourself daily with this and more! Amazing. Yet through all of that, breaking your promise to those two men you called friends, this is your greatest sorrow?”
“You gotta understand.” Garth shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “Those two guys, Drake and Sparks, they … they helped me be normal. When I landed –literally- on their fucking doorstep, I was a rock solid, stone cold killer of alien beings, Emperor. I’d already done battle against the Kith and Kin, and I’d witnessed firsthand the power of Heshii intervention. I thought this was some new trick, this weird, fake-seeming world where everyone was happier and healthier and ignorant of any great wars looming in the distance like a black hole waiting to swallow everything. They helped me be the man I am today, just by letting me figure out who I wanted to be.
After everything with Lissande, after Drake fell sick, after … after the showdown in Vegas … I swore I’d return, to make certain they were safe, that everything was going to be okay. I’d provided them with Samiel’s medical journals on Zig-6 and how best to tailor the drug so that it’d cure Drake of that fucking disease without severing his connection to the Universe, but I wasn’t there to see if it worked. I wasn’t there to help Sparks come to grips with things, because let’s be honest, he saw some shit. But … the M’Tai took that from me. They forced me to leave the only people I’d ever been able to call family alone, in the dark, never knowing if I was alive or dead, possibly hoping I was dead for all the strife I’d caused.”
“There was nothing you could do. The Ushbet M’Tai were all-powerful.”
“I could’ve done something. There, at the end, I was in my full glory. The kind of glory that danced through Tannhauser’s Gate and made an entire Galaxy of Bruush tremble. I was the kind of man that could plan and execute a deceit stretching thirty thousand years, the kind of man that could destroy a Universe to bring forth a new one, a better one. They couldn’t have known the full extent of my powers. It was the first time we’d met, and I’m a hard man to read…”
