by Lee Bond
It was hard for him to imagine that so much of the world he’d come to believe in, so desperately, when times in the Unreal Universe had grown to be their worst, had been so … manipulated, but if he were to extrapolate from how goddamn impossible it was to survive a fucking cab ride across a goddamn bridge, then it seemed that the Emperor-for-Life’s enigmatic implications were true; the Ushbet M’Tai must’ve led him down a rose-covered path, not just to Drake and Sparks’ door, but to the very end of The Line, where he’d begun his sortie against the piebald bastard, Baron Samiel.
The implications were staggering, and as Garth counted down the precious seconds until the moment he was supposed to hit his head so hard he nearly cracked his skull in half, he considered what that really meant.
One.
If a cab ride across a bridge resulted in a massive multicar pileup –with him being turned into various forms of hamburger, both cooked and uncooked- then the next dangerous moment, where he foolishly broke into a nightclub operating as a front for Samiel’s nefarious projects in this section of The Line, undoubtedly led to the actual cracking of the world itself. Of course it hadn't, because intervention.
Two.
And after that? A second conflict in SlimJim’s, this time with one of the very first almost-dead soul-drained soldiers working directly for Samiel himself, an augmented bastard on par with Heavy Elite. The lummox had gone down with a few nasty kicks and punches, but he’d been in an isolated area with no witnesses, and down The Line, that’d been a rarity.
Three.
It was the level of their insidious manipulation that had Garth on edge, that, and Etienne’s parting shot that his own personal memories of the Ushbet weren’t altogether … as clear as he'd always believed. Worry over what they might've done to him and their reasons for doing as they'd done was swiftly tainting his love of the Dream, and he hadn't even gotten out of the fucking cab yet.
Worse still, it had him pondering if anything he'd loved about 21st Century San Francisco had been real at all.
Four.
The cabbie swerved to avoid hitting the car for what felt like the millionth time, and Garth, hand wrapped firmly around the door handle and so fucking aware of every single second, every sound, every nuance of the moment, popped it open as soon as he felt the back end of the speeding cab begin to shimmy…
He was out.
Flailing through the air, but he was out of the cab –and still alive and uninjured, thank you very much- for the first time.
Instinctive training took over and Garth tucked into a tidy little ball just before he careened into the pavement. The landing was rough –he’d been prepared for it, but even then, when he hit, one whole shoulder shrieked in agony over the grisly road rash literally being carved into the flesh- but at least he wasn’t in the cab, which was …
The explosion sent an oily fireball puffing into the sky. Furious horns followed by the telltale squeal of panicky breaks being slammed on mingled with the orchestral sounds of glass and metal being broken and bent. More car horns, more glass breaking, a few odd, lingering seconds of aching silence and then … a fresh round of explosions.
Two more booms, in fact, and as Garth lay in the middle of the street, huffing and puffing and gingerly working his arm free of gritty asphalt, he imagined the cars involved in the eruption lifting off the street as if by pyrotechnic magic.
Working himself to a sitting position, rolling his hamburgered shoulder, Garth looked over the chaotic imagery, unsure how he should feel over the chaos that grew around him.
The Ushbet had transformed the events directly in front of him –Garth’s ears quirked as they picked up sirens not more than four miles away- from a catastrophe into something barely worth writing home about, but … was the scene to’ve been this desperate to begin with, or was the intrinsic chaos that followed him wherever he went to blame?
Sitting in the middle of the street was no way to continue surviving, not with service trucks en route, so Garth picked himself up and moved as quickly as he could –he’d missed the part where he’d somehow managed to bang his knee hard enough to have him hobbling away like an old man, to the sidewalk, where he politely ignored the concerned attention of all the lookee-loos who’d materialized out of nowhere; Garth was sure they were probably nice people concerned for his well-being, but he had no vested interest in accepting their offers of help.
In point of fact, he wanted to get right the fuck out of there ASAP.
“No, really, guys, it’s cool, I’m good, I’m all right, don’t sweat it.” Garth waved them away, finally adding, “I’m gonna wait for the cops and give my statement. One of the guys in an ambulance can hook me up.”
That last bit finally seemed to sink the lie home, and so the double handful of men and women –some of them with fucking kids and dogs- went back to recording the carnage on their smartphones.
Garth leaned against a railing and surveyed what he was seeing with clear eyes for the first time since being matrixed into the proto-Reality.
Everything was so real, so perfect, so … just as he remembered it.
Everything.
From where he stood, faint strains of Britney Spears’ comeback album boomed out from a teenaged girl's headphones while she listlessly tapped out the beat, looking positively bored out of her skull while she waited for her ghoulish mom scoring footage that’d be Liveleak worthy.
Further down the street –from the direction he and his apparently suicidal cab driver had come- Garth spied huge banner ads for the next DC superhero movie and he chuckled at the memory of him, Drake and Sparks sneaking into the megaplex movie theater one night to specifically –much to the irritation of the other nerds in the theater- to announce to everyone that Batman would always win because Batman was fucking Batman, and that no, they really fucking didn't need to be reminded that Batman’s parents were totally dead because he was fucking BATMAN.
Time to look for small detail that'd been missed. Nothing was perfect.
Something had to've been missed.
The sunlight prickling on his skin held the same warmth, that same delicious, invigorating feel. The wind blowing gently through the air was the same old sensuous whisper that gave you goosebumps. The gritty asphalt jammed into his arm had just the right kind of irritation to it, the bruise on his goddamn knee pulsed and throbbed vindictively.
It was all so … properly done.
Emergency vehicles began arriving, tearing into the scene with professional skill. Fire trucks. Ambulances. Police cars. The various lights lit the area up and everyone involved began the difficult task of restoring order and saving lives.
But was it what would’ve happened if the Ushbet hadn’t massaged the moment?
That was what Garth needed to know. At first blush -and Garth was by no means a rookie in arriving at well-reasoned assumptions- this version of the Engine's Dream was perfect, right down to the smallest details.
And that was horrifying.
The Emperor-for-Life possessed a power bordering on the godlike, giving him the ability to resurrect an entire planet, right down to the smallest of details, with pinpoint accuracy.
The only thing stopping the EuroJapanese monarch –who, if you asked Garth, had some kind of weird, personal grudge against one of the only good guys in the entire fucking Unreal Universe- from messing around with how the story was supposed to go was the man’s word.
Garth had learned some time ago that you couldn’t take anyone on their word alone. Not if you wanted to remain upright. He hated to say it, but actions really did speak louder.
But if Etienne’s word was true, if this proto-Reality was just as vicious and bloodthirsty and violent as the Unreal Universe was and the Ushbet had manipulated every second of his life here, then what for? Why would they do something like that?
Garth felt like he was forgetting something. Or that something was being kept from him. Something tickled at the back of his head. Some half-formed memory, someone wisp …
“Excuse me, sir.”
Garth blinked, drawn away from the spiraling rabbit hole of his musings. He bit back a curse, replacing it with a smile.
An officer.
Because of course an officer would approach him. That’s how the world here worked.
Garth caught a slightly guilty look from one of the people who’d offered him help. An honest citizen doing their honest best to be good and proper would naturally volunteer interesting information to a man in uniform.
It was how the people of America had been programmed to operate. Not quite a real Orwellian nightmare made real, but close enough for horseshoes and spycams.
Garth put on his best ‘absolutely nothing wrong over here, I am a totally normal guy who just happened to bail out of a cab three seconds before it turned the entire area into Chernobyl, move along, nothing to see here face’ and addressed the officer.
Meanwhile, Garth burned a precious moment genuinely wishing he were a Jedi Knight.
“Uh. Hey.”
Officer Gary Lalcombe eyed the man’s injuries with undisguised interest; according to the few people he’d spoken with already, they’d seen the man –six two, blue eyes, black hair, heavily muscled- leap from the vehicle that was believed to be responsible for the horrific accident and all the guy was doing was standing there, bleeding through his shirt and picking chunks of glass and crud out of an impressive patch of road rash like there was nothing wrong or weird with that whole thing.
Officer Lalcombe hoped it wasn’t drugs, especially the weird shit some idiots were getting up to these days, because if it was, they didn't have nearly enough combat-trained officers in the area to bring the guy down if he went squirrely.
Regardless, Lalcombe figured it was drugs, though. There was just no other reasonable or logical explanation for suddenly leaping to freedom in the middle of the street, or for standing there smiling pleasantly when your arm looked like four pounds of freshly ground chuck with a nice seasoning of ground glass, dirt and who knew what the hell else. Opting for prudence over optimistic expectation, Gary bladed his stance, because even though the man wasn’t twitchy like most junkies didn't mean a damn thing.
Gary pulled out his notepad and pen.
“Care to tell me why you jumped out of your cab in the middle of traffic?”
Garth controlled his automatic urge to respond to the cop’s change in body language. Adopting his own tactical stance would only exaggerate the moment and the last thing he really wanted right then was for guns to be pulled.
“He was driving like a goddamn crazy person. He was super pissy, too, about something. And so I asked to be let out a couple times. He ignored me. I feared for my life and my safety, so … I got out on my own.” Garth indicated the tragic scene. "You can see it was a good idea."
Officer Lalcombe jotted everything down in his notebook, keeping one eye on the man. “And where did you catch the cab from?”
Garth narrowed his eyes, suddenly uncomfortably aware that he had no fucking idea where he’d even caught the cab from. In the original timeline, he’d just woken up in the cab with a brain full of cover story and that’d been that. No one anywhere, at any point, had ever really grilled him on the means of his arrival in the United States of America.
Which was a gigantic fucking problem, because the USA was also right smack dab in the middle of being the most paranoid culture in the world, worse than they’d ever been, even during their personal issues with Russia, worse, really -in their own way- than goddamn North Korea, because while everyone thought they were free, they really weren't.
The US of A was the first completely televised, one hundred percent bona fide dictatorship, only no one had noticed yet because of their big screen TV’s and smartphones and Wi-Fi connected lives.
In less than a year, they'd be doing everything but blatantly shutting their borders to outsiders. They hovered on the edge of bankruptcy, spending billions they didn’t have on gearing up for the greatest homage to an Orwellian future Garth had ever seen outside of Latelyspace and …
And he didn’t have a fucking clue what to tell the cop, and from the tightening in the cop’s eyes and the way he adjusted his stance a second time all but screamed that friendly looking Officer Lalcombe, Badge #252, knew it.
“Get your piddy out.” Officer Lalcombe knew it was drugs. Or something. It had to be something.
Garth reached for his back pocket, but his hand froze halfway there, sudden realization dawning on him in a frosty wave of ‘fuck my fucking life sideways’.
He didn't have a 'piddy'; PIDpaks, as they were officially called, was a brand new America-wide 'always online' initiative designed to keep citizens readily identifiable to any government official.
Everything from birth records to medical reports, from your SAT score to your current job. All of that, and more. On a single device.
A zing of actual fear surged through Garth's spine.
He was fucked!
There really was no one to blame but himself for missing the obvious, and boy, had it been obvious from the beginning.
The Emperor-for-Life had even pointed it out to him and he’d still refused to pay attention to the fine details!
When he’d fallen through the ex-dee crack into this wonderful proto-Reality, it’d been into the cab, with a head full of fresh memories and perfect lies to spout to anyone who showed even the slightest bit of interest: he’d been Garth Nickels, a foreign exchange student from Sweden, sole heir to a great big gobsmack pile of cash he’d inherited from his parents, two Swedish superbrains who’d unfortunately died when his father –no actual name existed in Garth’s mind- had accidently crashed their two-seater plane into the side of a mountain.
Beyond that, paperwork for the University he was trying desperately to get to so he could test the limits of the Emperor’s pocket world had been filed. Beyond that, a proper bank account and an official American Personal Identification Data pack had been in his pocket.
Garth wanted to actually, physically drill a fist right through his brain.
How the fuck had he missed all that? How had he missed that he’d been the recipient of divine Ushbet M’Tai interference right from the goddamn beginning?
Very little of his time in the original Dream was making sense, now. Everything seemed topsy-turvy.
“Show me your goddamn Piddy.” Lalcombe snapped angrily. “Right now.”
When the perp didn’t move, he drew his sidearm and started barking into his radio, gesturing with his piece in a manner that everyone without proper ID understood as ‘get on the ground or I shoot you’.
“Well, shit.” Garth sighed miserably.
Over no-longer-friendly Lalcombe’s right shoulder, other boys in blue started gearing up to move and that ever-so-special layer of conscious attention Garth had always been able to sense when shit was about to go sideways settled over the area like a goddamn black cloud.
Before Lalcombe could move, Garth busted out a standard Krav Maga handgun disarm move, though instead of taking the officer hostage –which was definitely an option- he punched him in the chest as hard as he could.
Lalcombe staggered back, Garth popped the clip out of the officer’s .45, dropped it to the ground with a clatter, then kicked the magazine towards the officers while booting the sidearm in the opposite direction; the no-longer deadly weapon clattered and bounced out of sight.
Then he started hotfooting it the fuck away from a swiftly and rightfully pissed off gaggle of cops.
About ten feet in, his one badly bruised knee decided it’d had enough bullshit already and started complaining, dropping his speed from a decent quarter-mile record breaking sprint to an old man doddering up the stairs.
“How the fuck did I miss that?” Garth demanded angrily.
He risked a look over his shoulder. The officers in pursuit weren’t too far behind, but they weren’t pushing themselves overly much, forcing a sardonic grin from the fleeing Kin’kithal.
A
s far as they were concerned, all they needed to do was pace him until his wounds took over. Then they'd just stroll up and clap him in irons.
“Like,” Garth wheezed as he turned a corner, feeling like a total stooge, “why did I not even once go ‘Gee, I know I am a super-powered Kin’kithal and all, but creating a perfect and flawless cover story complete with identification papers and all that is kinda beyond my range of powers’? And if not in the middle of it all, why not … oh. You. Have. Got. To. Be. Kidding. Me! This is some serious bullshit!”
A UAV –roughly the size of a very large vulture and very shiny with it’s fresh coat of paint and bristling with ‘defensive and deterrent weapons’- dropped low out of the sky and practically growled at him; curls of air tossed newspapers and junk food wrappers all over the road.
The streets suddenly emptied themselves of foot traffic and even the few cars on the road sped like bats out of hell to be away from the bad man about to be riddled full of holes.
The energy-efficient engines of the UAV filled the now empty street with a soft moan that twined it’s way through the hiss of air being pushed through engines that could move the heavy death machine through the skies at more than sixty miles an hour.
Garth moved a bit to the left.
The gun ports followed him. He tried the same thing to the right. Then, when the UAV followed him like a faithful –and murderous- puppy, he desperately reached inside himself to where his Kin’kithal powers had always resided, even when buried away behind a proto-Reality’s worth of quadronium.
Nothing. He was just a man.
Whoever was operating the UAV from some remote location didn’t even bother with niceties. Someone somewhere had decided that he was the cause of the deadly multicar pileup a few streets away, and, combined with his lack of a PIDpak and the manner in which he’d disarmed Officer Gary, there was no point in playing safe.
The UAV opened fire, filling Garth full of red hot lead…
Give it to Him
“My God.” Sparks shook his head, ran a hand through his artfully dyed red hair. “And to think we thought this guy was cool. To think of what we did, of what we went through! For this guy! He can’t even get through the first fifteen minutes.”
