by Lee Bond
Lissande’s hopes spiraled through the twisty maze in her mind, hunting down the elusive spot that would allow her to talk to Samiel and failed every time. The agony was too much, the shattered seconds of future time splintering inside her like deadly frag grenades turning her insides into ribbons. Her weary intellect brushed up against it for a moment and for a brief, haunting second, she felt more than heard Baron Samiel himself screaming and bellowing in purest anger as he, too, struggled against the impossible tidal wave generated by this most resilient moment.
The pain was too much. Worse than anything she’d ever endured, including the final transformation from a normal person into the kind of woman capable of traveling through time. It transcended fluorescence and entered some new dimension. She was only dimly aware that at long, suffering last her joints were beginning to crack, her bones near to breaking from the powerful muscle spasms sending endless, rippling shivers up and down her body.
What would death be like, she wondered, laying there, gazing up at the darkening sky of Haiti. Would the ocular implants fire up in time to pull her corpse back up The Line, leaving nothing but a cindered outline, or –because of the plague afflicting her- would they fail, leaving behind a misshapen body full of broken bones, ruptured blood vessels, torn muscle?
Finally worn out, pushed beyond even her most resilient moments, Lissande Amour chose to greet death with open arms. She’d done all she could to serve Baron Samiel, to usher forth the future that needed to happen. What harm was there in dying in service of that man? As far as she could see, none whatsoever. She couldn’t remember having ever been at this point in her personal timeline before, which meant that –from the Baron’s perspective- it’d never happened until this mysterious now, which also meant that –for the first time from his point of view- it had never happened until now.
There was no telling how many times Samiel had lived through these moments. Lissande knew it had to be in the thousands, if not the hundreds of thousands, working diligently to pick his presence clean from the surface of history, using puppets and handmaidens to ensure that the things he had done were done.
But not now. SlimJim’s … was impossible now, where it’d always been possible.
She smiled, blood staining her teeth. Inside her, she could feel a big tremor coming. The biggest one yet. Which would happen first? Would all her bones break? Would her heart burst clean from her chest?
If only she could look up at the night sky with her own eyes instead of the implants …
The bubble was coming, big and dark and black and laden down with impossible but irrefutable proof that a fluid moment in time had been stolen from Samiel and turned into an immovable object, a veritable block of titanium sitting in the middle of the river that was time.
“Here we go.” Lissande whispered quietly. “Time to die.”
She took a deep breath and started letting it out slowly …
The bubble burst. Disappeared as if it’d never been. So too, the agony, that most excruciating pain, and the physical symptoms of that reversion effect’s horrific seizures. Lissande Amour was standing, eyes trained on Drake Bishop and Sparks Dangerously as they disappeared into the crowd, their brightly colored bodyguards trickling slowly after them.
Lissande ran a slow, trembling hand against every part of her body that she could reach, gently, carefully probing for any signs of wounds or trauma, her mind refusing to let go of the possibility that even though the Baron’s attempts to change things had failed, something more than memories might remain.
Nothing. Nothing at all. The pain and the agony resided only in her mind, and in time, with practice, even that would be gone, leaving behind only the echoes of the location where SlimJim’s was supposed to’ve been once upon a time and the place where it’d always been since that time.
The time-traveler shook her head. It was always so difficult, dealing with memories like that. She knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that SlimJim’s had always been a converted school. Knew it in her bones now. At the same time, it’d always been a warehouse five miles east of the school. Had always been there. Would always be there.
Had never been there. Always ha …
“Well,” Lissande said to the warm night air, “looks like it’s Cancun after all. I hate sunlight.”
Just then, the phone she carried when pressing matters required she speak to one of Samiel’s earthbound assets rang, the shrill trilling ring momentarily overriding the crowd sounds from down below.
Pulling it from her pocket, Lissande stared at it as though she were seeing it for the first time.
None of Samiel’s assets called her without her first being made aware of it from the Baron himself. It was how things worked; under proper circumstances, the devices could be made to call up or down The Line, an almost magical operation of the highest levels of science. An unscheduled call could be devastating.
It kept ringing.
Curious, Lissande checked the caller ID.
Granger, one of Samiel’s more influential assets. The puzzle of why the man was risking everything to make a call solved itself; her inability to render assistance in the SlimJim’s matter meant that her employer would’ve opted to rely on the only other person who could possibly make any kind of attempt at all, and that man would be Delbert Granger.
Had he been on the receiving end of that vicious temporal tsunami? Even a bit? As an ordinary human being with none of the defenses her kind had against such things, his mind had to be completely and utterly addled.
Still. Risking an unscheduled call? Samiel would be furious.
Lissande flicked the phone open and put it to her ear, already talking. “Granger, this is a stupid, bad idea. Don’t think you’re above Samiel’s wroth…”
Spelunking
Drake Bishop couldn’t admit it to his best and only friend, but … he didn’t feel right in his own skin any longer. Being Spur for five thousand years was proving to be something that he wasn’t able to shake off as easily as he’d imagined; secretly, deep down in the very basest levels of his consciousness, Drake had been hoping and praying that the moment he returned to the temporal incongruity, the stern and stoic persona of the dry android would be stricken from him, but it hadn’t.
Thoughts of what was right and wrong, programmed into Spur by himself so that he could more easily assist a flagging Bishop Empire, rose up in him more often than not, and never more so than when Sparks was dealing with Garth.
And that was where the problem lay, he supposed. On the one hand, it was very clear and easy for Bishop to understand why his friend Sparks was going after Nickels with such a vengeance. Prior to leaving for Zanzibar to keep BishopCo from capsizing under a colossal level of mismanagement and corruption, the two of them had sat down to finally discuss Sparks’ contribution to assisting their strange, weird friend.
Setting up BishopCo had been easy enough. Hell, they’d started that right from the beginning, almost right from the second they’d crawled through the pinhole bridge connecting the two different versions of Reality. What better way to establish their credentials than by becoming a linchpin company capable of providing the Armies of Man with the kinds of weapons and technology that they needed to deal with the growing threat that was the Kith and Kin and their horrific minions, the Harmony soldiers? As they were from the proto-Reality, their minds were capable of producing the kinds of hy-tech equipment that those most powerful leaders of the Armies had gotten used to receiving from Garth N’Chalez, so they’d been embraced quite, quite readily.
But that’d been more his thing, and Sparks –who’d confessed one night that he’d never really liked N’Chalez as much as he felt he should’ve- wanted to do something bigger and better.
Drake shook his head ruefully at that as he swiped his fingers through a data cloud of information. While he considered what to do next, he dug through the last five thousand years of history to see what’d been happening in the greater Universe at large; as a minion of BishopCo and
always watched by a combination of Turing Regulators and Trinity Itself, too great an amount of data had been simply withheld from him, and Jordan hadn’t been overly keen on letting his pet android know anything more than was strictly necessary to assist him in running the business.
Bigger and better, that’d always been Sparks’ way. If someone surfed at night, Sparks had to do it in the middle of the night, when there was no moon in the sky. If someone started doing tricks on the board, he’d be out there before you knew it, trying like mad to wow everyone with something crazily impossible.
Confronted with the absolute gravity of why Garth had kept the secrets he’d kept, of why he’d left them all in the dark about who and what he was, Sparks Dangerously had suffered something of a crisis of conscience, admitting to his only friend that had he only trusted Garth earlier, the whole debacle involving Lissande and Baron Samiel would’ve been over that much sooner.
“Except you didn’t.” Drake flicked through another swathe of history. It was as it’d always been out there in the Unreal Universe.
Trinity Itself swallowing galaxies whole, offering the citizens who lived there little in the way of freedom, barricading those beings who chose to deny an AI as their ruler behind varying degrees of impenetrable embargoes or outright conquering them. It all depended on what those galaxies and systems had to offer the machine mind in the way of preparing for the end of all things.
Of late, it looked like Trinity had been doing more crushing than coercing, and a lot of that had been done with Garth N’Chalez at the helm.
“What a fucking nightmare.” Drake muttered grimly, refusing to look once again at Garth’s memories of those times. The things he’d done to himself to get the Armies of Man to agree to his plan! He’d all but opened himself right up for direct manipulation, managing only to prevent their simulacra from doing so by getting to their personalities first. A hair-raising scheme that almost hadn’t worked, but it’d still left him vulnerable to Trinity’s machinations.
Drake’d watched a few hours of Garth’s worst moments before turning the screens off, and for one good reason; he’d traveled –however briefly- with Garth en route to the Emperor’s Dome, had seen him in battle, and he felt quite deeply that everything was on the right path now.
Should be on the right path.
Except … Sparks had changed. His dreams of doing something big and bold and drastic as a Galaxy-class apology to the one man who’d proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that he could be trusted in all things had eventually centered on providing Garth with an entire solar system of resources. All of that had been designed to culminate in a partner, a person capable of providing for him the kind of assistance that he’d never gotten in his time of need.
Drake summoned Sparks’ files on Naoko Kamagana. They were replete with data, right up until the moment Latelyspace had been sealed away behind that cunning shield. Bright, brighter than anyone else in the system, she’d been specially … bred … Drake supposed was the correct term, even if it somehow felt off-key … an intellect off the charts, an innate and brilliantly incisive mind that could see through to the kernels of any problem.
It wasn’t indicated in the files anywhere, but Drake was willing to bet his left nut that there was more to Naoko Kamagana’s existence than careful breeding. Tomas Kamagana’s files were just as complete as his daughter’s, but they were pristine, perfect. Everything in that man’s life had happened as if in a storybook. Perfect marriages resulting in perfect babies for centuries, the best levels of education, nearly obscene levels of power, even for a Yellow dog Elder clan. The child that’d become Tomas Kamagana was nearly as brilliant as the woman who’d become his daughter, with the only thing truly hampering him in his intellectual growth being reliance on artificial intelligence.
A genius father raises a genius daughter who is capable of seeing through to very heart of any problem, raised in a solar system with the resources to provide Garth N’Chalez with a standing army of thirty million nearly indestructible warriors.
Drake nodded, impressed. Sparks had indeed gone big, had indeed cashed in on his promise to give Garth N’Chalez precisely what he needed to do battle with Kith Antal and his eternal army of Harmony soldiers.
He went back to Naoko’s files, unable to shake the certain feeling in his guts that there was more to her than met the eye. There had to be something there, something to explain how the end of her life as Naoko Kamagana had become so rapidly awful. Sparks wanted him to believe that the failure began with her exposure to Garth, would undoubtedly site the so-called N’Chalez as part and parcel of the hows and whys of her transformation from a lovely EuroJapanese girl into the mad creature trying to rip the Universe apart, but …
“I don’t buy it. Not completely.” Drake couldn’t accept that as truth. They’d both seen the memories, could –if they really wanted to travel down that path- experience the man’s emotions in regards to Naoko, and there was one thing that was abundantly clear.
Garth had loved Naoko, and even with blocked memories from the proto-Reality preventing him from ever truly connecting with her in a meaningful manner, that’d meant something to him. Even if he didn’t have full control of the weird effect that sometimes took friends and enemies and transformed them into something that was in some way, shape or form necessary to his ultimate plans for Reality 2.0, Drake absolutely refused to believe that the Kin’kithal would allow Naoko to suffer so … wretchedly.
It was horrific. Drake was positive that if Garth learned what’d happened to his would-be girlfriend right that minute, he’d begin bartering for the rights to go save her. The signs were there; Garth felt deep, heart-wrenching grief over all of the changes he’d wrought in his comrades down through the years, wished with utter sincerity every time his eyes fell on Babel or Captain Eddie, that they’d never met him, that he’d never relied on them in all his years.
So if Garth felt that way about men and women he’d served with, that burning emotion had to be a hundred times brighter when it came to someone he’d loved.
Drake hammered the desk with his fingers, riffing out a long-lost guitar solo. There was more to Naoko than Eddie was admitting. He had to find out what it was, if for no other reason than he hoped to use whatever information he gleaned to steer his friend in a more gentle treatment of the man who hoped to rebuild the Universe; while they intended on remaining inside the sphere of influence generated by the temporal incongruity for eternity, the inhabitants of the Unreal Universe didn’t have those options.
If Garth N’Chalez didn’t survive Eddie’s cruel treatment, that would leave either Trinity Itself or Kith Antal’s masters, the M’Zahdi Hesh. Of the two, Drake supposed that Trinity’s version of a new reality would be marginally better, if only because It’d proven that It was adept at ruling a largish amount of living souls. The problem was, that was on a single plane, and Garth’s so-called ‘Reality 2.0’ was a tree bristling with an infinite number of universes.
It was highly doubtful that Trinity would be capable of controlling that kind of existence.
Hell, as far as Drake was concerned, it was wildly improbable that Garth’s chosen representative in the new Reality –Huey T. Roboticus- would be up for the job, but they all had to hope that whatever had been done to the vastly modified artificial intelligence was going to be more than enough.
The flip side, of course, was Antal and his overlords, the Heshii. As far as voracious locusts destroying the Universe every few trillion years to fatten up on the resulting surge of energy ripping through the extra-dimensionality went, there could be worse things. After all, from a broad perspective, two or three trillion years of life and growth in a usually unfettered manner was more than most people could possibly hope for, but …
That plan was right out the window. It’d been engineered that way by none other than Garth N’Chalez himself. The Unreal Universe was full to bursting with more potential energy than any other Universe the Heshii had ever destroyed in their en
tire career as dimensional supervillians.
Images of overfull balloons kept popping up in Drake’s head whenever he considered what’d happen when the Hesh tried to chow down on this old, bedraggled Universe.
So it had to be Garth’s way or no way. Drake had lived a long, long time. Seen more than enough misery and strife and backstabbing and egoistic bullshit to drive home the fact that he was nothing like Garth, had no real cares or desires to save the Universe. Especially after being trapped in Spur-body for five thousand years.
But what he did have was a desire to spare his friend a needless, pointless, mercurial trial that he couldn’t possibly hope to win.
Which was why he was digging into things that would certainly aggravate his only other friend, a friend who was –for the time being- more in control of the temporal incongruity than he was. Drake was more or less certain that Sparks wouldn’t let this little … indiscretion get the better of him, but then again…
“Hey, pal, what’s up?” Eddie strolled into the room, pushing the beads of data trailing down from the ceiling out of the way with a flick of the hand.
“Oh you know,” Drake leaned back in his comfie chair, ran a hand through his hair, “trying to get caught up to the present. You’d be surprised how much shit went on out here that I had zero idea about. Between good old Jordan keeping me on a tight leash and Trinity Itself insisting I keep my nose clean, there’s a lot I don’t know.”
Eddie nodded, pulling up a chair of his own to sit in. “Mmmhmm, I get that, I get that. Locked away in that Spur-body of yours for so long must’ve been a pain in the ass.”
