Emperor-for-Life: DeadShop Redux (Unreal Universe Book 6)

by Lee Bond

  The die was cast. Delbert Granger was in San Francisco, at ground zero, with an undocumented time traveler doing who knew what. It was up to one old man –who admittedly had a nearly prescient insight into the darkness of the world- to figure out what was going on and report back.

  As he started unscrewing the main cover for the long, unflinching list of personally watched moments in history, Baron Samiel’s eyes stole to the main chain emanating from San Francisco once more. Still more green than red. Just a tiny hint, a minor amuse bouche of soft pink, a general indication that while not everything was one hundred percent whatever it was The Man was doing, it had no voluble impact on anything.

  13. Is Everyone Ready?

  DAY ONE: Out Damn Spot and Let’s Fuck Some Shit Up, Time Traveler Style

  “Well, this is gross as fuck.” Garth craned his head around, taking in the downstairs hallway where he’d played out Death by Hellfire Missile more times than he cared to remember, taking in the sheer volume of vibrant red stuff coating very nearly every single surface.

  Including the ceiling.

  Garth licked his lips as he recalled the time he’d managed to redirect the incoming Hellfire missile at long last, almost feeling the surge of joy as the powerful and deadly projectile had finally changed direction.

  Right into the roof.

  With him on it. Like some kind of unkillable Major Kong riding an atomic bomb from an airplane, only with him exploding against the roof like a particularly … soggy piñata.

  Everything was red. Very nearly the entire hallway. Coated with stuff that looked like blood because it was the absolute precise color of old blood that’d been given plenty of time to dry, but there was, y’know, the distinct lack of that really grotesque old blood stink.

  Walking up to the nearest wall, Garth extended a hand and ran it along the red surface, expecting to feel something out of the ordinary, but all he got for his efforts was … absolutely nothing. The wall felt … wally. Like old wall that hadn’t been maintained very well over the last few years.

  Garth shook his head. “This is really gross. And weird. I wonder if this is some kind of weird bullshit trick being perpetrated on me by Emp Marseilles. Like, if I am surrounded by visible signs of my failure in one of the grossest ways possible I’ll throw in the flag and call it quits. Well, Emperor-for-Life Etienne Marseilles, it’s going to take more than making the hallway of my property look like Pinhead’s personal abattoir to get me throw in the towel, you dig?”

  When no overbearing God-voiced proclamations rattled the heavens and no pinched-face, displeased looking disembodied heads belonging to certain EuroJapanese supreme beings wandered into the hallway shouting epithets and cajoling him to begin making amends for his crimes against who-the-fuck-ever, Garth nodded to himself, very satisfied that Etienne was either not watching or was plainly disinterested.

  Either way, it gave him leeway to do what needed doing next, which was satisfy his curiosity about the red ‘paint’ dousing the hallway.

  While Garth wandered through the mazelike paths of the school, keeping an eye out for something like a janitor’s closet or –more preferably- an actual maintenance office, he started sketching out plans for the Tron-esque arcade that he planned on building.

  More importantly, he considered just what effect something as wicked cool and utterly badass as an arcade would have on Baron Samiel’s plans; the ultimate goal for the as-yet unnamed Arcade of Awesomeness was to lure Drake Bishop and Sparks Dangerously to him, instead of him going off into wherever Samiel was or soon would be building his own Bishop-trap.

  The rules of engagement were clear: because he’d spent the coin of their friendship on getting the school, the PIDpak and some operating cash, both Dangerously and Bishop could not become friendlies. He had to save Bishop from Samiel’s predations –not to mention Lissande’s otherworldly wiles- without either man forming any kind of emotional bond.

  Which would be hard, because Bishop was a typical fratbro. He loved everyone and everyone loved him. The man had a legitimate heart of gold and if you yourself weren’t an immediate douchebag, the chance that he’d embrace you wholly into his fold were pretty fucking high, Ushbet M’Tai manipulations notwithstanding.

  Dangerously, on the other hand, was –at heart- more untrusting than his BFF. Undoubtedly from being raised on the ‘mean streets’ of New York’s Upper West Side, surrounded by other rich kids who saw nothing wrong with trying to con a friend out of all the lunch money in the Universe, Sparks wasn’t a guy who trusted someone instantly, a factoid that –in the end- had cost everyone valuable time in saving Bishop.

  The arcade needed to be badass enough to lure both men in of their own free will.

  Theoretically, this'd be simple enough; thanks to his awareness of future developments, Garth was more than willing to 'create' blockbuster games in the here and now to get them through the front door.

  The hard part? Being enough of a dick so Bishop wouldn't want to become best buds with the cool dude owning a radical arcade, but not so much of one that Dangerously's 'Fuck This Guy in the Eyeball' radar pinged like crazy and they wound up bailing because Bishop hated it when Sparks turned cranky.

  Losing that foothold on their comings and goings would drastically lower his chances of keeping Drake safe.

  Knowing both men as well as he did should make the con as easy as pie, but … it wasn’t that simple.

  “Here we go, hey ho.” Garth sidled up to a door labeled ‘Maintenance’ and tried the handle.

  Locked tight.

  “No matter. I’m sure the building supervisor won’t mind.” A quick, brutal foot to the door a la breaching style number one and the door damn near exploded off the hinges. It bounced and rattled it’s way backwards into the maintenance room, kicking up a small storm of tools and screws and other odds and ends before landing at an awkward angle, wedged between an ancient, moldering desk and a monstrous black metal cabinet that’d seen better days … around the turn of the century.

  A dry, musty odor rose up to greet him. Garth’s eyes tracked along the exterior walls until he found an open window. He grimaced. Some kind of animal had gotten in but hadn’t been able to get out.

  “Awesome. I can add organic cleanup to the list. Old place like this, ain't gonna be cheap. Cool."

  For while he’d been mulling over his plans to save Drake and how best to build the Arcade of Awesomeness, Garth had also been trying to come up with a dollar amount that'd allow him to not only get his business off the ground, but to get out of the game with his wits intact.

  One of his primary goals, and it made no matter the Emperor knew, was to break the reality surrounding him. One of the best ways to do that was to start messing around with what everyone involved in Project Groundhog Day agreed was the most stable version of the timeline.

  In the 21st century, in the year 2016, there’d been more technological breakthroughs in six months than there’d been in the last five years. Everyone from astrophysicists to backyard geneticists to robot hobbyists had been inventing things that people only a year earlier would’ve sworn was impossible, turning the scientific community on it’s ear.

  From advanced solar panels capable of storing six times as much energy as current models to flexible micro-touchscreens to new forms of ultra-lightweight aerogels to 3D printers churning out infinitely more advanced and usable prosthetic limbs, this moment in time was rife with opportunities for a quasi-time traveler to thoroughly fuck shit up.

  And that was just the hardware.

  Software was a whole other domain. He knew more about the software –including games, apps for everyone’s smartphones and high-end programs- than the hardware, simply because he’d been friends with Drake and Sparks. Those two knuckleheads had been wired into social media, the Internet, and damn near every kind of gaming platform and computer system in the Universe, running everything from illicit file sharing servers from their dorm rooms to encoding top-of-the-line Dark Web crawlers.
One misplaced fish out of Universal waters had had no choice but to buckle down and dive deep into those very same waters.

  Garth figured he could code the next iteration of Google’s algorithms over a rootbeer float if he needed to, then sell it back to them at a sharp increase in price, but what he really intended on doing was exploiting the wild world of video games and apps.

  “Hey,” Garth said to himself as his eyes fell on a hammer, “if Kim Kardashian can make a hundred gajillion dollars for that stupid app, then I can do the same goddamn thing. And in the process, if I can fuck shit up enough to derail the Emperor’s mirage, then maybe he’ll have to call it quits. Yeah. I like the sound of that.”

  The powerless Kin’kithal grabbed a hammer and headed back to the Red Lobby. Every now and then, he swung the tool back and forth, getting a feel for the weight.

  ***

  “Okayyyyy.” Garth pursed his lips and considered what he was witnessing with an open mind. “This is … weird. Er. Weirder. This is. Yeah. Weird."

  Previously disturbed by the presence of blood that wasn’t quite blood staining the walls of his favorite hallway, Garth’s earliest plan had been to simply pull the walls down so he could avoid answering embarrassing questions delivered to him by petrified workers there to spruce the joint up a bit, the … situation he was now confronted with was something a bit beyond his experience.

  The old plaster drywall of the dilapidated school had fallen apart with staggering ease, whole chunks, six foot by six and bigger still, hitting the ground with each swing of the hammer. Garth -in the middle of this and grinning- had grown convinced that once the plaster dust settled, the gory hallway would instead be nothing more and nothing less than a dirty stretch of corridor.

  Not so.

  Not by a fucking long shot.

  “This is a fucking problem. A weird fucking problem that I don’t even like. This isn’t ‘oh, hey, I’ve developed the ability to see through walls’. This is a ‘holy fuck, bro, you got, like, blood, floating in the air where a wall used to be, we should totally call Tangina Barrons from Poltergeist to sort this shit out’ kind of problem.” Garth dropped the hammer on the ground and stepped forward to deal with the bloody swathe of red … whatever it was … that remained suspended in midair, right where a section of wall had once been.

  It was eerie how the spatter pattern just … hung there, like it was somehow attached to the memory of a wall that was no longer there.

  Tentatively, nervously –because who in their right mind, even with all the shit he’d dealt with in his own personally fucked up life of absolute, balls-to-the-wall random weirdness did this kind of thing- Garth reached out with several absolutely not trembling fingers and ever so gently touched what had, at one point in time, bits of vaporized Garth Nickels.

  Nothing happened.

  Well, none of the things he’d been expecting to happen –accidental vaporization due to coming into contact with previous time-traveling bits of himself figuring highest on the old List of Awful Stuff that Hasn’t Happened To Me Yet’- happened.

  Garth eyeballed his fingers thoughtfully. Was he imagining things, or had he felt the tiniest bit of … resistance, almost like a very miniscule electrical charge? Or was it his imagination? Was he trying to make this weird bit of … weirdness into something more important than it really was?

  “That’s a lucky thing. I don’t think I’d like to have to explain to Emperor Crankypants how I managed to vaporize myself or, like, fall through a crack in his precious ‘this isn’t a simulation, you foolish Kin’kithal asshole, it’s reality’ simulation. At least, not yet.” Garth touched the floating miasma a second time with more confidence, senses straining to evoke a firmer repetition of what he thought might’ve happened the first time.

  At first –like last time- nothing at all happened. It was just him, twiddling his fingers through a splotch of red floaty stuff. But just as he was about to give up, the smallest frisson of tingly energy shivered through a fingertip. Not much, certainly not enough to register on any kind of device, just enough for someone trained to use their senses to the nth degree to detect.

  Garth pulled his fingers back and scrutinized the hover-stain. “Hm. Is this an X-Files mystery or a Supernatural mystery? If I had my choice, I’d really rather it be the former, because Dana Scully! Although, chillin’ with Dean Winchester sounds equally awesome and terrible for my liver. Especially Demon Dean.”

  Garth didn’t trust the stains. He didn’t like their presence. They represented something he didn’t really have time to deal with yet, –not unless he wanted to lose out on several highly lucrative trades destined to take place in a few hours' time- but try as he might, he just couldn't ignore the suspicious graffiti.

  On the one hand, it could be something left behind by the Emperor-for-Life, in which case, the bastard was doing exactly what he claimed he wouldn’t do, which was cheat, and if the man running the game was cheating, then there wasn’t anything he could do to prevent it.

  Which honked him right off.

  That made the whole premise behind the Emperor’s Guilt Games a sham, and there’d been just enough hauteur in the ruler’s attitude to suggest that cheating was exactly the last thing that’d be going on.

  Minus, of course, the fact that he was making one simple Engineer play said game on Ultramax Superhard without any cheat codes. Which was totally unfair already, making random weird blood-fitti on the walls the kind of rank amateur behavior someone like the Emperor wouldn't bother with.

  On the other hand, this might be a glitch in the ‘it’s not a goddamn Matrix’. If it was an exploitable glitch … really, who could blame one subhuman bastard from taking advantage of a pre-existing issue inside the un-Matrix?

  Garth flipped the dried red mystery a long, nasty bird. “Fuck you, mystery. I don’t have time for your bullshit. Gotta rape the stock market now. If you’re here when I get back, kindly have a presentation ready for me on why I should trust you. Bonus marks goes to whoever can also explain to me how best to use you to my own advantage without getting busted by the Dungeonmaster.”

  ***

  Garth paused outside the stores, ears quirking to pick up some sound he was half-hearing, half-remembering, while his skin shivered beneath an invisible breeze; though the sun hadn’t quite reached it’s apex, you could already tell it was going to be hot as hell the whole day, a fact that had Garth looking this way and that.

  “This feels familiar.” He said to himself, peering through the grungy window into the internet café.

  And then a thin, wavery sound warbled it’s way on through the area, a barely-there, hardly-present ruumruumruum.

  A smile split Garth’s face. He knew what was going on and the Kin’kithal realized with a start that he’d been waiting for this moment.

  Samiel was watching. The strange, invisible sound threading down the street and through his bones was particular to the incongruity’s ability to peer through the mists of time and into any moment he chose.

  “About time.” Garth snickered at the sky. “Question is, are you watching, or waiting?”

  There was no answer, not yet, because the pinprick sounds covering the area were indefinite, amoeba-like. The bastard only knew the general area and the most likely point in The Line, but had no clue as to who, and most importantly, where.

  “You don’t have the whole picture yet.” Garth chuckled as he pushed his way into the shop, whistling the theme song to the movie Fallen…

  ***

  Larry eyed the bulky sonofabitch shouldering his way into the Internet café with barely disguised incredulity; the man looked big enough to break pretty much all of the other nerds and geeks in the place –most of whom were busy hollering at one another about feeding junglers or bitching about AFK motherfuckers that were almost certainly on the other side of the planet- in half without breaking a sweat.

  “Gym’s down the street.” Larry said, turning his eyes back to the Powerpuff Girls marathon he’d be
en watching since the sun rose. He laughed at the obvious BDSM overtones of HIM, wondering how in the hell some of this stuff had made it past the censors.

  “Say what now?” Garth furrowed his brow. A geek –a scrawny redhead kid with glasses- started shrieking and frothing at the mouth. Something to do with the fact that he didn’t speak Russian and how he had no clue why he was even playing CS:GO anymore.

  Larry pointed to the door, then jerked his fingers left. “Gym. Down the street. To the left.”

  “Uhm.” Garth pointed to a bank of unused computers further away from where the LAN-party nerds, LoLers and DOTA2 weirdoes were basically proving the point that if there was intelligent life in the Universe, those wise aliens were almost certainly avoiding planet Earth for some pretty obvious reasons. “I need to rent some computer time.”

  “You do.” Larry looked up from the Powerpuff Girls, pretty thoroughly on shaky ground now. “For what? All the porn sites are blocked, man. If that’s what you’re into, head right instead of left and you’ll eventually come to a titty bar. Or, if you keep walking, you’ll pretty much randomly run into someone being naked because San Francisco.”

  “Look, man.” Garth tried to keep as pleasant a demeanor as possible because this was the third Internet café he’d been to, and was the only one within reasonable distance that also had a direct PIDpak payment kiosk. He’d already missed out on a few high-volume trades that could’ve netted him a few hundred thousand dollars because ‘San Francisco’ also meant ‘too fucking lazy to click a fucking box in the appropriate fucking field’ when storeowners set up their fucking stores for online purchases.

  He’d flip his goddamn shit any goddamn second now.

  “I need access to the Internet for non-porn related reasons. If you’re okay with these fucking idiots,” Garth jerked a thumb at a rack of kids desperately trying to beat some Japanese wunderkinds halfway across the globe at Starcraft 2, failing to realize all they’d get for their efforts were sprained thumbs and 64-bit migraines, “hooting and hollering and generally doing everything but flinging their shit at each other to establish dominance, one guy who likes to be physically fit sitting in a corner quietly doing non-illegal Internet stuff shouldn’t be too much of a problem, right? I thought San Francisco was, like, a pretty mellow place. Don’t trigger me, man.”