by Lee Bond
“My dad’s a stock broker, old timer.” Emerson took another noisy slurp, delighting in the way the guy’s ears quirked at the irritating sound. “I know a bit.”
“You’re like, what, three years old?” Garth switched his attention to the drafting monitor and considered the designs for Changetech, the latest in a long string of brilliant ideas he had for a business front. He’d wanted to do as he’d done on Hospitalis, and use all the great-sounding fake businesses from the movies he most adored, but a quick check on domain names and all that’d revealed fairly early on that not only would he get fined for copyright infringement, he might win himself jail time. “Shouldn’t you be at home, getting your underpaid and overworked manservant to wipe your ass?”
Emerson shrugged. “Nah. Mumsy is in Cabo with her ‘tennis instructor’ and Dad is somewhere in the Catskills, hiding from investors. It’s this whole thing. Changetech is a lame name. I liked the other one better. Supradynamics Incorporated. Sounds better.”
Fiddling with the color palette and choice of fonts at lightning speed, Garth eventually wound up undoing all the changes. Being a perfectionist was one of many problems he continually battled with, but short of hiring a marketing firm –which’d cost him two arms and half a leg- the logo and digital press announcement fliers he’d worked up just weren’t going to get any better.
This was the kind of thing you used AI for. A level two AI could’ve designed everything he’d spent the last six hours hammering out in under ten minutes, with the whole lot of it perfectly calibrated for maximal impact on viewers and a guaranteed sixty-five percent favorable response threshold. From the designs alone. He wouldn’t even need to sell anything. People would just give him money. That’s how good an AI was at conning people.
This old school bullshit was … bullshit.
“Suprad … that was just a thing to get my design skills warmed up, weird little child with cherry red tongue. God, who taught you how to drink?” Garth watched on smugly as he made himself another fifty thousand dollars by shorting a sad little company called ‘Intellicon Majorcorp’; they couldn’t know it, but they were on their way out of the 3D printing and design game, with all their intellectual property destined to show up on the market as early as the week after, all thanks to his predilection for paying attention to cool shit. Once that happened, he'd snap everything up on the low-low and no one'd be the wiser. “It’s an unattractive name. Too unwieldy. Changetech is more in align … why am I explaining this shit to you? Why aren’t you hanging out with your howler monkey friends? Didn’t I hear that fatshit youngster …”
“Ricardo.”
“Whatever. Didn’t I hear Ricardo say he and his other fatshit friends were going down to the park to burn some illegal fireworks?” Garth wiggled his eyebrows alluringly. “When I was a kid, lighting off illegal fireworks in public places was something I used to dream about.”
Actually, when he’d been thirteen, he and Antal had gone out deep into the Mojave to practice grenade tossing, mortar launching and computer assisted RPG targeting, but that was neither here nor there. It was the same kind of thing, only less colorful.
Emerson rolled his eyes. “Ricardo is a dick. He says he’ll let you launch Roman Candles at him when we play IRL Wizards, but he runs away every time you start. Then he gets his bodyguards involved and his face gets all shiny when he starts crying on account of he does start crying. If I was his dad, I’d be really fucking embarrassed.”
“Oh?” Garth checked his balance. He was up three hundred grand. Not bad, considering he could’ve been closer to three million. It was all about the baby steps though. Attracting Samiel’s direct ire this early in the game was just too risky. “Who’s his dad?”
“Dunno. Some drug runner. Or gun runner. Or something like that. Or he used to be, but sold out all his friends. We’re supposed to call Ricardo ‘Ricky’ because of Witness Relocation, but the kid’s an idiot.” Emerson looked sincerely at Garth. “If I was in Witness Relocation and they changed my name to, like, Bart or whatever, guaranteed everyone would be all ‘Hey Bart’. From what I seen on the Internet, you burn your bridges with gun runners and stuff, it’s gonna be car bombs and kidnapping all over the place.”
“You know … what’s your name again, kidlet?” Garth bought up a bunch of shares in Redolex, not even bothering to feel guilty. In four months’ time, Redolex was going to find itself on the top tier of over-the-counter DNA analysis kits, but their genome sequencing software was needed for something a little more important: decoding the DNA of DeadShop infected ODDities.
In the original Line of the Dream, he'd never had a chance to learn much about the ODDities and how they were the way they were, but that was going to change, especially since he was gonna have to fight them with no super powers. Cracking their DNA was the first stop on that particular tour.
“Emerson.”
“Fucking rich white kid names.” Garth shook his head, unsurprised when Emerson nodded in full agreement. “Look, Emerson, when I was your age I wasn’t this jaded and cynical. You even have a girlfriend? I was trying to get laid at … what’re you actually, twelve? Thirteen?”
“Ten. And I have access to Internet porn, dude. Don’t need a girlfriend.”
“Christ on a crutch, you’re ten? You don’t look ten. You look about forty-five. What’s that all about?” Garth felt like a stranger in a strange land and he was tripping balls; if this was a simulation and the Emperor was somewhere behind the scenes managing the whole show, this little moment in time was one of the weirdest things he’d ever experienced, because Emerson the Annoying Ten Year Old wasn’t something anyone could fake.
Shouldn’t be able to fake.
“Mumsy thinks its GMO food. Steroids in the cow milk sort of thing.” Emerson shrugged. “You should see my buddy Eduardo. He’s like seven, and nearly six feet tall. He has to shop in the teen section. It’s hilarious. We get him to buy cigarettes and booze. Kid’s got a 1970’s cop stash and everything”
A wild question suddenly appeared, one Garth had never bothered to ask himself before right that second, not once, not when he’d first begun prepping the Unreal Universe for demolition and not any time since.
One he should’ve asked himself when Emperor-for-Life Etienne Marseilles had proven quite unequivocally that his own personal memories of the proto-Reality had been very seriously messed with by the local deities.
What actually made this place so much better than the Unreality?
He was sitting next to a ten year old who was about as jaded and bitter as some of the younger Specters he’d served time with, a thing that didn’t make a lick of sense. He was in a city that purportedly remained one of the best places in the entire world to visit, yet there were predator drones in the sky, drones capable of killing quite a few people without very little effort.
And those were just things he was noticing right this moment. What else had he missed? What else had been torn from his mind by the Ushbet, or mangled by them, or … fucking massaged?
Was his absolute love for the Dream so profound simply because the Ushbet M'Tai had been leery of his presence? When they'd managed to sink their claws into his brain matter, they'd seen both his present capabilities and the ultimate route his powers would take so …
Had they been afraid he'd return one day to destroy or conquer their little corner of the Engines' Dream, going so far as to fill him full of soap opera love for the place?
Or … was this version of The Dream not as true to the original as the Emperor had claimed?
The Emperor -or whoever he was when he was on the toilet- was from The Dream. Was this version a remnant of his memories?
Emerson sat there, noisily working his way through to the bottom of his Slurpee, blissfully aware of the grating sound and how it seemed to have an almost magical effect on anyone over the age of twenty. Emerson, aware his mother was in a foreign country having an illicit affair with someone not her husband and who knew his father was hiding
somewhere in the Catskills to avoid being arrested for Insider Trading or whatever.
“You stare off in the distance that much longer, dude, I’m going to steal all the money you made today. Wouldn’t be too difficult with all your browsers and shit open.” Emerson rattled his empty Slurpee cup at Garth.
Garth blinked. Nothing he was seeing could be taken at face value. Everything needed to be considered a little more apprehensively, because it was finally sinking in that there was more than one level to this game. Garth was sure he had that time-traveling motherfucker on lockdown and he technically hadn’t even fired a shot yet. Besides which, that evil bastard’s motivations were fairly well understood and he definitely lacked the ingenuity to mess around with the local timestream like this. No, Samiel's intentions would be made perfectly and violently clear.
That much Garth knew for certain.
This stank of the Emperor, fucking with him, somehow, because even though this entire realm was being created by the incongruity and directed by Etienne himself, there was only so much mojo to go around, right? It didn't matter that Samiel had once used the chunk of exotic matter to travel through time.
Rendering a true and perfect iteration of a place right down to how sunshine smelled off concrete and getting the irritating rattle of a straw being played against the bottom of an empty cup took a lot of processing power.
Dropping a kid like Emerson into the mix? A tiny proto-douche, with a fully realized backstory, complete with people in his life with the same levels of generated reality?
There had to be some automated script pooping NPC's out for the Emperor because … because reasons.
Thinking about this weird shit was definitely giving him a headache.
“Uhhh, dude, you, uh, might wanna close out all your accounts now, lock down anything you think is important enough to not be temporarily seized by the Federal government.” Emerson rattled his cup loud enough to permanently break Garth’s spell of deep introspection.
“Huh? What?” Garth looked around, looked at Emerson, then settled his eyes where they belonged: on the monitors where his transactions were being handled. “The fuck is this bullshit?”
The Kin’kithal pointed an accusatory finger at the tabs that were being locked down by very official-looking digital locks; he watched on, incredulous, as bold, brilliant blue logos with the words ‘Semper nos Custodiunt’ started slamming across an open trading screen open. Frantically, Garth wiggled the mouse around, trying to interact with the screen.
Nothing. Working quickly now, following Emerson’s suspiciously sage advice, Garth keyboard-tabbed his way to the next screen and quit out, choosing ‘yes’ to the few on-screen prompts that were either reminding him of important shit or asking him if he really wanted to lose out on some super cool thing.
Either way, it didn’t matter, because he was on to the next screen before whatever it was he’d exited out of had done so properly. He did this for the next three trading screens he had open, cursing quite profanely in IndoRussian; until or unless he figured out what the fuck was going on, he was either going to be a majority shareholder for a handful of companies he didn’t really want to be associated with –FrigiCor, for example, was a corporation working on ultra-chilling tech to be used on extremely advanced, ridiculously hot-running hardware, another business he would’ve preferred to future-raid into the ground- or he was gonna lose out on the opportunities altogether.
The last tab to be closed was the one displaying his personal bank accounts. Here, Garth took a few long, slow-seeming seconds to ensure that the data on the screen meshed with a quick sync to his piddy. Holding his breath, feeling a pressure he didn’t like, Garth triumphantly x’d out of the browsers altogether just as the front doors to the café slammed open loud enough for a window to crack.
An extremely pissed off Larry started off well, hollering a torrent of abuse at whoever’d kicked the door to his shop open. A few seconds later, Larry found himself staring down the barrel of a very serious looking automatic rifle, being wielded by someone dressed head-to-toe in equally serious looking urban combat protection gear. Half a dozen more people dressed like they were ready to take down the modern day equivalent of Al Capone filtered into the room, sweeping the muzzles of their guns this way and that.
Garth smiled blandly when one of them made eye contact with him through his or her shiny black combat helmet. He emoted quite strenuously that he wasn’t going to go anywhere and politely obliged the psychic request for him to raise his hands high enough to prove he wasn’t going to go bananas and start shooting anyone.
The six soldiers, wearing bulletproof vests emblazoned with legitimate Federal Bureau tags, shuffled his way, shouting the typical tactical communication code words.
Eyes wide, Emerson made a weird face. “Well, this is way too familiar for me, soooo I’m gonna fuck off now.”
“Fuck is this?” Garth looked down at Emerson, who was busy showing one of the soldiers his piddy. “Who the fuck are these dudes?”
“No clue, man.” Emerson took his piddy back and promptly headed towards the door. Before he left, the young kid shouted over one shoulder. “It means ‘We’re always watching’.”
“What?” Garth shouted back, handing his piddy over to a Federal stormtrooper, who didn't quite snatch it out of his fingers, but still kind of did.
“The Latin. On the digital logo. Means they’re watching. The government. They’re always watching.”
Garth watched the door open and close, then decided it’d be better if he paid closer attention to the people with the Colt LE6920 SOCOM II’s pointed at him. He risked a look over at poor Larry, who was being fairly politely interrogated by the Federal warrior pointing a rifle at his head. He nodded. The guy wasn’t in any way responsible for anything he might’ve done wrong.
“Hey guys, how’s it going?” Garth asked cheerily. “More to the point, can I interest you in some pizza? It’s a couple hours old, but I find that old pizza is better pizza, which is not what I was expecting. Like, old pizza should taste all gross and … gross, right? There’s this place called Dom’s Delicious Dough? You spend, like, a hundred bucks, they bring this stupidly sized box over. I fed everyone earlier. You can, like, have some if you want. Sorry, I ate the only salad like, forever ago."
“Garth Nickels?” A female voice came over loudly through the helmet's speaker.
“You … you have my piddy right there. In your portable scanner thing.” Garth –fingers laced behind his head- tried pointing at it with a finger, an action that –for some reason- got the Federal agents with rifles aimed at his melon a little squirrelier. “Soooo … yeah. You know it’s me.”
“According to your piddy, you’ve been in the country for about fourteen hours.”
“Yeah.” Garth nodded, doing the math. Minus the several hundred times he’d been doing the Timewarp with a Hellfire, it worked out to about fourteen hours.
“Ten of which were spent here.”
Garth tilted his head off to one side to check on Larry’s progress, politely ignoring the way the Colt assault rifles magically tracked his movements.
To the man’s credit, he wasn’t quite blubbering like an inconsolable manchild, but … there were definitely tears trickling down the guys face. The poor guy wasn’t to blame. It wasn’t every day some random Internet café guy had his door booted in by armor-clad Federal agents.
“Uh, yeah? Where the hell else would I go? I’m brand new to this city. What the hell is this all about, anyways? I’m assuming I did something illegal? I mean, I’m kinda sure the Federal government wouldn’t unleash storm troopers because I’m streaming the Science Fiction Network onto the monitor, there, right? Dammit! Buckaroo Banzai is starting.”
Special Agent Angela Devlin pulled off her combat helmet so she could talk to Garth on a different level. The Special Agent easily imagined the discussion she was going to have with her supervisor when they were all said and done, but really, effective communication was impo
rtant. When you sound like you're a hundred feet underwater, things took longer.
Besides which, she had a handful of well-armed men and women protecting her. So while recent immigrant Garth Nickels looked like the sort of man who'd get down and dirty with very little provocation, Angela knew very well he wouldn’t. “My name is Special Agent Angela Devlin, Mister Nickels. And we’re here to talk to you about Unfair Advantage.”
“Yikes. Your parents must've hated you as a kid. Who names their kid 'Special Agent'?” Garth replied easily. “Because that is a horrible name to go through high school with. While we're on the topic of 'horrible names', I'll take Unfair Advantage for a thousand."
“Sit your ass down, Nickels.”
***
Garth watched Larry No Last Name Provided be politely escorted from his own damn shop, not quite at gunpoint, but close enough to remind the man that the next time he let someone looking like his last customer in to goof around for hours on his computers, thinking twice would be a good place to start.
Poor Larry. Special Agent Angela Devlin and her crew had announced quite imperiously that some low-to-possibly-mid-level interrogation of suspected bad guys was going to be going down inside the, café, and that, sadly enough, any owners or people authorized to shut the place down couldn't hang out inside nor could they go anywhere until they were done because the Federal government wasn’t responsible for stuff that got stolen if the place wasn’t locked up once they left.
Basically, Larry LNU had to kind of chill on the pavement for who knew how long.
When it looked like Larry No Last Name wasn’t gonna hyperventilate or, like, turn into a spaz -which would be totally justified under any circumstances like this one- Garth returned his attention to Special Agent Devlin. About thirty-five, with close cropped red hair, one green eye, one blue eye, an interesting scar just below the hairline that screamed 'interesting story right here, folks' and the permanent scowl of someone who’d quite frankly gotten tired of all the shit she had to deal with on the regular, SA Angela Devlin looked to be a dynamo of Federal go-getting-ness.
