by Lee Bond
The last thing he needed in his life was an angry Federal agent who was capable of mustering an armed and armored tactical response squad at a moment’s notice. One who was also intent on watching him day and night, because sooner or later, he was going to catch Samiel’s attention. When the bastard’s evil minions started cropping up out of the woodwork, Special Agent Devlin would discover that she lived in a world quite different than the one she imagined was real.
“How in the fuck am I going to protect her and her people from this? Fuck my life!” Garth angrily saved his Photoshop and Illustrator projects, quickly emailed them to his brand spanking new email account –which he noticed already had a few hundred instances of spam- and headed out, barely able to look Larry Cumer in the eye.
The men and women and children he ran into in this simulated reality might not be real, might be even less real than the people populating the Unreal Universe, but it was really fucking hard to ignore the raw emotion boiling off one angry and terrified Internet café owner.
Cheaters Never Prosper
“Cheater!” Eddie’s voice rang loud and clear through the viewing amphitheater. Following hot on the heels of this condemning accusation was a bit of a Bronx Cheer.
Drake looked over at his friend, who was busy lounging on an old barcalounger. It wasn’t precisely the manner he’d watch events that might have a severe and major impact on the Unreal Universe unfold, but Eddie’s intent was clear. “I can’t tell if you’re angry or happy, and besides all that, who is the cheater?”
Eddie spoke over a shoulder, reluctant to take his eyes off the screen. N’Chalez had just left the Internet café and was making his way home, senses preternaturally sharpened for the presence of Federal agents. “If you’re worried about your little … visit into his reality, I’m not mad. I would like to know what that was all about, though.”
Drake plopped down beside Eddie, taking up his own personal comfy chair and reached out for a nice, ice cold beer. He took a long, deep drink –thoroughly enjoying the sensation washing down his throat- before speaking to his long-time best friend. “You know, this is one of the things I missed the most, being trapped as Spur.”
“Beer?” Eddie made to dispute the statement, but changed his mind. Five thousand years pretending to be an artificially intelligent android thousands of years in advance of anything else fabricated by the ruling AI could make a man miss whatever the hell he wanted, he supposed.
The Emperor wondered what his friend was playing at. Even though it’d been nearly forever ago now, his ears were still practically ringing from that loud argument and Drake Bishop was no longer the sort of man that’d just give up and let things alone; his time as Spur had changed him, and not for the better. Eddie could see it plain as day, etched into Drake’s Old English Money profile and wanted desperately to figure out how in the hell the man himself was missing the changes.
Once upon a long time ago, Drake Bishop had fled the safe confines of the temporal incongruity to save his family and his company from destruction at the hands of wildly corrupt children. True, a part of that story involved a five thousand year long time out, and that was where the changes in the man had risen up, but … Drake Bishop was no longer the fun-loving, devil-may-care young man he’d been for twenty-five thousand years!
That was one of the powers and the joys of the incongruity! It kept you as who you’d always been, no matter how many thousands of years rolled across the calendar. The sliver of temporal power built into the Spur suit had been enough to keep Drake alive, to assist the main ‘Bishop’ personality from decaying into something weird and awful –Eddie had to be honest with himself here and admit that he might’ve felt guilty roughly two thousand years into Drake’s exile and had investigated ways to bring his friend home- but that was it.
Drake’s youthful attitude, his endless exuberance … gone. Replaced with cynicism, doubt, mistrust.
“Yeah man, beer.” Drake belched. “It’s funny, the things you miss after a while in the boonies. At first, I missed everything. The food, the drink, the vacation realms, you name it, I missed it. But the more time went on, the lesser those dreams and wishes became. They dwindled away until all I wanted was ice cold beer.”
“It’s thoroughly permissible to use the incongruity’s powers to prevent you from gaining a beer belly.” Eddie waved his hand regally through the air, an Emperor dispensing free reign to do just that. “So was that you? In that Emerson snot?”
Drake nodded. “Lil bit. Lil bit.” He caught the displeased quirk to Eddie’s lips and pointed at the screens that were Garth’s eyes. “Look at the man, man. He’s all the way alone out there in his reality. None of the people that were friendly are ever going to be his friends. He needs people to talk to, okay? Otherwise he’s gonna go … weird.”
Screens blossomed off the main Garthcam, each highlighting moments from the Specter’s time in Special Services, on the unnamed world where he’d been marooned, even ‘neath The Dome. Bits of savagery, moments of unrivaled and unnecessary mayhem, seconds of viciousness played out in full, gory detail.
Eddie waved the screens away. “I know all about what happens to this guy when he’s left alone, Drake. I keep telling you, I’m not as ignorant as you imagine. I know precisely the kind of danger that he represents to himself, to others, and to the reality I’ve built up around him. Why would you even talk to him, even for a minute? These are the kinds of things that I want to happen.”
“Look.” It was like trying to pound sand with a bag full of sand. Drake wanted to pull his own hair out. “It’s a moot point he’s going to try and wreck or otherwise overwhelm this pocket Universe, right?”
Eddie laughed disparagingly. “Never happen.” He caught the look in Drake’s eyes and relented. “All right, yes, fine, he’s going to try. Look here.” Garthcam #1 flickered for a moment and began replaying the last few minutes before he’d left to eventually earn the ire of Special Agent Angela Devlin. “See this? This is about all he’s capable of. Pulling the walls apart in an effort to see if anything weird is going to happen. Look at him. He’s enormously confused about what’s going on. I can just imagine what he’s saying! What an idiot. As if I’d make his dimension so poorly that he’d be able to visually detect any inconsistencies!”
The feed switched back to the here and now. Garth had almost made it to the dilapidated school house. Thin audio filtered through the room. Their oldest friend was humming ‘Nowhere Man’ by The Beatles to keep himself amused.
Drake wondered why his friend wasn’t playing the memories back with the volume up but wisely kept his mouth shut; he’d already replayed those moments himself, when Eddie’d been up to whatever it was he did in sections of the incongruity’s limitless space that had just recently been more or less labeled ‘Stay Out, No Ex-Androids Allowed’, and the ramifications of what had really gone on with the walls were of enormous and profound importance.
Garth ‘Nickels’ N’Chalez had been going on about blood. Presumably his blood, spattered all over the walls, ceiling and floor of the ground level hallways where he’d met his fate a couple hundred times.
Try as one ex-android might, though, there was absolutely no blood visible. So one of two things was possible.
One, the man had cracked all the way through and was now officially stark raving mad and some mechanism inside his brain was keeping him from running around eating people, because imagining the walls where you'd been murdered over and over as being covered blood was the very definition of 'bugnut crazy'.
Two, Eddie’s control of Garth’s Kin’kithal nature wasn’t as pervasive as he imagined and a portion of that extra-dimensional link was still active in some way, giving their man some sort of leverage in the pocket Universe.
There was a third thing there as well, only it dealt with Eddie instead of Garth, and it would need investigating, sooner rather than later: Eddie Marshall, aka Emperor-for-Life Etienne Marseilles, wasn’t quite right in the head, especially if he wa
s either ignoring or was completely unaware of what’d truly happened in that hallway.
Drake was also neither unable to detect or see anything wrong with the simulation himself, which meant …
He didn't know what that meant, just that it worried him.
Drake waved his hands in the air, saying, “Look, let’s get back on track, all right? His initial efforts in proving or disproving the totality of your recreation notwithstanding, it is more than safe to say that he’s eventually going to get his hands on some real equipment, right? The man’s got enough going on upstairs to build a fucking LHC in the basement, and with his shenanigans on the stock market, that reality is going to be sooner rather than later.”
Eddie mulled the point over. He had to confess, he’d never really imagined ‘old’ N’Chalez as the sort of person to pay attention to the stock market and all those other things, then chalked it up as being a result of Kith Antal’s training. “Yes, I see the merit in what you’re saying. But it doesn’t matter. This isn’t like an episode of Star Trek: Next Generation, When Holodecks Attack, Drake. Anything in the dimension is ultimately mine to control. Case in point, how much you wanna bet he’s going to start trying to make hytech devices soon as he can?”
“No bet.” Drake shook his head. “That’s a no-brainer. It’s what the man does.”
“Yeah, well, he sure as hell ain’t gonna get any of them working.” Eddie stated smugly. “Because in your scenario, they’re the only things that could definitely undo my work. So, that. Ain’t. Gonna. Happen. And none of this explains why you drove an eleven year old around like a go-cart.”
“Because, man, I’m trying to keep him from losing his shit. You can do things your way, you can make it relatively impossible for him to undermine the cohesive state of the reality you’ve built for him. That’s totally cool and makes all kinds of sense, but I’m gonna do it my way. I very well might drop rando peeps into his life every now and then. You see the look in his eyes when Emerson started going on about his family and his friends?” Drake was particularly proud of that scene. If they were handing out Emmy’s for Outstanding Impromptu Pocket Universe Monologue, Emerson Lane would win.
“Yeah. What about it?”
“That’s the first moment Nickels begins to doubt his sincere beliefs that everything around him is fake as fuck. Look into his eyes. He’s only been on the planet for about a day, but he had this whole ‘none of you are real so my actions don’t really matter one way or the other’ vibe going on from the moment he walked out the doors. But here,” Garthcam flipped and began replaying the café scene from Emerson’s POV, “right here, he starts doubting. You can practically hear his thoughts. He goes from thinking Emerson is a chatty, well-scripted Interesting NPC to worrying that the little dick might just be a live being.”
“At this level of reproduction, it doesn’t matter. There’s no difference. You know that.”
“I know that and you know that, but N’Chalez doesn’t. And he’s the one you need to worry about!” Drake made soothing gestures with his hands, realizing that he was getting far more heated than he should over something so small. He was letting his insider knowledge concerning what may or not be a really serious hallucination and/or insanity on Garth’s part color his interest in keeping the man from poking too hard into the fabric of creation. “Okay, look, I’m sorry. I’ve been out of the game for a really long time, and let’s be honest, this is N’Chalez we’re talking about here. The man only recently destroyed the Dark Iron King, and pound for pound, a madman in control of Cloudtech on that level is nothing to sneeze at. Let’s say I’m just super keen on playing it safe until we know what Garth is really going to get up to.”
Eddie nodded slowly, inwardly laughing at what Garth was getting up to that moment. The man had spent so much time in his day raiding the stock market, making money and destroying companies so his versions of their tech would be the first to hit the streets that he hadn’t even bothered to concern himself with simpler things, like a bed to sleep on. The idiot was even that second crawling onto a musty –probably insect-riddled- cot in the nurse’s office.
“All right, I do see your point. But it doesn’t matter.” Eddie pointed to Garth, trying to fall asleep on the cot. “I’m gonna let him have one miserable night’s sleep on that smelly old cot and then I’m pulling the plug. The game is over, he’s lost.” The Emperor would cancel the whole thing right there on the spot, but the notion of forcing N’Chalez to spend the night in such a manner was just too rich an opportunity to let slip by.
“You weren’t calling me cheater?” Drake looked at his friend, puzzled. “He hasn’t done anything yet. Just made enough money to get started. Cleared the way for his own tech. Stuff you knew he was going to do. Stuff he said he was going to do. Everything he’s done so far is in preparation for saving me from Samiel.”
“Buddy, assuming he hadn’t gone out of his way to announce his aspirations for Reality Busting 101, I would’ve allowed him access to hytech gear because let’s be real here for a secco.” Eddie summoned his own memories of what came after Garth disappeared into the future, of the horrible and awful fate Humanity had been forced to deal with on their own, and of the terrible things they’d all had to do in order to survive. “Remember this?”
Drake ran a hand down his left arm. How could he forget? They’d all paid, and paid dearly. Thanks to the incongruity, all their physical losses had been neatly replaced, but nothing in the stone’s powerbase could truly help with the mental scars. “You know I do.”
“Right? I still wake up sometimes … anyways. Yeah. If N’Chalez hadn’t beaked off about trying to ruin his world, hytech would’ve been on the menu because they showed up, what? Within a few hours or so of his departure? The whole thing with Jericho Jade …”
“Could you not?” Drake ignored the hot surge of anger flashing across Eddie’s face. “I don’t like thinking about that time.”
“Okay, okay, fine. It’s not like those were good times for me, either.” Eddie snapped his fingers and the monitors reverted to a generic view of Earth. “My original intention … should he have made it to the end … was to let him see what’d happened to us, to the Earth, to the … to the people there. So he could understand where we are coming from, why we even came here in the first place, right? Why you built up BishopCo, why I gave him Latelyspace. Which is why I would’ve allowed hytech in the first place, because if there’s one thing that man loves, it’s his galactic combat scenarios. Only, he cheated. So it’s game over, no prize, no chance to learn anything of value, you lose the chance to reboot the Universe into something more appropriate.”
“I still don’t see how he cheated, Eddie. I’m looking through everything he did. There’s nothing.”
“Delbert Granger.” Oh, how he loved saying that man’s name! The opportunity-shattering name! With Garth out of the picture, all the energy devoted into maintaining the frankly exorbitant pocket dimension could be diverted into more appropriate avenues of exploration. Namely, the thing in the box. And, now he thought about it, quite possibly whatever was happening out by Latelyspace as well; because of the distances between Earth and Latelyspace and owing to the complications involved with using non-Tunnel-based communication networks, Mayin’s last update was a nearly useless hash of garbled words and jumbled equations.
Some inner tickle suggested that his Shriven Agent had indeed located his cloned self escaping that entombed solar system. That was a scenario that needed looking into as soon as possible.
“You can’t be serious!” Drake looked at his friend as if for the first time.
“Deadly.” Eddie nodded firmly. “One hundred percent.”
“Delbert Granger.” Drake called the man up on the screen. They watched the aging Federal agent putter around his Motel 6 room for a few minutes before Eddie flipped it back to Earth space view. “You’re ending things because of him. Garth has no fucking clue the man is even in San Francisco.”
“You heard
what Samiel said.” Eddie responded earnestly. “In all the iterations, and here we are talking about the real proto-Reality as opposed to mine, Delbert Granger never once went on vacation, never once entered San Francisco. He’s completely deviated from the trajectory of his own life. He’s never done this.”
“Ah!” Drake interjected. “Untrue! In the original timeline, Garth went to Washington, DC in an effort to uncover more about Baron Samiel. Don’t forget, his investigations into Samiel revealed that he has a fake and mostly unused FBI identity, presumably either an echo left over from a previous iteration of himself that was never properly erased or so he could –in times of need- use official channels to achieve his goals. Don’t forget, that’s where Garth first came in contact with Special Agent Delbert Granger in the first place.”
“Ancient history.” Eddie countered, curious to see where Drake was headed. “Not applicable.”
“Untrue again!” Drake was enjoying this, having an argument with Eddie that didn’t revolve … “Following their initial encounter, Granger undertakes special pains to kidnap Garth, going so far as to use weapons provided by Samiel in the event that one of his … special … operatives ever got out of hand. Correct?”
“I’ll allow it. It’s the truth, after all.” Eddie laughed. “I bet our friend the Kin’kithal woke up wondering what the fuck had happened, hey? I bet he imagined that there was nothing, anywhere at all, capable of putting him down like a bull elephant. Where are you going with this?”
“Your insistence that Garth is cheating somehow ignores a very real, very salient fact about Delbert Granger’s motivations.” Drake put it simply. “What is the very next thing Granger does with Garth?”
Drake’s final argument became instantly clear. “Takes him to Vegas, forces him to basically attack Samiel’s primary location there, otherwise known as the casino ‘Gentleman Jim’s’. Gave him some pretty hefty motivation as well by threatening to detonate explosives littered throughout the city.”
