by Lee Bond
Some things were too terrifying to consider, too great to even be housed inside your own mind.
What Babel did know was that –regardless of her insanity- Lady Ha had power. Real, discernible power. The kind of power that made him tremble and worry for the safety of everything and everyone.
Trinity might be aware of what she was trying to do. Hell, now that It was in the middle of trying to capture him, It probably knew good goddamn well what was going on in the system and was right that second working on a plan to destroy her.
Only … that meant losing Ci, Tel, Eddie and that stupid Xenocryst-Caltan.
So. In practical terms, yes. He was doing the right thing. He could stop Lady Ha. He needed to get an army around him, needed to be able to get back to the heart of the madwoman’s empire.
Needed to tell her something. Something specific. That would work. More than anything else.
Babel’s eyes snapped open. The Specter was ready.
Multiple Tunnel-incursion sounds reached his ears. Babel opened his eyes and risked another look. Amber lightning flicked and lit everywhere across the orchard, some of the entranceways cutting trees in half in the process.
Babel counted three hundred and his heart sank. Three hundred more of the already-impossible to kill robots. He licked his lips.
General Yuuki had outfitted his troops better than the ones that’d come to arrest him. The men in the battlefield right that moment weren’t dressed in their traditional samurai-style armor but the more sensible carbon weave combat suits and instead of your basic laser rifles, they were running around with heavy caliber bullet slingers of varying type. Still not super effective against a robot army, but better than before.
But they were still at a disadvantage. They hadn’t trained for this kind of warfare, if they’d even been properly trained to begin with. From what he’d seen so far, the best way to describe Delicate Heron’s standing force was ‘enthusiastic and mostly talented beginners with one or two gun nuts who spent all their time reading up on how to do things’.
Definitely not the kind of men you wanted saving your life.
But that could be remedied.
Tapping furiously on the keyboard, Babel Sinfell asked the hosted AI mind to give him a very simple and easy to read phonetic pronunciation of an even simpler to understand command. He read the words to himself a few times. It was getting easier.
When this was all over, when he had time, Babel promised himself he was going to take time out of his day to learn how to speak EuroJapanese. He was, after all, planning on mustering the support of the entire solar system in his battle against the wicked Lady Ha, and the last thing he wanted was to look like an idiot in front of his troops, sounding out the words like a three year old.
Feeling confident that there was absolutely no way anyone could misinterpret his commands, Babel Sinfell switched the handheld back to the PA system and spoke.
The effect was instantaneous and overwhelming.
***
“I’m sorry, but did he just … did they just …” Eddie’s voice trailed off into silence. On-screen, you could almost see the power of Babel’s command rip through the battlefield, actual, visual power drilling into each and every man combating against ADAM’s robot army, pushing fire and flames and smoke and blossoms out of the way, an invisible fist crashing through it all.
“Yes. Yes he did.” ADAM answered dryly. “He commanded every man in that orchard to be Specters. Best guess, he uploaded his own personal Specter training into their minds. Each of them received ten years of training in the deadliest and most well-trained and utterly combative military organization this Universe has ever seen. And from what you’re seeing there on the screen right now, it is fucking working. Listen to their tactical chatter. It goes from nervous panic to coldblooded focus midsentence. Look at their body language. Some of these men have never fired their weapons outside of a gun range before, dad, and they go from running around like morons to instantly organized combat squads of five. Which, as you might know, is the preferred operating of Specters everywhere.”
“Oh my God.” Eddie was only peripherally aware he’d spoken.
A man who could transform other men into Specters, simply by telling them? With a power like that under his command, Eddie … he could’ve used Babel Sinfell to command Garth N’Chalez to simply surrender.
If he’d only thought things through, taken the time out to even wonder at the true limits of Babel Sinfell’s extraordinary gifts instead of focusing on gaining time for Naoko, time that was ultimately pointless; as ADAM kept pointing out, she was an actual, genuine threat, not to just the Universe, but to those powerful beings who sought to control it.
If there was one thing Eddie knew about victims of the CyberPriests, it was that there was no undoing what’d been done. Their queer, broken Harmonics and their twisted hy-tech alterations were performed on the absolute lowest levels of existence. Even if he wanted to try sparing Naoko from the perversions, it’d mean bringing her here, to New Japan.
That … wasn't something Eddie wanted anymore. It was too great a risk. Even thinking about Lady Ha getting anywhere near the temporal incongruity was enough to make his tongue go fuzzy. The havoc she could wreak with something like that … it was …
Unbearable to even entertain.
“Cat got your tongue?” ADAM demanded mirthfully. “This is why I’m better than humans. Even a human with your powers, because let’s be honest, dad, even with the power of the temporal incongruity in your hands, even though you’ve lived thirty thousand years, you’re still only human. You made your choice with your heart and not your head, and now you’ve lost the single most important and powerful piece of weaponry you could’ve ever held. Well, no, now I think about it, not really. You do have N’Chalez there, don’t you? Babel’s a shadow, dad, an echoing shadow of that man you’ve got under wraps.”
“What is this really about?” Eddie demanded angrily, eyes riveted to the display. Babel was out in the field now, fighting alongside the faceless and nameless warriors, desperate to help them as they fought and died on his behalf. The Emperor knew that the Specter was going to fail because everything the man was going through –had gone through- was all a test, a preliminary examination of the general limitations of Babel’s power.
“Let Garth go.” ADAM replied simply. “Give him to me. Let me take care of the Kin’kithal. It’s obvious from your reactions whenever he’s brought up that you intend something quite dreadful for him, and that … well, that doesn’t really work for me, all right? Let Garth N’Chalez free of your trials and when you decide to run with the big boys in the Quest for Godhood, I’ll … I’ll go easy on you. I won’t kill you or maim Other Dad or anything like that. I’ll just … banish you.”
It was tempting. So tempting. He already had an Ushbet M’Tai in the box, and that was something that neither ADAM nor Trinity knew anything about. If the proto-deity continued decrypting itself into bigger, more advanced forms of itself, eventually, he’d be in control of a full-fledged God, an actual, literal God with powers far beyond anyone’s ken.
Technically speaking, Garth wasn’t even necessary; completely and utterly dominated as he was by the temporal incongruity, everything the man had known and thought prior to stepping into the field was now open for scrutiny.
Including how he planned on destroying the Universe and rebooting it into something much easier to control.
ADAM was so smug with his proclamations of superiority. He probably wanted N’Chalez for the same reasons.
Eddie licked his lips. It was so tempting. And to make the unspoken offer even sweeter, the odds were very high that ADAM’s methods of extracting information from Garth would be even crueler than his own.
“Just say yes, dad.” ADAM whispered. “Let Garth go. I can have troops outside your weird little dome in seconds. Robot bodies are perfect for Tunneling. They feel no pain, and if I lose a few million every now and then? So what? Let him go.”
Garth N’Chalez needed to suffer.
“No.” Emperor-for-Life Etienne Marseilles straightened in his seat and wiped the screen away just as one of ADAM’s robot foot soldiers slammed some form of giant metal helmet over Babel’s head. “No. Garth is mine. I made a promise. If he survives my punishment, he gets what he needs. He won’t survive, but I still need to see this through to the end.
“Well, I can’t say I’m surprised because you’re an idiot.” ADAM sighed. “All right then. Good luck with the Kin’kithal. You’ll need it. I mean, I get that you got him under control and are completely on top of the situation, but I gotta tell ya, dad, Trinity’s assessments of this man are quite hair-raising. If I had hair. You might think you’re in control but … anyways. I’m all done here. Ciao for now, dad.”
Eddie snapped his fingers and line went dead. The lights went out. It was time to sit in the dark and do some very serious thinking on how to proceed with the Ushbet M’Tai.
DAY THREE: Unfair Advantage Explained, Metaphysical Musings That Could Do a Guy’s Head all the Way In and This Fuckin’ Hallway…
As Garth spoke on the phone to one Mister Benny Wall –a lawyer who was too busy to see him in person but who was more than happy to earn his ridiculous hourly fee over the phone- he worked on setting up the first of many computers that’d arrived earlier in the morning; time literally waited for no man save perhaps Baron Samiel and if he was going to go ahead and ruin the maybe-simulation he was in by overloading it, then the sooner he got started, the better.
“Okay, so, what’s the deal here with this Unfair Advantage bullcrap, Benny? Can I call you Benny?” Garth winced at the price for having multiple licenses of the 3D modelling programs he needed. Even though they were in the middle of the worst economic disaster since the original Great Depression, it seemed as though there were still some areas that could demand whatever the hell they wanted. “And more to the point, can Special Agent Angela Devlin and her crew of gun-toting nutjobs storm trooper their way to wherever a dude is sitting?”
Benny sounded like he was driving through a tunnel while cramming food into his mouth. “Unfair Advantage is a very broad spectrum piece of legislation, Mister Nickels. It allows them to investigate individuals like yourself, who’ve done a considerable amount of examination into businesses and whatnot, but the true focus of anyone work on a UA task squad is to track down mobsters and other criminal organizations.”
Garth popped his head up and stared incredulously at the phone. Somewhere downstairs, someone was hammering on something loud and hard enough to qualify for anger management courses. Benny’s explanation of UA and Devlin's were on two entirely different … explanation … continents. “Wouldn’t that be considered Insider Trading, you know, from, like, bribes and coercion and stuff?”
“Eh.” Garth heard Benny shrug over the phone. “Six of one, half dozen of the other. The truth of the matter is, organized crime and other, similar institutions made out like bandits during the switch to All Day Trading. They were responsible for an awful lot of businesses going under, legit businesses that were in one way or the other preventing said crime-like syndics from earning a larger share of the money in any given area. So the white collar guys, the ones who went to college and got themselves law degrees and all of that, they went ahead and ‘proved’ that they weren’t engaged in Insider Trading. I can’t get into the particulars…”
Garth grinned like the devil staring at a fresh new soul up on the block. “Are you one of those lawyers, Benny Wall?”
“I can neither confirm nor deny that, Mister Nickels.” The words fell from Benny’s lips with the air of continued usage. “So the courts, they didn’t like that so much, so they came up with Unfair Advantage. It’s a gray area crime, one we really don’t see a lot of anymore, mostly because those criminality-minded firms are smart enough to avoid doing anything as reckless as what you did the other day. They target an organization that’s cutting into their slice of the American Pie, whittle them away to nothing, watch the carcass burn across the trading floor and away they go. The message is heard, and for like, six months or so, no new guys show up. They worked the whole 'AI algorithm' thing up to distract everyone from the true focus."
“Sounds cutthroat.” Garth watched more of his money disappear down the black hole that was legitimate software ownership, wishing that he could be more like one of Benny Wall’s ‘crime-ish foundations’ than being the for real deal; being forced to pay for shit instead of illegally torrenting what he needed were costing him a literal fortune.
Unfortunately, after Special Agent Angela Devlin’s proclamation that she was going to be watching him like a hawk, precautionary measures like hemorrhaging money better spent in other directions was the only option available.
“It is indeed, Mister Nickels, most definitely. With the US of A being in the financial shitter, there’s only so much anyone can do. The government has unofficially but officially recognized that there’s little they can do to prevent … colorful companies … from functioning, specifically because of how rough it is out there right now. So rather than wasting money trying to root out the source of misperceived evil…”
“Hey, just ‘cuz a guy who knows a guy knows a guy who can get you that television at less than a third the price doesn’t mean that any of the guys involved acquired it illegitimately, am I right? I’m right.” Garth placed an order for a half dozen top end 3D printers and clicked on the ‘rush delivery’ icon without even bothering to look at the total cost. They were needed. Everything was needed quickly.
“Precisely.” Benny Wall’s nod was easily seen through the phone once more. “So they let these wise men operate as they always have, only now there’s the unspoken rule that when it comes to legitimate businesses et al, there’s only so much high seas pirating and pillaging that’ll be ignored. Your new bestest friend, Special Agent Angela Devlin, she’s the local watchdog. Pulled some high profile broker …”
“Some dude named something Lane.” Garth broke in, remembering the slightly surreal conversation he’d had with the preteen video game junkie and all around jaded kid, Emerson Lane.
“You’re pretty well informed for a guy fresh in the country.” Benny commented. “Anyways, yeah. Roderick Lane. Yeah. No one knows why he did what he did, but he definitely did it, and so now Devlin and her friends are on the lookout for anyone doing crazy things like that. To her, sitting on the other end of her monitoring software, you must of looked like Blackbeard the Pirate, raping and pillaging your way through the High Seas of the Trading Room Floor. You pretty much painted a neon bull’s-eye on your forehead!”
This time it was Garth’s turn to shrug. “Hey, I was in a hurry. So when she and her crew busted in wearing full tactical gear and packing fully automatic rifles, that was a standard thing?”
“For all she knew, you were under duress from local gentlemen with … ties to the neighborhood, if you catch my drift. Or were the guest of Slavic fellows in comfortable track suits. Or having a starch-rich lunch with calm individuals with a great many tattoos. It’s not a thing as happens so much out here in the lovely land of San Francisco, but with the expansion of this new Federal branch, people like the aforementioned hypothetical people are always looking for a way to get in and out. So guns and ammo it was, only to find a lone man, CEO of Changetech …”
“Blackbearding his way across the Trading Room Floor.” Garth nodded slowly. Well, he hadn’t been the wiser, had he? Next on the list were solar panel sheets. He whistled silently at their cost as well, seeing immediately what was going on; there was no way Big Brother could prevent an individual from going off the grid in every way possible, but what they could do was make the cost of doing so so ridiculously steep you’d need to be rich enough in the first place where your electric bill wasn’t even a thing you knew existed.
“Bingo. Is th
ere anything else I can do for you, Mister Nickels? I’m about to make my business meeting.”
“Couple things, real quick. Can she watch me day in and day out from now until the end of time?” Garth didn't relish that thought, because sooner or later, he would be involving himself in things that any branch of the government would take personal offence to. It was just what doing battle with a time-traveling overlord sort of demanded.
“In a nutshell, yeah. You may not like it too much, but you caught her eye. My advice to you, Mister Nickels, is to play kissy-kissy, smoochy-smoochy with Devlin. Let her know when you’re going to be trading. Don’t go over the threshold again unless you really need to, because even though you’re legit, that first round is still on the books. She could've nailed you for all the trades that went down if she'd felt like it. Everyone who looked in on the arrest warrants’d see right away what was going on, but they probably wouldn’t do anything. All right? Is there a second thing, only I'm …"
"Yeah, one more thing." Garth popped another piece of his DIY PC together. "She actually accused me of running AI algor … well, not really, but she was close to it. Anyways, yeah, when did UA become about artificial intelligence and not mob guys?"
Benny chuckled. "Hey, oh! Who said crime-ish type guys couldn’t be smart guys as well? You see some dude in a white coat on TV talking about using AI to solve math problems, but what you don't see is the genius intellect kid sittin' in his dad's favorite bar, thinking 'that program could navigate the ins and outs of stock market trading in no time, hand me another cannoli'. Because that may or may not be a thing, Mister Nickels. Now we done here? We’re done here. All right. I’ll have my secretary Wanda send you the bill for today’s consult. You need anything else, gimme a call.”
