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

by Lee Bond

  “Fourteen million, three hundred thousand, two hundred eighteen.” Drake pursed his lips thoughtfully. “Give me a graph. From the beginning until now.”

  The wall complied, and the data switched to something more readily digestible; of course, should he so choose, the Spur Intellect could rise up within him quite swiftly and easily, and, within nothing more than a few seconds of intense concentration, the answer could be achieved on his own, but if there was one thing Drake didn’t want, it was to be Spur ever again.

  Before his eyes, the incongruity sketched out the growth of the Shriven Nation. There, in the beginning, Chiang Yang, the sole one of his kind, returned to his post as Minister of Finance, accepted back into the bosom of the system by direct Empirical order, and there, Minister Yang had remained for the rest of his life, leaking anything and everything that might bear some importance.

  Following Yang not more than five days later, Sirina Lau. Consort to a Yellow Dog Elder, responsible –or bearing responsibility for, it did not matter from whence the remorse came, only that it existed- for the deaths of just under a thousand orphans, all lost during a fire at an orphanage she’d been ‘responsible’ for; a gift from her paramour because she’d loved children, Sirina had in no way known that her lover had only done so to distance himself from the already planned immolation of the entire facility, and all to rid himself of about five bastards of different connectivity.

  She, too, had walked out Shriven. Devoid of everything save a willingness to serve the Empire. Her first task –voluntarily offered- had been to assassinate Elder Gang Shui, which she’d accomplished with little to no difficulty.

  Nothing, then, for a solid thousand solid years. Two, out of hundreds of thousands, leaving everyone else who came and went through their Guilt Trip nothing more and nothing less than regular old people once more, flushed clean of their obsessions and their regrets, free to return to their lives whole and new, ready to begin making amends for their transgressions against friends, family, loved ones.

  Drake tapped the graph. “And then, right back at it, with a vengeance.”

  Indeed, following a millennium of relative silence –oh, during their assessment of each hopeful, there’d been spikes here and there reflecting Shriven-like values, but nothing too outrageous- a sudden uptick in Shriven ‘births’. One, two, a hundred, a rapid swelling of men and women voluntarily emptying themselves out in service to what they’d believed to be a higher power, when really …

  “When really, it’d just been us, two dudes killing time until the end of time.”

  Only, that wasn’t really the truth.

  The truth was far less … interesting. Following their aborted attempts to help the Armies of Man deal with their own Invasion, which had turned out to be incredibly more difficult than they’d imagined, not to mention their own colossal mistakes, the two of them’d retreated to the relatively safe confines of the incongruity. The Armies of Man had been too busy at the time to check them out more fully, to investigate their sudden disappearance, and once the dust had settled, well.

  The remaining factions of Humanity had been kind of busy dealing with ADAM.

  “We didn’t know what to do with ourselves.” Drake admitted softly, still watching the graph of Shriven. After that initial surge of Shriven, right back down to zero, almost as if by magic. “Songbird … Songbird had given all the signs of being done for, though we should’ve checked a little more thoroughly. Suicide by atomic fire seemed to be pretty definitive. And ADAM. Oh boy, did we ever screw up there.”

  Round about the time they’d dug themselves loose from their responsibilities and they’d begun readying themselves for exile –a fitting and just punishment for two out of town boys who’d actually caused more harm than good- ADAM had been gearing up for the first of his major betrayals. They’d been locked away, working on a secret plan to appear to be two representatives of an alien species interested in giving the poor humans from Earth a little incentive to join the rest of the Universe; working as they had on the first and only non-AI driven Quantum Tunnel, when they’d pulled their heads out of the sand to deliver their gift, what they’d encountered had been …

  “Just fucking awful.” Drake tapped the second upsurge of Shriven-esque behaviors on the graph. The second surge saw a doubling of the freaky adherents to the Empire, and in markedly short time.

  Their … doubt, their … frantic realization that the people of Earth and the few colonies that’d popped up during their absence suffered because of their brainchild had paralyzed them even more than their failure with Songbird. ADAM had been meant to be a steady, faithful leader, a shepherd to mankind as they took their first fledgling steps onto the stage that was their local Galaxy, a kind-yet-forceful leader who’d do what needed doing to ensure that Humanity had their chance. Not like what Trinity’d become, because back then, helping Humanity to be a part of the Universe instead of it’s accidental overlords had seemed like the best thing.

  Confronted with the bestial nature of their only child, they’d done what they always did under circumstances too complicated for them to process.

  “We hid.” Drake booted the wall hard enough to cause the graph to shudder in place. “Again. Worked on the Guilt Trip system instead. Worked to understand what we were doing wrong, to try and figure out how to be better. I thought it was the incongruity, and you, wherever you are right now, thought it was the Unreal Universe itself, messing with us.”

  On-screen, another valley, another peak, another increase in Shriven activity.

  In truth, now, thousands of years down the road, it seemed like those initial failures had a lot to do with both factors, working against one another. Anything they turned their hand to had the taint of the incongruity about it, and once unleashed into the Unreality, the Universe did as it’d always done since time immemorial by moving unseen forces against a perceived incursion.

  Drake kicked the wall again. “ADAM should’ve worked. He was perfect. Instead he turned out to be a goddamn Ultron. Worse and worse still, for all the pain and suffering he caused.”

  And he was out there again, loose in the wilds, apparently fucking with Eddie.

  Drake literally turned his nose up at that. The guy wasn’t even interested in treating Garth fairly and had, in point of fact, been saying some pretty seriously awful things that hinted at behavior he didn’t particularly care for. For the time being, though, Drake was willing to pretend for the sake of pretending that Eddie’s casual hints that maybe someone else would be better suited to destroying the Universe were nothing more than blowing off steam; he had every right to feel angry and betrayed by what’d befallen Naoko, making the cruel and unusual things coming out of his mouth right now nothing more than grief rearing it’s ugly head.

  They’d seen this kind of behavior –and more, and worse- from people hoping to be freed from their Guilt. It was kind of why they’d invented the Guilt Trip in the first place. Knowing they could never enter the incongruity fully themselves, not without risking total contact and turning into something like Samiel, they’d developed the concept of pocket-worlds and opened the doors, secretly, conspiratorially, through whisper campaigns and more, to the public.

  The theory had been that by watching ordinary men and women cope with their regret and remorse, they, the Lords of the Incongruity, would derive a method of dealing with their own great mistakes.

  The report on the wall added another valley, this one Olympus-sized. Drake, wrapped up in his memories, barely seemed to notice.

  They’d been young, when they’d first come to the Unreality, hopefuls eager –some would say desperate- to give aid to the one man who’d proven above all others to deserve help. Fresh and shiny, they’d jumped right in, saddened that they’d missed their chance to directly assist Nickels in his efforts of freeing his ravaged Universe of it’s greatest enemy but more than willing to work with what they had.

  Stepping boldly onto the platform with Project Songbird had been a great
first step.

  And their first great failure. On paper, hell, even in the very beginning, right at the start of the venture, Songbird had been rock solid, the fundamentals of Harmonic energy, the concept of the Spheres of Existence, everything had been right on the money.

  Alas, that tune had soured. And then again with ADAM.

  “Going in circles.” Drake slumped against the wall and the graph, still patiently building itself, shifted it’s vantage point until the Lord could gaze, sight still unseen, at it’s progress.

  Had to be a reason he couldn’t get his head out of his ass. ADAM, Songbird, Songbird, ADAM. He was laden down with his own Guilt, still, after all those thousands of years. Not even his time as emotionless Spur could free his from that, could assuage all those boiling, festering feelings.

  He wondered if Eddie felt the same way, if Garth’s appearance might not be responsible for this unwanted, unwelcome, cumbersome assault of memories and emotions long-buried under tens of thousands of years.

  The lights in the hallway flickered, but Drake was too busy chasing down that particularly fresh-looking rabbit.

  What if … what if that was it?

  What if seeing Garth after all those years was why Eddie was being so weird? What if it had nothing at all –well, maybe not nothing nothing- with Naoko Kamagana and the horrifying thing she’d become and everything to do with how he’d been in The Dream?

  “Makes sense.” Drake nodded slowly, warming up to the notion.

  The truth behind Eddie’s behavior back in the day, when Samiel’d sent Lissande Amour sniffing around, when he’d been infected by an ODD-variant of specific design, had been known by Drake since before they’d crawled through the Bridge to this Universe; young Eddie Marshall, wracked with humiliation over how he’d behaved, had admitted his end of things the very moment the dust had settled.

  Drake being Drake, forgiveness had flown just as swiftly as the words from Eddie’s mouth; after all, being raised by Derek Bishop had given him all kinds of practice at forgiving the people in his life of their mistakes, so why would it’ve been any more difficult to do so for a friend?

  “But what if that guilt is still there, still inside Eddie?”

  Drake felt the top of his skull being pulled very gently apart by the notion.

  Overburdened guilt over subconsciously feeling responsible for how everything they’d ever put their hands to since coming to the Unreality had gone so disastrously wrong may very well be one of the underlying reasons why Eddie was treating Garth so poorly. Toss Naoko into the mix and you had yourself a witch’s brew of incredibly toxic proportions. Beyond that, there was five thousand years’ worth of personal alone time, more or less trapped inside the incongruity, with no one but himself to talk to and nothing else to do but run Trip after Trip, all with no one else to keep him from losing his mind.

  Short of directly confronting the only man he’d been friends with for the last thirty thousand years, Drake just couldn’t see the path to finding the answer on his own.

  And not to put too fine a point on things, Drake knew he wasn’t ready to confront Eddie head-on. Not just yet. Not after having been away for so long. The incongruity ran slowly, sluggishly, when he tried to do anything more than charlatan-esque trickery like summoning soda and junk food. The moment he tried doing anything more important –like finding out where the hell Eddie was spending most of his time when he should be focusing on making certain Garth’s Trip was handled properly- the connections … fizzled.

  Drake washed the Shriven feed off the wall directly opposite him. There was no point in going over the data anymore, mostly because he couldn’t really recall what’d prompted him to look them over in the first place.

  “Well, that’s not entirely true.” Drake admitted. Eddie’d decided to send one of his Shriven Emissaries off to talk very politely to Naoko Kamagana in that unfailingly humble way that the both of them knew from personal experience had a tendency to drive most people nearly homicidal.

  It went without saying that the poor bastard who ‘got the honor’ of dispatching the Emperor’s wishes would not be coming home. Except possibly in bags, or in a wet-vac container; the few moments in Ha’s life –remotely witnessed through the incongruity’s viewing portals- that Drake had sampled weren’t the sorts of things he wanted to dwell on.

  Naoko … Lady Ha’s … particular brand of CyberPriestly venom ran along the same lines as the old Songbird Initiative, though with a very … domineering slant that none of the other ‘Priests had ever really exhibited. Prone to mental manipulation and outright puppeteering, Ha had a tendency to make the people in her life act out relatively childish yet purely reprehensible acts.

  The emptiness inside a Shriven might just prove the foil to those kinds of trickery. The peaceful delegates had proven their resilience to such things in the past, with different warlords and different lunatics, though on a much smaller scale.

  “I hope for your sake you decide to do the right thing by Naoko, Eddie.” Drake pushed himself smoothly off the ground. His woolgathering and moodiness had proven nice counterbalance to his chaotic thoughts, providing fertile ground for the problem that really lay at the roots of his wandering:

  Eddie, and the secret he was keeping.

  He was out there, somewhere in the depths of the incongruity.

  Drake was going to find out where that was, what the secret was, and more importantly, the best way to convince Eddie Marshall, the man who was Emperor-for-Life, to back down and away from the dark road he was on before it got to the point where there was nothing left of Eddie at all.

  “Just a matter of buckling down and …” As Drake set off to begin hunting for Emperors in earnest, the very walls of the incongruity shook and shuddered. “What the fuck?”

  The hallway, sensing Drake sudden and dire need for information, threw some very sad, worrisome news up on a holographic screen for the man to read.

  “Power consumption, through the roof?” With a finger, Drake traced out the roots from currently operating simulations to where the power was being rerouted, only to come across ineffable levels of encryption. “Lemme see here … simulations failing by the boatload. Replication errors, dialogue script issues, whole sections just … digitizing into smoke and ether. Those people are going to die, Eddie.”

  Drake shook his head. This was bad business. The Shriven didn’t talk about what they’d seen, not ever, and even the few regular folk that made it through their Trip without going wonky had a tendency to remain tight as a clam, but there was one thing that all penitents knew, almost like the incongruity whispered to them while they slept.

  The number of failures. The lost souls, who’d entered and never returned. The ones whose lives and memories became a part of the incongruity.

  Give and take for an endeavor like the one those poor souls undertook was something they understood all too well, especially since most of them were the sorts of men and women who’d spent their entire lives treating other folks as little more than animals, but when their internal tally shifted from the ‘Survived’ category to the ‘Dead’ category by too far a margin, they got antsy.

  Eddie might be preoccupied in doing whatever it was he was doing when he wasn’t taking time out to make Garth’s life a misery, but there was something the man was forgetting; he needed the good graces of the EuroJapanese people a great deal more than they needed his. If the wrong people got word to the right powers, they could both be in for a long, difficult haul.

  The walls shuddered again. The holographic display ran a list of simulations close to the end of their lives, and the identities of the people stuck inside. Three Yellow Dog heirs, two EJ Chairs to Trinityspace and a smattering of regular old people looking to be spared the nightmares of their lives.

  “Looks like finding Eddie and dealing with him is gonna have to wait.” Drake rolled up invisible sleeves and headed off to find the nearest access portal.

  People needed saving.

  Garth
was going to have to work on keeping his own ass safe for the time being.

  15. A Day in the Life

  Shapeshifter Sorrows

  Fenris’ mocking words rolled through her.

  The role of a lifetime, implying that if she ‘did her job well, she might be able to return to the hollow mockery’ of an existence that was Indra Sahari.

  She hadn't been given a choice, though, had she? Unlike the BCUs churned out years later by Hollyoak, the thing currently calling herself ‘Sidra’ … she’d been designed along infiltration and espionage parameters.

  Being given the illusion of free will was worse than anything. She’d learned that in the cage with her creator and tormentor, the Bastard Drubarge.

  “Better,” the fake Sidra said to her mirrored image, “better to’ve told me the truth, Fenris, that there’s no way I’m getting out of this role, not unless I die in the process.”

  She considered her visage, brutal honesty glinting in eyes different than the ones she was used to. “Or I succeed, in which case I am most certainly going to be dead anyways.”

  It was the nature of the role. Day in and day out she was privy to information so far beyond classified that –from the very moment that odd little duck that was their Chairman had opened his mouth about something better left unsaid- Sidra knew a clandestine date with death waited in the wings.

  The things she knew about Fenris … guaranteed that she wasn't going to see freedom. The Horsemen of the Apocalypse wouldn't allow it.

  Sidra applied another layer of makeup to her already beautiful IndoRussian features, careful not to let her fingers stray too close to the device around her neck.

  Bright and shiny, it was both lodestone and prison. The awkward machine was a direct link to the real Sidra, who languished in some hidden prison, an unwilling participant in this duplicitous charade. Through it, fake Sidra heard the suffering Goddie's thoughts, dug through her memories, rifled through personal hopes and dreams and an endless cascade of truly horrific war stories that kept her awake at night.