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

by Lee Bond

  It was different than her time in the Hungryfish with Chad. When she’d been in there with the rest of the minds, there had been points of light inside her mind, but those had just been more artificially intelligent minds like her.

  Bliss paused in thought.

  Well, not really like her. Not really. Being in close proximity to Chadsik al-Taryin was poisonous to an AI mind. It was why they all went mad, in the end. There was –or had been, or still was, Bliss didn’t even know if Chad was still alive, out there in the Universe, doing as he always had- something strange about the man she’d thought of as brother, some weird signal emanating from somewhere deep within, some chaos that corrupted the ordinarily extremely resilient minds before ultimately turning them into fractured personalities so twisted, they were all crimes against …

  Everything, Bliss supposed. She could see that now. The only reason she hadn’t gone the way of all those others was because in his desperate madness, in his toxic, poisoned reality, he’d taken to calling her Bliss, his special little sister Wee Miss Bliss.

  Of all the minds in Hungryfish, she'd been the only one with a name. And with a name came an identity.

  And with identity came life.

  Of course, that’d twisted her like the others because that was what happened, but her insanity had been different. Chadsik al-Taryin, the man of a million men, he’d needed someone to talk to like a normal person, someone to help keep him from drifting away from the final shreds of decency and sanity lurking somewhere so far down inside his infinite self that they’d been more whisper than truth.

  Bliss had saved Chadsik from himself.

  And that was why she was doing what she was doing now, here, in Latelyspace.

  She couldn’t help herself. The system was at war. People everywhere were going crazy, crying out into the darkness for help in ways they’d never done before, begging for help, for answers, for freedom, for resolutions and for love.

  Chad had loved her. She’d loved him, but he’d gone somewhere else to do some other thing, leaving her behind to protect herself from the Latelians.

  Until Sa Candall had come. Sa Candall, with his story of love, regret, and revenge.

  Bliss remembered every story Chad had ever told her. They were a part of her, made her who she was. She knew they weren’t stories in the traditional sense, even if some of them were so … crazy they seemed fictional, but when Chad spoke, he always spoke in the third person, distancing himself from the practical realities of what he’d done. A defense mechanism, Bliss supposed, because much of what Chad had done was … wrong. Evil. Bliss saw now that Chadsik had hated himself for all the darkness pouring from his soul. Because the evil inside had been stamped over him.

  But not Sa Candall. Nor his story.

  Never before had Bliss heard such a tale of love and woe. The grieving man’s sorrow had curled through her electronic soul, filling her with the need to give him the relief he sought. Even if that meant her own demise.

  Of course, now she was free to roam where she chose. Intellect scouring the system on wings made of quantum light, Bliss understood now that her decision to assist sorrowful Sa Candall had had little to do with the power of his storytelling and everything to do with this thing called Harmony.

  As she pulled herself this way and that, deciding where she would visit next, Bliss recalled that final, terrifying moment when Sa Candall had experienced the first –and, according to the way Fenris thought, the last- human ascension to Harmony.

  Glorious.

  The only word for it. In her mind’s eye, Wee Miss Bliss –who was no longer wee, not by any stretch of the imagination- watched on as Sa Candall was gripped tight by the mysterious force called Harmony, witnessed the effusive glory of that tidal wave of light and energy pouring into him whether he wanted it or not.

  Saw him become two. Two halves of the same coin. Sa Candall the Glorious and Sa Candall the Vengeful. One man, willing to give aid and succor to those who feared their end would never come, the other, destined to provide blood and sacrifice for those whose hunger for the Falling Dark and Rising Light was a palpable thing.

  As an AI in control of one of the most advanced ships in the Universe, Wee Miss Bliss had observed this transubstantiation from a dying, desiccated man into two effulgent beings intent on assisting thirty million warriors being torn apart by their direct allegiances to either the Five Horsemen of the Apocalypse or Father Vasily, the man who’d cared for them for decades in the blink of an eye.

  That was all it’d taken. A single, quick flash of light, and Candall had become something more than anyone could’ve possibly expected.

  As an AI, Bliss had known –or believed, at any rate- that her demise would follow swiftly… She was a mind in a ball, after all, a bit of cunningly designed hardware with a smidgeon of something special right in the middle that made her think she was real, a ball stuck on a ship hurtling towards a moonlet with four Hands of Glory primed to destroy cruel and unkind Heavy Elites who’d obliterated perhaps one of the kindest men the world had ever seen.

  As an AI, when she’d prepared herself for death?

  Well.

  Shock had been the least of her surprises!

  Where before her world had been comprised of data flowing from machines connected to wires connected to her steel-VII orb and a handful of maddened AI chatterboxes, her world had been … transformed. Elevated. Expanded beyond her poor comprehension into a literal Universe of lights.

  Trillions of them.

  And at the end of each light, there was a person. A person with a problem or a secret or a hurt or a hope. A person with a story.

  So very many stories, all of them needing … resolution.

  Candall was out there dealing with those who needed it most because the manner of his deification demanded it; if there was anyone needing the solace of the dual-faced Candall, it was every immortal warrior in the God Soldier Army. Freed from chemical bondage and given back their hearts and minds by Fenris and the other Horsemen, every single one of them was still nevertheless being torn asunder by competitive desires.

  With Candall standing behind each one of them as either beacon of light or flickering darkness, the Army was on better footing than the Horsemen were willing to admit. Which made Candall’s presence even more unwanted.

  Such delicious irony!

  Bliss knew that awful Fenris and his brothers hunted Candall. They wanted him silenced well before his roots grew deeper and sturdier.

  They had surprises in store, each one of them. Fenris, Nalanata, Lokken, Stride and Solgun. They thought they understood the Nature of Harmony better than anyone else, and they were … wrong. Candall was closer still to the truth than he even realized, but he was preoccupied.

  Wee Miss Bliss, the ghost in the machine, the whispering arc of light … she knew the secret of Harmony. She’d seen it, had peeked beyond the bright shining lights heralding Candall’s rebirth into something inexplicable, seen it all with the uncompromising and unstinting eye of an artificially intelligent machine.

  It was awesome. And awful. Wonderful and terrible, all at the same time. She wasn’t entirely certain what was going to happen, but … there was a big story out there, somewhere. The biggest of all stories. She’d seen the edges, the framework. It was bigger than anyone suspected.

  And it'd made her go away. Told her, without words or thoughts or pictures or emotion to ignore what was behind the curtain.

  And … so she had.

  Bliss didn’t really know what she was now, but she did know one thing.

  Until that Big Story was revealed in fullness, there were trillions of stories that needed resolution. Right here, right now, in Latelyspace.

  Helping Sa Ute had been a step in the right direction.

  She’d been there, in the room, riding alongside the HIM’s incredibly powerful –if overly focused- semi-sapience when Chairman DuPont had turned him off. Whatever else she was, when the most ancient original God soldier had fall
en to the ground, stone cold dead, all signs of life and light pouring out through nearly completely subsumed and ancient duronium implants, well, something very similar to a heart had leaped right out of something she supposed she could call her body.

  Still fresh and new and coming to terms with what it meant to be alive without a sphere, to be able to think without the glittering chip that used to be her mind, Bliss had missed the opportunity to follow Sa Ute’s soul to it’s destination point, but she’d seen his resurrection clearly enough, seen it and witnessed the spontaneous creation of an internal Harmony more or less the equal of everything that Fenris had already created.

  A walking Harmony. A living song. Dedicated to … something. Something that needed preservation.

  So she’d helped him. Helped him understand that Sa Tomas Kamagana was the only one who could help him. She’d filled him with a purpose, a purpose divined from absorbing everything and anything made available concerning one Garth ‘Nickels’ N’Chalez, from his own public records to the encoded Specter files to the data remaining in the HIM, done that and set him on his way because if there was one thing Bliss knew, it was that Fenris was already past the breaking point.

  The Candalls were capable of surviving anything the Horsemen might bring against him, so he needed no looking after. Sa Ute in his post-transformational state, not so much. And so, Ute was free, free for his story to be played against the greater backdrop of the Universe. If he was lucky enough, his story would bind the next part of Garth’s own legend that much better to the overall, secret Story being told.

  The AI that was so much more carried no fear inside her that her machinations were dangerous or unwanted; surely the hidden tale of the Universe would've snuffed her out like a candle in the wind when she'd strayed too close to the heart. But it hadn't.

  She lived, and so she would help.

  Bliss smiled and hummed the song of Harmony to herself as she flipped through millions of proteii at a time, juggling this and jostling that, momentarily altering avatars to provide results not normally possible before fleeing on quantum wings to the next batch, leaving in her wake stories fractionally adjusted for an incrementally better outcome.

  Tomas Kamagana had been the easiest. Whispering through the static, singing to him through the shows he watched, implanting the idea of the Quantum Tunnel and the black hole engines as a burrowing mechanism had taken less than an hour to cement. As far as storytelling went, it wasn’t the best way to begin an adventure, but as Ute needed to be beyond Fenris’ reach, so too had Tomas: above and beyond the man’s grief over his lost daughter was the nature of the man’s true identity.

  Cunningly hidden to evade discovery by the dozens of Ministries that’d cropped up since the start of the War, Tomas Kamagana’s secret was still nevertheless discoverable.

  If there was one thing Bliss didn't want, it was the real Tomas Kamagana falling under Fenris' dark sway. The course of the war, of the very future of the Story itself, would be changed irrevocably. The Horsemen claimed to follow some path laid down by Lisa Laughlin, but 'Tomas' had incredible darkness in him, possibly enough to match Fenris himself.

  And so, two of her most intimate edits had drawn to a close. With admirable success as far as she was concerned, though preventing the Quantum Tunnel's death cry from reaching the ears of every AI mind in the system had been a great deal more difficult than imagined. In light of the HIM's withering scrutiny, Biss had decided that, moving forward, she was going to keep a very low profile. With the War going nowhere fast, things needed … resolution. The people of Latelyspace were spiralling into despair faster than they realized.

  The invaders were losing hope of ever accomplishing anything worthwhile and were succumbing to a devastating ennui that‘d see them turning violent and sadistic when things actually heated up. The Horsemen were involved in their usual hijinks, and while Bliss disapproved of everything they did, there was no denying that their darkness was interesting. The soldiers on the other side of the unbreakable shield … well, it was hard to tell because she could only just barely see beyond the walls, but it looked like they, too, were giving up hope.

  Only, not for long. Not with Tomas and Ute out there. They were getting the boost they needed, and now, so was the whole of everyone in Latelyspace.

  Running the dual-layered avatars inside Honor Your Offer’s ‘LINKed system had been child’s play. The only difficult thing there had been keeping the mirrored station on Hospitalis from catching wind of the sudden –and massive- uptick in processing power.

  That, and not providing the answers too quickly. There was a pacing to these many different elements, she was learning, and it'd be disastrous if one group got too far ahead of the other.

  Happily, Codemaster Tremax was the sort of Latelian who’d witnessed similar –in nature, definitely not in size or complexity- avatar evolution before now, making her efforts more a case of ‘let’s run with it’ and less a matter of ‘we need to find out how this happened, and right now’.

  Working through the netLINK’ed and personality-less minds aboard the Macho Man 5000, on the other hand, had been marginally more complicated; because she’d seen the wisdom in not leaving any of her own personality behind in the process, Bliss had instead been forced to work backwards through the cunning level 9 mind, Alonso, a frustrating and aggravating task. Owing to it’s specialized programming and exposure to Specter tactics for the entirety of it’s operation, Alonso had almost caught wind of her during that first femtosecond when she’d slithered in through an open comm channel.

  Luckily she wasn’t really an AI anymore, so she'd skated off into the depths of the AI's sphere unhindered. Augmenting and boosting Tourmaline’s brilliant design –she wasn’t wrong in that no one, anywhere, had ever generated an avatar-based AI interface before- had been, well, child’s play.

  Except for the part where Captain Zerr had decided they were all going to find out just why the new program had proven as efficient as it had been; Trinityfolk, Specters especially, were far too similar to the insatiably curious Latelian people. Zerr and crew weren’t going to shrug their shoulders, announce that everything was awesome and then go on their merry way.

  They would –when they had time- investigate. Tourmaline and Rezek would dig deep down in the nuclei of the avatar code in search of the inexplicable.

  Bliss hoped it took a long time; she didn't have the time herself to go back to ensure their efforts failed, nor did she really want to risk getting caught in the act.

  In fact, what Bliss genuinely hoped for was a complete and utter failure in their efforts right up until they were caught up in the impending madness on the edge of space.

  Wee Miss Bliss sighed and hummed a bit before making up her mind about what she was going to do next, no matter that the disembodied AI imagined her attempts would fail completely.

  Old Man Vasily was a tough customer. The toughest she’d ever seen, in fact. He seemed built to withstand adjustments to his personal story, and try as she might to give him even the tiniest bit of a better tale, he shrugged it off.

  It wasn’t fair and it wasn’t right. Bliss understood that not every story had a happy ending. She knew, in fact, that with a nearly infinite number of men and women and things in the Universe that it was more accurate to say that all stories ended badly because that was how numbers on that scale actually worked.

  But that didn’t mean that before that sad ending there couldn’t be a bit of happiness, right?

  If there was anyone in Latelyspace who deserved a bit of Bliss in his life, it was Vasily Tizhen. Fallen OverCommander, failed Father, dying Old Man.

  She would get him to the Falling Dark and Rising Light, because that was where he needed to be. His account would make it to very nearly the end of the Secret Story.

  It just had to.

  16. A Simple n-Space Geometry Leads to Very Many Deaths, a Bit of a Surprise, and an Awkward Conversation, From Which, Our Hero is Made Super Uncomfortable

&n
bsp; The silver lattice resting on the table before him had -once upon a time- led to the creation of one of the very first of the hytech devices that’d sent him on a journey filled with lies, deceit, manipulation and the deaths of everyone he’d ever really cared for, and as much as Garth hated to admit it, it was a thing of beauty regardless of all that it’d cost.

  The looping silver wire –provided thanks to either a sloppy or forgetful worker, as no one had come looking for it- crisscrossed this way and that across the flat plane of the table, first forming a hellaciously complex circuit board before vaulting up into the air.

  From there, held in place by more tools left behind by workers and some fairly antiquated science lab junk –beaker stands, test tube holders and a few ring stands- the ‘2D’ circuit board resumed it’s complex existence by forming the first 3D circuit the world had probably ever seen.

  In the very center of this most complicated maze, a space, about the size of Garth’s hand. When the n-space generator was activated, the entire rig would blaze briefly with power before creating a nearly limitless amount of space within that intentionally empty patch of circuit.

  It wouldn't last long because the power requirements were absolutely stupid, but success was success.

  Of course, the circuits used to create Alpha, Bravo and the Cordon-spheres had been even more complex, even larger, constructed to allow people in and out to take advantage of that limitless space, but this … this was nothing more than a practical test.

  Well, two tests, really.

  First up was a test to see if hytech devices would actually function in the Emperor’s little pocket Universe. Now, Garth wasn’t holding his breath, because though his particular brand of technology had never been brought up during the ‘negotiation’ phase of their discussion, the Specter was more than willing to bet that good old Emperor Etienne Marseilles considered hytech gadgetry as more of a Kin’kithal power than anything else.