by Lee Bond
Etienne gestured with a graceful hand. “This is it. You did wonderfully. What is it called? A double-tap to the head? Quick and clean. You angled the entry points of those nails to precisely destroy the medulla oblongata. Your Specter training?”
“That, and I’ve watched a lot of movies on the subject.” Garth rolled his shoulders and took the chamber in with a full 360 spin. It seemed to go on forever. The endless rows of Emperor-paintings stared haughtily back at him. “So I say ‘here it is’ and that’s that. What if … what if I say that before I actually get murdered by the Baron’s hench-zombies?”
Etienne’s eyebrows raised of their own accord. Always looking for corners and angles, was Garth N’Chalez. “I confess, I hadn’t thought of that, but now it’s been brought up, I suppose … I suppose I might allow it. On a conditional basis, of course. Depending on the manner and method of the impending death, though … I urge you to think on doing so with serious trepidation. Unlike your death in the cab or with the predator drone, there might very well be a moment in your future that cannot be undone, no matter how many times you attempt to change your fate. If you find yourself trapped in a loop with no way out, you will either have to call the game over or …”
“Live to die for eternity.” Garth ignored the sublime look of smug joy crossing the Emperor’s face.
Oh yes, his jailor certainly hated him. Short of the asshat coming right out and saying why, Garth would never know; it could be anything from his rough treatment of the Yellow Dog Clans during his time in Specter, or that one time he did that thing that wasn’t even worth remembering because come on.
By his count, roughly the entire Universe had one reason or another to hate him.
“And there we have it.” Etienne gestured, magician-style, showing both palms. “Ready to return, Mister N’Chalez?”
“Oh yeah, no, totally. Gotta work on the thing there. Oh, hey, one quick question.”
Etienne was feeling charitable. Now that Garth was finally moving towards –at the very least- trying to save Drake from Baron Samiel’s ministrations, things overall should begin moving quite quickly now; Samiel and his minions might have –and probably would continue to- miss Garth’s activities on the global stock market because projects like trading had extremely long range effects. Weeks, months, possibly even years might pass before Samiel noticed any profound historical changes.
But this attempt to bring hytech devices into the world? Naturally, Etienne would never allow hytech machinery -even the most basic devices- to function within the pocket dimension, a failure which would almost certainly see the Kin'kithal trying something drastic.
And that?
That would attract even the most dim-witted of Samiel’s men. Even sluggish Granger might feel compelled to mention strange doings to his loathsome employer.
“By all means. Ask away.”
Being in Specter taught you many things. It taught you how to assess a situation in a heartbeat. Taught you to count the assembled enemy in less than that. Enabled you to cold read nearly everyone. Gave you the skills to survive under the harshest of conditions.
It also taught you that a friendly enemy was an enemy that was lying.
Most people considered that sort of thing obvious, but it went deeper than that. It was natural to be wary of an enemy, to deem everything coming out of their mouths a lie, to count every action as laden with deceit. That was because they were the enemy.
But when you were in a situation where it was necessary to work with the enemy, presumably towards some mutually beneficial goal so you could resume trying to murder one another without anything else getting in the way of said murder, there were lies and then there were lies.
It was impossible to tell what Emperor-for-Life Marseilles might be lying about. It might not even be a lie, but a secret instead.
Now Garth knew it was there, he’d be keeping his eyes peeled.
Garth flashed Etienne Marseilles a quick smile. “What’s the time difference? When I go back, I mean. Thirty seconds? A minute? Two?”
“That is several questions, but since they all apply to the overall query, I shall ignore them.” Etienne replied regally, just the hint of rebuke on his tongue. “Under normal circumstances, it’s usually five minutes or more, but that’s for untrained men and women who aren’t really killing themselves to start over on purpose. For a ludicrously trained Specter and Kin’kithal warrior … one minute. Just for fun. Bye for now, Mister N’Chalez.”
Garth watched on as Emperor-for-Life Etienne Marseilles snapped his fingers like a stage magician.
A lingering flash of light, a pop of sound, and he was…
***
Right back where he’d started only a few seconds ago, standing on a plastic tarp, two nail guns in his hand. Remnants of considering how and where his save point suicide should be performed scurried away into the darkness.
Garth put the nail guns down and did a quick survey of the converted room to ensure that the One-Step security guard hadn’t broken the letter of his employment by coming back in to make sure the weird rich guy in the hopefully not haunted old school wasn’t being killed by the ghosts of Educational Failures Past.
All clear. No keen go-getters as far as the eyes could see.
There were, however, dribbles of blood on the plastic tarps with voids in them that hinted at brain matter glorping out the holes. Garth toed the sheets, then shrugged.
Aware that he should be getting on with possibly killing himself again straight away, Garth instead strolled over to the windows and peered out into the darkness, wasting a few minutes’ time by playing 'Spot The One-Stepper'.
During his brief death and rebirth, Garth had decided he wasn't terribly pleased with Zealous One-Stepper's gung ho attitude; with them treating him like royalty and San Francisco as Downtown Afghanistan, their heightened interest in being brought in full time could actually make the situation worse.
“I spy with my little eye a hobo that’s not wearing hobo shoes, a jogger with a hidden sidearm and one hundred percent the wrong pants, two … no, three casually strolling stroller-type people and a guy just flat out chilling on a rooftop.” Garth shook his head. "Are you fucking kitten me right meow? Might as well launch goddamn flares into the sky, have, like, Christina Aguilera do some kind of … Jesus."
And he wasn’t even counting the guys in the cars.
When he was done futzing around with n-space storage units, double-checking the temporary agreement he’d made with One-Step was next on the list; he sure as hell didn’t remember authorizing the mobilization of Alpha through Delta Strike Squads, so unless the biggest wig at One-Step had rolled this all out on his own dime, serious words would be had!
“Unlessssssss,” Garth drawled the word out as he made his way back to the shining contraption, “this thing zorps me so seriously that it fries whatever temporally incongruous mojo Emp Etienne is using on me to the point where I ain’t coming back.”
Garth checked the power supply he’d attached to one side of the three-dimensional circuit with a studied eye; wired directly into the building’s own generators, there were no silly things like circuit breakers or deadman switches or anything, y’know, safety conscious.
Once the handmade switch was flipped, a considerable amount of electricity would come rip-roaring through the wires and into the circuit, either creating a hand-sized space of nothingness that could store an eternity’s worth of nickel candy or a Garth-killing bolt of wicked brutal murder-energy.
“Now for the ‘fun’ part.”
Knowing Etienne Marseilles was watching this particular bit of drama unfold with an eagle eye – after all, the Emperor knew what was happening down in his little simulation- - Garth had prepared the next bit well in advance; in order for him to get his blood onto the circuitry without alerting the eternal EuroJapanese monarch of precisely what was happening, a loose blade from a contractor’s box cutter had been wedged into one side of the contraption. All it’d take was a pur
poseful -and sneaky- slice to a finger and …
A lifetime of injury kept him from wincing, flinching or otherwise reacting to the razor sharp blade slicing his finger open wide enough to get a decent flow of blood happening.
The next bit of the sham was even simpler; playing the role of a conscientious engineer making one final check of every inch of the complex circuit he’d created by running a studious finger along the circuit, Garth made certain that the thin trickle of blood spread from one end of the contraption to the other.
It took about ten minutes to get the entirety of the silver wiring coated with a thin layer of the good old red stuff, but it was time well spent, especially in light of the fact that he was trying to con the Emperor himself. If the all-powerful monarch thought something untoward was happening, he'd undoubtedly use his connection to the incongruity to rifle deeper into the matter.
Thereby ending the game before it began.
Stepping back from blood-streaked array, Garth tilted his head to one side and then the other before giving his invisible audience one final, serious nod.
“Okey-dokey, dude.” Garth said, rubbing his hands together in anticipation of imminent death and/or badass violation of the physical laws of the pocket Universe. “Let’s get, uh, yeah. Nope. I got nothin’.”
The Specter walked back up to the table, put a finger on the switch that’d send electricity through the circuits and smiled. He thrust his injured finger into the air and shouted, “No, hey, I do. For science!”
He toggled the switch.
Everything went incandescent. There wasn’t even a chance to see which took the surge of power first, the metal circuits or the blood-circuit, before everything in the room was absolutely annihilated.
***
“I am no scientist or engineer, at least not of the caliber you lay claim to, Mister N’Chalez, but I do believe there is something faulty with your design.” Emperor-for-Life Etienne Marseilles called down from his box, quite merrily pleased with the absolute failure of the n-space engine. “Would you like to see the totality of your initial failure?”
Garth poked and prodded his various limbs and face for a few seconds longer. That’d been quite the mess, even more so than the very first time he’d tried generating a stable bigger-on-the-inside space back in the Unreal Universe. “Sure, why not?”
Etienne Marseilles clapped his hands and a huge 3D depiction of the destruction caused by the failed experiment erupted into the middle of the space between him and Garth. “Impressive, yes? If your goal was to protect Drake Bishop from Baron Samiel by destroying most of San Francisco, congratulations, you succeeded.”
“It ain’t that bad.” Garth countered blithely.
Well, it wasn’t almost that bad. It was close, though; his first stab at n-space storage hadn’t merely turned him into disintegrated Garth-particles in the blink of an eye, it’d transformed the entire block into … nothingness. The explosion had scoured everything, right down to the bedrock, obliterating all life and all signs of life. It was as if no one had ever lived or worked there.
Garth did a rough estimate of the people that'd probably been in the area at the time and made a face. It was an appreciable number. "Lucky for me they’re not real.”
Etienne bit down on the angry retort that sought to surface with a noise deep in his chest. “They are quite real, N’Chalez, as real as anything the Unreal Universe has ever seen. It’s this kind of cavalier attitude … never mind. You no doubt wish to return, to make modifications to your design, yes?”
“You got it, dude.” Garth rubbed his hands together excitedly. “Love this kind of thing. I’m thinking maybe I should add in some step-up circuits to the power supply, you know, instead of just slamming a billion volts of electricity into the thing. In retrospect, that seems kind of stupid.”
“I am not a ‘dude’.” Etienne snapped snootily. “I am Emperor.”
“Copy that, Emperor.” Garth made a huge pretense of looking around the room. “Still no alabaster mandroid, hey? That guy was like a level 11 AI mind, Emperor. I’d’a thought for sure he’d pick up five thousand years of history in, like, ten or fifteen minutes with time left over to bake you some fancy cookies.”
Emperor-for-Life Etienne Marseilles snapped his fingers, abolishing N’Chalez back to his doomed to fail experiments.
***
There was that flash of light again, this time, lingering ever so longer, and the clicks and pops that accompanied the inexplicable radiance drew themselves out as well, just the tiniest bit and then…
***
Garth dropped the nail guns where he stood, relieved that he was going to be able to get right back to it. Then he spent the next few seconds preoccupied in dancing out of the way as the liberated guns fired a bunch of nails into the walls, with one of the pesky little bastards zipping really close to his cheek.
“Note to self,” Garth said as he made his way back to the circuit on the table, “no dropping nail guns like that ever again. That was stupid.”
As he got closer to the table and the circuit that’d turned the entire block into an empty parking lot –the deadly Specter marveled at the ruthless efficiency of the blast and was already working on plans to use this particular design as a WMD if the whole n-space dealio turned bust- Garth saw remembered just who he was really fighting.
“Hm.” Humming Blackholes and Revelations under his breath while he worked, the Engineer spent a solid ten minutes working his way through every inch of the design –much as he had when coating the wire with a thin veneer of his blood- only this time, he sought alterations.
Etienne was a wily bastard, more so than Barnabas Blake, that was for certain; though the two of them had spent roughly the same amount of time banging around the Unreal Universe, the latter had literally been mad as a hatter for the majority of his time alive and the former, well, the former didn’t seem so much crazy-crazy as driven to crazy measures for some inscrutable reason.
Definitely so crazy he’d stoop to secret cheating.
Nothing. Nothing at all. Unless Etienne had gone out of his way to monkey with his memory, the circuit was as it’d always been. If the asshat monarch had futzed with his brain goop, well, he’d figure out pretty fucking quickly that messing with a Kin’kithal’s memories was one of those things you didn’t just do.
That the Ushbet M’Tai were guilty of such a thing was to be ignored at all costs; short of re-entering the Engines’ dream of perfection for a chit-chat, there was sweet fuck all he could do. Besides which, he couldn't even do that because of his quadronium underpants.
"No more Dreams for you." Garth whispered at the N-space rigging. "Never again.”
Mulling -no matter how briefly- on the past, of being inside the Dream threatened to bring up real memories, memories of Eloise, and of how much he'd loved her, and how hard it'd been to choose between happiness and duty.
Garth reached inside himself and used everything at his disposal to push those dangerous thoughts away. Dwelling on a past that’d been –for nearly his entire life- locked away inside his own skull was a surefire path to becoming that dude that drowned in his own sorrows.
Regardless, gorgeous lavender eyes haunted him for a few seconds, unbelievably alluring purple eyes smoldering at him with the sort of love that made him feel all the more guilty for falling in love with Naoko.
For falling in love with her, and for failing her when she’d needed him the most.
Angry now, Garth smacked one of his fists into an open palm with force. The sound bounced against the walls, reminding him that his anger was a legendary thing, and if he didn’t keep it corralled, things would just keep getting worse and worse.
For him. And he really wasn't in the kind of place where handling more bad luck would be simple.
“Besides,” Garth said scathingly to himself as he turned back to the complex wiring, “Needa stay on task, don’t I? Gotta follow the mission I was sent here on, right? Right. Right.”
T
hen it struck him. About what was wrong with the n-space circuit board.
It wasn’t about what’d been changed or altered, it was about what was missing.
Getting right up close to one of the largest portions of the maze-like mass of silver wire and squinting with his right eye –it was still taking some getting used to that he had his own real eyeball in this pocket dimension, and even more time to realize that he’d actually grown accustomed to and that he missed the quadronium implant-, Garth finally saw what he’d instinctively seen.
Or rather, not seen. His blood was gone. Removed from the quantum substrate as if it’d never been.
“Mysteries abound.” Garth muttered to himself as he pulled up a stool. He wanted quite desperately to think aloud, but with the Emperor over his shoulder, it was just too risky. The distraction that kept the monarch from noticing what he was doing with the blood was a risk worth taking, but blabbering out loud about the mysterious properties of his red stuff?
That’d derail the whole goddamn trial and force the Emperor's hand; rather than continue on with this sham of a Guilt Trip, the over-powered ruler would spend the rest of eternity digging into just how an allegedly powerless Kin'kithal was doing anything without the express permission of the incongruity's lord.
That was time Garth didn't have, especially if this whole shitstorm was running 1:1.
So as much as talking out loud helped the ole thought processes, it was time to sit back and look introspective.
The most obvious solution lay in why pretty much everything in eyeshot had been destroyed upon activation of the circuit. Hytech machines -of any complexity- were basically hooked right into the very fabric of Creation itself. It wasn’t something that could be replicated, or monitored, or discovered. It was simply there, an innate and unbreakable link into what made the Universe be a Universe instead of, say, a boring old table.
If that link was unstable, or if there was a flaw somewhere in the blueprint … destruction. In a big fucking way. Powering up a flawed hytech anything typically resulted in something similar to what he and the Emperor had already witnessed, but as with anything in the Unreal Universe, there was no real way of determining the scope of that destruction until you switched the fucking thing on.
