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

by Lee Bond

Twisted science experiments. Same as everything else in this bullshit future. Maybe they were a parallel development brought on by the Baron and his monstrous ODDities, or a governmental or global response to the madman’s more and more overt practices.

  There was no way to know. The world he’d left behind, 21st century Las Vegas, was no more. Here, in the 25th, nothing was familiar, everything was alien. The world had been broken, somehow. All signs pointed to the Baron because that man was the only one still around and kicking, still causing problems, still sending men ramped up on Omega-Zee out into the blasted wastelands in search of tech, in search of answers, in search of … whatever it was he was so desperate to find.

  He was out to find those same things, but whatever cataclysm had ripped Earth to pieces and put it back together again in nearly unrecognizable shape had either destroyed or hidden those answers so profoundly that, simply put, they were never going to be found.

  He knew it wasn’t him. Everyone and everything in this world thought he was dead, killed in the crossfire between Jim Seeker’s Army and the fantastically pissed-off Wayfarer Jejune Sky.

  No one survived an angry wayfarer. That was gospel. Wayfarers had powers unlike anything anyone had ever seen. They could walk through the blasted wastelands without harm, could drink water so irradiated it glowed green or red in the night. Wayfarers didn’t even fear Samiel’s men, though out of prudence they avoided the mutated monstrosities.

  He ran a finger across the long scar running from his left ear down across his chin until it came to stop just above his collarbone.

  A parting gift from Jejune Sky, delivered via sharpsword. A killing blow to anyone not Kin’kithal. A gift. From a wayfarer who knew what he was, if not in truth, but in some indefinite way, and who knew that being penned in by Seeker’s Army wasn’t the path for him.

  He remembered the absolutely fucking awful way that blade had carved into him, remembered being goddamn surprised as hell at how much it hurt. Remembered wondering how it was that this other dimension, this strange, vibrant and all-too-deadly Universe could create something as lethal as a wayfarer when there shouldn’t be anything worse than the Kith’kin and Kin’kith.

  Anywhere. At all. Forever.

  He remembered Jim Seeker and Deshawn and Travail coming upon his ‘corpse’, deploying advanced –stolen directly from BishopCo, no less- medical equipment to detect any sign of life, the harried and worn-down commander of the last free people on the Earth –free as in neither ‘employed’ by the ‘gloms, downtrodden by crippling Omega-Zee addiction, or owned outright by SamielCorp- finally looking remorseful for his hard as iron approach to the stranger in their midst.

  He remembered being proclaimed dead, feeling the huge swell of relief in the knowledge that he would no longer need to pretend to be anything less than he was because here, in the 25th, being human meant being dead or being meat.

  The pyre caught his attention.

  Greens and blues were assembling deep inside the furnace.

  He sighed. Wayfarer. Caught by something it couldn’t handle. Tempolocust, maybe, though Samiel seemed to’ve stopped using them three years ago when he’d decided to bust up Seeker’s Serape Brigade. Blipping people out of existence was a great solution until you started noticing that having that person around was a lot less hassle than trying to deal with the temporal revisions.

  “Gridade, maybe.” He started trucking off that way, running tongue over teeth. Time to use some toothpaste. “I’d murder for some Colgate.”

  The Wayfarer started screaming.

  He put the gas on. Couldn’t afford to have a Wayfarer go up like a Roman candle, not with him in the same district. Samiel’s big guns always came looking and he didn’t feel like exposing himself.

  Not when he was so close to civilization.

  ***

  Garth shelved his memories of proto-Realistic 25th. He’d been spending too much time avoiding those particular recollections, partly out of fear that he’d learn or uncover the fact that there were even more memories that'd been hidden inside his skull by those goddamn Lords of the Dream. There was no telling how he'd react, so it was better to … avoid exposure. And, not to put too fine a point on it, there really wasn’t any point in dwelling on the past.

  This new Dream meant all bets were off.

  The loss and resurgence of previously buried memories still rankled. They’d been integral to his plans on taking down both his Father, the M’Zahdi Hesh and the Unreal Universe itself, yet he’d been utterly and completely unaware of the base reasons for doing so in the first place.

  He wasn’t ready to deal with that shit. It was rough enough knowing that whatever'd turned the original Dream into a Heronymous Bosch painting was inbound in the simulation.

  The 25th had been a shitstorm of vivid magnitude, but they'd had four hundred or so years to recover after the impending apolcaypse.

  The 21st would, by Garth's reckoning, become a feral wasteland and remain that way for a solid century.

  Garth went over to the workbench and started digging through the pile of stuff he’d stolen in preparation for … well, for anything that might need doing. He was Macgyvering the shit out of his imprisonment.

  “Nope. Nope. Yup. Yup. Nope. Yup. Yup.” Garth considered the small mound of equipment he’d picked out and nodded. “Okay. Step one. Build a step-up thingy. Whatever it’s called. Try and find the precise level of electrical go-juice this fucking thing can suck down before going kerblammo and go from there…”

  ***

  “What happened there?” The Emperor asked.

  “Sneezed.” Garth cocked his head at his captor. Something was off. The man was distracted. “Right when I was doing something where you shouldn’t sneeze. Electrocuted my whole entire face off.”

  “That was funny.”

  When you can quite easily recall all of your teeth exploding like ceramic popcorn, it fell super short of ‘funny’. Then again, Garth supposed that if you were Emperor, and you weren’t really paying attention to the guy you were trying for undisclosed crimes against undisclosed whoever instead of actually trying to help them through soul-searing guilt, you could basically find whatever the fuck you wanted funny.

  “Yeah, well, I got stuff to do, so if you could make with the zip-zap teleport stuff?” Garth waggled his hands around in the air and made vague magician-teleportation motions with his fingers.

  “Surely you will give up soon.”

  “Pal, I once carried around a cyber-pirate’s stolen cybernetic leg for, like, three whole years, confident I’d find a use for it. You don’t have any idea how tenacious I can be. Never did get to use it. Got blown up. Real shame.” Garth crossed his arms. “So, yeah, time for me to go.”

  The Emperor looked down on Garth N’Chalez from a great height. “It is your funeral.”

  Garth didn’t say anything. There was no need. He wondered if the real Emperor-for-Life had paid any attention to any of his time ‘neath The Dome in Arcadia.

  The throneless King of the New Arcadia suspected not; if The Emperor had, he’d know that –after dealing with the Platinum King, and seeing the vacant look in poor old Barnabas Blake’s eyes- his newest guest knew when he was dealing with the hyper-futuristic equivalent of a goddamn answering machine.

  And that worked for him. In so many ways.

  So he crossed his arms, stared at whatever the hell this Emperor really was, and waited to be bamfed back to work…

  ***

  One one thousand

  Two one thousand

  Three one thousand…

  He got all the way up to one hundred before the sounds began clarifying into noises that somehow felt familiar to him before he could open his eyes once more …

  ***

  “Okay.” Garth said to himself eagerly, rubbing his hands together in excitement. “Now that Monsoor Emp ain’t paying attention and coz he don’t look like a guy that messes around with Ye Olde PVR, let’s figure this right the fuck out.”<
br />
  The Kin’kithal motored right on over to the circuit, fully expecting to get right into monkeying around with the control mechanisms he’d built into the power source before having the reality of the situation hammer home.

  The latest addition to the n-space gadget had been built smack dab in the middle of the save point!

  It was gone!

  “Motherfucker.” Momentarily deflated but nevertheless still majorly stoked that he was free from the Emperor staring down at him from some point on high, ready to fire off ‘Disdainful Frown #4’, Garth sat down and started rebuilding that most important piece of the puzzle.

  “Thing that bothers me the most,” Garth said to himself as he deftly disconnected perhaps the most slipshod extension cord power relay system the world have ever seen -and here, Garth was including man's very primordial experimentation with electricity,- “is this whole blood thing. Like, I mean, really and seriously. The last time my blood did wonky shit, it was thanks to Bravo and all those neural sheathes and I definitely don’t have that shit in my system any longer.”

  The pain and agony, the sheer, soul-searing torture of having those microscopic granules removed from every atom in his body had only been eclipsed by the revolutionary new pain of having quadronium etched in those very same …

  “Hm.” Garth didn’t allow the sudden notion pinging the ol’ electrons in his brain get him too excited. Rather than start flipping out and rushing off into Mayhem Town aboard the Willy-nilly Bus, he instead chose to begin rebuilding the modulator.

  It didn’t take long because he’d done it once before, and when he was done, the power source and the n-space rig were ready to be powered up once more.

  “Record time.” Garth high-fived himself. Then he checked his watch. It was time for a little streamed TV. The Kin’kithal, who was intentionally forcing himself to be a normal person doing normal person things on a semi-regular basis, noodled around on his keyboard until he found a channel running a marathon. “God I love marathons. They are the best thing ever.”

  As he half-listened to a very handsome man -who was also in terribly good shape- announce that, not only was his name Oliver Queen, but his intentions on cleaning up his home city, Garth chose at long last to consider the ramifications of the thought he’d just thunk.

  It wasn’t precisely earth-shattering or anything, but it was a major revelation all the same.

  As the Dome’s inner mechanisms –minutely out of step with the rest of the Unreal Universe- had failed to completely undo who and what he was, so to it seemed that no matter how powerful the temporal incongruity was, it wasn't powerful enough to change what he was on the inside.

  And what was he on the inside? An infinite space fueled by quadronium, which was refined proto-matter.

  Which had been taken from …

  “Holy fucking hell.” Garth didn’t know where the Baron’s incongruity had come from, but theories abounded, starting with ‘raw protomatter from the Engines’ dreams of perfection’ and ending with ‘fucked if I know, man, all I know for dead cert is that it is a fucking pain in my ass’.

  Not exactly the most scientific of ideas, but when you’re in the 25th century and you’re trying to explain how Samiel has the power he possesses to a roomful of men, women and Wayfarers and all manner of thing in between, you just sort of let things go around the room, hoping desperately that someone smarter than you came up with something brilliant.

  One of the more prevalent theories was that the incongruity wasn’t really from their dimension at all, but from some other plane of existence, and that it’s translation from one Reality to another was responsible for the thing it'd become.

  “Sort of like Bruce Banner being bombarded by gamma particles, only we all know now how stupid that is.”

  But the theory had gained enough traction with the forces willing to fling themselves at Baron Samiel’s mobile pyramid fortress that they’d begun the process of attempting to determine the precise extent of power something from another Reality could really carry.

  Now, they’d never had the time to complete their investigations before Samiel had landed in his Amazonian base of operations for a little ’respite’; fearing the Baron's lapse in judgment would be their only chance to deal with him permanently, the World Army had rushed off to their graves, insights into the source of the tyrant's power remaining forever a mystery.

  But now, here, on the far side of having lived through that moment and everything else he’d endured since then, not to mention what he was currently going through thanks to the Emperor, Garth had solid, definitive answers.

  He knew how powerful alternate-sourced protomatter could be. He’d made Alpha and Bravo out of it.

  Whatever was happening with his blood, whatever it was that occured when he passed from the Emperor's Grand Foyer back into the simulation, it was all because he was stuffed full of quadronium. Because utilizing the nanobox and raw material from the Engines’ proto-Reality had transformed him into something far beyond the mere paradox he’d once become. The circuits and implants and everything else both he and Huey had filled him with were all part of the necessary steps to ending the Unreal Universe in it’s tracks.

  All of the new additions had been layered in overtop of his Kin'kith nature, blocking or otherwise impinging upon his inborn abilities but not destroying them. They were all still there.

  They were all still drinking in minute bursts of extra-dimensional charge. They had to be. Because he was still alive; if Emperor-for-Life had disengaged him fully from the quadronium circuits, odds were guaranteed he'd gack out in under a second.

  “So I’m still the realest thing in the room.” Learning something new was always exciting, but again, the news was tempered by certain, specific realities.

  The Emperor’s incongruity had a grip on him. That was definite. There was no getting around the fact that yeah, okay, he totally was the realest thing ever, but that didn’t diminish the fact that he was in a pocket dimension created by the Emperor-for-Life.

  He was still kind of at a disadvantage.

  Or was he?

  What if … what if The Emperor's efforts at shutting him out of the quadronium-based talent tree had inadvertently loosened up the ex-dee portion of his weird essence?

  What if his Kin'kithal powers were just waiting for him to reach out?

  Garth licked his lips. The notion was tempting. "Can't risk it. Nope. Just … nope."

  He shouldn't even be entertaining the idea of trying to access anything that the Emperor had shut off. Instinct and a million years gambling with Specters and other forms of madman across the Unreal Universe had told him pretty much right there on the spot that Etienne would shut the whole venture down the moment he karate chopped a building in half or, like, if he pulled one of Samiel’s ODDities apart with the power of his mind alone, so even if the powers were there, it just wasn’t worth it.

  Besides which, the window of scrutiny-free shenanigans was decidedly short, and it was highly unlikely that he’d figure out how to access any powers in the next few hours.

  No, if he was going to use anything of himself against both Baron Samiel and Etienne Marseilles, it was going to have come from his blood.

  Or more specifically, the quadronic atoms lacing the material from which he was comprised.

  “So I ain’t looking at blood tainting the fabric of the Emperor’s New Reality, but at quadronium tatters inside the blood. Which means I’m basically making circuits from ultra-refined protomatter, which is probably why Etienne can’t see it? That kinda makes sense, right?” Garth watched a man in a green mask kill a bunch of dudes with arrows for a little while, fighting against common sense to scream and yell at the idiot because come on, who wears a mask and green spray point to hide his alter-ego.

  It was worse than the whole Batman thing. All you had to do was look at the fucking guy’s chin and you’d be like, ‘Holy Shit, dude, you fucking gacked The Joker out!’.

  When they cut to a sc
ene with Oliver’s sister, Thea, Garth chose to go back to work because he hated that woman almost as much as he hated Sherry Palmer from 24. Garth stopped, frowned, then surreptitiously flipped to a channel running a Buffy the Vampire Slayer marathon. Surely no one would notice.

  “Working from what I already know,” Garth liked talking to himself because when he was alone, he was still a pretty interesting guy to talk to, “this here 3D circuit powers up just fine and dandy and everything is rock and roll awesome so long as the field generated right there in the middle isn’t disturbed by anything more solid than air. Then that shit blows all the way up. And when it’s coated in q-stuff, it sucks all the power in all at once and then it gets even more explode-y, a lot fucking quicker.”

  A full-fledged design for a properly built and ultra-lethal quadronium-powered MOAB popped into his head, swiftly followed by a few Baysian scenes were he just carpetbombed the absolute fuck out of legions of ODDities. Garth shelved it for later, promising himself that he’d only build something like that if things got to the point where mass destruction was the only option.

  “Q-stuff likes power. That much makes a lot of sense. So … the more of it, the more it pulls in?” Garth rolled the notion around inside his melon for a bit, working his way through the math.

  Without an AI or even a computer properly coded with pristine EuroJapanese script or hell, even a damned avatar ‘LINKed to a main, the math got heinously convoluted within a minute or two.

  If only he’d sat down and properly figured this shit out when he’d begun designing the quadronium inlay from first principles. Sure, he'd been under a lot of pressure, but come on, man. He was supposed to be the goddamn Engineer.

  He was better than this.

  “I’d definitely been more on my game back in the day.” Garth griped to himself as he reached out for some blank paper and a pencil. He started working the equations out as cleanly as he could. “I would’ve thought of all the ‘what-if’s’ and ‘maybe this’ll happens’ and ‘even though there’s probably a minus berjillion percent chance of this doodad even being a thing outside of my own brain, I am going to devise something to counteract it because that is the only rational thing to do’ and even though being stuck inside a pocket dimension created by a powerful chunk of protomatter and using my own quadronium-laced blood to form invisible circuits is actually less believable than any of the other weird crap that floats through my noggin, I really can’t help but think that old me would’ve thought about it. Like, all the time. To the point where I would’ve said ‘ah, yes, Weird As Fuck Contingency Plan 46-A: Quadronium-Laced Blood, and the Proper Ratio of Said Blood to Electricity Necessary to Form Safe and Not Explode-y Quantum Circuits’.”