by Lee Bond
By far the biggest design yet, the quadronic overload would wreck everything it came in contact with, and he genuinely hoped the dampening designs he'd tossed in at the end would keep everything limited to the designated area.
If not, San Franciscan predator drones would converge on his location in seconds, HD cameras capturing everything live and in color because it was going to look like the end of Independance Day on this here fucking parkade rooftop.
Why would the Engines prevent anything from happening? It didn't make any sense, especially since they allowed for everything else currently running around in the Unreal Universe to keep doing as they were doing.
"Couldn't be the Hesh, either." Garth pulled the big portable batteries he'd loaded into the sack out and began the process of connecting them to the light-born circuits. "They're on the other side of The Cordon with the old man, and ain't nothing they can do about it. They're off the board until I decide otherwise."
Garth finished the connections and stepped back quickly. Though there wasn't -and wouldn't be- enough juice to set everything going until the timers were set, the quadronix bit into the slow bleed coming from the connectors and turned a surly red.
He held his breath and counted to twenty. 'Standard' quadronix were a thing easily and readily created without too much worry or fuss, but the particulars of this design left too much room for accidental discharge. Built to eat energy and shit destruction, there was a chance the quadronix could chew right through the protective barriers at the drop of a dime.
Nothing. The circuits were stable, if ... glowier than normal.
It had to be the Engines, then. Either that or something had happened, some big thing, way back in the beginning, after he and the others had climbed inside Alpha. Something big and powerful to echo through time until now, here, when things were at their most delicate.
That made more sense. The Engines had already proven their/it's willingness to assist in the end of the Universe by allowing Chad Sikkmund of Taryn to be born and raised inside Arcadia; it was hard to miss the fact that -awful tendencies towards mass murder and general acts of irresponsible mayhem put aside- the two of them were peas in a pod.
So. An event, then. Back during the beginning stages of the Unreal Universe's planned destruction.
Being ignorant of something that profoud bothered Garth. Whoever or whatever it was ... it'd allowed for the creation of the Dark Iron King and the asshole also known as Emperor-for-Life Etienne Marseilles.
"I would fucking murder half this planet for access to a HIM." Garth groused as he set the timer for the batteries. Then he pushed his way through the opening of the tarp-made tent and scooted his ass to the far side of the parkade and waited for the inevitable. "Anything like what I'm imagining would've been recorded. Has to be."
As the timers reached down to the final few seconds, the nearly-neon lines of the floating circuitry caught fire with a brilliance that seared through the tarps and then everything went arctic blue for a long second. Garth remembered to turn his eyes away for the worst of the burn but still had to spend a solid minute blinking away the tracer fire before he could see properly.
When he could, Garth did a little bit of a jaunty jig, then abruptly felt like a complete jackass for doing so. He'd forgotten that the Emperor was probably watching, and that this was serious business, and that the least thing he should be doing was giving that voyeuristic assclown any further reason to look down his long, monarchic nose at him.
But the scene ... ahh, the scene was completely devoid of anything that had at one point in time been Zigg-head corpses and the remnants of his bloody shirt and any other incriminating evidence. Even the tarp had disappeared under the energistic onslaught, leaving behind only a few scorch marks on the concrete.
"Thank God something is finally working out." Garth crouched down and ran a finger through the fine layer of soot. Either a bit of rain or some quick work with the hose they’d left on level 2 would take care of the remnants, but that was something that could wait for a later day; anyone coming across the stains would think overloaded generator or some similar accident and definitely not ‘three people were murdered here and then someone used the power of quadronium-enhanced blood to destroy the evidence using some pretty serious explosive power’.
Humming the theme song to The Greatest American Hero, Garth moved on to the final stage of the events that he’d kicked off this morning by refusing to ignore the weird smell.
***
Changetech’s primary lab setup was still in the middle of being … set up, as it were, but Garth being Garth, had been unable to resist getting a start on things sooner rather than later. No doubt the workmen licensed to get the offices and labs up and running weren’t necessarily all that pleased to have to work their way around the already automated 3D printers and robotic assembly line he’d constructed right smack dab in the middle of the main ‘lobby’ but oh well.
He was the boss, and they were probably all nothing more than constructs themselves, so if they got themselves some hurt feelings out of the deal, they could go home and drink themselves into comas with probably not-real alcoholic beverages of their choice.
For now, most of the 3D printers were working on the bog-simple solid plastic housing for the smartwatch/personal health monitor that he still believed would become a firm base upon which his financial and technological empire could grow; comprised of two separate pieces that could be snapped together in such a way that they’d be a complete bitch to un-snap, the main housing had just enough space inside for a smidgeon-sized revolutionary graphene circuit and an ultra-HD OLED flexi-screen that’d be slotted behind a clear plastic front cover, the body of the health tracker was already a dozen times cooler than the nearest competitor.
Chuck in some low-level quadronix enhancements –amongst which counted an invisible GPS tracker and global circuitry … thingy- and Changetech’s cornerstone invention would sweep across the nation and the world before anyone knew what hit them. The units were too small to hold a large deposit of his quadronic-enhanced blood, making any addition to the global circuitry he was hoping to get off the ground very definitely a time-limited offer, but that didn’t matter.
Once he had a few thousand of the suckers built, Garth planned on unleashing them on the market here in Frisco. With the way everyone was being stupidly health-conscious -which was stupid because they weren't real- he reckoned they'd fly off the shelf. From there, those 'poor' tech sector people he'd treated so ‘unkindly’ would find themselves working through dummy corporations building mass-produced units that'd be shipped back to Changetech for ... final assembly.
Then they'd be shipped back out for packaging and sale across the world. It’d be time-consuming as fuck, but hey. Empires weren’t built overnight.
But ... that was only the beginning. Baby steps. Designed to provide him with a non-invasive source of income so Devlin could calm the fuck down and hassle someone else for a change.
No, his real goal was the next stage ... augmented reality games and apps.
There were geeks and nerds and dorks and casual gamers out there who were using their smartphones, laptops, tablets and other zany gadgets to play games that had them out in the real world, occupying non-existent virtual towers, attacking enemies spawned from servers and generally –and unbeknownst to them- getting the kind of exercise they always swore they didn’t need.
The as-yet unnamed project he was cooking up would see those kids –and their infinitely more healthy, agile and active counterparts- running around entire cities, non-stop, all the time, cranked up on energy beverages and whatever else it took to accomplish a never-ending, high-octane competition to see who was the best. Synced to the smartwatch or tablet -and, once the game proved immensely popular, badass VR-type glasses also constructed with hi-rez, ultra-flexible, supra-thin OLED screens- the game would prompt players to follow weird, parkour-esque paths through their houses, neighborhoods, blocks, cities. Things like speedruns and t
ime trials and competetive racing would be designed to keep the game fresh and interesting and disguise what it was they were doing.
Foolishly believing they were in a competition, they would instead be robots, laying down quadronic circuits for his master plan.
It’d start out simple enough. Garth could already see the beginning stages. Complete a lap around your house or apartment, starting at x,y coordinates. Win an ingame bonus. Next stage? Add lines starting at these coordinates, then move on and connect them to these end coordinates. The higher the stage, the better the bonuses. The higher the stage, the longer the line tracing before those bonuses could be won. And that would make the players absolutely nuts over completing each stage, so, taking into account how mental everyone in the original Dream had been over stupid-ass Xbox and PS4 acheivements, it was a goddamn guarantee that people’d be out in droves.
A relatively small city like San Francisco could be blanketed in the first layer of q-circuits in as little as a few weeks, possibly sooner if he decided to enhance the bonuses by including small cash prizes that might culminate in a very large prize indeed. It all depended on the success of the second tier of the enhanced reality game: drones and other remote-controlled flying objects embedded with a larger still GPS and quadronix emitter would go on sale so all those nerds could complete -all unknowingly- the 3D part of the circuits they'd been laying down.
Revolutionary!
Because his goal could not be accomplished without turning the circuits 3D. He had every intention of creating his own drone force capable of layering in those additional levels, was, in fact, already working on that by growing the first series of ultra-light aerogel bodies for his fleet, bodies that would be very nearly radar-invisible, damned hard to see with the naked eye, and stuffed to the tits with all kinds of quadronix circuitry.
But it wouldn’t be enough. He needed an active population of idiots running around the countryside … the world … intent and eager to win. To be the best. The first one. King of the hill. With competitive video gaming being a thing important enough to get coverage on actual sports channels alongside the utterly non-game that was poker and the absurdly and quite possibly intentionally stupid game that was darts, The Game that Hacked the World was poised to hammer into the market with all the subtlety of the Incredible Hulk losing his shit at a kid’s birthday party.
But that was for tomorrow!
For today, Garth ‘Nickels’ was going to have to risk being seen by the curiously angry-yet-disinterested Emperor, risk forging the first artificially intelligent operating system the world had probably ever seen, risk enhancing it with his weird blood. He wouldn’t be able to hide his movements through the overly-complicated motions of his robotic assembly line –it’d taken fucking hours to get the machines working on the GPS tags to look like they were just being incredibly precise as opposed to sketching out circuits made of his blood- which meant that if the Emperor was watching, he’d surely raise that thin eyebrow of his and wonder just what in the fuck was going on.
“Risk.” Garth grumbled as he made his way to the only room in the building that was already ultra-secure. He’d insisted that the workers building his Not Quite Evil Evil Lair complete one entire room so he could have a place to store his design station and a few other choice machines that he didn’t want prying eyes or idle hands to come near.
Entering the forty-six digit passcode, slapping his hand on the scanner, putting his eye up to the reader and breathing into the … breath testing thing, Garth pushed his way on into the room and took a deep sigh.
It was going to be a long night. He was going to have to work in stages, first by designing a machine capable of processing one or more of the the severely complex coding languages used thirty thousand years into the future; he hadn’t yet made up his mind as to whether he was going to use the brute force that was IndoRussian or the more elegant yet fiendishly intricate EuroJapanese, and probably wouldn’t until he officially sat down to do the work.
From there, a box capable of using the language.
From there, another one that he could connect to the internet, so it might begin assembling images and other datasets to work with, uniting each multi-layer EJ icon with thousands, if not tens of thousands, of meanings and connections to the other icons.
From there … a system to develop a playable demo consisting of the elements of his combat with Sketch and the others.
From there … an AI server to run the whole fucking thing, because there was no goddamn way he was going to be able to build everything he needed to blind the public in a single night. If he built the ‘game’ in such a way that a very minimal amount of standardized coding was stored on a player’s console of choice with the majority of all the elements stored on the AI server, the chances of someone discovering what would definitely seem to be alien code became virtually zero.
And with everything hosted online, on a level 1 AI machine mind, something similar to a Latelian ‘LINKed system but boosted, there was absolutely no way it’d be hacked. People in this timeframe were close to creating various flavors of AI, but their definition of what it meant to be artificially intelligent was off base. No one, anywhere in the world, could do what he could do.
It was just a matter of buckling down and doing it.
“Fuck my life.” Garth looked at the closed, sealed door. “I should’ve had them install a fucking bathroom in here. Jesus.”
Emperor’s Disdain
"Why are you so interested in this particular moment?" Eddie demanded, rolling his eyes at Drake's fifty-second replay of the fight between Garth and the drug addicts dispatched by Baron Samiel.
"As Spur," Drake answered, tracking through the Garth's maneuvers at a glacial crawl, "once it became evident I wasn't going anywhere, I eventually grew to be responsible for training BishopCo's armed security forces in virtually every area of combat. From basic hand-to-hand techniques all the way up to the requirements necessary to destroy planets. Garth's fighting skills are paramount. This is no more evident than right here and now, between these Ziggurat addicts."
Eddie scoffed. "He's at the absolute limit with these three, and they're hardly representative of what the Baron will send. Once Lissande is done and the other you is completely locked into her orbit, she and the others will be more than free to deal with him. And as we all know, proper 'ODDities' are a thousand times more dangerous. He absolutely won't stand a chance."
"That's debatable, but for the time being, I'll defer to what seems to be common sense." Drake watched Sketch's evisceration at normal speed, whistling at the beautiful technique. "This man's fighting techniques, taught to him by his father and through his time in Specter and elsewhere is a thing of dangerous wonder."
"Your time has Spur has changed you." Eddie felt a little wistful at what he'd done to his best friend, but it was colored by the absolute importance of -at the time- reminding Drake who was who and what was what. "You were never a fan of violence, not even during the invasion. You were one of the most outspoken against doing what needed doing. And now you sit and marvel at this vicious man's sheer brutality."
"Not a single motion is wasted, Eddie." Drake started the fight over from the beginning, content to let his friend believe that he was solely interested in Garth's skill when in fact he was trying to see if Nickels had -at any point- displayed anything other than the strength and speed of someone who was in top shape. "There's precision and calculation here. This isn't the kind of brutality you imagine it to be. He did exactly what was necessary to save his own life and to end theirs. No flourishes, no wasted energy."
"In the end, your idolatry of this man will bring you nothing but sadness and the awareness that you wasted all your time." Eddie snapped his own screens to display Baron Samiel in all his mad glory. "Once Samiel realizes that the first batch of proto-ODDities failed, he’ll simply issue more chemical commands through Zigg-Aleph. If they continue to fail, I am certain he'll choose to unleash the next level of the drug into 20
15 instead of 2025, if only on a small scale."
"That would be a mistake." Drake commented, squinting. He wished he could use his access to the incongruity to garner more insight, but the moment he did, Eddie would instantly become suspicious. "Everything but the final iteration of Ziggurat, especially those intermediary variations, are incredibly unstable. He knows this. There's no way he'd risk something like that."
Eddie shrugged. "The timeline, as far as he's concerned, is already corrupted. The theft of the original property still rankles, is still a wrinkle that has never -to his enduring experience- happened before. Then there's the Fed, Granger. That man's personal history has completley changed now, all thanks to Garth. Everything is being held together by the loosest of threads."
"There's still Chezzik." Drake pointed out, collapsing the high-def replay of the fight. There was nothing there. At least, not that he could see and besides, it was as Eddie had said; Garth had been at the end of his figurative rope in terms of self-defense against those three Zigg-heads. Anyone further up the food chain would tear him apart. "Samiel summoned him in the Dream to deal with Garth, so that's still a viable option here."
"Chezzik Elteren." Eddie couldn't wait for that moment. The old Baron ... that was to say, the real Baron, had unleashed the assassin on Garth several times in the original timeline, only to fail spectacularly each time before finally choosing to earn the Baron's wrath in the 25th century by refusing to return.
But that'd been against a nearly unstoppable Kin'kithal. Not against an ordinary human. Why, in comparison to Chezzik's usual assortment of assignments, Garth N'Chalez was more akin to a toddler than a threat.
"Don't sound so pleased." Drake was tired inside. Tired of dealing with what Eddie was becoming. Had become. It was plain that Eddie Marshall had no clue that the stretch of time where they'd been apart had changed him just as much as being Spur for five thousand years had wrought a considerably different Drake Bishop. "The man's still a Specter. He's still surrounded by those ex-military security guys. He is preparing for threats from the future."
