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

by Lee Bond

  “It’s those cubes you were building, right?” Rommen stepped closer.

  “Screw you for ruining my big reveal, man.” Garth pulled the blue tarp off with a flourish then spent the next few minutes trying to get it off his head. By the time he’d rid himself of the Evil Blue Plastic Demon, the assembled crew were already crouching down, looking at the semi-drones with undisguised amusement.

  “They’re adorable.” Samantha picked one up, then made a face as she realized how light they were. “What the heck?”

  “Modified transparent graphene aerogel with ultrafine solid state graphene circuitry. Grew them in the labs downstairs using high-frequency sound modulation to layer the circuits into place. Very precise. Time consuming as fuck because if you get the compression bit wrong, where you like, literally use sound to fuse shit together, you kind of … blow stuff up.” Garth motioned for Samantha to put the drone back where it belonged. “Added a third-stage semi-transparent solar panel to the top of each for nearly eternal power and one of those battery things that that bitch Teresa Kanawa blabbed about online the other day. Also mostly graphene because it’s the new hot shit, but with some extra lil’ bits most other people won’t think about for another ten or fifteen years. On the bottom and sides we’ve got your absolutely standard and kind of super-boring drone hovertech … things that keep it aloft. With the battery soaking up juice all day long, these fuckers can stay aloft for up to a full day of eternal night without blipping a blap.”

  “Blipping a blap?” Birchcreek laughed.

  “Yep. Tried a Rick and Morty. Didn’t work. Don’t worry about. Not gonna try that again.”

  “Oh, I love that show. Is it just me, or is the mom kind of hot?” Birchcreek ignored the looks from his team. Just because they chose to live the life day in and day out didn’t mean he had to.

  “Pretty much every cartoon daughter or cartoon mom in existence is gonna kinda be hot so …”

  “That’s all very well and good, sir, but you hauled us up here at midnight for something more important than discussing hyper-sexualized cartoon females.” Rommen looked around at the mystified looks on everyone’s faces. “What? I wrote a paper on it. In high school. Because of reasons, as you,” here, he pointed at Garth, who feigned being shot, “are so often prone to say.”

  “Yeah, all right, you got me. Blah blah.” Garth reoriented himself on the drones he’d built. “You guys can think of this array as the first ever dispersal-based computer system in existence. Using high-speed, undetectable, unhackable WiFi … don’t you even fucking tell me anything about bandwidth and all that bullshit Gags, I know how you Canadians operate, frequencies and signals are eternal and don’t fucking cost you anything. All you got to do is find one no one is using and go at it like a fucking monkey with a banana, Gagachuk … anyways. Nodular computer system. More specifically, a nodular, dispersed security system designed to pick up where your ordinary super-lame cameras and shit leave off. It uses an undetectable frequency to communicate with my primary servers in the basement and can utilize the Internet without being detected. Well, actually, everything I build can. Because that’s how I roll. But I still have to use regular internet or Special Agent Sexy Mismatched Eyes will get suspicious. It’s very irritating because that shit is so slow. It’s like watching molasses fall out of a sloth’s mouth as the sloth is falling asleep.”

  “Where our systems leave off?” Rommen could barely believe his ears. “We installed a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of the highest tech in security available! The only thing possibly higher is the stuff used at blacksites, which may or may not exist.”

  “Oh, they exist.” Anu replied knowingly.

  “Right?” Garth jumped in. “Like, there’s the one outside Vegas, and then there’s three in DC, and then … oh. Rommen looks like he’s going to shit Kansas wheat. Sorry, Rommen, please do, continue. You were explaining something.”

  “Our systems are topnotch. That’s all. Well worth the money you spent.” Rommen flailed around lamely for a second. “You didn’t need to waste your time or resources building these … things.”

  “Kinda did.” Garth resisted the urge to rub his eyes. “Your systems are badass, I was just fucking with you, but … this is a whole other level. Between the cameras and the motion sensors and the heat sensors and whatever else you’ve got and my GPS trackers with added biometric functionality … which reminds me … I will need you all to drop yours off for me before you leave, got to do the same for yours … we will definitely one hundred percent catch anyone who doesn’t belong on this property.

  But my needs go beyond that. Way beyond that. Since putting the new server online, it has already been subject to an unthinkable number of cyber-attacks, ranging from bored fat kids sitting in their yucky chairs to professional Chinese cyberterrorists and a few government boys with names like Kilo and, uh, Ed. For the time being, they’re doing this from remote locations, making it a little bit easier for me to deflect their efforts, but sooner or later they’re gonna come here to do it, and that means ultrasecurity. The kind I can’t buy off the shelf. Once installed, internal security will be at it’s tightest. My systems will be devoted to online stuff only, and that’s kind of more important than the other stuff. Yes, Gambelson, that is including the Zigg-heads that may or may not be loitering on the side streets looking to snack on my liver. Also …”

  “There’s an also?” Rommen was mollified by Garth’s explanation of what his machines were there for. Just barely. “How can there be an also?”

  “Always an also with me, Rommen.” Garth smiled mysteriously. “Also, my gear will detect … anomalies.”

  “Anomalies.” Sam stated flatly.

  “Yeah. Anomalies.” Garth nodded up and down, up and down. “Like, you know, things that don’t belong. Your basic anomalous thing. Like … yeah. Anomaly. Rommen you got this look on your face like if I say anom … that word one more time you’re going to shoot me in the forehead. What’s your problem now?” The Kin’kithal paused for a moment, then mouthed the word anomaly as slowly and as obviously as he could. Birchcreek, Gambelson and Anu stifled their laughter while Sam looked like she’d prefer to kick him the junk.

  Ah, well, you couldn’t please everyone.

  “Why the hell are we here then, if this is stuff that we won’t ever use or even have access to?” Rommen supposed he didn’t mind being kept up to date on what the man was doing, especially if there were going to be some fairly heavy duty real world concerns kicked into gear because of his activities, but there were ways and there were ways.

  Garth, flicking through the various protocols on his updated and augmented phone –one of the first things that was going to have to be destroyed once he built himself a better method communicating with the new network- looked up for a second. “Mm? Transparency. One or more of you have trust issues, and that’s mostly because I skulk around the joint acting like I’m some kind of secret superspy or something. So I was down in my evil lair slash secret superspy bunker thinking to myself ‘self, what can I do to make the people who are working to protect me and the things I own trust me more?’ And then so I thought of this.”

  “Does referring to his labs as a secret evil lair make it less likely to be true or more likely?” Gambelson enquired of Birchcreek, who was busy texting someone on his phone.

  The Aussie looked up, grinning. “Mate, I am not certain. All I can suggest is we wait and see what happens down the road. If he’s eventually exposed as an evil superspy, we’ll all just nod and try to prevent his world destroying devices from destroying … the world.”

  “Glad to see I’m not the only one who has that problem.” Garth cocked an imaginary gun at Birchy and pulled the trigger. “Don’t do it around me. That’s my thing. It’s the thing I do. If there are two of us in the same room, no one will know what the fuck is going on.”

  “Transparency.” Rommen rolled the word around his tongue. “OK. I understand all that, but why midnight? A memo would’
ve done the same.”

  “I am not a memo guy.” Garth found what he was looking for and poked the button. At his feet, the twenty-strong drone army begun shifting this way and that as the online systems –powered by quadronix, which were beginning to throb with a heavy red color that sent small daggers shaped from other, smaller daggers, into his eyeballs- sought to calibrate the servomotors controlling the complex fans. “And besides which, this is cool. I can’t do tech reveals without someone around. That’s … depressing.”

  Samantha smacked Gambelson in the back of the head for no reason other than if you didn’t smack their sniper in the head every now and again he sort of wandered away into the olden times when he wasn’t such a cheery fellow. “Yeah, sir, we get it. You have a very big brain and like to show it off, but … we’ve got those perps on the road, some of us have been up since 0400 and have a fresh shift in, oh, I don’t know, less than four hours now. These are weird square drones doing what drones the world over have been doing. If you were hoping for some kind of parade, you’ve got another thing coming.”

  “Well I dunno about you, Samantha,” Garth replied, sickly sweet, as he plugged in the next set of variables, “but when I was on tour, I’d get my head down whenever I could. In transit, en route, sometimes right in the middle of parachuting down over the mounta… like, just plain old anywhere. I once fell asleep in the toilet.”

  “On the toilet.” Rommen corrected. “And he’s not wrong, Sam. We all got some kip. You chose to stay up because …”

  “I get it, all right?” Samantha made a big show of being terribly interested in the drone army as it rose smoothly up to a height of about ten feet above all their heads.

  “Hah. And no, Rommen, it was in the toilet. In. There was this whole thing, and that was the only way to get aboard … place.” To Garth, the sky above their heads was starting to turn crimson with circuits formed from his energized blood. “Now for those of you, Samantha, lookin’ at you this time, who chose to stay up late to watch Big Brother After Dark because you got a secret lady crush on that dude with the stupid chin beard and hair, I also called you all up here for this.”

  With a grand flourish that was entirely diminished by the fact that he was doing nothing more complicated than stabbing a bright green button on his phone labeled ‘GO!’, Garth made the drone army disappear for everyone who wasn’t capable of seeing into the eighth dimension, or whichever dimension it was that caught his blood and made it sear the world a nice, toasty red.

  Amidst whistles and claps and even a few cheers, the overall tone was nevertheless one of compressed skepticism; these were big boys and girls who’d spent considerable time doing things they didn’t even talk to each other about when the lights were out and no one else was listening or judging. Their combined military talent and their access levels undoubtedly put them at the high end of the scale, so it was safe to say that when they let slip their knowledge of Super Soldier serums being developed around the world, there was a really fucking high chance that one or more of them had been directly involved in one or more countries’ efforts.

  Which made disappearing drones not all that special, at least, not to the assembled group of hard core soldiers standing around the third level of a concrete parking lot looking mildly … bored.

  “Now I get you’re all kind of disappointed, and that hurts, guys, it really, really does.” Garth put a hand to his chest and feigned the kind of heartbreak you could only ever feel if you were starring in a 1980’s romantic comedy and you’d just fucked shit up with your mega-crush and found out she was going to the school dance with the jock after all. “No, but seriously. It’s more impressive than you think, ain’t that right, Rommen? Samantha?”

  Sam, who’d held one of the dinky little drones in her hands, made her ‘I’m not going to bite’ face, choosing instead to defer to Rommen, who’d already voted himself in as Main Garth Naysayer and Holder of Rational Action.

  “Too small for cameras.” Rommen commented. “Even the lightest weight HD cams would put those drones too heavy with the size, shape and fans you’ve got on board. Suppose you could do it with the solid state equipment you’ve got on board, no one other than you has really done anything with solid state except hard drives, but … I didn’t feel any of the kinds of film currently being used around the world and even then, things aren’t so much as invisible as … not visible.”

  “What’s the difference?” Gambelson demanded with a snort.

  “Oh,” Garth said in unison with the Kansan, “there’s a difference, all right.”

  “Not visible … means you can still sort of see what you’re looking at, if you know how to look at it right. Around the edges. There’s a warping, but it’s very … difficult to see.” Rommen looked all over, trying to see if he could catch sight of something similar. “Then of course …”

  Anu snapped his fingers and swore in his native tongue. “The motherfuck fans.”

  “Ladies and gentlemen, the physical manifestation of Muscle otherwise known as Anu wins the prize for being most observant tonight. What’s his prize? Um … there’s … there’s a cold slice of pizza you could have, but I was kind of planning to, uh, eat that later?” Garth laughed and bowed as Anu graciously declined with a shake of the head. “So. That’s that, then. A little display of my actual Shaolin tech prowess for the men and women who’re gonna be dealing with me a lot more from now on. Isn’t that exciting? There’s a good chance there’s gonna be more moments like this, and more often, because things are going to be heating up, and sooner rather than later. I need some of you from Securicorps to know what’s going on so you won’t be surprised and so you can trickle this info down to those who aren’t explicitly in the know, and in a way that will be acceptable to their military mindsets. It’s important that I know you guys understand this.”

  Garth waited for every one of the assembled security officers –who really were in truth more the beginnings of his own private army than random dudes and dudettes who wandered around protecting stuff from rambunctious assholes looking to break stuff for no good reason- to signal their assent in one form or another before continuing.

  “Sweet. Dope. Thanks guys, I appreciate it. You can all skedaddle now.” Garth watched them all turn on their heels, chatting to one another about what they’d just seen, trying to come up with a way that it could’ve been done, before shouting after them, “Oh, and one more thing, guys, before you call it a night or whatever?”

  The team turned as one and waited for Garth, framed by moonlight, to speak.

  “Yeah, uh, one of the advanced security functions of this new assembly? Every single line of communication, whether it’s text, voice, smoke signal, or like, telepathy, it’s all recorded and analyzed. Every blip of data from your phones, your computers, your tablets. Even the encrypted Securicorps ones, and that includes the satphones. The Man employs more than just Zigg-heads to make people’s lives miserable. If there’s something going on in your lives you don’t want me to know about, make sure it happens off property and only with mouths and ears. You may not like it, it may be definitely super incredibly crazily illegal, but that’s the that of that. Peace out.”

  The Securicorps team held their respective tongues, but it didn't take a master in body language to see that more than half of them found his casual admittance that everything they said and did was going to be recorded and monitored moving forward less than ideal. Garth knew he could expect to hear from one of the higher ups at Securicorps concerning their ... concerns ... but they could go screw.

  Baron Samiel was almost as insidious as the M'Zahdi Hesh. What he lacked in overall control of the entire Universe, he more than made up for in terms of creativity.

  The lowest ranking members of Samiel's control mechanisms were the Zigg-heads; rarely used because of their utter, utter conspiciousness, they were nevertheless more than capable of getting things done. Garth wasn't entirely certain just how they received their orders. The only thing that made an
y kind of sense was direct sensorium upload through their favorite drug of choice.

  As part of the double blind bluff to prove to Etienne that he was working towards protecting Drake from Samiel, Garth intended on acquiring as many different samples of Ziggurat as possible and then running them through the mass spectrometer that he eventually planned on constructing. He was no fool, though; scientists the world over had been working on cracking Ziggurat’s secret mysteries , and for a lot longer than he. Near about the only thing working to his advantage was his ability to utilize a higher level of tech.

  Next on Samiel's list were the ODD-men and women. Those allegedly suffering from 'Ocular Degenerative Disorder' but who were in truth nothing more than Samiel's ultimately enhanced foot soldiers. With most of them coming from further up The Line, they were fully and completely augmented by the latest and greatest version of Ziggurat, also known in the slip-tongue patois used in the wastelands as 'Ometh'. They were beyond dangerous. Nearly as hard to kill as a Goddie in full bloom, the ODDS -or ODDities, as he preferred to think of them- were just ... brutes. Even Lissande.

  Garth wished fervently -and probably would until he was out of the simulation and back into the 'real' Universe- that he'd spared even a single thought towards discovering the truth behind Zigg-Ometh during his time in the 25th! The tech required to dig into the drug would be fiendishly difficult to create here in the 21st, but he was going to do his best all the same. Would've been a fuckton easier to do in the 25th, but ... he'd allowed himself to get distracted and besides all that, there'd been the ... difficulties.

  Garth cursed at the errant memory. He hoped to Christ Etienne wasn't paying attention to his thoughts, then went back to watching the invisible drones as they began etching their connections into the overall circuitry that surrounded him on all sides with but half a mind; the rest of his focus was on the third and -in his opinion- the most difficult of all of Baron Samiel's troops.