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

by Lee Bond

  They were responsible.

  For everything ADAM had done under the guise of ‘keeping people safe’ to the horrific, nightmarish bullshit that’d gone on ‘neath The Clockwork Dome. It might be a cowardly thing, but as he sat there, focusing on Garth's life, Drake came to the conclusion that while what they'd done had had profound and terrible effects on the Universe, there was no turning back the clock. Accepting their share of the guilt might soothe a few hurt feelings, but precious little else would be accomplished.

  That being said, you couldn't deny the fact that Barnabas Blake had earned a connectivity point with their Kin'kithal.

  Drake slotted Barnabas -and Arcadia's- influence into place. He was comfortable with Garth’s supremacy over both ‘sblood and any lingering madness, but with nanotech Cloud in play, you could never be too safe. You needed a little bit of that psycho savagery in you, especially when you intended on bracing your thirty-seven or so thousand year old, fully-blown Kith father in a space ship the size of an entire Galaxy.

  As Drake sat and watched Arcadia's reference shiver into the mix, he wasn't too surprised to see zero connections forged between Arcadia and any of the pre-existing controls.

  “I don’t like this at all.” Drake pummeled his forehead with a fist. “I’m missing someone. Or something.”

  The chair he sat in transformed into a recliner, and Drake leaned back as far as it’d let him. The back of his head brushed up against the gently throbbing wall while he thought about everything else Garth Nickels had gotten up to since coming to the future.

  "Ain't the Bruush. Far as we learned on our own and from the man's own memories, he wasn't ever dropped into a gene witch's cauldron, so he's not been converted and he damn sure isn't packing any Bruushian wetware around. His nature, and the sheathes, would've seen to that." Drake made some noises with his mouth while he stared at the backlit purple ceiling. "And while I might like it to be true, later, at Tannhauser's, he definitely could've fallen under someone's sway, but he was in the middle of Full Blown Shitstorm at the time, soooooo ... gotta say nope."

  Drake flashed his thoughts back further, to Gorensystem. "Malfunctioning Cloud Replicator and a weird HIM. Juiciest of juices. Oh yes, and Shyla Sin, corrupted Enforcer. Best place in the Universe for a fresh off the boat and powerless Kin'kithal to wake up totally compromised... again, nope. Sheathes. And even then, I'm kinda sure the Cloud Replicator would've noticed Garth sooner or later and pulled back."

  Still wasn't good enough. Still no connectivity. Drake threw it into the display he held in his mind and watched it just hang there.

  “What’s the earliest …?”

  And then it hit him. Actually hit him. Right in the forehead.

  “Fuck my fucking life.” Drake leaped out of the recliner, made it disappear, then forcibly summoned one of Eddie’s many replicas from deep storage.

  The wizened-yet-regal Emperor-for-Life simulacrum, clad in flowing gold and white robes, glared haughtily at Drake. “How dare y…”

  “Cram it, asswipe.” Drake snapped his fingers and a metal plate bolted itself to the entity’s mouth. He sidled up to the thing, saying, “Now, listen up and listen hard, program. Your boss is somewhere in this fucking incongruity, and he is messing around with the tail end of some goddamn M’Tai bullshit.”

  “It does not matter what he is doing. He is the Emperor.” A second Emperor-bot appeared out of thin air, hands formed into wicked claws.

  They’d all been warned that Drake would grow desperate to understand what was happening. Thus, they were prepared to protect the true Emperor’s wishes in all things.

  Drake slammed the ‘bot into a wall and bolted it there with an even bigger chunk of metal plating. “Get this into your heads. The incongruity is failing. Entire simulations have crashed into the ether. Does that sound like something your boss wants?”

  “What the Emperor wants is not for us to know.” The second ‘bot intoned, eyes flashing to the gagged but otherwise free Emperor-bot standing behind Drake.

  Before it could do anything, Drake broke that first Emperor-bot into pieces with the quirk of an eyebrow. Then he turned his attention fully to the second regal asshole. “How rational are you?”

  “I possess the functionality to treat with any Outside entities wishing to converse with the Emperor.” The second ‘bot sounded proud of it’s power.

  “Good. Then functionality this.” Drake cleared his throat and started explaining what he'd avoided actively handling since his return to bolster his argument. Other than using his incongruous powers to goof around, the only times he'd used even a portion of what was available had been to save as many penitents as possible.

  He'd spent so long being Spur he'd basically forgotten he was the closest thing to a God this Universe had ever seen. It was time to remember that.

  If he didn't get the answers he expected from the Emp-bot, the fucking incongruity was going to be pulled down around Eddie's ears!

  ***

  The box was no longer a box. It was … a small apartment, if Eddie had to be absolutely forthcoming. Needed to be, in order to accommodate the size and shape and … wandering tendencies this strange iteration of a deposed God had started up with some time ago.

  “Who knew Gods paced?” Eddie asked aloud, positively enthralled by the oh-so-humanlike display.

  Back and forth, back and forth. Every once in a while, the Ushbet –a humanoid form just over six feet tall but lacking anything resembling features, unless you were okay using the word 'features' to describe ‘eternal backdrop of stars and Galaxies whirling endlessly'- would stop and pause significantly, with it's head-type … thing … tilted to one side as if it was hearing something and then …

  And then it'd resume pacing.

  Eddie recalled the surge of unbelievable excitement when the Ushbet had unfurled itself from the vestigial deep sea-like creature into something more anthropomorphic, revealing in the process all those wonderful hints and tips as to a far more efficient way to use the powers of the incongruity.

  Eddie also remembered trying and trying and trying to get those compression algorithms to work, brain literally seething with excitement over the sheer increase in power success would bring him.

  The damage done to other simulations, the loss of the innocent –well, not innocent innocent- lives as each world had gone offline, unthinkable reams of power colliding with the internal core of the incongruity and snapping out of existence was regrettable, but ... you didn't bake a cake without breaking a few eggs, right?

  Because those people ... they didn't matter.

  He was working towards a different goal, now.

  “A newer goal.” Eddie couldn’t quite recall when he’d decided to supplant Garth ‘Nickels’ N’Chalez as creator of Reality 2.0, but since that moment, he'd felt right. “A better goal. I see it now. All these millennia, locked in here with Drake, toiling endlessly to prepare a path for that asshole, when all he does is destroy everything we … I … did for him? He doesn’t deserve the chance. But me? I do. Yes. I do. Thirty thousand years, I’ve been Emperor-for-Life for nearly the entire EuroJapanese population of Trinityspace. No other living being can make that claim. And you…”

  Eddie walked towards the pacing Ushbet, shaking a finger, “And you are going to help me. You just need to reveal a little bit more of yourself to me, the tiniest hint of where you’re drawing your power from, and we can begin.”

  The Emperor knew Drake was out there somewhere in the exterior portions of the incongruity, crashing and banging his way around like some kind of drunken asshole looking for the room full of booze, but he was never going to find this little hideaway. He wasn’t thinking clearly. With a head full of android algorithms and a heart positively stuffed with fanboy adoration for a man …

  “No.” Eddie shook his head angrily. “Not a man. A thing. A being. A fucking paradox, Drake, a paradox. He exists outside the normal flow of time and space. He practically operates outside the purview of th
e Universe itself! How can you trust someone like that to have anything but his own agenda? You can’t, that’s how.” Eddie booted the side of the impenetrable cage and the Ushbet didn’t even stop. Just … paced. Back and forth, back and forth. “This is the only chance I have to kill him. He needs to die because if I don’t do it now, inside the incongruity, where he’s at his weakest, he’ll find a way out, and there’s no fucking guarantees he can even be killed out there. Not with the Engines of Creation looking out for him.”

  That was the crux of the whole thing. Garth needed killing while under the incongruity's influence, where he was not only separated from that wafer-thin connection to the extra-dimensionality, but from his quadronium-infused and –enhanced …

  “I don’t even know what you’d call that, to be honest.” It was a real stumper, that was for certain. Familiar with hytech designs from way back in the day and further augmented by being Emperor-for-Life, Eddie wasn’t about to admit to anyone –not even the silent, wandering star-lit deity in a box- that he’d given up trying to decipher what was what when it came to the quadronium after about fifteen minutes of looking the schematics over.

  “The man is bigger on the inside, for crying out loud!” Eddie kicked the box again and this time, the God did stop.

  Just for a second.

  The smallest, least noticeable of flinches, but it’d happened.

  He’d seen it.

  Might mean something, might not mean something.

  “How does that even happen? Well, I know how it happens here. The temporal incongruity is an overcharged lump of protomatter left behind from the formation of the proto-Reality. It can do whatever it wants. But turning yourself into an n-space generator, then stuffing yourself full of purest forged quadronium? That’s fucking crazy. You can’t trust someone that crazy. Hell, he can’t even use the fucking thing properly!”

  Eddie checked the massive, coiled cables running to and from the M’Tai’s unbreakable prison. He’d seized on the idea just a short while ago to see if he couldn't just siphon power from the ancient, homeless relic. All it’d take was a single particle of Godlike exotic matter and then he’d have it.

  From there, the incongruity could synthesize the power source. In the beginning, it might not be real power, but it’d be a start, because from that small step, greater things would arise.

  Nothing from the cables.

  No hint that the thing inside even breathed… Every goddamn scanner in the place insisted the room was empty.

  Eddie knew better. He could see with his own two eyes. You just didn’t feel the kinds of exhilaration and excitement he felt when the Ushbet unfurled itself a little more for no damn reason!

  Those things couldn’t be faked, weren’t hallucinations.

  Eddie pressed his head against the invisible glass. “The best part about this whole thing is that when I figure you out, I know just what to do. First thing, I visit Gorensystem. They’ve got a HIM, you see, and that’s something I can’t build on my own and I don’t have the time to figure it out. Antal is at the gate. Grab the HIM, use the codes provided from Garth’s time inside Arcadia to rewrite the spoiled Cloud into something a great deal more efficient, use that to rip Gorensystem into shreds. Use the power from that to create a hole in the Unreal Universe. One from here to there, because again, Antal is tough. He’s got the Hesh. He’s got access to the extra-dimensionality, so that’s what I need. Fight fire with fire! Obviously, I can’t use too much of the shit, because I'll be noticed if I linger, but I’m certain I can get in and out, grab enough to ramp the old temporal incongruity up five or six thousand notches.”

  “And then?” Drake demanded raggedly as he almost fell through the wall; he was worse for wear and aching through to the middle. There was no getting around it. Eddie had layered in some impressively unfair defensive measures to keep his secrets secret, but there was one thing he’d failed to take into account.

  “Fuck my life.” Eddie kicked the invisible wall as hard as he could. The God in the Box quirked it's head to one side for a moment, but kept pacing. “Fucking Spurbrain and his time in the fucking Dark Ages.”

  Drake flicked his clothes clean and healed his wounds. “What do you plan on doing once you’ve ‘ramped’ the temporal incongruity up, Eddie?”

  Eddie scrutinized the power Drake had built up inside himself, and was … impressed. His old friend from back in the day had reached out and grabbed hold of his side of the incongruity in ways that he never really had. He was blistering with energy.

  Only, he was tired, now. Digging his way through the layers of protection, risking the edges of the walls … it’d taken a toll, one that would be some time in overcoming.

  So. No fight. Not yet, though there was enough anger and rage in Drake’s eyes to suggest that were he up for it, they’d both be flinging incongruous power around like no one’s business.

  Emperor-for-Life smiled. It was still his game, then. There was time to convince Drake Bishop, a man who’d wasted five thousand years of his life trying to save a family line doomed to repeat the same, evil, shitty mistakes over and over again, that his way was the right way.

  “What then?” Eddie smiled again, unable to keep from preening. He was proud of the plan. It was, he believed, worthy of even the great Garth N’Chalez himself. “The temporal incongruity will be more powerful than ever. It'll be unlocked in it’s fullest, but we’ll only need access to the Baron’s old gambit, Drake. Time travel within the confines of our own minds. We can displace ourselves back to the very beginning, and we can do what we need to to ensure that our plans for Universal revision are the correct ones.”

  “You want to do what Samiel did.” Drake couldn’t believe his ears. “Do you not remember what he became, right at the end, when he was vanquished?”

  Eddie rolled his eyes. He could feel the Ushbet M’Tai pacing still, though slower. Almost as if it was finally interested in something beyond the confines of it’s prison cell. Probably imagining things. It didn’t matter either way; once he was done educating Drake, it'd be time to ... work on the Ushbet.

  “Bloated and simultaneously stretched thin. The forces and excesses of time travel are tremendous, I will give you that. But we’ve got things on our side that he never did. We are smarter, obviously. We’re more durable, naturally. And also, we’re not going to be working with a million years of Linetime, Drake. A million years. That was ridiculous, and his own fucking fault. A smarter man would’ve done a better job. And for what? To stop the Invasion? His way? It was a terrible plan, Drake. An awful one, and it cost him his life because he gained the attention of the Ushbet M’Tai and Garth Nickels.”

  “It was never going to work, Eddie.” Drake had spent considerable time thinking about Baron Samiel and his efforts to transform the past into a realm capable of dealing with the horrific things that’d fallen onto their planet on a more even footing, and had come to a very inescapable conclusion. “Never. Even if Garth had never come, success was never in the cards for Baron Samiel.”

  Eddie tilted his head to one side, uncomfortably aware that his pet M’Tai was now utterly still… “What are you saying?”

  Drake sketched a bow to the strange thing inside the cage. He couldn’t say one way or the other if it was an Ushbet M’Tai or not, only ... it didn’t sit right. What did matter was that Eddie believed it.

  “Forget we ever took possession of the incongruity and used it as we did. Assume that Garth Nickels never arrived, never got involved. You take Baron Samiel out of the picture, you remove his efforts at saving the proto-Reality from Invasion, everything and anything that comes from outside the scope of our Dream's existence, and ... the invasion still happens. That is a guarantee. Now, in this stripped-down version of the past, we still survive. Not well. Not … prettily. But we do, because when Samiel arrived, he endured it. Made his way up The Line. Started working backwards. For what reason? What ultimate reason?”

  Eddie shook his head, unable to accept what Drak
e was saying. “You. For some reason, in the Dream, it was always about you. Even here, in Garth's Trip, Samiel hunts you. I know you never looked at those reasons, and I stayed away out of respect, which was ... stupid, in hindsight. Why? What was so special about you back then?" Drake shrugged. He wasn't about to peel off and go poking through the Baron's preserved memories, not right then and probably not for a long time to come; he and Eddie hovered on the edge of all-out war, and even a fractional split of awareness might spell the end for either one of them.

  So just as HE wasn't going to go hunting for that particular answer -which, admittedly, should've been done eons ago- he could rest easy knowing Eddie was going to keep his brains right where it was as well.

  The pressure from the thing in the box was growing, and the once-upon-a-time surfer dude wondered if Eddie could feel it, and if he was, whether or not he was intentionally ignoring it.

  That was dangerous. They were close to the edges of the incongruity. The Unreal Universe was literally no more than a few inches from where they stood, beating relentlessly on the weird nature of the incongruity, trying in it’s own insensate way to rid itself of an impossible tumor. The overbearing presence of the Unreal Universe's displeasure was starkly uncomfortable.

  By diverting as much power away from normal operations as he had to unravel the mysterious, star-fielded entity in that box as he had, Eddie'd thrown the whole lot of them down the path to Serious Trouble. Especially if the containment field failed and they really did have an Ushbet M’Tai under wraps.

  “What does that mean?” Eddie demanded, looking through the corners of his eyes.

  His … guest … had resumed pacing, but the pointed sense of interest was stronger than ever.

  The Emperor-for-Life had no choice but to ignore the possible threat behind the God's sudden awareness of things happening outside it's prison -one designed to keep it insensate- for the being because of Drake and his personal problems.