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

by Lee Bond

“The shrug. What does that mean?”

  “Means it doesn’t matter what Samiel was after! Man, think about it.” Drake rapped the side of his skull with a knuckle. “Before Nickels showed up, Samiel had a success rate of minus one billion in turning me to the Dark Side. No matter what he tried, no matter how hard he tried, something always went wrong. We’ve both seen the files. The footage. They were fucking with him the whole fucking time! They had shit under control. Always." The Ushbet had stopped again and this time, there was no denying the fact that it was keenly interested in the conversation. It was even tilting it’s head this way and that, and was … yes. It was stepping closer to the glass, so Eddie decided he’d step further away.

  It wasn’t that he didn’t think he'd be able to handle his prisoner, it was … prudence. “The Gods of our fucked up little proto-Reality were fucking with Baron Samiel. The whole time?” Spoken aloud, it demanded to be believed.

  They’d slogged through countless iterations of Samiel trying to transform Drake’s DNA so subtly that by the time the 25th century rolled around, all descendants would be genetically programmed to follow every demand the time traveler made of them without hesitation.

  All failures. Thousands and thousands of them. Over and over again, every time with Baron Samiel growing more and more desperate, willing to do things and take risks that would’ve sent earlier versions of himself screaming into the darkness.

  Maybe, once upon a time, Samiel’s intentions had been as pure as sunlight in springtime, but those repeated and infuriating failures had driven him off the edge so firmly that there was never any coming back.

  “Why the fuck would they do that?” Eddie looked around, confused.

  “Our exposure to Gods is admittedly minimal,” Drake said, shifting his stance a bit so he could gaze fully on the star-containing biped in the box, “but if there’s anything we’ve learned from pop culture, it’s that most Gods are kind of assholes. From Gozer the Gozerian to that asshat in Star Trek 4, none of them were particularly nice.

  Only thing I can think is that the Ushbet picked me, maybe at random, maybe not. Fiddled with my DNA or essence or what-the-fuck-ever, turned me into a giant neon sign that screamed 'Hey, Look at me! Ain't I weird?’ So that by the time Samiel settled down and started working on stopping the Invaders, all he could see was me. Christ, for all we know, they put the thought that my line would be instrumental in stopping them right into his fucking brain! How can you trust something like that?”

  Eddie’s disbelieving frown turned into a wicked grin. “Here we go. This is what I was waiting for. You certainly made a compelling argument there, for a second. Got me looking away from the prize. Here’s the thing, Drake. Everything that happened over there doesn’t matter any longer. The proto-Reality is nearly completely destroyed. How much remains? Less than a tenth of a millionth of a percent? A mustard seed. But here. Now, I can do so much more with what I’ve got. We might not even have to destroy the Universe, Drake! We haven’t even scratched the surface of what can be done with Samiel’s Line traveling abilities. We need to do this. We need to at least try. If we do it right, you … you won’t have to spend five thousand years wearing the skin of an android and I … I won’t have created Latelyspace, I won’t have cloned myself … none of what is happening right now would have ever even been!"

  Eddie's emotional shout, the deeply layered subtext that spoke of eternal guilt and shame, rang off the walls.

  The offer was tempting. So very tempting. To believe, even a second, that Songbird could be undone, that ADAM could be transformed into an idle, grim daydream… They could quite literally save the Universe.

  But that was how Baron Samiel had started off, wasn’t it? That very first time when he'd arrived on Earth, in San Francisco, in the 21st century, Samiel hadn’t been the queer, bloated madman literally strapping himself to his massive machinery to keep from flying off into Eternity, howling and slobbering into the temporal void.

  He’d been fairly normal. Uninteresting, really.

  Just a man aware of differences between himself and everyone else, a man eventually surviving an Invasion the likes of which no one could have ever even hoped to prepare for, not if they’d been given a thousand years’ warning, a man suddenly realizing he could hear his own thoughts from a few years before everything had gone wrong.

  A man realizing that he could change his own mind in the past, and see those changes happening around him.

  It could work. They had access to most of Samiel’s memories, possessed the schematics for the machinery required to keep track of limitless iterations of The Line and to monitor individual lines that could have major impact on all their goals.

  They were smarter. There was no getting around that. Everything about Samiel suggested average intelligence, from his mannerisms to how he envisioned things. The equipment he’d used to work on his master plan had been clunky, inefficient and, quite frankly, poorly conceived, where they’d spent time building hytech machines.

  Combine hytech with incongruous powers, it might be as simple as nudging a few lines here and there, and everything that Garth had wrought would be undone. As if it’d never happened.

  No ADAM. No Trinity. No Cordon. No Arcadia. No Latelyspace.

  No Kin’kithal. No Kith’kineen. No Antal.

  No end of the Unreal Universe.

  “No.”

  “No?” Eddie couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “No? After all the chances I gave you, all those opportunities? After everything I’ve been through? I have a chance here to do the right thing in a better way than he ever dreamed! It has the potential to fix the Unreal Universe, Drake! Why can’t you see that? I’ve been a good and proper ruler all this time! It’s time to do things on a grander scale!”

  “Because,” Drake said sadly, simply, “it went from ‘us’ to ‘I’ a long time ago and you never noticed. And because none of this makes sense. None of it is right. You haven't mentioned Naoko in I don't know how long, but I know one thing for fucking sure. If you really cared about her, you'd've sent a fucking squadron of Shriven to her goddamn doorstep ages ago! They’re immune to her siren song. Your inaction puts the entire Unreality at risk! You'd rather fuck around here, with this ..." Drake threw a disparaging hand towards the shimmering star-being, "thing, looking for some kind of shit that'll only benefit you. So this is about you, all over again. Just like before. Always needing approval, always needing to be right. Back then, your indecision nearly cost me my life, nearly ruined The Dream completely. I didn't see it, though. I was blinded by friendship and love, so I forgave you. I didn’t see it until it was too late, Eddie. Too late to do anything about it other than hope your quietly narcissistic ways’d just … disappear. But they only grew magnified under the lens of absolute power. The moment you were offered even the hint of more, you jumped ship on all your old plans without thinking. Now you’re in this room, too close to the outside and to the heart of power, talking to a fucking displaced deity about Godhood.”

  Eddie saw how it was.

  Drake wanted the power for himself.

  Well, he wasn’t going to get it.

  The Emperor-for-Life reached down inside and grabbed hold of his own wellspring of incongruity-gifted power and thrilled at the sudden strength flowing through him.

  Before today, he'd always believed the ... torrent of light flooding his veins was the most powerful thing the Unreality had to offer, but now he knew for certain the thing in the Box was a God in truth, all he could think about was what waited down the road.

  To dream of being a God yourself! What wonder! “Your problem, Drake,” Eddie said, wheeling to the left, fists blazing with purple coronas that threw strange shadows on the walls, “is that you never could see the bigger picture. Of the two of us, you had so much potential. You were richer, better looking, smarter … to a degree, anyway. You were willing to let your life waste away on that beach. Any beach. Willing to wake up between the legs of a drunk girl or a whore or whatever
until you died of some nasty infection. Never once did you realize what you were, what you could be. And that is just as evident here. You could’ve had anything you wanted from Trinity, anything at all. I bargained for an entire people. You bargained for a company?”

  “I bargained for family, Eddie.” There was no way out of this now. They’d been metaphorically circling each other for days, cat and mouse, testing the waters to see if there was anything left of their friendship. “And that’s why I would’ve already done something if my daughter were trying to hack the physical laws of the Universe instead of hanging around a basement fucking around with whatever the fuck that is.”

  Eddie risked a glance at the M’Tai. It was watching them. Had he erred in the construction of the containment chamber? He didn’t think so. If he had, the earliest and most violent of the iterations would’ve broken loose ages ago; big or small, the thing in the box had always possessed the same level of power, and that protoplasmic bit of muscle would’ve hammered it’s way out that very first day.

  “The tubes.” Drake replied, leaping at his friend with a closed fist held high in the air. “Sealed for escape, but not for anything else. You never did think things through all the way.”

  Eddie didn’t have time to move. The fist crashed into his skull and for a precarious moment, he thought he might black out right there on the spot. Fueled by purple-tinged essence, the blow rattled his brain for a few seconds and had him tasting blood on the back of his tongue, but other than that, everything was fine.

  Drake danced out of the way before Eddie could recuperate. He’d held back on delivering a killing or even an incapacitating blow on purpose; there was no knowing if the prison cell keeping the alleged M’Tai safe and secure was linked to the man who wanted to be God. They were on even footing. Neither one of them could handle an Ushbet M’Tai, and if Eddie'd been stupid enough to tie the cell's functionality into his own lifesigns, the 'God' would be amongst them.

  “I can’t believe we were ever friends.” Eddie picked himself up. He dabbed blood from the corner of his mouth, then wiped the mess on his t-shirt.

  “I don’t necessarily know if we ever were.” Drake adopted Patient Crane and waited for Eddie to move.

  As much as the man had been alone for five thousand years and had had the opportunity to learn whatever he wanted, Emperor-for-Life Etienne Marseilles had never once decided to really learn any of the martial arts his ‘people’ practiced as a way of life.

  He had. He’d invented one. Specifically for BishopCo forces. An elegant and brutal martial art combining several dozen long-lost skills into one formidable method that could –had- saved the lives of more men and women working for the family business than any other technique.

  Eddie launched himself at his ex-best friend, using a bit of the energy boiling in him to enhance his speed. Fists collided with the taller man’s chest and he felt the bones there twinge in protest, but then, suddenly, he was flying through the air, towards the far corner of the roof. He collided nastily, painfully, before hitting the ground.

  “That’s the thing about college.” Drake rubbed his wounded ribs until they knit themselves back together, cautiously watching the lump that was Eddie Marshall. In it’s cage, the M’Tai had it’s head tilted to one side, emanating interested curiosity.

  Oh yeah, it might not be an actual Ushbet from The Dream, but it was something nasty. Drake couldn’t believe Eddie’d thrown himself in with …

  Whatever it was.

  The lump disappeared and before he could react, Drake felt a searing brand of pain erupt throughout his back, an agonizing flare that had him zipping through the air towards the prison. Doing the only thing he could do, Drake pulled his arms up in front of his recently wounded ribs and bounced off one invisible edge of the prison at a speed that would’ve killed anyone not connected to the incongruity. His forearms cracked under the pressure, but he wasn’t done being a Wallenda; colliding with -and bouncing off - the prison sent him caroming off towards the very wall he'd recently burrowed through to start this whole mess. Drake Bishop, formerly known as the alabaster android Spur, hit the wall with a nasty thump that left him shaken, stirred, and numb.

  “Everyone adored you.” Eddie willed his wounds away as quickly as he could, not even really sure how to do it; in all the time he’d been inside the incongruity, becoming Emperor-for-Life, bringing aid and growth to an entire people, he’d never suffered injury. No illness, no sickness, nothing.

  Back in the day, when they’d fought alongside the Armies of Man, yes, certainly, there’d been damage, but that was so long ago that the memories were faint, insubstantial. He was just going to have to let instinct guide the incongruity.

  “None of them got to see the other side of you. The side laying in bed, pissing and moaning about your father. None of them saw your weakness. None of them saw your self-destructive side. I did. We were a team. A team. When you were in one of your moods, I’d just tell people you were sport-fucking some bimbo, all so you could mope in your fucking room, listening to fucking Enya or whatever. I did that for you.”

  “Never asked.” Drake rose from the ground, pulling power to heal his many injuries.

  By the time he’d risen to his full height, broken bones were nothing more than memories; in his time as Spur, in the Dark Ages, he’d been nearly torn in half once, by a rampaging biomech android the size of a tank, while another time, he’d fallen from the very top of an already too-high BishopCo building and had his arm torn clean off. Being bounced off a force wall was nothing and he would've preferred heal from the injury naturally, but...

  This wasn't over yet. “Never once did I ask you to lie for me. Every time you did, I found the person and confessed. They always understood, Eddie. Always. The world we lived in was tough, the kids our age, wiser than they wanted to be. All of us were broken. In that school? Every single one of us locked ourselves behind closed doors and fucking cried our eyes out, or broke every CD we owned, or contemplated suicide. Or drank too much, or took too many pills, or maxed out Daddy or Mummy’s credit card. We were supposed to’ve been the future, Eddie… The entire world outside our school’s walls was looking to us to fix everything! Saddling a generation of teenagers with that kind of goddamn responsibility was incredibly cruel. The only person I knew who never worried was you.”

  “Because I’m strong.” Eddie pounded his chest. “Me. The strongest out of all you bitches. I played second fiddle by choice. Because I knew, knew you’d come out on top. We were gonna fix the US of A together, bro-him. Us and no one else. We…”

  Drake slid into Pensive Falcon. “Newsflash, friend-o. Come graduation time, I was gonna lose your number. Even before that last big vacation, the one that got me infected with Samiel’s magic bullshit juice, I’d made the decision. That’s why it was such a gangbuster. Wanted to give you something to remember. College is for college stuff. Like drinking too much, like fucking too much, like being on double-secret probation. Grown up life is for something else. For making the tough call. We weren’t really friends. We were parasites. Parasites. I’d made a few calls, worked deals with half a dozen companies that were on the cutting edge but close to bankruptcy. I was out, Eddie. Done with the college life and halfway down the road to putting my talents to better use. But you … you were stuck.”

  Eddie smiled sadly. “If that’s the way you wanna play it.” He pulled on more, reaching into realms of the incongruity that they’d both stayed away from out of prudence. Neither one of them had wanted to wind up like Baron Samiel. Fat, bloated, stretched miles out of shape and howling mad.

  But this had to end. Eddie saw it, plain as day. The bile spilling out of Drake’s mouth hurt, but they were a truthful hurt. He’d just been blind, holding on to the memories of who they’d used to be, out of honor and recognition for where they’d come from.

  A mistake.

  Clearly, a mistake. He’d tried fixing it five thousand years ago, when he’d trapped Drake in BishopCo’s main N
orthAMC offices, only it'd failed, spectacularly. Drake had learned nothing during his exile.

  Well. It was time to fix that mistake. Once and for all.

  “Well?” Emperor-for-Life Etienne Marseilles demanded harshly, frame crackling with amethyst lightning. “Well?”

  “Indeed.” Spur dipped his head once, then wrapped his long, pale hair into a fine braid at the nape of his neck. “We are and have ever thus been hurtling towards this point. One thing, Emperor, before we finish this chapter in our too long lives.”

  “By all means.” The Emperor could spare his oldest servant a humble request before death. It was one of the things that made him Emperor.

  Spur indicated the holding cell, and within, the thoughtful image of a God. “If I fall, cease treating with this echo of divinity. It will bring you nothing but sorrow and heartache.”

  Emperor-for-Life Etienne shook his patrician head quickly. “No dice.”

  Spur had known the answer before asking the question, yet had done it anyways. “So be it, Emperor. So be it.”

  And so it was that two lifelong friends met in the middle of the room, amethyst lightning hammering away at lilac waves…

  Your Granda is a Fuckin’ Cunt, Mate, Of the Highest Order

  “So.” Chad stated once he’d finished with his cig, “Why isn’t you dad like you is?”

  “Could you stop calling him that?” Griffin asked wearily.

  "Yeah, but..." Chad's brow furrowed as they tried to work through the various permutations that had ultimately yielded in the amazing miracle that was Griffin, "'e is your da, though, right?"

  Griffin turned his attention -and deadly fire- onto yet another legion of Harmony soldiers trooping towards them at unbelievable speeds; Kith Antal had yet to unleash a serious response to the escapee and the unwanted madman in his Galaxyship, but he was nevertheless devoting a sizeable number of soldiers to keeping them occupied.

  "Only of the most technical of sorts."