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

by Lee Bond

  The red lines. The Lines that all Wayfarers followed from birth to death … they … jumped.

  Then they began to burn.

  So bright. So … so … so bright.

  Bombatom blinked. His mind fractured. All their minds did.

  For in that moment, The Lines had always been out. And had always been lit. Their past had always been angled towards this moment, and had never been.

  The fool Too-Lo-Ton was no fool, but a martyr, always and forever knowing that his sacrifice would bring the end, and accepting it.

  The martyr Too-Lo-Ton, forever and always the fool, bracing a brash and wild assassin, losing his head because he’d lost his wits.

  Bombatom howled.

  They all did.

  The world … the moments … the history … they fro…

  ***

  Images and sounds, smells and feelings … trickled into his perceptual awareness, slowly, like cold molasses being poured in the middle of winter. A veritable cacophony of imprints, yowling through him, a data storm of unprecedented volume, both from inside his own mind and from the outside, rappelled up and down his insides, rattling things as hadn’t been used in decades loose.

  Outside was easy to deal with. Everything outside himself was always easiest. Chezzik Elteren commanded his senses to ignore all stimuli crowding against his skin, against his ears, and soon, swiftly as anything, the outside world crawled to a glacial stop, then disappeared, leaving the assassin to deal with … what remained.

  Electronic signals by the millions clamored for his attention. Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and who knew what else. Chez knew he’d forgotten all the names for all the toys and tools and gadgets that the people in this time used to connect themselves to the Internet, and he thrilled at the discovery … well, the rediscovery that who he was now could link to all that data with ease.

  It was like there was tiny door in the back of his mind, and when he opened it, he became connected to the vast grandeur that was the collected intelligence of the entire Human race. Glorious!

  Shutting that door, though symbolic, worked to diminish the electronic storm grating across his mind.

  After a few seconds, the only thing that remained, that required his immediate attention, was a data file that’d been uploaded to a cellular telephone somewhere in the area, one that’d begun beaming info at him using a very recognizable encryption code, one not in use for at least another two hundred years.

  Baron Samiel, it seemed, was capable of providing for his temporary employees, regardless of how odd a duck he was in person.

  “Now then,” Chez said to himself, “time to see about getting this job started right. Name, Garth Nickels. Address, ah, how delightful, within walking distance. Pictures? No, because of course not. No matter. Lad like this, bound to make his presence obvious, hey?”

  Chezzik Elteren trucked off towards his mark’s destination, pulling directions from Googlemaps as quickly and as flawlessly as he’d been trained.

  This was going to be fun.

  25. Rounding the Corner

  DAY 90: Assassination Games and Other, Assorted Time-Foolery

  …time…

  …to…

  …wake…

  …UP…

  Garth ‘Nickels’ N’Chalez’ eyes fluttered open as if he’d been asleep for decades; the lids covering his eyes struggled to find their strength, and he fought against the kind of sleep-gunk that used to weld them shut when you were a kid growing up. A groggy sense of displacement filled him and as his lids finally separated from eyeballs, it took him a long, precarious moment to figure out where –and more importantly, when- he was.

  Once his eyes were all the way open, though, Garth saw instantly that he was in the same place he’d been for the last two months, though for the first time in those two months, there was only the one thought in his head, the one voice, the one set of memories.

  Ice-cold daggers tinged with burning lava slid gently into his old peepers, further worsened by the presence of the OLED-type lenses that’d been surgically placed there by himself well over a month ago. They were a wonderful fix to combat ever-growing sensitivity and migraines brought about by thick red lines carpeting … well, almost everywhere now, but they weren’t precisely eyeball friendly.

  “Thought I got a workaround on the wearability.” Garth cleared his throat, pressed his hands to the sides of his head and tried to literally push the discomfort radiating out from the eyeballs away through his nose.

  Nothing doing. Technically, he was being a gigantic pussy, because it wasn’t any worse than anything else he’d been asked to deal with down through the years. It was the most recent, though, so even though it was hardly more than an itch you couldn’t scratch, his eyes –which felt like they were boiling in their own juices- rocketed right to the top of the leaderboard.

  “Guess not.” Garth grunted as he swung his legs over the edge of the bed, still unused to the fact that sleep had become a sudden priority in his life when he’d basically managed to avoid or otherwise evade the useless waste of time. “Splitting yourself across two months of history several dozen times and manipulating things to your benefit is surprisingly tiresome.”

  Not to mention keeping track of what he could and couldn’t say to any of the people in his employ. Rommen was all good, the man could handle whatever was coming down the pipeline, so to speak, but the others –even garrulous Birchcreek- would have a hard time dealing with how weird their lives had gotten.

  Base memories hinted at Hollywood-esque levels of hijinkery and shenaniganery over the last two months, the kinds of things normally left for a Corey Haim/Corey Feldman silver screen vehicle, leaving Garth morbidly pleased he'd managed to avoid being the one actually doing all that stupid shit.

  Pressing his hands against the sides of his head once more, Garth resumed pressing until the Compunet Lenses MK IV ground, ever so gently, against the inside of the eye socket. “Mmmmm.” Garth quipped. “Bone against almost metal. Tasty.”

  But the pressure didn’t go away.

  No matter.

  Today was the day. The day everything came to a boil. He could endure discomfort for a little while longer.

  “All right. Time to remember everything.”

  The interesting thing about possessing one of Samiel's phones was that yes, it did allow for communications between iterations of himself through the timeline, and quite simply, all things considered.

  It was just that the human mind … well, his mind, at any rate … needed actual, literal downtime to compress and delineate any and all events altered by fiddling with time.

  A trick that was, not to put too fine a point on it, a colossal fucking pain.

  Actually talking to himself across various points through his personal timeline was a thing that’d gotten a little … weird.

  Garth still wasn’t sure how he felt about all of that. For a while there, it’d felt like he was going mad. Some of him, bored off their asses on, like, a slow Tuesday night, had pretended to go insane. Like, right there in the middle of working on another Galaxy for Specter or an advanced biometric scanner for the US government, one of him would start talking about smelling colors or tasting light.

  One regrettable evening, one version of himself -right smack dab in the middle of designing the very lenses he himself wore right that moment- had gone on at great length about the fundamental flaws in the Transformers movies.

  Garth didn't even remember watching the Transformers movies in the first place!

  “I,” Garth hopped out of bed, “am a dick. No,” he told himself in the mirror, pleased for once that it was just himself he was talking to and not any other version of himself, “no, it’s true. I’m kind of an asshole.”

  Garth pulled Samiel’s Phone loose from his pocket and fiddled with it for about the ten millionth time.

  Such a basic design. It looked like something you'd buy from a guy sitting on a carpet while you wandered through a bazaar in Egypt. Found on the str
eet, no one would give it more than a cursory glance, and there was almost no chance in hell that anyone would actually pick it up; even though the damn thing gave you the ability to temporally shift the focus of your conscience mind from one point to the other, the fucking thing looked like it was worth about three-fifty. “Gimme mah tree-fiddy.” Garth flipped the clamshell open, poked at a few buttons. Nothing.

  Nada.

  Well, not entirely nada. One button still functioned: the 'Send' button. Cracking, one corner lifting out of the cheap plastic frame, the gel-like button had been used to the point of distraction over the last two months.

  Faint vestiges of power stuttered deep inside the cheap unit. Once he pushed 'Send' and clapped the phone to his ear, everything he'd done to arrange for today would be ... sent.

  Crashing into his noggin like Doc Brown's stainless steel ride, though with considerably less cool factor and imminently more pain.

  But the other buttons in the grungy frame? Inoperable.

  As they had been since he'd fished the phone from underneath Granger's soiled pants.

  But once Samiel returned his focus to this point in the Line ... It'd come back online, and the walls of Temporal History would grow thin as parchment, but for the ... time being ... he was a solo entity once more.

  He'd come to the End of the Line, metaphorically and temporally speaking.

  Not only was today Assassination Day, it was also the first time he'd splashed down in this pain-in-the-ass version of 21st century San Francisco. Conceivably, somewhere across town, a version of him was getting his ass blown to smithereens every few seconds.

  Garth considered hopping on Ye Olde News Channels to see what was what before changing his mind. He'd been -would be ... was going to be- going through all kinds of shit in the cab.

  "Frankly speaking, I'd rather try buying a beer in Slagvelde Tuis's dingy little Barternic, VrotGat Extreme." Garth shuddered at the memories collected during his brief stint in 25th century South Africa.

  Garth realized he was wasting time and sighed miserably. This last upload was gonna be a real motherfucker.

  “All right. Okay.” Garth took some quick breaths, puffing them in and out, hyper-oxygenating his system. He didn’t need to, it was just that … receiving temporal updates was kind of … off-putting.

  “Yeah. We’ll go with off-putting. Because ‘it feels like someone is trying to blow my toes off with juuuuuuust the smallest bit of electricity required to do that thing’ is a little too on the nose. On the toes. Dammit. Dammit. That would’ve been on point! Why do I not have a handle on this yet?"

  Garth took another breath, looked at the phone, damn certain it was eyeballing him right back and convinced, Samiel’s tortured voice was going to rise up out of the speaker like a dead man’s whispers. The buttons glowed a bit, the cheap ass LED display flickered a bit, but other than that, it was just an ordinary…

  As if it were sensing what was coming, the rest of the button's winked and blinked and the cheap-as-fuck green LED screen juddered with nonsensical ASCII bullshit. Garth licked his lips and all but stabbed 'Send' with a thumb.

  The Engineer clapped the phone to his ear.

  Lightning crashed inside his skull…

  … figuring out how to use the phone’s incongruous aura to fractal time inside the workshop had been so time-consuming … days, hours, weeks, fiddling with different constructs to enhance, augment, and eventually to split the energy sleeting away from the humble object until … at last, success in the form of double, then triple and finally sextuple the output, a handmade concentration of time in a bottle, every GPS band, every fancy-ass VR goggle-rig, every haptic sensor band for the augmented reality game splitting, becoming two, three, four … eighteen times itself and then that number trebled, quadrupled, quintupled, with the dénouement of the whole project discovering how to undo all the lost time while leaving behind only success until a cross-town warehouse -shepherded by Anu and Gagachuk- was suddenly full to overflowing ...

  Garth pinched his nose. Blood was already coming, but it was too soon. Goddamn, getting that done had nearly killed him! He didn’t remember the near-death experience, other than to say that at the end of the … heh … time-consuming project, he’d been laid up in bed for nearly a solid week, poor Rommen going quietly and gently insane as the one man capable of combating a tyrannical despot from the future lay abed in a dazed wonderland.

  When he’d gotten better, of course the first thing he’d done was revise his own personal Line to remove all signs of sickness, illness, or weakness. The timeline had jerked this way and that, a prize bull lashed to an unbreakable tether, and in the blink of an eye, the wasted week had been replaced with a week of proactive efforts, most of which had been spent arranging sales and shipment of every damn thing associated with Line Runner, the admittedly poorly-named but wildly successful AR game.

  The phone beeped.

  Round two.

  Garth took a deep, deep breath and held it.

  Lightning slammed into his ear, then burned through his skull…

  … volubly arguing with Nickelback's incredibly spastic and surprisingly arrogant representatives … everyone … in a desperate attempt to get the phenomenally popular rock band to take a bit of a break from their latest tour to help a brother out by swinging on by to rip the lid of the Arcade of Awesomeness' opening day. Some –like Doc Brown or possibly even that fossil who wound up chilling with Morlocks- would find the use of time travel an abuse of power, but sometimes it was about the small things in life, wasn’t it? In the end, persistence equalled success, with an actual conversation with Mister Chad Kroeger on the phone, with a dead certain guarantee that Nickelback would indeed come on down for a set of no more than five songs to herald the opening of the newest in Arcades…

  One of the very few memories to be an actual experience as opposed to simple ‘temporal recollection’ was the night that the Arcade of Awesomeness had opened it’s doors to the public for opening night…

  What a gongshow!

  Fistfights in the parking lot.

  Way too many people fucking in both the parkade and under the bleachers belonging to the open-air theater.

  Men and women and children of all ages –much to the very well argued and politely phrased dismay of essentially every single person in any kind of authority that might take exception to anyone under the age of thirty howling the lyrics to 'Burn it to the Ground' alongside a biker burdened down with tattoos and an insane amount of beard- running around like idiots, having the exact sort of fun Garth had planned on from the very beginning.

  Oh yes, and Drake and Sparks, cunningly lured back from vacation early thanks to a subtle incursion onto all their social media accounts, driven by the not-AI in a box, arriving on scene, with an entourage missing exactly one spatially-displaced Kin’kithal, but what could you do?

  They’d come, they’d seen, they’d conquered.

  Drake had spent the equivalent of three people’s lifetime earnings inside the Arcade while –as planned- Sparks had squandered most of his free time indoors alternately trying to hack into the successively harder-to-hack Wi-Fi signals and to break through the many, many doors locked up nice and tight with an intimidating-looking keypad.

  Garth winked at his wan face in the mirror, frowning at the sight of blood pooling gently around his lenses. The excesses of temporal manipulation were a motherfucker. There was simply no figuring out how Samiel had managed it all this time. Two months in and Garth was ready to throw the fucking phone out the window.

  Hundreds of years? Presumably thousands of experiential years? Garth –with the aid of his almost-AI- had sat down to calculate around about how many years he’d wasted working out ways to fudge the volume of AR-game equipment, of getting Nickelback, of hashing out details with the US Government for design contracts, of … well … of everything he’d accomplished in the last few months, and the answer was humbling.

  Two hundred forty-seven years. Of patien
t diligence. Of endless tinkering. Of vexed frustration and yes … okay, sure, fine, he’d gotten a little on the upset side and had fucked off to Disneyland for three weeks because come on, who did this kind of thing all day every day and didn’t take time off to fling yourself off Splash Mountain.

  "No one, that’s who the fuck who." More blood pooled at the rims of his lenses, forming a ruby meniscus that winked in the light.

  Garth took another deep breath. There was one more last minute memory buzzing in the back of his mind. He could feel it there and it was the one he’d been ignoring since he’d started down this particular path…

  ***

  Rommen rolled out of bed and got dressed quickly yet efficiently. Today was the day. Nickels claimed they were going to see some interesting things today, stuff that’d 'fucking blow your mind so hard, brodiddly, that, like, you're gonna be born with a blown mind, yeah, never sayin' brodiddly ...’

  The ex-soldier turned personal security guard couldn’t see how that was possible. Since working for Garth Nickels, his personal worldview had been turned upside down more times than he’d ever imagined was doable. He could barely understand why he remembered some of the strange temporal magic Garth got up to, but assumed it all had something to do with being in the room when poor Delbert Granger had exploded into beads of light.

  “Temporal realignment of the soul.” Rommen tried the words on for size for about the eight thousandth time since Garth had busted them out a little under two months ago.

  He remembered the moment very clearly. He’d been down in the basement with Garth –his boss had, at the time, been wearing the bulky and clunky predecessors to the more creepy-looking but less stupid-seeming OLED Lenses- watching the robots belch out another batch of hi-rez AR-Goggles when suddenly…

  The entire room had been full of them. Box after box. Hundreds of thousands of units to be shipped to another warehouse where people being paid a fairly decent wage –many of them, Rommen learned later on, ex-employees of the companies initially destroyed by the man shortly after coming to the country- to assemble them into individual boxes for shipping to pretty much every corner of the world.