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

by Lee Bond

  That’d been the first time he’d seen something happen that’d –according to Nickels- taken months of temporal revision just right…

  Rommen tried not to catch his own eyes as he bent to the task of brushing his teeth. There was wildness there, a haunted hunger he hadn't seen since his days in Afghanistan. Hooded eyes. Pained eyes. Eyes that'd been asked to see too much, eyes that'd done things no Man should see, eyes hiding memories so dark and abysmal that it sometimes seemed there was no way to climb back into the light.

  But what else was he supposed to do?

  Garth had proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that there was more in the world than made sense, that there was a man somewhere in the future trying to kill him -in the damned past-, all so he could do who knew what to the planet.

  It was a hard burden, being the only one in the know. But … at the same time, it was liberating.

  With him being the only one completely aware of everything Garth was up to, when the time came to end things, everyone else would be spared the madness.

  He might be blamed. Hell, he probably would be blamed, but sacrifice was necessary.

  Duty was necessary.

  Doing the right thing –even if it seemed to be the wrong thing- was a way of life for a soldier. It got burned into your head, seared into bones, inscribed into your DNA. Every bullet fired, every grenade thrown, every enemy combatant neutralized ... every action carried such weight. Rommen finished brushing his teeth, glad he’d managed to keep from looking into his own eyes. They weren’t the eyes of a madman because he knew for certain that he wasn’t. But they were the eyes of someone haunted by a destiny too great and powerful to ignore and when he looked into the chips of blue ice, the ponderousness of the task he'd set for himself, for country ... for the world ... it needed to be done, and it was trying to grind him into dust.

  “Like Atlas, holding up the goldang sky.” Rommen proceeded to check his sidearm.

  Today was The Big Day…

  Today, Garth was going to speak in front of hundreds of people in person and probably the whole damn planet via satellite.

  He was going to talk about the impossibly sophisticated and incredibly popular video game ‘Specter’, and 'Line Runner', a stupid game that had idiots of all shapes and sizes racing around the planet engaging in the most ridiculous of events –all for no reason that Rommen could see-, about engines and clean air and fresh water and …

  Just about everything. The man was being touted as a savior. At it for only a few months, he'd finally managed to cast aside the cruelties he'd visited upon poor Americans on that first day in favor of proving, once and for all, that he was capable of resurrecting America.

  Rommen knew better, though. Rommen knew what Garth was. He was dangerous. He was the reason Samiel was out there in the future, doing whatever it was he was doing.

  Remove Garth, Samiel was removed. The threat that Samiel represented to the people of the United States of America was removed. It was simple. Once Garth and Samiel were both out of the picture, the tech left behind would go right to Uncle Sam, where it’d always belonged, right from the start.

  His sidearm was fine. The weapons snuck into the convention center were fine. He was fine.

  Everything was going to be just fine.

  ***

  “Rommen, buddy, how the hell are you?” Garth cheered and waved merrily at the security officer, noticing –as always- that the other man seemed to’ve gotten up on the wrong side of the bed. Couldn’t be helped, he supposed. There were those who could take the truth of how the world was, and those who couldn’t.

  “Fine, sir.” Rommen nodded greetings back to his employer, but was still unable to make eye contact; the weird glasses, like something out of a B science fiction movie, had been doable, but the odd lenses … too abnormal.

  The strange thing was, Rommen had zero issue with the harder, over-top-the-eye style employed by those people suffering from ODD. It really was … odd.

  “Well, that is awesome, pal. Pal-o-rino? Pal-o-mine. Yeah, no, that doesn’t work.” One augmented eye still on the television, upon which was playing the inestimable Ghostbusters –at this particular moment, Bill Murray was being Bill Murray and being so wonderfully awesome it was amazing that the other cast members had still called him friend after the show- and the other paying close attention to the data feeds filtering in from the almost-AI network.

  Today was going to be a busy day. Today, he needed to have everything under control. Today was going to be tough for everyone. Mostly for him, because the second Samiel discovered that the time lock was over, there was a good goddamn chance that the sonofabitch was going to cry havoc and let loose not only the dogs of war, but the kittens of war, the Daleks of war, the kitchen sink of war and when that was over and done with, he was probably going to get quite serious.

  He might even send Lissande.

  Garth didn’t want to run into her. The last time they’d met, it hadn’t ended well, and with how things were, there was no point in running the risk that she’d recall.

  “Never did figure that smell out.” Garth muttered to himself. Security at the convention center where he and all the other muckety-mucks was rock solid. Had to be, with dudes like Elton Crux, Stephen Hawking, all those other dudes from CERN and –if rumors were true- President Stevens rolling in to talk about their favorite topics, ranging from space elevators to climactic impact.

  If someone wanted to fuck America back into the Stone Age, targeting the convention center later in the day would be the perfect time to do it.

  Samiel wouldn’t go that overboard. He wasn’t an idiot. Everything he was trying to accomplish up there in the future had to be at least partially predicated on a moderately successful revitalization of the USA.

  Killing off all their visionary leaders wasn’t the way to go.

  “Smell?” Rommen thought backwards. “Oh, right. The smell that led you to the Ziggers.”

  “Oh well I don’t like that word at all.” Garth turned his nose up at the catchy word, one eye still reading over the information he’d set the almost-AI to crawl out and grab, stifling a grin when a certain flight manifest popped into view.

  One Garth Nickels, direct from Sweden, was in theory landing right that moment, and would be getting in a cab that would –very soon indeed- begin blowing the fuck up all over everywhere, and that was Stage I of Convince Rommen deShure That I am Right Because It Is Important He Knows This was going to go into full effect.

  “Radio host calls them that.” Rommen shifted his gaze elsewhere. There was a certain angle where the light in a room hit Garth’s lenses and transformed his face into something quite otherworldly. It was discomfiting. “It stuck.”

  “It sounds racist.” Garth twitched a finger, and the data feeds streaming through the now-invisible red lines and into his eyes were replaced with boring statistics from the night’s efforts in AoA.

  Another gangbuster night. The rich, influential and smart kids were coming to the Arcade by the boatload, hemorrhaging their trust funds into his coffers, precisely as he’d intended. The central Specter link, where two groups of five or one group of ten or any variation you could imagine, right there in the middle of the Arcade … it had lineups that could last the entire day.

  Some people were threatening to camp out, just so they could have a chance to play maps and missions that weren’t available for online play, or for download.

  Rommen shifted uncomfortably. “They’re a menace. Since you took care of those remaining four …”

  “Five.” Garth quickly pointed out. “Five.”

  “You didn’t kill that one. He got himself killed.” Rommen shook his head at the stupidity of the fifth remaining Zigger; from the looks of things, the man’d managed to get onto the property without being caught by either Garth’s revolutionary scanning system or by roving security checks, had dug himself a hole in which to hide, and then … hadn’t moved. Had lain there, underground, for days, until he’d lit
erally starved himself to death.

  “You say potato, I say ‘I murdered him because I say I did’.” Garth shook his head at the pinched expression on Rommen’s face. “This is a war. That idiot kid wouldn’t have wound up dying in a homemade burial spot if Samiel and I weren’t duking it out across the centuries. He’d be out there somewhere to this very day, beating his best friends to a fucking pulp every night and, like, stealing some shit to pay for his drug.”

  “Sounds like he got the better end of the stick.” Rommen replied seriously. “I’ve been tracking the statistics for users of Zigg, boss, and it doesn’t look pretty. It’s still more of an East Coast drug, with Zigg supplanting very nearly every other choice for a hard drug, all up and down the eastern seaboard. It’s even made headway in places like Russia, Australia. Small inroads into Middle America. Loads of people are dying from overdoses.”

  “I don’t think you can overdose on Zigg.” Garth called up footage from last night, interested to see if his old best friends forever were still coming to the Arcade as frequently as ever. On the TV, the frankly hilarious museum curator was flipping his goddamn mind out over Bill Murray getting too close to Vigo’s painting, and the Kin’kithal spared a laugh.

  His world, his Reality … Ghostbusters I and II hadn’t been a thing. The majority of the cast had been killed in a riot, in New York, following a subtly incited panic laid down by Kith Antal.

  Rommen had his phone out in a hot second, information already prepared. That was the one thing about Garth. The man loved to argue, and would continue arguing his point well past the moment when it was clear to everyone else in the room that he was all the way wrong, but he’d only quit when you presented him with proof. You could lay down an argument that’d have the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the goddamn President convinced, but if you didn’t back up your statements with tangible proof, by the end of the discussion, Garth’d be off on some tangent about how The Flintstones actually took place after The Jetsons.

  Garth batted Rommen’s phone-bearing hand away. “Look, bro, I know the stats better’n you do. Samiel’s gearing up for the thing that happens in, like, a month. No, I didn’t mention the thing because if I’m successful today, the thing a month from now won’t happen. Let’s just say he needs a lot of people for thing, because it’s part of what he’s been trying to do with my pal Drake Bishop. Anyways, we’re talking about Ziggurat addicts. You can’t die from an overdose. It’s not meant to work that way.”

  Rommen tucked the phone back into his pocket, forehead wrinkled. “Some days talking to you is a real pain in the ass.”

  Garth hooted. “You got that right, buddy. I can only imagine what it was like trying to have a conversation with me when I was all zoned out into a different portion of The Line, right?”

  “You sort of made it difficult for anyone to want to talk to you. Even Birchy finally lost patience.” Rommen admitted all of this with a smug grin on his face. Couldn’t help it. You really had to be a special kind of asshole for Birchy to find something better to do when you came in the room. “So you’re saying all the people dying from Ziggurat aren’t dying because they’re doing too much of it?”

  “I am.” On the lens, Sparks was still trying to burrow in through the security hand scanner, this time employing some very dodgy looking tech. Drake was elsewhere in the Arcade, clearly torn between playing more of his new favorite video game –a highly stylized, completely reskinned Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time- and groping the boobs of the hot girl beside him, who was herself shouting instructions to the idiot kid who clearly didn’t know how to play Bubble Bobble.

  “Then what…”

  “They’re dying because their bodies can’t handle the genetic reprogramming.” Garth swiped the video footage away. The trap was set. Drake and Sparks would undoubtedly continue to spend their days and nights in the Arcade, completely and utterly foregoing the bullshit and mostly pathetic SlimJim’s that’d opened up a few blocks away, choosing a genuinely fun night out over getting completely shitfaced and blackout drunk.

  When Lissande chose to make an appearance –again, now the time lock was down for the count, it was likely she’d stroll right into Drake’s life, there to offer explanations and reasons as to why he wasn’t feeling all the well- she’d find it extremely difficult to administer her particular brand of poison on property.

  Which was part of the plan. He hadn’t done much in the way of adhering to the rules of the Emperor’s game since appearing in the simulation, but now … at least for a little while … it was best if he be seen doing so.

  Because that way, when Baron Samiel stopped trying to do things on a local level, when he lost his temper and took advantage of the unlocked time Line, it’d be game over.

  “This would be for the thing.” Rommen put two and two together and inevitably came back to the original equation, which was one minus one. “That’s going to not happen now. Because of you.”

  Garth made a fake gun with his fingers and fired an invisible bullet right into the middle of Rommen’s forehead. “Got it in one, pal. Oh. Right. I forgot. We aren’t doing the ‘pal’ thing. That’s a terrible word. Anyways, yes. Yes, that’s correct. With me here, the thing isn’t going to happen because in the next little while, I am going to win against the Baron.”

  “How do you win against someone who controls time?” That was something Rommen was desperate to know. For the last two months, Garth had been in a kind of … mobile coma. Operating on an entirely different wavelength, using the phone in his pocket to shuttle his conscious mind up and down the time stream in either direction, the man had been able to talk to the people around him, but had been so distracted, it barely made sense to try.

  During that time, though, Rommen had tried on more than one occasion to pluck those particular secrets from Garth’s brain, because that was data that was of inestimable value. He was operating from the point of view that once Garth was gone, Samiel would be gone as well, but if that wasn’t the case, then knowing how his employer was waging this time war was perhaps the most valuable Intel on the planet.

  “By cheating.” Garth ran a check on the cab that he was –theoretically- sitting in right that moment. It’d just left the airport. He grinned. He hoped he was right, otherwise he was just going to look like an asshole. “Based on the flat look you’re shooting me right now … which, by the way, you could use to buildings on … that isn’t enough of an answer for you, so here you go. You defeat someone who can travel through time by remembering that anything you do in the past echoes into the future. That at some point in the future, any plan you might’ve laid down will be complete. And that once complete, it will have always been that way. If you’re lucky and very smart, like I am, that shit will echo backwards.”

  “Echo backwards.” Rommen was out of his depth. Again. Once this was all over and done with, he knew he could count on Securicorps’ upper management to find individuals who were smarter than he was, so they could deal with this end of things. “But it won’t be complete until it’s complete.”

  “Well, yeah, duh, obviously.” Garth wiggled his eyebrows. “But only until it’s powered up. Once it’s powered up, metaphorically speaking, because plans don’t usually need a power source, the plan will have automatically been completed. Like, right away. From the first moment of it’s conception. That’s why I called it cheating.” He stood up. “Come on, let’s go for a drive.”

  “A drive?” Rommen followed Garth out of the room, still trying to piece together the puzzle Garth had just given him. “A drive to where?”

  “Oh. You know. Places.” Garth gestured for the security officer to hurry his ass along. “It’ll be fun. Call it an object lesson in time travel.”

  “We’re going to travel through time?”

  “Holy fuck, Rommen. Get your head in the game. We’re always traveling through time. Just very slowly, in one direction.” Garth wiggled his eyebrows again. “Except for today. It’ll be neat. Then you’ll understand.�
�

  Rommen nodded affirmatively. He liked understanding things. It was important.

  ***

  "I don't understand why we're out here." Rommen made sure to keep on his side of the car; Garth was driving and seemed to be more interested in fiddling with the knobs on the company car. The man had proven to be incredibly aware of his surroundings regardless of where his attention seemed, but that was in no way comforting.

  The last thing Rommen wanted at this point was for Garth to pick up on the feelings percolating inside him. It was imperative for the protection of the United States and the growth of society that Nickels be … dealt with, and that could all come tumbling down at any second.

  "Oh. You know." Garth fist pumped when he found an all-rock station. "Reasons. Like, did you know I haven't really been off property since the first couple of days? Like, holy shit, bro. If I hadn't spent the last two months of my life literally inside my own brain, I might have completely lost it altogether."

  Rommen winced as a particularly loud and obnoxious song tore it's way through the speakers loud enough to rattle the windows. "I was under the impression that you were unwilling to leave property because you were concerned about being caught on camera. That you were hiding from Samiel. You said he's …"

  "Yeah, no, you aren't wrong. Weren't." Garth shook his head. "Time travel. Fucks a dude up. Anyhow, yeah. Samiel does indeed have his fat-ass fingers in all kinds of pies, including most of law enforcement and cameras and all that, because why wouldn't you? But I've got that on lockdown. Have done for a while now, but you know how it is."

  "I …" Rommen grasped for words to say. "I don't know how it is at all, boss. Nothing you're saying makes sense. You're even less clear than when you were doing your …" Here, he wiggled his fingers, "you know, your thing."

  "And that," Garth announced pleasantly, "is why we're out here doing this thing right now. I can't believe that we managed to get to this point without me having to fuck around. So awesome when that happens."