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

by Lee Bond

  Rommen started looking around for cover. An escape route. Something. Anything. The Garth Nickels over in the middle of the crowd, still in slightly damp clothes, appeared to be in far less control of himself than the Garth that was presently engaged in having an argument with himself. He didn’t care that his version of Nickels claimed that nothing was going to happen, he only cared about what instinct demanded of him. “You need to stop this right now.”

  “Nah.” Garth pointed at Earlier Him. “See, I remember being him, and being like, ‘what the fuck, man, who is the colossal dick in the audience’, and now that I’m being that colossal dick, it’s like I’m telling myself one huge joke. Hah! Okay. Check this out. This part is super cool. Drake’s Equation strongly suggests it’s only a matter of time. In our Galaxy alone there’s a minimum of two billion planets that could totally support life, and that’s if we’re only talking about carbon-based, quasi-pedal lifeforms. If we include silicate, or, like, viral lifeforms, then that number could be higher. Spread throughout the entire Universe, which is infinite or nearly so, the number of habitable planets with sentient life also reaches near the infinite.”

  This time, His Garth’s words made the people standing near them shuffle their feet awkwardly, and so Rommen shuffled a bit closer so he could whisper into his employer’s ear. “You see? You’re upsetting these people! They can’t tell that you’re in both spots, but they can tell that the guy in the t-shirt and shorts is riling up the freak in the hot seat.”

  “Don’t sweat it.” Garth got up on tip-toe, looked around, the nodded to himself. “We got 5-0 en route, Rommen. The nice woman I had a conversation with on my way to this here spot decided I was too cracked out or wonky or whatever to be out in public, so she went out of her way to find a nice, Friendly officer. He’s on his way to check me out. Which again works to my benefit, because of reasons. I got this one last little bit…”

  “Please don’t.” Rommen put a hand on Garth’s arm.

  “Gotta.” Garth shot his pal a wink. “Causality and The Line demand it. Your statements are dumbed down and baseless besides which. I … Hah. Wow. Look at me go. I … I was unaware that I actually managed to froth at the mouth there … woooo! Officer Friendly, handcuffing me like a superchamp. Damn, that was smooth. Wasn’t that smooth? Hey … Hey, Rommen! Come back here, man, that was smooth. Clink-clink. ‘Cuffing you for your own safety’. Who says that? Hey! Slow down!”

  ***

  Garth found Rommen, not too far away, sitting on a big rock that’d once been in the ocean but now served as a stony chair for people who needed a quick sit and a bit of respite beneath some trees that provided a fair amount of shade. The poor guy was sitting there, head in hands, looking for all the world like he’d just been dumped by The One.

  “Hey, man, what’s, uh, what’s … goin’ on?” Garth plopped down beside the poor guy. “Lissen, I’m not going to lie, I’m not super good at this whole making people feel better and understanding where you’re coming from thing, so if I accidentally piss you off or whatever, that’s totally not my point. I legitimately want to know what’s going on inside that blonde-covered melon of yours.”

  "This is difficult for me to deal with." Rommen found himself staring at his hands, cataloguing the dates and times and reasons for all the poorly healed scars crisscrossing his palms, lacing his knuckles. That was the easy stuff. Falling headfirst down a partially collapsed building in Qandahar, watching your AR slide away into the rubble, slicing your hands open on glass and bits of shrapnel from a fucking IED or having to deal with some eight year old kid so terrified that he'd attack anyone within striking distance with a kitchen knife hidden behind his back …

  All that was fine. All that was normal. Tangible reasons for physical marks left on his body.

  The … the … everything he was seeing today. It was all heavier than an albatross around his neck. It was worse than Atlas holding the heavens across broad shoulders.

  Rommen had been ready for this day for a long time coming, he'd thought about it long and hard and still believed down to the roots of his bones that it needed to end the way he'd planned, but when confronted with the staggering realities of time travel …

  He didn't think he was strong enough to shrug the day off.

  "I mean," Rommen struggled with the concept, visibly made an effort to deal with it, you were just arguing with yourself. With yourself. I don't even…"

  Garth made soothing noises, feeling like an idiot the whole time. "It's tough to get around, I know."

  "You seem to be doing okay. Better than okay."

  "Yeah, well." Garth looked over his shoulder. Earlier Him was being escorted up a long flight of stone stairs. In too short a time, he'd be ushered into a cab and driven off towards the University, where Earlier Him would come face to face with a Drake and a Sparks who had no interest in knowing him, or even the glimmer of recognition.

  If Now Him showed up on their doorstep, would they recognize him as the owner of the Arcade they were gearing up to spend all their spare time in, or would they remain blind? Would they instead mistake Earlier Him as Now Him, the result of which would be a complete and utter fistfuck of the preceding three months? The snipers in the trees and on the rooftops wouldn't feel compelled to protect Bishop's interests, they wouldn't split his wig with a single bullet, he wouldn't wind up before the Emperor, bargaining for the chance to do things a different way, squandering the lives of his friends and allies to wind up … right back here, right where he was.

  "I've kind of been through an awful lot of shit." Garth resumed, pushing concerns over what might happen in the next hour away. There was no point in worrying. Either Emperor Etienne had his eye on the ball and would make goddamn certain that there'd be nothing in the way of severe temporal repercussions, or he'd fail so hard in doing his job that the whole fucking simulation would derezz.

  Now that he thought about it, he'd be just fine with either outcome.

  "The kind of shit that lets you shrug off the absolutely insane realities of actual time travel." Rommen couldn't believe his ears. He fished a rock out of the sand and fiddled with it, trying to burn off some of the nervous energy percolating through him. He felt like he had lightning trapped in his guts. "That makes even less sense."

  "Welcome to my life, dude." Garth put a hand on Rommen's shoulder, felt the energy seething under the ex-soldier's combat jacket. "The stuff … anyways. Come on. We gotta go. One last stop before we head over to the convention center to set up. This will be very, very illuminating and should hopefully put everything into perspective."

  Rommen dropped the rock, cleared his throat, spat into the sand and stood up. The convention center. Just the place he needed to be. "Where are we headed now, boss?"

  "We're going to school, buddy! Ain't that great? Co-eds! Cheerleaders! Snipers, oh my!"

  ***

  "Why are we here?" Rommen felt like he was asking that question over and over again. He worried it made him sound stupid, or that he wasn't capable of keeping up with Garth. He was a veteran. He'd survived war and conflict the likes of which most people never imagined. When they showed stories of war on the news, they covered only the stuff that was palatable to the public.

  They buried the shit that people like him had been through.

  Garth pointed to Earlier Him as he navigated his way through the front gate. "All right, this next bit, this is why I'm actually here, fucking around with all this bullshit stuff when I should be, like, drinking Mimosas and junk. Definitely not sitting in a car with a dude named Rommen, especially when that dude named Rommen is griefing like crazy over stuff."

  "Stuff." Rommen watched Earlier Garth disappear beyond the fence. "So why are you here? I mean, why is the other you here? You said you came here for a reason?"

  "Yeah." Garth reached into the backseat and yanked out a Changetech customized, hand-built super laptop laden down with all manner of quadronix blood circuitry. He flicked it on with the flip of a switch and waite
d for the system to connect to red network blanketing the entire city. "Okay. So. This is weird, but when I originally came here, I was enrolled into this here school and I wound up being friends with these two dudes. One was Drake Bishop, is Drake Bishop, the other, Sparks Dangerously."

  "Ran security for Bishop once. In LA. A few years ago. Fucking nightmare." Removing the implausible parts of Garth's story left Rommen with a facet he could handle; naturally a guy like Bishop would find something interesting in the madman named Nickels. "Nearly wound up quitting because of his asshole friend. The one with the hair."

  "Yeah. Sparks. Got kind of an attitude." Garth nodded, commiserating. "Guy is fiercely loyal to Bish. Gets his asshair in a knot whenever he thinks Bish is being taken advantage of. End of the day, though, he means well. We butted heads pretty fiercely back in the day. Once I found out Bish was in the deep end of pool without both water wings and a hundred pound Mata Hari on his back, I did some digging, found out just how rich the kid is, Sparks found out and went all kinds of mennal. Had to almost karate chop him in the face to get him to see reason."

  "You were friends with those guys." As far as statements went, it came out more incredulous than anything else that Rommen'd said all day. "Those guys."

  "Hey." Garth high-fived himself when the laptop came online and immediately started searching the local airwaves for any and all available Wi-Fi and encrypted data signals streaming from the University. He was angling for a specific set of feeds, so it'd take some time. "First time around, I was a whole different guy. Not the guy you see before you now, being all kinds of awesome and badass and shit, but cranky. The kind of cranky you'd not only cross the street to avoid, but the kind of cranky you'd feel compelled to call the NSA over, just on the off chance I was, like, the Unabomber on steroids."

  "So," Rommen drawled slowly, glad the puzzle was finally beginning to make sense, "you came here 'before', made friends with Drake and that idiot Sparks, found out Bishop was in some kind of Baron-related trouble and then proceeded to get yourself involved in saving the guy's life? That about right?"

  Garth toggled through the available connection points until he found the Securicorps ultra-encrypted feed that was being bounced through all the snipers and other assorted officers keeping an eye on the wealthiest asset the US had and plunged on in. The almost-AI's devoted pVSnp kernel shredded the encryption into fine pieces of electric hash and that was that.

  "Basicallllly, yeah. It gets loads more complicated. But yeah, as far as nutshelling goes, you got it in one." Through the speakers, Bird's Eye was discussing Earlier Him's odd behavior outside the dormitory Bish and Sparks called home.

  Not long now.

  "Did you get into it with Samiel?" Since he'd only ever seen this version of Garth, a Garth that was already more than a bit abrasive and violent and cranky, it was damned near impossible for Rommen to imagine another Garth that was more of everything.

  "Mmmm. That's the complicated bit. Like, super, super complicated. And now ain't the time to tell that particular tale." Garth levered the laptop into a position so Rommen could easily view what was on the small screen.

  It didn't take long for the Securicorps specialist to see what was what, and even less for the man to lose his temper.

  "Goddamn, Nickels, that is not for your eyes!" Rommen moved to log out of the feeds, but Garth slapped his hand with a lightning-fast maneuver that had his skin stinging. "What in the hell are you doing with access to this! This … this isn't right!"

  "Might not be for my eyes, pal, but it involves Earlier Me, so by right of … me being me, I get to look at whatever the fuck I want. Ooh. This is it." Garth diverted his attention away from scowling Rommen, morbidly keen to see his own head explode. It would be the first time he'd ever been given the opportunity to see himself get killed. "So, this is what's going to happen. As you can see through this here sniper riflecam and from the chatter being exchanged, everyone tasked with keeping Bishop safe has decided that I am not a sane or safe individual, sooooooo…"

  Rommen visibly jerked in his chair when the bullet split Garth's head wide open. Face pale as driven snow, hands and feet even colder still, the Kansasite felt that his grip on the situation was less than tenuous. Hell, by this point, with the freaky Temporal Show and Tell he'd been treated to today, Rommen was entirely convinced he had no idea about how anything worked anymore.

  "They blew your head off."

  Garth eyeballed the destruction a second time, a very dark grin on his face. "Wow, holy shit, yeah they sure as fuck did. Phhhbllltt. Just like with everyone else."

  Thoughts pinged and ponged inside Rommen's much abused skull, leaving behind traces of light that themselves spiralled off into awkward geometrical shapes. "What do you mean, 'like everyone else'? They blew your head off and you're right here. You died, and you came back. You … I … what the hell?"

  "People shoot at me all the time, Rommen. Occupational hazard. It's just I'm either moving too quickly to get hit, or they shoot me somewhere I'm bulletproof. Well, here, I'm obviously not bulletproof, though that would've been nice." Garth logged out of the SecuriCorps feed and shut the laptop down, tossing it into the backseat before everything was done powering off. "Now. From this moment, I arrange to travel back three months so I could begin laying my trap."

  "F-f-for Samiel."

  "Sure, yeah, let's go with that." Garth put the car in drive. "Well, it's time to head to the convention center, press all the flesh, jibber-jabber with all those smart guys, make nice with the people, that sort of thing."

  "Why did you show me all this today?" Rommen pressed his forehead against the slightly cool glass of his window. It was so refreshing, so calm. "What purpose did it serve?"

  “Purpose?” Garth sped up a bit. “A reminder, Rommen, that there are some things in this world that can’t be avoided. That Destiny will have it’s day, no matter what. You’re looking kind of wiped out, so why don’t you …”

  But it was already too late. Rommen, head burning with ideas that made no sense and a desire to do what needed to be done the only thing keeping him going, was fast asleep, the corners of his mouth turned down into a frown as his subconscious struggled to keep him sane.

  Garth finally admitted to himself that the world the Emperor had spun for him was amazing, and it was no clearer to him than right then, in the car, with the man beside him. From the inside looking at Rommen, any soul on the planet would feel the man’s pain, would –unless the person was a sociopath or otherwise demented- want to reach out to soothe his inner wounds. It was a natural thing. One human bringing light to another.

  But to Garth, Rommen was nothing more than a very well-fleshed out NPC. An NPC that was going to learn later on in the day that when your life is scripted for you, you can’t escape the final cut scene, no matter how hard you try. No matter how hard you prepared.

  Destiny came for everyone, in the end.

  ***

  “You. There. You there. With the laptop. And the hair. Sto… ouch!”

  Garth looked over his shoulder and saw that Rommen –seemingly returned to normal thanks to the quick car nap- had caught himself an annoying person in a wonderfully executed and flawlessly maintained hold that was going to keep Mr. Nuisance right where he was standing until The Rapture came.

  He decided to let Rommen handle things. It was, after all, probably the first real time the man had been –ever would be, most likely- given the chance to do his job as defined by the paperwork signed three months ago.

  Rommen saw that he’d caught himself Staff. Rommen didn’t much care for Staff. They had an unerring tendency to get in the way of legitimate people trying to do a proper job and a brutal habit of acting like they didn’t know what the hell they’d done wrong in the first place, as if everything that was suddenly going wrong couldn’t possibly be because of them, wandering into a situation that your average fifth grader could reason out as being dangerous.

  It was like all Staff, everywhere, were trained
in a secret bunker somewhere in the world, their sole lesson being ‘How to Continually Put Your Noses Where They Don’t Belong, and How to Act Indignant When Caught’.

  This particular Staff had an immaculate moustache that was perfectly waxed on either end, and an astonishingly coiffed head of hair. Combined with the precious three piece suit and patent leather shoes, Rommen deemed to’ve wrangled himself a very precious Staff indeed; the Self-Important Planner.

  “What’s going on, son?” Rommen didn’t even notice that the old twang, patiently eradicated over a lifetime of service in the field, had crept back into his voice.

  “That man … over there … with the hair…” Erick tried dancing back a bit to alleviate the pain radiating outwards from his wrist, succeeding only in making it worse because the tall man with the blonde hair had some kind of issue or something. “Let me go!”

  “You know who that man is?” Rommen demanded with an up-tick in his voice that suggested that not only should everyone in the room –they were gaining themselves a bit of an audience, but since Mr. Moustache wasn’t screaming bloody murder just yet, they had time to banter- know who was with him, but what he was capable of.

  “Obviously I don’t know who that is.” Erick hissed angrily. “I assume you and he thinks he’s someone important, otherwise you wouldn’t have grabbed my hand like this, which, by the way, thank you very much for, I’ve had my eye on a new TV for a few months now, and the civil lawsuit against you and that man over there is definitely going to get one for me, so again, thank you for that.”

  Garth found a pole to lean on and did just that, leaned all the way back to watch Rommen do his thing. Maybe if the man burned off a little bit of steam before things got under way, the future might not look so bleak for them both.

  Rommen leaned in, got his mouth right close to Mr. Moustache’s pierced ear and whispered, letting the flurry of emotion he had for his employer flow into the words. “That is Garth Nickels, Staff. That is the sole man behind the brand-new juggernaut known as Changetech. Owner and proprietor of the Arcade of Awesomeness and best friends forever with Chad Kroeger. Inventor of Bodybit, Globalrace 3k, the mmorpgfps sensation Specter…”