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

by Lee Bond

  A small tweak to the physical construction of solar panels. Nothing much to the world, but my advisors tell me that it’s only the beginning, that though they cannot personally see where the change will head themselves, they feel quite strongly that when he is done with something so simple as solar power, those panels will be quite, quite amazing. They attempt to engineer future iterations for themselves. I will let them play, for now.

  An electric engine, as powerful, possibly more so, as standard fossil fuel machines. Decried in the marketplace for now, mostly thanks to my influence and efforts of the Oil Men, it will one day supplant those decrepit old engines, all the while fulfilling your typical American dream of ‘faster faster faster’. It is a pathetic thing, this reliance on speed, but … I digress.

  I mention these two things for no other reason than there are already dozens, if not hundreds of small tweaks and paradigm shifts to extant technology, changes that will eventually have an impact so profound that the very world will shudder beneath the revelation. And for one more reason, as well;

  They are as nothing. They are treats, tossed to the outside dog, to make that hound feel loved and special. Behind closed doors, something immense grows, something I cannot predict, something I cannot imagine, something … I believe I begin to understand now why you, my mysterious, guiding light, has reached out to alter the course of my life, for though I can’t beg, borrow or steal what I want, I can see it. In my mind’s eye, I can literally see the course of events preparing to erupt from the stone and steel, concrete and glass structure that our man Nickels hides behind.

  How do I know this? How can I profess to accurately see what is coming when all he does is earn money, destroy foreign companies, and unleash a flood of microscopic changes to designs that few people care about?

  His networks, benefactor, his networks. They are unassailable. Unimaginably so. I have at my disposal a legion of code monkeys, the disillusioned, the disenfranchised, genius-level intellects housed within egos full of blustering crudity, anarchistic fools who believe they stand under handpainted banners and hide behind cunning digitally-altered visages in an effort to enlighten the masses. Little do they know they dance to my tune, and the tune these days is ‘Hack Changetech’. And so they, and others, so many others, dig and dig and dig.

  To no avail. Hundreds of thousands of attacks an hour, grand and small, deadly and ineffective, over and over and over again, nonstop, days at a time, my digital army tries to gain a virtual beachhead. They seek to gain access or to bring the system down, or … any number of things. They’ve gone beyond the point of madness and now, they are on their own.

  But they won’t get in. They cannot. I don’t know how he has done it, but Master Nickels has apparently developed the single most unassailable computer network on the entire planet, easily outstripping anything you might find, anywhere. Even my own networks pale in comparison, and I have in my possession terabytes of data that should never see the light of day.

  I will of course continue my efforts at gaining access, up to and including employing people to attempt on-site hacking once the foolishly named Arcade is open to the public, but then, as now, I will actually hold little hope in my bosom.

  I … I will not record my thoughts on Garth Nickels until or unless something of actual noteworthiness occurs. He has grown to become a thorn in my side in such a short time. Thanks to him, thanks to the conundrum he poses, my other business concerns have begun to suffer. Independent contractor I may be, there are still people to whom I must eventually answer.

  Until then, mysterious benefactor.”

  ***

  Samiel liked being referred to as mysterious benefactor. It made him feel better about the oftentimes cruel and harsh methods invoked to make history come out the way he required.

  “Mysterious benefactor.” Samiel said each word slowly, emphasizing the vowels. Such an elegant ring to it. Others throughout time –Jim Seeker being the most voluble in any century- called him tyrant, despoiler, Abaddon –if they were particularly religious and eloquent- … the name calling was nonstop.

  But they didn’t understand. Their tiny little minds lacked the necessary wisdom to comprehend his goals. The whole of everything as it was now … didn’t matter. All the violence, all the cruelty, all the engineered and enforced misery, murder, slavery, all the mercurial anger and blatant abuses of power and even, yes, even churlish childishness …

  None of it mattered.

  When he was successful in ‘hacking’ Drake Bishop, once he had his hands on the man’s truly chimerical DNA, once everything was in place and the script was properly written, everything would change.

  Everything would be perfect. Everything would be sublime. The Invasion would end before it started, the devastation and destruction … a whisper. A dream had by the God he would become. Everyone, everywhere, would live their days in a paradise of his creation.

  Samiel opened his wide mouth and roared for all he was worth. “Mysterious. Benefactor!”

  It was a good feeling, this … relationship with Wood. It was perhaps the first honest one he’d had with a human being in millennia. Oh, he knew that Lissande –wherever she really was, whatever she was really doing- remained loyal to the cause, but he also knew that she loathed him with nearly every cell in her body.

  The same could be said with Granger, though perhaps, in hindsight, much of the dead Agent’s particular brand of loathing could possibly be laid at his feet. He had, after all, manipulated time directly while on the phone with the Federal employee, resulting in … resulting in that terrible mess.

  deShure was a cracked egg. Piloting the enormously patriotic fool’s life down a particular path had worked well enough, Samiel supposed, but that very same loyalty had yielded some fairly obvious personality flaws as well. The Overlord of The Line suspected that even if Garth Nickels hadn’t possessed the ability to influence The Line, he would’ve copped to Rommen’s intentions in due time.

  But Alistair Wood … good God, the man was perfect. Blind, unswerving loyalty coupled with an inherent awareness of his own needs, Wood didn’t allow his quest to undermine Nickels get in the way of being fully functional. Most importantly, he wasn’t allowing failure to get under his skin.

  “Oh,” Samiel’s voice, dripping with sarcastic irony, “if only other people had learned to deal with Nickels from a distance. How much more wonderful the world would be.”

  It was time to listen to the second to last voice recording on the drive.

  ***

  “Wonderful news, mysterious benefactor. Our man Nickels is at long last breaking his stony silence. Whether it’s because of growing pressure from the American government or the ill light in which he is being painted in nearly every sector of the media, Garth Nickels will be speaking at a local Technological and Scientific Convention later this week. It will perhaps be the only time the man is out in public. At the very least, I will finally be able to lay eyes upon this … strange being who’s shadow now shrouds most of the world.

  The things he has accomplished. I am not even certain if he’s aware of what he does. The breakneck speed with which he unveils new tech, new designs, how he floats concepts onto the Web without cause or concern … it’s almost brutal. The world scrambles in his wake. They struggle to come to grips with the ideas he’s cramming down their throats, and yet, every time the population announces they are full to bursting, another bold concept rivaling the achievements of Prometheus is jammed in there sideways.

  Through it all, I suspect … I suspect he doesn’t care. I’ve managed to lay eyes on a few different scraps of information. Small, pointless in the grand scheme of things, yet they point to the man’s character. He is fond of terrible movies and shows, benefactor, and consumes unhealthy food to the point of gluttony. He uses his Securicorps personnel as servants, ushering them out into the world to buy pizza and hotdogs and hamburgers and entirely foolish things like, as example, the entire science fiction and fantasy DVD rack at th
e local tech store.

  Ridiculousness. Or, apparent ridiculousness, at any rate. Seeing him as I do through the lens of cool rationality, everything ‘he’ does on the outside appears to me to be calculated. Certainly, if I were unaware of his other activities, I would consider Master Nickels to be just another idle youth, too rich and too influential for his own good.

  But he is not. He is the physical incarnation of Pandora’s Box, mysterious benefactor. I cannot say he’s unleashing evil into the world, but what spills forth from him might be just as dangerous.

  I managed to coerce one of my sole remaining military contacts into getting a look at the design concepts Changetech is selling to the government. Hundreds of ideas, benefactor, each more deadly than the last. The man truly is a Renaissance Man, fit to oust Leonardo with every stroke of his digital pen.

  I cannot wait for the convention. To stand in his presence, to see what he is like, to hear his words, to witness, with my own two eyes, the kind of man he is. And then, mysterious benefactor, regardless of price or cost, I will take him. Take him, and hide him, and drain him of every scrap of inventiveness.

  Until then.”

  ***

  Wood’s aspirations towards kidnapping and illegal incarceration were a bit worrisome, but not overly so; with Chezzik still in play –if the cyborg were to die, The Line Machine would simply haul him back to the here and now, and all so he could be sent back again until he got it right- there was very little chance that the Englishman would succeed in his goals of putting hands on Nickels. The older man existed only so there could be eyes on Nickels at all times. Once this little spot of trouble was dealt with, once Chez had Nickels incarcerated, Wood’s true purpose in the world would be revealed: the utter evisceration of everything Garth Nickels stood for.

  It wasn’t enough to make the man disappear. The world would look for a man like Nickels. No, no, Samiel wanted his great enemy crushed, ground into dust, spread into the sun, destroyed permanently and forever. Not his death, though. Never that. Never again. It had taken a long time to realize and Samiel wasn’t even entirely certain how he felt about leaving Nickels alive and untouched in the 21st century, but that was how it needed to be done.

  Besides which, the Invasion was a facet of historical life that could not be avoided. Not even Nickels would remain untouched. There, at that time, with those ships in the air and the implacable enemies on the ground, with their strange technologies … there he would meet his doom.

  “This old man’s voice, though … carries with it a fascination I do not like.” It was hard to miss the growing tones of adulation and interest in Wood’s patriarchal voice.

  Part of the territory, Samiel supposed, but a most unwanted one. The Overlord of The Line wondered if there was anything that could be done about Wood’s mounting fascination, and spent a few minutes examining the various methods by which that might be achieved.

  Ultimately –especially this close to success- anything he might do would prove to be too time consuming; gearing Wood up to be the sort of man capable of watching Garth all while remaining under the radar had eaten up so much of his remaining personal time that Samiel just couldn’t see good enough reason to make the effort to literally change the man’s mind.

  “It’s just fascination with a puzzle.” Samiel understood that. If he weren’t interested in taking a plasma thrower to this particular puzzle until all the pieces had been transformed into crispy dust to be later scattered through the virulent sands of Nevada, Samiel believed it quite likely that he, too, would be in a similar boat.

  “Lucky for me I am not some weak-willed human. I am Samiel. I am eternal. I will be victorious. All I seek will be mine.” Samiel snapped his fingers, and the audio began to play once more.

  ***

  “I am told by my lackeys that Nickels is here in the building. Try as I might, I can neither gain access to the back areas where he might be wandering around nor can I find purchase in the convention center’s security cameras. There are, whether they mean to be so visible or not, Federal agents everywhere, and their digital encryption algorithms are top notch. I’ve already let myself down in failing to consider that the American government would want to protect one of their most valuable assets to the best of their ability, and now that I have considered it, I am surprised that the building isn’t crawling with hundreds of men and women in basic black windbreakers, sunglasses and earbuds.

  There is quite a bit of excitement in the air today. As a matter of course, I strolled through the display areas, quite interested to behold precisely how visionary leaders like Elton Crux and Keever Rocklin intend on bringing American out of the gutter into which she’s driven herself. The usual fare. OLED displays inventors claim will become wearable tech with the decade, so-called revolutionary cooling systems for immense new computers, automobile tech, atmosphere tech … it is a glut. All uninteresting, all lacking vision.

  My own people, in London, would be politely laughing into their sleeves at the sight of what is being called ‘ground-breaking’ and ‘innovative’. If I were the President of the United States, I would politely call the Queen Mum up on the telephone and ask … no … beg for forgiveness. We could always use another colo… ah.

  What I have come here to see, in part. Master Nickels’ tech displays. They eat up nearly a half the space set aside, forcing lesser minds and their ridiculous machines to battle it out for floor space. The displays are indicative of the man’s attitude towards nearly everything he does; as far as I was able to ascertain through the usual sources, Nickels himself could not have even been bothered to set things up for this little show, thereby forcing those companies left remaining under his savage thumb to figure it all out for themselves.

  A grave embarrassment, to be certain. We can all expect the various magazines and websites that cover these events to have choice words from the men and women who found their laps full of work they would rather not do, but I digress.

  Where the rest of the machines and concepts being crammed down our throats and whispered into our ears are boring, disinteresting, the precise opposite of visionary, Garth Nickels’…”

  ***

  Samiel stopped the audio feed with a trembling hand. It simply couldn’t be possible. They were as far away from the place where a man like Garth Nickels lived that regardless of the man’s abilities, there would simply be no way for him to be here.

  Yet, Wood’s words struck a chord, deeply, stridently.

  Listening to the Englishman list the behaviors, talk about the attitude … far too resonant.

  The Overlord of The Line pressed his lips together tightly, resisted the urge to smash himself in the head. He’d done himself a terrible disservice by not focusing more on Nickels’ arrival, and all out of pigheaded pride and imagined superiority and now, now it was too damned late in the game to expend the resources as they should’ve been all along; he’d failed to recognize his own foolish interest in Nickels, had fallen right into the trap that was always there, always around the man.

  But it couldn’t be him.

  It simply could not be. The journey here from … from where he’d come from …

  Too painful. Too dangerous. Too … impossible. No. As weird and powerful as his Nickels was, no way would that man come here. He was too busy doing whatever it was he was doing, over there.

  Over here was for him. For the man that’d become Baron Samiel.

  This was something else. He was something else.

  “Doppelganger.” Samiel whispered the word into the air, and it shivered and spun away into nothingness.

  It was the only answer.

  The only answer.

  There were a few, here and there. He’d seen them with his own two eyes. Lissande, for example. His greatest asset. Before being inducted into the incongruity’s presence, the woman had cropped up time and again throughout the history of the world, starting right there in the 21st century. The last known iteration of Amour had been in the 28th century. />
  There were others, as well. People down there in the world reminding him of people he’d grown up with, people he’d spoken with, had dreams about … but they weren’t the same. Merely … merely the Universe … the Universe playing tricks with him.

  That’s what it was. He was so in tune with the Universe, the power of the incongruity was so ingrained now into the very fabric of everything, everywhere, that one of his own memories had fallen through the cracks of his brain and out there, into the wilds.

  To be born. To take a name. That name.

  To try and stop him. That was Nickels all over, but there was one thing Samiel knew that no one else did.

  This place was for him. It’d been made for him. Which was why he was working so hard to fix it, to bring it back from the brink of utter destruction, why his dream was to transform it from the world it was into the world he wanted it to be. Baron Samiel deserved nothing less than the absolute best, not after all he’d been through.

  It made sense. What Garth was … it finally made sense. He wasn’t the original, come here to taunt him further. Just an … echo. Pulled from a powerful man’s mind. Probably ripped from Ultimate Samiel, that bleating, bloated miscarriage of a being. So far up The Line that The Line itself was frayed and tattered, the Samiel eking out existence there, barely aware of anything, emanating a desire so powerful to be free that whole worlds –if they existed that far forward- would break into breadcrumbs, trapped inside a brain big as anything.

  With nothing left to do but think old thoughts, remember old lives, relive old glories.

  For all present Samiel knew, Ultimate Samiel was intentionally responsible for the whole thing. They all of them knew that their most ancient version shot past curmudgeonly and right into the homicidal range of the spectrum, and if He thought earlier versions of himself weren’t doing their jobs properly, it was not unthinkable that he’d include a little extra … push.

  Or, He knew something none of them could see. That He couldn’t articulate.

  That was of extreme benefit to their plan.