by Lee Bond
The Lines started cycling again, this time, powerful enough to paint the sky.
“Wh… what?” Wood felt odd. Everyone –including angry Habercome and his female Federal counterpart- had stopped with their various shenanigans to turn their heads this way and that, puzzled and concerned looks on all their faces.
Something was happening, just below where their eyes could see. Wood knew Garth was responsible for that something. Just from the way he stood there in the sudden quiet.
“What did he miss?” Wood asked into this bone silent quietude. Everyone. Everywhere in front of the Convention Center and therefore quite possibly across the entire globe, everyone save Garth Nickels and Alistair Wood had their heads turned to the sky, their ears tilted into the windless sky. “What?”
Garth flashed Wood a smile. “The world doesn’t end with a whimper, Mister Alistair Wood. It. Ends. With. A. Bang.”
And with that…
***
n-space generators, intended to fold a specific volume of space in on itself until a relatively eternal amount of new space was created within the confines of the field, were a thing that did not work in the Emperor’s simulation.
Intentionally so.
In his most august and churlish wisdom –august because he was Emperor, churlish because he’d still been upset over Naoko Kamagana-, the decision to prevent Garth N’Chalez from having access to a technology that might’ve made efforts in saving Drake Bishop and Sparks Dangerously from Samiel’s evil ministrations a little bit easier had marked the beginning of the end.
For the simulation. For the ‘Grief Run’. For everything.
Because there are two things you never want to give a man like Garth N’Chalez.
You never want to give him time to think. At all. Remove from him the luxury of thought, of the opportunity to plan, and you might find yourself on equal ground.
That was the first thing.
The second thing you never wanted to give Garth was no options.
Because the very next thing he’ll do is find a way around all of that.
n-space fields.
Localized, small generators intended to create an internal space-field of, say, four by four by four meters was capable of turning an entire school into an incandescent fireball that sent shrapnel raining down on neighborhoods in fake San Francisco for upwards of fifty miles.
That was a sonofabitch lesson to learn, but Garth had always been good at learning his lessons.
And, as a Kin’kithal, as a man capable of preparing a con lasting thirty thousand years, he was also good at biding his time…
An n-space field the size of an entire planet?
One powered by the energy of a temporal incongruity? No matter it was false? No matter it was a mere echo of the real thing?
Didn’t matter.
For the purposes of the simulation, it was real.
Now, how do you get yourself a generator big enough to do for an entire pocket dimension?
You use the materials at hand. And, not to put too fine a point on it, the Emperor had left a perfectly good planet-sized simulation basically just laying there.
Then you wrap it in n-space generator circuits.
Then?
You fill it with temporal energy direct from the hottest source of power in the entire fake simulation and wait.
Wait for the explosion, because the odds were high that even though it was a simulation, the chance that the real incongruity would fail to tell the difference between it and the simulated version were really fucking high to begin with, even more so when a so-called Emperor decides to pump your simulation up to the point where it’s more than 99% real. If the explosion wasn’t happening inside a volume of space generated by the real incongruity, Kith Antal in his massive Galaxyship on the far side of Unreal Universe would’ve seen the blast.
Would’ve seen it, made note, and worried.
That’s how big it was. And because the Emperor was a stupid dude who missed shit like the incongruity not being able to tell the difference between real it and fake it?
Explosions. Everywhere.
What was happening in the simulation just needed to follow a line that was like a detonation cord, right from the fake and straight into the real...
***
Inside his cage, the thing that might be one of the Ushbet M’Tai watched on …
Let’s Put a Pin in Our Cage Match for Now and Find Out What the Hell is Going On.
Friends fight. It’s a Universal thing. No matter how awesome and fun and cool you think the person you’re hanging out with is, sooner or later, there’s going to be a moment –or five or six or a thousand- where you’re just so sick and goddamn tired of looking at them that you imagine –for a second- what it’d be like to jam one of your thumbs in his fucking eye socket so hard that you can actually feel eyeball juice on your weapon of choice.
That was for normal people.
Chuck thirty thousand years of being roommates, toss in not one major war but the biggest war of all, and, just for extra spice, two colossally towering Alpha personalities and a chunk of protomatter into the mix, and you had yourself a volatile combination that should’ve resulted in legendary, ‘They Live’-style fisticuffs.
Better late than never…
***
Drake backhanded Eddie hard enough to crack the man’s jaw, but the wiry half-Japanese all-attitude asshole shrugged it off easily enough, forcing the taller, blockier man to follow through with a few punches to the gut.
There.
That had the idiot on the ropes, gasping and wheezing and spluttering like a boat with an engine only a quarter in the water It wouldn’t last, though, because Eddie was pulling heavily on his end of the incongruity, fortifying strength and speed and recovery times to the nth degree.
Skittering out of the way of a hastily executed leg sweep, Drake took a moment to let some of the incongruity’s essence filter into him; while he was by far and away the more skilled opponent –he had, after all, revitalized BishopCo’s security manual with an all-new hand-to-hand combat style and was a master in a few dozen other styles on top of that,- Eddie had a firmer grip on the incongruity, transforming every one of his punches into nuclear-driven rocket fist-missiles.
Various wounds and abrasions sealed up nice and tight.
Thank God the guy had the balance of a drunk ocelot while on the ground; if their venue for this little –and long coming- spate of bad temper had occurred on open water, Drake had no illusions about his fate. He’d’ve drowned nearly instantly and Eddie would’ve just gone on surfing. Brought up to snuff by the incongruity as he was, there was still only so much the weird orb could do to and for a guy.
“Can’t fucking believe you.” Drake smacked a piece of flooring out of the way.
Eddie was back to his old ‘Angry Poltergeist’ shtick now that chatting had failed to make any headway, angrily whipping chunks of laboratory at him, but it wasn’t going to be as effective this time; the first block of holographic stone caught him right in the old forehead, leaving him spinning and reeling, convinced that this was the end, but Eddie’d pulled back from the killing stroke at the last second, either stupidly believing that the argument was going to end with him seeing the benefits of becoming Godlike for a New Reality all on his own or that a second passionate speech would work.
Naturally, Eddie had been wrong. Drake didn’t want to be a God. He didn’t even particularly like doing what he was doing now. Even entertaining the notion of picking up a second batch of immortality and chaining that to a limitless new Reality stuffed full of an almost-eternal pile of dimensions filled Drake with misery.
Eddie sneered as the block of stone flashed back the way it’d come. It bounced off the M’Tai’s impenetrable prison, broke into three solid chunks, and hit the ground with a noisy clatter.
Didn’t matter. The whole lab could go up in a blaze of smoke and fire. They could shatter the walls and the floor into pebbles so fine they were
as dust. So long as the prize in the center remained right where it was, he was good.
“You can’t believe me?” Eddie couldn’t believe his fucking ears. “You. Can’t believe me. Who in the hell do you think you are? You don’t get to judge me. You don’t get to even think about me. You’re the asshole. You. We could’ve done this entirely differently. But no, you had to get up on that high horse of yours and trot around like some kind of fucking smug asshole. We used to make fun of people like you.”
Drake circled left, all of his incongruously-enhanced senses straining to keep track of everything Eddie was doing, thinking about doing, and even what the man wasn’t thinking about doing at all; he didn’t know if it was thanks to his time as Spur or if it was simpler, if it was just because he’d been away from the incongruity for so long, but it was like he could feel the darker, unhinged thoughts zipping through Eddie’s mind, the subconscious, in-the-moment urges that went from the backburner all the way to the front of The Line with no stops in the middle.
Eddie, for what it was worth, started circling as well, even though he was more comfortable standing in one spot. In the back of his mind, two things loomed brightly; one, of course, was the imprisoned Ushbet, watching on in apparent fascination, and the other?
His powerful intellect was burrowing ever deeper into the incongruity, hunting for a way to kill his best friend. There was nothing else he could do. There were no other alternatives. Drake Bishop was poison, now. Everything he said and did and thought was nothing but the brightest, most toxic of poisons, and it would be better for everyone if that kind of noxiousness was removed before the birth of Reality 2.0.
It was his fault, of course. Eddie knew that. It was easy enough to see, now. And, as he circled warily, deciding the next course of attacks, the Emperor was willing to accept that weight. Where Drake’s five thousand year time out was supposed to’ve taught the man a lesson in humility, was to’ve highlighted for him the real meaning of family and friendship, all it’d done was … the opposite.
Drake seized hold of a few lighting fixtures with his mind and tossed them half-heartedly at Eddie, who dodged quickly. “Grow up, Eddie. Those people we made fun of, those were the kinds of people we were supposed to become.” A few more shattered pieces of junk flipped towards his oldest and dearest friend. “Maybe we wouldn’t have ended up with mortgages and two point five kids and a fucking minivan in the garage, but our lives would’ve been similar.”
“But we didn’t wind up that way!” Eddie howled the words so loudly his throat cracked. Fueled by the incongruity, they pushed at the walls, rattled a few more covers loose, exposing internal circuits and thick wiring conduits. “We wound up here! In the Unreal Universe, eager as fucking puppies, to help that asshole! And now we’ve got him here, we’ve got him separated from his true power, and you’ve turned into a fucking pussy!”
Eddie launched himself at Drake, a jet-propelled human-shaped rocket. His intent was simple; knock his friend out –or, failing that, cause him enough damage with one solid attack so he’d become preoccupied with not dying- and imprison him.
It was a better solution; while he wanted to kill Drake, it'd dawned on him a second ago that no matter how badly the man's death seethed in his mind, it was also an irrefutable truth that Drake Bishop was firmly rooted in the incongruity.
So rooted, in fact, that permanent death might actually shear entire swathes of connectivity right into darkness.
So. Imprisonment. Right alongside the God in the Box. If he wasn't in the middle of a fight for his life right then, Eddie supposed he'd find the situation funny.
Drake reacted instantly by lashing out, grabbing hold of Eddie’s hands, pivoting on his back foot and spinning the Emperor-for-Life right back the way he’d come, right towards the M’Tai’s prison. Eddie screamed, collided solidly with the prison –which shook and stuttered from the impact- and fell to the ground, barely conscious.
Prepared for anything –it wasn’t beyond Eddie to play dead- Drake walked slowly but surely towards the shaking heap that was his best friend, all too aware that –as he got closer- the only thing keeping that alleged Ushbet M’Tai at bay was an energy field kept functional by Eddie’s will alone.
Eddie was broken. You could feel it, if you knew how to probe with your senses. Drake did that now, and felt a moment’s twinging regret; colliding with the implacable prison had broken most of the guy’s ribs, separated a shoulder. Hitting the ground had given one or more of those broken ribs the chance to perforate a lung.
Wounds like that, even fully connected to the incongruity, would take a few minutes to heal.
Drake tapped the energy field with bloodstained fingers. Other than a fleeting sensation of pressure, there was nothing, no hint there was anything there at all. The last man standing wondered what Eddie called the shield. Something silly, like ‘Z-shield’ or ‘Nega-shield’ or maybe even something a little fancier, like ‘Quasi Protecto-Field’.
“What are you?” Drake whispered the words. At his feet, Eddie shifted. Still unconscious, but his wounds were healing quickly. They’d be at it again, soon enough. Beating swiftly in his chest, his heart skipped a heavy beat at that thought.
He didn’t want to be fighting his best and only friend. It was just that there was no other way. Drake knew he should be spending this time trying to find a method of containing Eddie, of sectioning him off from the incongruity, all so that he might –over time- discover a method of curing the man from this sudden madness over becoming a God.
But he couldn’t. It was as Eddie had always said, even before, back when they’d been nothing more than a couple of rich, entitled idiots wasting away their college years when they should’ve been preparing themselves for adulthood.
“I am weak.” It was easy enough to admit. He saw the good in people. Always had. “And I suppose I always will be, but I’m OK with that. It’s who I am. It’s what I do. There’s got to be a way to reach the man. And you,” Drake banged the shield with a fist, eliciting a fraction of a response from the interested Ushbet, “aren’t going to stand in the way of that.”
Eddie rose to his feet impossibly fast, fists blazing with cruel power, each one aimed for a sensitive spot; left fist was locked in on a collision course with his old friend’s foolishly unprotected skull, the right, his stomach. There was enough incongruously-fed power in either hand to vaporize skin, crush bone, disintegrate blood.
Drake twisted out of the way of the fist intent on turning his precious brain-case into a puff of pink steam, only at the risk of catching the other fist in his stomach; Eddie’s glowing fist smashed into the unbreakable surface of the M’Tai’s prison -which immediately shattered into pieces, transforming that hand into a soggy skin-shaped bag full of splintered bone and ruptured veins- while the other fist, on a preordained date with Drake’s soft underbelly collided with the Drake's unprotected gut at unthinkable speeds.
Drake, injured beyond comprehension, danced further away, mind little more than empty slate, body so wounded that no part of himself was talking properly to any other part.
Pain. Already in fluorescent, scintillating torture from the first destroyed hand, fresh gouts of truly radiant agony shuddered up from a freshly mangled hand, turning the radius and ulna into so many bony splinters. The humerus cracked under the pitiless force, once, twice … five times and what little remained of a whole bone broke loose from the shoulder as swift as thought, tearing through Eddie’s magisterial robes, sending blood flying everywhere.
The Emperor-for-Life Etienne Marseilles, once upon a time nothing more than a simple man named Eddie Marshall AKA Sparks Dangerously, dropped to the ground, partially-functional hand -in that it retained your basic, hand-shaped ... shapedness- gripped the sodden, shattered mess that had once been an arm.
Agony. Drake couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt pain like this. He felt like it might’ve been that time he’d fallen out of a tree onto a rock, using his stupid legs as a kind of rough an
d ready crash pad, but the torture of mostly pulverized internal organs was nothing compared to that.
Not at all.
Liver, kidney, pancreas … they were all now nothing more than a dream had by his body, faint bits of flesh shattered by the deadly blow, all floating loose throughout, leaving behind a relentless, sharp and unceasing throb that threatened his sanity. He, too, sank to the ground, blood and worse pouring freely from slack lips.
The two best friends sat there like that for some time, each man thinking his own thoughts, considering the next best course of action, keeping themselves prepped and ready for when the other decided it was time to move on to the next phase of murderous intent, each one uncomfortably aware that there was an Ushbet M’Tai all but breathing down their necks.
Drake manifested a Slappy Burger XXX-Tra large Cola and took a sip. Ice cold syrupy deliciousness trickled down his throat, providing much-needed nourishment to every part of his distressed body.
“Ahh, God this stuff is good. You know how, when you’ve gone a really long time without drinking anything, and then you do, and then you feel like you totally get how it is to be a tree during a rainstorm after, like, a drought? Like you can feel what you’re drinking literally traveling along your veins and stuff? This is like that, only better, because I say so.”
Drake chose to ignore the bloody taste in his mouth, focusing solely on the wondrous nature of soda instead. Then, because he often didn’t think things through, hastily created a crude stomach just below his lungs in order to keep the soda from just sort of … winding up inside him.
