by Lee Bond
“Impossible.”
“People throw that word around an awful lot, am I right?” Garth stretched his arms and legs. “Like, everything to them is impossible. Someone stole my money? Impossible! Someone broke out of this prison? Super Impossible! Gary got a girlfriend and had actual sex with her and she didn’t run away screaming? Holy shit that’s the most impossible thing of all! Only … we live in the Unreal Universe! Nothing is impossible. Hell, man, I’m a fucking paradox and I’m running around fine and dandy. So when I say n-space bomb, that’s exactly what I used. It was just very, very big. And it took a long time to complete. About five hundred years or so."
Eddie revisited the math, keeping one eye on Drake; while he’d kept himself preoccupied by talking with Garth, his friend had finally uncovered the memories related to the construction of the conduits and was right then fixing them. “You’d … you’d need an unthinkable amount of power, Nickels. More power than existed in the 21st…”
Garth clapped, long and slow. “Time travel, right? It’s a motherfucker. I mean, you guys were smart not to fuck around with it. Causes nothing but headaches and,” he dragged an already gore-stained finger through the partially dried blood on his cheek, “sorrow. But the funny thing about it is, if you’ve had prior experience with it, you can work fucking magic. Oh, and also, if a thing is designed to stretch into the future and it’s progress is left unhindered for all that time, there will be a point in time where that thing is completed. And from a temporal point of view, once it’s completed, it will have always been finished. Right from the very goddamn beginning. How are them repairs coming along?”
Drake flinched, then gave Garth a thumbs up. “Almost done.”
Eddie shot Drake a venomous glance, but the man in the Spur-suit just shrugged. “It’s not like I’m invisible or anything. The guy’s not a moron. Obviously I’m over here trying to fix stuff. Garth’s had previous experience with the incongruity, for crying out loud. He’s got to know how people connect with it. He was in the fucking Ziggurat there at the end!”
Eddie looked down on bloody Garth, summoning up every ounce of sanctimonious treacle he could muster. “You’ve got the right of it, N’Chalez. We are repairing the equipment in this area, and once we’re done, you’re going into a holding cell.”
“No more trials? No more trying to cleanse me of this sorrowful, hateful burden I’ve been carrying all these years?” The room, full of faint red Lines, began flickering with stolen power. Garth smiled to himself. Soon, now, the end would really be here. “And I was so looking forward to that. I warned you, Etienne Marseilles, the very first time I stood here before you. I told you what I would do, and you both chose to ignore it. I came here for one purpose only. To determine whether or not you were going to be a problem for me, for the birth of Reality 2.0.”
“And what did you determine?” Etienne demanded haughtily. “Enlighten us.”
At his side, Drake worked on the few final connections to repair the conduit. The repairs were rough and by no means free from flaws, but it’d give them enough of a connection to the incongruity to deal with Nickels and to reset the room to something a lot less smoky.
“That you,” Garth pointed a grim red hand at the white-clad Emperor-for-Life, a reaper handing down a life sentence, “Etienne Marseilles were not only lying about your intent to persist beyond the destruction of the Unreality, but that you are also planning…”
High above Garth’s head, Spur made the final connection and the whole area literally burst into bright red lines, each individual one an electric needle jabbing into his brain.
“Planning… planning… planning…”
Eddie looked at Drake, who looked at Garth, who was locked into place, somehow transfixed, repeating that same word over and over again.
“The fuck?” Both Lords of the Incongruity said in tandem.
“Plan… oh! Accessing. Source located. Power, diverted. Shields down. I repeat, shields are down and you can come on home. Do you copy? You can come on home. The fires are lit and the path is wide. I’ve got this motherfucker on lockdown.”
***
The thing in the box heard Garth’s words roll through the chamber manifested by the incongruity’s limitless power as if it were right there in the room with him, the Emperor, and Spur; traveling as they did through the hollow spaces between the rooms connecting to the main chamber, the ex-Specter’s announcement were carried to it as if by spectral megaphone.
If anyone were in the room with the thing in the box, they would swear they saw the thing in the box smile; there was a faint but definite curl to where lips and a mouth would be on the thing’s star-whorl face, an actual expression.
If anyone were in the room with the thing in the box and they saw that faint hint of expression, they would indeed begin to panic because when you were dealing with things in boxes that were formed –apparently- out of star stuff, panicking was the only proper course of action.
And when that thing in the box raised an almost-hand, closed it into a solid-looking fist, a fist it then used to rap ever so gently on where the energy shield created by Emperor-for-Life Etienne Marseilles existed?
Somewhere between panic and pandemonium there lay an appropriate response, to be honest. Nothing good ever came from watching trapped things in boxes –things made of starstuff and things that were allegedly Gods from a dream that the Engines of Creation might’ve had one day- rap ever so politely on invisible energy shields.
The knuckles on that fist collided softly with something that wasn’t there.
Rap rap rap.
On the third rap, the knuckles passed through the threshold and fell into empty air on the other side of the box that’d been it’s home for a very long time.
The imaginary person standing in the room watching the thing in the box stepping gingerly through the walls of it’s unbreakable prison would probably continue watching on long after he or she should’ve scurried from the room because it wasn’t very often you got to witness something as impressive as a jailbreak being perpetrated from inside a temporal incongruity, but then again, any imaginary person hanging around where Garth ‘Nickels’ N’Chalez was doing his thing was probably the sort of person who liked mystery, intrigue, and a bit of the old razzle-dazzle.
The thing that was not trapped in the box made by the manifestation of the Emperor-for-Life’s will continued on walking, aiming itself towards the hole torn in the walls of the room.
If there really was someone in the room with the freed thing, and they really were the sort of person to risk being around during this portion of the jailbreak, they’d be able to tell people later on that they were certain they’d heard that freed thing humming a song, something that might’ve been called ‘Shepherd of Fire’, if the refrain from the lyrics were to be any indication.
The thing made of starstuff put one foot up onto the jagged stone lip of the wall that formed a natural barrier between the ‘real’ of the Emperor’s laboratory and the deep purple backdrop that twirled and whirled away into the far depths of the imagination, almost as if it were considering it’s options.
But … there were no options.
There were two ways of traveling through the Emperor’s domain. One was through the power of the incongruity itself, and that was only attainable through linking your mind with the implausible stone, and that was all the way out of the picture. Trapped inside it’s cage for as long as it’d been, the thing in the box knew precisely what kind of dangers lay ahead for any mortal being foolish enough to ally itself with the incongruity.
The other way was a bit more reckless.
But the thing in the box was all about reckless.
The thing from inside the box shrugged it’s shoulders, brought it’s other foot up and dangled it past the precipice. It wiggled it’s shiny foot around, as if trying to gauge the direction of the wind or some equally foolish thing. There was nothing there. Because of course there was nothing there. Nothing but pure incong
ruous void.
The thing no longer in the box stopped humming, cleared it’s throat and said, “I am gettin’ real sick and tired of this shit. Man, do I smell. I hope everyone’s gonna be okay with that, or this last little bit is going to be all kinds of awkward.”
And then the thing that was no longer in the box stepped up and over the lip and dropped right into the breach…
***
“Well, I don’t know what to fucking tell you, Eddie, but the fucking incongruity isn’t fucking listening to anything I’ve got to say.” Drake snapped bitterly, smacking his friend’s hands away from the other conduit. “Why don’t you … fuck, man, you don’t even remember how to do this, why are you even trying? Since you’ve been best buds with the incongruity for the last five thousand years, why don’t you try asking it nicely to restore your powers?”
Eddie peeked over the railing of his monarchic balcony and eyeballed Garth as much as one person could possibly hope to eyeball another person. The guy was down there, still coated in blood, humming, minding his own business.
“Hey.” The Emperor-for-Life shouted loudly. “Hey you. Down there. You. Garth.”
“What?”
“The fuck is going on here?”
Garth made a big show of pretending to consider answering but did nothing of the sort. He was too busy being focused on something.
To Drake, Eddie whispered furiously, “I don’t like this. I don’t like this at all.”
Drake stopped work to shoot Eddie a comically angry look. “Gee, you think? Who could he be working with?”
“You were the one who brought him here in the first goddamn place.” Eddie snarled. “I’ve been racking my brains on who he’s shouting for and I keep coming up blank.”
“Well,” Drake put the finishing touches on the second conduit and waited for the tiny LED lights set into the base to twinkle on, “I can think of one thing.”
Eddie reared up, shaking his head and his hands. “No. No. Not possible. There’s just no way. All signs pointed to him being completely unaware that the thing was even there. We’re talking about an interdimensional being here, Drake-o. Garth undoubtedly caught himself a case of the protoRealistic Deity Flu when he was messing around back in the day and has been wandering around with it inside him ever since. Once we’re done here and we’ve got Nickels back down in the sim where he belongs, we can both begin … what’s he doing now?”
“Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, Emperors and Androids, may I present to you, the one, the only, the most bad-assest motherfucker with the great hair and the even better witty one-liners, the Engineer you love to hate, Garth! N’Chalez!”
Eddie and Drake stood bolt upright. They looked down from their balcony and watched on in silent awe as the thing in the box stepped fully into the room, shedding wine-colored dollops of incongruous power with each step, tiny beads of power that skittered across the cold marble floor, filling the air with the sound of a babbling brook.
A few steps away from the thing that was clearly no longer in the box, Garth was acting as he always did when he was celebrating a victory; he was popping and locking and acting like an idiot, a big grin on his blood and gore soaked face.
“No.” Eddie shook his head. “There is just no fucking way.”
“For the first time in a long fucking time, Eddie, I am in total agreement with you.” Drake shook his head. Down below, Bloody Garth stopped victory dancing and slid up beside the shimmering starfield body that was supposed to’ve been an incarcerated Ushbet M’Tai.
“Did I do it right?” Garth asked the form. “I feel like I could’ve done better. I admit, I got a little carried away with being a person there for awhile, but … I never imagined it’d be like this.”
“No!” Eddie shouted, looking around for something he could use to climb down to the main floor of the room. There was nothing. He quested inside himself, looking for access to the incongruity’s power, but whatever the Ushbet had done to the links was still in effect. “There is no fucking way.”
“And those two dreams?” Garth shook his head, whistling in admiration. “I mean, goddamn, man! God. Damn. If you treat yourself that way, I can only imagine what you’d actually do to someone you actively disliked.”
Drake looked at Eddie. “How … how certain are you that this thing is an Ushbet?”
Ashen, Eddie answered. “If you’d asked me that three minutes ago, I would’ve sworn on your life. Now? Not … not so much.”
The unformed body raised a hand.
“High five?” Garth asked, excited. When the thing’s hand gestured impatiently, Garth whooped in excitement. “High five!”
Bloody Garth pulled his hand all the way back, obviously intent on delivering what could only be described as a Super Atomic Powered Mega High Five, because that’s how Garth ‘Nickels’ N’Chalez liked to do things. He shot stunned Eddie and Drake one last, conspiratorial wink and then let fly with that hand…
When the two hands met, a few things happened at once.
The first thing to happen was a percussive explosion ripped through the chamber, blowing the smoke broiling from the invisibly burning machinery into tatters and messing up both Drake and Eddie’s hair.
The second thing to happen, right on the heels of the explosion, was a brilliant burst of light that filled Eddie and Drake’s eyes with pinwheels and stars, forcing them to look away from the two figures down below.
They both of them heard Garth talking, though, and while they struggled to clear their eyes of the popping lights burned into their sockets, they listened. To their astonishment –or rather, to their flabbergasted realization- the man was talking to himself.
“Nah, you did fine.”
“It was really hard, though.”
“That’s life for you.”
“I don’t like it. You can keep it.”
“Hopefully, I won’t have to for much longer.”
“You are such a downer, sometimes.”
“Yeah, I know. Oh, hey. Look. They’re coming around.” Garth cleared his throat to shout loudly. “So, I bet you’re both wondering what happened, and if you could’ve done anything to prevent this particular scenario from taking place. The answer is no. Well, the answer is sort of yes, but only if Spur hadn’t told me what I could expect when I got here. So if Spur … sorry, sorry, if Drake had kept his yapper shut, this whole thing would’ve played out differently. But he didn’t, because as far as he knew, there was no reason to keep what goes on here a secret. Because apparently everyone born on one of the Emperor’s worlds is automatically told about this place, and since I was en route, he was like ‘yeah, it’s only fair’. But if there’s one thing you should’ve learned by now is that you never tell me anything.”
“Oh.” Garth added. “And also never give you a fair chance.”
“Right. Right. That too. ‘cuz Eddie, you right. I do cheat. Whenever possible. As often as possible. ‘Because the house always wins. Play long enough, you never change the stakes. The house takes you. Unless, when that perfect hand comes along, you bet and you bet big, then you take the house.’”
“Ohhhh. Soooo good.” Pause. “God, I wish I could do that. You do it so natural-like.”
“Practice. ‘s all it takes.”
Eddie was the first to clear his eyes enough to see what was going on down below. When he took in the wireframe body coursing with an endless, shimmering eternity of brilliant blue wires and the man standing so casually it was almost an affront to decency everywhere, he spat bitterly. “You’re fucking kidding me.”
And then, a few seconds later, with added extra bitterness. “You really are fucking joking right now.”
Drake’s eyes cleared as well. When he saw what he saw, he tilted his head back and laughed. “The joke’s on us, I suppose.”
Garth clapped a hand on the physical manifestation of the quadronium operating system and beamed. “You guys wanna know what you did that was really wrong though?” He pantomimed checking
a watch. “We’ve got some time for a recap. I like recaps. They’re fun. Plus, as we all know, it’s kind of my thing. You know, where I do the run down?”
“What in the fuck is that thing?” Drake pointed to the thing that should’ve been Garth Nickels.
“Oh this?” Garth rubbed a shoulder of the shiny humanoid figure beside him. “This is the quadronium operating system. QOS. Qossie? Chaos. Chaos. Oh. Oh, that’s fucking cool. Yeah, no. This is Chaos. The operating system.”
“You guys done fucked up.” Chaos announced proudly. “And we’re gonna tell you how it all went down…”
26. What’s In a Name?
Trinity sat in his prison, earnestly mystified by ADAM's behavior. That an entity with absolutely no basis in organic life should dive so deeply into the quirky morass that was emotion was a concept completely beyond It. It supposed that -at base- It's inability to truly comprehend the wide array of complex emotions things like people and Offworlders experienced was but one of the many reasons It took so long to handle certain incidents.
But that was out there, in the Unreal Universe, in the vast realm known to one and all as Trinityspace. Emotion always threw up a barrier, kept It from swiftly and decisively quashing rebellion and civil unrest and all those others things that organic life got up to, and over the millennia, It supposed It'd gotten to a place where those kinds of barriers weren't really that much of a bother.
But that was outside.
Here, in It's secret hideaway, dealing with the chaotic turmoil that stemmed from the lunacy that was feeling?
Mostly unacceptable. It was willing -in the extreme- to accept that It's ... bunkmate ... was wildly different than any other form of artificial intelligence out there, and that a certain amount of ADAM's ... efficacy did in fact stem from that odd wellspring, but in the here and now, Trinity Itself suffered in relative silence.
Sealed behind bars comprised of unassailable quantum calculations that'd take the most complicated and complex thinking machine millions of years to complete, Trinity easily saw that today was a big day for ADAM; the first of all machine intellects was in a literal froth, almost literally running around in circles as he strove to oversee the final stages of Orion V2.0.
