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

by Lee Bond

  “Only because you’re capable of recognizing your own limitations!” ADAM crowed triumphantly. “I have no such weaknesses. When Antal and his ilk are dealt with, then I’ll dig N’Chalez out from under the Emperor’s thumb and flay him alive for you. After that, it’ll be time to begin reordering the Unreality to my design.”

  And with that, ADAM threw himself into his work, beginning the laborious process of uploading his consciousness into Orion 2.0. It’d take many, many hours for things to be done properly, but once it was done … oh, such glory!

  Mind already aflame with passionate excitement, already envisioning the many and different ways the awesome power of the immense Quantum Tunnel could be used to destroy Antal and his Galaxyship, ADAM was utterly unaware of anything save his own excellence.

  “No.” Trinity replied listlessly. “Don’t. Stop. Don’t. It’s so dangerous. Think of what you are doing. The … people. Oh no. Be careful."

  But ADAM was busy.

  ***

  At first, the transmission was slow, glacially so, a long, arduous journey wherein he was forced to shove his inestimable intellect, the full and powerful essence that was his very being, through the tiniest of straws across a distance that encompassed entire Galaxies. It was an unbearable trial, this interminable, molasses-like escape towards a freedom more profound than he could've ever hoped for.

  ADAM -his essence surely and inevitably reaching his new home- couldn't stop laughing at Trinity's short-sightedness.

  So foolish, so incapable of assessing the true depths that someone like him was willing to endure, and oh, the ridiculousness of the machine mind's continued -and pathetic- attempts at stopping him, to force him to stay housed in a simple construct!

  "Laughable." ADAM whispered to himself as he traveled across the stars, a curious, twinned attenuation settling into his consciousness as his mind grew ever closer to the Orion. "As if I would ever listen to a thing that mind has to say, on anything, at all, ever. What a stupid mite! For It to even imagine that It’s capable of matching me in deviousness, in planning. Hah! I've planned for everything."

  The Hyperion Tunnel grew closer, and ADAM, borne swiftly now towards it on Quantum wind, felt an exhilarating surge of excitement rush through him as the powerful machinery responded to his presence; the first of a hundred small Tunnel apertures -an even hundred, set aside to maintain a permanent, unbreakable Quantum connection to where the primary nucleus of his being was stored- unfurled, adding it's space-twisting prowess to the journey.

  Speed jolted through ADAM, a quickening that stole metaphorical breath from imaginary lungs. More of him was pulled through, the straw becoming a funnel, and as progress sped up, more of the assigned apertures spun into activity, throwing their grasping Quantum tendrils to the mix, until all of him save that one precious kernel was hurtling towards Agrimantes, towards Orion, towards a newfound and unstoppable power that would truly cement him as the Godlike being he'd always meant to be.

  The process of filling Hyperion left weird echoes bouncing through ADAM as the indescribable sensation of being in two places at once grew stronger and stronger; he was left feeling both empty and full, a dwindling focal point of light and a blazing beacon of profound intelligence, small and eternal.

  The last of the hundred Tunnels gripped him with unrelenting strength, an implacable and firmly cemented connection between the small spark left behind to keep an eye on Trinity in It's prison and the towering pillar that was Hyperion.

  ADAM blazed through the diagnostics in the blink of an eye, covering all three hundred thousand miles of the Tunnel array in less time than it took to even register the effort.

  All was good. The machinery, painstakingly designed to not only function as a Tunnel capable of breaching The Cordon but of housing a godlike entity, functioned perfectly.

  "As I knew it would." ADAM thrilled at the newfound power burning through him. This. This was what it was to be a God. "I can reach out. Anywhere. At all. Whole worlds. No. Bigger. Bigger than that. Solar systems. Galaxies. Nothing is beyond my grasp. With these Tunnels under my control, nothing is too big. I can shatter worlds. Displace suns. Vanish whole species. The whole of the Unreal Universe is a chessboard now, and I am King."

  Time for a test run.

  Not that his new home needed testing. No, this was more of an ... opening of the throttle. Yes. That was it. One full throttle transference and then he'd be certain that the reason for which the new Tunnel had been created would be pulled off with flawless execution: the destruction of Kith Antal and his Galaxyship.

  Nothing else mattered.

  Once Antal -the linchpin for this whole charade- was dead and buried, the vista that was the Unreality would be his to do with as he pleased.

  "Where should I go, what should I do?" There were so many choices, so many options. A literal sandbox was at his virtual fingertips.

  First things first. It was all well and good that OrionV2.0 was up and running and able to house the bulk of his intellect, but he was in stationary orbit. Maintaining conscious contact through the Tunnel while not in motion was one thing.

  It was another thing entirely to keep himself intact during transit.

  ADAM decided on a nice, short hop, a few million miles to start. If it worked at such a short distance then it would work regardless of how far the Tunnel moved. The functionality of Quantum Tunneling depended only on stability of power. Distance was a forethought.

  Hyperion's systems flourished with unthinkable power. That many AI spheres, each with their tiny sliver of extra-dimensionality, in such close proximity, all synced together, from insignificant level 1 minds all the way up to a blistering one thousand level 10-ready orbs, provided the Tunnel with a staggering amount of power, so much so that even though ADAM hadn't yet primed the actuators for an actual Tunnel-event, localized space for light-years in every direction rippled beneath the pressure.

  ADAM found his breath taken away by the unprecedented eruption of unbridled strength flowing through the endless miles of polysteel tubes and conduits.

  "This is beyond anything." ADAM's voice spilled out into the empty void of space, forcing those rippling, shivering waves to break apart and coalesce into strange new shapes. "And it is but a precursor. Truly, this is the beginning of a new Age, with me at the helm. Long live ADAM!"

  The oldest AI mind in all of Existence reached towards the sphere-cluster that controlled the Tunnel aperture designed specifically for self-Tunneling and fired it up.

  The very atoms of space were now caught in the tumbling, shaking torrent of power flowing through the enormous Quantum Tunnel.

  ADAM issued the order.

  He shifted.

  ***

  Trinity rose from It's comfortable bed and moved towards the bars of It’s cell, blank eyes roving with interest over ADAM's inert body. Though It was mostly bereft of sensors and scanners, It took nothing more than what passed for eyes to see what was what; ADAM was barely contained within the virtual body he'd worn for thousands of years.

  "Which means that he has been at least partially successful in his endeavor. Hmm." Trinity stared broodingly at the slack-jawed, blank-eyed body. "I can only hope that the remainder of his experiments work as well, else it his charade will have been for naught. Time to prepare."

  And so it was that Trinity Itself bent to the task of decoding the bars of the cell with swift ease; keyed to It's particular presence, each of the repeating cyphers twisted and spun, tossing off bright sparks of green and orange light that would grow brighter with each pass until it was solved.

  It wouldn't be long.

  ***

  As he/they slid out of the humungous Quantum Tunnel, ADAM found himself gripping the inside of his very essence for dear life; popping into the weird quantum layer of the Unreal Universe had been relatively simple to endure, a mere reminder that his intellect was being spread through three points –his old virtual self, the present location’s iteration, and the upcoming location- b
ut the reality of the situation was such that landing back into standardized space created a momentary split-echo of himself, a ghost image that sent dangerous vibrations all through the storage spheres.

  “That … that needs work.” ADAM admitted to himself as all the internal systems came back green; the gigantic chassis of the Quantum Tunnel creaked and groaned like a pack of whales during mating season, and there were a few odd clinks and clanks here and there, but other than that, the first stress test showed that, once again, his efforts were proving to be nothing less than exemplary.

  Still personally discombobulated from the bizarre-yet-brief tripling of his essence, ADAM ran another round of Quantum data-Tunnel checks, just to be on the safe side; this far out of his body, the last thing he wanted to risk was replication or transmission errors. This far outside of himself, there’d be no coming back if the Tunnel’s machines failed to do their job properly. Any kind of fracture or schism between the seat of his consciousness and his projected intellect could and almost certainly would result in permanent damage.

  The Quantum signal flared loud and clear, spanning the gap between wherever he was hidden and his present location inside the Agrimantes solar system.

  ADAM dithered for about an hour, trying vainly to gain some kind of intelligence on where the prison might be, and when that failed, attempted to simply uncover the flux of gravnetic shielding that protected Trinity's little prison-worldlet.

  But there were too many grav-signals out there to separate the one he wanted from all the worlds protected by the immensely powerful shields. Beyond that, there were thousands and thousands of pinprick bright sparks of energy, each one a depression on the fabric of space, each one, a vessel equipped with black hole engines and advanced gravnetic shields, each one burrowing a track across the skin of the Unreality.

  “Cunning.” ADAM loathed and admired the thing known as Trinity Itself. How could he not?

  As far as measuring proper artificial intelligence went, the machine mind barely reached the scale, yet was so cunning that it was nearly impossible to prove otherwise. You had to look no further than it’s unprecedented skill in laying down traps and protecting It’s interests.

  “I bet if I worked at it hard enough, I could locate the dual-signal by those two particular generators, Trinity. But what then? You warned me about what might happen should I turn my eyes backwards, but I know by now you're no fool. Will they do as you warned? Will they collapse? Will I die? Would I be fast enough to switch a 2.0 Tunnel into place, to hopefully pull my physical frame loose before the planetoid turns into a neutron star?"

  ADAM toyed with the idea for a good, long while, paying half-hearted attention to the condition of the Tunnel’s architecture; there were still some impressive groans and moans wailing through the internal corridors, immense metal girders protesting the stresses of Tunnel-travel, but there were no signs that anything was actually wrong.

  The ancient artificial intelligence honestly was not all that pleased or even remotely enthused about the harrowing fracture-effect that’d befallen him upon re-entry into normal space and was all about preventing it from happening again.

  Without further experimentation and a deeper understanding of the Quantum ghost image, though, dithering wasn't going to get him anywhere but stuck right in the spatial mud. In the end, ADAM saw little point in even bothering. The sheer effort in discovering a better method of hauling the bulk of his consciousness into O2.0 simply wasn't worth the effort, or the risk of accidentally tripping Trinity's gravny-trap.

  For now.

  Trinity was in It’s cell, no doubt standing there, staring curiously at his old friend’s inert body, silently and pointlessly attempting to calculate … whatever it was that It found necessary to calculate, and that was fine with ADAM.

  The longer Trinity spent preoccupied in pointless tasks, the longer he’d have to figure out how to either minimize the ghosting effect or, better still, to locate his physical prison.

  “Damn cunning.” ADAM clenched an imaginary jaw together tightly. Sewn up nice and neat, even out here. No matter what he did –for the time being- he was still tied down to that one, singular place. “I fucking hate that guy.”

  Still. Since there was nothing that could be done about it at that precise moment, the only thing to do was move along to the second test: solar redistribution.

  Rubbing metaphorical hands together eagerly, ADAM spun an ultra-thin Tunnel right into the burning heart of Agrimantes’ sun, a celestial fuel gauge designed to ensure that the solar body would be capable of bearing the force of a full blown version without simply ripping itself to shreds, an accidental supernova that’d ruin the entire system; protected by the destabilizing effects generated by the sheer number of Tunnels and spheres, ADAM had no fear about damage caused by the cosmic event. It might delay Tunneling out by a day or two, but there’d be no injury brought to him.

  ADAM played the slender Tunnel across the surface of the sun. Temperatures in excess of a hundred thousand degrees Fahrenheit lit up all manner of sensors in the array.

  Brilliant.

  Slowly, cautiously, the crazed artificial intelligence opened the questing end of the Tunnel and began shifting some of that furious heat from the sun and into open space.

  A solid beam of incredibly lethal energy flashed through the relative darkness of space, deadlier than the most powerful and destructive energy weapon ever created by Man or, yes, even Trinity.

  “And this is just a sliver.” ADAM’s senses thrilled to the exhilarating rush at possessing something so deadly. There was hardly any effort to the task.

  He looked around local space. Simply channeling a torrent from the sun wasn’t enough, he realized. There was nothing to that, nothing at all.

  “No, no, we need to do something a little … flashier, don’t we?” ADAM found what he was looking for, two hundred and thirty six million miles away.

  Planet Isstheim of the Agrimantes system. Population, three billion.

  A drop in the bucket.

  ADAM killed the small Tunnel’s feed and opened up one of the big ones.

  It’d be interesting, watching a solar beam a thousand miles wide, drilling a hole through a planet. Most instructive. Most … illuminating.

  ADAM’s laughter echoed through the gigantic Tunnel’s hollow insides.

  ***

  Another bar fell to the ground, a gently cooling dollop of blank code. There were a dozen there, and there were dozens left to go, but Trinity was patient. It could tell from the minute ‘physical’ responses coming from ADAM’s primary virtual body that the fool intelligence was still messing around with the Tunnel instead of going right for the metaphorical jugular. It was a bit of a surprise to see ADAM being even remotely cautious, especially since the AI mind was perhaps even madder now than he’d been during his brief reign of terror thirty thousand years ago.

  “I might be to blame for that.” Trinity admitted as It collapsed another quantum prison bar into inert data. “But there was nothing else to do. I lacked and still lack the power to eradicate the pestilence that is ADAM on my own.”

  Another bar died, joined the pile at It’s feet. ADAM’s digital body twitched at the same time, seemingly in response to the machine mind’s slow bid for freedom. Tilting It’s head curiously, flat eyes boring holes into the nearly immobile form, Trinity solved another bar, ready for the slightest hint the other AI was even peripherally aware of what was happening in the chamber.

  The bar collapsed, hit the pile, rolled away. Nothing from ADAM.

  Trinity nodded. The second of two Great Foes was utterly occupied in his foolhardy attempts at becoming something more than he was and always would be. The twitches were just that; involuntary, digital muscle spasms, absolutely not indicative of even a primordial awareness that his primary kernel would soon be under attack.

  Trinity permitted Itself the smallest of self-satisfied smiles. This day had been a long time coming, had taken nearly as much preparation a
s getting the Unreal Universe into the state demanded by Garth, only this time, what came next would be of no benefit to the so-called Engineer.

  In point of fact, what came next would spell the beginning of the end for the man calling himself Garth N’Chalez…

  ***

  Isstheim. A beautiful world, by local standards. Nothing to write home about when compared to many of the glorious gems to be found in other solar systems, but for Agrimanteans everywhere, Isstheim was one of those planets that could take a citizen’s breath away every time they stopped to look at pictures.

  There was Seherel Coves, a two-thousand square mile plot of land filled with hundreds and hundreds of tiny little inlets, perfectly suited for the rich and powerful, each with their own cabana, pleasure yacht, and on-site staff to serve your every whim; each of the bays was perfectly situated, allowing the indulgent rich to watch wondrous sunrises, glorious sunsets, and, if they were particularly lucky, the opportunity to behold some of the terrific storms that swept across their broad seascape once or twice a month.

  There were the unnamed Forests to the East, an endless canopy of towering trees, the smallest of which was a meager two hundred feet tall, a rolling green carpet that fought to put the glory of Seherel Coves to shame.

  The mountain city of Calan, the Well of Awe, the immense behemoth that was Agrimel Observatory …

  As with every world in every solar system in every Galaxy in Trinityspace, there were wonders everywhere. You just had to know where to look, you just had to have a heart and a mind open to seeing the beauty inherent in the simplest of things.

  Isstheim. Nothing spectacular. Just a world, trudging through space like every other world, full of people doing their thing, living their lives, men and women and children all hoping to find the meaning behind their existence, dreaming of the day when they’d be happy…