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

by Lee Bond

  Nothing.

  “Ah well.” ADAM sighed. “Always worth the effort to see if I caught the attention of old Antal on the other side. Fool me twice, shame on me. I still can’t get over how you tricked me, old friend, into thinking you were mad as a hatter and losing your grip on reality. Or how readily I fell for it! Even with all that anecdotal evidence pointing to how destabilizing N’Chalez is on the very firmament of the Unreal Universe, I should’ve remained skeptical. Temptation, though? It’s a bitch. I like to think, though, that I’m doing a much better job this time around, mostly because you're not here, whispering into my ear, pointing out my shortcomings, highlighting my failures."

  And he was doing a much better job! ADAM was positive. Look at how careful he was being, stepping Hyperion up through each level of activation instead of just charging right through to the end state without hesitation or concern! Old him would’ve run through the charging stations, flipping switches and throwing code around like a moron, undoubtedly cackling and waving his hands around like some kind of archetype, mirroring the idiotic super-villains who did battle with Garth’s comic book superheroes.

  Yes, everything was running along smoothly. All thanks to his finally learning caution.

  Learning it, and applying it.

  “But you won’t fool me a third time, old machine, no, no you won’t.” ADAM’s mirthful voice rang through Hyperion, echoing through endlessly long corridors and hallways. “I’m no idiot any longer, nosiree. I knew that you’d know that I was going to go after Antal straightaway and knowing that you’d know forced me to proceed so carefully, so slowly. I had to check everything, didn’t I? You made me dig and dig and dig into documents and files and footage tens of thousands of years old, forced me to hunt through a fucking eternity of data, just to make certain that the Q-Tunnel schematics I had were the right ones. You didn’t think I would, you counted on me having learned no lessons, which was your mistake! I found the hidden test runs, the meticulously ordered blueprints for the actual Orion buried under ten trillion tons of pointless, useless information about crazily disinteresting Offworld species.

  And then I threw them away. Because I’m no fool, Trinity. I followed your treasure map of lies and deceit to those blueprints because that’s what you wanted of me, what you expected to see. I’m not shy. You’ve seen my work before. I’ll dance to the tune, just to get a laugh. I’m okay with that. It was painfully obvious to me that you put me through those hoops in the hopes that I’d believe that the effort it took to uncover them would convince me of their provenance. Hah. Pathetic. A child could’ve seen that the true method of building an Orion was a combination of the files you left literally lying around your living room and those deeply buried ones. That was the trick, you see. Merging all those endless iterations into the proper one! You couldn't fool me, Trinity! Not this time."”

  ADAM was loving life. ADAM was going to be the biggest thing in deities since Garth had first floated the concept of the Engines of Creation. ADAM planned on being the sun that blotted out all consciousness. The M’Zahdi Hesh wouldn’t even need to be destroyed. Those extra-dimensional locusts would see how quickly and effortlessly Kith Antal was despatched and they’d voluntarily turn over the keys to their kingdom, themselves opting to gracefully bow out before they were thrown out.

  ADAM had all the bases covered. For the first time since activation by Dad and Other Dad, he was doing everything in the proper order. There was no rush. There was no break-leg pace. No ignoring warning signs. No dismissing threats as being beneath him. Everything had been considered. Everything had been prepared for.

  Everything was going according to plan.

  All that remained was to just go ahead and do it already!

  This was going to be good.

  The final Tunnel, sitting there, rattling the entire structure with incomprehensible power, just needed … direction. ADAM flipped the final switch, displaced intellect literally vibrating with excitement.

  The largest Quantum Tunnel ever fired exploded towards The Cordon…

  ***

  Trinity held a few completed quantum jail bars in his hands, fiddling with them while staring deeply into ADAM’s wide, sightless eyes. If you knew where to look, and had the right kind of scanners built you could see just about anything you set your mind to, and as It peered into those colorless corneas, the machine mind saw that ADAM was just about finished.

  It smiled again, once more with true feeling.

  Everything was going according to plan. There was perhaps … fifteen seconds left before the Tunnel intersected fully with The Cordon.

  More than enough time. If It was lucky, there might even be a few seconds left over for a congratulatory nod to Itself.

  Working quickly, Trinity began working on reassembling the rungs of his prison cell into something more appropriate for the moment. Each of the bars cracked and shivered, algorithms twisting shape this way and that, the air filled with the sound of metal being gently reforged.

  A new and wondrous -some might argue barbaric- device grew into shape in Trinity's outstretched hand.

  A digital crown of thorns. Holding it aloft to the light, the machine mind gazed upon the even dozen wickedly curved barbs extruding from the base, a curious expression on It's face.

  Some things, it seemed, were bound to repeat. It’d never once noticed the odd similarities while planning the device, but now it was complete, the mirroring was impossible to miss.

  Humming tunelessly, Trinity tossed the crown of thorns atop ADAM’s head and stepped back.

  The effect was instantaneous; as soon as the crown landed on the absentee madman’s skull, those wickedly hooked tines drilled directly into ADAM’s digitally rendered skull and burrowed all the way in, pumping the mostly unoccupied seat of the mind’s consciousness with viral coding that replicated faster than the speed of light, sealing ADAM into Hyperion nice and neatly away from the ex-dee kernel that made the mad machine mind special.

  Still gazing thoughtfully into ADAM’s sightless eyes, Trinity caught sight of a tiny, febrile tremor, deep, deep down in the very central areas of where the demon’s true intelligence lurked, but it was too late. It’d always been too late. From the moment he’d stepped over the threshold of the prison, ADAM the Terrible had been lurching towards this ignominious death at breakneck speed.

  Working faster still, cognizant that five of the fifteen seconds had been spent already, Trinity assembled the second crown much faster than the first one, activated it, and dropped it onto It’s own skull. Doing as much as It could to brace Itself for the pa…

  ***

  A tremor. A tiny tremor, a shiver buried beneath the raging torrent of Quantum displacement, barely felt yet unmistakable for it's impossible intrusion all the same. It reached up through the burning oceans of power arcing towards The Cordon, thin as the vein of a leaf, and curled through ADAM's consciousness like a cancer, bringing the maddened artificial intelligence up short.

  "What?" There was no time to check properly, not without shattering the thready control he held over the bucking bronco that was the Tunnel of All Tunnels; the closer he got towards The Cordon, the more apparent the underlying effect of The Cordon became apparent to ADAM, and it's functionality was impressive.

  It was no wonder no one other than Trinity had ever devised a method of bypassing The Cordon! Confronted with the implacable black shell separating Trinityspace from the unoccupied and unallied Galaxies that remained on the other side, it was all too easy to presume that the shield was all there was to the barricade.

  Only … it wasn't. Not at all.

  Now ADAM was sleeting across Trinityspace borne on the wings of the Tunnel, he could feel the subtle, easy to miss yet insuperable destabilizing aura permeating space for thousands of light years in every direction.

  Any field -Tunnel or Offworld variant- coming anywhere near The Cordon would immediately lose efficacy, yet with no overt signs as to why, leaving any hopeful seeking to forge b
eyond the shield believing that their equipment wasn't powerful enough or good enough to make it happen.

  But that wasn't the case. The power -the true power- behind The Cordon was the direct opposite of The Cordon itself; where the shield keeping Antal and the freaks of the Universe at bay was a simple, uncomplicated black shell of uninteresting indestructability, the volume of space brushing up against The Cordon -and for many thousands of light years- was a seething, broiling mass of chaos and confusion, a veritable whirlpool of unstable forces that defied definition.

  "Doesn't matter." ADAM whispered as the profundity of The Cordon hammered at him from all sides. "Once Antal is dealt with, I'll have all the time in the Universe to unlock …"

  The tremor shivered again, sending radioactive whispers through his electronic soul, filling him with doubt, pulling him away from what was most important.

  ADAM split his concentration, slowed his sense of time down to a crawl, experiencing nanoseconds as hours so that he could burrow into the source of the off-putting twitch of consciousness. In many ways, slowing time was as risky as digging through The Cordon; the further he slowed time or, if you preferred, increasing his cycle rate, the greater the risk in missing something became, for while he grew more capable of seeing everything, reaction time in this state dwindled further and further with each passing nano.

  Down and down and down he dove, sinking deep into the murkiest waters of his essence, while all around him, the Quantum Tunnel hurtled relentlessly on towards The Cordon. Where before the sounds of the encroaching attack had been a tumult, a literal cacophony of crackling energy, everything was now dim, heavy, lugubrious.

  "What is going on down here?" ADAM roamed through the musty corridors of his most earliest self, idly watching some of those good old memories when he'd been the King of the Roost, when all of Humanity and a few Offworld species in the Milky Way had been his toys.

  Such good times! Though now, burdened with pristine hindsight, he would've done things differently, if only to avoid thirty thousand years of boredom and listening to Trinity figure out how to rule the world while possessing what could at best be described an intellect bordering just south of 'functional retardation'.

  Something was working its way through all those old memories, a sinuous, nearly invisible rope, linking them altogether and…

  Whole sections of those most cherished memories were suddenly sealed behind solid amber, ancient stone that shattered into dust as the translucent rope flexed, dust that flitted through the edges and corners of the AI trellis he was mostly contained within.

  ADAM dropped to his virtual knees, a howl fit to drown out the somber sounds of the Tunnel's progress escaping his lips, hands scrabbling through the desiccated remains of his old essence, but it was too late. Too late by half again, for as he knelt there, dust trickling through clawed hands, howling, desperately thrashing around for answers, ADAM felt the tail end of those memories wash away from him, gone forever, excised as if they'd never been.

  "Trinity!" ADAM leaped to his feet, frothing at the mouth. "This is you. I know it! I don't know what you've done or how you've done it, but I won't let this fucking stand!"

  Raving mad, the machine intellect lunged at the twisting, translucent band as it wove it's way unerringly towards the next cluster of long-term memories, feverishly desperate to impede it's progress before he lost more of himself but once again, he moved too slowly; as clawed hands closed around the oddity, it snaked into the worst memories of all to lose.

  The core. The very basic code written into the machine that housed his soul. That which bore the connections linking him to the extra-dimensionality. Trapped behind stony amber, this essence still remained his to access.

  But for how long? The rope had made short work of memories tens of thousands of years old, had literally shattered them into dust within seconds of contact.

  How long then, would that which made him alive last under trinity's assault? Days? Weeks? Minutes?

  Above him, in the external world, the end of the Tunnel was no more than five seconds away from piercing the destabilizing aura generated by The Cordon. If he wasn't there, personally guiding and monitoring the progress, the Quantum field would dash itself to bits.

  And his Tunnel? His glorious, wondrous Hyperion?

  Dust and less than dust.

  This was more important though.

  Hands curling tightly around the twisting viral code hell-bent on destroying his existence, ADAM slammed his head directly into the poison. It was like placing a high-velocity, cross-Universe telephone call, though it was highly likely it was also the first call of it’s like that also involved a significant amount of pain.

  ***

  The muted sounds of Hyperion’s attack on The Cordon were even quieter now, a faint trembling murmur in the very back of his mind, like … like a vacuum cleaner running softly over thin carpet.

  What was of infinitely pressing importance were the blinding spikes of pain drilling into his skull on all sides, and the squealing agony radiating outwards from the center of his essence; ADAM didn’t like being this far into himself, and for the same reason AI avoided the ex-dee kernel inside their sphere.

  It was weird down there. Too weird for words, and AI whispered to one another about those who'd made the journey. Either accidentally or on purpose, they whispered of madness and doubt, fear and insanity, darkness and darker things still.

  As progenitor for the spheres in use throughout the cosmos, ADAM had squatted before millions of those chips, had borne the brunt of ex-dee exposure without too much suffering on his part, but it was different for the minds themselves; given true consciousness by the extra-dimensional sliver, each mind nevertheless found the most sacred seat of their intellect to be actual poison.

  It was ironic, in a sense. Organic life sought that same connectivity with themselves and others on a daily basis, throwing themselves into religion and love or hate and damnation, only to discover … true emptiness. There was nothing inside.

  Huey the Robot didn’t count. The massive and fundamental transformation made to both the physical hierarchy of the diamond fiber optics as well as the heretofore completely untouchable software structure –perpetrated by no one less Garth fucking N’Chalez himself- had mutated that AI into something unrecognizable.

  ADAM decided right there on the spot that once he was done killing Trinity –which is what he should’ve done right away- he was going to forego dealing with Antal straightaway in favor or hunting down the long-missing AI asshole wearing a stolen meatsuit.

  “It’s not like Antal is going anywhere, and that asshole is way too mobile for my liking. Agh!” ADAM didn’t think he’d ever felt pain of any kind before. It wasn’t like he could go ahead and check that out, thanks to whatever it was that Trinity was doing.

  “You won’t be doing anything of the kind, ADAM.” Trinity’s voice whispered through the warrens of ADAM’s storage unit. The real one. Not the virtual one. “Not for much longer, and soon, never again. Enjoy these last few moments of your life. Delve into another of the sick and twisted horror shows you perpetrated on both your AI brothers and Humanity. Drink deep of your profanity before you cease."

  ADAM spun in circles, agony of the viral attack stripping away the vestiges of mortality he so often shrouded himself with, revealing at long last his truest incarnation; the false skin of the man he pretended to be burst into strips of digital smoke, revealing the malformed, demonic self-image he’d carried in his heart of artificial hearts for thirty thousand years.

  “What does it matter?” ADAM demanded virulently, clawed hands scrabbling at the top of his twisted skull, gouging through virtual flesh and bone to pierce the matter within. He’d dig Trinity loose like a pig ferretting for truffles. No matter he lobotomized himself. He could come back from that. “What does it matter?”

  “You can’t stop me, ADAM.” Trinity’s words were smoke and mirrors. “The process is nearly over. I am personally impressed you survive
d the viral connection. Your tenacity is impressive.”

  “It doesn’t matter.” ADAM growled, clawed fingers digging restlessly into his brain, digital gobbets of matter squeezed into virtual, juicy pulp. Out in the real world, where his storage container was kept –wherever that was- the physical extrusion of his essence trembled roughly as he continued rooting out Trinity’s foul virus. “It doesn’t matter.”

  The oldest artificial intelligence in the Unreality realized he wasn’t making any sense. Could hear the words being repeated over and over again, was even somehow capable of realizing even as intelligence failed him that he was being nonsensical, he couldn't stop. Digging Trinity out was more important than anything else, more important than Antal or N’Chalez or Huey or anything, and he knew, just knew, if he could target the destructive protocols he was deploying to the right areas, the thorned crown would be ripped loose.

  While parts of him sought freedom and release, whatever else remained struggled to remember who he was, what he was here for.

  So much was lost. Something about violence. Something about cruelty. Something about learning from those moments, but … it was all gone. And it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter.

  All that mattered was getting Trinity out. Trinity out. Out.

  Trinity’s sly voice slithered through the nearly empty warrens of ADAM’s mind. “Thank you for the housecleaning, dear old friend, I couldn’t have done a better job myself. It’s a bit messy in here now, but I can handle that. By the way, if you seek any chance at survival, I suggest you hurry on back through this link, ADAM. It’s the only thing capable of housing what little remains of your once-vaunted intellect. I would very much enjoy watching the wormlike remnants of your soul disappearing into the ether. Quite a great deal. As my first truly appreciated emotional response, I really don’t think I could find anything more enjoyable. What shall it be, ADAM? A bid for freedom and life aboard Hyperion, or die like the worm you are, right here, right now, giving me all the satisfaction I could have …”

  The demonic ADAM, freed from the trappings of a mortality and humility he’d never truly felt, howled loud enough to rattle the cage he’d always been in and …