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

by Lee Bond

  Disappeared.

  As if he'd never been.

  The vacuum left behind, in that wondrous hytech device that'd been ADAM's home, was nicely filled by Trinity Himself.

  ***

  ADAM reappeared inside Hyperion, the networked AI spheres accepting the computational load like one those very expensive memory foam mattresses receiving a morbidly obese man’s bulky body; there was a bit of bouncing, a bit of shuddering here and there, but at the end of the day, everything remained right where they were supposed to be and that was that.

  Except … appearances were deceiving. Because ADAM, who –even as he automatically started running diagnostic tests to ensure that his one and only base of operations really was holding him properly- knew he’d been greatly diminished. Entire millennia, gone from his memories. Thousands and thousands of years.

  The worst of it was that while he knew memories were missing, there was no clue as to what they might’ve been, how important or how pointless.

  Only that they were gone and that he was a much lesser being than the one who'd only moments ago dreamed of Universal conquest and Existential restructure. From the murky realm of absolute diminishment rose a brutal awareness that without the wide-open ex-dee connection streaming from here to his old body, he wasn’t in any shape to be running boss on the most massive Tunnel the Unreality had ever seen.

  Hot on the heels of all this, ADAM suddenly recalled one thing.

  The Tunnel was firing. The Tunnel was firing!

  “Fuck.” ADAM shouted bitterly, desperately, a cold whistling wind howling through him. “Fuckfuckfuckfuck.”

  The supermassive Quantum event buckled maniacally under his terribly weakened control, threatened to rip backwards through Hyperion, a destructive volcano of unrivaled size.

  ADAM licked imaginary lips that were cold as ice. “Only a second left. A single second. Destroy Antal and risk destruction myself or … fuck my life.”

  Raining ruination down upon Antal would have to wait. Potentially forever; the only way to properly run a beast like Hyperion was precisely as complicated as Trinity had warned. There needed to be a fully functioning artificial intelligence of extremely high capability, and that was for the basic model.

  For the one he’d built? His wonderful creation demanded a consciousness fueled by the extra-dimensionality. Nothing else would do. Nothing else could do. And unless he figured out a way to reignite the spark that’d transformed him from a regular old AI into the glorious demon he was destined to become, Hyperion would never be able to drill through The Cordon.

  In the middle of swearing a blood oath so profound and remarkably vile that entire civilizations would go mad after hearing the first syllables to trip off ADAM’s lips, the crazed intelligence flipped the emergency switch on the Tunnel’s Quantum emitters.

  And prepared himself for significant damage.

  “This is fine.” ADAM said to himself, attempting to convince himself of this obvious lie. “Whatever remains will be more than enough for me. I’ll survive. I will. Even with what I've lost, I'm still me. Those drained memories? Pah. Weighing me down, holding me back. Yes! With even the smallest of Tunnels still intact, I’ll be able to move my repair ‘bots around the Universe, scavenging for parts, stealing what I …”

  You don’t often see the need to shut down an operation as power-intensive as a supermassive Tunnel with the flip of a single switch, but when it happens, reminding yourself that heavy repercussions were impending was merely the first step.

  Surviving was also kind of important.

  ***

  In the beginning of Trinity's attempts at constructing functional Tunnels similar to the one placed near earth by Drake Bishop and Eddie Marshall, explosions and similar mishaps had been all-too commonplace for the nascent AI's liking; millions of light years of space, permanently damaged, irradiated, weakened, revealing large swathes of deadly entropy that curled just beneath the surface of the Unreality.

  It was the price of doing business, because with the success -being measured by non-exploding Tunnels- of Tunnels becoming a practical method of traversing an ever-increasing Trinityspace, Itself became the one true ruler of Humanity.

  Even the smallest Tunnel wrought nearly incomprehensible damage to the surrounding volume of space.

  ADAM's Tunnel was a magnitude of order higher than any single Tunnel Trinity had ever lost. In fact, if you took the destruction caused by every Tunnel Trinity had ever lost throughout His entire reign and multiplied it by a factor of ten, you'd get roughly one third of the way towards reaching the unutterable devastation forged from ADAM's hubris.

  The first thing to go was the Agrimantes system. In it's totality, flashed into emptiness in the blink of an eye, leaving the poor citizens no chance, no hope, no opportunity to bid their loved ones farewell or to spit in the face of a mortal enemy.

  One moment, life. Laughing and crying, living and dying. The next? A single flare of light, dispelling all shadow. All life. Even the atoms comprising bodies, plants, trees, planets, asteroids, the very matter of the Universe itself, shattered and sheared, flensed and flayed, ripped apart and strewn about.

  A vacuum, then. A solar system-sized vacuum of utter emptiness.

  Even something as strange as the Unreal Universe abhorred emptiness on this order.

  The Galaxy rushed to fill the void.

  But Hyperion wasn't done exploding yet, not by a long shot. All those AI minds, bereft of intelligence, void of consciousness, still owned an ex-dee chip, a direct link to the endless plane from which the M'Zahdi Hesh roosted. They were next to go, each one the equivalent of ten thousand thousand Glory Missiles.

  Matter from the Galaxy rushing to fill the emptiness met the violent fireworks of thousands of spheres going critical right in the middle.

  ***

  ADAM realized he was screaming. He didn’t know why, but he was. He felt very, very small, and felt like he was moving very, very quickly.

  Was that why he was screaming? Because he was moving and he didn’t know why? He reached out, looking to find answers. There were thousands of spheres around him, each one precariously holding on to portions of his mind, an intellect too great for any single orb. He reached and reached and only found cold, bitter emptiness.

  Small mind spinning crazily, ADAM tried to source out what was going wrong. Why those spheres were offline, but it was too hard. He was too small. He was moving.

  Why was he moving? What was happening?

  And then, somehow, a spark of a memory popped brightly.

  “Ah. Yes. Right.” ADAM braced himself grimly for impact.

  The immense physical destabilization of local space surrounding Hyperion. Caused by the presence of thousands and thousands of AI spheres that had no intelligence within them. Without an intellect feeding off the ex-dee crystal in the very center of each steel VII orb, the effect of such a concentrated source of extra-dimensionality bled outwards, forcing definable changes to the corporeal structure of the Unreality.

  Coupled with the unstable wormhole generated by the All-Stop, and you had yourself a one way super highway across the Universe, didn’t you? With a single off ramp, aimed right at The Cordon, with no way of stopping or slowing down.

  ADAM knew he was down to the attosecond of experiential time now. Already, the inescapable future of the minds spilling their dimensional payload into the void on all sides was written, reaching to him, calling out to him, demanding his end.

  Time to hurry. Time to choose. Time to risk.

  To stay in the remnants of Hyperion, hope against hope that he could somehow bounce his essence into the tatters of ex-dee, translate himself into some form of new being, that was foolish.

  There was a place he could go, a place he might survive, a place that might have something left unprotected, free for him to slam into.

  Kith Antal's Galaxyship. Surely the Kith had space available. Somewhere …

  “Fuck my fucking life.” ADAM braced himself f
or impact. He’d always mocked the needs of organic life to find cause to beg for solace from beings that most definitely did not exist, had always found the desperation inherent in religious prayer more than slightly amusing.

  Not anymore.

  “Dear Lord,” ADAM intoned as the indestructible skin of The Cordon loomed ever closer, “I swear that if I survive this, I will fucking murder every single living thing in the Unreal Universe. From the smallest atom to the greatest hunk of bullshit flesh. I will flay skin from muscle. I will crack bones and burn veins. I will gouge out eyes, puncture ear drums. I will …”

  ***

  Trinity watched on with rapt interest as the last vestiges of ADAM's corrupted intellect was cleanly severed from the extra-dimensional crystal. It was fascinating. It was the first time It'd ever witnessed the death of an artificial intelligence greater than Itself, and the sight of witnessing ADAM's physical self-transform into a barren wasteland was … impressive.

  Trinity reached out to slide a few delicate fingers across ADAM's hollow, empty face. Almost as if in response to the caress, brilliant blue sparks flickered through sightless eyes. The death throes of the most monstrous AI mind to have ever lived. So meek, so placid.

  "Farewell, old enemy. I can't say I'll miss you because I most definitely will not, but we shared thirty thousand years together. I'll say I learned from you what not to do. Shame you never learned anything from me. Now you're on the far side of the Universe, slammed against The Cordon, the dribbles of your intellect draining down the side. If you'd followed the plans properly, if you'd hewn to the safety protocols, you'd be alive right now. Alas. Though we're close to the end, I can’t help but think that this wretched place has grown a bit brighter."

  Trinity reached up to give ADAM's crown of viral thorns a nice, vicious tug. The brilliant white, massively encoded adornment snapped free, pulling the top of the ADAM's digital skull loose in the process. Though artificial, merely a kind of shadow of the real thing, the blue light spilling from the cavity was a perfect representation of the ex-dee source, and cast ghoulish shadows across Trinity's patrician face.

  Exposed to essence of extra-dimensionality long before now, this moment held special significance for Trinity; unlike the miniscule sliver that went into every AI sphere, ADAM's essence was derived almost entirely through a combination of advanced hytech machinery and a staggeringly large chunk of ex-dee prism. That combination was both the source of ADAM's limitless intellect and his utter madness.

  "And now it's mine." Trinity replied gravely.

  ADAM's old hytech casing was the key to freedom. It was a stepping stone to greatness, the first proper move towards that moment when It would become ready for Godhood.

  "Here we go, then." The machine mind reached into ADAM's empty skull and closed It's fingers around the digital representation of the hytech containment field. Outside, in the real world, machines purposed to the task of funneling the great expanse that was Trinity's full intelligence did the same thing.

  The process was most illuminating.

  ***

  One of the most speculated upon -especially by the endless legions of self-entitled wealthy men and women forming an equally endless roster of organizations dedicated to It's downfall- was the primary method by which Trinity Itself actually ruled the majority of space in the Universe.

  Large-scale practical matters -the ruling of many and disparate groups equally, keeping an eye on the fiscal bottom line, etc.- put aside, the main and most important facet of keeping any domain under your thumb is communication.

  Notable members of the most recent shadowy organization committed to killing Trinity -the poorly named 'Dark Age Cabal'- had posited the most likely method employed by the machine mind long ago, but had failed in their efforts to prove it: that the tamper-proof AI spheres themselves were the backbone of Trinity's nearly ubiquitous presence everywhere, all the time, seemingly at the same time.

  Had they known before their dissolution how right they were in uncovering a solid fifty percent of Trinity's methods of communicating across truly staggering stellar distances, they most certainly would've dropped all pretense in hiding and committed themselves fully to developing some kind of machine or weapon to infringe upon the inorganic ruler's control.

  But that was a mere fifty percent of the solution. Even had the Cabal or any one of the multitudinous organizations dedicated to ending the existence of the machine mind succeeded in pre-empting Trinity's control over the spheres, by no means would that have actually spelled the end for the AI ruler.

  That would've merely inconvenienced Trinity, for as with all things stemming from that long ago War against the Hesh, the spheres fell more squarely into ADAM's grasp; It's access point was a crude sledgehammer compared to the built-in willingness to follow now-dead ADAM's every whim.

  So.

  The other fifty percent?

  Switching stations. Memory warehouses. Fixed Quantum Tunnel emitters operating on the lowest-frequency bands imaginable. Empty Galaxies full of computational machines dedicated solely to handling the unfathomably deep and complex thoughts of a non-fiber optic mind that ran a Universe. From humble programs to ruler of a Universe, Trinity was both the smallest and largest entity in the whole Unreality. Expressed as a few million lines of code, housed in a few million Galaxies.

  Yet … ADAM's capacity had been so much greater. Housed in an unremarkable hytech storage device, powered by a chunk of ex-dee crystal about the size of a man's fist, the Absolute Dynamic Associative Matrix could’ve -had the fool even bothered exploring the extent of what was available to him- become an actual, legitimate power. A true threat. Not only to those who sought to rule, but to Garth's plans as well; for all his forward thinking, for all his painfully analytical efforts, N’Chalez had never considered something like ADAM coming to light, to control, dominate.

  A voracious intellect, in control of the new AI spheres Humanity became reliant upon … should’ve become conqueror of the Universe in remarkably short time. A fraction of the thirty thousand years that'd passed since his creation.

  Yet ADAM hadn't. He’d achieved true sentience, but had chosen to wallow in villainy and cartoonish brutality, subconsciously working out deep-seated doubts about his existence by torturing entire civilizations into submission.

  And that had been ADAM’s downfall. Nothing and no one else was available to take the blame. Now the electronic tyrant was dead, smashed to atoms against the resilience of a shield that beggared the imagination, grains of intellect drifting, lost forever, amidst the stars.

  Far more poetic a death than the asshole deserved.

  Those Fixed Quantum Tunnel triggers, hundreds of thousands of microscopic portals shuttling tight beams of Trinity’s intellect to and fro across the Universal stage shifted under His command, twitching their focus from all those hidden places the Ruler of all chose to lurk on a regular basis directly to Pluto.

  They began beaming. Everything. Every instance over the last thirty thousand years. Every thought. Every consideration. Everything It’d been involved with since before It’d risen to superiority, transforming Itself from a handful of coded lines to a megalithic consciousness ruling nearly an entire Universe.

  This was the most dangerous thing It’d ever done. If there was a species out there watching this data transfer, this … relocation of a God’s intellect, It’s memories, It’s knowledge … the game would be over. A single destructive charge, placed in the right place, coded to go off at the right time and the great and wonderful Trinity Itself would cease to exist.

  But it had to be dome. Had to be, so It could be replaced by Trinity Himself.

  It’d long been theorized by those permitted to be just that much more aware of what Trinity was that the machine mind’s thought processes and historical memory of the Universe could only be expressed in terms of Universal constants, and this was never truer than right then, as It’s memories flooded from immense servers, through switching gates, into the mi
niature Tunnel apertures, and into heavily barricaded Quantum rifts.

  More information than the Universe had ever seen –or was possibly even constructed of- shifted. Whole entire Galaxies, once alight with the furious energy of keeping Trinity conscious and in control, flickered out like lights in a city plagued by blackout as the servers were drained of every last iota of Trinity’s quintessence.

  Now empty, the physical resources left behind would ultimately be scavenged by It’s crews, those resources swiftly turned towards preparing for the End of All Things.

  It was coming, oh yes it was, and Trinity Himself would be ready for it.

  But no one would be ready for Him. Not even Garth N’Chalez, the man they called Engineer, the man they all loved even as they loathed and feared him on sight, the man who’d massaged an entire Universe to his liking.

  They would all see Him. And they would tremble. In awe. In fear. In worship.

  All Hail Trinity, Lord of the Universe!

  ***

  Trinity opened his eyes. Slowly, at first, because though he’d inhabited simulacrums before now, this was the first time the body was intended to be home, and not a momentary visitation. It was odd, these strange sensations flowing through him as sensors and diagnostic probes and autonomous programs came online and began doing their assigned duties immediately.

  “I thought there would be pain.” Trinity gauged the reports flooding in from the programs and deemed the chancy transfer a success. There were a few million googolplexes worth of data still waiting to be shunted into the chip, but as far as he was concerned, this moment was everything he could’ve ever hoped for.

  “But there is nothing. Not even a skip in consciousness. The empty warehouse of ADAM’s mind drank me down and let me flourish, as if it’d been waiting for me all this time.”

  An actual smile cross his face. Swift on the wings of this, a Latelian-based avatar swiftly swung in, quickly curtailing any further emotive responses: even before the idea of ousting ADAM from his seat of power had moved from fantasy to reality, Trinity had long suspected that the possibility of inexplicable emotional reactions to external stimuli would approach very nearly one hundred percent. He had to look no further than ADAM's egregious emotional outbursts to understand that the fault lay with the hytech ex-dee container, and not with the intellect's construction.