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

by Lee Bond

  For bonus points, it was highly likely that if you knew what you were doing in regards to scripting that code, there’d be absolutely no issues with what you got in return for your efforts. AI minds, even those pushing the boundaries towards 10, could sometimes become ridiculously stupid, mired down in the smallest of minutiae.

  “Quantum substrate chatter.” Tomas muttered to himself as he picked through the assembled map. “Got to be. Too responsive to the unseen bits of the Universe. A tachyon sleeting through the synthetic diamond fiber optic core could send a man’s request through a million permutations, and this Universe is lousy with tachyons. Can't take a breath of fresh air without getting beaned in the brain! Hmm. What’s this, then?”

  On the intentionally dimmed prote-screen, the three choices before him had been ‘graded’ by avatars he’d set to the task of keeping him relatively safe.

  Following the eventual and entirely hush-mouthed ‘forgiveness’ that’d whispered from the back alleys of Chairwoman Doans’ rule over the events surrounding his fall from grace, there were times that Tomas wished he’d stood on both feet and demanded more from the Latelian Regime than the basic right to live.

  Raising Naoko as a single father, scraping by on a salary that barely qualified as reasonable given the state of his intellect and the script he hawked to put food on the table, it would’ve been nice to see an actual stipend from the government.

  So many times, he’d had to tell his young, prideful daughter that ‘just because the other girls have it doesn’t mean you need it’ when he would’ve done anything at all to get her whatever her young heart desired.

  Anything at all. Oh, there’d been times when he’d been tempted. Tempted to use not only his profound understanding of coding, but of the revitalized technology based on his designs, to further his life. No one could’ve blamed him. No one, once they understood his story, would’ve blamed him. He had a daughter, a woman who’s intellect shone so brightly that the stars themselves seemed like nightlights, and a woman like that genuinely deserved everything …

  Tomas steered himself away from thoughts of his daughter. Down that road lay misery and self-pity and a whole slew of emotions that simply did not exist for prideful Kamaganas. Considering who his daughter used to be was to envision what had become of her now, and that wasn’t going to help. Not one bit.

  Wishes of a better financial situation for his daughter notwithstanding, there was, right at that very second, one thing above all others that he wished he’d spent his paltry savings on.

  A new prote. Specifically because of the conundrum he was caught in right that moment.

  “I’d give the last of my pipe tobacco for a proper prote. Something military. Not even that, to be honest. Something newer than ten years old.” Tomas poked at his prote, which obliged by making a noise that no prote should ever make, a kind of weird grunting squeal. “You’re at the end of your rope, old friend.”

  And it was true; the avatars he’d coded on the fly a few minutes after realizing he was going to intentionally stroll around inside the belly of a ship stuffed to the gills full of hostile combatants were absolutely cutting edge. Avatar Masters throughout Latelyspace would eat their hats in jealousy over the nature of the code he deployed, would do literally whatever they could to spend the rest of their lives reverse-engineering the specific language he utilized and they’d consider the time spent well spent.

  There was nothing wrong with the code. Given enough time and a clear head, Tomas held no doubts in his head that he could whip up a cross-interface that’d allow his prote to communicate on the machine level with anything that Trinityspace had to offer.

  “I was right there.” Tomas banged his prote against the bulkhead nearest him, first flinching then freezing in abject terror at his stupid foolishness. When no one came rushing at him out of the darkness, the hacker continued lamenting while trying to figure out what his prote was telling him. “Right there. Inside UMDT. I could’ve just reached out and put my hand on a freshly designed, absolutely top of the line proteus. Would’ve taken me ten seconds. Ah! Well, there we go.”

  The avatars, ‘sensing’ the purpose behind this map was one of expeditiously moving the owner of the prote in which they operated away from point ‘A’ to some other point that was sufficiently far enough away from said point that no hostile forces would associate him with anything that may have happened, had started running subscripts to assign various values to the kinds of technical and mechanical machinery they were detecting inside the service corridors.

  Working from the basic principle that while Latelians and all things Latelian were naturally better than anything else anywhere else, a comm-junction was a comm-junction and a data cable was a data cable and a service hatch was a service hatch.

  If this was true, then so too were the basic fundamentals of vessel design; you wouldn’t be foolish enough to have service corridors too close to the outer hull, nor would you be stupid enough to keep those very same corridors too far from the rest of the ship and crew.

  From there, at least from an avatar point of view, it was no difficult task to generate a map based on what was already known, a map that should show one Tomas Kamagana precisely where he was and where he needed to go.

  Tomas looked over the values behind the script the avatars were asking him to run and decided it couldn’t hurt to simply let them have their moment in the sun, as it were; though not as large as any Latelian vessel deployed by the Army, it was nevertheless much larger than a single, tiny old man could navigate easily or quickly. He could very well wind up wandering forever through the corridors and quite frankly, curiosity about how Trinity was managing It’s people during such a terribly protracted war was eating him alive. He tapped the button and waited silently for the machine to do it’s work.

  It didn’t take long, for which Tomas was glad. The proteus itself might be old and close to retirement, but once it was up and running and the avatars had all they needed to perform a singular task, things were completed fairly quickly.

  “Hmm.” Tomas flicked his fingers this way and that, pinching the screen down to get a full overview of the map his lovely avatars had generated on the off chance that they’d done a much better job than he’d expected.

  No such luck.

  Whole swathes of the map simply trailed off into nothingness and of the few areas that were more fully fleshed out, it was apparent that more than a little semi-sentient guesswork had gone into the production of the map.

  Still, it was better than nothing and at least he had a definitive way to get back to where he’d started, if that particular need should ever arise.

  “I guess I’ll have to continue along on my own for the time being.” Tomas picked himself slowly up off his heels, grabbed his cane, turned the prote-light back down to it’s dimmest setting and forged boldly off down through the middle opening.

  Working from the avatar-generated map, Tomas had chosen the middle path for no other reason than he felt it highly likely that the right corridor would bring him closer to the hull, and therefore to areas where engineers and maintenance men would probably be working, while the left path –at least to him­- felt like it’d simply curl back into other corridors that might eventually return him to the opposite side of the very loading bay he and Ute had first arrived.

  Neither option held optimal values, so down the middle it was, Indra Sahari’s rousing pop song ‘Commonwealth Ain’t So Common’ murmured breathily as he strolled softly and quietly.

  ***

  Beep. Beepbeep.

  It’d been decades and decades since he’d fled from his home system, enemy Yellow Dog craft howling up out of the darkness at him every time he’d believed himself safe, but you somehow never forgot moments like that, no matter how long you’d gone without thinking about them, no matter how far in the past they were.

  He’d been so very young, too young, really, to take up the mantle of Fleeing Nobility, but there, in the dark, people on all sides
dying around him as greedy –though, to be fair, they’d been more jealous and terrified than simply greedy- Elders ordered their ninja troops to slaughter everyone they could find.

  His own father had died in his arms, tiny, wizened face seamed with blood, sweat and tears, lips soundlessly whispering the same words over and over again. Jikkō shimasu. Nigemasu. Anzendesu.

  Run. Flee. Be safe.

  Tomas hadn’t understood back then precisely why the Elder men of each Clan had descended upon their beautiful world with murder in their eyes, but he had understood that if his father, notable politician and one of the most respected Elder Clansmen, wanted him to run, then run it had to be.

  And so he had. He’d run and run and run. Using all the wily tricks he could remember from the stories his Father had told him, using the extensive information available to him through the AI minds of the stolen ship, Zalamandra, an incredibly young Tomas Kamagana had fled into the night, across the stars, hopscotching from one solar system to the next, never quite managing to leave his pursuers behind.

  It was a flight that’d lasted years. Longer even than he'd ever told anyone.

  Beepbeepbeep.

  Tomas looked down at his prote with unseeing eyes, mind still turned to the past, when he’d been a boy, fleeing. This felt terribly similar to those times, and it was an unwelcome, unkind sensation that had his breath coming out in slow, laborious wheezes. He didn’t want to be in these service corridors any longer. He needed to be out from under the terrible rock of claustrophobia sitting on his chest.

  But more important than all that, he needed to be spared these cursed memories. He didn’t need to recall those moments in his life with such clarity.

  “Why are you coming to me now?” Tomas wondered, picking through the menus demanding his attention. “Why plague me here, while I’m doing my best to escape capture by people that are most decidedly against all things Latelian? It’s been more than seventy years since I even had a fleeting dream about my escape.”

  The avatars had continued on with their very demanding task, capturing and logging everything that crossed in front of the prote-camera, identifying all that could be labeled and adding it to the very nebulous and ill-formed map of the service corridors.

  The old man grunted. At least when he spared the time to think properly instead of being buried under a musty old blanket of unwanted memories, his perspicacity was right on the money; as far as the semi-sentient bits of code were concerned, had he taken the right-handed path, he most definitely would’ve wound up smack dab in the middle of a broad bay full of assault cannons of some kind.

  An area like that would be fully staffed, day and night, night and day, especially during a combat situation. They might not necessarily be fully engaged at all times, but even the dimmest witted –or inebriated- amongst them would be hard-pressed to ignore the sight of a wizened of EuroJapanese man with a cane walking around hitting things with said cane.

  And then, as Sa Nickels would say, the shit would hit the fan.

  The left-handed corridor wouldn’t have been any better of a choice, though for reasons entirely different than Tomas himself had decided; improbably, the loading bay where their escape pod had been delivered was ridiculously close to the engine rooms, and had he wandered off down the western corridors, he would’ve arrived posthaste inside the engine room, where –if Trinity soldiers behaved anything like Goddies at all- it was entirely too likely that he’d simply be shot before the first questions made an appearance inside their empty heads

  Tomas nodded. He liked it when he made the right decisions. Occasions for him to make the right call happened too infrequently for his own liking these days, so when they arrived, the old man did everything in his power to enjoy it.

  “I sometimes feel like the only time I ever made truly correct decisions was during the flight from my enemies.” Tomas dimmed his prote once more and resumed his silent trek, though with a bit more pep in his step. If the avatars were right, he should be coming up to another junction soon, and if they remained being right, their suggestion was that he needed to take the left corridor.

  Taking the Zalamandra had been the very first correct –and more importantly, flawless- decision he’d made. Eight year old Tomas Kamagana had never really been all that interested in understanding the inner workings of AI minds because like his father, he’d grown up with an enormous amount of influence and wealth, allowing him time to focus on other, more important things, like statecraft, negotiation tactics, hand-to-hand combat.

  The kind of education a boy destined to become leader of the Yellow Dogs would need…

  ***

  Tomas rest a hand on the section of wall that was no mere slab of metal but a panel leading out into the ship proper. Off to one side of the nearly invisible panel was a keypad very similar to the one he’d used to gain entrance into the bowels of the ship, but unlike that one, the code structure was different.

  Frustratingly, his own attempts at simply hacking the device as he’d learned to do so very long ago weren’t working, leaving him to believe that the reasons behind their escape pod being taken to that particular loading bay had a great deal to do with it’s inconvenient location near the engines, making the simplicity of the code guarding the maintenance corridor’s entryway so simple because no one ever went there.

  Here, with a panel leading directly into somewhere ‘ship-proper’, of course the passcode would be infinitely more complex. During a war like this one, where virtually next to nothing of importance had –or likely ever would- happen, boredom crept into the crew with merciless swiftness. As ship’s captain, the last thing you’d want were a bunch of bored idiots with too much time on their hands wandering around behind the scenes, poking fingers where fingers didn’t belong.

  That was how you got your ship scuttled.

  “When I was a younger man,” Tomas told the unresponsive access panel imperiously, “I was much better at this sort of thing. Decades of filling my head with avatar-style machine code has left certain areas of my training woefully inadequate.” He rapped the damned thing with his walking stick, a quirky grin on his face. “Shame that didn’t work. I was right there.”

  It wasn’t often that Tomas berated himself so repeatedly, but dammit, he just couldn’t forgive himself for being so heedless. He’d decided to blame it on a combination of sleep deprivation and excitement over finally being on the way, though inwardly the old man knew precisely why he hadn’t thought of it.

  “I’m old.” His joints and bones ached all the time. It felt like the skin over his chest was so papery thin that it was a wonder his heart simply didn’t burst free of it’s own accord.

  Things he could so very easily remember being taken for granted –running up a flight of stairs so he could beat Maurna to the top, hurrying to catch Naoko before she toppled from her high chair- were now either all the way off limits or required some serious effort to execute, with broken bones lurking in the background.

  “I’m old and I hate it so very much.”

  Tomas slumped against the wall, then dropped miserably to the ground. The only thing that still worked the way it was supposed to was his mind.

  In fact, mentally-speaking, Tomas had never felt more invigorated, more alive. Every time he closed his eyes, it was like looking at a field of stars that burned brighter and brighter, each one of those brilliant points of light filling this mental vista with an idea, a notion, a concept so fantastic that it beggared the imagination.

  And yet, all those ideas, all those different things that needed time to be brought into the light, they needed to stay on the back burner, perhaps forever.

  Somewhere out there, his daughter needed his help.

  And if the worst had come to pass, if beautiful, intelligent, awkward Naoko Kamagana had died … Tomas didn’t know what he’d do then. A sorrowful fist clenched his heart at the mere thought of ‘ko being anything other than perfectly safe, eyes alight with passion, that ever-ready smile of hers
flashing swift, like sweet lightning, just like her mother, before … before the sickness had stolen her wits away.

  Tomas sat with his back to the wall, head in his hands, acidic tears dripping freely from his eyes, where they splashed onto the smooth, clean floor of the service corridor. Voice mangled with grief, the Latelian escapee begged his missing daughter’s forgiveness.

  “I’m sorry, ‘ko, so, so sorry. I’m too old for this kind of thing. Too brittle. You’re out there, somewhere in the Universe, either still a prisoner of that bastard Bishop or somewhere else entirely. For all I know, you’re free and happy and living the kind of life I always wanted for you, and here I am, stuck behind a goddamn door.”

  It was embarrassing, is what it was. He was too old. He didn’t know enough about Trinity’s technologies to help, not with something as complex as this newer-style keypad. He lacked the tools to modify …

  “The floors are clean.” Tomas looked around, but it was too dark to properly see. He licked his lips. The risk had to be taken, no matter that he was quite literally no more than three feet away from an area where people might be; it didn’t matter that he could be arrested within seconds of turning the lights on, but … he needed to see.

  Tomas flicked the prote-light on to it’s brightest and played the beam back and forth across the floor. As he’d felt more than seen, the floors of this particular service corridor were immaculate, which was normally what you’d expect to see on any ship, regardless of affiliation. Dust was the enemy of anything technological, triply so on war vessels.

  “The floors are clean, but …” Tomas ran the light across the mostly hidden access panel and they keypad, instinct pushing him forward. “The floors are clean but there’s enough dust on both the door and the keypad to suggest that no living thing has been this way in some time. Which means … yes.”