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

by Lee Bond

  There was no way of knowing until or unless he opened his eyes, and that wasn’t going to happen just yet, either. The last time he’d popped his peepers wide after traveling through time had been when he’d bounced up to the 25th century, and that had been a whole passel of enormous bullshit; he’d learned –and in fairly quick order- precisely why the ODDities under Samiel’s controls had all been outfitted with those bullshit popped-eyeball nightmare contact lenses and he was not about to go through that again.

  Something in the eyes didn’t like time travel. Or maybe that was his hang-up. He didn’t know. What he did know was that when he’d opened his eyes in that 25th century laboratory, a shrieking fit of pain had crawled in through already abused orbs, whereupon they’d promptly proceeded to beat the shit out of his brain.

  “Yeah. No. Not happening.” Eyes still shut, Garth spun in a circle, raising his arms up until they were fully outstretched. Fingertips met nothing but empty air. “Definitely not in the old dorm room. By now my fingers would’ve brushed against Eddie’s ‘Showdown in Little Tokyo’ poster and Drake’s not at all sexist ‘Women on Bicycles’ poster.”

  There. Something clicked and popped in his ears and he was treated to faint, subtle sounds of a dry news reporter going over something that sounded as plain as sourdough toast with no butter.

  “All right, all right.” Garth rubbed his hands together in excitement.

  He hadn’t been wrong. It was nice to be right. It didn’t happen nearly as often as people imagined. The trick was to pretend, that while everything was completely on fire and/or melting or exploding, that everything was also going according to plan. If you seem like you're in control, no one's gonna doubt you, even when things start simultaneously exploding, melting, burning and possibly screaming.

  “Now we’re cooking with gasohol.”

  Other than the reporter lady on the as-yet unseen television discussion boring as fuck trade negotiations in some neck of the UK or other, there were no other identifying sounds that hinted at civilization.

  No big deal yet. Everything was swell. Aäl might’ve needed to bounce him forward a bit in the old time frame to make adjustments to the stream more viable. It sounded like a thing that might need to be done, especially when you’ve only just killed a man reaching backwards through time with evil … time … traveling … tentacles of … evil, which meant that Drake –wherever he was- would still be suffering from the excesses of exposure to the purple temporal incongruity and that Eddie was … Garth pursed his lips.

  He had no clue where Eddie might be.

  The last time he’d seen the guy had been in San Francisco, moments before he’d hopped a plane to buzz off to Vegas to for the great –and awful- ‘Let’s Rescue Drake from the Forces of Eeeeevil’ mission.

  The Kin’kithal shrugged.

  Didn’t matter.

  Eddie’d show up when Eddie was good and ready. Hell, if the man really had been turned back into the guy he’d been before turning into Emperor-of-Asshole Etienne Marseilles, there was a rock solid chance the dude was surfing his fucking face off while his best friend recuperated from being infected with Bruushian recombinant DNA.

  His ears clicked again.

  The next thing to resolve itself was smell. An aromatic melange of tea, faded but still very much discernible cigar smoke, the remnants of … bacon and eggs and sausage and … Garth took an over exaggerated sniff to fill his beak full … damp. There was damp for days and days.

  Garth squinted. Even though his were shut tight and he wasn’t in any imminent danger, he squinted fiercely. A bad feeling rose in him.

  “Uh-uh.” The time-traveling Kin’kithal –who still hadn’t and probably never would get over being conned a second time by a dude who looked like he belonged in a Tim Burton stop-motion animated film- shook his head firmly and with the greatest amount of denial the Dream had ever seen before.

  There was simply no way the asshole Lord had fucked with him this much. It … it simply wasn’t feasible.

  Time to open the old eyeballs, regardless of whether or not Aäl’s efforts at rebuilding the past of the Dream had been successful or not.

  Garth cracked them open a tiny little bit, just enough to allow slivers of light to flood his senses. When his brain didn’t explode with agony and his eyes didn’t burst for the same reason, he opened them a bit more, then kept opening them until they were fully open and he was gazing thoughtfully –and worriedly- around a room he had never, ever been in before. Not in his entire life. Not even when he’d been passing from one room to another had he ever stepped in …

  What could only be described as Olde Englishe Sittinge Room, complete with awkwardly levered in computer station and entertainment area. High-tech equipment running into the tens of thousands of dollars warred with wonderfully stained, honey brown wooden paneled walls. Upon the walls hung art that Garth –you could take a man out of Specter, but you couldn’t get rid of the Specter- automatically calculated as worth ‘a King’s Fucking Ransom’. His fingers itched to pull the glorious paintings from the walls so he could do a better appraisal.

  As it was, one or more paintings –a quick shifting of the feet and a peek behind a couch-looking-thing that was probably one of those things called a chaise lounge revealed the object of his particular focus was two­ paintings- had been pulled off a nearby wall to make way for one of those absurdly enormous, stupidly thin Ultra-HD 4k plasma television screens. On it, the dry English reporter lady talking about trade negotiations was wrapping up the boring as fuck discussion with swift dispatch while the news ticker made mention of some kind of situation occurring in America that was quickly ‘hotting up’.

  “There is more leather in this room than in a cow farm.” Garth ran a hand over the smooth, supple leather of a chair that must’ve been made around about the time King Henry the VIIIth had decided he’d rather make a whole new religion than deal with his awful wife. “Is cow farming a thing? I think that’s a thing. Where in the fuck am I?”

  The time-traveler started wandering through the Olde Englishe Roome, lips pursed, comfortable talking to himself. “I mean, obviously I’m in the UK somewhere, because there’s no way in hell anyone in the US would decorate a room like this. Pretty sure it’s against the Constitution and besides, I’m obviously here because Drake is a Brit. Which means,” Garth nudged a couch out of the way with his foot so he could get right up close to the window –which itself had a smattering of keen design around the edges, something so blissfully simple and sweet that it was … nice to see- and look out at the grounds, “that he is recovering from the effects of the incongruity and he’s come home to do it.”

  It made sense, buckets and buckets. While the US of A did indeed have the right to claim they had some of the greatest doctors in the world and some of the most technologically advanced medical equipment you’d ever hope to find, it was still America. If you could somehow magically find a doctor that wasn’t at least partially corrupt in some way –doctoring the bill so an aspirin ran upwards of ten thousand dollars- you’d still have to jump through roughly ten million hoops to get the treatment you needed.

  And that was for something simple. Like lupus.

  For a genetically altered witch’s brew containing Bruushian recombinant DNA that was slowly but surely turning you into a hybridized freak that should’ve never existed in the first place?

  “Good fucking luck getting that shit taken care of over there.” Garth whistled as he took in the backyard. Or, more accurately back-holy-fuck-I’ve-never-seen-a-stretch-of-green-disappear-over-the-horizon-quite-like-this-in-my-entire-life-yard. “Here, wherever here, specifically is, Drake’s Big Man on the Isle. Doctors be jumping at the chance to cure whatever ails one of the richest men in the world. Where in the fuck am I?”

  Of course, the simplest answer would be to actually pay attention to his surroundings more carefully, but Garth wasn’t the kind of guy to do simple. It wasn’t in his wheelhouse, and it was at the point now wher
e he suspected that if he even tried doing something the easy way, the Universe itself would hold up a finger, shout ‘no way’ and then, like, throw teleporting ninja robots his way until he wised up and volunteered for the toughest path.

  The reporter on the television was interviewing someone about some shenanigans in the United States, but Garth still opted to pay very little attention. It was the United States. Shenanigans and shenaniganery-related crimes had been happening there since well before they’d brewed a bay-sized cup of tea.

  Garth smirked at his mental joke and went on about the room, taking a random book off a random shelf before wincing so hard he almost broke his own face; in his hands, his scarred, violent hands, he held a signed, leather-bound first edition copy of Alice in Wonderland. Worth about eight thousand. Pounds.

  It took the Specter about a minute to work out the price in dollars, and when he was done, he gingerly tucked the volume back in it’s home. He wanted to tuck the folio into a back pocket and pretend he had no clue about anything, but suspected the book -and everything in eyesight- belonged to Drake, and stealing from a bro wasn't cool. He looked around to make certain that there wasn’t a weird butler silently buttling in a corner somewhere, frowning inscrutably at his barbaric behavior and waiting for the moment when he could box some ears or do some other sort of weird English chastisement.

  Check. Zero evil butlers.

  The rest of the shelf –and just the shelf where he’d pawed all over Alice in Wonderland- was stuffed to the tits with rare, ancient books. There was about ten million pounds’ worth of the damn things. On one shelf.

  “Where in the … oh fucking hell no. This is some goddamn fucking next level asshole bullshit you cocksucking motherfucker!”

  Wanting to be nowhere near an entire bookcase that was worth more than some countries could hope to make in a year, Garth had started moving away from that potentially dangerous situation towards the computer station. In the process, his eyes had fallen upon one of about a thousand different newspapers nicely and neatly stacked atop a coffee table.

  Nestled between an empty tea cup and a plate showing signs of a scone-related holocaust was an open, American newspaper. The headline on the article he’d apparently been reading before popping into his own bad self ran ‘CHANGETECH CEO GARTH NICKELS TO BE INDICTED FOR NUMEROUS CRIMES’.

  “This motherfucker…” Garth looked at the headlines of the other newspapers.

  They all delivered similar highlights. According to one paper, he was guilty of everything from murder to defrauding the American Government. In another, he was guilty of destroying the Russian economy. In another, the Japanese were accusing him of intentionally and willfully ruining their technological sector the point where it’d be decades before they recovered.

  The impassioned Japanese journalist –in print, no less- claimed that Changetech was worse than America during World War II, and this his actions were more devastating than any nuclear bombs dropped anywhere.

  “Are you fucking kidding me right now?” Garth wanted desperately to boot the coffee table and it’s repeated attestation to his horrible awfulness right through the window and onto the immaculately maintained lawn –really, you could golf on that fucker- but he didn’t because … well, if the situation was as dire as all this, he probably couldn’t afford the scones he’d murdered, let alone fixing a goddamn wall.

  Aäl hadn’t dropped him into the original timeline’s past. A past with a much simpler, much … cleaner resolution to the Samiel situation. Because that wasn’t how Aäl worked.

  That wasn’t how any of the Lords of the Dream operated.

  He’d taken the results of Eddie’s Guilt Sim and rammed it sideways down the gullet of the Dream.

  Here, in this version of the Dream, Chaos had rained rack and ruin upon the world for shits and giggles, leaving in it's wake entire countries full of super-pissed people.

  Here, in this version of the Dream, his face was the most recognizable mug in the world.

  Doing anything on American soil would be the most difficult fucking thing in the world, and that was, like, if he wanted to swing on down to Slappy Burgers for a Mega-Chilupa Chowstorm.

  Hitting Vegas to hunt for the incongruity before anyone stupid laid their hands on it?

  The A-Team wouldn’t be able to handle this kind of shit, not even if you gave Hannibal three whole weeks to make a plan.

  "This is some kind of super fucking bullshit right up in this bitch." Garth muttered to himself as he stared, mostly sightless, at the television. The ticker tape at the bottom of the screen suggested that Special Agent Angela Devlin had a few words to say about what'd been happening in the US of A regarding a specific manhunt.

  "Shit on me. Aäl, you assclown. This is not cool."

  And then there was a rap, rap, rapping on his door.

  Plucking on his lower lip, torn between the desires to see what Angela had to say about her efforts in hunting down the most evil man in the world and seeing who was at the door, Garth's decision was taken from him when the wooden door suddenly exploded into a few billion flakes of sawdust.

  When everything cleared, he took in the identity of the person who'd blown the door down with enough ferocity to make the Bad Wolf look like a pussy.

  "Nope." The Kin'kithal shook his head adamantly, screwed his face up into denial, then further crossed his arms defiantly. "This is definitely not fucking happening."

  Lissande Amour, late employee of Baron Samiel and top-tier human/Bruush hybrid, quirked an eyebrow at Garth. "Just what in the hell is going on here, Nickels?"

  If I Didn’t Know Any Better…

  “So…”

  “Yes?”

  “I know we never really … addressed this before, or anything, not … really really…”

  “Out with it, Oscar.”

  “You’re … an actual God.” Oscar licked his lips as he levered in another micron-sized switching construct to the proteus. It felt like he’d been working on the thing for what felt like ever, and given the nature of what was outside the Impossible Ship on a regular basis, it was very possible that he had been doing it forever.

  There’d been that business with the white light and the odd bits, but that’d gone away soon enough, and Diax had settled right back down again, so now that was that, and since the prote felt like it was close to being completed, he sort of felt like he could, you know, ask questions.

  “I’m not a God.” Diax said tiredly from his section of the Impossible Ship; he’d sort of sequestered himself a bit so that Oscar Sabellik would find it easier to concentrate on building the most impressive proteus the Universe had ever seen. “I’d’ve thought you would find the notion very … uncomfortable.”

  “Well, yeah, sure, okay.” Oscar waved a free hand over his head to sort of … admit that part. “Gods, Godlike beings, deities, entities of celestial ability, omnipotent essences, all that, not really a thing we were allowed to talk about back in avatar programming school or anything. But, uh, kind of seen some shit towards the end there, before I hopped into this old thing.”

  “You name it yet?”

  “What?”

  “The ship. This ship. This Impossible Ship.” Diax considered pointing out precisely what they were flying through, and where they were headed, but decided against it; he hadn’t strictly lied before, when he’d told Oscar about threading the needle, but asking the poor kid to deal with the fact that they were, for the most part, entirely theoretical and if Garth failed, they’d both just sort of fizzle out was … well, maybe a little too much.

  “Impossible Ship.”

  “That … you named it that?” Diax shook his head. Latelians. Capable of amazing things. Wondrous things, especially the nerdy guy crouched over a workbench right that moment. If he had any true idea of what it was he was building, his head would probably explode.

  Ask them to name something, though, and it was about as perfunctory as you could imagine. The first television they’d sold on the op
en market had probably been named ‘Thing That Shows You Programs from Other Places Where You Aren’t’.

  “It’s a ship.” Oscar replied reasonably as he checked the connectivity between the last circuit and the overall system. “It doesn’t care what it’s called. But you’re trying to change the subject. You say you’re not a god, I’ve seen you do some pretty weird shit. Unless … are you actually an Engine?”

  “What?” Diax shook his head adamantly. “That’s ridiculous. Do I look like I go vroom vroom?”

  “Just ‘coz I haven’t seen you do it doesn’t mean you don’t.” Oscar replied, reasonably once more. He ignored the exasperated grunt from his co-pilot and kept on working. “And anyways, you’re still changing the …”

  Just then, something contrived to hit their aptly monikered ‘Impossible Ship’ very hard indeed, sending both inhabitants –one displaced Latelian infused with Essence of N’Chalez and the other trying very hard to avoid being labeled- bouncing and clattering around all over the place like there was no tomorrow. A few times, both men slammed into one another, alternately knocking the wind out of one and beaning the other so hard across the side of the head that stars were the least of his worries.

  This went on for a considerable period of time. How long remained to be determined, because where they were, time was more of an afterthought, forged mostly by the unspoken-yet-consensual agreement between two Travelers through the Void that it was generally a better idea to have everything flowing from one place to somewhere else.

  “That,” Oscar complained from his spot on the floor, “was loads of bullshit. Way worse than last time.”

  Diax, also laying down but not from any injuries to any specifically-not-godlike heads, pursed his lips thoughtfully. “And technically impossible.”

  “Here we go again.” Oscar scratched the spot just below his nose. “What’s impossible this time?”