by Lee Bond
King Barnabas Blake the One and Only smiled.
It was going to be a good day, no matter what.
***
George Stevens tried to calm his beating heart. He’d been a CyberPriest for so long that he worried the spastic rhythm meant he was likely to have a heart attack. Nothing was working. No attempts to still the frantic lump of twitching meat in his thin chest was working. He was going to die, because of meat…
The communicator in his right hand spat and crackled with static. A thin, quivery voice sounding an awful lot like Erg’s came through the miniature speaker.
“Say again?” George shouted into the microphone as he ran hurriedly towards the Geared Door. “I … I can’t hear you! Speak up!”
“… Door … going … open…”
Of course Erg had managed to find a way to open the Door. As he hustled as fast as his beleaguered and ridiculously frail body permitted, George had to admit that of all of them, Erg had always been the most adventurous, the most capable. So naturally of all of them, it was Erg and not Faraday or one of the others to figure out how to open a sealed Geared Door. Quite unlikeable because of that difference, but still, it was unsurprising.
Their compatriot had been through some devastatingly bizarre changes since his initial –and ill-conceived- meeting with the strange Door a century ago. Time with Trinity, exposed to who really knew what –upon being returned to the CyberPriest fold, Erg had been notoriously reticent to discuss the actual particulars of what he’d endured at Trinity’s metaphorical hands- on all those alien worlds, eventually coming into contact with Garth Nickels himself, the originator of all their current woes, where again, Erg1 had been more than tightlipped. He had said nothing of important about his time with the man, or what he knew about the would-be Engineer.
Where Erg had once been the oddest in an already weird pack of cybernetic holy men, all he’d endured since falling by the wayside had made him somehow odder still.
“… hurry … difficult … maintain … can’t …”
“I’m running as fast as I can.” George griped urgently. “You try running across sand in these stupid CyberPriest robes!”
George ran, but could find no reason for why; maybe he was running because he’d spent thirty thousand years with these fools and idiots and couldn’t bear to be left alone. Maybe it had to something to do with the fact that he’d prayed -day in and day out for that same amount of time- for an end to crass banality of the foolishness that everyone assumed was ‘Real Life’.
Maybe it was because he didn’t want to miss out on whatever was going on inside Arcade City.
Because come on. The Dome was awesome.
George Stevens reached the Geared Door just as it swung open. A tiny flare of disappointment whistled through him at having missed that part, but only for a second. He hustled through the huge aperture without sparing the outside world a second thought.
He was going to be of use to the CyberPriests after all!
***
“I … I …” It was difficult to talk. He was … he was … pinned to the wall with cruelly barbed spikes. George lolled his head back to get a better sense of what was going on, only to whimper when his eyes fell on the scene of devastation rolling outwards from the Geared Door.
What had happened? Buildings looked to’ve been blown from their foundations. Trees ringing walkways were guttering like huge, leafy candles. Great gashes had been torn in the earth and everywhere, everywhere George Stevens looked, there were signs of men and women, children and old people having been killed where they stood.
Not even … not even Erg would be so callous, so destructive, so … so chaotic. People were beneath CyberPriests at the best of times, and their changed brother was doubly dismissive of mortals. Unless they’d directly attacked him, in which case …
“No, no it was my fault.” Barnabas admitted sorrowfully, waving a hand to catch the pinned ‘Priest’s attention. He was sitting on a park bench, cleaning his face with an engineer’s rag.
Gods, he’d lost his temper. How embarrassing. Yes, he was King and it was well within his rights to do as he pleased with the people who lived or died at his sufferance, but the sheer scope of this temper tantrum was shameful. Almost on par with the Brigadiers, though only in terms of sheer violence. In terms of actual loss … there was barely anything missing that mattered.
George tried focusing on the blur of a man sitting some ten feet away, but couldn’t. The pain in his arms and legs was too great, the profusion of human emotion running rampant through him at the sight of all this … ruination … it dominated him. How did people live their lives like this, day in and day out, for decades? He’d been human for hardly any time at all and it filled him with an aching, yearning madness to the return to the absolute surety of being a ‘Priest. “Who … who are you?”
Barnabas rose and straightened the shoulders of his jacket. He bowed deeply, formally. “I am Lord King Barnabas Blake the One and Only. I am ruler of Arcade City.”
George nodded as best he could, managing to eke out a kind of listless rolling of the head. Although the warm stickiness of the blood running freely from shoulders and legs were of some concern, being face to face with a living legend was quite impressive, even if the majority of what he felt simply had to be because of the meat. “We … we thought you might be a story.”
Barnabas dropped into a perfectly executed stage bow, sweeping a non-existent hat in the process. “I assure you, good and kind sir, I am no story. I am as real as you. Which is to say, not real at all.”
George felt a frown crease his muzzy face. That sounded suspiciously apropos. He wanted to ask after the meaning, but another question popped out of his mouth. “What happened here?”
Again, the ex-CyberPriest tried to look around, to … witness more of the chaos that’d torn through what looked as though it might’ve been a quaint little village. You know, before being torn from the roots.
Barnabas gestured to a pile of greasy ash off to one side of the park that had, for centuries, been a point of pride for Green Acres Estate. “The … the sheriff took offense to me touching My own damn Door. I lost my temper.”
George felt his eyes close and tried to open them. “I should say so.”
“I don’t even know when this happened.” Barnabas continued, getting hot under the collar all over again. “This whole thing of my subjects refusing people the wonder of touching my Doors. They’re phenomenal, these Doors of mine. A testament to purest creativity. A miraculous combination of form and function. So few people are capable of having both, you know. Who do these people think they are, denying those who want to bask in my brilliance? There’s only so much time left to them. They should be doing all they can to enjoy all they can!”
George found himself thinking inexplicably of Naoko Kamagana. He chuckled, but it came out funny sounding. “So,” the man said around a dry tongue, “you destroyed the whole village?”
Barnabas threw his hands up in the air. “Purely accidental. There’s a lot going on in my life right now. All kinds of hassle. You don’t even know.”
George chuckled again, morbidly obsessed with the blood dripping down his backside. He tried to skootch his head forward to see how much of the precious fluid was pooling at his feet, but failed. Alas.
The ex-‘Priest rolled his head back as far as it’d go. “Where … where is Erg? He … he radioed me. Told me the Door was opening. I …” he tried moving, tried yanking himself off the spikes holding him captive, “I … need to help my brothers.”
“Ah. Erg1. Well. That’s one of them problems, you see. He’s up there in my aerie, there, somewhere, digging in deep and I can’t rightly spare the time to root him out just yet. A constant, wriggling worm in the back of my brain, driving me to distraction. My other main problem is, well, seriously problematic. And your brothers?” Barnabas closed the distance between him and poor Anode221 with a single step. He grabbed hold of the dying man’s head, fighting the squi
rm of revulsion coursing through him to whisper delicately in ‘George Stevens’’ ear. “Ah, but they are beyond your help, Anode221.”
“That’s funny.” A weak smile crossed George’s lips. “You … you called me by my proper … proper name.” How had men and women and other wriggling things lasted for so long in this Unreality when they had to contend with such pathetically weak bodies? How could they’ve managed to spread across the stars in such horrendously impractical numbers when everything about them screamed ‘we are mayflies’?
“Oh,” Barnabas crooned, “but I did. You are Anode221. Fifth to taste the Enlightningment, one of the only true CyberPriests of Watt.”
“But …” George Stevens summoned strength he did not know he possessed, willed and urged and pleaded and cajoled weak, failing flesh to open eyes, to focus on the face of the man holding his head upright with heavy fingers. He blinked blurrily, eyes wheeling in their sockets, until finally, finally, the unwilling orbs focused.
“You!” George Stevens, once known as Anode221, stared into the mad eyes of Watt1. “You … you’re dead. We … we were all there. You leapt into the collider. It … it shredded you. We felt you die.”
“Death is relative, Anode.” Watt whispered, cradling his poor brother’s head gently. “In the moment of my transubstantiation, when I became what I am now, I saw what the Armies of Man truly wanted. Theirs was not a quest to defeat the Heshii. On the surface, it may have seemed so, but in truth, they sought to end all life. Across the entirety of Existence. Though they couldn’t have known it then, that is what they wanted. This … Unreality of ours, it was causing … is causing … so much pain and in ways never able to be fully understood. I saw this as their Harmony, manufactured and flawed in a hundred thousand ways, flooded into me. I saw this, and I knew what needed to be done.”
“We … we named ourselves after you. In your honor.” George wailed, sticky tears flowing down his cheeks. “We strived towards the goal as you laid out for us. And when we discovered the Unwritten Scriptures floating in the void, a gift from our future selves as we prepared to destroy the other Spheres … we … we … what is so funny?”
“You fool.” Watt sighed happily, a look of purest pleasure on his face. “Time travel, even on a quantum level, even when attempting to transmit nothing but data, is impossible in the Unreality. I wrote the Scriptures. Me. Watt. The perfect embodiment of the goal set forth by the Armies of Man.”
“The … the savior …” George gasped weakly. “You?”
The Kingly CyberPriest released George Stevens’ head to bow once more. “Me. I was preparing you lot for the moment when you returned to the fold, as it were. Though in this case,” the mad monarch pointed to the sky, “I suppose the ‘fold’ is The Dome. My amazing, beautiful Dome.”
“You’re … you’re creating your own Sphere?” George was stunned.
“Have created.” Barnabas waggled a finger. “But you lot nearly messed it all up. With your Savior. I thought you would’ve learned your lesson when things failed so spectacularly the first time. What you did to my poor boy. Why, if I’d had even the slightest inkling you and the other fools would go fully mental like that, I daresay I would’ve done things quite differently. For starters, I would’ve worded things quite a bit, shall we say, clearer?”
George pushed against the wall of the Dome, tried to free himself from the cruel spears flung into him by a ghost from the long-distant past. He didn’t know what he’d do if he managed to break loose.
Run at Watt, who’d been hiding under their noses this whole time, manipulating them with such artfully spun deceit? Run away from Watt, to hide somewhere under the massive Dome that seemed to’ve stolen what little remained of his wits completely away? Crawl into a hole and die of the mortal wounds he’d been given?
There were no good choices left. No matter which way he turned, all roads led to painful death.
When trying to break free failed, George turned his mind instead to what Watt was saying. Pieces slid together.
Barnabas caught the glimmer of understanding in poor old Anode’s dim eyes. “He gets it.”
“Elegant.” George whispered.
“You were always terribly creative, George.” Barnabas patted his long-lost friend on the head. “I need to get the band back together, sure enough. And once our shattered Harmony is contained within my Dome, it will be powered up properly by the next round of guests.”
“And … and … and then?” George asked, feeling the last of his life drift away.
“And then, dear boy, it’ll be like pricking a soap bubble. No more, no less. And all things in heaven and earth will disappear into the void. Guided by your weird brains, powered by the Suits. Brilliant, hey?”
“Won…won…” George Stevens died with a smile on his face.
“Yes. It is wonderful.” King Barnabas Blake the One and Only, once known as Watt1, soon to be known –though terribly briefly- as Destroyer of Everything, gestured. Black motes of King’s Will swarmed over George Steven’s dead body. The tiny things scoured through the corpse, discovered the quantum-level inscriptions left behind by the man’s initial transformation into a CyberPriest and began hotwiring the poor bastard back to life, literally bootstrapping the old CyberPriest protocols from the sub-molecular level all the way to the macro.
King Barnabas Blake eyed the re-transformation with interest: the first time around, they’d all been too busy shrieking and screaming and begging for death to pay any real attention to the glorious adjustments being made to their physical and mental state.
Barnabas sniffed.
All things considered, with everything he’d created under The Dome, the queer rippling wash of off-putting light wasn’t anything special.
“How disappointing.” Barnabas muttered as George did as he had thirty thousand years ago. “How terribly, terribly awful.”
Anode221 opened his eyes, but only for a second. The moment power was back on throughout all his magnificent enhancements, the swirling black cloud ripped him to shreds and flung him into the Dome.
Barnabas watched the final piece of this particular puzzle clatter into place, ears ringing with Anode’s horrific shriek. A fleeting ripple of illuminated circuitry washed across the Dome, then everything was ready for the introduction of the power source. He wrinkled his nose, debating whether or not he should resurrect the denizens of Green Acres Estate.
“No, I think not.” Barnabas tipped his imaginary hat to the dead of Green Acres. “I have rather a lot to attend to. I expect I shall need the matter later on, anyways.”
King Barnabas Blake the One and Only disappeared in a puff of black.
***
Someone was moving below him. Garth popped open an eye and sort of casually leaned over the side of the big tree branch he’d been … napping … on to take a peek at who was skulking around on the ground.
Nothing yet. Sounds of cautious movement pricked his ears, so Garth switched from the laissez-faire approach by training his other eye -which still wasn’t doing anything beyond working as a regular old eye only somehow less informative- on the ground as well.
A frizz of white hair hove into view.
Garth hung his head and tried disappearing into the tree.
“Ah!” Barnabas wanted to do a little jig. “There you are, my apprentice.”
“Heyyyyyy Barnabas.” Garth wasn’t entirely sure he could move yet, so he did his best to exude an ‘I am up here on purpose’ vibe; his limbs … everything … hurt so badly that at this point he didn’t necessarily trust anything beyond his mouth from operating properly. “How’s it goin’?”
And he’d thought the ass-kicking he’d received at the ‘hands’ of Kingzilla the Mighty had been terrible. In comparison, the all-over and all-the-way-through ache of whatever kind of explosion you called what he’d experienced the moment that goddamn control board had tapped the metal rod was infinitely worse.
About the only good thing to come from the zillion-volt e
ruption of electricity cascading through his sweet brain was the fact that the near-death experience seemed to’ve temporarily bootstrapped his unused savant skills up long enough to fully flesh out the rough ideas for a suit of Geared Armor. Minus the nerve-blistering pain and considerable worry for his life, it’d been just like old times, and now every time he closed his eyes, he was greeted with blueprints that were as clear to read as anything he’d ever whipped up while connected to the extra-dimensionality.
Barnabas sized up the trench Garth had dug in the ground with an unreadable expression on his face. He said tomatoes, Nickels said apples, though the King supposed –at the end of the day- it didn’t really matter one way or the other at this point what Nickels did, or if his contrary nature drew the attention of the Gearmen.
On the one hand, the outsider was going to be dealt with. Be it death, Specterism or some other thing Barnabas hadn’t yet considered. It was as inevitable as The Dome being powered up.
On t’other, should the Gearmen at long last arrive at his camp –more likely, now the Nannies were on the case more fully- welladay, they’d roll on out after just a few questions and nowt more than that, wouldn’t they just?
Being King did have its perks, e’en if none of them perks could be worked around Nickels.
Barnabas plastered a smile on his face. It wasn’t difficult. The scene was easy to assemble and he couldn’t be happier with the outcome. “Tolerably well, young apprentice.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “I was sat at camp, working on some bibs and bobs for our impending travels to Ickford. Lost track of time as I did. You know how it is.”
“Sure do, pal, sure do.” Without a sun in the sky, there was no accurate way to gauge what time of day it was. It was one of the more infuriating –and minor- things that drove him up the wall. Barnabas was full of assurances that learning how to tell time in Arcade City was just a matter of time. His exact words. Delivered without a hint of irony every time. “How long until to Ickford?”
