Subversive Elements (Unreal Universe Book 2) Read online

  “Hotel Services, Si Joanna, how can I help you?”

  Si Joanna was, as he’d feared, very chipper. Eyes bright like a chipmunk’s, hair blonde and wobbly, a smile with too many teeth and an aura of super-dooperness that transmitted nicely through the ‘Link. People seeing this kind of woman instinctively felt that what they wanted –no matter how wonky- was going to be fulfilled without problems.

  Garth braced himself for the worst. He hated cheery, especially in places like this; he always felt like he was dealing with robots, only the Westworld kind, not the original I, Robot kind. “I’m Garth Nickels, up in the Ultra suite?”

  “Yes you are, sa. How are you feeling today? The staff here wants to let you know that we were all pulling for you.”

  “Great.” Garth made a note not to drink the water. “I … was reading through your services here.”

  “How can we make your stay here more comfortable?” Joanna asked without missing a beat.

  “I’ve got, uhm, some … stuff? … That, uh, I need brought here as soon as possible.”

  Joanna nodded. Her hair bobbled in a time-delayed reaction of super-cool blondness. “Organic or inorganic?”

  “Say what now?” Garth blinked.

  Joanna’s smile faltered for a microsecond. “People or products?”

  Garth felt a heat wave rush up his face and shoot out the top of his head. “No, no, er, nothing like that. There’s this girl I’m sort of … what? Anyways, no. Not people, and sure as hell no ‘products’.” Jesus, Latelians were weird. He’d almost rather deal with the Cryptarch of Palargus again. At least that crazy fuck had been … crazy. Joanna seemed perfectly sane, which was worse.

  “Very good, sa.” Joanna’s thousand-watt smile returned to its full glory.

  “Yeah, thanks. I’ve got a storage facility with some equipment that I need, and … I can’t leave the Hotel right now.”

  “This is absolutely something we can do for you, sa.” Joanna consulted one of her many screens. “According to my information, you arrived this morning without a proteus. Will there be any difficulties in providing us with the necessary access codes to obtain your equipment? If there is, I must inform you there will be a nominal fee based on the level of difficulty.”

  Garth’s estimation for The Palazzo raised a full three notches. He wasn’t totally sure, but it sounded like Si Joanna would have no hesitations in ordering someone to bust into Port City Storage to steal all his stuff. “No.” He tapped a temple. “Photographic memory, me.”

  Joanna positively beamed. “Fabulous. Would you care to get started, then? Location?”

  “PS Storage, the one near the industrial park that smells like cabbage.”

  “PS Storage Facility 181.” Joanna made a note. “Access codes to enter the grounds and keycard numbers to enter the storage unit?”

  “Applesauce to get through the gates and Porkchops to get into the unit.” Garth rolled his eyes at himself; Joanna didn’t even flinch or look askance at his lame passwords, but even he thought they sounded stupid when spoken aloud. From now on, it was going to be zeta-this and tau-that. It was embarrassing to feel like he needed to out-cool all these nerds, but he was going to do it.

  “Excellent. And the items?”

  “A large bundle of climbing pitons. A spool of duronium wire. Some adhesive tape. A main. And … two vehicles.”

  “Type of vehicles and access codes?”

  “One is a Utility van, access numbers eight, twelve, seven, bananas. The other is a Fury 6 aircar, password solipsist45aX4.” At least Ashok’s car’d had a decent password on its own. “Um…”

  Joanna looked up from her notations. “Sa?”

  “Yeah, see … there’s, like, stuff in the back of the van? Stuff that, you know, might cause some concerns…”

  “Such as?” Joanna tilted her head to one side, as though she couldn’t possibly imagine anything that could shock her or the people sent out to recover his stuff.

  Garth ran a hand through his hair. In for a penny, in for a pound. As they said. “An automated sniper cannon with rounds and the system to run it. A crate of Obenstrech automatic pistols with rounds. A bag of credit chips and sundry melee weapons. And probably other stuff I can’t remember now.” The presence of the sniper cannon had surprised the hell out of him; it was probably the same one that the Portsiders had used to shoot him full of holes. A nice bonus, one that he liked to have but hoped he wouldn’t have to use.

  “The weapons will, of course, have to be registered with Sa Ute and outfitted with autolocks. This will prevent them from being used on Hotel grounds. The melee weapons fall into no specific category, so an inventory will be made, and, regretfully, any injuries occurring on the premises matching the profile of any will result in your immediate expulsion. Furthermore, copies of Security’s documentation concerning the automatic weapons will be made available to the proper authorities shortly before you’re asked to leave. Is this acceptable, sa?” Si Joanna smiled again, magically dispelling the all too real fact that she had zero problems with a customer wanting to be close to his sniper rifle and gun crate.

  Garth toyed with the idea of asking if Joanna knew where he could buy an unregistered tank. Tanks were always good to have during an emergency. She was probably running an illegal eBay-type auction service on one of those screens just in case some rich-as-hell uber-politician needed the blood of a virgin.

  “Er, no.” The Palazzo was the greatest Hotel in the known Universe. Way better than Hotel Hospitalis, least of all because nobody’d tried to murder him yet. He planned on shouting its name every time he stepped into the Arena. At the very least, they deserved the publicity. “Just bill it to my room.”

  “Of course we will, sa. Would you care to know the tally?”

  Garth gave her a look. “Not really. It’s probably pretty steep.”

  Joanna laughed a quick peal of pleasure. “It is, sa, no need to worry. Two employees have been dispatched to the location. Recovery time, complete with random routes back to the Hotel, is tentatively set for three hours from now. The vehicles will be stored on the bottom level of the parking garage until security has had time to lock the weapons down. After that, they can be moved wherever you wish. Delivery of the other items to your room will occur shortly after they’ve been processed and logged into the system.”

  “Thanks a million, si. You’ve been really helpful.”

  “As always, sa, The Palazzo and her staff are here to serve you to the best of our abilities. If you need anything else, please don’t hesitate to call me.” Joanna waved farewell before ending the link.

  Garth leaned back on the couch, smug as the cat that got the cream. In three hours, he’d have Huey and a main in the same room. Shortly after that, he’d find out if Ashok Guillfoyle’s research and development teams had been up to snuff when designing the baffle-sphere.

  A little of this, a little of that and hey presto he’d be back on top.

  xxx

  When everything was said and done, it took more than five hours for The Palazzo Strike Force to finish messing around with his stuff. Not only did they tag and bag the automatic weapons and the sniper cannon, they ‘temporarily’ confiscated all the melee weapons to boot. Ute explained that while it wasn’t illegal to own such weapons or even to use them in self-defense, nothing short of a full-scale war inside the hotel would let Garth near them without direct supervision. It was an acceptable –if depressingly impossible to defeat- explanation.

  “So those are autolocks, hey?” Garth jerked a chin at the crate of guns. They didn’t look like much, just an adjustable device that clamped over the trigger and fitted into the muzzle of anything up to an automatic rifle. The sniper cannon had been outfitted with something a little more impressive, but the Stretch guns were, to Garth’s mind, hardly even secure.

  Ute encouraged Garth to try removing one.

  The resulting shock -almost certainly lethal to any normal Trinityspace citizen and at least capable of i
ncapacitating damn near every Latelian in the building-, brought Ute perilously close to the ass kicking of a lifetime.

  Point well taken, Garth promised the smug security chief that the weapons fell into the ‘out of sight, out of mind’ category and would remain there until he wanted to leave.

  Or until he had time to bypass the systems, but Ute didn’t need to know that.

  The procedure for dealing with the weapons was only part of the battle to get going on his personal to-do list. Ute, eager to show off The Palazzo’s full range of disgustingly expensive, rarely used high-tech gizmos to someone who –under normal circumstances- would appreciate the effort, wasted two hours scanning both the van and the stolen aircar for anything ‘illicit’.

  Instead of being cool to watch, it was an exercise in patience and divine self-control. There was no way to know how well designed the baffle-sphere was or if Ashok had bothered to do anything security-wise to his aircar. Several times during careful scans of Ashok’s old car, Garth nearly lost his cool. All it’d take was a momentary blip on the fancy-looking metal detector. If that happened, Ute’d call up a roster of technicians just waiting to dismantle some rich guy’s car. If that happened, there’d be a lot of dead people and even more explaining to do: Garth couldn’t let anyone know about Huey, no matter what. It was a horrible thing to admit, but he’d be willing to kill an awful lot of people to protect Huey.

  Eventually, Ute –beaming like a proud papa- proclaimed the vehicles safe to move to one of the upper parking decks, cautioning Garth one final time that the guns –while still in the van- weren’t to be removed without his personal authorization. Then he and the rest of his Palazzo squad of security drones vanished into the woodwork to harass some other poor guest whose only dream in life was to nail three hot blonde Latelian hookers in a roomful of chicken feathers.

  xxx

  Glad to be alone, Garth lowered his aircar into its parking space. Then he spent a few seconds calming down; waiting and worrying that Ute would come across something that’d get him into serious trouble wasn’t exactly the definition of fun. When his breathing returned to normal, Garth started poking at the onboard systems to see if everything was all good.

  First things being first, Garth spent a solid ten minutes verifying that the data dump from his prote had gone through without a hitch. Beyond losing ninety million Trinity dollars in an explosion, there was all the stolen data from Guillfoyle enterprises to think about; although the man’s evil plans to destroy God soldiers with a minimum amount of effort had borne dark fruit, the road to discovery had also yielded experiments in assisting those poor unfortunates. Luckily, everything was all there. Every last dollar, every experiment, every blueprint. What a relief.

  One of his big plans involved the irritable and oftentimes hostile Doctor Sullivan: Garth planned to leak Ashok’s entire array of God soldier experiments to the doctor once his loyalties were better understood. Hopefully, an actual doctor could make headway into the rejection rates of God soldiers who were no longer in service. If all were good and right in the world, ex-God soldiers would no longer need the chemical and nutrient supplements that kept them alive while they served. It wasn’t covered in the news, but that reliance on the supplements and the difficulty in acquiring them was one of the reasons why cashiered soldiers were finding it so difficult to fit back into the society that’d made them what they were in the first place.

  Hell, if Sullivan was half the scientist he claimed to be, they could quite possibly begin removal of implants and organs that Nature hadn’t designed on Her own. It would make the doctor’s career.

  It was just one of many ways that Garth planned to help. Following what he’d gotten up to immediately after hitting dirt, it was the least he could do. If there were even the smallest chance that he’d survive beyond Bravo, he’d like his home to be more … peaceful. Disenfranchised and discarded God soldiers slowly dying in darkened alleys were a drain on an already poor and growing poorer civilization.

  Ex-God soldiers reverting to some form of Humanity to become productive members of society was something a Regime would have to love.

  Satisfied everything was in order, Garth ran a diagnostic on the hidden chamber inside the car. It was clear from warning signs popping up every few seconds that Ashok had never planned on the baffle-sphere being stowed away for more than a few hours; all of them indicated in one way or another that prolonged storage inside the vehicle increased the chances of it being detected.

  “Why is that?” Garth asked aloud, feeling stupid when the computer didn’t answer. Of course it didn’t. Huey wasn’t hooked up to the car. He was locked inside the baffle-sphere. Grumbling irritably, he started looking through the menus and found a help file explaining exactly why leaving Huey in the car for too long was a risk. He eventually found the answer in a main help file.

  The baffle-sphere was designed to hook directly into three of five internal data ports of a primary system. Activation of the sphere and the connection of the AI mind to the ‘LINK were taken care of by hard-wired commands, but until the gizmo was plugged in and powered up properly, base-line quantum emissions built up over time and could spill out like a coffee cup being overfilled. Risk of detection by relay nodes designed to do nothing else but keep their proverbial eyes peeled for such emissions grew exponentially after fifteen days. It apparently didn’t matter to anyone that in five thousand years, no one had managed to sneak an AI into the system. Everyone who tried got caught.

  “And got vaporized for their efforts.” Garth reminded himself aloud.

  Palms dry, stomach clenched, Garth swallowed nervously. He forced found himself to look around cautiously. Just because Ute hadn’t found anything didn’t mean the Regime wouldn’t; he hadn’t cut it fine, he’d cut it down to the atom. If he’d spent another day in the hospital, there was no doubt in Garth’s mind that those ‘useless’ AI monitors would’ve picked up Huey’s trace signal and the whole shebang would be over and done. Sayonara, Sa Nickels, thanks for dropping by, here’s your head in a basket.

  The only saving grace was the Regimist ego. The possibility –at least to any Regime scientist or security specialist - of someone getting an artificial intelligence into one of the cities was impossible, so there was no reason for there to be additional measures inside buildings. An AI was caught either at the port or in the streets. Ashok had known this, and designed his baffle-sphere around that blind spot. A few more years and no introduction to one Garth Nickels and Ashok Guillfoyle would’ve hit Supervillain Status, no problem.

  An avatar intruded into his dismal reverie, asking if he wanted to remove the baffle-sphere now. He keyed in the appropriate responses, climbing quickly out of the car so he could watch various sections of the chassis shift and pop out of position like a Transformer.

  “Cool.” Garth grabbed the baffle-sphere from the robot-clamp as it came close, smiling blissfully as the car reasserted its previous shape. Garth decided to add building giant robots that turned into other things to his ever-growing list of stuff he planned on doing once he got settled. The Latelians probably loved that kind of crap.

  He patted the baffle-sphere affectionately. “Well old buddy,” Garth said, heading off in search of an elevator, “looks like I got me some work to do.”

  xxx

  It is a recognized Universal Law that all manuals above a certain size required the reader to have advanced degrees in Quantum Physics and Zen Meditation. The instruction manual for a primary system was no exception to this Law. The ‘Boys at Protean Might’, as Turuin had described them, were Evil Incarnate. Or, at least as far as Garth was concerned.

  The Protipal Protean System was the epitome of computational systems. No bullshit. The guys deserved the chops they got for designing a proteus as powerful and as flexible as the Protipal had proven itself to be; it was a shame that the manual read like stereo instructions written for beings who lived in eighty-three dimensions and were capable of reading backwards. He’d been thoroug
hly out-nerded.

  All he wanted was to disable the main’s auto-connection to any available wireless grid. It was a fool who hooked a potentially insane AI up to a ‘LINK until that mind’s status was a known factor, so it was best to work under the assumption that Huey may not have survived the quantum copy attacks. If Huey had succumbed to substrate psychosis, introducing an insane artificial intelligence to the immaculately connected world of Hospitalis would be an error of ruinous proportions.

  The destruction of the spaceport would be inconsequential by comparison. A diseased AI mind connected to robot-controlled factories could start rolling out metal soldiers in no time at all!

  Making matters worse, the designers of the manual had constructed their chapters on the assumption that the reader knew everything there was to know about networking and the fiendishly complex glyph-based programming codes in use.

  Whether the Latelians knew it or not, that code -Large Interface Network Kernel or ‘LINK’ for short- was in use throughout the Universe. It was a supremely advanced style of programming, offering users superlative flexibility and power, be they programming a toaster or, say, a metal ball housing an AI mind.

  That flexibility and power meant precisely zilch to Garth; relying on the awesome capabilities of a Battlesystem to do the work for him, he’d never physically had to program anything in SpecSer, but he recognized what he was seeing. If someone wanted to run something off DOS or Pascal, he could totally pound out some funny stuff. But LINK? LINK made his brain fuzzy.

  He found himself wondering how the Latelians would react if they found out that their netLINKs were in use throughout Trinityspace, running every single piece of equipment and machinery more complex than a pocket watch. Then he shrugged. From what he’d seen of Latelians so far, they’d probably demand royalties and call it a day.

  Groaning, Garth turned back to the files. It wasn’t fair. He could close his eyes and figure out how to build a black hole gun in under thirty minutes, but trying to suss out the particulars of coding? He couldn’t even figure out how to make the ‘search’ function work properly and he had -once upon a time- built a telepathy helmet. His brain was playing tricks on him because as far as he thought, anyone who was as awesome as he was at inventing things should be smart as a whip when it came to programming. And yet every time he entered various permutations of ‘turn network off’ into the provided field on the advanced Sheet, the only thing he got in return was the 325th century version of a 404 error.