Subversive Elements (Unreal Universe Book 2) Read online

  “Sa Nickels, my name is Sa Herman Lanshell. I’m part of your legal staff.”

  “Staff?” Garth moved a little further away from the scene of the … the scene. He was feeling a little wobbly and didn’t want to have to keep worrying about the camera showing Sa Lanshell anything he shouldn’t be seeing. “I have a legal staff? When did that happen?”

  “I was originally tasked with overseeing the completion of documents pertaining to UltraMegaDynamaTron’s environmental and social responsibilities.”

  “What, like recycling and equal opportunity hiring?”

  “Precisely.”

  “Uhuh. Uhuh. Good. Go green!” Garth walked out of the lab and stopped on the other side of the wall, leaning up against it so he could … calm down. “So, uh, what can I do for you, buddy?”

  “My supervisor has indicated to me that you recently purchased a building outfitted with a number of laboratories and equipment, sa, and directed me to advise you on matters concerning them.”

  “Say what now?” Garth checked the cut on his hand discreetly. Thanks to a handy First Aid kit located next to the Prote-O-Matic there was no more blood. It stung like a son of a bitch, though.

  But no blood. Which was a good thing.

  Ordinarily, he wouldn’t have used bandages, relying on his sheath-borne healing abilities to seal the cut up, but he couldn’t have his blood just leaking all over the place. Not … not until he understood.

  Herman didn’t sigh though he sorely wanted to; Sa Herrig had been kind enough to warn him that Garth Nickels was a man who pretended to be obtuse and generally slightly confused all the time. He’d gone on to discreetly mention that he was personally of the opinion that Garth’s interaction with the rest of the world was a cunning front.

  Herman pressed on. “I’m calling to ensure you don’t interact with any of the equipment, sa. Ownership of the building does entitle you to do so, but only after extensive training in their safe operation. I’ve looked at the manifest and quite a number of the …”

  “Gadgets?” Garth supplied helpfully.

  “Gadgets, then.” Herman did sigh, then. The man used so many words that made no sense at all. “Many of the ‘gadgets’ you now own are dangerous if handled improperly, sa. And mishandling is a certainty without full training. I would be remiss in my duties if I didn’t warn you that if something were to happen without a fully trained technician at the controls, you can and most certainly will be punished to the maximum allowable sentence.”

  “Oh?” Garth stuck his head around the corner. Yes, the crater that had once been a fully functional Prote-O-Matic was still there.

  Fire suppression units mounted in the ceiling had done a bang up job of putting the fire caused by the massive explosion out, but Garth couldn’t find anything in the ‘LINKs under a ‘hole-filling’ category. He didn’t know what to do about that. His brain was still rattling around inside his skull.

  “Well,” he said, smiling a hundred gigawatt smile at Herman, patently ignoring his memory, which was doing a bang-up job of replaying the last few minutes over and over in his brain, “it’s a gosh-darn good thing I would never ever do anything that stupid. No, I’m just wandering around the place, sticking my nose into rooms and such. I like to look at things. It makes me feel rich. ‘Cuz I am. Rich, I mean.”

  Herman narrowed his eyes thoughtfully. He was inclined to draft up some papers to prove his client was suffering from Survivor’s Guilt. If the man’s undoubted reckless behavior came to light, showing the man wasn’t in his right mind could come in handy. “Very well, sa. I hope I didn’t upset you. Sa Herrig was very concerned that you might become over-excited and do something … unwise.”

  “You can tell ol’ Herrig that he’s nothing but a worry-wart.” Garth nodded. “Yep. Nothing crazy going on here, don’t you worry.”

  “Until the next time then, sa.” Herman ended the call on a suspicious note.

  Garth tucked the Sheet into a back pocket as he made his way back into the lab and towards the crater that had once been a fully functioning proteus manufactory. It wasn’t a very big hole, but that wasn’t what had captured his attention, even as he’d run away as fast as he could.

  It was the shape and condition of the hole that was neat.

  Anyone walking into the room would immediately notice the destruction. It couldn’t be missed. And it was so very interesting; caused by the prote machine explosion, the crater captivated Garth because it appeared to form a perfect sphere.

  Given that the manufactory had rested against a wall, the divot was only across two planes. Anyone with half a brain could tell that if it’d been surrounded on all sides he’d have a perfectly carved sphere.

  Nothing remained of the prote machine, nothing. Nothing at all. There were no bits slammed across the far end of the lab, no shrapnel littering his backside. That was the first interesting thing about the damage.

  The second interesting thing about the wreck was that it was, well, perfect.

  A normal destructive blast caused by the detonation of, say, a grenade, is only theoretically spherical; in reality, everything from wind conditions to air pollution affects the distribution of a grenade’s force, bending the destructive energy out of shape as conditions dictate. Prior exposure to the Sheet extruders in The Palazzo and the prote machine in Sa Turuin’s old shop had given Garth the impression that nanotech in Latelyspace was safe as houses.

  Something had happened in this lab to make nano unsafe.

  Running his hands across the surface of the semi-sphere, Garth smiled. He doubted there was a smoother surface anywhere in the system. In the process, a swarm of nanotech beads had nearly eaten him, but never mind that: this damage was flawless. But, that wasn’t the weird part.

  No, the weird part about the whole situation wasn’t that he’d fooled around with something beyond his comprehension and made a mistake whilst doing it.

  Not at all. He hadn’t even had a chance to fiddle with the guts. He hadn’t even gotten the first screw off the side plates.

  Whoever’d put the fucking thing together must have been a God soldier with a hard-on for tools, because the screws had been all but welded into place; in an effort to liberate said screws from their prison, he’d held onto a corner while torqueing the screwdriver with the other.

  The chain of events after that was fairly easy to follow, even for someone as fundamentally brain-dead as himself. Applying all the pressure he could bear –which was phenomenal, if he didn’t say so himself- on the screwdriver, the damn thing had bent itself into a shockingly perfect right angle. Following that, he’d sliced his hand open on the corner of the prote machine that he’d been using as a brace. From there, he’d bled all over the fucking thing like a stuck pig.

  From there?

  Well, the machine had started spitting sparks and shooting smoke and generally implying to the hard-of-thinking that it was about to blow itself the hell all over everywhere.

  Garth dimly recalled shrieking like a little girl, but he was pretty sure when he retold the story, he was going to have it so he strolled out of the room in slow motion while someone screamed awesomely in the background. Cue sunglasses and witty remark about explosions.

  Then floomp! A massive -theoretically globally cataclysmic- puff of nanospores had erupted forth, doing nothing except eating the machine before stopping. This was improbable because of how nano didn’t eat itself but everything else and stayed hungry until there was nothing left anywhere.

  And he hadn’t done anything to kill the nano because as far as he was aware, the only people in the Universe properly set up to do that were Enforcers.

  So what’d happened?

  The only workable –and sensible- theory behind both the nanotech’s explosive reaction and its abrupt disappearance rested not with his blood, but what lay inside: the neural sheathing. Garth readily admitted he had no clue what the stuff was made of, nor did he have any idea why the nearly magical science giving him his strength and
speed should be affecting the microscopic machines so explosively now. Hell, on Gorensworld he’d been coated in dusty, inoperative nanospores for days on end and he hadn’t blown anything up once the whole time he’d been there. Assuming for the moment that that hadn’t happened because it’d been inert, the moment The Cloud had gone properly online … things should’ve gone kablooey all over the entire system!

  Bravo had the ability to push him over the edge and react violently if he wasn’t careful, so was this whole nanotech bloom-explosion a side effect of that? Did Bravo not want him to interact with Latelian-based nanotechnology or was this just an unexpected side effect of overcharged neural sheathing?

  “This,” Garth said heroically as he whipped his Sheet out, “totally calls for experimentation. Ahah! Applied Biomechanics Laboratory Sixteen, eighth floor.”

  xxx

  “Hey, Herrig, how’s it going?” Garth asked casually.

  “Fine, sa. And yourself?” Herrig returned pleasantly enough.

  “Oh…” Garth touched the bump on his head self-consciously; he’d picked it up while bursting through the solid metal door of the Applied Biomechanics Lab Sixteen in order to avoid a nanobloom. Again. Who knew doors could be so hard? “You know, just doin’ … stuff.”

  “I … see.” Herrig put his Sheet down and devoted his full attention to Garth. “Is there something on your mind, sa?”

  “Sorta.” Garth chose his words carefully. “Do you … do you remember when I was in the hospital and Dr. Sullivan did all those blood tests and whatnot?”

  “I do.” Herrig failed to see how this could have anything to do with the mischief his employer was undoubtedly up to his eyebrows in.

  “Good, good.” Garth nodded thoughtfully. “I can’t remember if Sullivan destroyed the blood samples like I asked. I’d like for my proxy dude to find out.”

  “And if he hasn’t, sa?”

  “Ohhhh…” Garth tapped his lips. He’d given this some heavy consideration. “Let’s seeeeeeee… I want the blood and tissue samples along with all of the computer files, records, personal observations and any other stitch of work related to ‘em destroyed. Any clothes I was wearing need to be destroyed and, if possible, launched directly into the sun or a black hole.”

  Before Herrig could interrupt, Garth continued stridently. “And I want proof. I gave five blood samples and four tissues. And … and if there’s been any more work done after I was released from the hospital, I want Sa Dr. Sullivan fired from MediCor and blacklisted in the medical community. Like, shag his ass to Trinityspace or some shit.”

  “Don’t you think that’s a little extreme, sa?”

  Garth surveyed the damage done by the second Prote-O-Matic going critical after exposure to his blood.

  Or more accurately, to the neural sheathing.

  Realistically, no more than three drops of the good red stuff had caused the first explosion. The resultant five-foot sphere of annihilation had eaten through everything in its path without pause before inexplicably shutting down.

  Ever one to escalate a test, Garth had opted for double the amount of blood on the second machine, curious to see if there was an exponential component to the mysterious power source fueling the neural sheathing.

  And there was.

  Was there ever.

  Applied Biomechanics Laboratory Sixteen was no more. Hell, he was lucky to be alive! Six drops of blood, pooled carefully in the palm of his hand until they could hit the proteus machine all at once, had driven the damned thing super-critical almost instantaneously. The nanotech floomp-boom had flowered outward at a dizzying speed, forcing him to run with every ounce of haste he could muster and it nearly hadn’t been enough.

  Jesus. Six drops of blood and not only had the entire lab been eaten, but most of the floor above and below as well!

  Garth continued leaning against the wall, breathing deeply, staring unhappily at the crusted blood in the palm of his hand. He was a walking nano-bomb. If he bled or –God forbid- died atop of one of those things, the neural sheathing would create a nanotech bloom so intense that it’d probably consume the planet before he’d finished dying.

  He couldn’t rightly say how much of his tissue and blood samples Sullivan might’ve managed to spirit away. The first few days of his hospital stay, he’d been more or less comatose, but Garth knew damned sure it was more than a few ounces. And, sadly, Sullivan belonged to the same school of scientific endeavor as one Garth Nickels, which meant that sometime soon, if not already, the idiot was gearing up to start flinging his blood around a lab.

  There was no telling what other types of high-tech equipment the neural sheathing could affect so explosively. There was every chance that what he was seeing here, with the prote machines, was on the small end of the responsive scale.

  “No. If anyone on the Board of Directors or the staff gets involved in any way except being supportive, they are fired, too. Matter of fact, anyone touching or knowing about my blood and gunk and whatnot, they’re gone too. No. Wait. Even better. You know what? Anyone working for that place that knows I require blood, food and water to live is out the door, too. The only people who get to stay are people who say ‘Garth Nickels? Isn’t he a robot?’ No joke.”

  Maybe it was Draconian of him to insist on such measures, but Garth believed in maximum damage control. “If anyone asks, have Proxy Dude tell ‘em that the evil Offworlder believes in shaking things up. Don’t tell him it’s over the blood. We’ll pay ‘em out, naturally. Great gobs of cash.”

  Herrig didn’t understand Garth’s reasons but didn’t object. It was a hard thing to do without knowing the underlying motive, but in the end, Herrig was just an employee and Garth his employer. “Very well, sa. Is there anything else I can do for you?”

  “Yeah.” Garth poked the bruise on his head again. Almost gone. “I … need for you to add two proteus construction units to my shopping list. And some power monitoring gizmos, too. For, uh, large amounts of output. Think fusion reactor size.”

  “The manifest for your building lists four operational units.” Herrig couldn’t keep the sigh in; it escaped noisily and wearily without him even noticing.

  “You should see this place, Herrig!” Garth shouted. “God soldiers went through here with a vengeance. All kinds of whacky damage. Hell,” he added offhandedly, “they even blew chunks of duronium off the outer walls. Shit. That reminds me. I need work crews. Bunches. Get on it, will you?”

  “Yessa. Two prote machines, several large-scale power monitoring devices, fire anyone who’s had the misfortune to look at your blood and comment on it.” Herrig read the list stiffly. He didn’t want to think that the power unlimited wealth brought was having an adverse effect on Garth, but the man’s actions were beginning to seem … erratic. “I will speak to you shortly concerning MediCor.”

  “Hey, Herrig!”

  “Yes, sa?”

  “Um, yeah.” Garth chewed at the inside of his mouth. “I know you hate me spending all this money, but I’ve been thinking…”

  Herrig sighed again. Whenever Garth Nickels had a thought, trouble followed. “Sa?”

  “Yeah. Diversification. It’s not enough for UltraMegaDynamaTron to be housed in a single building, or to even be just a single … brand name. Is that right? I think so. Anyways, to my way of thinking, the meaning of the word ‘conglomeration’ basically says ‘a bunch of companies’, right?”

  Herrig feared that if he did much more sighing, he’d soon run out of oxygen. In his blossoming role as Conglomerate Financial Officer –a post that seemed to do most everything-, Herrig had genuinely hoped his employer would miss that particular bit. More than happy to purchase the occasional company for Garth whenever the mood struck the strange man, Herrig didn’t relish the notion of truly Conglomerating; he rather doubted Garth had any idea at all of what that would entail. “That is so.”

  Garth smiled. Herrig was a one-in-a-hundred-trillion sort of guy. With UltraMegaDynamaTron in the absolute center of th
e business community’s watchful –and scornful and covetous- eye, he could use it to deflect curious lookee-loos from any real work being done, work that’d be handled by the dozen or so company names he’d been working on since he’d purchased MediCor.

  “I’m sending you a list of company names. I’d like you to register each one under the umbrella of UltraMegaDynamaTron’s business charter. Make it all legal. Hire as many people as you need to in order to satisfy Latelian hiring practices, give them a nominal wage and tell them to just hang loose for the time being. I’m not entirely certain what I plan to do yet, just that I’m gonna need all these things in place.”

  Herrig read the list as it scrolled across his screen. Acme. Weyland. Mesa. An ominous sounding OCP. UmbrellaCorp. The list went on and on. “Are these to be virtual companies?”

  “Heck no.” Garth shook his head. “Buy any available space you can. For preference, stick to Port City. They’ve got all kinds of warehouses and stuff and, uh, are probably more lenient on … noise.”

  “Noise.” The word fell flatly out of Herrig’s mouth. Garth smiled cheerily and gave him a thumbs-up. “As you wish, sa, so shall it be. These … these ‘companies’ will take time to process, as will finding, hmmm, trustworthy employees.”

  “What, like a week, two weeks?”

  “Perhaps sooner, perhaps later.” Herrig hated to be brusque, but Garth had little to no concept of time, or of the effort things took.

  “Groovy.” Conversation over, Garth continued poking and prodding the bruise on his noggin.

  Once he was done being popular –a burden he still hadn’t figured out how to defeat, though an idea was forming- he’d still be under the scrutiny of Chairwoman Doans and her pet attack-OverCommander. If he wanted to build the things he wanted to discover -or ‘rediscover’- the stuff lurking under his amnesia, he needed out of the way places to get that done. The only way to accomplish that was to create a Byzantine maze of businesses so circuitous and just plain old frustrating that they’d ignore it –and him- until it was too late for them to do anything but sit back and hope he didn’t blow the planet up.