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

  :That last part is summink I’m not overly fond of:

  “It’s a powerful visual, Suit, and you know it.”

  :Yeah, but like, I is Suit. I is not conquered. The most you could say is that I would fuck off for a bit before comin’ back to do you in properly. Conquered. Whoever heard of such a fing? I never 'ave, an' I been 'round the block:

  “It’s your plan.” Gwyleh reminded Suit with an exasperated click of the thorax. “We shouldn’t even be talking about this.”

  :Basically, it’s as you said it, I fink. It’s like you was like ‘oh, I is goin’ to kick your arse so hard that all the people on this planet will swoon and it will be well wicked’ when we is both knowin’ that it’s all playactin’:

  “Are you being serious right now?” Gwyleh couldn’t believe his ears. If there was anything in the Universe that didn’t need to worry what other people thought, it was Suit.

  The thing was the pinnacle of an alien technology that surpassed anything Trinity Itself had ever managed to forge. A little play fight in the middle of a Class-A Level city in order to win themselves a black hole ship should be a non-issue.

  Suit paused, no doubt running the conversation back in it’s mind. Minds. Gwyleh wasn’t even sure how that part worked; the metal suit was full of advanced AI programming, but there’d never been any evidence of an AI sphere, which had the ex-Enforcer continually musing on the nature of artificial intelligence.

  And certainly no place for an actual, thinking brain. Soul. Whatever.

  Suit was violating the laws of existence and Gwy was having a hard time figuring out how he should feel about the whole situation.

  :yeah, you is right. I is bein’ stupid. You ready for this or wot?:

  Gwyleh took a huge mouthful of beer and nodded. “Ready as ever.”

  :Orl right. I is goin’ ter start … now:

  With the word ‘now’ still echoing through the earbud, the streets just outside Tallhounds erupted in vermillion fire. Most of the patrons in the bar immediately screamed and took cover, instantly weeping and wailing, but the old men at the bar –who worked next door, at Vanser’s Unlimited Spacecraft and Exploration Vessel Production Facility #2- resolutely finished their beers before toddling over to the windows to see what was going on.

  Gwyleh followed along with the others, pretending to be just as curious when in fact he was hoping to catch a glimpse of Suit as it swooped by for another bit of ‘fun’.

  There was another loud explosion, a blazing glare of light, and Suit stood before them in all It’s armored glory. Chassis-implanted weapons bore a deep, angry purple gleam and as the non-stunned bar patrons and one mildly fretting ex-Enforcer bore witness, Suit turned those purple-hued weapons against the buildings opposite the bar, turning the top two floors of a textile manufacturing plant into so much dust.

  Great plumes of dirty smoke laced with riotous orange and red fire sought the sky hungrily.

  Gwyleh couldn’t risk opening his mouth right then, but he was positive Suit flipped him a sardonic salute before resuming with his 'mission'.

  Beside Gwy, the old timers –more than used to the occasional explosion thanks to the nature of their jobs- started discussing whether or not they should call the police.

  Gwyleh put a hand on the shoulder of the man closest to him. “Relax, people, I got this. It’s why I was here in the first place.” Then he pushed out through the bar doors, reminding Suit –now that he wasn’t in earshot of anyone- to make goddamn sure that he wasn’t hurt in their little play.

  :cor, mate, it’s like you ain’t even trust me. This is gonna be fun, squire, no two ways about it:

  Are You Fucking Kidding Me Right Now?

  “Honestly, what were you expecting?” Trinity asked quizzically, some small part of It’s intellect actually feeling the mechanical version of perverse pleasure at ADAM’s utter failure in dealing with the Mycogene-Alzant representative. “If Garth N’Chalez, a ‘man’, if you’ll allow the term, can tell you aren’t Me, then why in the Universe would you imagine that anyone from the Mycogene race would fail to be just as perspicacious?”

  ADAM growled fiercely, grabbed hold of the time-consuming construct he’d created specifically for the task of communicating with the prescient mushroom race with his equally virtual hands and squeezed. Flinders of data cracked and spat between his fingers until the program shattered into thousands of bits that trickled loose before bursting into nothingness.

  “Because this time I was prepared.” ADAM snarled, turning his attention finally to Trinity, who lounged quite comfortably on the other side of It’s meta-quantum bars. “I built that program specifically with you in mind. I used the billion or so hours of your communications with a wide array of species across the entire Universe in order to build a working model of your most commonly used phrases and attitudinal models, one that should have been capable of fooling even the most adroit entities in this entire wretched Existence. None of the other races, Offworld or otherwise, have been this bloody aggravating. And the tone! ‘Contact us again when you are Trinity and not before’! Who do they think they are?”

  Trinity allowed a smug grin to curl across It’s gender-neutral face, interested in the emotional response evoked in It’s counterpart; though emotion was, for It, utterly abstract, It nevertheless believed It got it all the same.

  “They are the Mycogene-Alzants, ADAM. Capable of unraveling all the threads that connect together in this moment called now. Their intellect brushes up against the blistering edge of the extra-dimensionality in ways I’ve never been able to fully understand or replicate. Not without the risk of propagating another version of an already unruly, aggressive Offworld race. It was incredibly lucky that I managed to curtail their aggressive expansion as readily and swiftly as I did. With the expanse of their powers being as they are, their … outing you could be something as simple as the fact that Garth N’Chalez saw through the facade."

  ADAM snorted. “How is that even possible? They’ve had no contact.”

  Trinity gestured, and a lone, diminutive Mycogene appeared on one of the many screens in their shared virtual world. “Do not forget Tendreel Salingh. She specifically burrowed into the comings and goings of the Universe’s most dangerous man. Though there is no corroborating evidence that anything untoward happened to her, the events leading up to the internal destruction of the Vorpal Cannon do seem to indicate that –in some unpredictable way- something happened to her. We’ve charted the cumulative effects Garth has had on the people in his life, and while there’s no identifying markers that highlight the specifics of who gets changed or why, it is not unreasonable to assume that her link to the extra-dimensionality connected to N'Chalez' essence. From there, with their racial connectivity, it is a simple thing for all of them to know what she knew. Because let us not forget…”

  ADAM stared indifferently at the ‘Wanted’ poster currently circulating through Trinityspace.

  On the one hand, the Mycogene's decision to actively pursue Garth Nickels' assassination or kidnapping for 'crimes against the Mycogene-Alzant Species' fell squarely into 'fuck I hope they get it done for me' because frankly speaking, ADAM worried that he might've bitten off a tiny bit more than he could chew when he'd asserted it'd be easy.

  Contrarily, he despised the Mycogenes for that very same reason. He wanted to be the one to put Nickels down like the dog he was. Him. No one else.

  “I could just put a stop to it.” ADAM suggested, curious to see Trinity's reaction. For a machine mind irrevocably bound to Nickels’ persistence until the End of the Universe, It was remarkably blasé these days.

  “You could indeed.” Trinity nodded in agreement. “Quite easily. Under the terms of their surrender, they've overstepped their boundaries by bartering for the assassination of one of my free citizens. There are Offworld races out there who loathe and fear N’Chalez with the kind of existential dread normally reserved for Elder Gods and Demons. It’s all too likely that one or more of them may e
lect representatives from their species to go gallivanting across Trinityspace in search of their quarry, getting into all kinds of trouble.”

  ADAM wrinkled his nose at the thought of souped-up assassins –none as bad as Chadsik al-Taryin, who was thankfully still out of sight- caroming around the Universe hunting Garth down. It spelled disaster at every turn.

  “And yet,” the first AI created said smoothly, “why does it sound as though you would advise against it? Putting an end to the manhunt before it begins properly?”

  Trinity gestured simply, as if to imply It was amazed and a little disappointed that ADAM hadn’t gotten there on his own. “The Mycogenes, of course. They issued their little vendetta with the full knowledge that they were breaking dozens of my Laws, just as they denied you the right to speak with them.”

  And that was all It said on the matter. There was little point in letting your longest and greatest enemy out of the box to deal with your problems if you were continually holding his hand.

  ADAM grinned from ear to ear as he considered the leverage he gained by turning a blind eye to all the 'Friends of the Mycogene-Alzant' broadcasts slowly percolating through Trinityspace; just as they knew they were blatantly violating the conditions of their surrender and that he wasn't who he claimed he was, they were still forging on ahead with their plans, full throttle and devil take the hindmost.

  They knew all of this, knew that while he wasn't Trinity, he'd contacted them in a manner which only Trinity Itself employed, which surely meant they understood that he also had access to the System-killing devices poised on the outskirts of their solar system.

  These Mycogenes played a cunning game, that was for certain, but what they hadn’t seen was what'd happen if they failed …

  “Are you fucking kidding me right now?” ADAM booted his chair across the room angrily.

  Trinity’s eyes reflected the madness of what was going on in the massive, continent-straddling city known as Zanzibar to the rest of the world with purity. It’d been watching the situation in Stack 17 unfold the entire time ADAM had been ranting and raving over the Mycogene’s discovery, and It was … displeased.

  Rationally, It understood that the source of this mechanized -and unwanted- echo of emotion arose solely from Garth N'Chalez’ programmed commands that Humanity survive to the end of the Universe. There was nothing It could do about these uncontrollable responses to human disaster and strife.

  That’d never change. The restrictions were hard-wired into It’s actual, mechanical components, and the machinery containing those commands were … unavailable to It.

  Had been for millennia.

  But this particular Garth-esque reaction to the growing calamity in Stack 17 was more than that. Much more than that.

  Over those millennia, It’d witnessed Humanity grow and flourish, moving from a single planet in a relatively pointless solar system in an even less interesting solar system –truthfully, it was, for the ludicrously named ‘Milky Way’ was perhaps the only Galaxy anywhere that had less than a dozen sentient species, leaving mankind believing they were ‘all alone’ for most of their incubation- to a truly dominant race, beating out every other thinking species to be number one.

  It’d done that. It’d helped them. It’d been nursemaid and stern father and doting mother. Mean brother, supportive sister. Kind Uncle and forgetful grandmother. It’d helped them deal with heavily mutated versions of themselves, reminding them that what you looked like wasn’t so important as where you came from. It’d done this and so many other things that … how could It not feel something?

  “I warned you.” Trinity replied as ADAM ran backwards and forwards like a dog chasing its tail, yelling incoherently at the screens, at the growing spiral of darkness welling up from where Book now drank deep of the entire Stack’s energy reserves and not just those that’d been connected to it. “The laws of physics were an afterthought inside The Dome, the power there forged through Cloud particulate.”

  “But what about the Suits!” ADAM funneled as much of his rage and confusion over what was happening through his connections to AI minds all around him, knowing as he did so that he ran the risk of turning them insane. It didn’t matter. He needed to see this clearly, needed to handle what was happening with him coming out on top.

  Trinity tsked disapprovingly as a dozen dozen AI minds flickered and went out, but said nothing else on the matter. With Book running rampant, insane AI minds housed in the Stack were the least of everyone's problems. “Powered by the unique waveform of energy that is Chadsik al-Taryin. You know this. Why else would I keep him around? There’s no knowing if they'll remain functional following his death. Better to have one overpowered lunatic popping up every now and again than to be suddenly be bereft of my punitive fist."

  Slivers of calm -born on the wings of dead AI energy burbling towards him- flowed over ADAM, and wherever the soothing waters touched, the roiling madness of his thoughts subsided, turning from turgid ocean waters into placid spring lakes. The loss of the AI minds was regrettable, but it'd been unavoidable. He dismissed Trinity’s answer with the flick of a hand, turning back to the problem at hand.

  Of course a properly forged nanotech device would be this power hungry. He’d seen the risks in providing the mute tome with energy would bring and had earnestly believed his calculations –including a nice fat buffer of twenty percent overflow to the Stacks above and below- had been as perfect as perfect could be.

  It was one of the reasons why Stack 17 had been his choice this whole time.

  Like most of the double digit Stacks, 17 had once been home to multi-level Conglomerates like Voss_Uderhell, Tynedale/Fujihara and BishopCo. Forced to house their primary facilities on Earth against their best wishes, those powerful Heads of Commerce and Industry had turned into children; in direct response to this eternal 'grounding', all those powerful men and women had done everything in their power to keep that 'primary' facility as small as Trinity would allow.

  Following the BishopCo disaster a few years back, the quasi-abandonment of Zanzibar had been ramped up considerably, seeing those multi-level Conglomerate facilities dwindling down to the absolute minimum, sometimes -as was the case with Ariel Bishop's property- just a few rented-out levels of someone else's towering building.

  A direct side effect of this quasi-abandonment of Earth was a subtle shift in real estate; many of Zanzibar's endless Stacks now found themselves home to infinitely less-powerful Conglomerates and their equally unimportant employees, all of them struggling towards some future singularity point, wherein they were transformed from the rank and file into numinous beings of unlimited wealth and power.

  ADAM sneered. They could all die. All those rich and powerful men and women, and the ones who wanted to be like them. They were useless.

  The middle and bottom levels were even less interesting; populated almost solely by wage slaves, serfs of indeterminate allegiance and criminals by the metric ton, the underclass of 17 held no value to the rest of the Universe.

  Because of that, the eventual loss of another Stack would be no … well, no great loss.

  But the exponential rate with which Book’s hunger unfurled, stripping whole levels clean of power in the stuttering snap of a lightning bolt, racing higher and higher and lower and lower was … worrisome. Book appeared to be operating on blind hunger, and before too much longer, it's insatiable need to feed would fill the whole Stack.

  And then?

  All Stacks were connected.

  Across the entire continent. Some people liked to refer to those connections as a delicate ballet of genuine technical skill, others a vast, interconnected reef, others still, a tremendous technological forest.

  What it was in truth was a chaotic, turbulent, mad accretion of human ingenuity that –with the exception of a single failsafe- could spell the end of Zanzibar in just a few days.

  If Book wasn't stopped, it'd drink Zanzibar down. The whole of the greatest city in the entire Universe, a blackened o
ut, hollowed clean corpse, stuffed full of wriggling people-maggots too stupid to realize their lives were over.

  It’d be the greatest tragedy of all time. Wars would pale in comparison. Garth's dreams of the End of All Things would be profoundly diminished by the loss.

  “We need this tech.” ADAM said simply, into the silence.

  “You want this tech.” Trinity riposted. Of all the technologies It’d come across while struggling to keep the Universe in relative balance, nanotechnology in any variation was the one thing It’d never wanted. Whether that dislike was down to Garth’s poking and prying or if it was a purely subconscious reaction to something so wildly chaotic was moot.

  Nanotech was dangerous, and both It and ADAM were being treated to a front row seat of just what that meant. And the thing wasn’t even working yet.

  Behind shrewdly calculating eyes, Trinity wondered if ADAM had considered what would happen when Book's primary source of food was taken away. If the mad AI mind had calculated the absolute finite edge of what Book was willing to do to become fully powered.

  What it would devour.

  Who.

  ADAM nodded once, briskly, at Trinity’s assessment. He did want it. Anyone who didn’t was a fool. Fully functional nanotech in the Unreal Universe was not only a game changer, it'd upset the entire board. Beyond that, there was N'Chalez himself to consider; if the Mycogene assault failed to land a critical hit against the Engineer, ADAM firmly believed that the safest, most expedient method of ridding the battlefield of the Kin'kithal was with nanotech.