Subversive Elements (Unreal Universe Book 2) Read online

  “Yes.” Alix replied dryly. “It appears Chairwoman Doans has been rather more successful in her attempts to idealize Trinityspace to the masses than we originally thought. Quite surprising, really. Five years ago, you wouldn’t have made it past the front doors of that awful Hotel Hospitalis without being shot dead and here you are, the toast of the town. If you would prefer, I can see if I can arrange that for you?”

  “No.” Garth glowered at Alix, irritated that he’d at last come across someone immune to his stares; he’d stared down cyborg kings and chatty cockroaches, leviathans and Deep Strike Elites, but Alixia van derWhosits was stone cold immune. The aging publicist returned his angry gaze with one of such perfect Zen complacence that he buckled. He was going to have to figure out a way to work around the woman’s impossible talents. “Fine. Fuckit. All right. I can’t argue that the show did a good job of making me more acceptable to the eyes of the Universe.” Even if it would make things nearly impossible down the road.

  Chuckling, Alix dropped more ash from her cigarette. “Good boy. Now, about tomorrow. One of the other Big Channels wants to interview you about your personal experiences in surviving the …”

  “Forget it.” Garth shook his head firmly, jaw clenched. Nothing short of a threat from inter-dimensional aliens could keep him from hanging out with Naoko. He’d burn Central to the ground before he’d miss a single moment with that woman. “Not on your life. No interviews. None. Not tomorrow.”

  Alix considered Garth’s facial expression and his absolute adamancy. It was quite remarkable. Alix couldn’t shake the feeling that her newest client wasn’t simply disinterested in being famous; he loathed the idea. It was bizarre, positively alien. Who didn’t like being famous? Who didn’t dream of it day and day out? She couldn’t say how she knew, but Alix was positive that somewhere in that roguish brain, Garth Nickels was actively trying to destroy himself.

  That nothing had come to her attention yet meant either he hadn’t gotten the ball rolling or whatever he’d done hadn’t broken yet. She smiled wryly. Her sister thought she could control this man. The entire system was likely to buckle under such foolishness.

  Still -strictly speaking- it wasn’t terribly necessary for Garth to give personal interviews. Yet. The conversation they’d had the day before could easily be broken into sound bites for the press. It wasn’t optimal, but it was better than trying to corral Nickels into a situation that could cause him to react … poorly. “Very well, sa. No interviews. Yet. I remind you, though: you only have a few days left before what you’ve given me won’t satisfy. When that day comes, it’s either you greet the press or they follow you around.”

  “Let ‘em try.” Garth said confidently, gesturing to his rooms. “I’m in The Palazzo, si. World’s most paranoid Hotel?”

  “Indeed it is.” Alix had stayed there once, a long time in her golden, glorious youth. “But that doesn’t mean reporters can’t get in, Garth. Don’t forget that every Lisa and Lorelei out there wants a piece of you, and if one of those fine people just so happens to be the head of a department of your fabulously expensive hotel, there’s nothing to stop them from letting a reporter in under the sly. No place save The Peak is safe from prying eyes, and I rather doubt you’d like the accommodations. Not enough pillows for that massive head of yours to rest on.”

  Garth hated fencing with Alix. It was like trying to break a brick wall with a goddamn toothpick. “Okay. Four days of peace and quiet, then I promise. I’ll do some face time with the press. But you’d better hope that they’ve got some kind of bleeping device when I swear and some alternate video feeds to cut to if I get all antsy in my pantsy, si. I need you to add something to the agreements; I need absolute and undeniable control over what can be aired. I may mention something that’s classified. So classified that if Trinity heard, It’d send Enforcers out here to purge the data. And then everyone would have a very bad day.”

  Working that rider into any contract would be difficult in the extreme. Latelians, especially Latelian reporters, were notoriously dismissive of Trinityspace and the powers of It’s galactic ruler. They wouldn’t care one way or the other what Garth said. In point of fact, the juicier the better, the more classified, the better. Suggesting that they let Garth view and delete anything he felt was 'unsafe' would leave a mystery would rankle like an infected tooth. Nevertheless, it was a sensible precaution all the same. She’d try, she supposed.

  Alix took a sideways look at Nickels. The set of his shoulders, that particular glint in his eye, the clenching of the jaw … She’d never met a more stubborn person, and her mother, the Bitch Queen of the System, had raised her. Twice in a single conversation, they’d butted against an unbelievably resolute inner core! This man had secrets.

  “Done.” The Big Three would swallow the bitter pill or they’d find one of the runner-up news channels suddenly flush with Garth Nickels exclusives. “Now, before I go and leave you to whatever bizarre hobbies it is you do to keep yourself amused, please tell me you didn’t go out and buy the old Guillfoyle Building.”

  “Can’t tell you that.” Garth grinned from ear to ear. The only thing she was missing was the red shoes, because he’d sure as shit dropped a building on her. “On account of I did.”

  For the first time in her life, Alix pulled her car over to the side because she didn’t think she could keep from crashing into another vehicle after hearing that bombshell. She’d weathered some incredibly stupid decisions from clients; once, a now-not-so-famous opera singer went out and had herself a gangbang that got caught on prote-feed, and she hadn’t even needed to slow down. This, though … it was so colossally stupid she feared she was going to have to take an IQ test when she got home. Who did that? Who went out and bought the building of the man that was accusing you of being the Devil Incarnate? It was mind-boggling. It was also just the sort of thing her client would do.

  “Are you aware, sa,” Alix spoke slowly, at last taking a long, deep drag on her cigarette, “that Ashok Guillfoyle has lobbied claims against you to the effect that you are the Devil? The fact he doesn’t have a tongue any longer does not diminish his ability to communicate through grunts, squeaks and a proteus. Some people do listen to the man, traitorous scum notwithstanding.”

  Garth discreetly placed a call down to the kitchen for some food. He had the sinking feeling Si Alixia van derTuppen was going to want a minute-by-minute description of his day.

  When he got to the part where he shouted, screamed, and generally threatened a lieutenant in the God Army, her head would likely implode.

  He really hoped that happened.

  8:00 AM in the morning is too damn early for some shit

  Even though his conversation with Alix had taken him into the wee hours of the morning, Garth awoke refreshed and ready to take on the whole goddamned Army. His publicist had spent most of that time refusing to understand why he’d even consider purchasing the building of a known traitor, occasionally adding a spicy dash of intellectual doubt when his rebuttals proved insurmountable. It was only thanks to the fact that three-quarters of what he did as a Conglomerate was bound to privacy that Alix backed off, though she remained darkly pessimistic about his abilities to make rational decisions.

  Alix ended the tête-à-tête by speculating that he’d lost his mind in the accident, claiming her job was easier now that she knew he was likely to do something else vastly moronic.

  Standing in the living room debating whether he should wear his Foreign Devil tee or move on to one of the other equally aggravating slogans, Garth noticed he had a few calls waiting for him.

  Clicking through the text messages one after the other, the would-be Conglomerate King learned that Dr. Sullivan was no longer an employee of MediCor, that two thirds of the board of MediCor were under investigation for breach of contract and that the remaining members had quit in protest over the shoddy treatment by their new major shareholder.

  UltraMegaDynamaTron’s proxy director for MediCor was handily dealing
with the power vacuum at the top, choosing replacement directors later that morning. Following announcements of new top staffers, a press statement to the appropriate sectors of both the government and intelligence community regarding the layoffs was going to be released relatively quickly. Everyone quit or fired would likely try to buck the ‘Non-competition’ riders in their contracts, but Garth had been assured in the over-long text that the contracts were binding. No other research and development company would be able to reap any knowledge retained by the freshly unemployed; in short, everyone gone from MediCor was unemployable, would remain so for a long time and would immediately be suspect if anything ‘revolutionary’ in the fields of medicine or genetics arose.

  That was a relief. Garth hadn’t even thought of that. Still, though, he wasn’t particularly pleased with the turn of events. As the now temporarily defunct MediCor was the only ‘functional’ enterprise he owned, the shenanigans didn’t bode well for the future. Luckily, investors weren’t something he needed to worry about.

  The second message came from the restoration company hired by Herrig to survey the building he’d purchased. He zipped through the itemization, not really caring about the cost because beyond the one goal within its walls, there wasn’t much else he planned on doing with the property; his true goal –which wasn’t even properly anything at all yet- saw much more need for properties in Port City than in Central.

  That being said, by the time he reached the end of the extensive document, there was much he didn’t care for; against his explicit instructions, the examiners had gone through the interior of the building floor by floor, adding the cost of inside repairs to the already large price tag.

  Did anyone do as they were told? Could no one on Hospitalis follow simple instructions? He believed in a can-do attitude –hell, he was the most can-do-ist guy he knew- and even admired their one step beyond approach, but really, this was bullshit.

  Even though he wanted to yell, scream, and look for a different contractor, Garth dashed a hasty response off, reiterating that the only thing needing repairs was the exterior of the building. As the words flowed from his fingertips, the email turned adamant: He would brook no discussion on the interior at all. He would sue the pants off them, buy the company and sell off the hardware to people on the streets for pennies.

  Feeling immediately guilty and doubting the origins of his response, Garth sent a second text message hot on the heels of the first, promising large bonuses if they completed the maintenance before the end of the week. Again, Garth lost his temper and wound up guaranteeing in the process that if a single employee went inside to do so much as take a whizz, he’d buy the company, fire every last one of them and launch all their assets into the sun. He hit send anyway, gloomily aware that he could try all day long to write a non-threatening email. He didn’t care. At least it was rude words and not murderous Karate chops to the neck. Feelings mended.

  Garth took a deep breath and stretched the kinks out of his neck. He needed to do better.

  The third communication came from an organization called the ‘Latelian Industry Standards Conglomerate’. It was about as dry a missive as possible without sand being involved.

  Reading through the congratulatory paragraphs with half an eye, Garth eventually settled on the ‘Widowmaker’ t-shirt; the graphic tees were no longer whimsical statements on his frame of mind, they were subtle assertions of what could happen should someone push him too far. Since Latelians spent so much of their time reading, perhaps a text warning would drill into their thick heads quickly enough to save lives.

  He got the gist of the letter from LISC in less than two minutes. The group was a watchdog unit set on him by Doans. The crafty Chairwoman would naturally attempt to disabuse him from such a thought, but the writing on the Sheet was clear.

  From the tone of their communication, they struck Garth as hellaciously eager to get their professional reputations back on track after missing the patently obvious fact that Ashok Guillfoyle was a big fat liar. It was either that or they’d fired all the guys getting payola and were doing their damnedest to put the dark shame behind them. A fair response, to be sure. Any innocent group having done business with Ashok Guillfoyle would naturally want to distance themselves from the world’s most notorious Traitor.

  As Garth read, his eyebrows crawled further and further up his forehead. Someone –most likely Doans, again- had turned them on to his gravnetic generator designs, a huge no-no; if Trinity found out, the machine mind would lose It’s multi-systemic shit all over the place.

  The polite insistence that they be brought in on the ground floor of any new inventions or discoveries -citing the dangers inherent in manipulating gravity and bending EM fields to Man’s whimsy as good enough reason- was quite strong. They couched everything in the politest, most ‘good for the community’ way humanly possible, but Garth was finally coming to understand Latelian phraseology.

  They wanted to spy on him. They wanted to be able to torpedo anything striking them as anti-Latelian before it even got started. Most importantly, they wanted to benefit from his innovative mind before anyone else, almost to the point where no one at all but them enjoyed the fruits of his labors. Garth didn’t want a watchdog group overly concerned with anything hovering around his backside.

  Grinning craftily, Garth cc’d the message to Herrig with an addendum; he asked the man to figure out what the fuck was actually going on in the letter and that he please explain it to the less intelligent. Herrig would see through the sincere glaze in a heartbeat and –knowing his employer as he did by now- would set about putting the brakes on LISC and their demands. He’d probably release another hangdog sigh at the task, but he’d do it.

  After that, a gazillion letters from people all over the system. There was a glut of one-line emails, all falling firmly into one of two categories. He immediately separated them into two distinct categories: the Garth Nickels Fan Club and the Kill the Foreign Devil Now Lynch Mob and Tea Party Crowd.

  He dumped all the fan mail and then emptied the Sheet’s trash. He didn’t want to wake up one morning and feel the need to soothe his ego by reading through all the gushing love letters from severely deranged Latelians.

  The hate mail, though, were treasures; unlike their counterparts, each politely phrased letter of condemnation was at least a solid paragraph long. Which would help, or so he hoped: a single, angrily vile and vehement email from that pile would deflate any swollen ego threatening to smother rational thought. There were real people out there who hated his guts and they had the ability to reach out to him.

  No one across The Cordon could do that, though there were worlds out there that wished they could.

  If there were time to spare between now and stealing The Box, he’d go through each to see what it was that’d turned him into a baby-eating megalomaniacal monster. Then he’d expand on those behaviors, Alixia van derTuppen be damned.

  Three messages from Alix popped onto the system and he trashed them without thinking. His publicist had warned she’d get back to him first thing in the morning concerning the potentially career-destroying decision buying the Guillfoyle.

  He didn’t want any of it.

  Today was his day to hang out with Naoko Kamagana, she of the gorgeous dark hair, luminous green eyes, and shockingly amazing figure.

  He was a ball of nerves.

  Ironically, he had Alix to thank for the rest he’d been given; if he hadn’t argued the night away, he wouldn’t have slept at all and that was no way to go on a date! Or so he suspected.

  There were no messages or missed calls from Naoko, but it was still quite early, even for a guy who used to wake up at the crack of several hours before dawn even thought about showing up. With all the hard work she’d put in to helping the clean-up crews at the port, Garth imagined the poor girl needed all the sleep she could get. Deciding that if he didn’t hear from her by ten, he’d call her, Garth pulled on the rest of his clothes and went off in search of a Continental
Breakfast.

  Chapter Four:

  Naoko’s Discoveries

  Naoko stifled a yawn with the back of her hand. The yawn went on for a very long time, ending with a shudder that threatened to throw her off the chair. The young woman looked around sheepishly, hoping her Father had heard nothing. Faint sounds of him puttering around in the kitchen reached her ears, which was good.

  The old man was preparing his daily meal; he was lucky enough to have been invited to the God soldier Elimination rounds, and was up very early as a result. Hearing his only daughter fall to the floor with a loud thump wouldn’t stop him from going to such a prestigious event, but it would bring him running.

  Whereupon –thanks to the man’s inability to recognize personal boundaries where his much-cherished daughter was concerned- he would quite blatantly read what was on her Screens while she lay there, potentially wounded. The worst part of the whole dreamed-up experience was that her Father would say nothing. He’d merely hem and haw and tell some parable of his own young foolishness, expecting in the process that she do the right thing.

  Unfortunately, in this instance, the right thing was also the worst thing.

  Morgan the Dead had come through on his promise to deliver all available information on Garth Nickels to her main by the time she got home, and so, rather than study for school or prepare for the day’s events, she’d started reading.

  And what a read!

  Naoko shivered, unable –and unwilling- to forget the price Morgan had endured in getting the material. After seeing what was available, what the man could do… very nearly any price was worth paying to help the man called Garth Nickels.

  At the same time, Naoko wondered if her Decision Tree could really be worth so much as all that. If it’d been worthless, Morgan the Dead wouldn’t’ve opened the front door for her, much less … do … whatever it is he’d done to get the files on Garth Nickels. But gain them he had, with all due haste, leading her to toy briefly with the notion of making her Tree available for purchase. The only reason she didn’t was thanks to Lady Ha; the hacker mastermind’s digital fingerprints were immediately recognizable, and anyone who looked at the coding behind the Trees would instantly see that Naoko Kamagana was Ha.