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

  Drake watched Garth’s body disassemble itself before being vacuumed up by the ever-present incongruity’s presence; the rest of the scene began fast-reversing itself to the moment where their friend woke up in the cab, but he interrupted the process, stopping the reversal as soon as they got to the part where the car door popped open.

  “What the hell?” Sparks looked over at Drake. “What d’you think you’re doing, man? He didn’t make it to an approved save point. He starts over.”

  “Give it to him.” Drake demanded bluntly. While he was pissed they’d apparently wasted their entire lives here in the Unreal Universe, devoting considerable time and effort into ensuring their best friend forever had the kind of help he’d always wanted and never had, he was –for the time being- more pissed at Sparks for his part in trapping him in BishopCo Stacks, in a Spur suit, for five thousand years.

  That mood would eventually –probably- flip back once the crushing realization that they’d turned themselves into mostly gods for a guy who neither needed nor wanted their help, but until then, he was going to ride Sparks pretty hard.

  “Give it to him?” Sparks couldn’t believe his ears. “Give it to him.” He repeated, flatly, completely stunned.

  Drake pointed to the frozen moment in time just to make certain his point was being made. “Give it to him. He deserves it. He’s died something like a hundred times in a goddamn cab, man.”

  Sparks didn’t respond. Instead, he gestured. A beautiful woman’s face popped into place over top of Garth's cab. “Naoko Kamagana. An actual daughter of mine. Born from my loins.”

  “No one says loins, not even this far in the future.” Drake caught the awkward look in his friend’s eyes and suspected that over the course of five thousand unsupervised and Drake-less years, Sparks Dangerously had uttered many off-kilter things.

  That extra five thousand solo years of connection to the incongruity had done some pretty weird things to his friend, that was for certain.

  Drake wondered how deep the changes were rooted.

  “She’s my daughter. An actual, genetic daughter. But she’s more than that, and you know it.” Sparks gestured again, and all the girl’s grades, all her achievements, psychological profiles, intelligence tests, everything the young woman had accomplished in Latelyspace flowed around the wonderful picture of youthfulness. “She, like Latelyspace, was a gift. And he ruined everything.”

  “I disagree.” Drake hurried to explain when a very angry color crossed Sparks’ face. “About Latelyspace, I mean. Yes, you worked long and hard to ensure that a civilization would rise up in that place, one dedicated to avoiding the ‘evils of AI minds’ because of what’s actually going on with Trinity Itself, but the rest of it? Not our fault, not his fault. The people of this Universe are incomprehensibly shitty, dude. You know this. Everything that happened there is either a direct result of the original settlers messing around with Kith technology or plain old human greed. Or Lisa Laughlin’s intervention.”

  Neither man said anything further on Lisa. There was nothing that could be said.

  Where their powers were immense, hers had been colossal; she’d possessed the ability to project herself right into the heart of the sanctuary provided by the incongruity, and she’d burrowed into their minds and souls in search of the reasons for their existence, and for meddling into affairs that weren’t theirs to concern themselves with.

  Both men thanked the heavens that this had taken place before the current … souring … of their intentions: they’d each tried expelling, subduing or destroying the numinous entity that was a true goddess for the Unreal Universe. Tried, and failed.

  Gloriously. She’d laughed at them with savage contempt, mocked them for the power they clung to, made them feel … small.

  But she'd let them live. Deemed their intentions worthy. Hell, she'd even offered them some pointers.

  If she’d come after, when Sparks’ patience and forgiving nature had transformed into the vendetta that now coursed through his veins like a vitriolic poison, … it didn’t take a genius to know that the woman would’ve burned their minds from their skulls.

  “Fine. Okay. Yes.” Sparks conceded the point.

  Their one true effort in actually creating a system instead of contacting various EuroJapanese civilizations throughout Trinityspace and reminding them of the reasons behind their fealty to the Emperor-for-Life hadn’t been all that successful, which was why they’d stopped at the one.

  For bonus points, N’Chalez –asshole that he was- seemed to’ve found a way to work with a civilization on the brink of utter disaster, which only strengthened Sparks’ stance when it came to their old friend; because Garth had proven so capable of working with a nearly ruined system, he broke everything around him until it fit his modus operandi.

  “But my daughter is another thing entirely. Once we understood the nature of the Universe and what was wrong with it, I worked so hard to ensure he’d have someone who could help reorder things.”

  Sparks gestured again, and the view before them both changed into something bleak and oppressive.

  Drake drank the scene in, feeling a remorse he knew Sparks had to see.

  What’d happened –was happening- to Naoko Kamagana was a terrible thing. Perhaps one of the worst things to ever befall a single human being in all of Trinityspace’s long, varied history.

  And he’d tried so hard to prevent the damned CyberPriests from capturing her, because –even without speaking with Sparks- he’d known immediately what those twisted cybernetic madmen would do.

  If only he’d considered Chadsik al-Taryin’s involvement, factoring in the level of his intent to secure the girl for them so he himself could be free of their madness.

  A clusterfuck of profound proportions, in every sense of the word.

  On-screen, the mad Lady Ha’s empire grew like a cybernetic tick feeding cruelly on the lifeblood of the entire solar system. When she’d arrived, twisted and broken mind hungry for revenge against the Elder members of Yellow Dog who’d so cruelly ruined her Father’s life, it’d just been her, a single upgraded CyberHacker with a twisted and poorly healing mind.

  And, of course, a body full of CyberPriest technology. And a mind genetically engineered to hack the Universe for one Garth N’Chalez.

  But now, things were different.

  Now she controlled nearly a third of Jade Whisper, and she was filling that space with strange vessels that twisted and turned queerly under the light of the Unreal Universe, awkward, awful black machines with long, flexible parts that clicked and clacked and sent shivers through the skin of the Unreality.

  Whole worlds –two of them, in fact- were buried beneath a dark, impassible fugue, the men and women ‘LINKed to their mistress through cerebral implants that stole their minds and controlled their bodies. For the most part, they toiled through their days on autopilot as every single inch of their homeworlds was prepped for mining, for the indomitable Lady Ha was building … something.

  Not even two men, armed with the power of the incongruity, could comprehend what it was she sought to build.

  And her armada grew, too, sometimes on an hourly basis, as desperate and terrified Yellow Dog Elders squandered more and more of their immense wealth by hiring mercenary forces to –at the very least- pick at the edges of this strange invader’s even stranger army.

  Glass Hammer. Torquemada’s Armada. Shattered Silence. Brave X. Quando’s Emporium of Enforcers.

  Others, too, Offworld war profiteers profoundly illegal to employ within Trinityspace; the Shibraxi Select, O’oal Salat, Mentex.

  All, all of them, snared by those strange, shivering machines.

  The hardware, disassembled and flown to the center of Lady Ha’s empire for further use. The organic matter, either repurposed for deployment on one of the slave planets or simply discarded as pointless.

  And then, of course, there was Ha herself. Damaged somehow before her cybernetic defenses could come on line properly, that damag
e was now a part of her augmented matrix, and the … intentional corruption that came with being CyberPriested now … flowered.

  Grotesquely. Awfully. Insanely, it flowered from her wounds, some kind of twisted angelic eruption of halos and spires and shimmering lights that hurt even their eyes whenever they looked at it.

  Sparks snapped the maddening images away, and their auditorium literally rang with silence for a long, tenuous moment.

  Then, full of grief and sorrow, Sparks found his voice. “And you want me to ‘give it to him’? She was perfect. One of the only decent things in the Universe, Drake. An intellect, an organic intellect, truly capable of considering and understanding this Unreality for what it is, and she’s become this … this … thing. Because of him. Because she fell in love with him. Lord only knows what exposure to his Kin’kithal nature has done to her on top of all that. And you want me to give it to him.”

  Drake was currently in the process of accessing information concerning the so-called N’Chalez Effect in an effort to understand just what happened when the man spent too much time focusing on specific people, so he held his tongue on what may have happened to Naoko; there wasn’t enough data for him to prove his theory that nothing at all would’ve happened, or that the CyberPriesting had ground out the changes, and besides all that, as far as Sparks was concerned, it wouldn’t matter.

  Garth was to blame, and so he would always be to blame for Naoko’s downfall.

  Besides, there was a better tactic to follow, here.

  “If you keep him trapped in the cab ride, he will forever try to break free.” Drake indicated Garth’s intent. “He knows this is some kind of simulation, or is at the very least treating it as one, leaving him with considerable motivation to keep fighting. Forever. He won’t give up. Because he can’t. I’ve only peeked at some of his memories, of some of the things he’s gone through since returning home, and from what I’ve seen … you call our friend a savage and maybe you’re right. He definitely has a fucking vicious streak that neither one of us dreamed existed, but more than that, he won’t quit. Because of that viciousness, because of that savagery. Instead of the cab ride …”

  “No. He stays there. Forever. Or until he admits he’s a failure. Then we can destroy the Universe to make way for a better one.”

  Drake leveled a thoughtful gaze at his friend. “Is that what you really want? To become Gods of another Universe?”

  Sparks laughed, the first true laugh since … he didn’t know when. “I thought about it for half a minute, yeah, but no. The incongruity will survive the death and birth. We can continue doin’ what we’ve been doin’. We’ll pop in and out all over the place, take a look, have the ultimate adventure. I don’t want to be in charge of nothing.”

  Drake nodded. Neither did he. The pressure of something like that had to be enormous. Hell, the two of them working on smoothing the way for Garth had been more than taxing, more often than not, and they'd had the incongruity helping them every step of the way.

  To think that Garth had come all this way, done everything, all on his own …

  “Okay, look,” Sparks cleared his throat, “I get what you’re saying here, all right? But why are you saying it? This man … what he did to our proto-Reality… what he did to Naoko … that needs paying for.”

  “Well, dude, he ain’t gonna pay for it on a fucking eternal cab ride. I swear the last time his head got cracked open by a log from that truck, he actually laughed.” Drake threw a bunch of moments from Garth’s personal history onto the wall. “Look at these. Look. Our man can soak up physical pain and punishment like no one’s business, but these … here. Look. Look at how he’s feeling when he sees how sick I was in that Vegas suite. He’s gutted. Look at his expression when you rip into him for violating the sanctity of our friendship, or here, in the future, when he’s all the fuck alone and roaming through irradiated wastelands doing … nothing. He’s just lost out there, man, being hunted by zoners, ostracized by the only people who could’ve helped him because he accidentally let loose with his Kin’kithal mojo in front of them … shit like this will break him way more than a five minute gag reel of his deaths. If you keep him locked here, it’ll eventually lose all meaning. But if you let him get further in, when he realizes how terrible things actually are without the Ushbet’s interference … it’ll be like cake, bro. Like cake.”

  Sparks considered Drake’s words. Of course, the man was right. When it came to matters of the heart, Drake was almost always right. He nodded slowly.

  “All right. I’ll allow it.”

  Garth was going to get his wish.

  And long may he suffer for the freedom he was about to receive.

  Hitting the Ground Running

  Garth opened his eyes expecting to deal with the irate cabbie losing his shit –still, for no apparent or particular reason- on the spastic driver next to them, mind already working on some new method of getting out of the cab at the right moment when he realized that he was midway through the action using the combination of the cab’s momentum and his own bodyweight to slam the door wide open.

  “Shitshitshit!”

  He was out in the air before he could properly prepare himself, the frenzied sounds of American steel snarling and snapping all around him. Rolling into a ball hadn’t done him any favors last time –the faint vestiges of the brutal road rash turning his arm into five pounds of ground round still lingered - so this time, he went for the old tuck and roll.

  Heart hammering with excitement, mind whirling –trying to decide if this was some kind of trick being played by the already obviously cruel Etienne Marseilles or if the tricky bastard had finally gotten bored of Final Destination 78: Garth Doesn’t Give a Fuck Anymore- Garth flowed into the roll with perfect execution, pleased as all get out that the Emperor hadn’t used his evil mojo to remove naturally developed skills and abilities along with everything else.

  It wasn’t the best landing he’d ever made, but it certainly wasn’t the worst. That honor went to the time he’d been attempting a bad ass ultra-high-altitude insertion onto a planet –complete with awesome flame spirals and smoke puffers and the whole nine yards- and his suit had failed at the very last minute.

  If he hadn’t been in the middle of being a full-blown Specter, he probably would’ve died, leaving behind a very amusing hole in the ground along with a terribly unimpressed corpse.

  Still, as he rolled to his feet, Garth took the scrapes and bruises to his palms, knees and elbows as the price of admission, but he didn’t take any time off for being exceptionally awesome to loiter; the same lookee-loos from the last time around were still on the sidewalks, doing everything from taking selfies with the blazoning fire in the hopes of hitting a new meme record and doing on-the-spot flash journalism in the hopes of being able to sell their five minute mpeg to the local news for some cash.

  They were still looking sideways at him, trying to muster the courage to approach.

  The Kin’kithal zipped up to the sidewalk where he’d stood before, intending on orienting himself on those few idiots who’d ratted him out to the rapidly approaching cops when a sharp pain very reminiscent of the wounds he’d earned the last time around rattled the cage a bit.

  Hurriedly checking his shoulder to see if the Emperor had opted to be a colossal asshole by translating those old wounds into this new iteration and finding nothing but an uninjured shoulder vibrating with sympathetic pain prompted Garth to … not precisely worry …

  What the hell?

  Something was twigging those pain receptors.

  Wasting a few precious seconds he didn't have -lookee-loos being lookee-loos and cops being cops-, Garth did a rapid scan of the area in search of answers.

  If he’d been in any more of a hurry, he'd've missed it, but with his Spidey senses tingling as they were, it didn't take much to spot the weirdness giving him problems.

  It was just that the weirdness didn't make any sense and it'd continue not making sense because with ever
y goddamn person smartphoning the shit out of the area and Not So Friendly Officer Gary making his way through the crowd right that second, lingering wasn't an option.

  The weirdness beckoned for him to linger.

  Dried blood. His dried blood, there, on the ground, looking obscenely bright thanks to the brilliant fire raging not too far away.

  Garth knew that if only had the time, he could follow the pitter-patter trail of blood right to the scene of his extravagant death by UAV, but he was already out of time.

  Lookee-Loo Number #1 had done his civic duty and Officer Gary was already en route.

  “Fuck my life.” Garth hung his head for a moment, considering his options.

  Talking to Lalcombe would always lead down the same path because the officer’s involvement in this situation was perfectly scripted. Sooner or later, Gary'd ask for the Pidpak, and then they'd be on Page 182 of Garth's Least Favorite Choose Your Own Adventure Book.

  Running away before Gary got here would only bring the UAV that much quicker. That much was certain, and while his injuries were gone, Garth really doubted the Emperor had randomly decided to return his missing powers to him.

  The UAV thing bothered Garth. Quite a bit, really; when he'd last been with Drake and Sparks, he'd never really been concerned overly much with the ever-present Eyes in the Sky or the cameras on every pole or the quietly intense way everyone was watched all the time. He’d accepted the American government's vigilance and factored it into his reactions, and that'd been that.

  He should’ve paid more attention to that kind of stuff. He should’ve. But he’d also been a full-blown Kin’kithal at the time, rocking a sturdy assortment of ex-dee given powers and abilities, so what real worries had he really had? His only overriding concern back then had been 'don't wind up on Youtube flipping cars end over end with the power of your mind'.