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

  The comm line went dead, leaving Eddie to stare thoughtlessly at the screen.

  It was time to take a look at the beast in the basement.

  ***

  Emperor-for-Life Etienne Marseilles aka Eddie Marshall stared at the thing in the box. He knew what he wanted it to be because that’d make things so much easier, but for the time being, there was no way of knowing what –if anything- it really was.

  He wanted it to be the tattered remains of something from the proto-Reality, some flimsy little remainder of how the Ushbet M’Tai had corralled Garth into the mindset they’d wanted, how they’d managed to massage and manipulate everything in the man’s life.

  Etienne wanted it to be that because if the chromatic extrusion of color, the shifting palette of grays and silvers and platinums that rapped and tapped it’s way through it’s tiny little prison like a sketch with low FPS was even the tiniest bit M’Tai, then …

  Then he might be able to resurrect some form of proto-Realistic deity from the weird thing in the box that was in the basement.

  With something like that under his control, Emperor-for-Life Etienne Marseilles reckoned he’d be able to go head to head with not just Kith Antal and his burgeoning army of trillions but the very Engines of Creation themselves.

  Etienne nodded.

  Godhood.

  Once the idea was on the table, it was damned difficult to ignore.

  All the herky-jerky thing needed was a little TLC, a little juice from the incongruity and some exposure to N’Chalez’ antics in the pocket dimension. If there was anything in there that remembered being a god, there’d be a reaction.

  If not? Well, there was a bit of power in there that’d do well if it was added to the incongruity’s matrices.

  Eddie nodded again before deciding to go check on Garth’s progress; if things were going the way he suspected, the arrogant Kin’kithal was just that moment finding out just how difficult it was to battle a true time-traveler, one that had a far more precise view of history than the M’Zahdi Hesh.

  This was turning out to be a win-win-win kind of situation all over everywhere …

  ***

  Unbeknownst to Emperor-for-Life Etienne Marseilles, as he was watching the thing in the box, so too was the thing in the box watching him.

  Slowly but surely, the wheels would turn.

  7. Simply Not Possible

  Something on one of the staticky screens wasn’t right.

  Baron Samiel could tell.

  He’d been staring at them for generations, absorbing and contemplating the precision-engineered flow of time, the most pristine and elegant way for things to happen, and across such an extended length of time that he could simply gaze, unseeing, and locate the error; fully five thousand years of history flowed across the apparently endless row of monitors, and he was as intimate with every second of that pre-history as he was with his own name.

  Some of the monitors were bigger than others, and those were dedicated specifically to the main mooring points of his great and grand DeadShop Experiment. Through those glistening windows, Baron Samiel could peer –sometimes effectively, sometimes not, depending on the person, the moment in time and a whole host of other factors that still seemed to be more random than specific- right out through the eyes of those he’d severed from Reality.

  It wasn’t something the Baron enjoyed doing, that staring out through the eyes of his minions, because some of them couldn't maintain a full and safe connection to the thin thread of their mediocre lives. They burned out like pathetic, old-time light bulbs, overwhelmed and overpowered by his terrible powers.

  Most of the monitors were tiny little things, little more than statistical trackers, keeping an eye on established, historical fact. Generally not necessary, but as a time-traveler, as someone capable of maintaining five thousand years of history in his memory at any one time, there was no one more suitable to admit that sometimes, strange things happened.

  It was the way of the Universe. One moment, an occurrence that’d been stable as a table since the very beginning of his DeadShop venture would go sideways, careening off into the murky distance, threatening to break the legs of that metaphorical temporal table clean off.

  When that happened, it was just a matter of issuing a minion to scurry off to the aforementioned moment in time and put things back where they belonged.

  The luxury of a time traveler with a legion of disposable, Reality-free worker bees was that it didn’t matter how long it took or how many of those bees died in the process, because you had all the time in the Universe to get it right.

  It probably wasn’t a big problem, this minor glitch. They happened. It was life. It was history. It was the …

  Baron Samiel’s eyes, shielded by huge aviator glasses mounted directly to his face via clamps melded to the bone of his skull, would’ve bugged right out of their sockets and popped out onto the consoles were they not held in place by those very same glasses.

  This wasn’t a minor glitch, some semi-important person going left instead of going right or a leaf falling into the eyes of a sniper at that penultimate moment, this was …

  “Simply not possible.” Baron Samiel’s high-pitched voice was a hiss of disbelief. Before his very cautious scrutiny, rolling error codes began flashing across the whole of his continuity, a deadly ripple effect that threatened to blow everything out of the water.

  This wasn’t a ruined table.

  This was a fractured timeline.

  “Not possible. No, no, not possible.” Baron Samiel was at a loss. Stretched fat fingers flew across keyboards, trolling the murky past for answers, explanations, anything that might throw light on this most impossible moment.

  The property was gone. Stolen from him. Right there in the beginning times, at the very first juncture of The Line, that most precious moment, right there, when he’d first landed. The first thing he’d ever done.

  Ripped and stolen from him.

  From his very own personal timeline.

  A timeline that no longer existed.

  Naturally, he’d gone out of his way to erase himself from history once he’d gotten to the very end of The Line, scrupulously washing and scrubbing his own self out of the picture and replacing all of his actions with the actions of others, using a revolving and rotating casting call of footsoldiers and the cautiously manipulated doings of others but still.

  Everything he’d ever done back then always happened.

  Had to.

  Baron Samiel exhaled noisily through his nose. Was he protected from paradox? He thought he must be so, because if he wasn’t, he would’ve probably gone pop by now, yes? The rolling codes continued flexing their way down The Line, pushing and prodding everything out of whack. Entire signature moments were being gutted!

  There was time before those changes got to the end of The Line, where he squatted. Time still to fix the situation before everything clattered off that table.

  Baron Samiel pushed a button. A link was made. “Lissande.”

  Lissande Amour’s dulcet tones shivered through the air. “Baron Samiel. How can I assist you?”

  “Something has gone … wrong. With a prime stability point.”

  “I thought that wasn’t possible.”

  “Shouldn’t be. Shouldn’t be.” Baron liked Lissande. Of all his soldiers, of all his glorious chimera, she was best and brightest. She understood things perfectly, all the time. “But here we are.”

  “Which point?” She sounded busy, distracted.

  Baron nodded when he recalled what she was up to: priming the Bishop boy. Most important. Most needed. Yes. “SlimJim’s.”

  “What’s that?” Lissande’s puzzlement wasn’t forced, wasn’t faked.

  Samiel bit back a curse. Forgotten already. Ripped right out of her mind as if it’d never been, as if she’d never even been there, cajoling Drake Bishop down a dark path with her seductive, wily ways. He rattled off the address of the old school that would, in the local timeline,
become a major focal point for his efforts at that point and for many decades to come. “This has always been mine. I need it to be mine again. I need you to move up The Line a few months…”

  “Bishop’s cagier than expected.” Lissande interrupted. “He’s resisting my charms. Again. Worse than ever. Infiltrating his security team over here was easier than this. For the lady’s man and legitimate hound he is back home, he’s playing it remarkably safe over here. His friend … the one with the hair and the stupid nickname, would be an easier target.”

  Samiel had long considered Eddie Marshall a viable suspect for the endgame procedure, eventually choosing Bishop instead for one good reason and one good reason alone; of the two, Bishop’s stranglehold on the business market in a few years down The Line grew to be so profound that it wouldn’t be until decades after … after what happened that any other company gained a foothold. Marshall’s intellect and inventive prowess would take many more years to flourish.

  Too long, in fact, to be of any use whatsoever.

  “No.” Samiel stated baldly. “Needs to be Bishop.”

  “Well, I don’t know what you want me to do then. This address … this ‘SlimJim’s’, is it as important as the man?”

  Baron Samiel pulled back and considered the carnage being wrought on his wonderful plans. It was beautiful, in it’s own way, how everything was cascading from green to red, a glorious sine wave of unraveling plans and crumbling fortifications. The loss of SlimJim’s represented a core weakness in his West Coast operations, a fault line that propagated itself forward until the 25th century, when Jim Seeker and his band of lunatics and pathetic weaklings chose to rise up out of mediocrity to battle someone that was undefeated.

  Without the schoolhouse turned nightclub turned primary base of operations once the dust from the 21st century destruction settled, Seeker et al were already growing more powerful in the region, conscripting loyalists at an alarming rate. Too much longer, and that sector of the Line would become a prime point, unimaginably fortified against temporal predation.

  “Yes. Almost more so.” Samiel tapped one of the monitors. How could this have happened?

  Oh, the possibilities were nearly endless.

  Someone –however improbably- had developed their own method of time travel. Samiel had never looked into other procedures because the temporal incongruity was by far and away the easiest method.

  One of them had fallen through a crack in the Universe. Very improbably, but given how things had gone, still likely. Locked into the past as he’d been upon his arrival, the deadly enemy had to be possessed of an awareness of what’d traversed prior to their arrival and was now preparing to do as he’d done.

  Some new, strange enemy, attracted by the terrible war and awful devastation, had followed them through their crack between the walls of fiction and fact and was curious.

  And on and on and on.

  “Baron? Baron! Baron!”

  “Sorry my dear, I was … distracted. There is so much going on here, this far up The Line. You were saying?” Which possibility could it be? What else could it be? What was he missing?

  “Things with Bishop are going to take at least another three weeks. Then they’re heading back to San Francisco. I can try to hurry things along or … or you can split me, but that’ll reduce my efficacy.”

  The timbre of Lissande’s voice screamed reluctance over being split louder than the destruction of the Universe itself, and Samiel commiserated; it was possible –with a great deal of effort and with possible eradication looming over all their heads until the moment it was done- to use the incongruity to pull either a former or future version of one of his special children to the same location as the local one, thereby creating a … duplicate.

  Lissande’s dislike of splitting was well-founded. Not only was it painful, it generated paradoxical memories that were almost impossible to smooth out, and the more often a person was split, the more deeply rooted those contradictory histories became, eventually resulting in madness and ultimately, a very messy death.

  His most favorite girl had already been split twice. He couldn’t risk her again, for as much as she might suspect she was as important to his plans as Drake Bishop or the property in San Francisco, she could never know that she’d be with him until the bitter, bloody end.

  “No.” Samiel’s tone was one of utter finality. “I can’t risk it. I need you operating at one hundred percent efficiency, especially if Bishop is being mulish. I’ll use local assets to deal with whoever or whatever took the property from me.”

  “Understood.” Lissande’s relief rolled through Samiel’s workspace. “The moment I’m successful with Bishop, I’ll move up.”

  “There shouldn’t be a need. Unless the situation changes radically, of course.” Now his course was set, Samiel was certain all it’d take to get the land back was a drone malfunction. Once that was done, once whoever’d stolen his future away from him was obliterated and the old schoolhouse burned down to the foundation, he could use a proxy to purchase the ruined land from the government and commence building SlimJim’s –and all that would be beneath the soil- in the way it’d always been built. “Should my own efforts somehow fail, I will contact you.”

  “Understood. Lissande out.”

  “Until later.” Baron Samiel leaned back in his chair to consider how fragile time really was; both scientists and philosophers –not just in the 21st century, but throughout history- had always considered time to be one of the more stable things in existence, somehow magically course correcting when something defined –somehow- as a ‘fixed point’ was affected by wild improbability.

  They’d only ever had theory and possibility. They’d never possessed the understanding someone like him owned, and their tiny little minds would melt into soup at the merest explanation of how fragile and easily ruined history could be when the right pressures were brought to bear in the right places.

  It’d taken him thousands and thousands of years and quite possibly hundreds of thousands of corrections, alterations and adjustments to get this close to finding the precise method of ensuring that the upcoming invasion would be a mere bump on the road, and he was damned if anything was going to affect his eternal work.

  He’d become evil incarnate to ensure that victory and his personal sacrifices weren’t to be dismissed.

  This was but a minor hiccup. One that would be solved with missiles and fire. Not the most elegant of resolutions, but sometimes, oldies really were the goodies.

  Samiel pressed a button on the control panel. The connection was made. “Granger. I need assistance from someone in your San Francisco offices. I would like to schedule a severe drone malfunction at…”

  8. Arcadians and the Things They Get Up To…

  Pointer Has a Think On Things Before Getting In Proper Gear

  Chevril Pointillier had grown accustomed to the concept of flight almost from the very moment he’d first stuck his head out the window of his old accommodations to spy upon the strange things whizzing through the sky like the birds that’d been long lost to poor old Arcadia; with all the thoughts fizzing and sparking in his old melon, filling him in on things like projected rate of travel, distances achievable on a single ‘energy cell’ and even summat as hair-raising as maximum height, the old Gearmaster had taken it as moot that the things he saw were as natural to this world as watching a gearhead solder his arm back on with a fine paste of Dark Iron was to his.

  That were in theory, and as Chevy had learned long ago, theory weren’t much more than a drunk lad sayin’ as how he’d done for a King all on his own. Well. Excluding the one person he knew as had done it on his lonesome, and of course them greyskins and the damned Golems …

  Chevy raised a trembling hand to his forehead to wipe it clear of the fine beads of sweat as were taking up permanent residence there. The bonny lad who’d just dropped him off in this … he took a quick look around to get a better look at his new surroundings … in this park higher in the
sky than were surely advisable was even that second winging away in his Zorton Airloft Special V2.0, none the wiser that the man who’d literally leaped from a window and onto said flying deathtrap without blinking an eye were as close to a heart attack as he’d ever been, and for considerably less hair-raising reasons than jumping forth from a high building into the thinnest of airs.

  “Well now,” Chevy said charitably to himself, “hain’t like I ever been in a car as flew before this very minute, now is it? I warrant any lad or lass in this place got a peeperful of lumbering Big’Un or an Obsidian Golem in the midst of a rampage would find themselves a little damp in the undergarments their ownselves, hey?”

  Chevy moved himself circumspectly away from the landing pad, keeping half an eye on the building he’d jumped free of. Gut instinct and the whispering voice in his head as understood things like engines and airspeed and electricity and all else as were taken for granted here suggested that it were highly likely no one in the … Stack –which were nearly dark and silent as any old tomb in Arcadia- were going to come alooking for him right then and there.

  If at all! Aye, the way Chevy saw it, them inside had other, more pressing matters to attend to just that moment.

  The flying lad –one Petros Markham Dandilier- had informed him once he’d satisfied himself that the lunatic dressed in a metal longcoat who enjoyed leaping from windows wasn’t a violent madman at all, that Stack 17 were in the worst sort of ways right then; sometime between his flinging himself out the window to make a lucky landing on the Zorton Airloft, the Stack had been ‘shut down’.

  Pressing for details had revealed a very dark, unhappy future for the billion or so residents calling the darkened superstructure home, with Petros saying it were most likely that –minus them as could make their way to the top levels whereupon they could call for help to their neighbors- they’d all be dead in a week or so as things like food and water and whatever methods they were using for their backup generators failed.