Citizen Pariah (Unreal Universe Book 3)

by Lee

  Citizen Pariah:

  The Latelian Cycle Volume Three

  Lee Bond

  ©copyright Lee Bond 2014

  kindle Edition

  A special thanks to all my fans! You’ve been running with Garth ‘Nickels’ N’Chalez since the beginning, and I appreciate each and every one of you!

  Aftermath

  The Most August Lady Ha’s ‘Difficult’ Choice

  Naoko woke quietly, momentarily forgetting where she was; it wasn’t until her eyes –blinking and fluttering against sleep- fell on the ridiculously wonderful stairwell spiraling up to a second floor that she remembered she was in Garth Nickel’s bedroom. A sly smile stole across her face. She wondered what her friends –her father- would think about that.

  Lying in bed, Naoko wondered where Garth was; the last thing she remembered was him saying he was going for a shower. The woman wrinkled her nose. Knowing him, he was sleeping in the other room to prevent anything untoward. Her Father would approve of that.

  Remembering her father brought her bolt upright and fully awake within seconds. Her Father! She hadn’t spoken to him in hours! Almost the entire day and … and he’d known she was going to The Museum! He had to be insane with worry.

  “Foolish girl!” Naoko berated herself, mimicking her father’s predictable ire.

  A terrible tragedy easily beating the Spaceport Disaster in terms of life lost with her being in the middle of it and not reaching out to her father. What kind of daughter forgot that?

  Naoko fussed with her hair a bit. Then, deciding it was improper for her to be seen in anyone’s bed but her own –even if that anyone had saved her life, and the lives of thousands of others- Naoko moved to the foot of the stairs. After making sure her prote-cam would show nothing improper, she nervously placed the call.

  Tomas Kamagana answered almost immediately. Of course he was awake; The Museum was a smoking ruin. She was most likely the only Latelian on the planet with her head on a pillow.

  “Hello, daughter.” Tomas greeted his daughter reprovingly, eyes narrowed to concerned points. Where was she? He could find out, naturally, but it was better done other ways.

  Naoko fought to keep from pouting. She was a grown woman and she could do what she wanted. She was Director of the Spaceport, and although her job was now in limbo, that made her a very powerful person indeed! She’d spoken to the Chairwoman herself on a number of occasions, and most recently, had been congratulated on the efficiency of her work models for both Penzengraaf and DSU. How could he still make her feel like … like a child?

  It wasn’t even as if the man was angry; his tone simply said he’d expected more of her. Naoko blinked. She was being irrational. “Hello, father.” She answered in her meekest, quietest voice.

  Tomas Kamagana resisted the urge to smile. For a moment there, the internal war raging across his daughter’s face had reminded him of his dear wife. The two were so similar at times, it was painful. “Interesting evening?”

  Naoko bobbed her head, cheeks flushing instantly. “Yes, father. Very interesting.” She wanted to shout about the things she’d seen, about the things she’d done. She’d prevented a Sigma! No one in the world had done that! No one in five thousand years had done that. She’d simultaneously hacked thousands of proteii and beamed a never-ending stream of data to News4You. She’d seen … she’d seen Garth Nickels incarnate himself into … a God of War, a tireless, ceaseless hero trying to protect the lives of innocent Latelians.

  Naoko closed her eyes for a moment, took a deep breath. The things she had seen. They would be with her for a lifetime.

  “How was your ‘date’?” Tomas asked around a mouthful of pipe smoke. His eyes drifted to one side; the Screen to his left was replaying Chairwoman Doans’ heart pounding Regimist speech.

  Doans had come close to spilling secrets decades in the keeping, and yet perhaps only one in a hundred million might find themselves looking for more answers, answers gaining them nothing but disappearance into the night. More systems. Of course they needed more. Anyone with half a brain knew that. All you needed to do was look out your window and see the truth of it. He was regularly greeted by a half-hundred of his closest neighbors every time he checked the weather. All that, and hundreds of millions still missed what was right in front of their faces.

  Alyssa Doans had ever been a consummate liar, but that speech was the pinnacle of Politics. No one questioned how they were going to get those new systems, or the toll they would ultimately pay. They just accepted that the Chairwoman would get them what they needed and went on with their lives, blissfully ignorant.

  “It wasn’t really a date, Father.” Naoko bit back a yawn. “It was … noisy.”

  At this, Tomas could not help but laugh aloud. He loved his daughter so! When she wasn’t busy playing at being like his wife, she was busy playing him. Only much better! Very well. As she was, so too would he be. “I believe I heard something about this on one of the slower news channels, daughter. Are you safe now?”

  Naoko looked at her surroundings. She thought about the security guards and the systems in place at The Palazzo, remembered some of the things Garth had told her about how seriously the Hotel took the privacy of the guests. Short of renting a room at The Peak, there really was no safer place on all of Hospitalis. “I am, father.”

  “And … and Garth Nickels?” Introspection said no one should trust Garth Nickels, but there was an undefinable feeling in his guts. Listening to instinct had given him the courage, the strength and the vision to flee his homeworld scant moments ahead of … friends turned enemies. Instinct had led him to Latelyspace, the one system those enemies would never turn their eternal gaze to. That flight had been long and arduous, yet inevitably, worth all the pain and suffering a thousand times over.

  Instinct warred with a Father’s duty where Garth Nickels was concerned. The man filled Tomas Kamagana with a feeling that change was coming and that that change would be bloody, painful. With Chairwoman Doans’ words echoing in his ears, Tomas considered Garth, the change he represented, the … birth of change that he seemed to embody. The old man couldn’t shake the feeling that it was all terribly, terribly necessary.

  Naoko did her best to ignore the sudden heat in her cheeks. Her Father obligingly did the same.

  “Garth is …” she was about to say ‘fine’, but she faltered.

  Garth Nickels was anything but fine. He’d hovered on the brink of collapse during dinner, OverCommander Vasily’s words crushing him further with their weight with every syllable. His efforts in the Museum had quenched his internal fire to the point where it seemed utterly extinguished.

  Then there were his wounds; to her practiced Gamehead eye, Garth’s wounds barely counted as a concern, yet the ex-Specter’s unspoken, constant fretting over their presence wasn’t easily dismissed. If Garth Nickels was worried about something, everyone should be worried.

  Naoko pursed her lips before answering. She didn’t like lying to her father, but … some things needed to be done. “He is fine.”

  Tomas took a long draw on his pipe. “When will you be home?”

  Naoko checked the time. It was just after midnight. She had only slept for about twenty minutes. It would be some time before rest found her a second time. “I am not certain, Father. I …”

  Smoke billowing from his nose, Tomas interrupted. “Take your time, little one. The roads aren’t safe. Thousands of citizens rush to The Museum to gaze upon the devastation. The Chairwoman’s Watergate Men are out in force. I would hate for you to vanish hurrying home to care for such an old man. My old heart would dry up and fall out a nostril should that happen.”

  Naoko laughed a high, bri
ght, fluttery laughter than brought a huge grin to her Father’s face. She smiled, too; that was the threat he’d used frequently when she’d been a child, and the image of a tiny shriveled heart falling out of her father’s nose was absurd. She bobbed her head. “All right, Father, I will … I will stay here until it is safe, then. Will you be okay?”

  Tomas thought of the perilous journey he’d undertaken to arrive in Latelyspace. If his daughter only knew! He simply smiled. “Of course, Naoko. I am perfectly fine. Should the task of cooking my own meals prove too onerous, I can simply asking Si Stonigvale across the way for assistance.”

  Naoko felt her lips press together. Si Stonigvale was a hussy. A hundred year old hussy who continually acted as if she was in her fifties and was always inviting herself over for everything from breakfast to late night snacks. And her Father almost always said yes! It was shameful. She turned the frown into a smile. “You do what you think is best, Father.”

  “As you, daughter.” Tomas ended the call.

  Naoko leaned her head against a wooden bannister. She was worn out but she decided really wouldn’t be able to sleep properly; too much had happened too quickly.

  Furthermore, as her Father had implied, the news stations were going to be full of stories about The Museum.

  She nodded her head once, firmly. Even though she’d been there for all of it, Naoko decided that she wanted to see what the carnage at The Museum looked like for everyone else.

  xxx

  Well, there was no Garth in the main room either. Naoko stood there, trying to imagine where the man had gotten to before realizing that that ‘what’ could be anything from parachuting through the atmosphere to digging down to the molten core of Hospitalis in search of interesting rocks.

  Naoko plopped down on the couch, realizing moments later that it was oddly shaped. She stood up and stared thoughtfully at the piece of furniture, tilting her head this way and that before figuring out what was wrong; Garth had had it –and all the other furniture- replaced with items Suitable for non-Latelians.

  “Well this is no good at all.” Naoko muttered. How was she supposed to be able to enjoy watching the Screen when the couch itself was physically shorter than she was? She wasn’t even a proper-sized Latelian and the couch was too small! “And where,” the young Latelian woman demanded suddenly, “is Garth Nickels?”

  Arms crossed, Naoko surveyed the living room, looking to see if the man had missed anything. A chair, even. Something properly sized. The man had been insufferably thorough. Eyes passing over a small table with drinking glasses, she saw that he’d gone so far as to switch out the normal 20oz cup with something more fitting a man of his size. Who could drink less than 20oz and be satisfied? A Latelian child could swallow a 12oz glass of water in seconds and demand more. Naoko resumed her hunt for proper sized furniture. An ottoman, perhaps. Something she could stretch out from the ludicrously small couch to rest her feet on.

  And then Naoko’s eyes fell on the main.

  She squinted. To her expert eye, it’d been opened. Carefully opened and even more carefully reassembled, but one of the things they taught at school was the importance of recognizing minute changes to mains; many Latelians –many Latelians- considered themselves handy with a tool and took that handiness to anything in their line of sight, safety and wisdom instantly disregarded.

  Though Naoko’s goals lay in entirely different directions, main assembly and repair courses were mandatory after fifth year. A happy accident of enduring the courses was the tremendous boost to Lady Ha’s hacking skills; understanding the complex hierarchy of the hardware systems in use across Hospitalis had given her yet another layer of control.

  Naoko identified the complex computer system as being a Protipal Protean System, nodding with satisfaction at Garth’s obvious taste. The best of the best. Then, having witnessed firsthand the lunacy that one Garth Nickels got up to when left alone with systems and machines of profound complexity and sophistication, Naoko promptly decided that the safest course of action was to see what the man had gotten himself up to this time.

  Worrisome, though, were the possible reasons Garth would fiddle with a main when he had the whole of the Guillfoyle Building’s nearly unlimited riches to tinker with.

  Naoko hated being suspicious, but … suspicion with Nickels came hand in hand with love. And the man had no sense. No sense at all.

  There was only one thing worse than attempting to modify a protean creation unit. A classmate had mentioned the concept as a training exercise, a simple game to fritter away some time and had vanished fifteen minutes later. While irrational to imagine that Garth had managed to do something yet again no one in five thousand years had accomplished, rationality had abandoned Latelyspace long ago.

  Naoko’s knowledge of the Spaceport destruction was encyclopedic, and what she couldn’t recall was available at a moment’s notice; her prote received updates every hour on the hour concerning the deplorable state of the port. Everything of value to Garth Nickels had been vaporized in that first furious, volcanic eruption.

  Regime Investigators did not make mistakes. Their lives depended on it. Naoko had seen the official report sent to the Chairwoman regarding the AI powering Garth’s Trinityspace vessel, and no less than three separate Investigators employed by an equal number of Ministries had reached the same unsurprising conclusion.

  Steel-VII wasn’t immune to damage. There was a point where the resilient metal broke apart, and the Spaceport conflagration was worse than nearly anything that had happened anywhere.

  Nothing could’ve survived the Spaceport. Naoko soberly amended that. Nothing except Garth Nickels.

  “There is simply no way.” Naoko told the room. “My boyfriend is many things, but even he is not capable of sneaking an artificial intelligence onto Hospitalis.” She strode towards the machinery, hoping quite fervently her imagination was running away from her.

  xxx

  “My boyfriend snuck an artificial intelligence onto Hospitalis.” Naoko’s heart sank even as it soared. She was beyond giddy at the notion of having an AI mind at her fingertips, but the feeling was moored to blocks of terror and astounding fear.

  In theory, she was seconds away from fiery death.

  If even a single AI-detector sensed the quantum emissions, orbiting gun satellites would rain a million pounds of duronium shells onto the Palazzo. It was an automated system and those satellites would continue raining annihilation until a threshold had been reached. Then, naturally, God soldiers would be dispatched to stomp everything flat.

  Obviously, the planet-bound system had never been tested, but everyone knew it worked. The first Offworld Game five years ago had proved that; Smash All Infidels had similar sensors and the automated systems aboard the station had ripped a ship open before anyone had even had a chance to move.

  Yet, according to the vastly complicated Sheet she gripped, detection was impossible.

  Moreover, it had all made possible by one man, a … traitor.

  Ashok Guillfoyle was many things. Liar, cheat, scoundrel, devil, Traitor. He deserved those titles as much as any human being who’d done as he’d done, yet he deserved another:

  Genius.

  The baffle-sphere’s structure was a thing of inspirational beauty and genius. The formation of duronium lace, the way the myriad connections fractalized quantum emissions … Naoko’s head ached with the perfection of the design. The magnificently engineered sphere could hold an AI mind inside for just over two weeks before those emissions grew to be too much. The emissions were like a river being dammed by a ferrocrete wall; inevitably, the run-off grew larger than the wall and water would spill. Then –and only then- would the duronium rain scenario Naoko couldn’t shake from her head happen.

  And the Traitor had done it himself, in secret, with no help.

  Jealousy gnawed at Naoko.

  She liked to imagine she could develop something like this, but now she would never know. The sophistication of Ashok’s solution
wormed its way into her repertoire and that was that. Once seen, once understood, Naoko doubted she would ever be able to find her own answers.

  Not that she’d need to. Ashok’s key was all that was needed. It was as simple as asking the most obvious question: ‘Was The Palazzo being destroyed?’ Since the answer was an emphatic ‘no’, no other exploration was necessary. The design worked. It was a masterpiece worth discussion for a thousand years. Thankfully, no one would ever know.

  Naoko puffed a lock of hair out her face as she reached for the second Sheet. Placed in front of the non-operational main, almost like a shield or warning, Naoko had taken it and put it aside until she’d had time to read Ashok’s Help Sheet thoroughly.

  “Why aren’t you on?” Naoko asked the main. Oh, she knew the ‘answer’. It wasn’t plugged in.

  But she also knew Garth Nickels better than any other being in the system. The man laughed at danger and willfully ignored everything that prevented him from accomplishing his goals and woe betide the entity or occurrence that threatened such.

  An unplugged main housing an AI mind –a mind ultimately requiring exposure to critical levels of danger to save- suggested that there was a danger inherent in full activation that not even Garth Nickels was willing to risk.

  Naoko’s mind flashed to the ludicrous modificiations to the protean creation unit, to the unshielded power sources, the haphazard connections between hastily devised hardware. Naoko hoped that Garth was at the Guillfoyle Building right then, working to transform that … that open pit of disaster into something safer. That hope left her wondering, though; previous attempts at PCU modification had resulted in nothing but thousands of square miles of pristine bedrock.

  What was worse than that?

  Naoko turned the Sheet on and started reading. Fifteen minutes later, she put the Sheet down, hands trembling, skin pale as a ghost. Substrate psychosis. In school, they learned of it as an abstract concept, as a thing to know about simply so students would stop pestering weary teachers about why Latelyspace refused to use artificial intelligence, especially when it was excruciatingly clear that they’d reached the limit to linear programming.