Citizen Pariah (Unreal Universe Book 3)

by Lee

  “None of this is real.” He muttered dejectedly.

  Kant looked to the skyline. It was something he’d discovered since walking out of the terribly busy Spaceport, this … instinctual knowledge of where Garth Nickels was. Looking at the horizon –or as best he could with most of habitable land being positively lousy with epic skyscrapers-, Kant could see … well, he didn’t know what, not precisely, but a kind of indentation pressing against the sky was probably the only answer he was going to be able to come up with.

  “It really isn’t.” The other voice agreed.

  Kant had long since stopped trying to argue with the voice inside his mouth. The reasoning it offered, the subtle dance of logic and rationality it plied him with, it was all so … reasonable. Following the regrettable demise of the captain of The Midnight Song and his crew, this other voice had explained in absolutely rational tones the reality of the situation.

  If nothing was real –not even him, not really, not at the end of the day- then ‘killing’ fictitious phantasms wasn’t a crime. It wasn’t anything. It was dancing with phantoms.

  Kant turned around and caught up to the Latelian who’d bumped into him. He reached out with a hand and touched the very tall man ever so gently on the shoulder, squashing the irritability of feeling like a tiny child away quickly. The giant turned, a questioning look on his face.

  “You aren’t real.” Kant said sadly, shakily, looking off to one side, refusing to make eye contact. “So this doesn’t count.”

  The man opened his mouth to say something. Smoke poured out of the hole. The body fell to the ground Latelians in the crowd turned to look. Many started screaming. Others ran away. Kant turned back towards his destination.

  Instinct said the very high, very tall Hotel a hundred feet away was where Garth had hidden himself. He couldn’t wait to tell Nickels about the Dark Age Cabal so he –and the others of the hidden group- could come up with ways to destroy the Trinity AI. Then, with Trinity’s task admirably executed, he planned on doing to Garth Nickels as he’d done to the man behind him, a surly guard outside Densen Spaceport and the crew of the ship that’d brought him.

  After all, as the voice had explained, none of this was real.

  If he had his way, even the things that were unreal would find themselves on borrowed time.

  xxx

  Chad smiled. They was fresh and whole again. A good long nap, a nice fry-up of local foods, some fresh togs … why, they were nearly one hundred percent. It was a miracle of miracles, oh yes it was.

  Almost a hundred percent was good enough for them; bits and pieces of their body still felt a little off, but that was to be expected wasn’t it? The cyborg expected that was what happened when it decided all on its own that it was going to fold itself into a weird and wholly new form, and all magnanimous-like, they’d decided to forgive themselves for the atrocity. It did make a fella wonder, though, what else they could change into.

  The Voice tried to open their mouth and answer that question, so Chad punched themselves in the side of the head. “We ain’t likin’ you terribly much right now, my son. Wot you did to Mijomi was not on. Poor girl.”

  The Voice –crafty as ever- explained silently that no one was real.

  “You been sayin’ that a lot since we woke up.” Chad nodded pleasantly to the couple beside them on the bus. Startled, they returned the cordial greeting, albeit with less enthusiasm. Chad leaned back in their chair, stretched their arms out.

  “We is sorry, folks. Some of us inside here,” they tapped their pale temple with two fingers, “seems to fink we is not real. I mean, does that make any sense? If we isn’t real, what is we? I mean, we is sittin’ on a bus drivin’ really quite slowly frough the streets of Central City. I imagine it does not get more real than that.”

  “All life is a fiction.” The Voice said hollowly. “We … I … We … I keep telling you.”

  Chad punched themselves in the head again. “We said something in a different voice, didn’t we?” The FrancoBritish assassin hung their head morosely. Ever since being blown up, they felt like they were more in control of their craziness than ever. Case in point was The Voice’s new lack of identity. It kept trying to refer to itself as ‘we’ as well. Another factor pointing towards a far more reliable and stable Chad was the bit where it was having an awfully hard time taking control, all without drugs.

  Though Chad did find they rather missed being high as fuck all the time, they supposed it was better this way. They hadn’t killed anyone on the bus at all, and some of them had been giving them rather weird looks. Well, they hadn’t killed anyone. The other they had, and it was only Mijomi, and probably no one would find her until the Hotel Hospitalis started smelling rather a lot worse than it already did, which was saying much.

  Mijomi hadn’t needed to die, but The Voice was mean-spirited. Wandering around a fella’s head thinking you weren’t real did things to a person’s self-esteem, real or otherwise.

  The Voice denied this silently, railing against whatever internal mechanisms had grown inside Chadsik al-Taryin’s body.

  A voice came over the loudspeaker, announcing in crisp tones the next stop on the tour bus.

  Chad grinned. “Fantastic. We is lookin’ forward to seein’ this Hotel the … what’s it called … Palazzo? Cor, we wonder if anyone is knowin’ that that word is Eyetalian for palace. Firty-fousand years in the future and there’s an honest-to-God actual foreign word. This place is strange, innit?”

  “Are … are you going to stay at the Hotel?” The man across the aisle asked nervously, weathering a slap to the chest from his wife with a wince.

  “Nah.” Chad said with a smile. “We is not all posh and artsy-fartsy enough. We like Ground Zero much better. Place is stuffed to the tits wiv hookers and gangsters and stuff like that. Keeps us occupied. Nah, we is goin’ to visit a friend. We were going to figure out a way to rip him to shreds all artistic-like, y’know, do some sort of mural in his blood and guts, possibly, we don’t know, mount his bones into a metal framework sort of fing, but … we is missin’ home quite a bit. It’s a bit of pisser, this decision to do your basic murder and all. We aren’t really pleased, but it is time for this bonny fella-me-lad to go home.”

  “You aren’t real.” The Voice muttered unhappily to the shocked, horrified Latelians. “You aren’t real and we’re … goddamnit… I’m not in charge and this isn’t the way it is supposed to be.”

  Chad stood up when the bus slammed to a halt. “You’ll have to excuse The Voice, folks, ‘e is ‘avin’ a bit of an identity crisis. ‘e used to make us do the most awful fings.”

  “You … you …you just said you were going to kill someone, rip him to shreds.”

  From the stairwell, Chad answered. “Nah, ‘s wot we said we’d like to do, right? Besides, we is here to kill this particular guy, yeah? Not like we is just randomly runnin’ around killin’ innocent people. Well, we, erm, we admit that we ‘as, strictly speakin’ from an ‘idle ‘ands’ sort of fing, done that as well, but we isn’t pleased about it. We is getting’ paid for this one comin’ up. Total difference, innit? We do have a work effic.”

  “Would you get off the bus please?” The bus driver shouted angrily. “You are terrifying everyone.”

  “Orl right, my son, no needa get angry.” The Voice hammered it’s way up and out. “We … I am coming back here and you are all going to be very sorry!”

  Chad chuckled as they stepped off the bus. They looked the Hotel Palazzo up and down appreciatively. The bus sped away at what they were sure was several times the speed limit. “Calm down, my son. You is only going to give yourself an injury.”

  Thoughtfully, kindly, they allowed The Voice to speak. “We … I don’t know how you’ve done this, but it cannot be allowed. You must attend to your Enlightningment, Chadsik al-Taryin. You were meant for bigger and better things than this. We … I must be in control more than I … we … are. Am. How are you doing this?”

  “Well,” Chad
rapped the side of their head with a knuckle, “as you was tellin’ us when you should’ve kept your mouth shut, we is all the we’s we could be, right? As we was loungin’ about waitin’ for Mijomi, we had a bit of a think on that. Psychologically speakin’, it sounds like a load of horseshit, yeah? We mean, there’s only the one dimension or wotever you’d call it, right? You’re implyin’ that there’s all sorts of … echoes, like, if we was to turn left insteada right then there’d be this potentially real splinter dimension, and that you guys, whoever the fuck you are, took all those echo-me’s inside me ‘ead and made me into a we. Does that sound right?”

  “It is an admirable attempt to explain multiple-dimension theory.” The Voice admitted this cautiously, unsure of how things were going to progress.

  “Well,” Chad hopped lightly up the steps, pleased as Punch with how things were going, “if that is the case and you bonny lads made us the most real fing uvver than this one uvver fella, it got us to finkin’ about you. If nuffink is real, right, an’ follow us close on this, if nuffink is real except for me and the other bloke who is probably the guy we is going to kill in a moment ‘ere, if that is really an’ for truly the right fing, then we is realer than you. If we is more real than you, you is not the boss of us. We is the boss of you. Pretty smart finkin’, right? Top class idea.”

  “I … we … you …” The Voice stammered. “Shit.”

  “That is wot we fought you would say when we came up wiv the idea.” Chad got near the doors and their mind went blank for a moment their eyes fell on a non-Latelian tourist. They blinked, refocused, and their mind went blank again. Then the tiny little man’s body fluttered, sparked, spat, and went all sorts of crazy angles before slapping itself back into a normal Trinity-shaped human body.

  “Oi!” Chad shouted, body sprouting all sorts of weapons. “Everyone get the fuck down! We is got a fuckin’ Offworld alien muvverfucka right the fuck over there an’ we is gonna blow it right the fuck up!”

  “Chad, we are begging you. Don’t attack that man. He is important to you.”

  Chad paused long enough to punch themselves in the side of the head again. “Like we said, assfuck, we is in charge around ‘ere and we don’t know how or why that fella-me-lad is ‘ere or wot ‘e fought ‘e was doin’ when ‘e woke up this morning, but we can promise you this; ‘e is a cunt ‘air away from bein’ turned into fuckin’ nuclear dust. That weird shit goin’ on wiv ‘is body is the exact same weird shit we is rememberin’ from when we was kid-and-brain-napped an’ we ‘as been sayin’ for a long time that we is going to murder all of you.”

  The Voice panicked. “Erg1! Run! Run for your life! Chadsik al-Taryin is in control! He has assimilated himself!”

  “Oh for fuck’s sake.” Chad muttered unhappily. The crowd was just sort of hanging around, looking like very tall, bipedal cows. It was a fucking embarrassment.

  Latelians were stupid. They’d only just had their whole entire City rocked by a terrorist activity, one resulting in the destruction of their Museum and all sorts of other barmy shit, and nary a one of them was showing the slightest bit of concern that they was shouting in two different accents and growing weapons capable of leveling entire buildings to the foundations.

  Chad al-Taryin, raised in Arcade City, born and bred to be the greatest assassin the worlds had ever seen, kidnapped by an ancient race of … somethings … for some insanely bizarre purpose that seemed to revolve around the concept of Real vs. Unreal, opened fire on the diminutive man just as he opened the doors to the Palazzo.

  xxx

  Garth stormed angrily towards Kant Ingrams, mind absorbing what he saw in a flash; the Historical Adjutant hadn’t been sleeping well and there were numerous tremors under pale, grey skin. The condition didn’t look healthy. He opened his mouth to start shouting when his sixth sense towards danger literally took control of his body; he ate expensive Latelian tile just as an explosion ripped the front half of the Hotel Palazzo away in a bright burst of debris and dismembered tourists.

  Ute grabbed him by the shoulder a few seconds later, bellowing loudly. “What is going on here?”

  Garth patted himself free of dust, critically examining the damages. He wondered if they were going to try to charge him for that, too. “Someone just blew up some guy that I … are you fucking serious? That guy? What is that guy doing here?”

  Chaos swirled around them as the onslaught continued. Smoke, fire, screams and blood began spreading outwards from the two men.

  Garth eyeballed the cyborg he’d fought alongside the other night. It didn’t make sense. Obviously, the FrancoBrit was here to kill him. Your atypically super-powered killbot didn’t head off to The Palazzo to check out the scenery.

  What was most irritating was the fact that he hadn’t even tried in The Museum. At all. Sure, they’d been in a hostage-situation, but after having seen the cyborg assassin in action against all those God soldiers, there really had been no reason to not kill him well before that particular shit had hit the fan.

  “Do you mean the sa standing there with part of the door in his hand?” Ute pointed at the Trinity Man, who was indeed, standing there, holding a shiny silver door handle in one hand like it was a particularly confusing animal.

  “Nah, there’s no … way … Kant …”

  Kant dropped the door handle, wiped his hands clean on his trousers and, stepping gingerly over the debris at his feet, made his way to Garth Nickels, nose wrinkling at the sight of the … the … man. He itched to kill the thirty thousand year old anomaly, if for no other reason than the ancient human had lied with such flawless perfection. “Citizen Garth Nickels. How are you doing?”

  “Someone just tried to blow you up.” Ute was utterly nonplussed. The few scanners that he could still access so long as he wasn’t near a God soldier found nothing interesting about the man. God soldiers would’ve had a hard time after being hit with that kind of attack, and this tiny little grey man with the facial tic had managed to … to … not be dead.

  “Nonsense.” Kant Ingrams shook his head. Latelians. Dramatic and foolish. He stuck his hand out in traditional Trinity-style and waited for Garth to shake.

  “The fuck are you doing here?” Garth balled his fists and kept his eyes on the cyborg, who was, that very second, tilting his head to one side and then the other, very blatantly having an argument with himself.

  “This must be rather a shock to your system, Garth.” Kant smiled as easily as he could with his skin doing the things … the things it was doing.

  Garth whispered to Ute. “Do you have a gun?”

  “Several.” Ute handed Garth one. “But I don’t think the bullets are going to have any affect. Who is this man to you?” He pointed to the cyborg –which he recognized from News4You footage- saying, “And why is he here?”

  “Oh,” Garth chambered a round, “the guy shouting at himself is an assassin hired by someone in Trinityspace to kill me. This will be, uhm, the second attempt. He is way lots worse than the first dude.”

  “I’ll say.” Images of the maddened cyborg devastating soldier after soldier flashed through Ute’s mind. He’d seen a lot in his long life, had done some pretty wild things in the process of living, too, but never had he seen something like that. “And this sa, who seems to also be talking to himself?”

  “The talking to himself thing is new, and so is this wiggly-skin thingy he’s got going on.” Garth pointed the gun at Kant’s forehead, “but this guy held me captive and tortured me for a standard solar year. I promised myself I would kill him if I ever got the chance.”

  He pulled the trigger.

  xxx

  Chad saw Garth point the gun at Kant. “No way. Not fuckin’ likely. We totally promised myself we was goin’ ter kill any of the Offworld bastards as did wot they did to me if I ever came across any. An’ there is no fuckin’ way we is owin’ the Job a fuckin’ favor. Not in this lifetime.”

  Chad started moving.

  xxx

  Ute watched th
e bullet flatten itself against Kant’s forehead. He wished he had access to his old systems. There was very much more to the man than he was seeing. He looked at Garth. “The assassin is coming this way, sa, and he doesn’t look pleased.”

  Garth checked his mental clock. He didn’t have time for this. He didn’t have time to discover how Kant Ingrams had suddenly become both bullet-and-rampaging-torrential-explosion-proof, and why it was his own personal assassin seemed more interested in killing someone else all of a sudden either. If he spent any more time dicking around with this kind of crazy, the world was going to explode.

  Though, he supposed with dark humor, if he and Ute just sort of hung loose, maybe stole a spaceship and took off, two of his personal pet peeves would be destroyed in a very colorful manner.

  The ex-Specter shook his head at the grim daydream. He hated Kant an awful lot, but not enough to kill a whole world full of people just to see one man dead. The things Kant had done in the pursuit of his job, the terror and torture and unconscionable horrors he’d forced upon the interred Kin’kith and Kith’kin in an effort to simply understand … the entire situation had been awful, a direct result of Trinity’s needs. Killing Kant would and always be something Garth wanted to ensure, but not today.

  Today there were other things to do.

  “That was very rude, Garth Nickels.” Kant rubbed the spot where the bullet had flattened itself. “I have been asked by the Trinity AI to approach you on a matter of extreme delicacy.” In the back of his mind, he dimly realized he was supposed to have kept that part quiet, but no matter. He couldn’t unsay what’d been said.

  “The Trinity AI can go fuck itself.” Against better judgment, Garth stalled. “Quick now, before the guy who just tried to blow you up gets here. Oh, look. He’s shouting with himself again. This is so fucking awesome.”