by Lee
Naoko imagined doing that, imagined turning around to fly into Garth’s arms. It would be easy. So easy. The thought of being beside such a man as he rose up to meet his great destiny was thrilling; if there had ever been anyone in the whole of life with something truly important to accomplish, it was Garth Nickels.
Only … she had a destiny now. There was only one person who could free her peers from Jordan Bishop, and that was her.
In her life, Naoko had never dreamed of such things. She’d envisioned a life like everyone else’s; you found a job you liked, a man you thought you might fall in love with one day, an apartment –or if you became wealthy, a house-, you lived together, you had children. The backdrop of living in a Regime with all the violence and restrictions that engendered was just that: backdrop. If you were happy in your life and were with the ones you loved, nothing else mattered.
She might’ve risen to greatness on her own. She was, after all, Tomas Kamagana’s daughter. As Director for the Spaceport, she had authority, respect, admiration. There was simply no way of knowing where that life would’ve taken her. They said all roads led to the Chair if you were good at what you did.
Naoko laughed quietly at that. Chairwoman Naoko Kamagana. Beside her, OverCommander Garth Nickels. A dynamic force for change in the system. Catalysts for endless growth. Of course, a Chairwoman who routinely hacked into other computers to test her skills and an OverCommander who found it exciting to attack his own troops without warning –probably while talking about the benefits of a healthy diet and regular exercise- would be an interesting change from leaders who frothed at the mouth and demanded heads on pikes.
Naoko couldn't dismiss the people. The people held by Bishop and the albino humanoid who was probably no man at all…
They had no lives. They had no destinies. Whatever futures they’d written for themselves as children had been taken from them by the very virtues they’d developed, the very skills that they’d intended on using to transform their lives from mediocre into excellent.
“No.” Naoko said into the ruminative quiet. Everyone around her twitched at the sound.
Greuz, –who couldn’t believe what was coming out of his mouth- ignored the just as stunned looks on Alli and Sandlak’s faces. They might be capable of pretending they’d make it to the end of the journey without losing someone or at the very least being attacked by their own ship, but he couldn’t. He wanted the Zhivago back and in non-murder mode as soon as possible. If that meant turning around and dropping the psychopathic hacker off on Hospitalis, so be it. There were other jobs, other employers. “Are you sure?”
“Yes.” Naoko nodded, her backbone stiffening. “We go forward. Ever forward. Into destiny.”
Seta shivered. She –unlike Sandlak and the others- sat close enough to Naoko and was in the right position to see the look in the girl’s eyes. There was something in her, something strong enough to take a ship from a captain, something strong enough to turn away from the man she obviously loved with her whole heart. Seta, who’d loved and lost more than most women she knew, shivered again.
Who had they ‘kidnapped’?
Greuz rose. “You heard the woman.” He slapped Alligorni in the back of the head. “We forge ahead.” He laughed somberly. “Into destiny.”
Smaller on the Inside? Why Would I do that?
It was like a light being switched on. As simple and as uncomplicated as that. The last piece of the puzzle box that’d been sliding around in his head for the last ten years or so suddenly wiggled into place and everything was illuminated.
Just. Like. That.
Garth had to laugh at his own audacity.
He laughed until he wept. From the moment Lisa had told him that he suffered from no amnesia, that he was intentionally keeping his own memories from him, he’d assumed it was to protect the plan from being discovered by outside forces.
A reasonable precaution, all things considered. You just couldn’t know who to trust after thirty thousand years. Anyone and everyone could be an agent of the M’Zahdi Hesh, and all without being aware.
But no. That wasn’t true. No one save a select few could’ve ever figured it out, and not one of them could’ve done anything to stop the plan.
Except that wasn’t entirely true, either. There was one person. One person with the ability to stop, to turn around, to change his mind, to undo everything that’d been done, that was about to be done, that needed to be done.
Him. He was the one he’d been playing against. The plan had required strict adherence to the rules, and if there was one thing Garth N’Chalez knew about himself, it was that he didn’t play by the rules. In order to win, he’d cheated against himself. Garth laughed again.
The scope! The hubris! To think everything had stayed –more or less, plus or minus- on track! A sobering thought rose in him and the Kin’kithal warrior shook his head sadly. Were it not for Lisa’s tremendous sacrifice, her tireless adherence to her promises, it would’ve been for naught. Her loss weighed heavily on him, as would the price she’d paid.
As it was, there were megalithic challenges left, for not even one as unimaginably powerful as Lisa Laughlin had had the ability to manipulate the whole of their Unreality. Things were wilder and woolier out in there in the old Universe, crazier and more intense than anyone could’ve possibly imagined, not even after dropping a bucketful of high-grade LSD and tripping balls. There could be enemies out there he knew nothing about, enemies capable of challenging him or the Heshii. That was a dour thought.
Garth ran a hand through his hair, reflecting on Lisa’s life. It was unimaginable, unknowable.
He owed her everything. Everything. In the grand scheme of things, his rough estimates had viability at a hair over seventy-five percent. Everything beyond The Cordon was like what old-time scholars and adventurers had imagined the edges of their world map to be like, except in this case, ‘Here There Be Dragons’ literally meant ‘humanity has lost it’s fucking mind and has turned themselves into dragons intent on eating suns and good luck with that’.
The galaxies beyond The Cordon were quiet. For now. As The Specter, he and the others had hammered them into frightful submission. All too likely, that peace would only last for so long, especially now. Any parties interested in the outcome of War for Reality would be perking their heads up, curious to see how they could bend and fold events to their own purposes.
Garth took a deep breath, found himself laughing. It wasn’t perfect. It wasn’t great. So much had gone wrong. Either way, they were close enough, and as his dad had said, ‘close enough is good for horseshoes and hand grenades, son’.
First, Bravo. They had a lot to answer for, the minds running his ship.
At the other end of the hallway that led into what the occupants undoubtedly imagined to be the ship proper was a retinal scanner. Innocuous, regular. A standard device that he himself had constructed and put there.
As with everything in his life, it was a test.
Garth took another deep breath. He really didn’t like this part. Personal wants and desires made no difference. Like everything else he'd suffered through, the next part was necessary. He desperately wanted the test to go right, but –because of everything that’d happened on Hospitalis- Garth knew deep in his bones that he was wishing on a star.
At least, in this one thing, this one instance, there was no middle ground. Pass or fail. Truth or consequences. Yes. No. Live. Die.
He walked towards the retina scanner, marveling at the seething hatred that seemed to radiate out from the very basic machine. The quadronium circuitry in his body started shifting in anticipation of the final test yet to come; the operating system read the intent and purpose behind Garth’s need and the quadronium in his left eye abandoned flesh and blood, bone and sinew, as if the area was toxic. It was a bizarre feeling.
By the time Garth got to the scanner, his left eye was free and clear of the q-form. Nothing to prevent the machine’s optics from getting a good solid readin
g.
Or, if Bravo’s minds were up to no good, from taking the eye.
A small enough sacrifice, to gain the truth.
xxx
“Fuck me sideways.” Garth staggered into Bravo ‘proper’, holding one hand to where a whole goddamn eye used to be. “Fuck that hurt.”
Did it ever. The bastard minds housed within Bravo’s computational systems had –as he’d worried- messed with the ID scanner, ramping the power of the low-yield laser up until it’d been powerful enough to vaporize the eye right out of its socket. Even as he rode the waves of pain until they fell away, the q-form was rushing to augment the loss, filling the eye cavity with an indestructible lacework of quadronium fibers. Soon enough there’d be something in there doing the work of an eye, though what it’d actually be able to see mystified Garth.
More painful than the loss of the eye was the fact that he’d been right, right in not trusting the commanders for the Armies of Man, right in laying a trap to test their loyalties. The change hadn’t happened over night, because for a long, long time, those self-sacrificing men and women had been as noble and trustworthy as anyone. Change they had and the brunt of the blame for their switch rest with none other than Garth N’Chalez himself.
It was his fault.
He should’ve known better, and now they were all paying the price, now they were all at the ragged edges of Unreality, tired, manic, and angry. Some things were better left unsaid.
Garth took his hand away from the empty eye socket. It was a weird sensation, the … emptiness in his head. Dim light was already creeping in along the optic receptors, the q-form’s version of an eye –following either his genetic profile or some coding- slowly but surely gaining volume.
“Commander N’Chalez so good of … you … to …”
Garth took stock of the ‘men’ waiting to greet him, waiting as they had for thirty thousand years. How angry, how filled with rage they must’ve been when internal clocks ticked past the absolute latest date he’d promised he would arrive and plunged on into hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of years.
The first man he recognized was Doctor Sullivan. He laughed for a solid fifteen seconds, a random pile of factors colliding together to make for a very interesting puzzle. “That’s hilarious. No wonder you didn’t want to touch me. I would’ve known right away.”
Sullivan, pleased to be back in his ‘own’ lightbody, drew on more of Bravo’s internal scanners. N’Chalez was dreadfully ... mortally wounded and he was acting as if nothing was wrong. They’d always speculated on the upper limits of the Kin’kith and Kith’kin survivability, on their tough bodies and how much damage they could soak up, but this … this was beyond comprehension. He was literally a walking corpse!
Garth went around the room, nodding cordially to the three others. There was Major General Stark, Colonel Simes and President Umbigwe; each of the men arrayed before him, clad in virtual representations of their appointed profession, looked less than pleased. “Where’s General Zhao Chun?”
Sullivan stepped closer. “What is wrong with you?”
“All kinds of shit.” Garth answered glibly. “More than you can possibly understand. Where’s Chun?”
“Answer the man, Nickels.” Stark ordered crisply, stepping forward, the virtual stars of his rank glinting fiercely in the light. “Our last recordings of you indicated nothing like this.”
“What?” Garth paused in his search for Chun; the ‘room’ was about the size of one of his old apartments, but he’d thoughtfully crammed it full of equipment of varying purposes just to make the cruelly small area smaller still, so the creepy Asian General could be anywhere at all. “What are you talking about?”
Sullivan pointed to one of the walls and it flickered to life, revealing the extent of Garth’s wounds. The doctor marveled. Had the sheathes done something unexpected to N’Chalez’ cognitive functions? Their Kin’kithal had always been a little on the wild side, a little unpredictable … maybe the inversion process had shorted his higher functions out. Either that or their small gift of reprisal had been too much. Still, he’d deserved it. That, and more.
Garth examined the rotating images of his body and grimaced so hard he thought he might pop a vessel. He looked like a very heavily damaged zombie. Half his lower jaw was missing, his entire face was indented like it’d been hit by a car full-on, his chest was completely ruined … “Oh. Haha. That’s … that’s fucking hilarious. Yeah. I figured.”
It wasn’t pretty. Garth poked at his chest, feeling the quadronium with his fingers. Blank, empty resistance. He could wait for stuff to start growing back properly.
Umbigwe, president of the African Confederacy and the only non-military personage to be given the right to assist in the future mending of a shattered world because of his inherently pleasant attitude and far-reaching visions of man working with man, stepped forward. His accent was completely gone, as was the majority of his kindly attitude. “What is ‘hilarious’, Kin’kith? That we’ve been in this tiny little room for thirty thousand years? That we’ve lost the war? What? What is so funny?”
“Tons of shit is funny, Umby.” Garth resumed his search for Chun, the lightbody men resolutely following behind, shouting questions, demanding answers, casting threats.
Garth found General Zhao Chun banging his lightbody head against a wall. “Holy … holy shit.”
“He’s been that way for … what is it now, Stark, twenty-five thousand years?”
“Eight.” Stark corrected briskly. “Twenty-eight. Man popped a vessel and went sideways almost right away. Started singing religious chants first, then moved on to praying, then when that didn’t work, this.”
“Yeah … but…” Garth’s wrinkled his face at the … sight of it all.
If only some bean counter hadn’t caught the fudged requisition forms moving the raw materials around… then these five men wouldn’t be here, wouldn’t have gotten in the way of defeating the Heshii properly. To soothe concerns over the loss of their humanity, Garth had developed ingenious holographic displays so they could mimic the appearance of life while they’d awaited his return.
If they hadn’t been so forceful, so demanding, hadn’t intimated with every breath that their motives were vastly different from what they told Humanity, their time inside Bravo would’ve been so very different.
General Zhao Chun continued banging his head on the wall, one entire side of the man’s holographic lightbody completely crushed. Littered around the kneeling man’s legs were pixelated shards representing the man’s lost skull. Garth craned forward to hear the nearly silent litany of words streaming from the Asian’s lips.
They were nonsensical. Nothing but a continual release of gibberish. Garth reached out and poked a finger at the body, unsurprised at actual resistance.
Simes spoke, voice cracking from disuse; it’d been nearly two thousand years since he’d found the need to speak, and he went out of his way to speak directly to N’Chalez only. The other three could go hang. “The poor chap lost his mind. Somewhere in the middle of his insanity, though, he discovered … solidity. Quite amazing. We, of course, seized upon the moment.”
Garth poked a finger into the open cavity that was Chun’s brain. The solid hologram shrieked like a demon, twitched violently, then resumed the bashing when Garth hastily plucked the digit away. “Fuck me that’s fucked up.”
He was actually beginning to feel bad. Then he remembered the eye, what that small betrayal implied and set his jaw. If they hadn’t cost him his eye, he might’ve felt actual remorse. “So you guys figured out a way to create your own lightbodies and started wandering around outside.”
Umbigwe nodded. “We couldn’t figure out how to do it inside Bravo.”
“More’s the pity.” Simes added.
Sullivan pointed at Garth, trying to draw the conversation back to what was imminently more important; that the one man they intended on using for their purposes was at Death’s Door. “What happened to you?”
“Tried.” Simes confessed, much against everyone else’s wishes. “And failed. They are a very resilient people.”
Stark bulled forward, stepping through both Umbigwe and Simes, who squawked angrily at the rude intrusion. “The planets are full of Harmony soldiers. It needs to be done.”
“Uh, no.” Garth wanted to poke poor Chun in the brainpan again, but resisted only because the similarities between the man’s current condition and late stage matter-eating zombies from Gorensworld were too profound for comfort. His skin was crawling at the similarities. “Not Harmony.”
Seeing there were no in-roads down that way, Stark –who’d been the first and most vociferous doubter of one ‘heroic’ Garth N’Chalez- turned and headed in another direction. “Tell us what we want to know. Tell us why you lied, why Bravo is smaller on the inside. Tell us everything. Tell us and we will heal you, give you your powers back, make you whole again. Then we can rain death and destruction upon the Hesh. It’ll be glorious, son, glorious.”
Umbigwe nodded, joining in. “Then we can restructure everything, Commander N’Chalez. We can free the people from Trinity and …”
“And thennnnnnn?” Garth demanded archly, walking over to a section of wall no different from any other section of wall … except that it was completely different in every way. It even looked different. Well, to anyone with organic eyes. Well, one organic eye; his q-form eye wasn’t finished growing and the visual information it was gathering didn’t make sense yet, but his natural homegrown eyeball could totally tell the difference. He’d built the OS to do that, and he was happy that at least this one thing was behaving as expected.
Umbigwe cut himself short, darkening considerably. Simes looked supremely pissed off at the almost-revelation. Stark and Sullivan both shot daggers at the African president. Everyone got awkward.