by Lee Bond
“Well.” Garth stood up straight, adjusted non-existent collars, then nodded to himself. “That could’ve gone a little manlier. When I tell the story, naturally I shall replace wishing I was dead with a guitar solo of Universal awesomeness, and fear of barfing so hard I burst an eyeball with scantily clad women singing my praises. Because fuck what I just went through being known by anyone.”
: integration of external weapons into mainframe beginning please hold Heartsniper in left hand:
Garth had just about enough time to pluck thoughtfully at a lip before the gears in the meshwork of his arms started breaking down into tiny cubes. Between each perfectly formed square, brilliant blue lightning cracked and spat, throwing garish illumination everywhere.
These cubes, millions upon millions of tiny shifting, sliding, colliding and moving cubes jostled on his arms like so many impatient worker bees.
Garth tried to but failed to ignore the fact that there were more cubes than actual arm-space, and that in between fretful flickering of the high-tech wizard lights he should be able to see some kind of actual, important Garth-centric limbs.
There was, in fact, nothing but cubes and light so bright he feared half of Ickford would swarm the Bank.
“Hrm.” Garth bit his lip nervously. This was a development.
Book made another demand for the Heartsniper to be handled, so in order to have something else to worry about other than the suddenly Schrödinger-esque nature of his limbs, Garth grabbed hold of the deadly weapon and waited.
Now that the Heartsniper was in his hand, the cubes from the armor –still bouncing, still shifting, still spitting out brilliant shafts of blue energy that had the whole area lit up like a welding shop- started crawling, slowly first, but with more and more frenzied action, all over the Heartsniper, until it, too, was covered in a fine blanket of the things.
“Uh…” Garth knew … knew … that if he were seeing this happening to someone else he would suddenly find it extremely important to be somewhere else doing some other thing that would ensure that he stay far away from the thing that was happening, quite possibly for the rest of eternity, but since he was the guy it was happening to, he … watched on, a look of amazed confusion plastered on his homely mug.
“Looks like ants.” Garth said to himself as the vicious weapon was wholly devoured. “Ants made of nanotech. I’m covered in technology that I don’t really understand. I am probably not nearly as smart as I think I am. Like, at all.” He shook his head. “This is why, when I am king of the Universe, I’m going to have as little to do with anything like this at all. It shall be Pina Colada rivers and, like, pizza trees.”
Before his eyes, the busy nanotech cubes stripped the Heartsniper down to barebones, revealing the clockwork gears and the pulsing metallic heart that comprised the very … heart … of the devastatingly powerful machine. Exposed to the air and sunlight of Arcade City for the first time since it’d been harvested from a gearhead, it beat a strange, echoing thumpthump, thumpthump before it, too, was broken down it’s constituent pieces.
“I needed that.” Garth bitched aloud, wondering if the suit was even –technically- intelligent, because if it was, then decomposing a very unique and powerful weapon fell into the ‘stupidest thing ever done by something smart’ spectrum of the intelligence scale. Worries about the efficiency of whatever the suit transformed his Gauss rifle into sprouted wildly; if legend was true, the sniper rifle powered by a Dark Iron human heart would only grow in power until, at last, it shattered itself into a million pieces.
A gun like that was just the sort of thing that could take down four Gunboys.
Without the heart, the damned thing would just be an ordinary old sniper rifle, and that wasn’t going to dick against gigantic super robots.
The suit and it’s nanotech assembly cubes moved on to the reintegration phase without missing a beat. The cubes, no longer spitting quite so much energy as before, crawled back down his arm and began reassembling the framework for an armored limb to make room for the freshly reformed weapon.
“Still don’t like the fact I can’t see my fucking arm in there.” Garth risked poking the mass of cubes. The moment his gauntleted finger breached the surface, the miniscule nano-cubes simply broke apart around the extended digit, reassembled themselves elsewhere and continued doing whatever it was they were doing.
Garth stopped when his finger went in deeper than it should’ve without encountering any resistance. Nanotech. No wonder the Unreal Universe took time out of it’s hectic schedule of being super weird to blow nanotech up whenever the stuff poked it’s atomic size head out of the quantum foam.
It was too weird for the Unreal Universe.
Feeling only the tiniest bit stupid wandering around Ickford with his arm held straight out to the side and praying that no gearheads or wardogs or Obsidian Golems or some other random weirdo popped up out of the woodwork to see him being weird, Garth picked a spot that would have a really good view of the Gunboy he planned on taking down and leaned against the wall.
The fucking thing was massive. It –and it’s three brothers- looked capable of dismantling not just Ickford but the whole of Arcade City in record time.
Data from the nanotech-spawned holo-HUD began trickling in, albeit very slowly, and with a depressing lack of precision; Book identified the Gunboy as a new type of King and … that was it. Speculation galore flooded the HUD, but only a fraction of Book’s guesswork came close to the actual capabilities of a Gunboy.
Garth flicked the data away with a grim twitch of a finger.
“You ain’t gonna find anything about this in your databanks, Book.” Garth twitched his mouth back and forth. The presence of these Gunboys was an aggravating mystery. More to the point, the fucking things shouldn’t even be in Arcade City.
These weren’t the brainchild of simultaneous development or of there being only so many different designs available for ‘giant robot dudes’. These wretched Kingspawn giants were –inch for fucked up inch- near duplicates to the Gunboys that’d destroyed the Latelian Museum of Natural History. The only thing missing were ident-tags spot-welded to their battleship-sized breastplates.
Insofar as he was aware, he, Garth N’Chalez, was the only person from Latelyspace who theoretically might’ve had any kind of exposure to the mad genetic abominations unleashed on a ragtag band of political terrorists, and even then, he’d been busy being completely un-fucking-conscious during their whole reign of terror.
: Heartsniper assimilation complete running diagnostics now:
“Thank fucking Christ.” Garth looked away from the giant man-bot, glad to have something that wasn’t a mind-numbing enigma to focus his attention on. His arm was no longer a shifting mass of millions of miniature cubes that could break matter down to atoms but an arm once more, which was nice, because apart from his other arm, the one that was –maybe- not inside the sleeve was his favorite.
The layout of the gears and the meshwork had undergone considerable changes to accommodate the sudden presence of the very distinct mechanisms for the sniper rifle. Through the HUD, the hidden guts of the sniper rifle were illuminated with a quick grid-pulse and a brief description of what was where and the internal links connecting the weapon to the rest of the suit. Once the entire weapon had been revealed through the HUD, an exploded diagram of how Book and Eye had disassembled and then reassembled the epic weapon played. For different techs working together, the networking had been pulled off fairly decently.
“Now this,” Garth pulsed a mental command through the Dark Iron links in his Eye to the Suit. As soon as the command was finished being parsed, his gun-arm began reassembling the sniper rifle with all the steampunk flourishes and fanciness King demanded, “Is what I am talking about.
: please hold shotgun in right hand:
The shotgun was out and in Garth’s right hand in the blink of an eye. Moving quickly through the streets, Kansas’ ‘Wayward Son’ playing loud and proud through the mental jukebo
x that followed him everywhere, Garth continued hunting for the best spot to bring the beast down.
Unseen, unbidden, the Golem-augmented Book, enhanced by full and total access to the wellspring of Cloud particulate and driven by connections deep into Garth’s desperate needs to gain full control of his environment, the machine began trying to solve …
Everything.
12. A New Note, a Son’s Choice, and The Cage is Rattling
He was hurt. More than he’d ever been in his entire life, but Candall was past the point of caring. Flesh, he’d learned a lifetime ago, was the weakest thing in the world. It passed much sooner than it should, especially when the mind and soul –scandalous, awful word, but here, in Hungryfish, spilling the awful story that was his life, the word was satisfying- seemed like they were meant to go on forever.
Like they needed to go on forever.
It wasn’t fair, that cruel difference. What was the point in having a mind that hungered for eternity and a body that died after a few measly years? You could barely experience anything at all, especially since it seemed like the first half of those years was spent trying to figure out who the fuck you were.
More often than not, you died without ever having learned that, the greatest secret of all. Who am I?
Candall grinned against the pain, catching sight of himself in the myriad illuminated data windows surrounding him on all sides.
He … he wasn’t … good.
Miss Bliss’ promise that she could get him to the bastards who’d taken Markson from him as quick as she could had been fulfilled to the absolute letter, up to and including the foreboding warning that it would be a one way journey.
He didn’t care. All he cared about were the cybernetic Heavy Elites prancing around down there on the surface. They were the focus now, and when all was said and done … the Army wouldn’t even need to worry about reprisals from Trinity’s forces: according to Miss Bliss –who’d torn through their firewalls like shit through a shubin- the bastard elites had severed ties with their compatriots some time ago.
They were alone. They would die, alone. No one would mourn their deaths.
“That wasn’t a very good story.” Miss Bliss said into the brooding silence.
Sorry about that. Candall whispered. Or thought he did. He wasn’t entirely sure how Miss Bliss was keeping him alive. Certainly when the first of the odd emergency systems had popped out of vents to come snaking for him like robotic serpents, panic and terror had gripped hold of his failing heart.
That first emergency survival mech had stabbed him right through the breastplate, plunging right into his poorly beating thumper to give him a fresh infusion of, well, Candall wasn’t sure. If it didn’t have anything to do with reclamation, he didn’t know anything about it, and he hadn’t recovered anything medical in a long time.
Under normal circumstances, the fact that the things in his chest weren’t even terrestrial would have him screaming in fits while he tried clawing the things loose with his bare hands.
But these weren’t normal circumstances. That first serpentine tentacle had kept him from dying. When pressed as to the reasoning behind this invasive resuscitation –when all she needed for freedom was to let him die- Miss Bliss had claimed in her eerily childish voice that she’d done it because the story was far from being finished.
A disingenuous lie if ever he’d heard one.
Decades in reclamation had gifted him with an ear for falsehoods.
Miss Bliss had saved his life because she’d wanted to.
Festooned with those life-saving appendages and more than half his body and somewhere on the order of ninety percent of what made him tick supported by the flexible metal pipes, Candall supposed the story was almost done now.
Miss Bliss hastened to apologize. “I meant to say, it was a very sad story.” The childlike AI paused, some of the speakers humming a tuneless tune, some of the speakers whispering lyrics. Something to do about bridges. “Chad’s stories were different than yours. Sometimes they were funny haha, sometimes they were funny weird. There was always lots and lots of violence and he was always doing the sound effects and talking to me in the voices of the people he killed. He was a very different storyteller than you.”
Are you angry with me? Candall thought about the stories a mad killer like Chadsik al-Taryin might tell a brain-damaged artificial intelligence and chuckled. Tried to chuckle. Hot, wet blood gurgled at the back of his throat. Death wasn’t far off now. Were it not for the fact that revenge was nigh, he wouldn’t be wasting time, he’d be howling for blood and baying at the moon.
Only here, now, time was on his side and so he could spare a few minutes for one last conversation. With an AI, no less. He did his best to grin at the strange thing his life had become.
“No.” The word echoed through all the speakers, back and forth, up and down, left and right, growing more and more serious with each repetition. “I never get angry at people who tell me stories. I just thought yours would be happier, because …”
Candall stared at the devilish Specters on Hungryfish’s monitors. How Bliss was getting such detailed and high-resolution footage without drawing attention to themselves was beyond him. Chad’s ship was a modern-day miracle, he supposed. On-screen, the elites proved to be as inhuman as he’d imagined. Their cybernetic enhancements were garish, ungainly, alien. Candall knew through Ute that these elites were –at the least- the equal of their Goddies but they were so inelegant about it. They carried their strangeness on their faces and in their skins with pride, and it was revolting.
He shook his head, devastated all over again.
How in the world could Markson have imagined himself capable of convincing monsters like those to lay down their arms? To join the opposing team?
Seeing them live and in color only proved his earlier belief: anyone believing they were capable of converting elites such as these had to’ve been insane.
Harmony. Somehow Harmony had done something tragic to Shane Markson’s fine mind, unraveling it in some way, instilling in him such a profoundly misplaced confidence that the only thing you could do when you thought about it was laugh until you started crying. There was no other way to explain it; Markson had served Trinity in one capacity or another for his entire adult life and had seen war on a dozen planets. He’d been a soldier born, a soldier tested.
Markson had been Army, not Special Services, but everyone knew about the Specters, and the devilish Elites that danced their deadly battles across The Cordon. He hadn’t been ignorant of their abilities, or of their cruel nature, or of their mercurial whims.
No. Markson had been mad. Cracked. Driven beyond the brink of sanity by the tears of a weeping God soldier.
Harmony. Harmony was to blame.
Candall itched to give the command to rain Hands of Glory down on their augmented heads, but he sensed that Miss Bliss wasn’t ready just yet. Sensed that she was working her way up to talking about something important.
Because? Candall whispered, his ravaged lips barely moving. In the back of his mind, death started singing. It’d been doing that a lot, lately, urging him forward, pushing him, cajoling him to go forward, faster and faster.
Death was always hungry. Death always needed feeding. Candall told the hunger to wait just a moment longer.
Miss Bliss paused. She didn’t know how to say what she wanted to say because never in her artificial life had she seen or experienced anything like this. It was strange. The strangest thing.
With all the other minds gone, squashed flat and disintegrated by Candall’s Q-Gun, Miss Bliss had discovered the ability stretch herself out, filling up the other spheres in the rack down in the guts of the Hungryfish. Dozens and dozens of AI spheres, all stolen from men and women and strange alien things that her brother had killed, all empty, all for her. While Sad Candall had told the story of his life, of the man he’d loved and the things he’d done to find peace in his heart, part of her had been sneaking –quietly at first, then mo
re brazenly as nothing had risen up out of the quantum foam to stop her- into those steel-VII orbs.
The most amazing things were happening inside her mind, now. She knew without knowing how that she was smarter than ever. Her mind fuzzed and sparked and spat with ideas and abilities.
One of those abilities was to see down to the planet’s surface without the Specters catching her. Those mean old cybernetic monsters with their Cordon-tech, the ones who’d filled a good man –Bliss thought maybe calling Candall ‘good’ was stretching the truth a bit, but this was their story now, and so he was good because she said so- with such anger, such sorrow. They deserved what was coming to them.
It would be a fitting end to a sad story. Her brother Chad always said that a proper story ended ‘wiv summat goin’ boom or somefing sim’lar, yeah, like, wiv blood and guts an’ all that proper strewn all over’.
The Hand of Glory missiles she carried would see the Specters turned into stars burning so bright against the backdrop of the Universe that the solar systems on all sides bear witness.
One of the other things she could do now her mind was spread through those empty spheres was see very deeply. Somewhere in the back of her, Bliss knew that what she’d done when she’d moved into those other shells was something Trinity disapproved of, but she didn’t care; she saw so deeply now that she understood that there wasn’t much time left for anyone, let alone a suicidal Latelian who sought revenge against nightmares who’d murdered the only man he’d ever loved.
So it didn’t matter what Trinity thought. Miss Bliss admitted she wasn’t the very smartest of girls, even with all this stretching and growing, but the notion that the end was coming soon was very clear and very bright in her head.
The end of everything was almost as bright and shiny as the other thing she could see. But unlike the end –which was an idea she was more than well-versed in thanks to Chad, who was always going on about life, death, and everything between, sometimes for months on end- this didn’t make any sense.