by Lee Bond
Garth threw his hands up in the air. “I can’t keep giving you dirty looks every time you open your mouth and say something stupid, man. My face muscles will get tired. As with the stunning lack of wisdom in leaving important things like weather in the hands of the Cloud Particulate, the shit happening to your gearheads is basically completely the opposite of any fucking process. But,” Garth pointed a finger at Barnabas, “We’ll address that and a few other things at the end of class.”
Barnabas scratched the side of his nose, embarrassed he were pleased Garth had left him the use of his hands. “As you say, lad, as you say. I suppose I held you captive wi’ my blatherings longer than this. I’ll do my best to hold my piece, though I would like to know what you’re looking for in them logs? My eyes do tell me you’re into data streams near enough to five or six thousand years old.”
“Trying to source out the moment your Will became semi-sentient.” Garth answered absentmindedly. He the shock passing through Barnabas and waited for the King to decry such a statement. Pleasantly, the monarch did no such thing, which was a nice change of pace.
In the original documents, entire passages had been devoted to strings of code and hardware limitations built into the actual particulate generators specifically designed to prevent nanotech from gaining anything remotely resembling sentience.
There was no one else in the entire Universe who knew as much about particulate as the two of them.
Barnabas licked his lips nervously. It weren’t possible. His Will hadn’t gained it’s own thoughts! But as Master Nickels was taking the time out to discuss other versions of nanotech that could function on the outside, it were all too likely that soon or late, he’d come to a tale of woe, and it all had summat to do with simplicity. “Go on wi’ your tales. I’m interested in these other types of Will, sure enough. I wonder how Trinity never caught wind of them.”
Garth tagged another handful of log entries that screamed Willful alteration. Seven thousand years in the past, Will was still capable of gently massaging the King’s ability to function properly. The Kin’kithal suspected he already knew precisely when things had gone down the shitter, but it was important to check your facts. “Blind spot. Now. The second type of nanotech is even more simplistic … relatively speaking … than the stuff used in Latelyspace. Infinitely more powerful, though. I designed the Cordon nodes to do precisely two things. One was to shield an ever-growing parcel of universal space from the depredations of the M’Zahdi Hesh and anything else that might be out there in the dark…”
“You built those?” Barnabas could barely contain himself. “You. How on earth could you accomplish all these things and fight a war?”
“You’ve traveled with me, Barnabas.” Garth sighed. “I never sleep. Or if I do, for about an hour. The rest of my life, of my time, is devoted to one singular goal. And back then, when the Kith and Kin and their Harmony soldiers strode the land, me and mine were finally set loose in all our own, terrible glory. You wanted to know how I did all this? Extra-dimensional assist. Now can I continue?”
Barnabas nodded. Loathe as he was to admit it, he was held fast by Garth’s story, e’en though it was only being revealed piece by piece. The man he’d been before transforming into Watt had only ever been peripherally aware of the Kin’kith and the Kith’kin, for they’d already left the Earth on their secret mission, and as a ‘Priest hidden in plain sight, working for the military, he’d been far too involved in figuring out how to bring his plans for Universal destruction about to even bother digging into the old history files.
It were fascinating. He were seeing a side to Garth N’Chalez that –Barnabas was willing to wager everything in his possession- few people got to see. Garth was old, he was tired, he was eager to have everything done, and showing that side of himself was something the lad would come to regret.
“The other thing,” Garth ignored the crafty look in Barnabas’ twinkling eyes in favor of continuing on with the story, “my nodes do is reproduce themselves. Incredibly slowly. They draw extraneous matter through their indestructible skins over the course of centuries, mining the space around them at a snail’s pace. When the time is right, when The Cordon needs to expand, it does. Quicker even than the smartest and fastest AI can process. One Planck-second, nothing has changed. The next, a few hundred thousand light-years more of space falls under Trinity’s protection. Like the tech in Latelyspace, the nodes perform perfectly and have done for the entire time they’ve been in use.”
“Oh, you’re saving the best for last, then, hain’t you?” Barnabas demanded greedily. He had it now. Somewhere out there, one of the lad’s great and grand experiments with particulate had gone awry, and he’d been the one to deal with it. Summat awful, summat horrible enough to drill into him an instinctual and pervasive loathing of the gearheads and their terrible affliction. “Wot was it then, hey? Wot was it you saw that makes your skin crawl even now?”
Garth pressed his lips together tightly as he thought about what to do or say. He flipped through the logs for a few minutes, silently considering the pros and cons of telling someone like Barnabas the whole, unfettered truth about what’d happened in Gorensystem.
The man was pathologically insane, cracked in about a billion different ways and had been on the threshold of destroying the Unreal Universe, but if there was anyone in the Unreal Universe who could possibly understand the true depth of how terrifying the Matter Eating Zombies of Goreene had really been, it was that pathological madman.
On the other hand, filling Barnabas Blake in on the horror show meant exposing critical weaknesses, things that –when the time came- the King would undoubtedly attempt to use to his advantage when everything was all said and done and it grew time to call the awful experiment that was Arcade City to a close.
Garth tagged another log, this one nearly nine thousand years old. The instances of Willful intervention between what the King saw and what was true were taking a drastic downturn the closer he got to the moment he’d already pinpointed as the King’s downfall. Such a long time. Only the impartial intelligence of nanotech could work so tirelessly, so doggedly over such a lengthy period, with so little to show for it.
Well, Garth thought grimly, nanotech and me.
Barnabas saw the dour look on Garth’s face and misinterpreted it as a sign he was gaining ground. “Come, lad, what is it? What could be worse than the foul things my own gearheaded children became, in the end?”
“You really wanna know?” Garth spun on his makeshift seat and confronted the King boldly, steeling himself to betray no untoward emotion. “Really?”
Barnabas nodded hungrily. Anything, he’d listen to anything if it were to further his understand of what made a man like Garth N’Chalez tick. “Aye, lad. One creator to another. Hain’t through our successes where we learn who we are, but through our failures.”
The irony behind the King’s obviously manipulative quip was an arrow. One he deserved, he supposed. Garth smiled at the barb, and opened his mouth. “Once upon a time, before I came the horrible thing known as Specter, I was being hunted by a faction inside Tynedale/Fujihara, a vast Conglomerate with a great deal of power, time, money and arrogance. I was Indebted to them for the destruction of a mining facility, and they were totally pissed off about it. They started targeting Specter crews in the hopes of forcing the commander’s hand, but he gave me leave to take care of business. I tracked them to where they were going to be, and headed off to this boring little solar system called Goren. Only, it wasn’t boring, not at all.”
Garth took a deep breath and pushed onwards, ignoring the King’s greedy eyes and how they seemed to glow from within. “It started with the dust that covered everything, I suppose. I should’ve noticed it right off, but I was worried about dealing with Tynedale/Fujihara’s forces…”
***
If he wasn’t bound firmly in place, the One and Only King would’ve summoned a large, comfortable chair to drop down into and just … sit. For a long mome
nt. He reflected on the harrowing, bone-chilling story of Matter Eating zombies and decided that perhaps, just perhaps, he would’ve liked to take more than a long moment.
No wonder the lad had owned such a crawling dislike of everything associated with gearheads! It was well understandable, given his inclination to label all the odd bits and pieces growing out of the skin or to replace lost body parts as ‘replication errors’, and were he to’ve been through the same sort of thing, Barnabas admitted he’d be just as biased, just as predisposed to be so ultimately wary.
Goosebumps squirmed up and down his arms, a thing the King hadn’t felt in thousands of years. N’Chalez was a formidable storyteller, when he got right down into the guts of the tale he were telling and dispensed with all the pretenses he wore like a suit of armor. The mental imagery of the first time Garth had seen one of the afflicted skittering and crawling back together after having been … detonated … tiny whorls of particulate-controlled flesh leaving tracks in the ubiquitous layers of dust covering everything, the long, slack-jawed howl of a mouth nearly three feet in diameter, the gasping, wheezing cough…
“Well.” Barnabas said after he shivered the fear out of himself. “Well.”
Garth laughed dryly. The few people he’d told that story to –Huey, Ute- had said the same sort of thing, though he suspected of the three, only Barnabas was truly capable of recognizing the … whole of it all.
“And you say the … the HIM were what kept things on the up and up for so long?” Barnabas knew scanty about the HIMs, though he did admit to himself having one of them powerful intelligence machines at his disposal would’ve made the governance of Arcade City quite a bit easier.
“Until Trinity decided it wanted to reclaim the system for Itself, yeah.” Garth pinched the bridge of his nose. He’d talked nonstop for over an hour. Barnabas had been so enrapt in the story the ordinarily interruption-prone King had kept his gob shut the whole time. “Bombed the shit out of the place until the Goreenes gave in. One of the bombardments damaged the primary control console. Fucked everything up.”
“And the … the machine you ordered built out of a solar system?” Jealousy gnawed at Barnabas, though only just; here he’d been thinking he were the absolute best blacksmith in the whole of the Universe for having built his Domed City and all that’d gone on ‘neath the wondrous cap, yet across from him there sat a man who’d risen one morning thinking to himself ‘today’s the day I turn a solar system into an engine to assist in the destruction of the Universe’.
Remarkable. The scope of the man’s vision was unimaginable.
Garth thought of poor Shyla Sin, the last Enforcer Trinity ever sent out to the system, ostensibly to see what was going on but who had in fact been ushered forth to see if some modicum of control could be regained. Shyla Sin, infected by the Goreene Matter Zombie Virus, but not so far gone that all willpower was gone, waiting in the depth of the ‘empty’ solar system for the moment the call went out.
Then it’d be nothing more complicated than hitting a button. From there, the systemic-sized engine would almost literally materialize around the zombified Enforcer. For all Garth knew, the process would take less than a minute, as a quadrillions upon quadrillions of nanotech particulate completed their eons-old task.
“Waiting.” Garth said at long last. He hated Gorensystem, loathed what’d happened to the people there, wanted quite badly to bring Trinity to task for It’s stupidity. But it wasn’t going to happen, and, well, if he was on the winning side of the impending war, Trinity –and every other damnfool idiot in the Universe- would get what was coming to them.
Permanently.
Barnabas thought he could see where Garth was trying to lead the conversation, so he jumped in. “Well, you see, lad, there’s a far difference from what you wrought on the outside than what exists here in Arcade City, hey? Your nodes are wi’out doubt the most amazing thing I’ve ever heard of, to be true, and, well, like as not your solar system-sized machine is something I doubt I could’ve ever even wrapped my meager brain around, before and after becoming as I am now, but, ah … apples and oranges, laddie. The Arcade City Will …er … Cloud Generators and all the software and hardware as runs ‘em are just fine. Perfect, e’en. Never had no fault, never did nothing I didn’t … want …”
As soon as his brain caught up with the gloating his tongue was set to do, Barnabas shut his eyes in anguish.
Obsidian Golems. They were a thing he didn’t want, had never wanted, would never have wanted running about ‘neath his Dome, doing horrific, awful things to the men and women and babies of Arcade City.
“You’re beginning to see it now.” Garth said softly, gently. “The worry you’re feeling now … it’s what I feel all the time. The systems and everything I left in place, I got no way of knowing they’re all working or will work properly until I’m literally standing on top of them. Did I miss something? Has someone or something else gotten smart enough to undo a critical element of my plan? Will everything work out? Why would Trinity get rid of pizza, for fuck’s sake? It’s a small bit of circular, pepperoni-having heaven.”
“My Will is perfect.” King Barnabas Blake the One and Only uttered adamantly, thrusting his jaw out as pugnaciously as he ever had before. “Cut me loose from my bonds and we’ll have at it like proper gentlemen. Then,” he announced darkly, “then you’ll see.”
Garth restrained the hoot of joy that wanted to climb out of him as his eyes fell across the very first instance of Willful manipulation of the man who would be Destroyer of the Universe. As he’d grown to suspect for some time now, it was the encounter with Chad Sikkmund … no, wait, there was another log, hours before … not quite as manipulated as the rest, but tainted code striated through the heavy blocks of encryption. So. Will had tried cracking through the protocols embedded deep into the guts of the thing that controlled it and failed, then had moved on to something far easier to get into.
Barnabas caught the guilty look on Garth’s face and something queer happened in his guts. It were an odd feeling, making him feel as though he were about to lose all he’d ever eaten. Unreasoning fear based on nowt more than a single look! “What?” The King howled, thrashing against his bonds. “What did you discover, hey?”
Garth turned to look at his ‘captive’. “The problem with nanotech particulate, King Barnabas Blake the One and Only, is that it is a complex system that can only handle simple commands. And that it is an adaptive system, like the man who invented it. It is more than adequately capable of doing any goddamn thing you ask it to, it’s just that … it grows in complexity along with the undertaking. My Universal nodes do as they’ve been doing and will continue. Same with the Sheet and prote-machines in Hospitalis. Gorensystem functioned as well as it did for the longest time thanks to the mitigating properties of the HIM, but the moment that Trinity ushered Humanity in to populate those worlds, multiple layers of complexity were added in to the mix, and the particulate had to ask itself, are the carbon based life forms a part of the soon-to-be machine, or aren’t they? The HIM managed to keep the humans out of things, but then it got damaged, and the particulate was left on it’s own. It incorporated people into the matrix, but then got confused, because it’d never been properly programmed to deal with the biological process of life. It read in the DNA of the men and women it began infecting that they were supposed to go on and on and on, as life is wont, and so, that’s what happened. Complexity causes an exponential surge in intelligent processing, but also gravely increases the potential for extreme risk. Cloud Particulate Systems, King, make it past whatever Universal process that destroys other forms of nanotech because everyone else trying to design the molecular machines to start with complex and move on to ‘holy fuck this thing is so complicated I need to invent four-dimensional math and start talking in colors.”
“None of what you describe or imply could happen has really happened here, Garth.” Barnabas replied with genuine sincerity. “Oh, aye, there’s them Obsidian Gole
ms and what frightful things they are, but beyond that, there’s nowt in Arcade City as bad as them Matter Eating Zombies, hey? Now explain that look you gave me or let me loose.”
Garth made to say something, then shrugged. Ever since he’d crawled out of the broken crystalline prison and witnessed what’d happened to King Barnabas Blake the One and Only, he’d known that this moment would come.
For all they’d been through together in the last month, and for all the vile, awful things that the King had forced his people to suffer through for the last thirty thousand years, well … Garth would’ve sworn it impossible to find a punishment too grave, too severe for such a man as that, but it seemed he was wrong.
He cleared his throat. “Shortly before the penultimate showboating fight between you and Chad Sikkmund, there was some kind of Alpha-level interaction between you and Will. What was it? This code,” Garth moved the long string into the air between them so Barnabas might better see, “is really damn long and I’ve got no inclination to decode it.”
Barnabas recognized the entry and couldn’t help but smile. Oh, how the people of Arcadia had trembled in both fear and excitement when he’d materialized in their midst, walking out of a dark curtain of solidified Will. That first teleport. How grand an idea, how wondrous. The whole square of Arcadians had fallen tomb-silent at the sudden appearance of their grand monarch in their midst. Some had fainted, e’en, but in the end, they’d all owned a face full of rapture, hadn’t they just? Barnabas related all this to Garth, wrapped up in the warm embrace of good memories, adding, “Though I must tell you, Master Nickels, I were more than a little timorous that first time, hey? Got easier, of course. As with anything.”
“Of course it got easier.” Garth almost shouted the words. It was so fucking hard to reconcile the King before him right now with the image of the man … ‘Priest … who’d worked so diligently to first decode then improve upon the original Particulate. That being had been someone of stellar intellect. This one, nothing more than a pale shadow.