by Lee Bond
“It is, isn’t it?” Garth whispered quietly. It was. “I’ve thought of this, and other things. Over and over again. The best way of destroying the Universe. The quickest. The longest. The most violent. The most peaceful. Combinations of them all. Saving my Father. Killing him. How best to unspool the fabric of the Unreality, then to rewrite it all. Back and forth, back and forth…”
“None could stand against you, my liege.” The Platinum King was humbled. Awed, even. Until They gazed into the eyes of their newborn King.
Then fear grabbed hold, for the Kin’kithal’s eyes burned and gleamed with terrible purpose and though he was speaking of doing as They’d dreamed for millennia, somehow … somehow it worse.
“No.” Garth smiled, edges of Specter curdling the air around him. On either side of him, the massive spheres of nanoparticulate … squirmed. “No. No one could. Not even my Father. Or the M’Zahdi Hesh, or any of the other things out there in the dark. With what I have in my hands now, I could rip everything to shreds before dawn tomorrow. A single Quantum Tunnel, King, twisted to my Will, and my darkness would spread across the Unreality like a plague. Or …”
They tilted their head to one side. “Or?”
“Or this.” Garth raised a hand once more, only this time, instead of more blackened Will bubbling to the surface, a familiar form coalesced. She winked and smiled at him, jade green eyes full of humor. Others rose then, the first –and never, ever, ever spoken of- Armageddon Troop. They knelt. “I could bring back everyone who’s ever died by my hand. I could do it all.”
“It would be your right. With such power, anything you wished could be yours.”
Simple. So simple. It wasn’t even Specter that wanted to do this. It was just … just him. He was so fucking tired of it all. All the pain he caused others, all the pain he himself had to endure. All the lies, all the tragedy, all of it. It was just so … sickening. A single command, a simple command, and the million tons of nanoparticulate quivering to do his bidding would flow forth from Arcade City and all who would stand before him would become a part of his plan.
They watched on as Garth battled with this urge to do as none had ever dreamed, and as they did, They saw something … unexpected; a tiny … frisson of bright sapphire light curling through that one blue eye and suddenly…
“No.” Garth dropped his hands. Lost friends splashed into the dirt. The deadly spheres returned from whence they came. Vibrant dreams of near-instant Universal destruction shattered.
Garth sighed miserably. “No. The path I’ve stepped on is the only one I can follow.”
Their imaginary heart almost stopped in Their regal chest!
There was summat inside the man that weren’t neither Specter nor N’Chalez. And he didn’t know! They could turn this to Their advantage, for it’d been clear from the onset that the Kin’kithal had no need for Them; They’d played this role already with Barnabas –and with spectacular results- mayhap it would work again.
A bargaining chip! Not a great one, hardly e’en a good one, but it were something.
“Then what?” They demanded slyly.
Ragged edges of code he recognized as his own suddenly floated up through the datasphere of Barnabas’ epically horrendous structure. Keeping one eye on the King –who seemed content to play the role of duplicitous seneschal- Garth dove headfirst into the programming.
The first thing he found was … unsurprising.
: Project Rainmaker failed … no data ports…. Insufficient command access … please reboot … please reboot …:
Garth tilted his head back and let loose with a short, barking laugh.
“What does my King find to be of humor?” They asked slyly.
“Irony.” Garth gestured and the code he must’ve subconsciously uploaded into Book shimmered into view between him and Platinum King, a sinuous mirage of deadly code intended to undo things quickly.
They read the commands, eyes widening. “Ah. We see. Well, one cannot be everywhere, not truly. You intend to use this code, then? To dismantle this wondrous world? Instead of what you just revealed to Us?”
Garth nodded, a mighty pleased look on his mug. Finally. For once, something had gone right. Sure, a lifetime of regret, blood and sorrow had been shed to get him here and he’d learned some painful lessons along the way, but they said it wasn’t the destination but the journey, right?
Riiiiight.
A quick snap of the fingers unleashed Rainmaker code into the Cloud Particulate’s primary servers. Unable to resist the temptation, he issued other commands, drawing both from his own memories of Great Britain and the original geographical blueprints contained with the Cloud’s eternal storage devices.
Somewhere high above the two, The Dome groaned and creaked as everything started working.
The Platinum King almost jumped out of Their false skin. “What is this?”
“The entropic field between the armored layers.” Garth answered, smirking a bit at the King’s fearful face. “Reordering denatured particulate requires a lot of power and a very particular kind of destruction. With it, and the fucking pile you hid from Barnabas, I’m going to do something good for a change. The Dome will collapse because of it. Happily, of all the matter left in Arcade City, the only stuff still fresh as the day as it was harvested is the inner Dome so as it collapses, it will be transformed. New land will fall to the poisoned skin of my sorrowful homeland. Fresh, unsullied, clean. If the people of the Earth are smart, they’ll treat Great Britain 2.0 as the gift that it is.”
The heavens creaked and groaned again and as They absorbed the fullness of the gesture, They saw that yes, parts of Their eternal Dome were indeed collapsing in on themselves, shivering into … into clouds.
“We…” They stammered, utterly uncertain, “We should like to offer you Our services. There are things We know about you that you…”
“Can it, asshat.” Garth snapped. “I’ve had enough of things whispering in my ears. Enough for an eternity.”
“But we can…”
Garth slashed the air viciously with his hands and the final bit of sentience that was King’s Will broke apart at the seams. Tiny droplets of quicksilver bright liquid splashed to the cobblestones, draining away into the cracks.
The King of Arcade City, Engineer for Reality 2.0 and Kin’kithal warrior stood in the middle of the empty world, listening to the sounds of The Dome falling to pieces as the entropic generators continued artfully cracking every bit of denatured nanoparticulate open, suffusing each atom with fresh, energized matter stolen from the glorious TikTok Dome itself.
The mist filling the apex of The Dome began thickening, turning into storm clouds pregnant with a unique payload. The world grew still then, and the tortured sounds of metal being wrenched apart transformed into thunder.
“Wait for it.” Garth whispered, the words tainted with both joy and sorrow. Such an unshakeable, foreboding feeling had crept into him. “Wait for iiiiiiit.”
The Dome gave one final, tremendous apocalyptic scream and …
The clouds split open, filling Garth’s world with the sounds of heavy rain.
And wherever the rain did fall, the land did grow, just as it had in the beginning.
A faint smile tugged the corners of Garth’s lips. His time in Arcade City wasn’t precisely over, not just yet, because if he knew anything about the people living on Old Earth…
Yep. There they were. Shielding his eyes with a hand, Garth counted dozens of ships spiralling downwards through the thick clouds. There would be Bishop and Voss_Uderhell, Tynedale/Fujihara and others. All kinds of ships, and they’d all be fighting over whatever they could find.
“Here I was worrying about a ride out of this place.” Garth shook his head. “Silly me.”
Then he started hunting for a hiding place, running through the best way of hijacking a ship as he did so.
27 Odds and Ends before the End
Domefall
When one of the greatest mysteries t
he Universe has ever witnessed is on the planet from which all Humanity sprang, everyone and their genetically enhanced kitten pays it some kind of attention; from the richest and most powerful Conglomerate heads to those poor souls eking out some kind of miserable existence in the depths of Ground Zero, everyone, everywhere, was at least peripherally aware of Arcade City.
Many knew, many read the brief updates, did some basic fact checking on the who’s who Rogue’s Gallery of fools who did something stupid enough to get themselves chucked inside. They read theories on what went into the Dome, how it’d been built. They read the interviews with the guards, compared notes, so on and so forth.
Then they went back to the business of living their lives because the damned thing had been there for something like thirty thousand years and as a member of a race that required things like food, sleep, work and the possibility of sex now and then, there were better things to do than obsess about a giant metal dome.
That was regular people.
Conglomerate heads, men and women like Emile Voss and Annalise Uderhell, they were the farthest thing from ‘normal’. Their dedication –indeed, their dedication to all things mysterious in the Universe- bordered on the manic obsessive and were it not for the fact that there were so many mysteries to hold them captivated, their galaxy-striding conglomerates would collapse overnight as they obsessed over improbable minutia.
They, like regular people, usually only spent a few minutes a day looking stuff up, but unlike the wretched masses, they had thousands of AI minds tasked on focusing on everything related to Arcade City, the Emperor’s Dome, 9-Nova-12 and all those other interesting hotspots seeded throughout Trinity’s vast domain. With all those minds doing the watching, those great Conglomerate heads were able to spend their time doing things like running their companies, or –as in the case of Voss_Uderhell and a few others- throwing alternate-existence super-dinosaurs under the bus.
But then … things started happening at The Dome. Things that’d never happened before.
The first pack of guards disappearing had been merely a blip on the radar, so to speak; as much as those on the ground and before the Geared Doors tried to downplay such occurrences, packs of men slipping away into the night happened more frequently than any of them wanted to admit. It was the unbearable pressure of being so close to something so profoundly and unutterably different all the time, day in and day out. It either drove you mad or drove you away.
Sometimes both, and quite brilliantly.
The disappearance, though, of the other guard posts, all at the same time and with such … emptiness of answers? That’d prompted the big boys and girls on Old Earth to start paying real-time attention, a sudden redirection of mental energies prompting a considerable number of smaller players that were always lurking on the edges to do the same.
More quantitative processing power turned towards Arcade City that moment than had been used in the last thousand years. AI minds ranging from tiny pipsqueaks barely able to solve p vs np all the way up to kaleidoscopic intelligences with intellects dense enough to grind neutron stars into dust started watching, waiting.
But like children grounded by parents just in the other room, their attention was tentative. Probe too hard, dig too deep, show too much interest and like a child edging a toe out the bedroom door just to test the limits of their restrictions, Voss_Uderhell, Tynedale/Fujihara and the others had been prepped and ready to fly back into the safety of their own conglomerate superstructures the moment Trinity or one of It’s Enforcers so much as whispered in their general direction.
No warnings had come, though. Well, none save the usual ‘don’t be too nosy or you’ll lose your nose’, but any truly galactic conglomerate got enough of those in a single hour to giftwrap entire planets in the paperwork, so they’d all just gone on waiting for something exciting to happen.
Only … only nothing had happened for so long that the various powers-that-were had just been about to pack up and go home when out of nowhere, fourteen Enforcers had landed at fourteen Geared Doors only to …
Disappear.
After that, it’d taken precisely one hour and thirty-one minutes for Tynedale/Fujihara’s lead Reclamation teams to park one of their full-sized vessels right atop the vey apex of the ancient Dome, whereupon they’d gotten down to the business of serious goddamn waiting.
Waiting for something to happen to The Dome, waiting for Trinity to finally order them away, for Enforcers to burn the ship out of the sky, for the Mad Goth King his own self to issue a rambling complaint in weirdly accented, broken English for them to get their vessel off his world.
When nothing of the sort happened?
More ships. Great and small. Filling the skies and land and Dome above and around and near legendary Arcade City, as far as the eye could see, each captain aboard each ship ready to not only vamoose at the first sign of trouble but to waylay their nearest neighbors to ensure their getaway was made clean.
Nothing. And for weeks. Nothing more. Interested parties came and went, sometimes as quickly as the sun rose and set. Theories abounded. Trinity was battling the King. The King was winning. All was dead inside. The Dome was going to crack like an egg and monsters would spill out. They theories grew evermore fanciful, wild, speculative, but still, nothing happened.
Through it all, the biggest boys and girls –not to mention the most desperate- stayed. They wouldn’t move. They couldn’t. Something else was going to happen, they said over and over again, and the longer they stayed, the more adamant their beliefs became.
And then…
Ah, yes.
And then The Dome did fall.
Didn’t it just?
The Sleeper Must Awaken
She was with him always, there, in an unused corner of his mind, whispering, whispering to him, trying to trick him into letting his guard down, con him into letting her into his mind properly, her soft, seductive voice a thing doing little to hide the wicked scything sharpness of her cruel, cruel hunger. When seductive words failed –as they always did because they rang false and hollow, like an automaton reading from a badly written script- then it was sharp fingers, skittering and scratching across his mind. Vicious attacks like that, when she revealed herself as what she really was, were even less effective, for he, like the others –hopefully- was inviolate.
Babel Sinfell was a prisoner, both in mind and body, but not in spirit; from the moment the strange connection between him and the other Armageddon Troopers had risen up in them, the diminutive conman had spent as much time as he could within, testing the parameters, seeing how far inside his own soul he could go before he stopped being him and started being one of the others.
The answer? Not very far. Their minds and hearts and souls rubbed up against one another far too quickly and far too intimately for his own personal liking, but there was nothing he –or any of them- could do. Cianni had tried on more than one occasion to drive a deeper wedge of … spiritual distance … between them all using that formidable talent of hers, but to no avail; out of all of them, the one with the computer buried in her soul should’ve been the one to find the path to freedom.
Lady Ha’s reed-thin whispers curled through him, trying to find purchase.
Babel opened his mouth, to laugh, to mock, to make her understand the futility inherent in her efforts. “I’m sorry, Lady Ha. The Specter you are trying to find isn’t available right now. At the sound of the beep, leave your name and number, and he’ll get back to you as soon as possible. Beeeeep.”
Lady Ha’s psychic curse roiled like poisonous black thunder through his mind and were the Specter able, he’d smile, but he couldn’t, so he satisfied himself with a hearty mental chuckle.
They were all prisoners of the redoubtable Lady Ha, but … special; their connection to one another and their undeniable ties to Garth Nickels were somehow preventing their captor –a woman who possessed the ability to rewrite the source code of the Universe- from digging in through the Soul-HUD. She coul
d run them like robots, program their flesh to carry on with the most demeaning, degrading tasks as long as their bodies were capable, but only for so long. Flesh was weak, needing rest, recuperation.
When rest was given, minds temporarily locked behind barricades were given leave to roam the confines of their inner thoughts once more.
All save poor Dagon, who was too alien, too complex, too … unnatural. He was elsewhere, under special lock and key until the Lady Ha found a way to crack him wide open, a stony egg full of sweet secrets.
Rest did mean freedom, but it also meant a different kind of punishment.
Rest was when the whispering started.
The cajoling, the promises, the tricks and traps. They weren’t very good, nor were they very effective, at least, not from a Specter point of view: all of them had been through truly hairy times, all of them had undergone vicious torture and cruel empathic manipulation at one time or another, all of them had come out on top. Why, beautiful blonde Cianni had once been held captive by a no-name cartel on some backwater planet in a solar system that Trinity didn’t even recognize any longer, and those buggers had tortured her mercilessly for nearly six months and not once had she given them a single thing.
They were Specters. Specters didn’t break. Specters didn’t fold. Specters never gave up trying.
That being said, Babel worried.
None of those drug lords or pirates or mercenaries or cartels or dispassionate third parties had possessed a tenth of Lady Ha’s resolve, a fiftieth of the power trapped in that queerly twisted halo of hers.