by Lee Bond
“Chairwoman Doans dispatched us to assist you in getting out of the hospital without any … difficulties.” Veo admitted cautiously.
“And why,” Garth asked, turning to confront the two agents direly, “would I find it ‘difficult’ getting out of the hospital?” The trillionaire had the distinct feeling of being fucked, and quite hard.
Latelians. They had to be clones of Machiavelli. That was the only thing that made any sense. They popped out of the womb trying to con their mothers out of milk.
“There are a lot of reporters in the lobby waiting to ask you questions, sa.” Veo’s heart jumped when a dark storm cloud of anger flashed across Garth’s ordinarily calm face. It was gone just as quickly. “They’ve been here since the day after it was disclosed that you’re the sole survivor the Port Disaster and …”
“And?” Garth asked hollowly. White noise filled his ears. Yes, he was being fucked. He wasn’t even out of the hospital yet and people were messing with his decision to be calmer, less-blowing-up-of-things Garth Nickels.
Could an entire solar system have a death wish and not know it?
“And it seems they somehow learned of your … impressive charitable donations. They’d … like to interview you. Ask you what it’s like. How it feels. That sort of thing. You’re a celebrity. The Chairwoman thought perhaps you might like some … discretion … in your comings and goings.”
Garth closed his eyes. “Fuck me sideways. A celebrity?”
xxx
Trying to run a system that is hovering on the brink of collapse without letting the people who lived there know how truly desperate the situation was required talent, drive, and an unwavering moral compass. Chairwoman Doans, regardless of what detractors and the Noble Opposition felt, possessed these qualities in spades. The single most important thing in her life next to keeping her relationship with Vasily an ‘unconfirmed rumor’ and nothing more was ensuring that Latelyspace didn’t crumble like an over-baked cookie.
It was still widely believed that her predecessor, Chairman Scottsdale, had been a paramount leader of untarnished character who’d done more in his time for the glorious Latelian Regime than any leader before. Pundits added ‘or since’ when they were feeling especially lucky. On the surface, even Alyssa found herself agreeing with the Old Man’s PR squadrons; armed with artfully spun phrases, carefully spoken Systemic Addresses and more circuit tours than was even thinkable, Scottsdale had manipulated the inborn Latelian love of spectacle with masterful skill.
But it’d been smoke and mirrors.
While this ’man of the people’ had spent his time pressing the flesh and kissing babies, the stresses of an office left in unskilled hands had begun the nigh-on irreversible trend of destroying the foundations of Latelian society. It was only coming out now, but it’d already been too late forty-five years ago; the damage was done and all that remained was to see if they could weather the approaching storm. One of the only possible ways to protect her people from complete and utter destruction –through their own hands being the most popular forecast at this point- was to acclimatize them to what Trinity could offer.
Not a popular decision, but a necessary one. Late at night, when melancholy struck, Alyssa imagined the Trinity AI, smug, all-powerful, and groaning under Its own tremendous intelligence, laughing at them. I’d cost that damnable machine mind nothing to give them their ‘freedom’ in exchange for certain … favors … and now, in the fullness of time, fully five thousand years since that first accord had been signed, Trinity was getting what It’d probably wanted all along.
What was five thousand years to an immortal machine mind? All It had to do was sit back and wait for Latelyspace to collapse in on itself and It could claim the nearly empty system as It’s own.
The worst thing about the situation was that she -Chairwoman Doans- would probably be reviled through the ages as the turncoat, even if she were successful in her long-term goals. It wouldn’t be until well after the fullness of her plans were understood that the Doans Family Name would be cleared, but until then, scapegoat, traitor, pariah.
But it needed to be done.
Individually, her citizens were fine. They were tolerable in groups of no more than four. When they got together in larger numbers, they stopped being individuals and became mobs so pumped up on false Regimist tendencies and such an overwhelming crescendo of patriotic pride that it was sickening. It was that kind of foolish preening that kept everyone from seeing the truth right in front of his or her eyes. Confronted with it, they shouted loudly and ran away, reluctant to imagine that the way they’d lived was no longer good enough. And all thanks to the Ministry of Pride.
They couldn’t expand anymore without ruining fragile ecosystems, without becoming overcrowded hives of humanity. Realistically, they couldn’t even enjoy the Games. It was all too expensive, all too time-consuming, all too blinding. They needed more.
They needed freedom, and the only way to get it was through Trinity.
Alyssa held no illusions that she would eventually be vindicated. The birth spasms of Lately version 2 were going to be loud and nasty, and although no one knew it yet, the destruction of the spaceport wasn’t an isolated incident, it was the first sign of the coming apocalypse. Her spin-doctors worked overtime to keep more of the less palatable facts as innocuous as possible. No matter how badly she wanted her citizens to know what loomed on the horizon, by the very same token they couldn’t handle the fallout. It’d rip her planets apart.
Yes, they were ignorant about things that were dreadfully important, and yes, they ‘deserved’ to know, but they simply wouldn’t be able to handle the news that their society had less than ten years before total collapse.
A little over two weeks ago, they’d had forty. Forty long years for her to prepare the grandest scheme in all the Universes.
The best analytical avatars in the system had been working day and night to determine the cause of this drastic shortening, and they’d finally come to a conclusion. Neither Vasily nor Doans had been surprised to learn that the most responsible factor wasn’t an occurrence but a man.
Garth Nickels.
Her … plans … with Trinity needed to go forward as quickly as possible. There were ways to accelerate the timetable, but with speed came risk. Alyssa didn’t want to push Trinity’s representatives any more than usual, but things were coming to a head and the sooner they –she- had everything in place, the better. With Garth in the picture, well … things got muddy. Thus far they’d kept their noses out of the Nickels affair, aloof snobs that they were. Eventually, though, they’d pull their heads out of their ‘scholarly examination’ of Latelyspace’s deepest histories and notice what was going on around them.
Garth Nickels.
Alyssa couldn’t decide if he was a Trinity spy or not. She supposed she could simply ask the representatives, but that meant cluing them into Garth’s presence. There was no way of knowing if the three Trinityfolk sequestering themselves away were even aware of the Spaceport Disaster –or if they were, what they thought of it- and the last thing she wanted was to ask them for help. They’d give it, naturally, and be ever so condescending about it.
Garth Nickels. Spy, terrorist, what? Terrance had certainly believed the man to be a universal threat, and had ‘acted accordingly’ with his attempts to use the man to further his own political agenda.
Vasily -who’d spent a number of years in Trinityspace as all OverCommanders must- felt Nickels was something else altogether, agreeing in the same breath that the man was more than simply dangerous. They’d coolly discussed assassination long into the night three times already, always coming back to two salient points: Trinity wanted him alive -regardless of personal or political cost- and it was highly evident they’d need something more impressive than a spaceport falling on the man to make sure that death stuck.
So what was he? Alyssa didn’t know. Vasily didn’t know. She had a traitor in maximum security who’d started spouting religious rhetoric
before the Traitor’s First Tongue had been implanted, calling him ‘Antichrist’ and worse. She had an impertinent medical doctor who envisioned Nickels’ body as some kind of panacea and was still trying to convince her to force more tests even though the man had been released from hospital. Any day now the man –this … Sullivan- was likely to suggest they kidnap Nickels and perform the sorts of horrific genetic experiments that’d yielded God soldiers.
Worst of all, though, was discovering that she had a populace enamored with the man, making it even more difficult for her to move against him, should it prove necessary. Alyssa was personally willing to go on systemic television and swear on a stack of confiscated Bibles that Garth Nickels was responsible for everything that’d happened since he’d landed, even if it meant political ruination.
Unfortunately, it was all about proof. She was leader of a powerful Regime, true enough, but it was a precarious time. Under normal circumstances -as Chairwoman- she could damn well do as she pleased and then turn a blind eye to the fallout, but not now, not with everything so ill-balanced. A single misstep at the wrong moment and her planets could rise up against her, undoing the work of a lifetime in just a few moments. No, she needed proof, tangible, visceral, undeniable proof that Garth Nickels was precisely who she knew he was. When that happened –if that happened- she could deal with Nickels in the most flagrant manner imaginable.
They were commodities she was notoriously short of, and because of that, she was going to do something dangerous.
She was going to ignore Garth Nickels.
She could afford to. In just under two weeks, he’d find himself in the ring against a God soldier a hundred times more mechanized than the one he’d fought in the Elimination trial, and regardless of what he did between now and then, Garth would become a dim, distant memory in the minds of everyone save Gameheads. He’d become a statistical blip, an anomaly. And then they could all go back to the business of saving Latelyspace. There was no chance of him making it to the Final Game and they’d all be spared having to deal with Garth Nickels.
Was it risky? Yes, because ultimately it was doing exactly what Terrance had unsuccessfully tried to do. It’d be done better, because she had access to machines, avatars and software that no one but the Chairperson could use, but in the end -if she was caught- her career was done. The next person in line was a man so thoroughly entrenched in the very patriotic mindset she loathed that it was an utter certainty Lately would die even quicker than if Garth lived.
No, she was going to do nothing and hope that the problem that was Garth Nickels resolved itself quietly, and with little fuss.
In the meantime, Doans figured it’d be worth a shot to see if she could get her hands on some of the man’s trillions.
xxx
When they weren’t trying to be intimidating, Veo and Scoom were all right fellas, even though they did work for someone who was a dictator when everything was boiled down into a thick political tar.
Veo and his wife Ellen were due to have their second child, and their first, a young woman named Silken, was on her way to being top of the eighth grade class. To hear Veo talk about it, Silken was the smartest thing ever born, ever.
Scoom -a notorious bachelor and professional man about town- was apparently in the middle of a relationship that was, according him, getting uncomfortably serious. It seemed he liked her quite a bit, but for obvious security reasons hadn’t told her his real name or what he did for a living.
They both indicated at different times during the drive that they were personally very impressed with his survival.
The only marring point during the conversation was when they both decided to pump Garth for answers as to how he’d done the unthinkable. When that happened, Garth closed his mouth and stared out the window humming old theme songs; lately, every time he put his brain on idle –which, owing to his hospital stay, was often- the damn things popped up with the tenacity of, well, a theme song.
Eventually, he caught sight of the spaceport.
He lost abrupt interest in the theme song for Alf. He stared long and hard out the window as they drove by, committing the scene of obliteration to memory, aghast.
Very little of the spaceport remained. Amidst the debris of the various hangars, telemetry rigs, landing pads and other structures vital to running a spaceport, a lone building stood ‘relatively’ unharmed: the central operations building where he’d met Naoko a zillion years ago.
There was fire damage, of course, but most damaging had been a small passenger carrier’s rude entrance through the huge bay windows; shot down by malfunctioning Gatling cannons, the pilot had done his best to keep from crashing into the fiery maelstrom surrounding the main building. Garth knew from news reports that something like this had happened before, and the small shuttle had been ‘caught’ by internal safety measures, sparing the terrified, huddled masses trapped inside from death by shuttle. Beyond that one incident, much of that structure’s damage was cosmetic.
Surrounding that one building -which now served as a debarkation point for clean-up crews and logistical headquarters for various government agencies interested in assisting- was a scene ripped straight out of any post-apocalyptic science fiction movie Garth could name.
And he’d lived through it. Neural sheathing at its finest or something else? Garth couldn’t forget Lisa’s words. They –the sheaths- were running at four hundred percent capacity, allegedly creating a pain that would kill every living thing on Hospitalis and he felt nothing. So was it the damnable neural sheaths that’d given him the fortitude to withstand that chaos, or was it his … ‘heritage’? He couldn’t forget that he was the same as Lisa and the others, and they’d been … capable of amazing things. Garth blinked the thoughts away; musing about coulds and woulds and might be’s was pointless until he got his memory back, and that wouldn’t happen until he was in Bravo.
He turned his thoughts outwards once more, back to the shattered remains of the spaceport.
Little remained of the fifteen square mile plot of land that had been the economic focal point for the entire planet; without it, Hospitalis was going to have to endure until something temporary could be made available, or, God forbid, a new one built.
Gaping craters displayed blackened, treacherous subsurface access paths and material transport lines completely ravaged by fire, plasma, toxic waste, deadly gasses and the eventual methods used to douse the fires of Hell; thick black smoke still guttered from half a dozen such ‘vents’ while firefighting squadrons tried vainly to get in close enough to put them out. It was rough going still, two weeks later. Meteorologists opined that the heat and waste spilling into the atmosphere would permanently change the weather patterns of balmy Hospitalis, perhaps for the worst.
Ringing the spaceport were the much-abused OIP the God soldiers had used to ‘save the port’, but they now lay on their sides like discarded children’s toys. Heavily damaged, most of them had taken tremendous amounts of hostile fire from the very same cannon turrets that’d destroyed upwards of ten shuttles. Others, landing too close to the then-perimeter of the rapidly growing tragedy, were melted into useless shapes: the duronium sheathing coating the more common metals had ultimately proven incapable of handling such terrible heat.
Grotesquely, some of those OIPS had been transformed into vast metallic tombs, the God soldiers inside trapped, unable to break free. Garth shuddered. Renowned for their simplistic intelligence, even the dumbest amongst those trapped must’ve realized what was happening.
What a horror show.
There was nothing he could do to dispel the madness of what’d happened. He was responsible. By coming here in search of answers to who and what he was, he had driven Ashok Guillfoyle down an indescribably desperate –insane- path.
Bravo’s influence and his own galaxy-class ego had caused all this. Was one more responsible than the other? Did it even really matter which portion of his fucked up brain was responsible? If Bravo had blinded him to Ashok Guillfoyle
’s treachery, his own ego had provided him with an unreasonable solution. Conversely, if his towering megalomania tricked him into ignoring any threats beyond the most obvious, Bravo had supplied him with an incredibly destructive and overwhelmingly irresponsible reaction.
News reporters covered the clean-up efforts day and night, filling the netLINKs with stories about the victims and the people they’d left behind, the valiant efforts of God soldiers unskilled and unprepared for such conditions, the mystery of the gang war, and, of course, the survivor. A few of the more intrepid and unscrupulous channels used the chaos in the preparation area to break into secure areas so they could try to steal the limited amount of footage caught by external cameras. One channel in particular, News4U, purported to have a star witness who was an employee of the secret government agency that had first discovered the strange goings on.
“Shit.” Garth had seen and had been responsible for many things in his life. In the service of Special Services, he’d attached enormous chemical booster rockets –ordinarily used to send hundreds of thousands of tons of processed organic waste into space- to a building filled with guns and other WMD, sending it into space to be reclaimed by his ship, the Zanzibar Cat. Structural fallout and the sheer stress of ripping an entire skyscraper out of a downtown core had left tons of dust, dirt, debris and broken glass for miles in every direction, but this … this was awful.
Scoom nodded. “See why people are excited to know you?”
“I’m a foreign devil.” Garth replied reflexively.
Veo laughed. He’d gone through Garth’s effects at The Palazzo on the off chance that he’d left some incriminating evidence lying around, and had seen the custom-made shirts. “Not anymore, sa. You’re a citizen of the Latelian Regime now.”
“Super.” Garth muttered. “How long till we’re in Central?”