Subversive Elements (Unreal Universe Book 2)

by Lee Bond

  I have no doubt in these old bones of mine that not only are you entirely guilty of modifying that PCU –something that has never once been achievable in five thousand years, I should like to add- but that you also developed that aborted attempt at a proteus covering your entire arm. Though it’s plain to see that it’s destroyed, I am certain those techs could discern a few tricks leading to certain … unwanted … secrets being revealed? However, I digress. We are talking about protes.”

  Vasily resisted the urge to grin at Garth’s apprehension; he’d planted a seed of concern about Harry Bosch and that was going to keep the man off-balance for some time. He continued. “Modification of a protean creation unit has been a dream of scientists and programmers -Naoko included- for as long as this system has been around, and I cannot stress to you how incredibly foolish people in pursuit of that dream can be. The Technicians eventually tasked with understanding your impossible modifications will implement them before they are even half understood. This is not an assumption, this is a fact. Through the ages, we’ve lost more than fourteen thousand square miles of land on different planets throughout Latelyspace to badly contained nanotech explosions, sa. All because the techs felt certain they knew what they were doing.

  I –and this is my decision, not the Chairwoman’s- cannot allow the Technicians to get their hands on that PCU. The danger it represents borders on the apocalyptic. We are simply not ready for that kind of revolution. If they or anyone else gets another glimpse at what is possible without going through the trial and error stages of development in a controlled environment, we could be risking this entire planet. I am willing, no, I am going to look the other way should, say, the building be … I don’t know, destroyed to hide your unutterable foolishness. It will be a small matter to conclude that some splinter faction of either Ashok or Vilmos’ is responsible for the demolition. Alyssa will, how do you say, lose her shit, but it will be containable. A man of your talents should find it simple to clean up after himself, yes? I needn’t mention that the sooner this is handled, the better?” Vasily flashed another smile. “One more thing.”

  Garth tried to stifle his groan and failed. He wasn’t going to touch anything more complicated than a piece of paper from now on, and even then, only in a dire emergency.

  “Until you prove yourself trustworthy as only a true Latelian can be, you are not to wear, use, or have any direct contact with a proteus. You may use mains and Sheets and Screens and access the netLINKs to your heart’s content, but the moment you put a prote on, I will hand you your ass. Are we clear?”

  Obviously, the hidden caveat in the restriction was that he have nothing to do with PCUs until the sun died. Garth nodded, utterly defeated by his own foolishness. Again.

  “Wonderful.” Vasily beamed unfeigned pleasure. He’d accomplished something that he suspected no one in History had every achieved, and with little to no effort; Garth Nickels, cowed and humble. It was exhilarating. “I am very glad we had this conversation and that you understand precisely where you lie. If you please, wake Naoko?”

  Garth nodded dumbly, mouth still dry. He rose and headed towards the couch. He turned back when OverCommander Vasily spoke his name. “Yes?”

  “Be sure that your proteus, which seems to have experienced drastic trauma anyways, is also destroyed? I would hate a Technician to see it and correctly conclude that it no doubt has the processing power of at least two proteii. A request for your interment coming from them would be difficult to block for any length of time.”

  Garth banged it on the edge of the table ever so gently. The machine crumbled off his arm into a pile of metallic dust. “Prote?” He demanded archly. “What prote?”

  OverCommander Vasily beamed at Garth again. “Just so, sa, just so.”

  Naoko stirred at Garth’s gentle touch; she’d tried with every fiber not to fall asleep, but with the day’s events and a full belly, the challenge had beaten her.

  From the sour, defeated look on Garth’s face, it was evident she’d missed something monumental. Though they’d promised to talk about various secrets that’d made themselves evident during The Museum, Naoko highly doubted Garth would reveal the topics discussed while she’d dozed. “Yes?” she murmured sleepily.

  “Your turn at bat, sweetheart.” They exchanged positions.

  Naoko sat across from her Uncle, wondering what, if anything, the man actually needed to say. Though her Uncle, he was first and foremost the OverCommander, a man tasked with the defense of the Latelian Regime and all its peoples.

  Vasily pursed his lips thoughtfully, wondering if perhaps it would be best if he spoke with his niece another time. The events of the day had to be wearing on her, whether Naoko showed it or not.

  Still, he had free time now. With a press release waiting in the wings, he would be unable to meet with her in relative privacy for days, if not months. Uncomfortable discussing family business in front of Garth, Vasily had to take advantage of the opportunity, painful as it was. “Firstly, I am sorry.”

  “Sorry?” Naoko was instantly wide-awake. This was something she’d never expected. As a matter of fact, being as she was The Lady Ha and she’d only just recently perpetrated not only one of the greatest televised hacks in the entire system but had managed to prevent a Sigma from being issued, she’d been waiting for her Uncle to send her to The Peak alongside Garth. “What are you sorry for, sa?”

  Vasily bowed his head. “Yes, little one. Sorry. I am sorry I left you and your father. The … your mother … my sister. It … it was all so unfortunate. I didn’t know how to deal with things. I was a coward. I turned away when you and your father desperately needed my help. I wanted you to know that, with all the things I have done over the years, pretending you and your father didn’t exist was the hardest.”

  “Uncle … I …” Naoko tried to find the words but couldn’t. She smiled gratefully as Garth gave her a supportive wink. “I blamed you for a very long time, Uncle. A very long time. I hated you. I still hate what the job of OverCommander demands of you. Five years ago, my father and I had a conversation about you. It was a very long talk. He showed me home movies of the three of you together, when you were just a regular soldier, even before you become UnderCommander, and I began to realize, with his help, that you didn’t leave because you hated us, but because of what you were. He showed me that, as a soldier ... as the man who would become OverCommander ... your loyalties demanded a certain behavior. I stopped hating you then.”

  Vasily blinked, astonished. He’d hovered on the brink of reaching out to the Kamaganas for years now, pulling back every time out of fear of being rebuffed. He laughed at himself. Marshall of forty million God soldiers, and two Latelians and what they may say had filled him leaden fear for two decades. With his mother and father passed, with the stresses of his job and his relationship with Alyssa being rocky at the best of times, he’d begun to regret desperately his actions from so long ago. “That’s … that’s very mature. I…”

  “Of course, my father will become insufferable, now that he has been proven right about Ashok Guillfoyle.” Naoko had learned all there was about the manufacturer of her father’s doom at an early age. Her Lady Ha persona had started out as a vengeful fantasy, a great and powerful hacker destined to destroy the man who’d destroyed her father.

  Removing Ashok Guillfoyle from his high roost had always been in the back of her mind and she was a little sad that someone had beaten her to the punch. “I expect that after all these years he will go on about how, in his old age, he is above such petty traits as ‘I told you so-ing’, all the while asking me if I have seen the latest news reports on Ashok Guillfoyle and demanding to know how you looked during this conversation.”

  Sighing, Vasily drew the conversation back to his point. A wound mended after so long was still tender, and there was no telling how Naoko would react to everything else he needed to say. “I wanted to speak to you about your father, actually. Naoko, he came to me today with a solution to our infected
hardware. He demanded I save your life … and his.” Vasily pointed at Garth, who had the decency to appear suitably confused. “He said … well, I will not repeat what he said, but I need you to do something for me, Naoko. I have no right to ask, not after twenty years of silence, but I need to ask all the same.”

  “What?” Naoko asked, suddenly worried to her toes. She knew her father very well. Faced with losing his daughter to a terrorist action was something he wouldn’t accept. Nor would he permit the ‘culling’ of ‘Trinity affected’ citizens, even though he had –unfortunately- assisted in some during his time with the military. She could very easily imagine the types of things he would say, the threats he would use, and saw in Vasily’s eyes that her Father had very definitely pushed the OverCommander into a corner, something that was never the wisest of courses.

  “First, thank him for me.” Vasily looked sideways at Garth, who was this time was the picture of perfect innocence and ignorance. “It is his right to receive a large reward for his assistance and I have it on good authority that the government coffers will be full in a few days.”

  Naoko nodded. Then she held her breath, because even though she’d not been near her Uncle in twenty years, she knew the look in his eyes very well. That look was televised often enough. He wasn’t happy with her Father, not at all. Dolefully, she motioned for him to continue.

  “Secondly, warn him. Tell him … tell him that as much as I cherish him as a brother-in-law, and how much I love his daughter, nothing in the Universe will keep me from striking him down if he ever coerces me again. Ever. I am OverCommander. I am the Duronium Fist, protector of the Latelian Regime. I will not be spoken to again in that manner, nor will I tolerate that kind of foolishness. I forgive him this once because of my own actions and because of the way I spoke to him at Maurna’s funeral. Tell him to go back to his quiet day job and stay there, for his own safety. If I see signs of his particular brand of avatar on the streets in any form, I will come for him. Possession of those kinds of assembly codes, even written from memory or designed for purely academic reasons without being part of government think-tank … it guarantees Peak-time. Do you understand? Can you do this for me?”

  Naoko nodded, sniffling back a tear. She was sick to her stomach over what her Father had done. To risk himself so, to command the OverCommander! It was dangerous in the extreme. The man was OverCommander. Regardless of family ties, that talk could have gone another way entirely. She could be without her Father right now if Vasily hadn’t felt guilty about his own, two decades old behavior. “I … I can do that for you, Sa OverCommander Unclesa, if that is what you want.”

  “It is not what I want, little one.” Vasily said gently. “It is the way it must be. Your father was banned from scripting that grade of avatar a long time ago, and for reasons you well understand.”

  The OverCommander rose abruptly, and stuck his hand out to Garth, who’d meandered back to the table. As the two men shook hands, Vasily took one last look around the city outside the windows. He spoke. “The Palazzo, while magnificent, does not seem to suit you, sa. It is too … fancy for a man of your sensibilities. Besides, if you are indeed interested in my niece, you should not expect her to come this far to visit you. I think it would be best if you … avoided … Central for a time?”

  Garth let go of the Commander’s hand, saying, “Uh, sure. Thanks for the tip.” With Alyssa Doans howling at the moon over everything that’d gone down, technically speaking the whole of Latelyspace was dangerous for him.

  Vasily put his hat on. “Anytime.”

  Then he turned to Naoko, who rose to give him a hug. Standing there, hugging his niece for the first time in twenty years, Vasily wondered if maybe he’d made more than a few terribly wrong decisions in his life. Perhaps ... perhaps ‘democracy’ wasn’t as bad a thing as they’d been led to believe. Certainly, a young and vibrant woman like Naoko Kamagana could not have survived life under Scottsdale’s reign of insatiable terror.

  Standing there Vasily thought that perhaps he would rather see worlds populated by people like her than like him. Then he clamped down on that thought and shoved it forcibly away. He and Alyssa had come too far in their plans to let sentimentality get in the way. Still, he spoke warmly, “I should like to see you again, niece. Perhaps next time, it will be less than twenty years.”

  “Perhaps, Uncle, something can be arranged.” Naoko dimpled at the look of frustration on Vasily’s patrician face. “Oh, I am sorry, OverCommander. Yes,” she laughed, “it would be nice to see you again, too.”

  Vasily nodded, and, feeling abhorrently out of place, left the conference room without saying another word.

  The pair waited a few minutes in silence, contemplating how close each of them had come to being in serious trouble. Too close by far. Both of them privately hoped that the OverCommander wouldn’t come to regret his decisions; it was well within the scope of his authority to undo what he’d done.

  Sharing a sigh, Naoko allowed Garth to lead her to the Ultra Suite.

  Hope for a Better Tomorrow

  Naoko and Garth stood there hand in hand, -Naoko was busy staring, enraptured, at the ridiculous luxury of his suite- when her prote and the Screen nearest him abruptly erupted with thousands of text messages and panicky video messages. They burst out laughing before shrugging; it was the way of Latelian life.

  Naoko located a couch and started going through her text and visual messages while Garth grabbed a Sheet that he adroitly twinned to the room’s ‘LINK. By the time he plopped down beside her, his Sheet was ready to relay the first of the video messages.

  It was from Herrig. The man was a mixed bag of emotions; there was ecstatic joy in there along with mortified embarrassment and jangly worry. Herrig pushed his glasses back onto his nose properly and began. “I … I’ve just now seen the news about what’s going in The Museum, sa, and I can only hope that you’re going to get out. Chairwoman Doans is notoriously rabid on … on terrorists. If you don’t, I … well, it will be truly awful. The good news first. In the early part of the afternoon, the bureaucracy finally relented, and The UltraMegaDynamaTron is at last a viable systemic Conglomerate. You and I will need to sit down and go over your new responsibilities. Er, that is if you survive. There will be no proxies for this, sa. Your name is on the letterhead, as it were. Chairwoman Doans lobbied quite strenuously against permitting you to ship materials from Trinity in, and, ah, after what we’ve seen today, I believe I can understand her reasons. So there it is. Congratulations.

  Other good news, though I am amazed you managed to get a text message through the mishmash going on down there. At your behest I managed to acquire several waste management companies and coordinated an effort to … ahh … lowball the bid. Yes, that’s the phrase. For the cleanup. It’s been negotiated.” Here, Herrig tilted his head to one side, a vaguely mystified smile on his pudgy lips. “It’s almost as though you knew you’d need the space, but of course, that’s impossible.” He cleared his throat repetitively. “I am told the clean-up effort will begin almost immediately following the … the end of the day. I’ve directed the crews to deliver all the waste to a few warehouses.”

  “The … the bad news, next, then?” Herrig looked at his prote, lips working. “I received word from a … Sa Trevore Phillips today … he’s a gentleman in the employ of the … of the Protean Technicians Union. It, ah, it seems, once again, you chose to ignore recommendations against using things you shouldn’t. He was unbearably vague about the punishments you would receive for using the machines in your building, but I am certain that they will be quite high. I have a legal team on standby should you need immediate representation for, well, for this crime or anything that you might get up to inside The Museum. Er.” The banker turned second-in-command of the most powerful Conglomerate in Latelyspace twitched suddenly, as if he’d just realized that he’d accused his employer of being a maniac. He coughed to hide his embarrassment.

  Herrig harrumphed and removed his glasses, twiddl
ing them nervously between his fingertips. “Yes. Er. Quite. And now, er, now for my apology. Ah. Yes. When you ordered the termination of Doctor Sullivan and any staff theoretically involved in … er, experimentation on your … samples, I was very, very upset. And angry, and confused. I … am ashamed to admit that I began the process of terminating my employment with you pending the completion of my agreed upon task: that of Conglomerating. I must confess I didn’t understand your reasons and I thought perhaps they were made in an attempt to become ‘less famous’.”

  “I wish.” Garth muttered. Naoko snuggled in beside him and continued responding to her messages.

  Herrig continued, growing more miserable with each second that passed. “Through due diligence, your proxy determined that blood and tissue samples destroyed at the hospital were actually significantly less in volume than indicated by the original paperwork. Working with some of your legal staff to determine a more lawful parsing of your request, he began a formal inquest into the matter, discovering that Doctor Sullivan and three other terminated staff members had begun a series of experiments on the … on the samples. At a black-market medical facility! Acting on his own recognizance but still operating under legal remit, he enjoined a police task force to raid this facility. This happened only a short time ago. By the time they arrived, they discovered a most shocking sight, sa! I am told that the entire facility was very nearly entirely obliterated by some form of explosive they’ve –the police- have never encountered. Three corpses were discovered, and preliminary forensics suggests that Sullivan himself was … well … as grotesque as it sounds, sa, they believe Sullivan was … vaporized.”

  Garth smiled dourly at the news. They must’ve introduced his blood to something incredibly dangerous if it’d vaporized Sullivan altogether. Herrig’s message continued in his typical apologetic fashion.

  “And so, sa, I am deeply sorry that I distrusted you or doubted you in any way. I will still quit if you wish. That, er, is if you, well… if you aren’t already dead.” Herrig sighed nosily at his own foolishness. “I am sorry.”