Emperor-for-Life: DeadShop Redux (Unreal Universe Book 6)

by Lee Bond

  The urge to demolish Chad Sikkmund of Taryin was a palpable thing, but there was a new wrinkle in the man’s unwanted existence: his utterly impossible power of manifesting things here, in a space where he, Kith Antal, truly was God. If one man possessed a power like that –even if it lacked the ability to conjure up anything capable of harming him personally- then more than one could.

  Powerful as his Harmony Army might be, as limitless and easily replicable as each soldier might be, as close to infinite as his stores and matter might be … something like what Chad possessed might get the better of all that over time.

  “I underestimated you.” Antal admitted as he turned to run. “It won’t happen again.”

  Chad watched as the mighty Kith Antal ran away, kind of nonplussed that the bastard hadn’t even shed a single sweaty droplet of concern for his physical wellbeing. “Yeah, well, like … nertz to you.”

  “Ya’ll realize he’s goin’ to come back atcha hardern’ ever afore, right? He’s gonna try an’ figger out what ya’ll jus’ did an’ how y’did it, an’ when he does, he’s gonna come fer ya. What ya’ll jus’ ran into? Ain’t nothin’. Great big ole Granddaddy Antal went real easy on ya. He’s got real an’ true power, that one. Didn’t try t' do y'in on account o' your intelligence assets, y'unnerstand? Reckon ole Garth’s gonna have some trouble on his hands once this show gets started properly."

  Chad clipped the Cannon of Mighty Disappointment to an available clip on their back and strolled around to the other side of the crystal outcropping they’d been resting against this whole time, wondering what another being like Garth N’Chalez would look like.

  Griffin Jones, one-time Enforcer, full-time Kin’kithal warrior, had seen better days. The stress and travails of being forced to use his unlimited power born of fire to fuel an enormous, Galaxy-sized construct faster than ever so they might gain the advantage of surprise had been great. The imprisoned Texan, having had plenty of time to deal with the hugely ridiculous fact that none other than the sociopathic, psychotic, drug-addled lunatic mega-assassin Chadsik al-Taryin was ‘aboard’ Antal’s ‘ship’, busted out a weak ‘guy nod’, saying,

  “How ya’ll doin’?”

  Chad looked on with pity at the lad’s sunken eyes and shriveled frame. Whatever he’d been through at the hands of Kith Antal, it weren’t the sort of thing that proper people did, even if you were well pissed at that person and totally off your rocker.

  One of him quite gently reminded them that he had, at one point, turned the lovely Reywin into a meat puppet.

  Chad took a moment out to remind themselves that that point in their lives had been very dark, and besides which, they’d been possessed by the mind of a completely fucking mental CyberPriest as had gone completely off the deep end.

  They all agreed that it weren’t the best thing to bring up.

  And then, because they couldn’t have been the only ones to notice, they asked Griffin Jones a very important question. “Is there summink wrong wiv your mouth, mate? As we is tryin’ to understand what is comin’ out of your piehole, only it sounds like you is garglin’ wiv marbles and maple syrup.”

  Griffin laughed weakly, only to have it trail off into a whispering cough. “Ah could ask ya’ll the same damn thang, son, the same damn thang. Now, how’s about ya’ll git me outta this here contraption afore Granddaddy comes back with somethin’ that’ll drill a hole through ya? I’d be very much obliged.”

  “Now, mate, hold on a mo, yeah?” Chad took a puff on their fag. “We is know who and what you is, yeah? Heard all about it from a friend of ours, and so we is knowin’ you is not precisely in Camp Garth, as it were. And while we is hate seein’ anyone bunged up in this weird lookin’ crystal prison that appears to be suckin’ you dry of your life essence of wotever, but … you see our dilemma, yeah?”

  “Son,” Griffin put as much sincerity and honesty into his voice as he was capable of mustering, given that he felt about near to death as a dog in the desert, “Ah c’n guarantee that come hell or high water, Ah’ll do whutever Ah can to undo the bullshit trouble Ah caused. Swear on mah life.”

  “Did you just take the ‘a’ out of ‘can’?” Chad demanded, unlimbering their cannon. “I mean, we is understand we sort of play fast and loose wiv King's Hinglish and all that, yeah, but, like, takin’ vowels out of words as only have one vowel? That are a bit bonkers. Oi, hold on, don’t struggle. This fing is pretty mental. If, ah, if we is accidentally disintegratin’ anyfing of your person, don’t hold it against us, will ya?”

  “Ya’ll c’n have one of mah goddamn arms if only y’git us outta here. Now hurry the fuck up.”

  “Calm your tits, my old china, calm your tits. Gettin’ some readin’s here. Oh, by the by, I is in need of staggering quantities of free, unclaimed atoms and all if we is to, y'know, keep from dyin' an' all. Is you fink your Granddaddy will be well pissed if I blow this planet up?”

  6. Emperor’s Never Cheat, But They Also Never Lose

  Is This Live, Or Is This Memorex?

  Climbing free of the water pretending he was Daniel Craig from that 007 movie didn’t make him feel any less conspicuous to the people who were staring, but at the very least, it helped him feel less of a dork; the beach where –once upon a time- he and Drake and Sparks had held court for many a bonfire party, was full of people all doing the things that people did at beaches, but they all took the time out of their own personal fun to stare at the guy emerging from the ocean fully dressed.

  “You got all your clothes on, pal.”

  “Hm?” Garth looked at the tubby guy in a pair of board shorts and flip-flops. He was about as tanned as a human could get without turning into a strip of tanned leather, and he reeked of coconut suntan lotion. “Oh, yeah, right. Uh. I’m … running an experiment.”

  “An experiment.”

  The word had taken root in Garth’s mind. An experiment. That’s definitely what he needed to do, here; the Emperor claimed to possess enough power to create whole pocket universes, and with the temporal incongruity at his command, it definitely seemed like something that sounded plausible but …

  Was that something the Emperor just said? That was thing that was bothering Garth more than anything else because if there was one thing he knew –and from personal, recent experience- was that this kind of power definitely tended to corrupt on a scale that transcended ‘absolutely’.

  A one hundred percent corrupt supervillain wouldn't find it amiss to fib a little about their accomplishments.

  “Yeah, you know. An experiment.” Wheels spinning and plans turning, Garth threw his hands in the air and framed the sun that was beating down on them with enough glorious light to have already begun drying a stolen dead man’s clothes.

  The chubby guy who’d taken an interest in the weird guy climbing out of the water fully dressed flinched a little bit, setting his impressive gut wobbling a little bit, but he didn’t move.

  You couldn’t pay for this kind of entertainment, and if there was one thing Maury knew, it was that weirdoes were the best kind of fun.

  Maury nodded slowly. “What kind of experiment, guy?”

  “Are we real?” Garth demanded seriously, adopting –he hoped- the kind of fervor that came out of the mouths of very seriously hard-core philosophers and the kind of scientist he was pretending to be. “I mean, how do we know if we’re really real? We could be hallucinations, or projections, or the thoughts of some kind of super computer or even the daydream of some other thing entirely.”

  “Oh, pal, I’m definitely real.” Maury grinned from ear to ear. A total loon. He was dealing with a total loon. What better way to kill a few minutes before the wife showed up and started harassing him about talking to, well, to lunatics. “My bank reminds me of that every time I’m late with a mortgage payment.”

  “That’s just the sort of thing we’d be programmed to say if we were the product of a computer simulation!” Garth retorted, cranking up the whackadoo dial to 11. “Can’t let things
spiral out of control, right? Don’t want to realize ourselves right out of living, right? Because that’s something that could happen, if we were a program. We become self-aware, we disappear right off the grid!”

  Maury raised his hands. This … this might’ve just become more than he was willing to swallow. “Easy, friend, easy. No need to get yourself all worked up. And … you going swimming fully clothed, that’s part of your experiment to determine if we’re real or not? How’d that work out for you?”

  Garth shrugged his shoulders. “Inconclusive. I thought I might be able to detect some low-level quantum dispersal along the edges of the fabric in the water, but I … I lost my equipment.”

  “Equipment.” Maury saw his wife coming up out of the water like a darkness; even from twenty feet away, he could see the angry look on her face. As much as Maury loved his wife, he just couldn’t understand why she couldn’t understand how much fun it was to talk to people. He did it as part of his job, sure, but if you didn’t talk to people, you missed out on all kinds of interesting things.

  Like a very well-built but clearly crazy person trying to find out if he was real or not.

  “Yeah, for sure! Equipment. A proton dispersal measurer and a quantum backscatter collector. To measure the fractal degradation at the lowest level of the whole Universe.” Coming off like a water-drenched loon was distressingly easy for Garth, and he wondered for a moment if he was playacting.

  “So,” Maury said, keeping a sideways eye on his wife, who was working up to a nice head of steam, “what happens if you find out we’re not real? Wouldn’t everything just sort of … disappear? All of us? How fair would that be?”

  Garth caught an eyeful of someone who was obviously Tubby McGee’s equally tubby wife storming towards them with a face full of ugly and shrugged. “I dunno, man. I haven’t gotten that far yet. This is all preliminary.”

  Maury patted the deranged kid on the shoulder and smiled. “Well, friend, I hope for your sake you prove that we’re all real and that you find something else to spend your time on, because I’d personally be very disappointed to wake up non-existent one day. Now if you could arrange for that to happen to my … whoopsey! Gotta go. My wife is comin’ and she doesn’t like it when I talk to people.”

  “Take it easy, man.” Garth laughed silently when Tubby sped off to intercept his wife five feet away, only to get a smack up the backside of the head. The interdimensional traveler watched the two of them bicker for a few seconds before picking a path that’d take him away from the beach proper, his head whirling.

  So much of what he’d already experienced screamed real. The breeze coming in off the water, carrying with it that very particular oceanic smell, laced with a hundred different types of suntan lotion and sunscreen and the people having themselves some illegal barbecue action smelled exactly the way it had every single time the three of them had come down after the sun had set. The sounds of children laughing and screaming and having the best time of their lives was unmistakably fresh and fragrant, and with as much power and wisdom someone like the Emperor probably had, Garth just found it impossible to imagine anyone conjuring up such realism.

  Except … they had to be fake. They just had to be. If you had the power to create reality –even on a small scale- what possible reason could you have for using that supreme ability the way Emperor-for-Life Etienne Marseilles did? Did he truly care about all the people who’d come through his purple Dome? What was the purpose behind the whole thing?

  More to the point, Garth wondered miserably as he turned up a path that’d take to him to an approved picnic area, why did it seem like the Emperor was especially pissed at him?

  Just what in the fuck had he done to piss the Emperor off, anyways?

  ***

  Officer Terrance Friendly loved his beat and he’d do whatever he could to remain one of the last few ‘beat cops’ in the Bay area. Wandering around for the majority of his shifts was an homage that many of his friends and colleagues couldn’t understand, especially in light of the fact that they were making the full shift to nearly 100% automated patrol structures in less than a few months.

  Trial runs for the predator drones and the new digital camera systems had already proven remarkably successful all over, and with factual data coming in from some of the more worn-down cities –New York and Detroit to name two- it was already a given that beat cops were dinosaurs waiting for that meteor. Even officers in patrol cars were slated for the axe; vehicular patrols were going down to the bare minimum per zone, providing nothing but window dressing for the more aggressive UAV/surveillance system.

  Terry Friendly didn’t much care for that. Bouncers maintained a presence. He’d been a cop for twenty years, had strolled down almost every street and alley since he’d put on the brass shield and sworn allegiance to his brothers and sisters in the blue. The thought of sitting in a climate controlled room somewhere hooked up to a machine using … what were they calling it … virtual telepresence … it filled him with a distinct dread.

  Not that there was anything wrong with these methods. Not really. Everything they were doing to resurrect the US of A, to bring the country and it's people back into the light, it was all worthwhile, in the long run.

  Something had to be done. With a hugely ineffectual 'war against drugs' and the even more staggeringly poorly executed 'war on terrorism' combined with Old Guard politicians failing to recognize that America had stopped being a world power the moment someone fired a rifle round from a grassy knoll had transformed the Free World into something considerably less than it'd ever been.

  Unemployment was through the roof, all across the board. Drug use was rampant as wildfire in summertime. Crime of all flavors was seeing a resurgence that -if left unchecked- would peak in the next few months at a level that'd see most urban centers looking like something out of Mad Max.

  Just one problem.

  They couldn’t put enough bodies on the streets to keep everyone and everything safe.

  Thus, the UAVs. The cameras. The cellular tracking. All of it. It was needed.

  Just not here, not in San Francisco. Everyone was so mellow. The worst thing Terry Friendly could remember getting involved with had been six months ago, when two men –lovers in the nighttime, one of them your classic drama queen and the other looking like George Costanza- had had themselves three too many bottles of pinot at Addisons.

  “Officer? Sir? Officer … sir?”

  Officer Friendly brought himself back to the here and the now without missing a single step. He looked at the young woman in the paisley dress and the bright pink hair, took in her full sleeves and quarter-done tattoo on the left leg, the piercing in the eyebrow and smiled. His favorite sort of person.

  “What can I do for you, miss?” Terry asked politely. The new age of rebellious young person, with their tattoos, with their piercings … more often than not, they were incredibly polite and had a pretty decent head on their shoulders. Terry’d learned it was in the quality of the ink they had on themselves that separated them from criminals and ne’er-do-wells.

  It was a thing you learned on the streets, talking to people. A predator drone can’t tell the difference.

  Sandra ran a hand through her hair. She could feel her friends kind of making fun of her, but that was fine. She didn’t have issues with the police –none of them did, not really- but her friends wanted to hang out and watch the show for a bit longer before the fun ended. “There’s … there’s this guy in the park over here by the beach … he’s being … weird.”

  Terry quirked an eyebrow. “Weird how?” He genuinely and sincerely didn’t want it to be ‘cracked off his ass on bath salts’ weird or ‘wearing someone’s severed head as a backpack’ weird; for all his protestations that San Francisco was a nice, normal city with quiet citizens who only got up to the normal amount of murder, rape and physical violence, there was a new drug out there –ZG3, or Ziggy- that caused some people to go colossally fucking weird.

  “
Um.” Sandra shifted nervously from foot to foot. “He says he’s doing science experiments. To prove something about reality. I don’t know, I didn’t understand a lot of what he was saying. I’m an art major. Right now he’s got all these boulders and things on one of the swing sets for kids? He’s turned it into one of those clicky-ball things? None of the kids seem upset, but he’s … kind of strong looking and he’s got this desperate look in his eye. Like, what happens if one of his ‘experiments’ gives him the wrong answer?”

  A map built itself in Terry’s head straightaway. There were two universities nearby; San Fran Uni and San Francisco State. The former –where the lovely young woman undoubtedly came from- was your basic ‘get educated so you can get a job in the real world doing something worthwhile for your country’ affair. People went there so they could prove to prospective employers that they were capable of following orders and sticking to the matter at hand long enough to get the job done. There were thousands of those across the country, turning young boys and girls into men and women prepped and ready for a workforce that’d grind them into the dust by the time they hit retirement.

  Grim, but it was how the world worked these days. With their economy failing, with all the other countries in the world operating on a better working model, boys and girls who’d otherwise get no education at all were getting a relatively decent one that’d shoehorn them into the kind of mentality that was okay with working fifty to sixty hours a week for a pretty piss-poor wage, tattoos and rebellious nature notwithstanding.

  The other University –State- well now, that was a whole different ball of wax. The men and women that went there were geniuses. And rich. Rich geniuses getting the kind of education –and tax breaks, and promises, and offers from a government desperate to keep people like that inside the United States of America- that the rest of the people in America could only ever dream of. Young men and women who were the offspring of Corporate America, with fathers and mothers who were titans in their fields. The new movers and shakers who shifted information and science around as readily as the guys from the fifties and sixties had done with backroom deals and thick manila envelopes full of compromising pictures.