by Lee Bond
Rationally, preventing someone from utilizing a gift or talent that had nothing at all to do with anything other than pure creativity and a firm understanding of how the Universe really operated seemed kind of a bullshit thing to perpetrate, but, when you got right down to it, the Emperor-for-Life was kind of a bullshit guy. Everything about this so-called trial felt rigged, so if Etienne insisted the playing field be that uneven, well, it was up to one Garth N’Chalez to figure out how to not only even that board, but to tilt it to his advantage.
And that was where the second test of the evening came into play.
The blood. His blood.
Downstairs, in the Red Hallway, his blood had left behind some kind of existential scar, some type of … dimensional disturbance that was more than capable of capturing and transmitting electricity from one section to another. Besides being quite gruesome in nature, it was probably one of the coolest things he’d ever seen, with his kind of resume -ten years in Specter, growing up in the middle of a war againt the M'zahdi Hesh, winding up in 25th century proto-Realistic Earth- that wasn't saying something, that was saying everything.
The forthcoming hairbrained scheme would be win-win, no matter the outcome. Either hytech machines would work in this false dream, or the curious properties of his blood would prove beneficial.
Or they'd both fail, which suited him just fine, though Garth did hope bloodtech proved to be of more value than boring old hytech.
“Gah.” Garth shook his head. “That sounds terrible. Bloodtech? Gotta work on that.”
Someone’s footsteps on the stairwell alerted him that a visitor was en route, so Garth shifted to working on the computer. With a mindful eye on the door, the displaced Unrealite did a quick check on his stock market plays and on his gambling winnings.
The latter was doing super well, though he was already running out of live on-line bookies willing to take his action. After positively mauling the competition in a shocking turnover game between the Rockwell City Rollers and the Shoretown Haulers –a more amazing, top-league game of football he’d never seen before- everyone out there was kind of leery. They were still taking his money, but the hoops he was being asked to jump through in order to make his outlandish bets were getting larger and more aggravating to reach. Some of the more 'respectible' online establishments had already emailed him, informing his IP address had been blocked, which was put another cramp in his plans, but it was those fucking hoops that were honking him off more than anything.
“That’s one problem with a piddy I didn’t imagine.” Garth poked his piddy –which was now more or less permanently beside the main computer- with disdain. When it came down to gambling and bets of significant size, everyone in the good old US of A demanded that the piddy be produced. All his gaming accounts had to be logged in with the ultra-special PIDpak identification number, and Garth was goddamned if he was going to take the time out of his life to memorize the forty-five digit long code.
But with that code came liability, and legitimacy. Every online bookmaker could track his winnings, see the amounts bet, the odds given, the actual chance of winning that bet, everything.
It seemed Maiden America really didn’t like gambling. From the looks of things, he hated it even more than playing the stock market like a game, if the amount he was taking from every single bet was any indication. There were no hints of it yet, but Garth detected the stinky whiff of Unfair Advantage's realm being extended to include games of chance.
“Good old Maiden. Pretty as pie, frigid as a witch.” It was no better across the oceans. Elsewhere in the world, online gambling by Americans was so heavily restricted and monitored it was hard to wonder why anyone bothered at all.
Still, he was making money from sportsing events the world over, and while he was losing anywhere from ten to twenty-five percent of each transaction thanks to ‘user fees’ and ‘operational costs’ and ‘fuck you, give us your money’ costs, some extra operational dough in the here and now was better than none at all.
The PC borped and a detailed breakdown of his adventures across the ocean popped up in nice, easy to understand fonts and diagrams.
His stock portfolio abroad looked like something a very well educated Jason Vorhees would get up to one night after one too many chocolate martinis in Fancy Lounge Where Rich People Go after an eighteen hour workday; in the space of ten hours, he’d gutted a Russian cryogenics company, a Japanese medical science operation, three Polish weapons manufacturers and a South African shipping company. The Russian, Japanese and Polish organizations had fallen to his particular brand of uncompromising tactics because by the time they got around to working on their top-tier equipment –a circuit board capable of withstanding the most brutally cold ultra-sub-zero temperatures ever recorded, an advanced imaging and resolution camera capable of seeing in very nearly every spectrum both known and unknown, and a handful of weapons that would be better used soon, against Samiel’s men- it would be too goddamn late for their innovations to be of practical use to anyone.
The shipping company had gotten themselves under his sights just because it was always good to be the proud owner of a fuckton of boats. Shady, sure, unkind, you bet, but again, no one else on the planet was being asked to fight a war against a ‘man’ who could travel through time and who had a nearly unstoppable force from the future.
Boats were a contingency.
His metaphorical Jason Vorhees-esque approach to global stocks was about to take the night off, giving those weary companies the opportunity to relax and get some sleep before the slaughter picked up the next day.
Stateside, his currency gambit was paying off in even better dividends, and to make matters better for him and worse for Special Agent Angela Devlin, there wasn’t anything she could do to prevent him from raking in the literal American dollars because it wasn’t illegal, shady, or causing anyone any real harm.
But it was his investment portfolio that’d have Agent Devlin chewing through a bar of soap every time she looked at it; he was now a majority shareholder in six of the ten largest companies the United States had ever seen. He had his fingers in everyone’s pies, and were it not for the fact that they were all sending him a positive deluge of emails and making a nearly unending number of calls, he might’ve gone for the whole list. The gist of the emails, calls and messages were all the same:
They liked him, they liked his vision, they liked where he wanted to go. They wanted to know what Changetech was about, what he intended to do, what plans he had for business opportunities between them. He had about three hundred of those from each of the six.
Soon enough, they’d start sending low-level executives to come see him, literal red shirts beamed down from the USS Enterprise to get vaporized by his utter disinterest in being anything other than the guy who had a load of shares in their companies, shares that were going to continue making him money without him having to do much of anything at all.
And if being that guy somehow allowed him access to the things he would’ve much rather stolen outright?
Well, shit man, shit happens, right?
Still and all, he was playing by Agent Devlin’s draconian rules and that was all that mattered as far as Garth was concerned.
He laughed, actually laughed at the thought of the woman who’d inserted herself into his ultimately chaotic life for no other good reason than she didn’t like what he was doing. If she insisted on persisting, there was a very good chance she’d learn the true way of the world.
Even if it was fake, there were no such things as snow days when you were learning the truth.
The footsteps that Garth had initially heard on the steps finally stopped outside his door. There was a gentle rapping, then a head stuck itself through the open gap between door and wall.
“Sir, is everything all right in here?”
Garth motioned for the security guard to step fully into the room. “C’mon in, man, give me a sitrep.”
The unnamed and unknown guard working for O
ne-Step Security did as he was commanded, eyes roving this way and that through the room in search of anything or anyone that might be causing his newest employer duress.
When nothing was spotted, Colm gave Garth a brief nod. “Internal areas secured. External patrols will begin in the next few minutes. We’re on a rotating schedule of four hours on, four hours off.”
“And you’re covering the whole grounds? Including the track field and the other buildings on property?” Garth tabbed to another page and began signing himself up for the all-streaming package of every channel God had ever created. It should’ve been taken care of earlier in the day, but slashing and burning businesses was time consuming and required focus.
“Absolutely, sir.” Colm nodded firmly. “We’re also covering the approach to this facility on all the main roads, sir. There are men in unmarked cars at strategic locations for up to three miles on all sides.”
“Good.” Garth smiled briefly. One-Step wasn’t as good as Securicorps, Brick Wall or Armada, but they were a close cousin; he hadn’t been able to wrangle a meeting with Securicorps’ Director of Operations –one Mister Eero Arvo, a firm sounding Fin who’d done some serious things all over the globe- until the following morning.
One-Step knew this was a temporary gig and had obviously ordered their men to bring something a little beyond their ‘A’ game in an effort to convince him to change his mind.
Garth approved. He caught a look in the guy’s eyes. “What’s on your mind?”
Colm gestured to the building they were standing in. “It’s this, sir, this whole area. The outside is on lockdown, but without being able to provide you with protection here, on the inside, we can’t one hundred percent guarantee your safety. There are too many access points. We …”
Garth held up a hand to silence the guard. “Your concerns are well founded and even appreciated, but I guarantee you, if someone gets in here, I’ll be fine. To be honest, you’re not here for me, you’re here for the guys I hired to rebuild this structure into something a little more honest. As long as no one is stealing the copper pipes or the tools, we’re good.”
Colm could see there was no point in arguing with Mister Nickels, so he gave the man a curt nod and headed back out of the room. To satisfy his own conscientious need for attention to detail, his intention was to perform a quick sweep of all the rooms before heading outside to his post.
Ears straining, Garth very faintly detected the guard doing an internal sweep and resisted the urge to run out there shouting and hollering; he was about to do a thing he’d kind of promised himself he wasn’t ever going to do, and the need for privacy was at the very top of his list. Worrying about some goofus who couldn't follow orders when he was suppsed to be the epitome of that kind of guy was an added stressor that'd make the first step in his 'win-win' experiment a helluva lot more difficult.
Hytech. He needed it. It was comfortable and it was familiar and it was the kind of science perfectly suited to bootfuck the Samiel Clone right into the heart of a dwarf star.
Bloodtech. It was an awful sounding name. He had no idea if it was viable. Here, in this not-a-sim, it might be more powerful or less powerful than hytech. There was just no way of knowing what, precisely, the laws of physics were, or how they'd relate to his efforts.
Hytech. When performed incorrectly, it had a tendency to blow all the skin and meat off your bones, vaporize your blood and cook your brains inside your skull. As a nearly immortal Kin'kithal, he'd been seriously injured once, maybe twice the whole time, but he'd bounced back. Here in the un-sim, he had no such protection, so his death, when it came, would rank really super high on the ‘Holy Shit This Hurts Wall of Ouchie’.
With death almost certainly inevitable the moment the switch was flipped, Garth needed to ensure that he wasn't dropped back into the frame at the beginning.
Garth was pretty sure Etienne was running this simulation on a 1:1 ratio, meaning that while he was forced to fuck around dealing with his grief and an Emperor's secret vendetta, the rest of the fucking Universe was truckin' on towards the inevitable.
If everything ran perfect, if everything happened just as it was supposed to, enemy and foe alike would be a minimum of three months ahead of him in their own efforts.
And that was assuming that, three months from now, Samiel took one look at him and tapped out.
Garth licked his lips. "Time to get freaky."
***
Laying down plastic sheeting to hide or otherwise contain the scene of your own suicide was pretty fucking surreal.
It helped to look at it from a clinical point of view. There was a mission to accomplish, there were objectives that had to be completed in the proper order. The 'suicide' element was nothing more than a preliminary step in that mission. It might be a particularly violent and seemingly cruel step that existed for no other reason than because a complete asshole was running the show, but that was how it went sometimes.
It also helped that he had plenty of skill in dressing the stage for a gruesome murder as it gave him something else to focus on for a time.
Because for his debut attempt at suicide, Garth was going to go as simple as possible, making any temporary distractions welcome; two gnarly-looking nails driven right into his big ole melon, delivered at critical velocity right through his dome thanks to untended nail guns.
Humming the lyrics to How You Remind Me by Nickelback under his breath, Garth put the finishing touches on the scene of the upcoming crime.
The Kin'kithal stood and shook his head at the Jigsawian Nightmare he'd created.
“I’m going to die tonight.” It sounded so weird. “Scratch that. It is weird. So weird. The weirdest thing ever. I’m not even certain I should trust you, Emperor. How can I be certain you’ll hold up to your end of the bargain? What if you’re like all ‘well, hey there, man, sorry you killed yourself and all, but you can’t go back because that’s how people signify that they can’t win against their grief’? Or like, if you just laugh at me and are like 'Holy fuck, I can't believe you actually did that shit, man, you craycray.' What then?"
Nothing.
Well, nothing but silence from a mostly gutted-out old school that was becoming creepier the longer he stood there, contemplating whether it was more efficient to drill two long nails into his heart or whether planting one through each temple for a nice and neat short circuit of the old thinking matter was the better way to go.
Garth went back to the table supporting the n-space circuitry, just to see. Just to mull over whether or not his plans were worth this kind of madness; no matter how hard he tried to think past anything the Emperor might do or say or how he might actually treat the creation of this ‘save point’, Garth just couldn’t escape the feeling that Etienne Marseilles would look down on him from this moment forward, might punish him in some way.
Even if the Emperor had proved to be uninterested in joining the game on the outside, Garth felt like he would've decided to do the fucker in on general principles. The thought of an asshole like Etienne Marseilles using the incongruity's powers to skip merrily into the new reality made Garth's teeth itch.
The silvery circuit shone in the waning light, hinting that with it’s creation, the war against Baron Samiel might very well be over and done with before it even got started.
N-space storage mingled with a few other hytech designs would easily help Drake in ways that no one in this world could even imagine.
If this simple circuit failed -explosively was pretty much the only way things could go- then there was a limiter on what could and could not be done in Etienne’s simulation of Earth.
If that was the outcome, so be it; hytech machinery wasn't technically of the Dream, so if Etienne was a righteous cock-mangler and hytech went blooey, there was still the thing with his blood.
Because as far as Garth was concerned, the weird properties of his blood was a thing occurring inside the simulation. It was a part of Emperor-for-Life Etienne Marseille's bullshittery, and
therefore, might be of considerable value to his efforts.
It was just a matter of figuring out what that might be.
“Fuck this.” Garth went back to the laid out plastic sheets in the corner of the room opposite the windows –this way, no one would see him doing the deed, neatly cutting out any lurking snuff-fans- picked up the nail guns and cleared his throat.
“Hey, so, uh, we never really laid down the rules for, you know, setting up a save point. Well, beyond the whole ‘you need to kill yourself’ thing, but uh, yeah. ‘I hereby officially declare this a save point because reasons.’”
Without further ado, Garth raised the nail guns, pressed each end against each temple and pulled the trigger.
A double-snap, the sensation of weird pressure, a flash of light…
***
“It is about time.” Emperor-for-Life Etienne Marseilles clapped his hands dryly as Garth materialized in the room with the most stupendous look of confusion on his face. To the man’s credit, he recuperated very quickly; most of the men and women who came to him for guidance generally died at least once during their efforts, and when they wound up here, in the Emperor’s chambers, it often took hours to convince them that all was well, that they were able to return.
That they hadn’t lost.
“Where’s your buddy, the alabaster mandroid?” Garth jerked his chin at the empty alcove behind the Emperor’s left side.
“Hm?” Etienne shifted his head a bit. “Ah, yes, Spur. Come now, it’s been five thousand years. A great deal has transpired since he went off to the Bishops. As a loyal construct, he is doing all he can to familiarize himself with the state of things in the Universe so that he might better serve me in the future. I am certain he is doing so in order to prevent another lengthy ‘time out’.”
“So how does this work?” Garth took a few steps, enjoying the relative freedom. This was the first time he hadn’t been tied to a chair and he wondered what –if anything- that suggested. “The whole ‘save point’ thing. We never really did discuss it.”