by Lee Bond
Doodling high-end supermath on a regular old piece of paper in an abandoned and mostly dilapidated math classroom in a school destined to become both the most awesomest arcade the world had ever seen and the location of the highest-level tech also seen by that very same world was … weird.
Garth caught himself laughing as he worked out the problem. Real life was weird as hell.
Reading through the math once more, the Kin’kithal shrugged helplessly. Everything on the piece of paper was –honestly and truly- nothing more than a best guess scenario. Too little about the implants and circuits inside of him were properly understood; he hadn’t exactly had time to sit down and chitchat with Huey as to the changes made to the original design because end of the world scenarios had literally been popping up all over Hospitalis.
And then, well, and then he’d done gone and got himself stuck in a temporal trap thanks to the asshole minds inside Bravo. Suffice to say, following that colossal lapse in judgment, the majority of his stint inside time prison had been devoted to figuring out how to break free, not in comprehending his new nature.
“I mean, this looks all right.” Once he was done fucking around with this n-space malarkey until it worked or he called it quits, he was gonna focus more on getting Changetech up and running. If he intended on investing any amount of time and effort into plumbing the depths of the properties behind quadronic-laced blood, he was going to need proper access to proper machinery, not this off-the-shelf crud that was barely internet ready.
The arcade was –more or less, give or take- a moot point. All the guys involved in tearing the school down and putting up the Arcade knew what they were doing and –minus the occasional insight from the man paying them all- they could almost certainly be trusted to work on their own.
Garth took a deep breath and settled in to re-wire the construct with q-blood. He was going to need some kind of cup and some water.
Dilution was the key.
***
Dilution was not the key.
Not at all.
“You truly are persistent, are you not, Mister N’Chalez?” ‘Etienne’ applauded the man’s continued doggedness in trying to solve the unsolvable.
“Yeah, well, that’s me.” Garth sketched a hasty bow. Inwardly, he was trying to figure out what in the hell he was doing wrong.
Theoretically, it was impossible to separate the quadronium bond from each droplet of blood. That was a given. Since he’d already witnessed that quantum-level cohesion between each droplet of blood –in the hallway and during his initial test- it therefore followed that each drop was quantumly entangled, which suggested that he could create an attenuated connection –through dilution- that’d then create a much weaker but still viable q-circuit.
But damn him if the whole fucking thing hadn’t lit up like a Christmas tree designed by Tesla after drinking three bottles of Absinthe and dropping a whole bucketful of LSD. If anything, that motherfucker had blown up around him with a vengeance.
“I warn you, N’Chalez. While you seem more than agreeable in wasting the rest of your life executing these murderous little experiments, I may grow bored.” ‘Etienne’ filled his voice full of direness. “And I can assure you, if I grow bored, I will call this to an end.”
“Wouldn’t that violate the covenant of our agreement?” Maybe he was using the wrong liquid to dilute the blood? What about whiskey? Or … Mister Pibb? Or, failing that, something more reasonable, like a gel-liquid that possessed electrical dampening properties that'd inhibit the speedy translation of power?
Finding that out, though, was impossible. At least, within the restrictions he was working with. Fake Etienne was probably giving the real Emperor play-by-play of what was going on in the chamber, making tonight, this save, the only time that he was absolutely certain he’d be able to get something working without direct interference. The stuff he was doing right that second with the blood was probably suspicious enough. Getting hijinky with other liquids would perk robo-Etienne's Shenanigan Sniffer right up.
“I am Emperor.” The mannequin replied stridently. “The agreement changes when I say it does.”
Garth nodded. “Good to know, Almighty Emperor-for-Life Etienne Marseilles. Well, since you seem to be in a pissy mood, how’s about you send me back at least once more so I can decide what the fuck I’m going to do with the rest of my night? Watch fourteen hours of Arrow or kill myself half a dozen more times? Which will it be? Our viewers can’t wait to find out which!”
“Begone.” Fake Etienne snapped his fingers and …
***
Thirty one thousand…
Thirty-one one thousand…
Thirty-two one thousand…
Garth began worrying that the translation effect would never end. It’d never gone on this long before and with Etienne off doing what supervillains with delusions of grandeur did when they weren’t pretending to be Kings and Emperors did, a dragging, gnawing feeling that it might be quite some time before anyone figured out that he hadn’t been dropped back into his very own private dimension settled in over his excitement at sneaking around being tricky.
The sounds surrounding him –originally little more than pops and clicks that’d slowly resolved into slow motion clinks and clanks- became clearer still, sluggishly revealing themselves into sharp, percussive sounds, like metal hitting glass …
…
…
…
Bwaaaaaaaam!
The brilliant white light surrounding him on all sides like a particularly unwelcome prisoner’s hood suddenly parted, like the sun rising in a split second instead of taking a few hours to get to the point where the whole world got to bask in it’s illumination.
When you’re a Specter –or even a boring old Kin’kithal, for that matter - great pains are taken to train you for every eventually, and being taken prisoner, complete with hood over your head, isn’t just an eventuality, it’s a given.
Visiting war-torn systems and planets to see who was doing what to whom and if they were really allowed to be doing so and then delivering the kinds of punitive damages Trinity wanted done was the sort of activity that almost always seemed to generate massive amounts of dislike for the Specters involved.
That dislike typically boiled down to two responses.
Option one –which was always a source of immense hilarity for the Specters in the shit and generally wound up being replayed at Specter HQ for the enjoyment of others- was direct confrontation with the Specter team, and that was just plain stupid. Lots of people wound up dead when that happened because Specter involvement and their liabilities were made stringently clear to whichever group of people had invited them in, and that clarity–thanks to ubiqituous application of all It's Laws- was automatically passed on to all citizens, everywhere. Didn’t matter if they were aware of it or not.
That was how Trinity rolled. And across The Cordon? Didn’t fucking matter over there. Trinity kind of hated most of the types of Humanity that’d grown up outside It’s influence, so the more of them that wound up dead, the better. It didn't even need to send out apology letters or bouqets of flowers or anything.
The second –and far more common, because when Specters were done being the representation of nightmares made incarnate and they were done looting what could be looted- option available to disgruntled libertarians or ultra-post-Communist soldiers- was the occasional kidnapping and ransom scenario.
Garth –and pretty much every other Specter- had been trained to count everything from footsteps to seconds in a vehicle to minutes aboard a spaceship to measure distance traveled, location arrived at, the whole nine yards. It was quite impressive and was a wicked way to play hide and go seek during your down time.
All that training and experience also allowed someone who’s just had a hood removed –or, in this particular instance, a blinding white light that probably signified something but was also a something that Garth gave precisely zero fucks and minus shits about- to take in their ent
ire surroundings automatically, 'blindness' notwithstanding.
“I know this place.” Garth said aloud. “Me and my friends had coffee here once. We got kicked out because Sparks tried to pick up the AGM for the entire chain. When that failed, he tried buying the chain, just to get her personal phone number. When that failed, Drake tried jumping over the rail, slipped on the top part, landed on that same AGM-lady’s foreign car, dented the fuck out of the hood, cracked the window, and ran away. Sparks knocked a server over, spilling her drinks and left her his phone number.”
“And you?” A heavy voice, full of gravel and weight, reached his ears.
“Walked right the fuck out.” Garth grinned at the memory. Bold as brass tacks where his friends had bailed like children. The first time in the proto-Realistic 21st century where he’d really seen how fun being an idiot could be. “I was still … me at this point.”
“Why are we here?”
“Fucked if I know.” Garth shrugged his shoulders. Part of him ached to look sideways, to physically see and be confronted by the man who sat next to him at the quaint little wrought-iron table, but for now, for right now, he refused.
Right now, he was back in that old place, in that old time. Proper Drake and Proper Sparks were somewhere out there in San Francisco, getting ridiculously day drunk and planning a cyberheist for the answer keys to some test or other or they were downtown looking for stupid things to buy to amuse themselves for a few hours before they got down to some serious partying at one of the many, many beaches they frequented.
Somewhere out there, he was tagging along, still getting accustomed to the strange reality that no one, anywhere, was trying to kill him.
How bizarre that’d been! Not a single soul, anywhere on the planet. Well, okay, that was kind of stretching the truth pretty seriously, but Garth remembered thinking -trailing behind hyperkinetic Sparks Dangerously and eternally laid-back Drake Bishop on one of their many adventures- that he was a free man.
No M’Zahdi Hesh. No Kith and Kin. Nowhere. Just regular men and regular women out to do their neighbors and everyone else wrong. No global wars. Just conflicts between countries. Standard issues with standard resolutions. No need for a man like him, not really.
It’d been the most refreshing realization of his entire adult life
The moment in this café had been a revolutionary, eye-opening one for a displaced Kin’kithal; in his own world, hijinks like that would’ve seen Army of Man dispatched within seconds, everyone involved arrested and interrogated –and scanned with varying degrees of invasive technology- to determine the reasons behind the tomfoolery in the first place, with jail time or worse waiting in the wings for the offenders because they were in the middle of the worst war the world had ever seen.
Being forced to deal with asshole teenagers when there were Kith and Kin out there kind of pissed the Army off.
Garth amused himself for a few more minutes, watching a red-and-black-and-green haired waitress wearing a cute 1950’s style dress and some positively scandalous knee socks bounce around her tables, expertly determining the moods of everyone as only a true professional could before dealing with the very impossible man sitting next to him.
“You can’t be here.” Garth’s tone was firm. Unshakeable. Unbreakable.
“After all this time, you still remember the sound of my voice.”
“Only been a few years for me, Dad. For you, thirty thousand.” Garth took Kith Antal in, reflected on just how dominant the ancient warrior had been and wondered how and why, in all the times he’d operated out in the open –even before news of the hidden war had broken loose- no one, anywhere, had even tried to deal with him.
Had to’ve been instinct. Or something. Maybe direct influence from the Hesh or possibly even the Engines of Creation themselves, because when you looked at Kith Antal, even sideways, you knew you were confronting someone who was, in every single literal way, your master.
From the stories he’d been told as a child –during the rare downtimes between merciless training sessions- Garth knew Antal had been entirely non-descript. Just a normal dude from a really long time ago. Short, in fact, less than six feet tall, but in the kind of physical shape that came from a lifetime of hard labor providing for a family. Sandy yellow hair, bluish eyes, strong teeth. Basically generic civilian guy doing the normal kinds of things dudes born five thousand years before Christ got up to, which was, in kind of every way, super boring and altogether not life-fulfilling for a guy who also –when no one was looking- spent all of his time at night staring up into the stars and wondering what in the hell they really were.
Time, exposure to the M’Zahdi Hesh, the ultra-small extra-dimensional granule implanted into the base of the spine, and five thousand solid years of war had transformed that slender but athletic, earnest and hard-working serf into a virtual wall of muscle, scar tissue and radiant hostility. Inculcated for many centuries into the mindset of a Kith by the soul-subtle whispers of the M’Zahdi Hesh, Antal had shed every iota of humanity residing inside him in favor of the unbelievable power and puissance offered up by those who sought to destroy the Unreal Universe. He didn’t even bother to hide that disdain, that … overt dismissal.
Even if the person experiencing that automatic write off didn’t understand what they were feeling, they knew something wasn’t right. And kept their mouths shut.
Looking at this figure who wore his father’s skin, the sheer bulk of him, the psychic pressure generated by that many centuries of fighting and death and destruction … it reminded Garth that at one point in his life, he’d wanted to be just like Antal. Fighting on the side of the humans, of course, directing that same ruthless gaze, that same boundless thirst for destruction against the Kith, the Kin, and their Harmony soldiers.
Antal smiled and shook his head, bluish eyes sharp as ever. “You look pretty similar to me as it is, boy. Don’t fool yourself. You became what I wanted you to be.”
“Don’t flatter yourself, old man.” Garth bantered back, content –for the moment- to allow this particularly unkind charade to continue. “I was what you wanted. Then I came here, and I was shown that I could be similar but not the same. If I was … well. If I was completely like you but owning a different endgame, my plans would’ve been significantly different.”
Antal tilted his head back, let loose a barely audible chuckle. “Had I known your true plans, boy, I would’ve stuck a shiv in your neck and let you bleed out in front of all your friends.”
“Had you known my true plans, old man, you wouldn’t have even got close.” Garth’s words shot like arrows into his father’s chest. “You were a nightmare made flesh, true enough, but Kin Shikozi was worse. And I took her apart at the seams with my own two hands.”
“Ah, dear old Shikozi. Steppin’ Razor herself.” Antal went misty-eyed for a moment before the hardness returned. “You did. You fought her to a standstill, then ripped her apart with your paradoxical powers. Because you had different plans for me. How could you have done that, boy? Lied to your own father that way? Perpetrated that kind of deceit on the man who gave you life?”
“Technically speaking, I gave myself life.” Saying it out loud made the whole scenario seem exactly as preternaturally bizarre and as uncomfortable as it felt, but it needed to be said, because whoever Kith Antal really was needed to understand the level of commitment it took to bring about Reality 2.0. “You and mom were just vessels. I was the beginning of myself. That’s what makes me the only one capable of doing what needs doing.”
“It’s that kind of self-involved and delusional thinking, boy, that gets you into this kind of trouble.” Antal indicated the fabricated reality they were currently in with a slap of a hand on the table. “And your ego since coming into this future is nothing short of miraculous. If you’d told me what you planned on doing, boy, I would’ve helped you. I was loyal to you like a dog. I would’ve laid down and died for you, had you asked it. A son, a miraculous, nearly all-powerful son, where none sh
ould’ve been possible.”
Garth waved the old man’s argument away and counter-attacked. “You were free from their influence for only a moment. A blink in time. Mom found herself back in the Hub, and every day you leaned further and further back into their embrace. The Harmony of the Heshii is unbreakable, old man. You yourself told me that, time and time again. You tried pretending that you weren’t hungry to resume your mantle of World Destroyer, that their silver chimes weren’t playing in your ears, but I knew different. From the other side, I finally understood why you pushed younger me so hard, why you rode me so mercilessly, why you were so … rough. Because you’d already seen the me I was going to become, and you knew you were falling. So you had to hurry. To get me right. So don’t sit there and pretend. If I’d come to you with my plans to destroy the Universe, you would’ve gone straight to the Hesh, a loyal dog, barking secrets.”
This time, Antal really did howl with laughter. The patrons at the other tables shifted uncomfortably for a few seconds before resuming their conversations. Their eyes, however, were showing a bit more white than normal and they glanced with nervous reflexes at the table holding two men who clearly hated each other every few seconds.
“My gods, how you talk to me!” Antal wiped a joyous tear from his eye. “Just like me. Just like me.”
“No.” Garth said firmly. “I’m worse than you, because I know what happens to you. I sent you out there, old man. To face madness, and chaos, and rage unlike anything you’ve ever experienced. Out there, past The Cordon, following my commands until the final moment when you could follow them no more. That’s what I did. You nearly destroyed the Earth. I did more. I did worse. I did better. But …”