by Lee Bond
"He can't ready himself for what he can't remember." Eddie replied calmly. "And the Ushbet explicitly erased those memories. Garth can ready himself for ODDities, Lissande, everything and anything on his plate, but none of his defenses will be enough to stop that lunatic. And besides," the Emperor said with withering contempt, "he's not even doing anything. He's building iWatch/Fitbit knockoffs in the basement and fooling around with homemade drones, preparing to make some kind of … stupid enhanced reality video game! About the only thing I've seen that could be remotely considered as preparation are his attempts in creating AI. For his sake, I hope he sticks with period-friendly efforts, too. It might work. In the long run. I just cannot fathom how he was so successful in the Unreal Universe."
Eddie paused, head tilted to one side. "Wait, no, I retract that. It's as I said. The power that's his to command. That's the only difference. It's not his intelligence or his creativity or any of that. It's just the power. Take that away and we're left with a violent sociopath with a penchant for gadgetry. I've seen nothing in his actions that implies he's a great tactician."
"You're basing your assumptions on a faulty viewpoint." When Eddie shot him a dirty look and got ready to hop back atop that soapbox, Drake hurried to explain. "Let's look at the man's life. For the first however long, he was trained by Kith Antal, to be a weapon aimed directly at the hearts of the M’Zahdi Hesh. Don’t forget that by the time Garth came on the scene, Antal had been fighting wars across the planet and directly exposed to the Hesh more than any other entity before or since. That kind of … presence … leaves a powerful impact, especially on a growing boy.”
“A boy with the powers of a god.” Eddie pointed out bitterly. On one of the many screens surrounding them, Garth’s final, fateful encounter with Kin Shikozi –the deadly and beautiful African warrior princess, the so-called Seed Mother- raged back and forth. As with many battles between the Kin’kithal and any of the brood loyal to the M’Zahdi Hesh, the playback was done at the slowest speeds imaginable, with the pacing still being quick enough to watch without agonizing over the crawl.
“He’s toying with her. Look, here. He could’ve torn her apart right then and there, right here at the very beginning before she even managed to summon up the aspects of her power, but he doesn’t and so they fight a vicious, deadly battle wherein he inflicts maximum amounts of physical punishment and pain on his enemy before finally, finally pulling her apart at the seams with those powers of his. Kith Antal may have set the ball rolling on the dark attitudes and grimness that we saw plenty of in Army archival footage, but he was by far and away … what did Griffin refer to him as in his psych evals? A dark star, a black hole, sucking anything and everything into his wake, only to be destroyed? And that was before the fool caught sight of Shikozi’s destruction. His own son knew what was wrong with Nickels before the rest of the goddamn Universe!”
“If I may?” Drake swept away Garth’s memories of destroying Shikozi. They were pointless and graphic besides which. “And you’re skipping ahead in the narrative.”
Eddie made a grand flourish, adding a little magical light show full of frippery and nonsense because every now and then it was good to have a little bit of fun with the power you had. “Pray tell, Master Spur, what is it you are trying to do, and in such a long-winded manner?”
“You want to understand why Garth is doing as he’s doing, and so I am trying to explain the man himself to you. You’re … preoccupied … with whatever it is you’re doing and, for the time being," Drake mentioned nothing about saving suffering penitents from their collapsing worlds because he knew Eddie held little in his heart for those people any longer, "I’ve got nothing but time on my hands, so I’ve delved into Garth’s life. Deeper than usual. I’ve learned quite a few surprising things, things that might help you understand why he’s being equal parts boring, savage, and stand-offish from the main goal you’ve set for him.” Burrowing into the Kin’kithal’s life as seen through his eyes had been, well, an eye-opener.
On so many levels and in so many ways.
Further, armed with what he –they, really, though as he’d just so bluntly pointed out, Eddie was more than distracted- knew about the Unreal Universe and the things operating behind the scene, it was frightfully clear to see a sadly rough truth about Garth ‘Nickels’ N’Chalez.
One Eddie needed to understand, or at least know about, so that when the end came, when Garth was successful in his trial of guilt and in ways that would come close to destroying the very core of what Eddie Marshall had become, the man calling himself Emperor would have no one else to blame but himself.
Eddie leaned back in his chair, transforming it on the fly into his old reclining chair from college. “Do tell. And, just so you know, the stuff that’s got me ‘preoccupied’ is pretty important. You’re not the only one who’s taken inspiration from seeing our old friend.” The Emperor laughed at Drake’s quirked eyebrow. “I’ll only say for now that it has to do with compression ratios. It’s too soon to tell. Let’s just say that if I am right and I’m successful, any future modeling we do in here will be that much more precise with a completely restructured drain on the incongruity. We’ll be able to do more for less and for longer.”
“I like the sounds of that.” Drake replied cautiously, mind –long accustomed to working on multiple projects at the same time, even when not being augmented by the incongruity’s powers- already working on unspooling Eddie’s little, deceitful game. “May I continue?”
“Yeah. Sure. We’ve got time. Nickels is as usual being boring as fuck, completely ignoring the Baron when he should be readying … anyways.” Eddie waved a hand around, urging Drake to resume what he obviously imagined was an important discussion. “You were telling me I was jumping the gun. Go ahead.”
“Before Garth wound up in charge of his children in the special task force for the Armies of Man, he wound up in the proto-Reality, a Universe that we all imagined to be real, correct?” Drake, infinitely more laid back than the frenetic ball of energy that was Eddie Marshal had taken the news of their relative unreality a lot easier. When Eddie gave a begrudging nod, he went on with the story. “Now. Now that we’ve had access to his most intimate memories, it’s … well, shocking. Naturally, before the … before the end of things, we’d come to learn more than a little bit about the Ushbet M’Tai and how they operate, but … but when we’d been nothing more than ordinary men doing extraordinary things … mind-boggling. To learn that they’d grabbed hold of Garth and forced him down the path they did … it explains a lot.”
“About what?” Eddie’s demand rang through the room.
“Imagine. Imagine you’re a God,” Drake caught the faintest, smug curl on Eddie’s face, a response he didn’t like and filed away for later examination, “and one day, someone comes hurtling into your dimension, a virtual comet slamming into the side of everything you’ve held dear. They were like us, Eddie. They looked upon the vast domain that was their Existence and imagined them to be the be all and end all of everything. Only … they weren’t. Here comes a Kin’kithal warrior, trained to kill things exactly like them. At least on paper. The M’Tai were always less … draconian …”
Eddie laughed at the word, motioning for Drake to continue. He had to admit, this tale was beginning to sound interesting. When the M’Tai in the box was capable of speech, he might very well take time away from learning how to siphon it’s powers away to discover if this was the truth or not.
“The M’Tai were always less destructive than their Unreal counterparts, the Hesh. You could call them two sides of the same coin, with kind of a fucked up Venn diagram overlap when shit gets awkward.” Drake took a sip of water from a cup appearing out of thin air. This was –minus the shrieking fish market argument they’d had not too long ago- the longest discussion either one of them had had. “But suddenly there’s a new integer in the equation. A mortal … mostly mortal … being. From somewhere else. With the kinds of powers that, in their opinion, no
being should ever possess.
But they were also plagued with a problem. Baron Samiel and the temporal incongruity. We never did manage to uncover the reasons why they chose to ignore or otherwise dismiss the guy’s rampage through time and space for as long as they did, or why they yanked Nickels away from the very edge of destroying him, but they did. No matter, I suppose. They grabbed Nickels and slipped him a Mickey, forced him to deal with Samiel and the ODDities.”
Eddie found he was warming up to the discussion. Towards the end, after they’d found the incongruity and learned how to awaken it’s powers for themselves, they’d had ample opportunity to learn everything about Samiel. It hadn’t been until after their escape from The Dream into the Unreality that they’d further augmented their knowledge by uncovering bits and pieces –mostly extracted from fragments of Garth’s memories that’d been stored in the strange rock- about the Ushbet M’Tai. As it turned out, they actually owed their escape from a dying Dream into the nightmare because of the M’Tai; were it not for the wormhole those beings had created to send N’Chalez home, they would’ve died.
“See, that’s the thing I don’t understand, man.” Eddie shifted in his lounger. “Okay, so we know where Baron Samiel comes from, and with Garth’s appearance on the stage, the M’Tai probably figured it out for themselves, but the question is, why didn’t they just kill Samiel on their own? They were actual, literal Gods. Like, of the Universe. Sure, not a real Universe, even technically less real than the Unreal Universe, but we were the chosen ones, right? The model upon which the Engines of Creation themselves planned on forging a new Reality, should the Heshii ever be destroyed?”
“I don’t think they could.” Drake answered, excited. “I think they were linear. I think actual time travel was never supposed to exist. The chunk of temporal incongruity … the changes it went through … that was a fundamental incursion into the fabric of the proto-Reality, a complete and utter violation of the natural laws of time and space. Gods they might’ve been, Eddie, but Gods living alongside mankind and whatever else, in the singular river of time. They couldn’t do anything to Samiel because they knew immediately that anything they did do would be undone. So Garth arrives, and is unknown. And unknowable. Sitting –as now- outside Samiel’s temporal purview. So they hammer in commands. Fix the mess, destroy Samiel, save the Universe. Typical sci-fi stuff.”
“That’s pretty intense.” It was, it really and truly was. That limitation, that primal inability to move through time when a mortal man named Samiel was more than capable of doing so … oh, how that must’ve rankled the immortal, ineffable, all-powerful Ushbet M’Tai. “But then they went and booted Nickels back into the Unreal Universe without having destroyed Samiel. Why in the hell would they do that?”
Drake shrugged. Efforts to find those moments in Garth’s memories were proving pointless. They had to be there, but if they were, they were locked all the way tight and would take more than casual probing to unlock. It was something he didn’t necessarily want to do, but would if the situation grew dangerous: Eddie was only a little unstable at the moment, working through some pretty passionate emotions. Drake knew the moment he began actively digging into Garth’s memories, hunting for those locked away answers, well, that might become the moment Emperor and Android truly started fighting.
Beyond that, there was the fact that he didn’t want Eddie to know the matter of any final discussions between Garth and the Ushbet. Because there definitely had been one. It was just … difficult to root out.
“Look, we both know Garth’s memories of his time there are disjointed, splintered. Possibly partially destroyed by the Ushbet’s method of sending him back through the hole he’d burrowed between the proto-Reality and the Unreal Universe. But I’ve been giving a lot of thought to what might’ve transpired between them. Once he left, they dealt with Samiel, somehow, and left the incongruity for us to find. Then … well. Invasion. Quadronium Fractures. You know the rest.” As far as theories went, it was about as sound as they were ever going to have without finding those veiled moments. “It’s a big if, a really big If, but what if the Ushbet M’Tai demanded Garth destroy the Universe? What if they gave him the plans, the motivation, the … drive to do all this?”
“Bro.” Eddie felt weird, like in the movies when they do that camera shot where the camera rushes at the actor but the zoom goes in the opposite direction. “You literally just blew my mind completely out the back of my head.”
Drake rushed to keep striking while the iron was hot. “So in the proto-Reality, Garth is completely hampered by the M’Tai. Even if he wanted to tell us, they probably would’ve stopped him. Or whatever. They massaged localized time enough to make the situation easy, but end of the day, he was their pawn. They sent him back, but with an ingrained geas to destroy the Universe in favor of a better design, one that turned him into the kind of guy capable of coming up with an actual plan to do just that.
Then, in order to get the Armies of Man to trust him completely, he does the unthinkable. He voluntarily agrees to be shot up with neural sheathes, intentionally giving them levels of control that were quite frankly the stupidest fucking thing I’ve ever imagined. He and his unfortunate children hop into Alpha and they wind up inside Pluto for thirty thousand years. When they get woken up, all of them except Garth …”
“Yeah, I get it. This shit, I know. I’ve been keeping some pretty tight tabs on Nickels since he climbed out of Alpha. Not even Trinity knows how much I know about the asshole.” Eddie had no intention of reliving any of the moments of Garth’s less than illustrious career this side of the future.
“Okay, sure, fine, but you’re missing the point.” Drake held up a finger. “One, we have the Ushbet M’Tai’s commands …”
“Hypothetical commands.”
Drake ignored the insinuation. He’d been doing this kind of data extrapolation for five thousand years. If there was anything wrong with the concept, it’d be the small potato stuff. He resumed without missing a beat. “Forcing him to rush along the End of the Unreal Universe. Two, we’ve got Trinity Itself. Brainchild of Garth himself, completely unaware of It’s limitations in dealing with the man, Trinity begins slow and subtle machinations to force the Kin’kithal into revealing himself as the kind of demi-God everyone … everyone … back in the day imagined him to be. Still with me?”
“Yesssss.” Eddie hissed the word. There was light at the end of the tunnel and the Emperor wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to see the dawn.
“Then we’ve got Bravo. Through the neural sheathes, they took the man’s Specter transformation and just fucking ran with it. They turned him into a rampaging bull in Latelyspace. Were it not for Nao …” Storm clouds brewed in Eddies face so Drake went in a different direction. “Were it not for events keeping the man from losing the last vestiges of his humanity, that whole system would be ash and charcoal by now. Three different command structures, running through the man. All at once.”
“Okay, so what?” Eddie demanded, being intentionally ignorant.
Drake ignored Eddie’s stance, once again. “Now we’re working backwards, to here, right now. We see him lose the sheathes, we see him grab hold of his Kin’kithal essence. He’s free of Bravo’s indomitable influence, so he’s no longer entirely a raging asshole hell-bent on absolute destruction, which is nice, because if he’d run into Fenris and gang under Bravo’s complete influences, this whole Universe would already be gone. But there’s something wrong with ex-dee, some taint, some deadly poison, so … Garth goes another way. He uses quadronium, which has the unfortunate side effect of destroying what remained of our proto-Reality.
Then he enters Arcadia. Gets slammed full of Kingsblood. This ignites Specter and the hungers of a full-blooded Kin’kithal in ways that would’ve had the minds in Bravo shitting bricks backwards through time. All I can say is thank fucking God that he didn’t … doesn’t have access to whatever the hell his quadronium body is actually capable of. Garth sees himself become the
utter and absolute definition of violence, death incarnate, right? He becomes even crueler, even more deadly, but in the end, that Dark Iron forces him to confront and accept it. He learns how to control those urges, how to direct them outwards, only when necessary. Another compulsion gone. And now we’re here.”
“Where he won’t survive.” Eddie stated confidently. “Because if what you say is true, the only thing keeping him alive and strong out there in the Unreal Universe were those compulsions. The M’Tai Geas … nice phrasing, bee tee dubs … pushed him into becoming a tyrant, a man willing to use his own children in an effort to wind up where he needed to be. Trinity’s Specter allowed him to further his own cause of creating a gigantic buffer zone between the Rim galaxies and Kith Antal’s arrival. It hasn’t gone unnoticed that the Universal area where Antal’s Galaxyship has settled is almost entirely devoid of life, all thanks to Garth’s … ahem … Deep Strike missions. Bravo’s Kin’kithal doesn’t even exist any longer, buried beneath trillions and trillions and trillions of tons of atomized quadronium. Yes, those implants can be powered … temporarily … by draining AI spheres, but there isn’t enough of that exotic matter left in the Universe to boot him up fully. So he’s in here, powerless, without the exterior drives haranguing him. Because now he’s just a man, fighting against Samiel. I deplore and decry him for his savagery and violence because when I knew him back in the day, he found other ways to do things. I know and understand now that he found ridiculous ways of coming out on top thanks to the M’Tai Geas, but the feeling still stands. He is savage, he is vicious, but he’s also at least smart enough to know that he has no fucking chance against Samiel. And this is never more evident than right now. What is he really doing? Gadgets. Advancing the cause of science. Fiddling around making bets, earning money. Precisely what he did on Hospitalis, only with remarkably less success. He’s doing nothing to combat Samiel because without the M’Tai, without Trinity and Bravo nipping at his heels, he’s got nothing.”