by Lee Bond
All to be transformed through hytech science into quadronium for a man desperate to free himself from the poisonous taint that was the extra-dimensionality.
As either Drake or Spur, the man walking down the purplish-lit halls could scarcely wrap his head around who and what Garth N’Chalez was now. Thanks to the life he led, Drake easily recalled Garth ‘Nickels’ as he’d been with absolute clarity, and compared that man with the one trying to battle his personal demons.
Their current Nickels was still similar to the man they'd helped him become, but only by a string. A shadow. The merest whisper.
And that was discouraging.
Garth N’Chalez, the Kin’kithal warrior who’d fallen through a self-made wormhole and into the Engines of Creation’s very own pet project, the Dream, had been a self-contained ball of suspicion, chaos, and unbridled power. Of course, he and Sparks hadn’t had the wisdom necessary to see what their newest and oddest friend for what he'd really been, but they’d seen enough to treat him with kids gloves.
But over time –thank God- the man had fallen in love with the Dream's beauty, and had finally started acting enough like a human being that he hadn't stuck out like a damned sore thumb everywhere they'd gone. Still the most powerful being in the place –excluding both Baron Samiel and the Ushbet M’Tai-, still hiding who he was from the two men who would’ve done anything for him, but still trying his best to be human.
“Some of that’s M’Tai embellishment, though." Drake knew that now. Saw it plainly enough.
Naturally, the Gods of that other place had wanted to protect their roosts in the heavens from a being literally designed to kill beings like them. So they’d snatched Nickels up in his weakest moment and worked him over, arranging everything around him to be the simplest, easiest version of events that they could find. They’d provided him with enough framework to be in the right mindset to battle Baron Samiel and then they’d kicked him back to the Unreal Universe moments before the deed had been done, leaving Garth with a case of regret deep and powerful enough that he’d come back to the beginning to work through it all over again.
This N’Chalez was … worrisome. Darker. Different. Stranger. Wilder and more … more. Drake couldn't get over the differences between the two men, not even after familiarizing himself with Garth's exploits since his return. Always hard, always rough, always ready and willing to do the things that no other man would ever consider in their darkest days, there was a definite edge to Nickels now, one that filled Drake with trepidation; this latest incarnation felt far too similar to the N'Chalez that'd first crash-landed in The Dream. Curled under the edges of incipient Shriveness was a gleam of that old cruelty, that Antal-esque dismissal of anything not him, a resurgence of darkness that'd allegedly been curbed during his time as an Onyx Brigadier.
Unbidden hope that should Garth survive his ordeal, some Shriven tendencies blossomed inside the dark and fertile ground that was N'Chalez' inner soul flooded Drake.
It was impossible to imagine how a new Reality forged by Garth as he currently was right that moment would turn out, save perhaps to say that the paradise he imagined would be marred by the very darkness he sought to spare those new souls from.
"But he was like this before he stepped into Alpha." Drake wandered down a random hallway, trailing his fingers against the deep purple slashes. "The Garth we knew certainly was tough. But not callous. Not enough to engineer the lives of the Kith'kin and Kin'kith and then their absolutely pointless deaths, or cruel enough to do arrange what's happened to Antal. He has his moments of goodness, but ... everything he does is barbed. Everything takes its toll, on everyone around him."
There had to be something in the man's memories they were missing. Well, that he was missing. Eddie was wrapped up in his ‘work'.
Somewhere between leaving The Dream and hopping into Alpha, something had irrevocably marred Garth, and whatever it was, it was something that'd remained unaffected by Trinity's manipulation, Bravo's neural sheathes, the unbridled hunger of Kin'kithalism, the dark brutality of Kingsblood or the Shriveness trying to currently root into his heart.
If anything, all those trials and tribulations had only strengthened this ... quadronium-laced, unflinching resolve, and the Guilt Trip was only ... highlighting that secret, inner face for them to see.
Some niggling thing, some remnant of the brutal logicality from Spur wormed its way through Drake's wandering mind.
In all honesty, he couldn't rightly say exactly how weird 'Emperor-for-Life Etienne Marseilles' had gotten in the last five thousand years -their conversations, after all, had been limited both to when a Dark Age was screaming around them on all sides, and very briefly even then, lest they catch the attention of beings loyal to Trinity during It's downtime- yet this sudden deviation, this utter abandonment of thirty thousand years' worth of work -Naoko's demise notwithstanding- was entirely too coincidental to be ...
"Coincidence." Drake's causal route through the underbelly of the incongruity slowed to a crawl, then a complete stop.
The very air seemed to pause. He'd always believed, right from the beginning, when Garth had arrived to rescue him from the shattered ruins of Bishop's mighty domain, that there'd been something more going on.
That feeling had quintupled since his admission into the Guilt Trip, but no effort, great or small, was revealing anything.
And Drake -not to put too fine a point on it- was more than up to the task of rooting for answers. No matter where or how deeply he dug into what Garth was doing, it seemed to Drake that all he caught sight of was smoke and mirrors: all Garth’s missions had an air of showmanship, the flavor of confidence games being played, making the flourishes and grand stands and over-complicated looking machinery just that.
Showmanship.
“And now he’s got hold of an incongruity-powered device.” Drake took a right down the hallway, letting his feet do the walking while his brain did the talking. “Creating a temporal tidal lock stripping Samiel of all his power for as long as the lock remains, which looks to about ... two months. More than enough time to do damn near anything he sets his mind to, and that's assuming he doesn't fuck with the phone. Who knows what else he’ll be able to do if he starts tinkering?" Drake regretted being so open and honest with Eddie over his concerns with how the monarch was treating Garth. He was out in the cold now, twisting in the breeze, completely unable to make headway with Eddie, especially now he'd admitted his intentions on ordering the Universe to his specifications. The confidence on Eddie’s face when he’d revealed that he was now going to be helping Garth win so he could then murder a Shriven Nickels for complete and total access to what they both assumed were hidden memories … it wasn’t just a one-eighty attitudinal adjustment, it was a complete and utter nightmare.
They’d never wanted that, not even at the very beginning, when they’d used the incongruity to push the Invaders back from whence they'd come.
Right from the get-go they'd sensed the limitless power of the incongruity, never more so than after their success. The stresses put on their little corner of the Engine's Dreams had been intense, stretching the influence of the incongruity into wild, powerful new shapes. And then later, when what was eventually proven to be Garth's harvesting of the Dream for quadronium?
More power still.
But never ever had either one of them truly taken themselves, or the power they held, seriously. They were just two good old boys with a chunk of rock that allowed them to do what needed doing. Nothing more than that. Eddie’s abrupt reversal of intent had something to do with his secretive side project, and that mystery was, quite simply, tied into Garth N’Chalez’ arrival.
There was no getting around it.
More worrisome even than Eddie's declaration that he -and therefore, theoretically, the both of them- were going to override the natural order of future events by supplanting Garth as Destroyer of the Universe was a distinct lack of Naoko Kamagana.
The particular flavor of Garth's
Guilt Trip had been liberally seasoned with Eddie's profound and utter disgust over what'd happened to his self-proclaimed daughter. Everything from the bit with the exploding death cab to the very nature of how the Trip was being run had it's basis in the belief that Garth was guilty of destroying Naoko.
Where, then, was the gnashing of teeth and howling into the sky over poor Naoko Kamagana and how badly she suffered? Where were the pointed, snide comments shot across Garth's bow every time he wound up in the Audience Hall?
It was almost as if Eddie'd written Naoko off. As if he'd forgiven Garth, absolved him of his guilt. As if ... as if Naoko no longer mattered.
It all boiled down to the secret in the basement. Drake was beyond positive of that. It was responsible for keeping 'Emperor-for-Life Etienne Marseilles' from following through in his self-appointed duties, It was responsible for the deplorable state of the incongruity, It was responsible for the fresh, uncomfortable friction between the two of them.
And that secret was bound up with Garth's arrival. But ... was Garth somehow responsible for it all? Drake stopped and banged his head against a wall. He was caught in a goddamn logic loop and it was driving him insane.
“Okay.” He said in between soft thumps. “Time to go over this, once and for all. Step by step. It isn’t something he picked up en route because I was with him the whole fucking time. The man can do a lot, but he can’t be in two places at the same time. That would be a fucking nightmare for everyone involved and besides all that, I'm pretty sure if the Engines of Creation are a real thing, it ... they ... would have a real serious issue with two Nickels'.
It isn’t Dark Iron, because the remainder of that shit is ... enthusiastically bonded to the atomic structure of the quadronium megastructure. Even if Garth was capable of pulling 'sblood from his body, there's no goddamn way he would. He's reckless, but he's not insane. Free-roaming Cloud particulate inside the incongruity? No way. Isn’t neural sheathes, because no way. Isn’t Armies of Man influence because Garth’s Guilt Trip would be loads different than it is. Isn’t Antal’s presence because if anything, the Trip would be different again. Truly, truly different and I've already seen that Garth doesn’t feel bad over what he did to Antal. That whole thing is wrapped up nice and neat and squared away. And last but not least, it sure as fuck ain't the Hesh. Garth has no access to ex-dee, Inside or Outside, and I'd bet every second of my life from now until the End that if they got a toehold inside here, we would've been dead as doornails from second one."
Drake willed a chair into existence and he sat his ass down the moment it rose from the ground. He sectioned his mind into as many separate pieces as he could without forgetting who he was. It was a neat little trick he’d been forced to learn as successively -and aggressively- lazy Bishops had come to rely upon his efforts to the exclusion of all others. The mind trick should do wonders for him in this particular instance, where he was trying to juggle too many factors all at once.
Everything he knew about Garth Nickels went into a vast mental reservoir, from which he began shuffling things around in the hopes that whatever secret or lie or whatever it was that was rattling around in his head would suddenly, magnificently, gel the whole quagmire together.
Antal. Check. The massive Kith loomed heavy and large in Garth’s history for hundreds of years, a domineering and dominating presence. Drake felt awkwardly lucky that by the time he and Eddie'd made their way through the wormhole from dream into nightmare that Antal and his brood of deadly warriors had already fled the local area. Not to say they'd been off scot-free; though Antal had been gone, minor Kith and Kin and their armies had still needed dealing with.
Armies of Man, both the fleshy versions and their digital simulacra, trapped inside Bravo for relentless millennia. They’d run roughshod over Nickels from the very beginning of his ‘service’. Drake had never enjoyed dealing with them during his and Eddie's stint as hytech wunderkind, and to be honest, their interactions had always been terribly limited. The ex-surfer couldn't fathom what it'd been like for Garth, suffering under their sheathe-borne trickery.
Causal links automatically joined Antal and the Armies of Man together, implying a whole host of interaction between the dreaded Kith and the leaders of Humanity. The relationship between the two forces working to control Garth ‘Nickels’ N’Chalez were of the highest order.
An order of connectivity dangled off one side, representing the Bravo-contained intellects; neutered before being stored in one of the many hytech storage devices aboard Bravo, they’d nevertheless exerted control over Garth. Historically speaking, the living versions had been more insidious and for longer, which was why they had a first-order connection to Antal, but the Bravo-minds were hardly free of complicity; if you knew where to look, you saw the Bravo-minds attempting to influence Latelian growth -both societally and technologically- for decades.
Were it not for Garth's brutally decisive manner of dealing with them, the Bravo-minds might have figured more prominently, but alas.
Trinity Itself. Check. On a personal level, Drake was impressed by It's deviousness; had he or Eddie been at all aware of the utter depths to which Garth had been brought thanks to Trinity's remarkable deceit, they would've swooped in without a moment's hesitation. Sadly, the two of them hadn't been on speaking terms at the time, which was definitely regrettable; if they had, they might've been able to stop Garth's transformation into Specter in the Stars.
If for no other reason to stop what'd come after that nihilistic incarnation.
“Full blown Kin’kithal.” Drake refused to linger on those dark missions beyond The Cordon more than was absolutely necessary, where Garth had been … pitiless. Close to being just who and –more importantly- what Trinity Itself had planned. “Not evil but … not good, either. All the appetite and excess of a Kith, so many more times the power to execute, with the only thing standing between him and Universal domination being willpower.”
This was where Eddie was stuck. Staring at Garth as Specter, an uncompromising annihilator, using his power and intellect to destroy entire worlds simply as object lessons, or to end a mission quickly so he could get back to planning the end of the Universe.
It was easy to understand why the ‘Emperor’ refused to see anything but this destroyer, laughing darkly against an endless sea of winking lights. Who in their right mind would trust someone like this with something as important as the rebirth of a Reality? There were, at this moment in Garth’s life, absolutely no indications whatsoever that he’d do a good job.
Or that he’d even do it all, to be frank. Garth’s absolute dislike for beings like himself, the strange, the weird, those who flouted the admittedly fragile physical laws of the Unreal Universe, glowed in the dark, highlighted with a particularly flagrant dislike. To the Kin'kithal, nary a one of them deserved a chance at life in the New Reality. He ached to give the normal, the regular, the ... simple their fair shot at life without complications. That sincere desire whispered through every action, every decision.
Drake could see those desperate wishes intertwined inside many of his friend’s worst episodes, but they were thin, nearly invisible. Eddie accused him of wishing them into existence, but they were there.
Specter was slotted into place amongst the others already there. Primary connections were forged between all of them as well, including the shadow minds of the Armies of Man. Lines spread outwards across Drake's mental landscape, hurtling past an imaginary Cordon and connecting to alien species. Were they hints of alliances and allegiances, compacts and accords?
If they were, Drake couldn't see them. “Not surprising.” Garth’s mind was a miracle. He had a natural ability to split his focus. Not up to as many times as someone trained over five thousand years to do it, or as easily as an artificial intelligence was able, but he could do it all the same.
There was the Garth you spoke to, the Garth who planned, and the Garth who watched. Theoretically, you could actually be speaking to any one of the three at any tim
e, only you’d never know it. That kind of talent lent itself very nicely to being so incredibly inscrutable that -were he already painfully ready to kill the man- it was theoretically possible Garth was working alongside Kith Antal.
“Who or what is next?” Drake pulled up the Dark Iron King Barnabas Blake the One and Only, his Cloud-doppelganger the Platinum King and the bloody stuff itself, Kingsblood.
“What an absolute fucking mess.” Drake shuddered at the simple thought of being exposed to that foul, viscous nanotech concoction. “And our blame should be legendary, our guilt, endless.”
They’d shat the bed with Songbird. Both of them would admit that, all day, every day, until the forthcoming End of Everything. They never should’ve messed around with Harmony, in any form, at all.
In fact, the moment the AoM reps had come knocking on their humble office doors with the suggestion, they should’ve packed up shop and fucked off for the hills.
Instead?
Both of them had leaped at the chance to mess around with something that they’d never laid hands on before.
“Setting into motion several obvious and terrifying things that basically fucked everything up for Garth.” Drake shook his head bitterly. From Songbird had risen ADAM. The more they’d begun to understand Harmony and the extra-dimensionality, the more they’d been able to work on the fledgling sentient intellect, and vice versa. For the longest time, it'd seemed as if the creation of the Songbirds and ADAM had been born to complement one another.
When Songbird had gone all the way off the rails, with every single one of them allegedly killing themselves in such grand and glorious fashion, they’d quickly and quietly finished working on ADAM before sequestering themselves away inside the incongruity. Once safely ensconced inside their incongruity, they'd speedily agreed that the Unreal Universe really wasn't the place for two brohams from the Dream.
“We buried our heads in the sand and that was that.” Drake didn’t care what Eddie thought about their culpability for the direction the Universe had taken.