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

by Lee Bond

  “You’d need to create a lever.” Garth stormed back to where the conversation was taking place. “A massive paradoxical lever, to prevent any changes I make to the ‘original’ timeline from flooding through the bridge back to here. The moment I set into play anything that prevents Drake and Eddie from laying eyes on the incongruity is the moment everything they did here begins to unravel. And as much as I feel somewhere in the region of maybe-kinda bummed your brothers are dead and all, these guys are right. There’s no way I’m gonna risk the entire Unreal Universe for them. I don’t think you’ve got the juice to forestall that kind of pressure, Aäl. You’re a God, sure, fine, whatever that means in this weird fucking place, but … that’s the pressure of thirty thousand years waiting to come crushing down on you. Might not kill you as quick as this ‘sentient entropy’ that’s lurking out there, but …” Garth shook his head. It wasn’t that he didn’t think this fool’s errand could be done.

  Quite the contrary, in fact. Now Aäl had laid the seed in his mind, the idea had flourished into a workable plan. The God wasn’t wrong. If there was even enough space inside the Dream for a single thought to enter, they could use the incongruity to funnel that thought backward into the past. From there, it wasn’t too much of a stretch to drop one unwilling Kin’kithal inside and blam!

  Time travel. No fancy DeLorean, no gigawatts, no lambent balls of spherical lightning –thank god for that- no stupid portals, nothing. Just a guy moving from one place to another.

  Kind of a let down, really.

  Garth’s points were all very salient, but Aäl –who’d sat back and waited for Garth to arrive at a particular point in his conversation with Eddie and Drake inside their simulation- had spent a considerable amount of time working through the parameters, and had come up with an ironclad method. The elevated human was simply unaware of the lengths that he was willing to undertake in order to see his brothers resurrected.

  Time to set the record straight.

  “It will take everything I am, Garth N’Chalez, to prevent the paradoxical tidal wave from ripping this Universe apart. All that, and most likely everything the incongruity has to offer. None of you can properly appreciate the power this purple moon possesses within it’s innocuous rocky form. It is … power.” Aäl gestured and the temporal incongruity rose from it’s housing within the central computer system and floated into his hand.

  All three men held their breath for a long moment as they considered the impossibility that was the temporal incongruity, alternately amazed and amused that something so simple-looking could give one man the power to travel up and down his own lifetime, over and over again while it gave other men the power to model entire Universes within itself.

  It was Aäl said; the incongruity was underwhelming, unless you could sense it’s power. If you were blind to the levels and layers of energy that surrounded you on all sides, every minute of every day until the moment you died, all you’d see was a boring purple stone that was just a little bit bigger than your standard basketball. Pitted and pocked and marked in ways that suggested it’d suffered during it’s journey from the Unreal Universe to the Dream, there was nothing in the way of identifying marks to tell them where it’d come from in the first place.

  And not for a lack of trying. Once they’d discovered it, uncovered the first bits of accessible power, both Eddie and Drake had tried digging into it’s history, only to come up short. As far as the inert lump of matter was concerned, it’d come from nowhere.

  Hard to imagine something so ordinary, owning a power that could unspool the entire Unreal Universe.

  “You’d do that?” Garth demanded, striding right up to Aäl and staring into his deep black eyes. “You’d risk your own life to save those of your brothers?”

  “This is madness.” Eddie shouted. He liked who he’d become. Sure, okay, yes, all that he was now wasn’t necessarily the best person in the Universe and he was monumentally ashamed of his behavior over the last five thousand years, but when weighed against the preceding twenty-five thousand years … you could hardly paint him as a power-hungry madman hell-bent on destroying the Universe, could you? The sins of the moment shouldn’t outweigh that many thousands of years of good work. “Madness.”

  Drake nodded, agreeing with his friend’s assessment, though for far different reasons. All told, if he could return to the way he’d been before discovering the incongruity, he’d leap at the chance. He was tired, so very tired, of being full of the kinds of thoughts he had, of carrying the burden of so many millennia on his shoulders. He wanted to be Drake Bishop again. It wasn’t to be, though.

  “The tidal forces of such a tremendous paradox are effectively incalculable, Aäl. You can’t guarantee your ability to defend the Unreal Universe from an attack like that, no matter how powerful you are. It can’t be done.”

  “We won’t allow it.” Eddie pronounced boldly, eyes mesmerized by the incongruity floating gently above Aäl’s outstretched palm. So powerful. So, so powerful. But … not strong enough. Not to do as the God proclaimed.

  “It is adorable.” Aäl said offhandedly to Garth, who was still just distracted enough to indicate his amazing mind was still working on the mechanics of the proposal.

  “What’s that?” Garth asked absentmindedly, so absorbed by the problem he was mostly unawares of what was happening right beside him.

  “Your monkey friends, Dreambreaker.” Aäl gestured at the two humans with his free hand. “They believe they have an option in the matter, that they can somehow prevent me, us, from embarking on this journey together.” The God shook his head disparagingly. “It genuinely boggles my mind, Dreambreaker, that these things are the primary focus of the Engines. They are … were … the focus of considerable debate amongst me and my brothers for many thousands of years, you know. Yes, in the fullness of time, they can become miraculous beings. I’ve seen with my own eyes how mutable, how glorious, the human race truly is, simply by looking through your eyes. And yet, whenever these two open their mouths, all I can hear is the braying of some stupid farm animal. The one with the red hair will shout until his own death surrounds him that he wants nothing more to do with the incongruity, yet since I pulled it free from its housing, his eyes haven’t left its form. The other one, marginally more intelligent, though that may be more because of our intentional painting of a bull’s-eye on his backside than anything else, why, he would sacrifice millions to return to the Dream, but refuses to admit it’s possible. He stands on the premise that he wants the Unreality to remain safe and whole so you can kick it apart like a child kicking an anthill, but he’s secretly afraid of becoming so considerably less than he is now. He would deny it … look! There. The shame in his eyes, the fear in the other’s. See? Tell them, Dreambreaker. Point out the flaws in their argument. Educate them as to precisely what it takes to be on this level. The Engines know they’ve play-acted at being important long enough. Time for them to understand fully.”

  Garth looked at his two friends, heart aching in his chest.

  The incongruity had a terrible effect on the people who used it. It changed them, and not for the best; somehow, it found the darkness inside each person who used it for too long, found their weaknesses and illuminated them, gave them strength. Eddie, perennially second-best in a group that’d started off as a duo but wound up being a threesome, had always wanted to be first and foremost, the premier man, the Top Dog, the BMOC, so the incongruity had allowed him to transform into Emperor-for-Life Etienne Marseilles, magnifying all the petty insecurities until they’d blossomed into full-blown issues. Unseen behind the impartial mask of Emperor, but festering in the darkness until –with his arrival on the scene- given the chance to flourish.

  Drake Bishop, the titular Big Man on Campus, all thanks to his welcoming smile and genuine interest to ensure that everyone around him was having the best of times. Always up for the dare, always down for the challenge, no matter how insane or how risky, behind those blue eyes had lurked a river of inse
curities; surrounded by people clearly smarter than he was, more capable, more intelligent, better suited to be tapped by the American Government to assist the failing society in their most desperate time of need, Drake Bishop had been transformed into a calculating machine infinitely more intelligent and ready than he’d ever been.

  Here and now, both men could see just what the incongruity had done to them. They understood the full and total implications and ached to be free of the taint, but the thing’s hooks were too deep into them. Even if they could see the truth behind Aäl’s statements, that the temporal incongruity could send him back and Aäl could prevent the paradox stemming from those efforts, they’d deny its possibility until the end of time itself.

  Still, Garth knew he had to make the attempt at convincing them it could be done. He knew it could. There was absolutely no doubt in his mind that, merged fully with the purple rock, Aäl would protect the Unreal Universe from the paradox storm.

  That wasn’t to say that he was going to make the attempt, just that he was going to tell them it could be done.

  “Fellas.” Garth put that tone into his voice, the one that said ‘I am all serious business right now and what I’m going to say next is no bullshit, you can take what I’m saying and it’s going to be chapter and verse’. He rarely used it because that was no way to live your life, but the time for goofing around had come to an end. The Kin’kithal could tell from the change in their stances that both Eddie and Drake were paying full attention. “I assure you. Aäl isn’t kidding. He can manage his end of the deal, even if it means his death. Actually, now that I think about it, if it came down to sacrificing his life …”

  “Which is the absolute last thing I would ever do.” Aäl chimed in, pleased that the Dreambreaker’s words were having the desired effect on the monkeys.

  “Ignore him.” Garth pointed two fingers at his own eyes, then at the eyes of his friends, drawing them into a circle of three. “Listen to me. If it ever got to where Aäl needed to spend his own life to ensure that his brothers and the Unreality survived, that sacrifice would definitely prevent all harm. As for my end, we know I’m pretty fucking awesome at that kind of shit. So if I were to go through with this, go back in time inside the Proto-Reality to keep you two from ever laying eyeballs or hands on the fucking incongruity, everything would balance itself out. You two would remain here, as you are now, only … only there’d be two of you back there, living out …”

  “I made no such promise.” Aäl interjected darkly. “And do not think for one second, Dreambreaker, that the scenario I’ve presented is optional. You will return to the Proto-Reality, you will try to save my brothers from death by idiocy. And these two? These two will return. All things from the other side will return to the other side and that is final.”

  Garth turned to confront Aäl, steel in his eyes and calm fire in his voice. “Or what?”

  ***

  "It's very simple." Aäl answered honestly. "Simple enough for even these two to comprehend the full totality of what I mean, all without stressing their miniscule brains. As Edward pointed out so succinctly to you some time ago, the incongruity possesses more than enough power to survive the end of the Universe, no?"

  Eddie nodded mulishly, face turning a bright crimson. He had no clue how Drake was able to keep calm under the incessant insults and badgering delivered from Aäl, and he'd sorely love to have a moment to learn the secret. "Yes."

  "And there you have it." Aäl nodded and smiled. "In a nutshell. If this one decides he'd rather have nothing to do with my simple request, several things will happen in very short order. One, the two of you won't live for more than a few seconds following his denial. Two, the Dreambreaker and I will spend the rest of eternity inside the incongruity. With the destruction of the Unreal Universe a guaranteed occasion, with more than one party invested in being top dog, that end is perhaps no more than two years away from this very moment. The Reality he intended to bring about will be no more, meaning whatever fresh existence is brought into being will be skewed either towards Trinity Itself's dreams of eternal control or Kith Antal's vicious and barbed nightmare of torture and pain. Either situation will be positively inimical to beings such as us, so, inside the incongruity it will be. From now until eternity, or until one of us dies, or one of us discovers a method of killing the other. All I ask is a simple, genuine effort at saving my brothers from eternal death. Is that so unfair, Dreambreaker? You've done infinitely more for absurdly less. What makes my hope so very different?"

  "Your fucking bargains always have these loopholes, Aäl. You just don't play fair." Garth's mind became a quagmire of confusion as he tried to find a different path out of this situation, one that didn't involve time travel or the deaths of the two men who'd helped him become the man he preferred to be. "Don't think for one moment I haven't figured out why all the people in my life wind up dead, altered, insane or all three."

  Aäl put a hand to his bosom. "What? That? Come now, Dreambreaker, surely you understand the why of that. You're better off on your own and you know it. Besides which, all those 'friends' of yours, all the strange and wonderful things that have happened to them, they all serve a higher purpose. Each one pulls on the strings of the Unreal Universe, giving you a considerable advantage in terms of success. The fabric of this strange half-life is so much thinner because of me."

  "Pain and suffering, Aäl, is all you've caused." Garth felt Chaos within him, felt the few quadronium cores that stored power cycling up. A battle HUD popped into existence, bright orange markers indicating theoretical weaknesses, spots of opportunity. Statistical probabilities streamed down one side. The two of them had always been evenly matched, but with the incongruity in his possession, Aäl came out slightly on top, so the Specter urged QaOS to dial it back down.

  The smug smirk on the alabaster God's etched face begged to be smacked, and hard, but Garth kept his cool as best he could.

  "The number of lives you cost, the heartache and sorrow…" Garth couldn't find the right words.

  "Wait." Drake butted into the conversation. Something about what Aäl had just said kept repeating itself in his head. "You said honest attempt. What does that even mean?"

  Aäl clapped his stony hands together, filling their meeting area with the sound of boulders crashing into one another. "Perhaps, just perhaps, your time as an android has gifted you more than I first imagined. Well done, not-quite-monkey, well done indeed. While two of your companions seized upon the negative, you focused solely on the most important part of the deal. Yes, Dreambreaker, an honest attempt. That is all I ask. Nothing more. I do not demand success, only that you try. I am neither arrogant enough to imagine my brothers are worth an entire Universe of living beings, nor I am all that confident in your chances of triumph, so all I require is effort. Bring all that you are as Kin'kithal, Engineer, Specter and Dreambreaker to the task, do your best to undo the damage these two did, and all will be well. If you fail, so be it. I will bring you back, and you and I shall venture forth once more to continue arranging for the birth of a new Reality. Do nothing, refuse, and it will be as I said."

  "Sounds fishy." Garth crossed his arms. "Sounds fishy and I don't like it."

  "What other option do you have, Garth?" Drake truly wanted to know. He didn't hold a candle to Garth when it came down to thinking around corners, but he had spent a few thousand years operating as a level 11 AI construct. He wasn't a slouch at this kind of thing. "Us dead, you trapped, with this fucking guy. Or you drop back into the Proto-Reality and try."

  Garth shook his head adamantly. Even Eddie was looking comfortable with the notion of being returned back from whence they'd come, and he supposed he understood why; after everything the two goofs had been through for the last bazillion years had to be weighing down on them, ten trillion ton albatrosses around their necks. But they weren't thinking things all the way through. All the information wasn't there.

  Aäl was, in short, keeping something back. Just as he'd made no me
ntion of the fact that the asshole was going to spend all of his free time intentionally warping every man, woman and child he got close to into some kind of aberrant power-wielding weirdo, there had to be something left behind, something that would make this hypothetical time jump a huge pain in the ass.

  It was how Aäl rolled.

  Garth stabbed a blunt forefinger at Aäl, who gazed at the digit, wry amusement on his face. "What aren't you telling? Because from where I stand, stopping these idiots … or the idiots back then … from laying their hands on the incongruity is as easy as keeping them from digging into my actions. If they don't learn I didn't disappear inside Gentleman Jim's, they've got no reason to go to Vegas at all."

  Aäl pursed his lips together for a moment, as if he’d never for one second considered the possibility that the con they were trying to pull on the actual timeline would be anything other than a walk in the park. After a few moments of internal conversation, Aäl appeared to arrive at a realization.

  “Well, now you mention it, Dreambreaker, I do suppose there’s a small chance that the arrival of the Bruush some months after your heroic and valiant efforts in saving two idiots from their misplaced loyalty might jeopardize my brothers as well. They are a rather destructive species, and planned on treating the Dream as they do sheathes broken off from the main Core. Had they not been routed, they might have shucked the Dream like an oyster. With Drake and Edward no longer at the forefront of the Bruushian Prevention Squad, someone will surely have to step in and stop them. Most regrettable, but … it must be done, else.” Aäl smiled pitiably down on the Dreambreaker and his moronic friends. “Well. We’ve already covered that part of things rather thoroughly, haven’t we?”

  “When I am King of the Universe,” Garth countered hotly, angrily, and honestly, just plain old pissily, “there ain’t gonna be no room for assholes like you, Aäl. You colossal cockbite.”