by Lee Bond
And he’d succeeded. Perhaps too well. Violating another of Trinity’s Restrictions, this one of connecting to AI systems as an AI himself, Spur had assimilated the building’s command structure into his own neural network in the blink of an eye. He’d then gone on to locate the explosives laid down by Chadsik, determined that there was no way to defuse them, and plotted.
When the counter on the device had gotten down to ten seconds, Spur had leaped.
The ancient EuroJapanese android’s first taste of freedom had been transformed into a harrowing brush with death as somewhere in the neighborhood of fifty tons of ferrocrete slammed into him, pinning him like an insect.
Many of his systems were offline. All connections to BishopCo’s systems were dead. Hundreds of years of continual worry about crossing Trinity flickered and burned in his mind. He was only … three hundred feet from the edge of Bishop’s property, but the machine mind wasn’t known for forgiveness.
The android struggled with the massive weight pinning him to the ground. Even though it was hopeless, fear of being destroyed, of being taken before having a chance to assist the Emperor-for-Life in his eternal glory once again, convinced him that the enormous slab of ferrocrete was shifting.
Sensors indicated a decrease in pressure. The … it was moving. How was this possible?
The ferrocrete wall was lifted up and tossed to one side.
Spur, damaged and nearly incoherent with terror at Trinity’s impending ire, stared up at the figure who’d rescued him. “What are you doing here?”
“Things to do, people to see, you know how it is.”
“But this isn’t possible.” Spur felt his mouth twist into a sickened grimace as the man bent down and picked him up, cradling him in arms that didn’t budge under the extreme weight of his android body. He hadn’t been touched by anyone other than the Emperor-for-Life since his inception. The … the familiarity curled his brain. “You … you cannot be here.”
“If there’s one thing I’ve learned, Spur, is that there are all kinds of things that’re impossible. Come on, let’s get you somewhere safe.”
Spur turned his gaze upwards. It was the first time since he’d made the long –and intentional- journey from The Dome to BishopCo that his restless android eyes had fallen on the sky. It was a much diminished sight. Too many things had changed, and all of them for the worst, since that trek so many hundreds of years ago.
Still, it was nice to see. One of the first things he’d done for the Emperor was write a haiku about the sky. A contrail split the sky. Spur tried to point, but the machinery in his arms had been mangled. “Look,” he whispered, loathing the feeling of being carried like a child, “an Enforcer has come to Zanzibar.”
Spur felt a heavy sigh come from the man carrying him.
“That,” Huey said miserably, “is one of the reasons I’m here, I suppose.”
“Where are you taking me?” Spur demanded.
“With luck, somewhere no one will find you.” Huey angled towards a deep crater caused by one of the falling super-structures. “With luck, not even Trinity. At least, not until you’re needed. Because you’re important, aren’t you, Spur?”
Spur the albino android, thousands of years old, one of the rarest things in the Unreal Universe, said nothing.
***
Fifteen miles away from the scene of the devastation, high up in the sky, crouched above the world and the peons who eked out execrable lives, sitting in his throne of comfort and majesty, surrounded by trinkets and toys from bygone days that were worth more than some solar systems, Jordan Bishop stared thoughtlessly at the monitors arrayed around him.
His mind was a literal blank. Every few seconds his mouth tried to form sounds that would fall into a single, simple question. That question was ‘How?’, but the … the staggering complexity of things that’d occurred to form the chaos and devastation that were behind that simple word had quite literally tugged Jordan Bishop’s mind down into darkness.
All around the four-hundred year old Conglomerate owner, AI systems shrieked warnings, howled over lost data connections, highlighted and disseminated the cost and the loss of … of … of everything.
Similarly trapped as Spur had been –for surely the EuroJapanese android was no more- by Trinity’s Restrictions, every major Conglomerate holder was bound to Trinity Prime, and for hundreds upon hundreds of years, this had been no great thing for Jordan Bishop; as first and oldest by a considerable span of years, his holdings had always enjoyed maximum security and ultimate protection from any great harm.
That wasn’t to say that BishopCo hadn’t had its fair share of damages. When you pushed the envelope of weapons technology, fires and explosions were inevitable. The same went with exploration into various forms of engine tech, or investigations into genetic and/or chemical warfare. Risk had its own rewards, and always before, Jordan had managed to turn the sudden eruption of a single building or the deaths of an entire research team to his own end.
The same could be said for the occasional Conglomerate War. Sometimes strange bedfellows woke up one morning to decide that they could no longer tolerate their counterparts and picked up arms. Generally relegated to virtual combat where AI machines tried to raze an opponent’s systems into digitized ash, from time to time, previous incarnations of Voss_Uderhell or Tynedale/Fujihara had sent platoons of mercenaries or hordes of soldiers after BishopCo’s physical assets, only to be rebuffed by what some called ‘absurd levels of response’.
Under normal circumstances, the loss of so many buildings, the cost of replacing all those people, the time involved to reclaim whatever materiel could be reclaimed would simply be a matter of buckling down and making sure it’d get done.
But not this time. This time, the damage was incalculable.
Commanded to remain on Trinity Prime as long as there was, somewhere hundreds of miles below their feet, some type of earth, every Conglomerate grew like an organism comprised of buildings, people, machinery. Every few years, the main movers and shakers of the nebulous entity that was Human Enterprise absorbed a handful of buildings or a stretch of reinvigorated land, slowly but surely creeping and crawling across Mother Earth like cancer, tearing down old structures and erecting new ones.
Part of the process was moving the center of their base, the heavily fortified, encrypted, armored and integral equipment that was, when everything was distilled into purified commerce, the essence of their existence.
In such a tech-heavy dependent existence as Jordan Bishop lived in, with the almost impossible-to-imagine swathe of Humanity that was under his sway, the accumulation of machinery required to maintain a stranglehold on things was, some speculated, equal to or greater than the sum of all everything all the other Conglomerates needed to run their businesses.
They weren’t wrong, and with such a colossal assortment of AI spheres and data backups, of brute-force engines and … and … well, Jordan barely knew anymore what went into ensuring his domain remained solidly connected. That’d been Spur’s department. But with all that stuff came exorbitant prices to move it all.
And he hadn’t. He hadn’t moved the center of his power from where it’d been sixty-three years ago. He hadn’t done the smart thing because he’d looked out over the land he owned, the vast and metallic demesne that was his to command and had decided, in a fit of magisterial delusion, that there was no further need. Who, he’d posited to Spur, who in their right mind would even attempt an attack for any reason whatsoever on the heart of BishopCo holdings? Who possessed the stones to try? Who had the sheer tonnage of war machinery to push past the perimeter, the outlying regions? Who could hope to move an entire army on Trinity Prime without him noticing?
There was nothing else to do. He –his company, a company as old as the stars, a company that’d greeted weary colonists with smiling faces and open stores- was more vulnerable than ever been before. Without the AI systems buried deep inside each of those five buildings running things, even the smallest,
most pathetic Conglomerate could waltz in and start taking a peek at things. Bigger companies, so-called ‘peers’ like Voss_Uderhell and Tynedale/Fujihara, why, Jordan would bet his personal assets that their troops were already in flight.
Jordan waved a hand and the ever-increasing plague of alarms and notifications ceased. He sighed into the silence.
Not all was lost, of course. There were redundant AI machines seeded throughout his vast domain, hundreds of them, but each would require personal activation before they could be brought up to speed and merged into a new BishopCo network. That would be immensely time consuming, during which time, he’d be under constant assault by his detractors. Here on Trinity Prime, all that remained were basic structures and asset storage.
It was the asset storage that Bishop needed to save. He raised a hand to slap a button.
“I don’t think so.” Gwyleh Ronn blew Jordan Bishop’s arm off at the shoulder.
High-grade military protocols booted up as soon as the weapon’s fire was detected. Gatling cannons opened fire once sophisticated tracking programs triangulated the location of the attack. Medbots were dispatched to Jordan’s location the very second the man’s vitals –monitored every second of every day- dipped low.
Gwyleh Ronn stood there, allowing his Suit to deflect the hard rounds pouring out at him from five –no, six- fully automated Gatling cannons that were better suited on tanks, or, better yet, airships. The Enforcer appreciated the overwhelming response as perhaps no one else could; as empathic as he was, Gwyleh knew, knew how terrified Jordan Bishop was of everything around him, how black his soul was, how consumed with exerting control the most powerful human being in Existence really was.
Bullets the size of a human’s hand bounced off his armor and flew around the room, shredding tens of thousands’ of years’ worth of priceless Exodus trinkets. Magazines from the Dawn of Mankind puffed into pulp. Eating plates with strange faces and even stranger logos shattered and cracked into porcelain shards. Toys of no discernible purpose erupted into plastic flinders. Artwork –some of it quite good, if merely human- caught fire and burned in their frames.
Gwyleh Ronn howled with laugher. Jordan Bishop’s mighty Conglomerate vessels had come to Empator-Tyrene. They had come and offered allegiance. They had come and offered his suffering brothers and sisters balm against the cruel tyranny that was Trinity’s Rule. In exchange, a chance to explore a small cross-sample of Empator-Tyrene citizens in an attempt to isolate the genes or sequences in their majestic Offworld DNA that’d given them the gift of true empathy, true telepathy, all without loss of self.
Oh yes, Bishop had come calling to the Empator-Tyrene’s door like a used vacuum salesman, and his brothers and sisters had eagerly accepted. Who wouldn’t? Jordan and his team of salesmen/soldiers were the first beings other than themselves that they’d ever spoken to. They couldn’t read their minds. They couldn’t feel their feelings. Talking to a human being had been like talking to a stone. Nothing but cherished silence.
And when the gene sequence proven specific to the Empator-Tyrene and not in any way cross-mutable to the Human Condition … well.
Payback, Gwyleh Ronn had heard during his travels as an Enforcer, payback was a bitch. It was why, in the end, he’d decided to allow Chadsik al-Taryin his colossal, fiendish damage. Trinity Itself was screaming in Gwyleh’s Suit, demanding to know what was going on, demanding that he hurry on with things and capture Naoko Kamagana before the mysterious entities working alongside Chadsik get away.
Gwyleh turned the communicator off. Jordan was staggering wanly to his feet, eyes comically wide as he surveyed the destruction of an Exodus collection that was to’ve been his method of fleeing the planet without emptying BishopCo coffers. The damage was total. There wasn’t a single thing left of a collection that’d taken a succession of Bishops thirty thousand years to acquire.
“Your medbots must be using illegal tech, Jordan Bishop, for your wound to’ve healed so well so quickly.” Gwyleh’s deep bass voice lapped at the walls and pulled the frantic human into the conversation.
Jordan grinned madly. The drugs in his system, administered by the medbot, were … were powerful. “Only the best. Direct from Medellos Medical. Healing factor cross-spliced from a half-dozen different Offworld species for maximum recovery. The man’s a genius. He hotwired the sequence to trip up an … a species ladder, working from an Offworld colony so alien even their breath is poisonous until finally, it works on Man.”
“That’s a violation.” Gwyleh Ronn tsked.
“Shouldn’t you,” Jordan reached out to steady himself on his desk and fell hard to the floor, smacking his head on the desk on the way down. He lay there, gasping for air. The Offworld drugs coursing through his veins took care of the damage and he righted himself once more. “Shouldn’t you be outside, dealing with my invaders?”
“In due time.” Gwyleh Ronn nodded.
“They’re causing incalculable damage to Trinity Prime!” Jordan struggled back to his feet, clenching his sole remaining fist in rage. “They are destroying the Birthplace of Humanity! You will do as you’re told! As Trinity commands!”
Gwyleh couldn’t help but chuckle again. It wasn’t something Empator-Tyrene’s had done on their own, it was a trick learned from Humans; when you’re telepathic and empathic, everyone around you knows when you find something funny. There’s no need to be crass enough to announce it. “What would your Dark Age Cabal friends think of you now?”
Jordan licked his lips and did his best not to eye the button that would send the AI spheres that held his asset connections into deep space. Gwyleh knew he’d been trying to hit the button. Paying it any heed before leaping towards it would only cause the Enforcer to destroy the desk. “They understand the need for self-preservation over everything else, Enforcer.”
A voice boomed into the room. “I am not fucking around, Gwyleh Ronn! You get out there and you deal with Chadsik al-Taryin right now!”
“Is … is that Trinity?” Jordan’s mind whirled and wheeled in the confines of his skull. The systemic AI sounded … frantic. Worried. Afraid. Never in his dealings with the powerful machine mind had he ever heard the AI sound anything but vaguely amused. Once or twice Trinity Itself had portrayed various stages of disappointment but never anything as provocative as fear. “What’s wrong with It?”
“There’s a lot of stuff going on that you don’t know about, Jordan.” Trinity glowered. “Do as you are commanded, Gwyleh Ronn.”
“I have unfinished business with Jordan Bishop, Trinity.”
“Ah. Yes. Your people. I should’ve realized. Very well. Shoot his other arm off and then get out there and for the love of God, destroy Chadsik al-Taryin. For preference, capture one of those weirdoes that he’s got with him. I suspect I know what they are if only because they’re avoiding all but the most sensitive of my scans. Do you understand?”
Gwyleh bowed. “By your command, Trinity.”
“Good.” The comm signal went dead.
Jordan raised his remaining hand in a half-hearted gesture of supplication. One of the laser cannon’s on Gwyleh Ronn’s Suit stuttered into life. As he passed out, Jordan watched his arm fall away to one side.
Gwyleh stood there, contemplating whether or not to disobey Trinity’s unspoken command that Jordan remain alive. Killing the man would free trillions upon trillions of living beings from the iron fist that he used. The Offworlder shook his head. No. Trinity wanted Bishop alive for some reason, and really, at the end of the day, Gwyleh liked being alive. It was why he was an Enforcer in the first place.
It was why he was the only Empator-Tyrene left in all of the Universe.
His Suit turned and flew him through a wall, already plotting attack vectors to deal with the cybernetic assassin, Chadsik al-Taryin.
***
The two ‘Priests were visibly nervous and Chad knew why; they’d only just managed to verify that whatever trick Spur had been planning wasn’t going to happen any longer
and now the very distinctive energy signature of an Enforcer Suit was bearing down on their location at reckless speed. Whatever wonky mojo the creepy little fellas were perpetrating on Naoko to keep her docile was still having an effect; this was good, as when the Electric Friars got all antsy in the pantsy, normal folk picked up on that psychic vibe and started off on their own ill-behaved foolishness. The last thing any of them needed right now was the sole reason for all these shenanigans getting it into her head to jump off the edge.
“All right, you lot,” Chad pointed one of his pale white fingers at one of the ‘Priests, snickering when the ancient cyborg holy man twitched, “Now you is tellin’ me why you is needin’ me to do this when you is obviously quite fuckin’ capable all on your own of kidnappin’ a silly twat.”
Naoko shifted. Vaguely aware she’d been insulted by Chad, she tried to tell him to mind his manners. The thought dissipated. The men holding her were … interesting. Naoko thought she could see numbers and symbols spilling off them like tiny electric insects, but every time she tried focusing, things changed. Changed into clashing, smashing gears and scythes and fuzz that –were she not being held in place with buzzing fingertips- threatened to push her to the ground.
The ‘Priest he’d singled out spoke, his voice harsh electric static buzzing against the loud backdrop of the pandemonium surrounding them. “We do not have time for this, Chadsik al-Taryin.”
Chad lit a cigarette. “We may not ‘ave time, my sonny Jim, but we is ‘avin this chinwag all the same.” He exhaled. My Lord he really did enjoy smoking. He jabbed the cigarette at the other CyberPriest. “You is thirty thousand years old. You is been ‘idin’ in plain sight for all that time. You is plottin’ the downfall of Existence an’ every fuckin’ fing that makes Life worth livin’. You is able to teleport an’ all manner of fings. An’, I might fuckin’ add, that fuckface as wot was on Hospitalis was quite the hander outer of asskickings. So why is you lot not doin’ the same?”