by Lee Bond
“It is not too late, Jordan. I can give you back your arms right here and now. I will gladly return the money you paid me so long ago. You can live anywhere, in any style.” Andros said the words, but didn’t mean them; in truth, he wanted to plug Jordan Bishop as full of as many genetic enhancements and alterations as he possibly could. Alas, his own personal code of ethics, as bent and as warped as they may be, required that he make the effort. He might even consider honoring Jordan’s wishes, should he change his mind. “There is no need to take this risk.”
“No.” Jordan shouted as the med-techs carried him out of the room. “No. I want this. Either I die, or I survive, then I can exact revenge on those who’ve done me wrong. I will be transformed, Andros. With your aid, I will bring terror to the world.”
Andros smiled at the empty room. “By your wish. Terror you will become.”
In Between
Oscar Sabellik wondered, even still, what he’d been thinking. The fire that’d burned inside him, that’d driven him to create the Improbability Device, to … ‘pick’ a destination that didn’t even exist yet … it’d all made so much sense when his mind had been twinned with Garth’s.
Why, if he wasn’t careful still, Garth’s passions started burning, and Oscar would find himself edging towards the machinery that kept him hurtling through a literal void, fingers twitching to modify this or fiddle with that. It was hair-raising.
It was at times like that that Oscar wished he’d done something less interesting with his life, like joining the Regime Military Sciences Projects, or, like, sun diving. Diving into the sun. Just as rational as some of the urges he struggled against.
As Oscar stared gloomily out through the invisible shield protecting him from the inky void that would –at least one day- be filled with Reality 2.0, he thanked Pete that the journey so far had only been roughly half an hour. He’d brought magazines and books and a slew of other time wasters aboard, all loaded onto his proteus and ready to be accessed the moment he got bored.
There was something … alluring … about the void. Oscar didn’t know how to explain it, but then again, he’d never been very good at explaining anything, had he? Between the stutter and the conflagration of ideas inside him, actually trying to explain anything to anyone outside the halls of academia, well, if ever there’d been a better description of pointless, Oscar’d never seen it.
Alluring was a good word. At times, it seemed as though the nothing was changing, which, when you got down to it, implied that nothing was becoming something. A subtle shift to the neutral color that was no color, a … a … shift, if you will, here or there suggesting growth. It was always over quickly, leaving Oscar with more questions than answers. He wanted to use the onboard systems, delicate and seriously advanced machinery that he could barely remember creating, to plumb the depths of the nothing that he sailed through, but absolute fear over breaking something and leaving him stranded stayed his hand.
The Improbability Device used the fabric of Existence as its energy source, and it was separate from the systems that were taking him to the new Reality –or, where the new Reality would possibly show up-… if guidance went down, he’d be trapped on the other side of everything forever.
Oscar rose from the ‘floor’ and took a few steps. He hated it when his brain did that. It’d happened a few times already. His brain was a traitor, latching on to the grimmest and scariest things it could imagine, and when you were surrounded by Nothing, your brain could go to some very weird places indeed.
Suddenly and with intense ferocity, a quicksilver illumination sheared through the blankness, forcing everything around Oscar and the Improbability Device into wholly new and never before seen concepts. The Latelian found himself pressed up against the cool, impenetrable shield, hand cupped around his eyes, looking desperately to see what could be seen.
The blazing quicksilver light was intense, and … sickening. Oscar’s skin felt greasy, which he knew was stupid and impossible because nothing could get through the shields. He continued watching, ever mindful to look away should the light blind him.
The nothingness that would one day yield a new Existence, a real and proper Sphere to join the other Spheres that already existed, fought back, mysteriously organizing itself into an envelope. As Oscar watched, mouth agape, eyes watering against the painful brilliance of the strobing mercurial illumination, the envelope of absence folded itself around the shabby intrusion. Seams of light appeared for a moment, followed by a quick burst of nova-bright energy, then it was just … Nothing.
Nothing all over again.
Oscar took his face away from the shield, lips pursed. He was a voyager on an unknown sea surrounded by unknowable things. Was what he’d seen a natural phenomenon of the Nothing or was it something else? He’d been led to believe that the Improbability Device was a thing that could never be reproduced, that the events leading up to its creation had taken thousands of years to maneuver into place.
“Matter intrusion.”
The voice, unexpected in every way, startled Oscar clean out of his wits for a solid minute. He stood there in the middle of his ship, lips working, trying not to pass out from sheer, unadulterated panic.
“Matter intrusion.” The voice said again, as calmly and as matter-of-factly as before.
“Impossible.” Oscar said to the machine. “Nothing can penetrate the shields. That’s … their whole purpose.” He looked around, not a little smugly, eager to prove the machines running his Improbable Ship wrong, a purely Latelian action that made him as nerdy as anything.
The shields flickered briefly with holographic lights, and then, in a seemingly smug counter-move, formed into a map that led Oscar directly to the ‘matter intrusion’.
“Son of a bitch.” Oscar knelt down, ignoring his popping knees as he struggled into a better position to stare at what’d done the impossible. “Matter intrusion.”
The Latelian poked the hunk of metal that’d somehow become lodged in the shield with a finger. He made noises with his mouth. Then, remembering his proteus, he ran some preliminary scans.
“Well, I know what you feel like, but that isn’t possible.” Oscar stared at the readouts. If what he was looking was what he thought it was, the fact that his prote, one of the most advanced of its kind, was telling him that there was nothing there seemed to prove his theory in one fell swoop.
“Recalibrating shield size. Please wait.”
Oscar stepped back and watched as the chunk of not-possible metal clatter to the floor ‘floor’. He nudged it with a toe, then picked it up. It had virtually no weight. It looked like duronium, but after his time with Garth N’Chalez, he knew precisely what it was.
It was a solid chunk of quadronium and there was only one place it could’ve come from, and that wasn’t a good thing to think about.
Hefting the mysterious prize back and forth, Oscar moved to the workbench to run proper tests with the Improbable Ship’s computers.
“Matter weakness evident in sample.” The ship said calmly. “Six hours, forty-three minutes before cohesion is restored.”
Oscar looked down at the lump of metal. “Does that mean it’s malleable right now?”
“Yes.”
The Latelian scientist swallowed nervously. He could feel the fire of an idea burning from the spot in his brain that he’d labeled ‘Garth’s Crazy Insane Ideas’ and before he knew what was happening, he was working on creating a proteus.
After all, he only had six hours, forty-two minutes. No sense in wasting time. His trip could be over at any moment.
***
Chad didn’t mind traveling via teleportation when it were done proper; the one time he’d gone along with Huey there at the beginning of their odyssey, well, that had been quite painful. Being hauled through a Quantum Tunnel was like being dragged, one of them told him, down a wobbly hallway by your short and curlies. Chad Himself didn’t know much about that, but the one of him insisted quite arduously that it was well painful.
No, the only proper way to travel from one place to another that wasn’t inside a spaceship was via the CyberPriest route. Erg and Faraday and the few other fellas as had taught him how to do it in the vain hopes he’d come ‘round an’ be their buddy claimed that the passageway or pathway or whatever it was was actually a quick nip outside the Unreality.
Outside the Unreality was a fancy way of saying it, but Chad knew the truth; you couldn’t very well leave the thing you was a part of. That were crazy. No, what they were doing was skimming just on the other side of the skin of the Unreality, close as possible to the Nothingness.
It weren’t as quick as instant, but that were okay by Chad as well. He liked the silence of the void and the other hims didn’t, so they were even more inclined to keep their yappers shut.
Chad’s cybernetic systems started squawking, warning him of an impending collision. The ex-assassin turned CyberPriest Savior turned … layabout looked around with his own two eyes, trying to see what could be seen. There was nothing. Just the weird, sort-of-colorless backdrop that there always was.
“’s quite enough of that, mind.” Chad told his systems to shut up. Even if other ‘Priests were wandering through the void en route to whatever weirdness they had planned, there couldn’t be any collisions. Technically speaking with him inside the nothing, with a particular road ‘plotted’ as it were, his origin point, the path he was taking and the exit point weren’t a part of the void. The nothing had become sort-of-something on account of he were in it. It were off limits. When he got out again, then it was back to the nothing it’d been before. Well simple idea. Gobs of people thought it were impossible.
His systems alerted him once more to the impending collision then shut off. Chad nodded smugly at himself. He was still in charge, yes he was.
And then a great big shining cube housing a very apologetic looking Latelian beaned him good and proper on the side of the head.
Emergency protocols came on. Chad felt one of his many other hims reach for the nearest place that they knew like the back of their own hand. The original exit point, twenty feet outside his favorite watering hole in Ground Zero –even though it probably wasn’t there anymore thanks to Huey, Chad wanted to see with his own eyes-, shifted to the last place in the Unreal Universe he wanted to go.
“NO!” Chadsik al-Taryin howled, his terror sluicing through the void. The cube filled with an apologetic-looking Latelian disappeared. The emergency exit opened. Chad fell through.
***
“Rise. And. Shine.” Chirped a merry electronic voice. “Rise. And. Shine.”
Chadsik refused. He hadn’t heard that voice for decades and its false bonhomie filled him with toe-curdling dread.
“Rise. And. Shine, Lord al-Taryin.”
Chadsik al-Taryin, master assassin and galaxies-wide terror, refused, going so far as to pull the scratchy cotton blanket over his head. He didn’t need to open his eyes, he didn’t need to rise and shine to know where he was. It was all too much. “Fuck off, wouldja?”
“Language, Lord al-Taryin.” The merry voice hissed with scathing indignation. “What would your father think?”
“My father,” Chad shouted beneath the blanket, “is a fuckin’ twat ‘how can fuck ‘imself sideways wiv a fuckin’ nuclear-fuckin’ powered fuck-stick.”
He could feel where he was. The endless ticking. The unsubtle thunk thunk thunk of the massive, city-spanning gears and cogs whirring to new formations.
The nanny-AI, the machine mind ‘given’ to him by his father, hissed again in disapproval then proceeded to shock the ever-loving shit out of him with an extended cattle prod. “When you are in your father’s domain, young Lord al-Taryin, you will abide by his rules.”
Chad held tightly to the blanket covering his eyes. If he didn’t see where he was, if he didn’t see Mistress Taint, then he wasn’t in Arcade City. “I is a grown man, Mistress. I is allowed to swear if I is wantin’.”
“Be that as it may.” Mistress Taint replied primly, retracting her cattle prod. “Your father is older than you, and is king, and has forbidden you from cursing. Come. There is work to be done.”
“No.” Chad scrunched the blanket over his face even tighter. “No. I don’t want to.”
“But you must.” Taint hummed sweetly to herself. “There is a dreadful backorder. Supply and demand, dear boy, is the meat and potato of our survival. Our client has been most … agreeable until late. Something has been happening on the other side of our wonderful dome, something that has seen a sharp rise in orders.”
The thought of returning … of returning to his workshop so very high above the world that was Arcade City, the notion of … Chad shook his head. He’d escaped Arcade City for a reason, and that reason was the endless, ceaseless demand for machines that only he could create.
“No. I won’t make that climb.” Chad shook his head. He reached for his weaponry and found that he could find none. The voices in his head, the myriad connections to the hims who’d never been and never were, were gone. The silence inside his own skull was insufferable. The assassin wanted to weep.
He was already there. He was already in his workshop, and the dreaded machine built by his mad fucking father had already grabbed the fuel that made it work. Chad pulled the blanket off his eyes.
Mad Mistress Taint, Nanny AI to the Royal Scion Chadsik al-Taryin smiled wildly, the clockwork gears of her clockwork face click-clacking into a reasonable facsimile of a pleasant greeting. She gestured broadly, arms whirring and buzzing with the perpetual motion of trillions of gears, some of them no bigger than an atom.
The lights went on, revealing a laboratory out of an Olde Age science fiction magazine. Chad knew every inch of the place. He’d been in this series of rooms from the moment he’d been birthed to the very moment he’d devised a way to escape. He’d created his first wondrous machine at three, and the second his father had learned that his bonny son could talk to versions of himself that had never existed had been the last moment of ‘freedom’.
Naturally, that first creation had been someone to talk to, someone to play with, because at three, when your only companion is a cracked and addle-pated artificial intelligence that thought it was a 19th century mistress of household, that’s all you want. When your entire Universe was a room above a city that seethed with warfare and madness all hours of the day and night in an eternal wave of sound, smell and sorrow, you want someone to connect with, and that’s what Chadsik al-Taryin had done.
Because his father was who he was, Chad had always been … special. Special enough to dig through the layers of Unreality all on his own, to seek out friends. Friends who could spare him the loneliness.
Chad’s eyes roved over the toys and tools with a shameful hunger. He’d enjoyed working in the labs, once he’d gotten over the shock and horror of watching that first friend destroyed to make room for more. He’d loved the challenge even as he’d hated the hot, almost sultry hungry oozing from dear old dad’s lamp-like eyes, the covetous gleam, the … nasty pleasure. The ex-assassin looked at Mistress Taint, who’d busied herself tidying up. “I don’t want to do this. I really fu… I really don’t.”
Mistress Taint nodded and smiled an empty, vacuous smile. “I know dear, just as you don’t want your dear old dad coming up here to have a few words. Which, I wonder, is worse? Tinkering away at something you find fun or feeling the hot pressure of your dear old father’s hands around your throat, the painful whip of his dark iron lash as it bites into your skin? It’s been a long number of years since you’ve been home, you wandering lad you, and your dad has been so sad and lonely without you. Why, he’s been gone so long now, people believe him dead!”
Chad licked his lips, running his hands over a brass gyroscope. “The whole time? Wot’s ‘e been doin’, then?”
Mistress Taint shrugged. “No one knows, Chadsik, none at all, Our King speaks to no one. Not me, not the Matrons, not his Gearmen, no one and no thing knows where he is. All we know
is were he dead, The Dome would’ve fallen ages ago.”
Chad snickered petulantly, mind whirling with ways to free himself. The old method was surely barricaded.
Mistress Taint puttered about the room, preparing her charge’s things. “No matter, though, no matter at all. You are back now, and once your father learns of this joyous moment, why, that horrible moniker they call him on the Outside shall disappear, and all shall learn to tremble at the Dark Iron King’s true purpose. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? Why you came back? To put things aright and to get the family business back up to speed?”
Chad didn’t say anything. Mistress Taint believed –as did everyone in Arcade City- that the whole Universe knew of his father’s ironworks, of the tools and weapons built by their regent.
Were they to know the truth, that naught of what their King had done for those many thousands of years had been credited to him, well… Chadsik figured their brains would explode into runny pudding.
And were they to learn that when they spoke of the Mad Goth King Blake, that they did so with dripping irony and awful sarcasm? Chad shook his head.
Some things weren’t worth bringing up, especially since doing so would … aggravate certain mad Nannies.
Chad strode over to a heavily curtained window and flung it wide. Light poured in and he blinked the tears away until he was able to see the faint traces of the massive Dome hanging over all their heads. A small sigh escaped his lips. Still there. Still a bizarre, endless, impossible collection of gears and crank shafts and cogs and wheels, a mammoth stretch of metal filling the horizon in all directions. He remembered staring up at it as a wee lad, trying to figure out why, if his dad could create that, he couldn’t fill the orders himself, why his son was doing all the work.
Chad also remembered the lessons, some administered by his dad but most taught by Taint herself, as to why it was best to remember one’s station in life and why one should never seek to rise above it, or to ask questions about one’s betters.