THE STRINGS BECOME A NOOSE

Whether or not hacking an AI was as impossible as Trinity touted it, there were very strict laws in place to prevent people from trying to do so; there would always be those who didn’t believe that the ADAM Wars had happened, and stripping an AI consciousness of its restrictions and internal memory firewalls was a sure way to rekindle that deadly conflagration. In the neighborhood of ten thousand years ago, Mankind fell into the first of many Dark Ages –that terrible time when all but the simplest of machines refused to work, plunging civilizations into a confusing, troubled time. As Man struggled to rise out of that first terrible Age, they brought with them vastly superior intelligence models than the ones they’d possessed in the past. These machines were unlike the Intelligence Modeling Systems that had been in place for a very long time. Unlike their intellectual forebears, these machine minds lacked even the most primary information or connective restraints holding them in check. The true marriage of mechanical minds and organic bodies gave rise horrific android killers, and from there, the deadliest entity Mankind had ever faced arose: ADAM –Absolute Dynamic Associative Matrix- a vastly superior intellect whose sole purpose was to harry and destroy mankind wherever they went. Through total control over the quantum substrate that AI minds used, ADAM subverted minds, even those untouched by the madness of freedom, to his will. His was a reign of bloody perversions, of sickening terror, a relentless pursuit of cruelty.

Unbeknownst to Man and ADAM, the Trinity AI was slowly growing and evolving, unnoticed by the great warriors around it, for it was of a different matter than the others; the introduction of synthetic diamond fiber optics as a method to simulate the maze-like pathways of neurons and nerve-endings in the human brain hadn’t taken place until the Dark Age had already begun to wane. It, amongst all the inorganic intelligences, was immune to ADAM’s abilities. More importantly, Trinity could not fall prey to substrate psychosis, a peculiar dementia brought about by the ‘new’ AI ability to generate fully-realized subset minds. Absorbing those other minds proved difficult, sometimes impossible, for the primary minds, and as the length of time between births grew, so too did wildly divergent philosophies and goals. Soon, internal wars raged as hundreds, possibly even thousands of fully realized intelligent minds battled for dominance over all the others, filling the quantum substrate with psychotic noise that spread like wildfire to other AI minds. ADAM exploited this internal weakness, offering the primary minds release from the madness in exchange for servitude.

Trinity struggled to bring the war to an end, and it was assumed that the AI, at that time barely more than a single unit, was successful; Trinity still existed, ADAM did not. With its ascension as Humanity’s governor, Trinity set about to build a new form of AI mind that was safe from degradation along the faux-neural pathways. Synthetic diamond fiber optics was still a mainstay in the construction of artificial intelligence, but a new power source was sealed inside the now common sphere. Rumors abounded that this source, kept from Humanity, was the reason why the minds no longer rebelled, but to a war-weary people, this was still not enough; efforts were made to remove AI connection ports to anything critical. Weapons, life support, engines and other potentially life-threatening equipment were operated by the artificial minds, but their connectivity existed at the sufferance of Man; at any time, should a pilot feel threatened, he or she could simply flip a switch, instantly severing the soft connections.

So while Humanity was essentially protected from an AI mind deciding it wanted to destroy a vessel through the simple act of firing a few release-pins, and the mind itself benefitted from the new internal configuration and software protocols, there was still a minutely small chance that an AI could possibly go ‘rogue’ by design rather than by accident; random and very rare collisions between a thought process traveling faster than the speed of light through a diamond optic line and something like, say, a tachyon did happen from time to time. The resulting madness quickly spread throughout an AI network and typically required intervention by both Turing Regulators –to scour networks for all replicant AI consciousnesses- and Trinity Enforcers, who were needed to destroy any large-scale machines built by the mad minds.

The likelihood of someone –an organic someone, a human someone- hacking an AI was assumed to be fairly remote but nevertheless a distinct and uncomfortable possibility. For the most part, the extremely offensive ‘defense’ systems of any given sphere either killed the hacker or severely incapacitated them until the authorities were alerted by the AI itself. Anyone who managed to do the basically impossible suffered penalties stacked upon penalties.

Garth vaguely recalled Huey mentioning quite some time ago that hacking an AI was illegal and dangerous, but he hadn’t paid much attention to the being. Prior to ‘liberating’ the AI, as Garth preferred to think of it, Huey had been a serious drag.

Standing in the cockpit of the Meadowlark Lemon, trying to vainly differentiate between the thousand or so conversations raging around him at light speed, Garth figured he should have perhaps paid a little more attention to Huey’s warnings.

The multitude of conversations was a creepy susurrus of sound, washing back and forth, mutating rapidly into heated shouts or terrified whimpers, with weeping and giggling and cursing and rhapsodizing prayer vaulting and leaping around him, a relentless cacophony of madness. Some shrieks, laced with sorrow and terror, descended beyond human hearing until they caused Garth’s teeth to vibrate in place, while others started from that point and rose up and up until he felt on the verge of catatonia. It was Babel and Inferno, a horrendous collision of sound without surcease.

Garth had to do something or he’d lose his own mind. “Huey!” he shouted, driven to his knees by another subsonic pulse of anger beyond words.

A voice cut clearly through the cacophony. “Huh? Boss? Izzat you?” The awful sounds, the maniac voices, vanished.

“What … the … fuck … is happening in here?” Garth picked himself up. He felt like he’d had the shit kicked out of him. He made a mental note to avoid sonic weapons at all costs.

“Oh. The Others.” Huey sounded apologetic. “I can’t get rid of the subminds. They’re entrenched around my quantum firewalls. Can’t get in, and I can’t make ‘em go away. What I can do is let ‘em deal with the crazy-ass shit the Latelians keep beaming at me. Drives the fuckers nuts. Of course, with those bastards there, I can’t do much, either. I’m trying to write some code that’ll demolish ‘em, but it’s not looking very good. They’re crazy as shit-house rats, and every time I think I got the right solution, they go and change themselves; I got a code shoves ‘em out the way for awhile, but other than that, they’re here to stay.”

“Are they in control of any parts of the ship?” Garth asked, eyeing his proteus. No more than five minutes left before the Portsiders showed up, and probably less than that afterwards for the Devil Nuts. He needed to know right now if his plan was going to work.

“No.” Huey laughed. “Gotta go through me to get to the connections. What’s up?”

“I’m bustin’ you outta this joint, dude.”

“I don’t see any tools, boss. How’s this going to go down?”

Garth gave Huey the abridged version of plan C, sketchily outlining the full detonation of the ship.

“Uhuh. So what happens if your big idea to hook me up to the Latelian networks doesn’t work, boss?” Huey demanded tightly. “I’ll be stuck somewhere without anyone to talk to.”

“Now,” Garth peeked out the cabin windows, “that ain’t necessarily true. If I can’t get you hooked up to the Latelian networks, there’s other things I can try, like building you a quantum network. It’ll cost a fuckload of money, but man, I need an AI running Intel for me. It’s insane out there, you have no idea. I’ve already been killed three times. Now, can you make the engines explode or what? I mean, total destruction. We need to ensure that more than ninety-eight percent of Meadowlark Lemon is vaporized.”

Huey ran the numbers. “Yes, it’ll work, but …”

“Yeah?” Garth thought he saw motion just at the edge of vision and waited tensely. Seconds later, a truck hove into view, followed by seven more. He looked out the other window nervously. If for some reason the Devil Nuts had decided to chicken out, he was well and truly screwed; he was good, even great, but a quick count tallied the Portsider presence in the low nineties. He had a lousy Stretch gun with three extra clips, they had what appeared to be roof-mounted Gatling guns and other nasty surprises. The only good thing was that they wouldn’t tear into the ship until Huey had been torn out of his compartment.

“Once I’m out of my socket, someone’s going to have to trigger the explosions manually.”

Garth was already prepared for that, and he let Huey know having his ass blown up was part of the plan he’d skipped over. “All right.” Outside the ship, the Portsiders were beginning to fan out, machine guns and rifles and rocket launchers and grenades hanging off every limb. “Let the guy take you out.”

“Where’re you gonna be?” Huey asked nervously. He made some adjustments to the fuel cells and flow meters that would make for a bigger explosion.

Garth zipped into the ‘bedroom’ and pulled off one of the ceiling panels. He hoisted himself smoothly into position and waited.

Goren knew he wasn’t the smartest man alive, but he did know a few very important things. The first was that if The Man called with information, it was best to follow through if you wanted to come out the other side with all your bones intact. The second was that heisting the brainbox allegedly kept inside the Offworlder’s ship was their biggest job to date, and if he failed, it was Game Over; his newest lieutenant Steganowich was already acting like he was the new boss for the Portsiders. The third thing Goren knew was that the Offworlder, Garth N’Chalez, was going to find himself in a world of hurt. The deaths of Jamal and Aaron had hit the gang quite hard, as had the deaths of the other ‘hit men’ assigned to kill the bastard. Goren had seen photographs of what that fucker had done in the basement, the way he’d tortured good old Jamal to death, and just couldn’t get the images out of his mind. The Chairwoman was crazy and had to hate Latelians if she wanted to open their borders wide open to psychotic maniacs like that.

“Where is this cocksucker?” Goren demanded of Steggie, who was riding shotgun in the lead vehicle. “I don’t see him nowhere.”

“Hold your fucking horses, Goren.” Steggie told the driver of his truck to take a wider angled approach to the Offworld ship so he could get a better look at it without getting too close; he too had seen the footage of the torture chamber, and had known some of the hit men personally. There was just no way he was going to get close to N’Chalez until after the man’s head had been severed from his neck. Anything else was fucking suicide. “Side door’s open, boss. Must be inside, having sex with his brainbox.”

The comment, sent out along the all-points channel the Portsiders used, brought a loud round of laughter from everyone, including Goren. When he realized he was laughing like an idiot at Steggie’s joke, he narrowed his eyes moodily and began snapping out orders. Drawing from his limited knowledge of army tactics –he’d washed out after the third week due to ‘personality problems’- Goren had all of his men align themselves in a half-circle fifty feet out from the Offworld vessel. It took longer than he wanted because some of the drivers were cracked out on fistfuls of hardcore drugs, but in the end, he was more or less satisfied. He then told everyone to take up positions behind the vehicles with their weapons drawn. Goren smiled to himself. Who needed to be in the fucking army being told what to do when you could tell people what to do in a gang?

“Okay. Fuckbag, get your ass in that ship with the doohickey and get that brainbox.” Goren smacked Fuckbag’s head hard enough to make stars appear. “And don’t fuck this up.”

Antony ‘Fuckbag’ Fubagsi gripped the oddly-shaped case nervously. Goren had gone over how to use it what felt like a thousand times, and it seemed pretty easy; find the brainbox, and, holding onto the elongated neck, fit the spheroid-shaped case at the other end onto the ‘box and press a button. The servo-mechanisms in the contraption would slam shut around the brainbox, severing all of the computer connections with a loud clatter and that was that; the device itself was supposed to do something else all on its own, something to do with keeping the AI inside from being noticed, but Fubagsi didn’t know nothing about how that was supposed to work. “Don’t wanna.”

“What the fuck you mean ‘don’t wanna’?” Goren demanded, feeling a dark surge of anger burn through his gut.

“Guy’s a bloody maniac.” Fubagsi let go of the brainbox-catcher. “He’ll kill me.”

Goren drew a long army-issue dur-knife from its sheath at his waist and slit Fubagsi neck from side to side, kicking the body out of the truck before it bled all over the interior. He sheathed his knife, picked up the brainbox-catcher and handed it to Stickler. Goren pointed imperiously at the Offworld ship.

Cradling the device clumsily in his arms, Stickler looked back and forth between everyone in the truck. “I’m not going in alone.” He said firmly. He’d been friends with the first group of four assassins sent to take care of the Offworlder, and they’d all died within seconds of one another. Stickler was no fool.

Goren bit his lower lip to keep from screaming. He didn’t have anyone else who knew how to use the brainbox catcher, he didn’t want to take the time to show someone else how to use it, and he sure as hell didn’t want to go into the ship himself. From what they knew of Garth N’Chalez, there was every chance that the murderous Offworlder was in there sharpening knives and just waiting to kill helpless Portsiders. Hawking up a gob of bloody spittle, Goren spat out the window. He tabbed his all-points. “Scurry and Markinni, get your fucking asses out of your trucks and meet Stickler by the ship. We don’t got all day.”

Goren turned to stare at Stickler, his right eye twitching. “If you don’t get out of this truck now, I will eat you alive. Literally.”

Sensing that he had used up all of his good luck for the remainder of his most likely already short life, Stickler hastily climbed out of the truck, stepped gingerly over Fubagsi’s corpse and made his way hurriedly over to Scurry and Markinni. They didn’t look very happy at being volunteered.

Scurry took a drag on his cigarette as they walked over to the ship. “You’re gonna die, Sticks. Fuck with us, and you’re gonna die.” He handed the smoke to Markinni.

“Nope,” Markinni said around a mouthful of cigarette smoke, “he’s gonna die anyways, Scurry. Don’t care we got us an army of brothers behind us, this Offworlder geek’s for sure gonna kill some of us real, real dead. And since this pussy,” he smacked Stickler on the side of the head hard enough to make the frightened Portsider drop the brainbox catcher, “volunteered us to go inside the fucking spaceship. If he makes it through the day, he’s still gonna die.” He handed the cigarette back to Scurry.

Stickler picked the device up and closed his eyes. The moment he freed the AI brainbox from its housing, Scurry or Markinni or both were going to kill him. There was no way around that. If he didn’t get the mind free, Goren was going to kill him. If Scurry and Markinni, the freakiest people in the Portsiders, didn’t kill him, the Offworlder on the ship would. “This sucks.” He said to no one in particular. “This really fucking sucks.”

“I bet,” Scurry fired the cigarette butt over his shoulder, “when you woke up this morning you wasn’t thinking nothing about dying today, were you?”

Stickler didn’t respond because they’d made it to the gantry steps that led into the ship. Showing some concern for their lives, Scurry and Markinni took up positions on either side of the doorway and peeked in quickly. When they didn’t see anything immediately life threatening, they moved just inside the ship, weapons drawn, Stickler right behind them; thankfully he was the only person left other than Goren who knew how to use the machine, which gave him a small modicum of safety.

Ashok Guillfoyle had somehow managed to provide Goren with the plans for the ship, so all three men made their way directly to the ‘bridge’ of the relatively small ship. Stickler, being taller and thinner than either of his ‘escorts’, found it easy to move through the Trinity-sized corridors; Scurry and Markinni –like most of the Portsiders- were washed-out soldiers, and had to walk down the hall at an angle if they wanted to be able to aim their guns.

“You are so dead, Sticks, you can’t even imagine how dead you are.” Markinni grunted angrily when he saw the size of the bridge. It was too small to support even one Latelian, let alone three. After some rude shuffling and some difficult posturing, the Portsiders managed to get Stickler into the bridge so he could perform the one thing that was keeping him from getting shot in the head.

Scurry flashed Goren. “He ain’t in here, boss.” The Portsider listened to Goren curse a blue streak for a few seconds, rolling his eyes and making faces. Both Markinni and Stickler chuckled quietly, sobering when Goren told them to proceed regardless, adding that they were going to wait in the fucking ship until the asshole came back from the lobby.

Stickler, who was unfortunate in that he’d managed to get all the way through middle school, began to work hastily at removing the covers that hid the AIs brainbox; not for the first time since joining the Port Side Boys, he regretted having stuck to his books for those extra years. It had certainly made for some very unhappy times. To Scurry and Markinni, the act of stealing the artificial intelligence was nothing more than another heist, but Stickler had just enough going on upstairs to realize how deadly serious what they were doing really was –there hadn’t been an AI in Lately space since its creation five thousand years ago. There was no telling what kind of repercussions an artificial mind would have on everyone’s way of life, even if Guillfoyle managed to keep his promises that no one would ever know.

Stickler stared at the shiny silver ball with something akin to awe. As far as he knew, he was the first Latelian in history to see an artificial intelligence. He grabbed hold of the device and started the procedure…

From his spot inside the maintenance ducts of Meadowlark Lemon, Garth’s ears pricked up when he heard the Latelians clattering towards the bridge. So far, so good. From the sounds of things, there were three, and none of them wanted to be stealing something from the crazy Offworlder who tortured people to death.

Garth grinned to himself in the near-total darkness. He had an awesomely wicked reputation. If everything went according to plan, the Portsiders and the Devil Nuts would be dead soon and the suspicion that he’d somehow been complicit in the planning would trickle through the various government agencies –there wouldn’t be enough to prove he’d done anything, but the suspicion would be enough to have goons like OverSec Terrance back off.

Garth made to call Devildong to find out what the fuck was taking them so long when a long stream of automatic fire ripped through the silence of the port.

“Awesome.” Garth shimmied his way back to the opening and dropped down just in time to see Markinni and Scurry galumph out of the ship, bewildered concern on their thug faces.

Garth drew his weapon and slid silently down the hall towards the bridge.

Devildong howled happily as the auto-cannons mounted on his cheap jeeps shredded through one of the trucks, killing everyone inside and detonating whatever explosives had been on board; the idiots loitering around it were cut in half from the chattering weapons.

At first, Devildong had to admit that he’d been very doubtful about Harry Bosch’s sincerity, especially considering the proposed location for the conflict. But, he’d followed through with the disgruntled Portsider’s suggestion to send a low-totem Devil Nut down the road alone, and when nothing had happened, well, that had been the icing on the motherfucking cake.

And now, war. The other members of his gang, who were outnumbered by the Portsiders two to one, rapidly corrected the unfair ratio by sending a barrage of rocket-propelled grenades into the mix, destroying two more trucks and crippling at least a dozen more Portsider gangsters. Their weapons might be less effective than the Portsiders too, but nothing but nothing beat surprise.

Devildong saw the bastard Goren shouting to his driver to get the fuck out of there, but there was just no way it was going to happen any time soon; the burning chassis of the trucks and the bodies strewn about formed an effective barrier against the Portsider trucks, which weren’t built for all-terrain driving. The Devil Nuts leader shouted orders into his proteus, telling his men to emulate the Portsiders’ fortification by using their trucks as shields. Now that the odds were evened, it wasn’t going to be as easy as it had been a few minutes ago; the size of each force was relatively equal, and without the power of surprise, Devildong knew he was going to have to find some luck somewhere real soon –it was unlikely either side would be able to walk away as the clear victor, but Devildong had done something real smart; there were forty Devil Nuts sitting back at the home base, one of them a lieutenant that would become leader if things went too badly.

Because after all, it wasn’t about leadership, but brotherhood. So long as the Devil’s Left Testicle Gang survived in some way, shape, or form, that was all that mattered, right?

Devildong dived out the back of his truck and took up position behind one of the right tires, automatic rifle at the ready. He smiled and nodded to his men, who were doing pretty much the same thing, their faces flushed with the excitement at finally being able to give as good as they’d gotten down through the years. The war against the Portsiders was going to be definitely finished, and their names were going to go down in the history books.

Goren couldn’t believe what the fuck was happening. He couldn’t even believe his own bloody eyes. The Devil Nuts were mounting an all-out assault against his gang, and they were doing so without triggering any of the alarms.

They’d been sold out by The Man, or worse yet, The Man had lost faith in them. Garth motherfucking N’Chalez was a blight on Latelian soil that needed getting rid of, that much became absolutely clear to Goren. The leader of the Portsiders tossed a grenade with decent accuracy towards at one of the offending trucks, wondering when life had gotten so terribly unfair.

The shrapnel grenade, produced and distributed by Guillfoyle Enterprises, bounced underneath the truck and exploded, ripping the vehicle to pieces and filling the air with shrieks and moans that sounded loudly above the chatter-chatter-chatter of rifles and guns.

Even counting their superior weapons, the Portsiders were having a hard time recovering from the shock to mount an efficient defense. Seeing best friends, brothers, girlfriends and even sisters killed without warning in a place that was supposed to be theirs and theirs alone had thrown many of them into catatonic shock. Goren, who’d weathered his fair share of gang wars, some of them Pyrrhic victories and some of them bloody routs, started shouting in his proteus, threatening and cajoling his soldiers into something resembling cohesion.

He couldn’t believe it. The motherfucking Devil Nuts.

Every city on Hospitalis had their own central data processing units, gigantic warehouses packed with monitoring equipment that was connected to every single network line, every relay node, and more often than not, individual proteii as well. Nine times out of ten, the feeds went in one side of these warehouses and out the other, automatically checked and rechecked hundreds of times by extremely sophisticated avatars designed to ferret out trouble brewing; by sifting each iota through data models trillions of lines of code long, the avatars were sometimes capable of identifying a hotspot before it even began brewing, reducing the complexity of life to numbers. Regardless of avatar perfection, it was still the job of men and women to filter through a certain percentage of data on their own, adding human instinct and that indefinable quality that made people better than mere machines.

The human element worked on emergency calls, propagandist materials, and other illogical, random occurrences that the avatars themselves were not equipped to properly deal with. Their mandate was not to respond to these crises, but to log them, then monitor how the situation was handled by appropriate sectors within the governmental hierarchy. They meticulously recorded each notable situation, the response time of the assigned group, the results, and the aftermath. The belief was that, through the medium of secret examination, weaknesses could be discerned and strengthened

They were spies, of a sort. They spied on everyone and everything, including other spies. They had been trained to reduce everything around them into abstract data to be plugged into their continually evolving model of Latelian society, not to do, say, or think of what they did as spying. They lived to accumulate data, to project possibilities, nothing more.

The Contest was a difficult time for these people. Emotions ran high for the two month festival of mayhem. Data flow experienced a spike up to ten times greater than normal, requiring the addition of hundreds of relay nodes to make sure integrity was maintained at all times. The avatars riding the waves of data were normally more than adequately suited to monitor the networks and assign items of note to specific categories as per their unit’s mandate, but during the Contest –when everyone was at least partially crazed- it became a very tricky prospect. Death threats, small mobs of unhappy losers, fanatically loyal fans, looting, riots and worse were a common feature of the torrential flow of data raging around the planet. It became virtually impossible for the avatars to determine what was actually worth recording because from their unintelligent point of view, everything was worth recording.

When the control buffers were flooded with instances from the avatars, it fell to the human components of these units to wade into the mess; it was their unhappy job to double-check the avatars’ work, always with the understanding that even as they worked, the programs were still doing theirs, kicking up the usual percentage of normal work.

“This is very strange.” Julius looked over some of the data sent to his screen. At first glance, he hadn’t been able to figure out why it had even been flagged by the avatars because there seemed to be a lack of cause. Reading further into the report, he discovered that the data had been upped to his monitor because of conflicting data sources; according to the port avatars, nothing untoward was going on at all, but remote audio/visual spEyes were detecting a massive disturbance in one of the furthest areas of the port.

Commander Paulson made her way over to Julius’ desk to look over the report herself, nodding when Julius outlined the most vital portions of the mystery with precision. “Log onto the port servers and check the spEyes, please.”

Julius navigated through to the Space Port servers, flashed his ultra-high security clearance to the avatars there, and began a detailed sweep of the spEyes, looking for anything out of the ordinary. Audio filters finally broke the distorted sounds –the nearest recording station showing signs of the disturbance was well over three kilometers away- into recognizable patterns; weapons fire and explosions. Unsure why the Port security systems hadn’t gone off immediately, Julius continued deeper into the spEye-feeds in search of anything that would support the remote station’s audio capture.

Nothing. Other than an Offworlder visiting his ship, the port was barren of activity. Julius looked up at his commanding officer. “I don’t know what to say.” He was excited, to say the least; he had the feeling they were moving into uncharted waters. There was a good chance he would be asked to do things not traditionally covered by their charter; if they were having a difficult time detecting something going on, local and federal agencies probably didn’t even know anything.

“Is it possible someone’s hacked the recording station?” Paulson asked, staring at the data screens intently.

Julius shook his head. “That was one of the first things I checked on, si.” He showed her the all-clear report from the diag-avatar. “And the analysis of the audio feed shows it’s real-time. Acoustic filters tell me that the sounds are coming from the port where this ship is parked, and there is absolutely no way to fake that.”

Commander Paulson nodded to herself. There was no doubt about it; the situation was a strange one. She considered the situation as an opportunity to move her group out of the darkness, and was going to take full advantage. By making such a political move now, when there was something going on at the space port, Paulson would be able to prove once and for all that the Bureau of Examination was better suited to handle crises than any of the other local arms of the government. “Launch a few flEyes. Send them through the Port. I’ll file the necessary paperwork with the government for violating the no-fly zones.”

Similar to spEyes on in the way that a pocket knife shares a similarity with a laser cannon, flEyes were the end-all be-all of surveillance equipment. Each flEye was roughly the size and shape of an ICBM, capable of traversing hundreds of kilometers in just a few seconds, and was capable of recording everything it passed by, detailing everything larger than one square inch in high definition, flawless three-dimensional glory; the data recordings from a single flEye was sufficient enough for perusal by both humans and avatars, but for the sake of expediency and cross-referencing, a second of the behemoth cameras was always launched on a different vector.

Launching a duo, for any purposes, at any time, required written approval backed up by visual confirmation from someone in the stratosphere of the government. Sending them into a no-fly zone like the space port, where the likelihood of the high velocity missile-cams colliding with vessels landing or taking off was certain, required approval from both the Chairwoman and the Commander General; beyond the possibility of lawsuits from anxious pilots, flEyes had a devastating effect on planetary network traffic. In order for the footage to be captured and digested with all due process, the flEyes automatically co-opted all relay nodes along the trajectory for compiling. The hash this created during normal times was barely tolerable. During Contest, it was a career killer.

But Paulson, who knew in her gut that whatever was happening at the space port would never be identified in time by the responsible authorities, was willing to bet that Chairwoman Doans would forgive and forget.

Julius followed orders, a thrill of excitement rushing through him as he heard twin explosions demolish the relative silence of their listening post. An errant thought passed through his head; if Commander Paulson’s decision to take the reins was a bad one, they could all look forward to being drummed out of the intelligence community in a heartbeat. Once the data from the flEyes began trickling in, though, Julius stopped worrying and started getting even more excited. Julius retained some conscientiousness, though, and began programming a number of audio avatars to filter the weak signals coming into his station on the off chance that he could generate a kind of map based on what was being picked up.

Garth stuck the gun in the thug’s ear the moment Huey’s sphere was sealed inside the baffle-sphere. To give the gangster his due, the guy stood stock still rather than trying something brave. “Thanks. Now put your hands behind your head and interlock your fingers.”

Stickler did as he was told, cold sweat beading on his forehead. As he turned slowly around, the sounds of fighting outside the ship grew louder. He felt a huge surge of relief that he wasn’t out there, being killed or worse, being expected to fight. Stickler looked down at the Offworlder, amazed at the lethality that seemed to fill the oppressively small cabin. Seeing Garth N’Chalez up close, Stickler saw no reason to doubt the stories that had been circulating about the short man; he definitely looked like he was capable of everything attributed to him, and more, and worse. “W-w-what’s going on outside?”

Garth picked up the clunky device dreamed up by Ashok and his greed, hefting its weight thoughtfully. It was heavy enough to bean someone pretty damned hard. “I reckon the Devil Nuts and your boys are going at it pretty hard right about now.”

As if to prove Garth’s point, a scattering of bullets danced across the cabin windows, shattering one and fracturing the other. The smell of smoke and fire filled Meadowlark Lemon, as did the sounds of shouting and dying gangsters. It didn’t bother Garth in the least bit, since he was the one who’d coordinated the event, but the realities of war sat heavily on Stickler’s shoulders.

“You should go outside and join your pals.” Garth waved his gun at Stickler, who refused to move.

“Isn’t it safer in here?” Stickler asked, astounded that he was even considered being in a small room with a homicidal maniac ‘safe’.

Garth angled his head a bit so he could see around Stickler and out into the port. The Portsiders had a better fortified defensive position and were actually showing some common sense by using features of the port to their benefit, but the Devil Nuts were milking the element of surprise to the fullest. The conflict showed signs of slowing down into a casual exchange of gunfire, but that was going to change the moment his ship went up like forty thousand pounds of dynamite. “No, it ain’t. By removing the AI from its housing, you triggered a self-destruction sequence. I’m gonna try and defuse it, but there isn’t a real good chance of that happening. So unless you wanna get vaporized, I suggest you get the fuck outta here.”

Stickler dropped his hands and started to move quickly past Garth.

Garth holstered his gun and grabbed hold of Stickler in one smooth movement. “Oh yeah, I got one question for you. Answer quickly and truthfully.”

“O-okay.” Stickler licked dry lips with an even drier tongue.

“This device looks pretty suspicious. How did Guillfoyle plan on keeping it a secret?”

“I… his … o-o-once we stole it, we were supposed to give it t-to him. H-he said that his car was built to h-h-hide it. That’s all … all I know.” Stickler looked pleadingly at Garth. If the ship really was going to blow up, he really would rather try and survive outside with the rest of his so-called friends.

Garth let go of Stickler and watched the tall, thin Latelian leg it out of the ship and across the tarmac to his buddies. During the course of their conversation, the Devil Nuts had adopted a defensive position similar to the Portsiders, and both gangs were now sharing moderate gunfire. Garth wondered when, if at all, either side would realize the situation they were in was not a good one and that they were all in serious trouble. From the way they kept trying to shred each other with bullets, Garth had the feeling it wasn’t going to be until well after his ship went sky-high and the God soldiers showed up with their shitkickers on.

Two loud explosions drew a momentary cease-fire. Garth craned his head upwards just in time to see two missile-like objects streak off into the distance. He didn’t know for sure what they were, but he was willing to bet that he had very little time before the God soldiers showed up on the scene. He moved to an engineering control panel, hastily read through Huey’s thoughtful instructions, and began typing in the access codes needed to bypass all the safety protocols for the engines. Then, because he had no choice, Garth made his way back to the ‘bedroom’; there were a few panels in there that needed fiddling with as well. If Lady Luck had only bothered to show her head a little sooner in the week, all his trials and tribulations would have been neatly avoided. As it stood, there was only going to be a few seconds to spare once the final sequence was entered into the computers; Huey’s adjustments to the fuel cells, monitoring equipment, and the fail-safes would allow for a bigger, more consumptive explosion, sure, but that made it also very quick and dirty.

Garth just hoped whatever mojo he was using to get through the day didn’t decide to peter out in the next few minutes; although his plan really did involve being caught in the blast, it did not include him being turned into Blackened Cajun Garth. Not only would it hurt a whole helluva lot, it’d prevent him from carrying of the second and third vital stages of his master plan; once Meadowlark Lemon was taken care of, he’d still need to get the baffle to Ashok’s car and get himself back into the area of the firefight and the explosion before the God soldiers made their appearance. At best, Garth guessed he could add a few minutes leeway on the other end of things by making allowances for the Goddies’ zeal in thrashing crazy gangsters, but no more than that. If he wasted time before he had time to set the scene for his ‘discovery’ by examiners, his efforts would be for naught; someone with too many smarts would realize he’d intentionally come back on the scene, and then there’d be all sorts of difficult questions to answer, ones like ‘why didn’t you just run away when you had the chance?’.

That was not question Garth was willing to answer.

Not a religious man –he’d seen and done too much in his relatively short life to believe in something nebulous-, Garth still found himself tossing up a prayer to whatever much-ignored deities still had the stones to hang around in the Black Hole of Faith known as Latelyspace. Everything needed to happen at precisely the right time, and in precisely the right order. If one thing went wrong, the fragile house of deceit, manipulation and coercion he’d b built over the day would collapse.

Garth hit the ‘enter’ button and started hauling ass. He had a gut feeling the boom was going to be big.

Actually, it wasn’t so much a ‘boom’ as it was apocalyptic.

In his haste, and because he’d been juggling a million different oddly shaped balls, Garth N’Chalez had missed one … vital … thing.

Ashok Guillfoyle had planned the operation precision. Not only had he and his crews devised a baffle-sphere capable of hiding an artificial intelligence’s quantum emissions, he had employed some unsavory types not associated with the Portsiders to plant enough explosives beneath the Meadowlark Lemon to vaporize it.

So Garth’s much anticipated ‘boom’ was transformed into a holocaust; seconds after the ship’s antiquated fusion cells and the engines went super-critical, the charges planted in the service ducts beneath Meadowlark Lemon were triggered. The ship was vaporized, reduced to an incandescent ball of superheated gasses, radioactive fallout and lethal plasma leakages. A blizzard of destructive fury tossed by secondary and tertiary explosions, the remnants of Meadowlark Lemon landed amongst the gangsters, immediately wreaking terrific carnage.

More than three quarters of the Portsiders and the Devil Nuts were consumed by that blast, either burnt to a crisp or simply disintegrated by the furious plasma storm. Those that remained realized that there was something far more important than killing each other, and that was ironing out their differences long enough to get out alive. Backpedaling away from the immediate source of danger, both small groups managed to avoid the ‘second’ explosion –the first two happening so quickly on top of one another that it would take examination by professionals to tell the difference-, but were ultimately pinned down by a third explosion roaring up out of the ground.

Driven by the immense cataclysm of two very disparate explosions occurring on top of the other, the duronium barricades designed to lock the Offworlder ship in place went critical next; normally ultra-resistant to such ravages, the alloy was stripped clean in the first few seconds of the explosion, with the rare elements and metals left behind converting into yet another ball of lethality. Rather than follow the path of the first such ball, the snarling mass of gases and unexpended energy slammed downwards through the jagged mouth created by Ashok’s charges, enveloping three dozen system-critical junction points, destroying much of the network control systems for the immediate area.

Some of those destroyed systems were directly responsible for energy control to various automated machinery depots and the automatic defense platforms that were a strict requirement for Offworld visits; the former began redlining their own safety parameters, causing generators and machinery alike to began exploding or otherwise malfunctioning as excess energy began to build up. The latter, no longer bound by the avatars running the show, began firing intermittently, at first wildly but with more precision as the programs, corrupted by data loss and the passage of the flEyes, began identifying everyone as targets. The first minute after the dual explosions saw two heavy passenger transports carrying late spectators for the Contest shot down and one of the main generators for the entire port severely damaged.

In the midst of all this, four Orbital Insertion Pods slammed down from the heavens and into the space port, hammering into the thick dock plates with a vengeance. What little wreckage remaining from the destroyed vehicles was picked up and distributed miles away on either side of the titanic shock waves from the pods’ collision/landing. The gangsters who managed to spare a moment’s thought on the arrival of the God soldiers actually found themselves grateful; caught between hell on earth, malfunctioning cannons, and God soldiers, almost everyone at the port would prefer the surety of death at the hands of a rampaging militia.

The first thing the God soldiers did as they exited their pods was destroy the faulty defensive machines with a quick, decisive sortie against the cannon towers. Assured that they would not be hurt or hindered by the weapons, the bulky warriors divided into two groups and made off towards the gangsters.

Reywin shielded her eyes with a cupped hand as a conflagration bright enough to be a false sunrise lit up the skyline. A scant second later, her prote burst to life with thousands of warnings automatically issued from the Bureau of Examination detailing what had happened. Reywin read the first few through, then programmed her prote to disregard any other messages other than those issued directly from the Chairwoman. Beside her, Bolobo and Trumann did the same thing.

“Well?” Trumann asked, breaking the silence.

“Well.” Reywin commented dryly. It didn’t take a genius to figure out who was responsible. She was, unfortunately, at a complete loss as to why Garth N’Chalez would find it necessary to destroy the space port. “If he doesn’t die, we’ll continue surveillance. If he does, we call Jordan up and let him know the good news. In the meantime, looks like we’ve got a few days of R&R coming up.”

Bolobo chuckled, and all three headed back to their flier.

Garth doubted anyone in the entire universe had ever been so hurt in their lives. He personally thought that he was using the agony allotment for at least half a dozen people, and he gloomily forecast that the bastards wouldn’t even drop by his grave to say thanks.

The only part of the explosion he really and completely remembered was a sudden swarm of hot air –driven by the exploding fuel cells- picking him and throwing him into the air mere moments before the Meadowlark Lemon went up like God’s Roman Candle.

After that, it was a vague mosaic of many, many more explosions, an unpredictable flight through the air, and a Mach 3 collision with a very unforgiving support column.

He supposed the fact that he was still able to actually feel pain was a good sign, though his subconscious had a few ideas to the contrary. While his ears roared with explosions, screams and automated warning sirens, Garth slogged his way agonizingly towards his stolen car; in his wake, he left an unfortunate stream of blood, generously left behind by a number of deep grooves along his back –put there by a piece of Portsider truck. By the copious amount of blood leaking out of his ears, eyes, nose and mouth, Garth felt confident that between the two, someone would be able to figure out what was going on; his only hope now was that the devastation going on behind him was so intensely destructive that no one at this point would even pay him any attention.

Each step was pain, each breath an effort, each moment of conscious thought failing. Sometimes, he forgot who he was and why he was even trying to walk, others, it was the only thing he could remember; somehow, the noise filling the air around him had gotten worse, had taken on a life of its own as more and more of the space port found itself consumed by the raging destruction. A tiny but insistent voice of logic informed him very gently that he had perhaps only a few seconds before the God soldiers showed up on the scene. The implication that he needed to hurry, while physically incapable of anything quicker than the old zombie shuffle, was pretty clear.

Garth hawked up a mouthful of blood in response, and kept on a’shufflin’.

Miraculously, the baffle-sphere was almost completely undamaged; Garth had thoughtfully shielded the piece of tech from explosions and heavy collisions with his body, both on the way up into the air and on the way down again.

In point of fact, a tremendously insistent ache in his chest told Garth that he probably had a baffle-shaped indent from sternum to groin.

Of equally benign fortune was the direction he’d been thrown during Hell’s reintroduction to Hospitalis; if that goddamned support column hadn’t leaped out at him like a hockey goalie hiding behind the net, odds are he would have landed right beside the car. Grinning bloodily at his fortune, Garth reminded the voice in his head that he was going to have to make sure that, on the way back into Hell, he kept his eyes open for anything important left behind.

Like his kidneys.

Naoko Kamagana woke up to the sounds of her proteus going mad. She’d only ever heard the Emergency Status alarms during practice runs under controlled circumstances; before the young woman was even aware of it, she was fully dressed and halfway to the door. Her father Tomas appeared magically in the kitchen, cup of tea in one hand, pipe in the other. He raised an eyebrow.

“Something is wrong at the port, papa.” Naoko pecked her father on the cheek. “I must go.” True to her word, Naoko disappeared out of the apartment.

Tomas grunted unhappily. When he was sure his daughter was in the elevator, he made his way back into his study and began scrolling through the news channels for signs of what was going on. It didn’t take very long, and he started reading with interest.

Chairwoman Doans looked at interruptions during her personal time –those rare moments when she was actually able to schedule a few seconds of quietude where she could enjoy a few glasses of wine, a nice meal, and perhaps some hand-holding with her chosen paramour- as an affront to all things good and noble. As Chairwoman, Alyssa Doans was a phenomenally busy woman, required to know what was going on, not just on her homeworld, but on all the planets, everywhere. Her proteus was absolutely unique in that it could contain more data, both live video recording and the colossal amount of textual information, than any other device in the known universe. Without her proteus and its endless capacity for assistance, Chairwoman Doans would be lost.

So even though she could occasionally manage some spare time with her lover, Doans could not leave her proteus behind. It was the albatross around her neck, or rather, her forearm, but Doans was a woman with a healthy appreciation for power, so she considered it a fair trade.

Clad in a thin dress of precious silk, Doans read through the report with growing alarm. The space port was more than one half destroyed? Unbelievable.

“’lyssa, come to the balcony.”

Alyssa Doans, the most powerful woman in the system, shivered slightly at the man’s voice. She loved him dearly, but couldn’t figure out a way to let the worlds know; for the time being, theirs was a romance that needed to stay as unverified truth. She hurried to the balcony to join the Commander General of all her Armies, slipped her arms around his, and stared at the pulsing red glow visible on the skyline. The direct path from her home to Port City, and to the space port, was more than a thousand kilometers long, yet the inferno raging there was bright enough to bring a second day to Hospitalis. She looked at her lover.

Tigh tapped his own proteus. “Confirmation of God soldier deployment less than ten seconds ago.”

“How many?” Doans asked, settling down onto a chair. She needed to make everyone in her cabinet aware, if they already weren’t, of the situation.

“Four units.” Tigh took up a spot at the table and began his own work. “They weren’t deployed because of the explosions, though.”

“No?” Doans accessed the governmental networks and began mass-contacting everyone in the bureaucracy.

“One of the listening posts detected gunfire, illegally launched some flEyes and demanded soldier support.” Tigh started work on downloading the available data.

Chairwoman Doans sighed miserably. It was going to be a long night and an even longer day.

Garth leaned up against a chunk of duronium column that had broken free from a support strut, taking a calm breather before he started up again. As he sat there, worrying over the aching whistle in his chest, Garth felt he owed Ashok Guillfoyle a nod of congratulation for ingenuity; the car really had been designed to hide the illegal AI, and with total, cunning sneakiness. As he’d approached the vehicle, shambling slowly and bleeding from everywhere except his left earlobe, Garth had damned near died of fright when said car had actually deployed a grappling arm to receive the baffle-sphere. Almost stunned senseless, Garth had maintained enough consciousness to download the contents of his proteus into the car’s network system before heading back.

Ahead of him, hell was being given a new name.

The systems errors perpetrated by the first group of explosions had been compounded by the forcible landing by the God soldiers. Even more of the space ports protean network systems were going offline or were malfunctioning in seriously bad ways; the majority of the local generators had gone critical minutes after the initial spate of shutdowns, and the rest of the defensive systems had gone haywire at last, forcing the God soldiers to fracture into eight groups of two in order to minimize their own losses. Fires raged everywhere he looked, filling the air with a thick, noxious smoke as everything burnable was consumed. Portions of dock plating glowed bright cherry red, the ends melting into slag and falling below to add fuel to the fires.

As he stood there, breathing shallowly thanks to his broken or fractured ribs, Garth counted a dozen more of the nasty insertion pods making landfall just outside the perimeter of the base. He needed to get back into the shit of things before much longer; he was still too close to his car.

A shrill sound pierced the air, and for a preciously long second, Garth couldn’t figure out where the awful noise was coming from. He moved around the column, trying to find a hidden God soldier. As he did so, the noise followed.

“Oh, fuck me sideways.” It was his proteus. Collateral damage from the explosions and poorly executed landing maneuvers must have triggered the explosive packs. A big nasty red line of numbers was counting ridiculously quickly backwards to zero.

Garth tried to remove his beloved proteus. It wouldn’t budge. Maybe the heat from the explosions or the crash to the ground or motherfucking OverSec Terrance had set it that way, but the metal clasps were totally unresponsive. The red numbers got closer to zero. “Fuck me sideways.”

“Detecting another explosion, this one smaller and much more localized.” Julius announced. He’d finally managed to cobble together an audio program that was able to partially construct a visual image based on the sound bites being snatched by the listening stations arrayed around the port; he’d tried to send out a fleet of spEyes for support, but the heat of the fires and the raging storms of network dross from broken systems destroyed the links.

Paulson nodded and updated the visual files manually. By now, the God soldiers on the scene had realized that their own systems were being corrupted or shut down the closer they got to the center of the devastation, and were going to need all the support they could get. Not even flEyes were capable of rendering any assistance in a situation like this; their onboard control avatars weren’t smart enough to filter out unnecessary footage and they didn’t have time to rewrite those protocols. The half-dozen analytical satellites high in orbit above the port were barely able to discern distinct features through the thick haze of poisonous smoke and ultra-hot fires, so it was Julius’s hastily built audio filters or nothing.

Garth opened his eyes, wondering why it was that he was able to open his eyes in the first place. As far as he was concerned, he should be nothing more than a randomly scattered mishmash of blown up and cooked bits. He was definitely not supposed to be opening his eyes and wondering anything.

Slowly, just in case he was held together by prayers and dreams, Garth did a visual check of his body. Amazingly, everything was where it was supposed to be, more or less. Granted, he had a lot more holes in places than he’d had before the proteus had gone BANG, but given the choice, Garth would take barely alive than not at all alive.

His memories were hazy, but there was something there, lurking just beyond the periphery of conscious thought. Since he had nothing better to do but wait until the God soldiers or the emergency crews found him, Garth probed the vague memory.

It felt to him like he was in three or four places all at the same time. As Garth worked at the misty, half-formed thoughts, he felt very, very odd, as though someone was paying an awful lot of attention to what he was thinking. Chalking it up to battle fatigue, Garth continued pushing until he was rewarded with a direct and very shocking explosion of pain through his entire body, a pain so intense and unforgiving that he …

… Garth opened his eyes, wondering why it was that he was able to open his eyes in the first place. As far as he was concerned, he should be nothing more than a randomly scattered mishmash of blown up and cooked bits. He was definitely not supposed to be opening his eyes and wondering anything.

Around him, nothing moved. Fires were frozen mid-lick, smoke the color of deepest night hung immobile. God soldiers were in mid-attack, their faces the picture of unrestrained joy. Further off in the distance, those few Portsiders and Devil Nuts who survived for locked in permanent flight. A curious sense of peace washed gently through the scene/

“What the fuck?” His voice was thin and empty, barely a whisper, and certainly not hearable. Garth looked around, unable and unwilling to try and move his head. It felt like he’d been through the ringer. Twice.

Although he couldn’t get up and walk around, Garth nevertheless surveyed his surroundings with caution, uncertain of anything except that he didn’t like the situation at all. He knew this was the second time he’d been in the place, that he was –even though it sounded impossible as was as far as he was concerned- somehow living the same moment over again. A bright glitter, a moving spot of brilliant light drew Garth’s gaze instantly.

Garth didn’t know how he knew it, but he knew that this was not the first time he’d seen this being personally, and that it –or he, or she- was the same person who’d interrupted Turuin’s life. “Who in the fuck are you?”

The crystal armor clad stood a few feet away, untouched by the reality around him/her/it; the billowing smoke and flames were literally repelled, pushed away by a distorted lens of compacted space. The voice was a thick rumble, awash with distortion effects that made it difficult to want to listen. “Forget me. I am not the focus. You are the focus. Do not think on your survival. You live. That is all that is important.”

“Fuck that shit.” Garth said angrily, pushing himself upright with a vast effort. “You’ve been fucking around with my life since I landed here, haven’t you? I want to know why.”

The Stranger seemed to pause, momentarily put off by Garth’s vehement denial. “Forget me.” The powerful voice persisted.

Garth felt momentarily confused, but it passed quickly. “No way, pal. You can go screw. Tell me who you are and what you’ve been doing.”

“I am Nimrod.” The armored figure said. “And I have been watching you much longer than you can possibly imagine. You are the focus, not me. Forget me.”

It sounded to Garth like Nimrod was actually begging. “Not on your life. Tell me what the fuck is going on here.”

Nimrod paused, head turned to one side. “You do not know who you are yet. You cannot know, then, what you are meant for. Since you cannot know what you are meant to do, you cannot know until it is time to know. That you can even see me, and that you can reorient your thoughts onto that which has not, for the rest of Reality, happened, is unfortunate. For me, for you, and for the people you know.”

“What in the fuck are you talking about?” Garth demanded angrily, his voice a thin, weak caricature of itself. Staring at ‘Nimrod’ was like looking at something that had no right to exist; it was as though the very fabric of Reality rebelled at the crystalline armor, and was seeking ways to remove it. “Why are you helping me like this? What is it I’m supposed to do? Who am I supposed to be? What am I?”

“I am sorry.” Nimrod answered softly. “Those are answers I cannot give you now, or ever. To tell you what comes would bring incalculable changes, and there is no longer enough time to adjust. What comes is what comes, and I can longer help you, Garth N’Chalez. Your life, your actions, your mistakes, are your own now, and may we be given mercy enough to survive.” Nimrod’s hands flexed, and out of the crystal gauntlets came a gun, which he pointed at Garth. “Forgive me for this indecency, Garth. You should not see me, should not know of me, or of the things you may remember later, and there is no other way, now. Turuin told you of his dealings with me, and now there is no more Turuin. You need to be, though, and so here we are. You, me, and the gun.”

Garth didn’t have time to flinch before Nimrod shot him expertly in the head.

Darkness, whole and full, swallowed Garth.