TURUIN’S SECRET AND A HOLE IN MIND

Turuin was tired, agonizingly so, and with good reason. At long last –longer than he’d suspected, having passed by his own ‘best by’ date by an agonizingly painful three months- the dermal and subcellular implants threaded throughout his vat-grown body were finally succumbing to entropy. It was only through monumental effort of will and toxic doses of painkillers that he’d managed to keep control of his ‘favorite’ face for so long. Anyone coming across the slowly dying man would have learned the ultimate, horrific truth about one of the government’s darkest, sickest secrets; Turuin was only human in the briefest of senses. He was a BioChameleon Unit, a gender-neutral entity capable of fine-tuning machinery seeded throughout his body so he could look, sound and act like anyone he wanted. Given a suitably fresh genetic sample in a large enough quantity, he could bleed, shit and piss like anyone.

Turuin’s life, indeed the lives of all BCU’s were fraught with danger, sorrow, misery, facts which, as far as Turuin knew, any one of them would die before announcing, regardless of a million reasons for it; their loyalty was not to any particular man or woman, but to the Latelian paradigm, that unsullied demarcation that separated Latelyspace from the rest of Humanity. And in order to protect the ideal, steps had to be taken. Steps that now, on his deathbed –or rather, death floor, since he was dying on the ground- Turuin regretted. His life had been spent ferreting out dissent and radical ideas. He had labeled ‘friends’, ‘neighbors’ and ‘coworkers’ as ideological terrorists planning to wage war against the perfection of all things Latelian. For their crimes, sometimes no worse than speaking out against a particular proposal by this Chairperson or that representative, those men, women and children had been set to prison camps, execution houses and God chambers, all on his word. By now, the number was in the thousands, and he carried with him the memories of his time with them, being what they wanted, being what they needed.

Beyond the emotional torment, which was palpable and impossible to protect against –rendering a being immune to feeling was the surest way to spoil them for the job-, was the physical torment. The machines, the organic implants, the micro-cellular engines fused at his nervous system and in his mind were in a state of constant rejection that no amount of medication could silence. The life of a BCU was spent in eternal vigilance against the moment when the mind gave up for just a fraction of a second, and the physical illusion of Humanity was banished.

It’d happened once, of course. It always did.

Field Ops prefaced every BCU’s ‘release into the wild’ with the same warning. That dangerous lapse of conscious control, that split second when the face, the hands, the body reverted into a kind of grotesque blank slate … it would happen. There was a barrier in the mind, one that the remnants of ‘id’ and ‘ego’ maintained and projected as the final barrier. It was that place which, according to the Field Ops, the final war would be waged. The processes of winning that war against Humanity’s intrinsic need to trust, to believe, to love would also shut the machines down. There was no telling when that moment would come, save that it would, because again, making a BCU immune to that moment made the BCU useless in detecting insurrection; a conscious, logical recognition that doing what needed to be done no matter the cost in individual human lives needed to be made. And the trade-off for that choice to do the right thing was the clean-up.

The Loss, as it was called, always seemed to happen in public. And it was the responsibility of the BCU to ‘clean after itself’. Forty years ago, Turuin’s Loss had taken place in a crowded restaurant. To cover it up, the meeting place had been obliterated by firebombs hastily planted by a lurching, semi-conscious simulacrum of a man.

After that, vigilance. Constant, unending, torturous vigilance. Turuin knew his handlers believed him dead. He’d managed to pull that much off on his own, proving his long-dead trainers absolutely right; he’d been the best and the brightest, a statistical anomaly in his own right –genegineered from the same tissue samples as all the rest of his crèche group, Turuin had nevertheless succeeded his host’s parameters. If Chairwoman Doans’ Chief of Staff –who was also the senior executive in charge of the BioChameleon Program- ever found out that one of his own agents was still alive and technically gone rogue, no effort would be spared to locate and destroy him.

But Turuin had no choice. He’d been told what he must do. At first, he’d rebelled against the notion of assisting an Offworlder, but the … the … man who had come to him had been so persuasive, so powerful, so … otherworldly, that in the end, Turuin had capitulated. The crystal entombed being had known things no man could know, had done and shown things to Turuin that were patently impossible yet undeniably true.

Turuin was not a coward. Nor was he a brave man. He’d always done as he’d been told, and done it well, and all for the cause of his people. But when the … the stranger had shown Turuin that in order for the Latelian people to survive, they must first lose most everything they held dear, he’d felt true fear. Turuin lauded Chairwoman Doans –was, in fact, supernaturally loyal to the woman thanks to his conditioning- and believed firmly that it was high time for his people to be introduced to the greater world outside their own terribly small border; what the … stranger proposed was worse than that, though. What the stranger said must happen was terrible.

A war, terrible and sublime in the same breath, devouring not just Latelyspace but Trinityspace as well. A great engine of destruction cycled just beyond The Cordon, and Garth N’Chalez was somehow directly involved.

Turuin was immensely glad that he had very little time left.

The window he was watching shattered into a thousand tiny, glittering pieces. A few seconds later, Garth rolled through the aperture, slicing his hands open on the shards as he tried to slow down.

A man pointing a double-barreled shotgun large enough to swallow your head will make anyone cautious. “Please,” Turuin said quietly, breaking a silence that had lasted for days, “don’t make any sudden moves. I’m tired, and I’m afraid that I might overreact if you do anything stupid.”

Garth moved slowly into a seated position, then carefully laced his fingers behind the back of his head. The voice sounded like Turuin’s, but the ancient, withered man in front of him, holding a shotgun that looked like it should be mounted onto a battleship, looked nothing like the flighty secret agent who’d helped him a short while ago. His hands smarted painfully from the cuts. “What kind of glass do you guys use for windows? Shit that hurt.”

Turuin smiled weakly. “The old windows in Central are all diamond-based. A few hundred years ago a switch was made from that type to a less dangerous one, but many of the buildings in this particular area are still outfitted with the original style. I believe the modifications to this building do in fact include replacing the windows.”

“I think I have a few pieces stuck in my hands. Do you mind?” Garth couldn’t keep from staring openly at the withered old man. The voice was definitely Turuin’s, and as he stared, waiting for the gun-wielding octogenarian to make a decision, he began to see some familiar facial features underneath the sagging, grey skin and partially rheum-covered eyes. The similarity was gone quickly, dissipated underneath a tremor of agony.

“Fine.” Turuin waited patiently, watching as Garth unlaced his hands and began picking small chunks of very sharp glass out of the wounds. When his temporary prisoner was done, Turuin kicked a first-aid kit over to him.

Garth pawed through the kit looking for an antiseptic spray and nu-skin applicator. “So what the hell happened to you, Turuin?”

Turuin chuckled wetly, ending with a rasping wheeze that drew a look of worry from Garth. He motioned for Garth to mind his own business. “The whys and wherefores of my own demise are none of your concern, sa.”

“Fair enough.” Garth blasted one hand then the other with the antiseptic spray. “Care to tell me why you’re here? In the room I only just decided to invade less than five minutes ago? With a gun big enough to kill even me and a first-aid kit?”

“That,” Turuin said softly, “I am prepared to explain.”

“Good.” Garth replied, applying nu-skin to both his hands. He didn’t really need the stuff, as he’d heal quick enough, but the cuts hurt like the dickens and he had a suspicion he’d need to pay all kinds of attention to Turuin’s story.

“So you’re telling me some weird guy in a suit of armor came to visit you a few months ago and he told you exactly where I was going to be and what I was going to need and it turned out right, is that it?”

Turuin had spent many sleepless nights going over that first encounter in greater and greater detail, enhancing his perfect recall with a dizzying array of black market drugs, desperately trying to find some flaw in the experience that would prove it had never happened, that it was a test of loyalty to the cause. Nothing had worked, of course, other than Turuin’s realization that the figure, who had never named himself, was as real as anything else in the world. Realer, perhaps, because of his knowledge of future events.

The agent nodded.

“And then he called you up after you helped me at the prote shop and told you to help me out again, right?” Garth checked the time. Turuin had given an annotated story, citing Garth’s own pressing time schedule as the reason, but Garth was not a man to let this particular dog lie down. The interrogation, markedly more peaceful than his last, showed no sign of stopping at the forty-five minute mark.

“He did, yes.” Turuin had been consumed by that crystal-armored man’s visage. Even now, as he lay dying, his thoughts turned to the warnings, the flickering suit of light, the hissy echo surrounding the being.. Turuin feared that he had begun to worship the being, and for frighteningly good reason: everything he’d heard, every word coming from the helmet, had come to pass. Everything foretold had occurred. Turuin knew next to nothing about Gods, or the miracles they were supposed to perform, or the countenance they were supposed to carry, but he knew he’d been ordered by one. Or the Devil, considering the end result that was called for.

The only thing Garth knew for certain was that Turuin believed with his last ounce of strength that he’d met this ‘Stranger’ of his; to him, it sounded like a fairy tale, possibly brought on by whatever Mengele-like methods had given Turuin life in the first place. There was, unfortunately, no getting around Turuin’s presence in the here and now. To hear the dying agent tell it, he’d been waiting in the room for five hours.

Sitting in a room that had been chosen on a spur of the moment, with the necessary equipment to treat serious cuts and a boomstick big enough to shoot a hole through a tank.

“So why are you here?” Garth waggled his hands in the air. “I mean, assuming for the moment that I buy any of this crap.”

Turuin smiled thinly. He was very close to death now, and there was something he needed to know, even if it meant failing the God/Devil. “Give me your reasons for coming here, sa, and I will tell you want you need to know.”

“I am here to open the Box, sa.” Garth admitted, feeling a slight burden lift from his shoulders. “It’s mine. I don’t know how I know this, or even why it’s mine, but it is. It won’t open for anyone else, no matter how long they try, or the methods they use. It’s mine, and I came here to open it, and that’s what’s going to happen.”

It was just as the God/Devil had said. Turuin closed his eyes. Opening the Box would not be the start of things, or even in the chain of events, given the way things would eventually turn out, but Garth didn’t need to know that. “Surely you know what will happen.”

“I do. Panic in the streets, the end of all things as the people knew it, that sort of thing.” Garth looked at Turuin. “I guess the higher-ups knew a long time ago that no one could open the Box, is that it?”

Turuin nodded. “True.”

“I tried the easy way, Turuin, I really did. I made a formal motion that was intercepted by the OverSecretary.” Garth hefted his proteus. “He gave me this, and citizenship. He told me that although I was a Trinity spy, he had plans to use me and let me go. I agreed because it got the guy off my ass and because it got me this nifty spy-prote.”

“And now that you know you cannot possibly hope to win against a God soldier? How does this affect your plans?”

Garth decided not to tell Turuin that the jury was still out having lunch on that one. It’d only confuse the poor bastard further, and the last thing anyone should feel when dying was confusion. “I’m pretty sure that whatever Box is going to be present in the Arena isn’t going to be the real one. I doubt it’s ever been the real one. Same goes for the one on display in the museum. Once I’m done with my current … mission, that’s my next step: find out where the real Box is. If I’m wrong, I open it there on the spot. Maybe I can do it without anyone copping wise. If it’s the one in the Arena, well, I expect a crazy Offworlder opening the Box on Systemic television’s going to cause a massive ruckus.”

“And if both are false?” Turuin asked shallowly.

“Then I use Huey to find where the real one is hidden and take it from whoever’s got it.” Garth gave Turuin a hard, hard look. “It’s mine, sa. No matter what it’s become for your people, it’s mine. And I need it.”

“Why?”

Pursing his lips thoughtfully, Garth answered. “The Box is the key to my memories, Turuin. The man you see before you is barely even a third complete. There are more mysteries inside my own head than anywhere else. Every day yields answers, yeah, but with that knowledge comes a million more questions.” He thought about the blood pouring from his eyes, the pain of going exdee, the confusion he felt towards his goals. “Quite frankly, I think if I don’t get in there sooner than later, I’m going to die. And I don’t want to die, Turuin. At least, I don’t wanna push up daisies without knowing who I am first.”

Turuin smiled weakly at Garth’s answer, because even though he was dying, he saw how much it had cost the man to speak so truthfully. It was an honest answer, and a reasonable goal. Garth had indeed done the right thing by approaching the government first –if only they had agreed, they could have controlled the incident without reproach. The public need never have known, and perhaps the future would be a little less grim; by forcing Garth down this road, they would give him cause to love Hospitalis, and the man would never willingly give up his adopted home...

Turuin understood his government’s decisions. There was no reason at all to heed the wishes of an Offworlder making utterly ludicrous claims. Doing so, even in secret, would make them equally foolish: at the same time, though, it would have cost them nothing and gained them everything by making friends with Sa Garth N’Chalez. And now Garth would fall in love with Hospitalis, and all manner of terrors would befall her and the other planets. “You are going to free your AI tonight, aren’t you?”

“Yes.” Garth gestured with his prote-arm. “No matter how awesome this bad boy right here is, there are areas in the government networks I need access to, things I need to make happen that I can’t accomplish with this prote. Huey has the computational power of your entire system, and I have a way to merge the two together. Or, at least I think I do. It’s either that or everything blows up, or he goes crazy. But I need him. And the way to get him is through the Portsiders, and the way to the Portsiders is through Ashok Guillfoyle.”

Turuin closed his eyes. Artificial Intelligence on Hospitalis. The opening of the Box by an Offworlder. Quite possibly the two of the worst things ever conceived of by Latelians were going to take place because of a single man’s desires. Oh yes, it was better that he was not going to live through the day. “Download all the information and software from my proteus. It contains the highest-level access codes available. With them, you can walk right into the Guillfoyle without immediately triggering any alarms. Don’t worry about the guards. They follow the advice of their avatars without restriction. Ten minutes in, though, redundant servers will start researching the codes and comparing them to on-site data. Shortly after that, they’ll determine that you aren’t me, and then you’re on your own.”

Garth started downloading the data off Turuin’s prote. He was grateful for the help, even if he couldn’t trust the source; Turuin wasn’t helping because he wanted to, he’d been forced into it by someone with very detailed information about events that hadn’t happened yet. He had the troubling feeling that Turuin had broken some kind of rule by confessing to the armor-wearing stranger’s influence, and wondered what would come of it. He looked at Turuin. The agent’s face was contorted with an agony Garth could only imagine. “Thanks, Turuin.”

“Thank you. Now do it.” Turuin opened his eyes even though he couldn’t see through them any longer. Before he’d begun the impossible tale of a man in crystal armor, he’d ruthlessly extracted a promise from Garth; when everything was said and done that day, he wanted a bullet for thanks.

Before putting Turuin out of his misery, Garth had his proteus scan the information and programs for any viruses or other malicious software that would interrupt his plans. When he was satisfied that Turuin hadn’t tucked any unwanted surprises inside the bulk of information, Garth drew his Stretch and put a round through the agent’s heart. Turuin gave a shocked gurgle –it was almost as though he hadn’t believed Garth would do it- and then died, a faint smile on his desiccated lips.

Garth stood there watching with horrified fascination as Turuin began to age even quicker now that he was no longer in control of the various machines inside him; it was like that scene in one of the Indiana Jones movies where the guy died of extreme and rapid old age, although much messier and far too realistic. Garth gave an involuntary shudder. Everywhere he looked, there were signs that the rot infesting the Latelian soul ran from the top down. No one in their right mind would employ tactics and technologies like what they’d forced Turuin to go through, even if he’d done a good job and hadn’t abused his power. No one should have to go through that kind of torture every day of their lives.

When Turuin’s body was done force-deteriorating, Garth picked through the clothes, curious to see what he’d find. Nothing but a few odd lumps of metal and a few kilos of dust. There was no sign that a man named Turuin had ever existed. Not at all.

Garth stared at Turuin, or all that remained of him, suddenly unwilling to leave the room. He was still committed to the course action he’d set in motion, but Turuin’s unknown antagonist remained a niggling pain in the ass. Garth considered himself a well-rounded guy, easily able to believe thirteen different impossible things before lunch and have room left over for a few heavy philosophical conundrums before he went to sleep, but one thing he did not believe in was time travel. He did not believe that you could launch your space ship at the sun and use its powerful gravity to fling yourself back through time to save a crapload of whales. He did not for one second imagine that you could hook a nuclear generator up to a Delorean and send it back to the Fifties. It was just as impossible to believe you could wander through the vast genetic network of ancestors righting wrongs and saving souls. Time travel was impossible, plain and simple. It couldn’t be done.

The same went for fortune telling. The actions of a single man could not be so easily predetermined, so simple to guess. There were uncountable numbers of things –thoughts, emotions, external stimuli, other people- that affected the course of a person’s day. To be able to comprehend with absolute certainty what was going to happen before it happened was to have a machine –or a mind- capable of envisioning the entire scope of reality, and even then, there was another problem; to know the future and to act on it was to affect the outcome before it happened. Ancient Cassandra’s suffering had been a self-inflicted prophecy, and anyone acting on similar knowledge would run into the same problems.

Some people would like to argue that the data models generated by an artificial intelligence to plot the course of a civilization or to determine the specific responses a culture would have on any given thing was a form of fortune telling, but it wasn’t; no matter how in-depth, how involved a project was, an AI’s best model was still nothing more than a very carefully laid out guess. There was no room in the model for unpredictability or the purely random.

Like shooting the glass out of a specific window. Like a decision to come to Hospitalis. Like everything he was doing.

The unavoidability of Turuin’s presence and his awareness of Garth’s plans –which he knew for a fact he hadn’t told anyone- torpedoed those thoughts, which trouble the ex-mercenary deeply. Turuin had professed to a strong belief that the stranger had Garth’s best interests at heart, but there was truly no way to prove that. Sure, this mysterious crystal armored man had made things easier for him by putting Turuin in his path, but what would that ultimately yield? He’d be able to get into the Guillfoyle building easier, but things would go south very quickly when the building computers identified the passcodes used did not belong to the man who’d used them…

Garth shook his head. He didn’t like it, not one bit. He was going to abort, come at the plan a different way, take some more time to flesh things out. Going head-to-head with Ashok and his pet gang might have been a bad idea from the start, but it’d been his; right or wrong, good or bad, he’d been the one calling the shots.

Now, though, there was some freaky geek in a crystal suit running around behind … ahead… of the scene, arranging things to some other plan, and Garth just plain old didn’t dig that idea one bit. If the freaky geek wanted to explain what the hell was going –and along the way maybe prove that time travel really worked- then fine, Garth was willing to pop a squat and listen.

But until that happened, he was going to find another way to free Huey. Silently thanking Turuin for the now-useless assistance, Garth shouldered his way out of the room.

Half a second later, something roughly the size and shape of the known Universe knocked him on the back of the head…

… A tracking light from a Guillfoyle guard’s heavy duty slugthrower flickered across Garth’s eyes, forcing him to shoot blindly. A combination of luck and skill sent the bullet through the guard’s forehead. Knowing that there wasn’t much time before the guards caught up to him, Garth grabbed hold of the corpse before it hit the ground and dragged it around the corner. Hastily, he rifled through the guards pockets for spare ammo clips and any other useful gewgaws before running down yet another featureless hallway; beyond his wildest dreams, Garth discovered a pack of flat, palm-sized fragmentation grenades strapped to the man’s stomach. These were rescued, and then he was away down the hallway, trying as he fled to figure just what in the fuck was going on.

The last conscious memory he had was in the restaurant. He remembered eating, and working on the blueprints for the relay station. He remembered tipping Missy a big pile of cash for putting up with him, and then heading out to take care of business.

Then, nearly having his head taken off by a trigger-happy guard with an over-sized machine gun. Between paying his bill and now, nothing. It was as though he’d been dropped down into the middle of the shit, only the funny thing was, everyone else seemed to know what was going on.

Garth looked over his shoulder, attention drawn by a ratcheting clatter that sounded awfully like … yes, someone was flinging frag-grenades down the hallway at him, banking the deadly explosives off the corner with such skill that Garth knew, just knew, this was a thing they practiced at the Guillfoyle Family Picnic. Garth jammed his head down and bulled forward, hands on his ears; he wasn’t going to be able to protect himself from the concussion, but the least he could do was make sure he could hear. A few seconds later, just as he neared a door, a huge wall of force laced with tiny shreds of razor-sharp shrapnel picked him up and threw him against the wall.

Garth groaned, trying to find his hands and feet, and then his fingers and toes. His back was an aching mess of minor lacerations, which, he supposed was a godsend; any slower, and the ribbons of metal would’ve turned him into sushi. “Not cool, guys.” If anything, shouting angrily at the guards may give them pause for thought, if only on how long they should laugh before resuming Hunt Garth For Fun.

Before the smoke could clear, Garth took one of his stolen guards, set the timer, pulled the pin, and chucked it down the hallway; a faint ‘clunk’ told him that the grenade was now doing double-duty as a landmine. Hopefully the men chasing him wouldn’t realize he’d stolen some of his own hardware and walk right into the thing. Then he ran into the room that he’d so obviously been herded towards.

It was a grim situation, indeed. Or so the guards probably thought; the room was one of those cardboard cut-out meeting rooms that were absolutely featureless and had only one way in or out. Unless, of course, the person running away was actually small enough to fit into the ducts that brought deliciously chilled, air-conditioned and pre-freshened air for corporate fat-asses. With next to no time left to waste, Garth grabbed hold of a huge wooden table and dragged it to the door. Then he piled all the chairs he could find on top of that, then added a holographic projector liberated from a closet for good measure. It wouldn’t stop the bastards for long, but he had enough breathing room to actually think.

Everything was slowly coming back to him; rather than sneak in, he’d been forced almost from the get-go to start plugging away at the faux construction workers with his silenced Stretch. He’d worked quickly and methodically all the way up to the third floor, where he’d burst into the secret relay room. Startled, the network technicians hadn’t put up much of a fight. Then, with all the time in the world, he’d spent a solid twenty minutes data-stripping their protes, sending the spEyes faulty programming, and wreaking a cosmic level of damage to the security systems inside the Guillfoyle building.

Or that’s what he seemed to remember. It was almost as though … no. Garth shook his head. There wasn’t enough time to try and deconstruct his memories to see if what he thought had happened was the truth; all that mattered was that he was where he needed to be, and was in the pursuit of his goal. The guards, smug and cocksure, knocked politely on the door. Garth chuckled. Now that they thought they had him cornered, they were pretending it was all one big joke; they’d behaved much differently at the beginning of their time together, discovering with horrific shock that all the internal defensive systems were busy singing ‘I’m a Yankee Doodle-Dandy’, all the exits were sealed, and external communication bands were shut down. That they were able to find the humor in the situation after all of that and the deaths of five other men in wildly unpredictable and very bloody ways was either a testament to Guillfoyle training or a sign they’d cracked under the pressure. Regardless, Garth grabbed the sole remaining chair and climbed into the ventilation shaft. He had just enough time to replace the ceiling cover and scuttle frantically out of the way before the doors to the room exploded inwards.

As he crabbed-walked quickly through the maze of interconnected shafts, faint strains of a heated argument between the surviving members of the night crew reached Garth’s ears. A few of the men seemed to think it was a test, while others argued it was government infiltration. The commander warned them all to shut up so he could check to see if his proteus carried any schematics for the ventilation system.

Garth scooted up a ten meter shaft as quietly as he could to avoid telegraphing his location to the listening ears of his enemies. Crouching at the top, he strained his hearing, and, sure enough, he detected a faint thumping that meant the commander’d found someone small enough to fit into the ventilation shafts. Since they couldn’t possibly know his target, Garth looked for the next grill leading into a room and dropped down into it. He carefully replaced the grill, and smiled.

Luck was on his side. If Lady Fortune really liked him, though, the security team after his ass wouldn’t figure out their prey was no longer in the shafts. Eventually, they’d come to the conclusion that he’d snuck out somewhere along the line, but with their proteii working at less than half-capacity, the chances they’d catch him now diminished with every passing second; they’d only come close to perforating him because of his own damned stupidity. Now that he was back on track and thinking straight, he was the Invisible Man.

Creeping softly, Garth opened the office door slowly and looked both ways down the hall. The coast was clear. From this point on, the task was a simple one: get into Ashok’s office without attracting any more lethal hit squads, and treat the man’s private network system like a funhouse –raiding the secret spEye command center’s systems had yielded an unexpected amount of information concerning Ashok’s predilections. It seemed the man liked to keep his hands in everyone’s pockets, and had configured his personal computers accordingly; not only could the man run the entire building’s defenses from his office, there was also –if the files he’d read were to be trusted- an obscene amount of encrypted files.

If Garth knew anything, he knew that the encrypted files of an upper-echelon thug like Ashok Guillfoyle would be good reading. Good enough to convince the man to come to his offices, unarmed, alone, and without God soldiers on tap. Good enough to force him to call up the Portsiders, rather than messing around with unnecessary steps.

Whistling softly under his breath, Garth checked his location in the building against that of the stolen blueprints –again, ripped out of the now-defunct station-, reoriented himself and was on his way.

Locked out of their main systems, unable to exit to call for help and with their own internal communications systems completely compromised, the security guards were at a total loss on how to proceed. They literally did not know what to do because none of their contingency plans had involved alternative methods on how to deal with someone who’d managed to do the impossible: first, breaking into the building, second, deactivating the defensive systems, and third, reactivating them under his control. Uri knew their intruder was still somewhere on the premises, he just had no idea where to start looking, or how to proceed. They still had the ambient connectivity that linked proteus to proteus, but without the control system, that small shred of hope was only worthwhile if they were actually chasing the intruder. And even then, the man had proven himself unusually adept at avoiding capture.

According to the training manuals and info-seminars, anyone breaking into a building like the Guillfoyle was willing to kill to stay alive, and their mysterious visitor was text-book when it came to that sort of thing. Beyond that, though, the trespasser had also proven a fondness for sidelining attack teams in very improbably ways: four men were stuck in an elevator between floors, six men were irrevocably locked in a bathroom until the door, welded shut with an illegally owned laser weapon stolen from someone, and three men were tied up in a droid closet.

Uri’s proteus chimed, and for a long moment, he thought he was imagining things; being without a proteus, even for an hour, was awful. He read the diagnostic data streaming along one side of his prote. If the data was not corrupted by the same process that had given their intruder access, he was calling from Sa Guillfoyle’s personal offices.

That drove the situation from incredibly bad to suicidally rotten. Sa Guillfoyle’s personal main controlled the entire building, including the labs, weapon facilities, rows upon rows of deep data storage, everything. From there, their prototype mechanized infantry robots could be deployed. From there, illegal mutagen viruses could be released, not only into the building, but into the air outside. From there, every single thing Guillfoyle knew could be stolen. And if Uri heard right, Sa Guillfoyle knew an awful lot, and none of it was any good.

“Hey!” A voice shouted from one of the loudspeakers. “Answer the fucking phone!”

Uri tapped a button. “Yes?” he asked stiffly. Hopefully the man didn’t know he was in a position of supreme authority.

“Lissen,” Garth said from his lofty vantage point, “I am in control of this facility, from the top to the bottom and everything in the middle. You follow me?”

Uri’s heart sank. “Yes.”

“Care to tell me why the inside of this facility is riddled with autocannons and laser support? Ashok shoot people when he gets bored or something?”

Sections along the walls and ceilings popped open with a loud clatter. Autocannons and laser grid emitters began moving into place, tracking the motions of the rest of his team with mechanized doggedness. If any of his men panicked and opened fire, the automatic systems would respond with lethal force.

“You have access to the computers, why don’t you tell me?” Uri asked, stalling for time. He didn’t have any idea –beyond living for a few more minutes- what he was stalling for, but he couldn’t let his troops see how terrified he was.

“I’m busy decrypting them all.” Garth paused. “Your boss was paranoid, eh? Anyway, here’s the thing. I can’t find a prote-sign for Ashok Guillfoyle anywhere in this fucking office, and I really need to talk to him. Do you know how to call him up?”

“He…” Telling anyone not authorized to know Ashok’s prote-sign was a sure-fire way to get killed, but the presence of immediate death was an overwhelmingly convincing reason to be as forthcoming as possible. “I’ll flash you the access codes. But it won’t get you anywhere. He won’t bargain with you or give you what you want.”

“Oh,” Garth said cheerily, “I’m sure you’ll find I can be pretty persuasive, given the right leverage. Uhm, you guys hang loose. I should warn you the cannons and robots and things all have orders to kill you if come up to this floor, if you try to blow up any of the walls leading to the outside world, or if you try to cut the power. I’m sure I don’t need to remind you that while you might succeed in shutting the main power off, the defense systems all run on coded backup generators that’ll need Ashok’s personal access codes to shut down. Unfortunately, by the time he gets here, you’d all be killed very dead. So head on over to the cafeteria and eat some food. On me.”

Garth tracked the despondent security teams as they made their way to the cafeteria. To make their lives a little easier, he’d reactivated internal communications for all of them; watching grown men stumble around, suddenly cut off from the perpetually streaming presence of other people was depressing. It had been far too similar to watching ants suddenly losing their Queen.

Ashok Guillfoyle’s prote-sign was unlike any he’d seen so far; standard proteus communication links were very similar in nature to IP addresses used to identify computers and servers on the Internet of his own time. The primary difference between that long ago format and the Latelian proteus identification sequences was the addition of an extended, unique algorithm based on a person’s name or something similar; that code was automatically added to the primary city servers, and as a person moved through the streets and across relay boundaries, the proteus was continually pinged, making it easy for average citizens to be found.

Ashok’s, though, was unlike anything Garth’d seen in the city so far. It lacked anything that resembled the identifying algorithm or the sequential numbers for a proteus. Head cocked to one side, mind running over the various different possibilities, Garth found the answer, and had to laugh at the man’s audacity.

Ashok Guillfoyle wasn’t even using Hospitalian networks. He was using a Q-Comm network to communicate with the Portsiders, which explained why he hadn’t been identified as the main man behind the gangster’s activities; as a government-funded Research and Development company, Ashok needed to guarantee that the different ideas he worked on couldn’t be stolen by a net-savvy hacker looking for massive data transfers along the networks. In order to hack into a quantum entangled communication beam was fiendishly complex, even with a top-of-the-line AI. Without one, there was no way anyone in Latelyspace could even begin to make a dent in the phenomenally complex counter-intrusion measures. By agreeing to let Ashok work for them, the government had given him all the things he’d need to fund his own personal criminal empire.

It was genius, and Garth wanted a Q-Comm system for himself, especially if he was going to continue being the target for disgruntled people with far too many resources at their fingertips.

Inspiration spoke to Garth, so when he placed the call to his number one mortal enemy of the day, he did so as Harry Bosch.

“Who is this?” Ashok demanded, his dark skin going darker with rage the moment he realized that he was being called from someone inside his own offices.

“Call me Harry.”

Ashok smiled, his face twisting with obscene pleasure. “Well, Sa Harry, I can assure you that whatever you think you’ve accomplished, you haven’t. God soldiers are going to be on their way.”

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you.” Garth said through Harry. To show the man who was boss, Garth flashed some of Ashok’s own decrypted files. “I think Chairwoman Doans would be very interested in learning that you’ve been working on ways to counter a God soldiers effectiveness with things like Experimental Drug #467-a, don’t you? Or that you’ve begun implementing your own hardwired commands into all of the protean systems you develop for other people? Why don’t you come down here so we can have a little talk?”

“Possession of those files proves nothing.” Ashok snapped, though with considerably less vehemence than before. “They could be faked.”

“Uhuh, uhuh, that they could.” Garth admitted as he flashed Ashok video feeds from laboratories where Guillfoyle scientists worked on their illegal projects. “But these files couldn’t be faked. Not if I ran them real-time out to one of the Entertainment network feeds with a mile-wide trace signal. I am in control of your entire life, Ashok Guillfoyle. If you call in the soldiers, two things are gonna to happen. One, I will gut your data systems –I’ll keep copies of all the good stuff for myself, of course. Two, before I kill your enterprise, I’ll make sure people who find this kind of info interesting get copies as well. Actually, there’s a third thing, too. I’ll shut down all the security systems and invite all the fucking gangsters and thugs and thieves down here for an auction. You follow me?”

“You wouldn’t dare.” Ashok hissed.

“Ashok Guillfoyle, there is very little in this life that I wouldn’t dare to do. Crushing you like a puny bug is an aperitif to what I really want done, so unless you get your ass down here in the next … fifteen minutes, you should start looking for a home. Any longer than that, and you should buy a coffin. The soldiers show up, and your face will be the most widely known face in the entire system. And don’t do anything stupid like bring your own security teams in, because I control the defensive network and I’m reprogramming it now, all right? Hugs and kisses, see you soon.” Garth ended the comm as Ashok fishmouthed his way through a bout of apoplectic fury.

It was time to find out why Ashok Guillfoyle wanted an AI so desperately he was willing to sacrifice his own personal crime organization to get hold of one.

Garth had to give it to Ashok: the man was ambitious. Stupid, but ambitious.

Metallurgical sciences in Lately had stalled out around three thousand years ago, leaving the Latelians with a very durable metallic alloy that could be applied to virtually any frame they wanted through a complicated electroplating rig; duronium was insanely heat-ablative, and, depending on the thickness, resilient to a staggering level of physical punishment. With the final secrets of their glorious Box still at arm’s reach, research teams turned their attention elsewhere, caring little for the repercussions of their wonder alloy.

While the scientists toiled onwards, some few theoreticians maintained that the possibilities of alloys a hundred times, a thousand times more efficient than mere duronium existed. All it would take, these poor few who turned their eyes away from the glory in search of answers, was the right inspiration. Everyone, even their detractors in the academic world, admitted quite readily that duronium was not the final answer –they had only to look at the Box to know this was the unvarnished truth. But wherever the Box had come from was the only place where the final key could be found; it was a fool who tried to crack a secret like that. Peer-pressure and the disappearance of all-important grant money eventually convinced all but a few of the diehard fanatics that their time and efforts were put to better use working on the then fledgling science called cybernetics.

And so it was that dreams of the Final Metal disappeared, relegated onto dusty shelves and ancient, long-forgotten corners of the network.

Until Ashok Guillfoyle showed up on the scene, brash, young, idealistic. He had promised in the most explicit phrases that his teams were close to a breakthrough of epic proportions, one so profound that the entire duronium market would be revolutionized over night.

Of course, the whole thing had been a spiel designed to lure eager government agencies in hook, line and sinker. The experiments, which Garth amused himself with briefly, had enough pizzazz and flare to convince the layperson, and maybe even hopeful literati into believing otherwise. But Garth, who knew just what the Box was made out of and how to make the metallic alloy if he was ever given a chance to relax for a couple years, found Ashok’s ballsiness to be just about the funniest damned thing in the world.

A bold move, one that resulted in massive benefits along with renewed contracts for preexisting agreements. Large sums of money that the government couldn’t really afford to spend anywhere else except on keeping their society running wound up in Ashok’s pockets, money that he immediately turned over to his illegal R&D teams.

Bold, and yet uncompromisingly stupid, because sooner or later, the lie would be revealed.

Without an artificial intelligence capable of processing phenomenal amounts of data at unrestricted speeds, it was impossible to crack The Final Solution. Yes, a Muslim ceremony had sparked the entire concept of harmonic reinforcement in the mind of an attending scientist, and yes, human minds had eventually come to understand how to combine harmonies with other ‘invisible’ influences like gravity and n-space manipulation to reorganize the atomic structure of their own form of duronium, but … without even a fledgling AI mind to organize and coordinate thousands of different processes occurring on a molecular level, there was simply no way it could be done. The human mind, while wonderful and virtually limitless in terms of potential, was incapable of the task.

Garth wished he could travel back in time to the moment when Ashok and his development teams had realized their big flub; the look on the man’s face would’ve been awesome. In all likelihood, Ashok hadn’t intended to lie to Chairwoman Doans. Discovering the next step in duronium was like the Holy Grail for the Latelians, and besides, anyone stupid enough to lie outright to a woman with Doans’ disposition towards sending her God soldiers out on the town at the slightest provocation would never had made it as far in the business world as Guillfoyle. Their inability to produce quadronium for investors was the sole reason why everyone in the company was now looking at ways to stop, immobilize, or otherwise kill the theoretically unkillable God soldiers: when Doans found out, it was going to be mayhem.

Garth was banking on the fact that Ashok Guillfoyle would do whatever it took to keep his secret research secret.

Ashok sent the necessary landing permissions through to the nearest Federal relay system and touched down inside the plaza, angrier than mere words could sum up. He could not imagine how a thug had accomplished the impossible feat of breaking into his research facility. If it weren’t for the fact that the man, whoever he was, had sent packets of information corroborating his statements, Ashok would’ve considered the incident a hoax.

But it wasn’t. His proteus, configured to automatically dredge through the buildings protean mains within ten feet of the door, did nothing. As a man who liked to keep on top of what he attaching his name to, Ashok was dependent on being kept up to date one everything that happened; the only way someone could keep his proteus from updating itself was if they were in control of the building. Unbelievable.

The doors wouldn’t open either. Ashok pounded angrily on them until his proteus chimed. He looked at the caller. It was the thug. “I cannot imagine you want me outside attracting attention.”

“No.” Harry Bosch said with a sly grin. “Of course not. Hold on a sec while I check some stuff out.”

Ashok’s proteus began spilling data into the ether. Unable to stop it, the businessman watched on, horrified, as everything he kept closest to him was drained out of the proteus’ capacious memory banks until he was left with nothing but an empty shell.

“Good.” Harry nodded. “You didn’t make any calls or warn anyone, just like I asked. You’re a smart cookie, Ashok. Come on in. Don’t mind the laser cannons and things. They think you’re a designated target. Sort of like an emissary from another country whose considered a threat until they’re gone. Don’t go anywhere except to the elevator that’s already open, don’t push any button other than the one that’s for your personal offices. The internal communication system is up, so if you want to talk to your security guards to see how they’re feeling, go right ahead.”

Ashok waited for the doors to open, fuming. He had no intentions of finding out how his security detail felt. They’d be lucky to live. The situation was untenable, and yet, for now, there was nothing he could do; the nature of the data files that the master thief had access to meant that he was untouchable until something permanent could be done.

Ashok hurried quickly through the doors and made a beeline for the elevator. Obviously nothing could be done until he got the intruder out of the building. Once that happened, Ashok planned on making a call to the Chairwoman. She seemed very willing to use her soldiers at the smallest pretense. Someone breaking into a civilian research facility with government and military contracts would give her an excuse to roll out the very best of her God soldiers in the most spectacular way possible. Ashok was angry, yes, but he wasn’t stupid. There was no way that the intruder, whoever he was, could expect to make it through the night, no matter how talented.

Garth watched Ashok through the spEyes in the elevator and in the hallways, vastly amused at the man’s discomfort. As far as Garth was concerned, everything Ashok Guillfoyle suffered through was perfectly justified. If it hadn’t been for the overreaching grasp of one single businessman, his entire experience on Hospitalis could very well have been completely different. For one, the death toll wouldn’t be as high. For another, well, Garth couldn’t think of another at the time, but it would come to him eventually. Every few seconds, Ashok attempted to access the main servers for the building, each time meeting with absolute failure –the dark-skinned corporate executive met each of these disappointments with a shocking display of cursing and kicking of walls.

Not once during the ten minute trip did Ashok make any efforts to get in touch with his security teams.

If the idiot wasn’t so concerned about proprietary information, he’d learn within seconds that an Offworlder, not a Latelian, was in command.

“Strike one.” Garth said to himself, priming one of the viral programs he’d loaded into Ashok’s systems in preparation for the man’s own stupidity; the lowest and most non-essential string of databases and information caches were instantly purged. The other two viruses Garth had installed into the servers were far more complex than the first, and were dependant on actions undertaken directly by Ashok; he would be warned that the viruses were there, and what he would need to do in order to avoid activating them, but after his failure to demonstrate even the smallest bit of kindness, Garth didn’t think Guillfoyle Enterprises would be doing much of anything in the near future.

To frighten and demoralize Ashok, Garth had programmed all of the counter-insurgency weapons –the interior cannons, recoilless rifles and other non-mobile equipment- to respond to the man’s presence by moving around and making a lot of noise. The first time Ashok walked by a laser cluster on the top floor, it began spiraling madly, each of the emitters pulsing low-level –and absolutely non-dangerous- beams of light. Ashok let out a very girlish scream and hurried down the long hallway, no doubt regretting his decision to force supplicants to his endless wisdom to take the ‘Long Walk’ to his office.

Garth indulged in a hearty round of laughter before activating the comprehensive hologram program he’d built up using Ashok’s own detailed library and information from his prote. Garth had a big surprise planned for Guillfoyle.

Ashok banged open the door to his office, hurried inside and slammed the door shut, gratified that none of the weapons had actually opened fire on him. His lovely hallway had been transformed into a terrifying gauntlet and it was his sincere intention to make that hallway a third its presence size the moment he regained control of his building.

“Right on time.” a voice commented gruffly from just behind his finely engraved wooden desk.

Ashok could not believe his eyes. The intruder, the man who’d made short work of a multi-billion dollar security system and who had turned all of the mains against the rightful owner, was a God soldier. And one that had been out of the military for some time, if his ability to accurately judge the ill-effects of being taken off the supplements wasn’t impaired; as part of the program to defeat the God soldiers Ashok had become as intimately knowledgeable on the systemic degradation a God soldier went through when the supplements were no longer available. At first, the symptoms were relatively mild, really nothing more than a slight reduction in the machine/mind interface controlling the cybernetic joints. From there, things declined rapidly; once the vitamin and chemical nutrients the soldiers were given was completely washed out of the body, rejection rates for the joints and other ‘onboard’ systems began destroying the organic portions of the body. As the rejections continued, more and more of the afflicted soldier’s internal organics –heart, lungs, liver, bones- were consumed by the deleterious machinery, until death, painful and prolonged, took them.

Ashok had it on good authority –mainly from captured God soldiers- that death by consumption was not a pleasant one. The trespasser looked very close to death and was probably in an insurmountable amount of pain. “You’re a type III soldier, aren’t you?”

Harry Bosch’s hologram was controlled directly by Garth, who was cunningly hidden by the same machinery that had given his Latelian alter ego life in the first place. Continually mapped by sensors mounted into the walls and ceiling, anything Garth did would affect Harry; by the same token, the audio filters running Harry’s voice damped out any chance Ashok had of hearing anything but what good old Bosch had to say. “Yeah.” Harry admitted grudgingly.

“How long have you been decommissioned?” Ashok asked, hoping he sounded paternal. He knew from his previous experiences with dying soldiers that they often responded well to concern and interest in their military careers. The situation was thankfully still salvageable if he could manipulate the beast.

“Year and a half.” Garth had picked the length of time based on the figures in Ashok’s database; Harry and his grossly malformed body –some of his machined parts had already been jettisoned, leaving behind grotesque, barely healed wounds- fell right into the median of survivability.

Ashok moved further into the room, eyeing the man. “What’s your name, soldier?”

Garth had to resist the urge to laugh at Ashok’s audacity. The fool was actually trying to handle the situation. “Harry Bosch.”

“Well, Harry,” Ashok said soothingly, “what’s this all about?”

Garth had given a great deal of thought to that. Clearly, Guillfoyle was using the Portsiders as a blind so he could steal the majority of nutrients targeted for decommissioned soldiers to further his own tests without endangering his own men; the bastards probably had no idea they were contributing to their own friends’ terrible deaths. Ashok had already bought the lie about Harry being a God soldier, so he would also choose to believe that the poor man was interested only in acquiring an unlimited supply of the drug. Garth knew from Jimmy –may he rest in peace- that the Portsiders had been planning a raid on the Space Port that very night. “I need the drug, Guillfoyle.”

“What?” Ashok feigned ignorance. This was one very well informed walking corpse.

Harry pulled his gun and pointed it at Ashok from across the table. “I know about the Portsiders, Guillfoyle. They talk when they drink, and they told me you can get them into the port whenever they, or you, want. I know they’re going there tonight.”

“If you kill me, you won’t get anything. You won’t even get out of the building.”

“If you don’t give me the drug, I’ll die, so what the fuck should it matter what happens to you?”

Ashok found that to be a very good point. “Other than killing me, what possible reason could I have for helping you?”

“If you don’t help me,” Harry grated, “I will send all your files out. Millions of people will learn what you’ve been doing to God soldiers, of the lies you told the government, and all your other secrets, too. That would be worse than dying for real, Guillfoyle. Tell me you think otherwise.”

“All right,” Ashok nodded, holding up his hands in defeat, “assuming I could make this happen for you, what is it exactly that you want to happen?”

“Before I tell you,” Harry grinned maliciously, “I need to know how you can do this. How you can keep getting people onto and off of the space port property without getting caught. I don’t want to go out there and get shot full of holes, even if I am dying.”

“I can only assume that you’ve somehow managed to program my systems to vomit their contents out into the world networks if something happens to you?” Ashok continued when Harry nodded smugly. “We built the network systems that run the port. Foreseeing the need to have unlimited access to its environs, I told my engineers to build several backdoors into them. I can make anything with a transponder signal or a proteus signal disappear. The surveillance programs automatically erase any location where the relay nodes get a hit using pre-recorded footage. There’s absolutely no way to trace it short of taking the entire network of systems down and installing a new one.”

“That,” Garth said, putting the barrel of his Stretch against Ashok’s spine, “is just what I wanted to hear. You’re a very smart man, Sa Guillfoyle. Or, you were.” He killed the hologram.

Ashok watched in astonished confusion as Harry Bosch disappeared in a burst of disintegrating pixels. “I don’t understand…”

“Of course you don’t.” Garth shoved Guillfoyle forward with his gun. He pushed his captive all the way over to the expensive leather chair and forced Ashok to sit down. When the Latelian realized who he was, the look on Ashok’s face was utterly priceless and well worth the diversion.

“You!” Ashok shouted. “YOU!”

“Me.” Garth sat on the desktop and pointed the gun casually at Ashok’s head. “Pretty neat, huh?”

“What’s this all about?” Ashok demanded, still unwilling to believe that the God soldier Harry Bosch had been nothing more than a complex hologram. Even in the midst of his confusion, though, Ashok found himself marveling at the surprising use of the extensive holographic emitters; by the time the Offworlder made to speak, Ashok believed he’d figured out the methods used to perpetrate such a flawless simulation.

“You want my AI.” Garth replied simply. He tapped a few commands into his proteus, pulling up the design specs on the device that Guillfoyle and his team of pet scientists had dreamed up to carry Huey off the ship without letting anyone be the wiser. “Where is this?”

“That’s purely theoretical.” Ashok said hastily.

Garth pulled up the purchase reports for the materials required. “Where is this device?”

Ashok paled. “I … it’s … I don’t have it.”

“Do the Portsiders have it?” Garth demanded, pressing the muzzle of his gun firmly into Ashok’s kneecap. “Having a kneecap blown off hurts like a motherfucker, Guillfoyle, so I would think carefully before answering.”

“Y-y-yes.” Ashok swallowed nervously.

“What do you need me for? You can get into the port unannounced, you can apparently hide the AI’s quantum emissions with this baffle dealie, so what possible reason do you have for wanting to kill me?” Garth moved the gun to one of Ashok’s eyes. He’d played around with that earlier, staring into the muzzle himself, and it was very disquieting. It was big enough to see the round in the chamber quite clearly.

“T-t-two reasons.” Ashok swallowed again, this time also repressing the urge to scream and babble. Garth N’Chalez had already proven himself to be very capable of considering life expendable. “One is because y-y-you would alert the authorities to the theft. T-t-t-the other is because I w-wanted to steal your money.”

“That is really disappointing, Ashok. You’re already richer than shit, what the fuck could you do with a few trillion more credits?”

“M-my net worth is only two and a half b-b-billion credits, N’Chalez.” Ashok snapped, suddenly angry. “You’re the richest man in Lately and you don’t even know it.”

“Well, I kinda did.” Garth admitted lazily. “Just didn’t really give a damn. Now, are the Portsiders going to try and steal Huey tonight or what?”

“Huey?” Ashok asked blankly. He spoke again as soon as he realized Garth was talking about his AI. “They were, yes, but now they’re on a manhunt for you. They’re not responding to any of my calls. The idiots.”

“Yeah, well, if you’d seen what I done to their buddies, you’d probably wanna kill me just as dead.” Garth poked the gun at Ashok’s nose. “You’re in luck, buddy. You’re going to have a chance to get what you want and the Portsiders are gonna get a crack at me.”

“What are you talking about?” Ashok frowned.

“You’re going to tell the Portsiders I’m at the space port. You’re going to tell them I’m there to visit with my AI, and that now is the best chance for them to grab the AI and to kill me. Two birds, one stone.”

“You think you can beat them all?” Ashok really couldn’t believe what he was hearing. The Offworlder was completely insane. “The entire gang is looking for you. They will tear you to pieces.”

“I know. There’s a catch.” Garth flashed Ashok’s main with the list of prote-sigs he’d stolen from the Devil Nuts. “You’re going to tell the port systems to ignore everyone on this list, as well as any associated vehicles and weapons.”

“You want me to stage a gang war at the space port?” Ashok shrieked. “Are you mad? God soldiers will show up within minutes after the conflict is detected. Not even I can tell the system to ignore gunfire.”

“You can do that for me or I can just go on ahead and call Doans up at home. I got her number off your private list. I think she’d be interested in learning a few things.” Garth poked Ashok in the ear with his gun. “What do you think? Sound fun? I bet she’d send some soldiers down here pretty fucking quick, yeah?”

“But it’ll be a massacre.” Ashok couldn’t deny that he’d gotten used to having the Portsiders at his beck and call. Here and abroad, the Portsiders had given him freedom to move more important assets around without jeopardizing the legal components of his company. Losing them would be like losing an arm or a leg…

Garth shot Ashok in the foot, and when the Latelian lurched forward, gasping and aching with shock and surprise, he grabbed hold of the man’s neck and slammed his forehead into the desk. Ashok’s screams subsided into mewling whimpers. Garth leaned in and began whispering in that deadly earnest voice that had driven Jamal insane at the end. “Listen to me very closely, Ashok Guillfoyle, and understand everything I say. Either I get what I want or I kill you and do it anyway. Your participation in this isn’t strictly necessary. I have the tools and the means to convince your gang leaders I am you with absolute flawlessness. I am giving you this opportunity to stay alive. The manner of that life isn’t high on my priorities because you tried to have me killed. I don’t care at all about the Portsiders or the Devil Nuts, but they have their uses in life just as they will in death. I assume your life is worth more than some mangy street thugs?”

Ashok nodded into the pool of blood streaming out of his nose. His foot was a dimly remembered ache at the end of his ankle.

“Groovy. Now. Do as I asked you and I can pretty much guarantee I won’t shoot you again.” Garth pulled Ashok’s head back up. In his anger, he’d broken the poor bastard’s nose. He reached out with blinding speed, took hold of the broken appendage, and savagely twisted, clicking it back into place. Garth smiled at Ashok when the bleeding stopped immediately.

“W-w-what do you want me to do again?” Ashok felt absolutely deflated. The pomposity had been beaten out of him with ruthless efficiency. His therapist was going to have a field day with the incident.

“Call your boys. Tell them I’m going to be at the space port in around an hour. Program the Devil Nuts prote-sigs into the system so they’ll be invisible as well. You can do all that, right?”

Ashok slumped in his chair. Even if he managed to survive Garth N’Chalez’ appetite for destruction, there was no doubt Chairwoman Doans and her staff would eat him alive for misrepresenting his scientific data and for bilking the government out of millions of misappropriated dollars. There would be very little left of Ashok Guillfoyle once he was done with the Latelian government. It would almost be worth it to tell N’Chalez to go screw and force the man to kill him right there on the spot. Almost, but not entirely. Taking a tremulous breath, Ashok began the procedures, first adding the Devil Nuts proteus signatures into the backdoor pass at the space port and then flashing a message that Garth had prepared to his Portsider contacts.

Garth clapped Ashok heartily on the back when all was said and done. “That wasn’t so damned hard, now, was it?”

Ashok didn’t say anything. All he could think about was getting medical assistance for his gunshot foot. But Garth wasn’t done with him yet.

“Now,” Garth began, swiveling the monitor towards him, “I know what you’re prolly thinking. You’re thinking that once I’m gone, you’ll be able to call the God soldiers and the Portsiders and whoever the hell else you want to get me out of your hair once and for all. And you can. Or, you can try.” He moved the monitor back so Ashok could examine the viruses being uploaded onto the main systems throughout the building. “All I wanted to do was come here and participate in the Contest, but you’re forcing me to be a really bad guy. So here’s what’s going to happen. If you place a call to any proteus other than my own in the next twenty-four hours, all of your data will be copied to zillions of networks and then ultra-encrypted so you can’t delete it to save your skin. The only way to keep this from happening is if you call me up and apologize, and it’d better be a sincere apology, or I’ll extend the time limit to some stupidly unrealistic length. This also includes all of your employees, so you can’t tell one of your security guards to place the call for you. Uncool, I know. The second virus is way cooler, though, and of the two, I prefer it. If you don’t stop your experiments on God soldiers right now, the next time that you, or anyone who works for you, says, types, or implies in any way anything that sounds remotely like God soldier, all your money goes to charity. You might be able to get away with it for awhile, but sooner or later, someone’ll fuck up. Now, because you’ve really pissed me off, you and whoever else is in this building is going to be stuck here for awhile; the doors and windows and all the other lockable doodads are going to shut down once I’m outside. If you try and circumvent or otherwise alter the programming, you and everyone else will automatically be identified as intruders, quite possibly ending your lives. Are you with me, Ashok?”

‘Y-y-yes.”

“Awesome.” Garth smiled toothily. “Oh, and I feel I should do my due diligence and tell you I’ve got a personal copy of a lot of your data on duronium and your anti-soldier techniques. I plan on working them through to their most logical conclusions, but only after the government tears you a new hole.”

“Don’t bother.” Ashok sighed. “There’s no way to improve beyond tertiary stage duronium.”

“Latelians are tremendously hampered by their philosophical leanings, Ashok.” Garth replied as he made his way out of the office. “No one in Latelyspace is emotionally, intellectually or spiritually capable of discovering the proper methods to turn duronium into quadronium and q-IV into … into whatever’s next.”

“How do you know all this?” Ashok demanded loudly, hobbling after Garth.

Garth paused at the elevator. He turned to look at Ashok, who was leaning against the door frame, breathing heavily and favoring his unwounded foot. “You’re looking at the guy who helped build your damned Box, Ashok.”

Ashok fish-mouthed for a few seconds and watched aghast as Garth stepped happily into the elevator, whistling a merry tune.