Unidentified Funny Objects 2 (23 page)

Instead the Profound Imperator just yawned, totally ostentatiously, complete with patting his mouth with the palm of his gauntleted hand and then stretching his arms over his head. “Please. The retgun’s powers depend on displacement, Kirtley. You can’t endow me with psychically contagious backstory unless there is a complete absence of contradictory information in the local node. In any informational conflict, the facts as they exist in reality will always win out over your feeble attempt to retroactively weave me into the local continuity. And since this world is
filled
with records about me, and populated by scores of my inferiors and servants and subjects and employees and helpmeets and slaves and assistants, and who all have very clear memories about me, your feeble attempt to press-gang me into your pathetic ego circus is pointless.”

Kirtley didn’t freak out or anything, but the impenetrable façade cracked a little. The retgun disappeared back into its invisible holster. “We’ve only been gone for two
days
,” Kirtley said. “You can’t possibly have that much infrastructure in place here already—”

“When the Prime Army decides to occupy a node, we don’t delay. This world is rich in timber, fossil fuels, and delicious megafauna. I haven’t been able to get mammoth steaks in the capital for
weeks
. And with no noticeably sentient land-dwellers to oppose our arrival? It’s low-hanging fruit. That this node happened to contain your hideaway was merely a happy accident.” The Professional Impenetrator stood up, and I stepped back, because that guy was at least seven feet tall. “A word of advice, ‘Kirtley.’ If you’re ever a wanted fugitive in the future, you might try hiding in a world with some
other
sentient creatures and technological artifacts? The energy signature of your little bat-cave here was visible on our first cursory scan. You’d have been better off hiding in the sewers beneath a teeming metropolis.”

“Run,” Kirtley said, and
then
Kirtley hurled the mecha-ferrets and triggered the sonic screamers in the heels of Kirtley’s boots and activated the collapsible ceiling and the biometric conditional trapdoors and called down the cyber-bats from their hidden ceiling holes and launched the remote flash-bang flares and all that other stuff. It was like an earthquake in a blender in an ambulance with a shrieking siren in a volcano at a rabies-infested petting zoo and we ran like hell and hit the escape chutes (I’d always hated polishing the slides, because I never saw the point, but here we were, Kirtley’s bullcrap validated once again).

We landed on the spongy bed of moss outside at the base of the slide and found ourselves surrounded by a full metric cohort of the Prime Army, complete with bioengineered venomous weevil-tanks and weaponized ice-lizards and, of course, a whole lot of guys in goofy armor with very practical-looking guns.

“Don’t listen to anything they tell you,” Kirtley said as they shackled us, taking away my purse, the jerks. I had some gum in there, and also explosives.

“Right,” I said. “The Prime Army are a bunch of treacherous liars.”

“Well, no,” Kirtley said. “They’ll probably tell you the truth. They don’t usually bother to lie. Which is why I’d really rather you didn’t listen.”

KIRTLEY IS A FIELD OPERATIVE for the Sublime Union of Ethical Anarchy and Sustainable Hedonism (SUE-ASH), a non-hierarchical Em-Banksian collective of augmented supergeniuses who live in a heavily-shielded node that’s all smart matter and Dyson spheres and Ringworlds and Leafworlds and computronium and sentient stars and uplifted intelligences, where the cockroaches are as smart as third graders and the third graders are as smart as weakly godlike Rosenbaumian AIs, and the AIs look like kinetic sculptures and take care of all practical matters with a cheerfully whimsical nonchalance, all while inventing new sexual board games in their spare time. After the cool vast impish intellects there discovered the principles behind the Seagroves-Raschke exotic matter bridge and learned how to travel to parallel universes, they decided to spread their ethos of personal freedom and really good designer drugs and beating up fascists (because you can beat up fascists without feeling guilty about it) across the known multiverse. Kirtley found me in a particular shithole of a dimension where malevolent clockwork robots ruled the few remnants of the human race—Kirtley was in full tough-guy-boy-drag then, helping to lead the rebels, pretending to be a refugee from the faraway Garbage Archipelago, and Kirtley saw something in me. (What Kirtley saw was that I’m awesome. I could make improvised explosive devices out of the guts of active clockwork soldiers without them even realizing it. Okay, that’s an exaggeration, but I was a fine blower-up-er of things.) After we reduced the clockwork men to cogs and gears and rubble, Kirtley showed me the marble and asked if I’d like to join Kirtley in making life miserable for assholes across the multiverse. The alternative was to help found a new democratic government and rebuild the wreckage of a world that had been altered to fit the whims of insane military automatons, and I’ve never been a big fan of cleaning things up, so I told Kirtley I was in.

“That is all complete nonsense,” the Profound Imperator said, rolling his eyes at me across the interrogation table. “Fabrication, confabulation, and outright lies.”

“What do you know about it, Professor Imp?” I wasn’t shackled or anything anymore, but they’d taken the pointy chopsticks out of my hair, and my spiked heels, and my hollow ring with the needle full of knockout drops, because I could use them as weapons, but it wasn’t like I didn’t have
other
weapons. “The Prime Army is the greatest enemy of SUE-ASH in the multiverse. Your entire government is a military dictatorship, the opposite of everything they stand for!”

“We are a meritocratic oligarchy, actually,” he said. “But close enough. There’s no such thing as SUE-ASH, though, is what I’m trying to tell you. Kirtley, as you call him, made the whole thing up. It’s
imaginary
. An anarchist techno-utopia full of benevolent wisecracking AIs? They say anything that
can
exist
does
exist somewhere in the multiverse, but I haven’t ever seen anything like
that
.”

I stuck my fingers in my ears and said “LA LA LA LA LA” but the bastard waited me out. My attention span has never been that great so I unplugged my ears after a while. “Okay,” I said at last. “Fill my mind with your poisonous lies.”

He returned to his folder, though it was looking more like a prop than an essential font of information. “Kirtley was an assassin in the employ of the Prime Army, one of the commandos we sent into technologically-advanced nodes in order to soften up resistance with a few targeted executions. Kirtley was consistently one of our most dependable and efficient operatives, at least until he had a crisis of conscience. He continued performing sadistic renditions acceptably for a couple of years into that crisis—we began to monitor him closely when his psychological evaluations showed spikes in the empathy area—but the zeal was gone. He continued out of momentum or laziness or lack of imagination, I suppose. Then the S/R bridge he was using on an assignment glitched—it happens sometimes—and sent him into an unsurveyed universe, specifically into the ruins of some kind of alien colony from the vastness of deep time, where he discovered the psychic manipulator you call the ‘rotgun’—”

“Rotgun? It’s the retgun. The retcon gun. The retroactive continuity gun.”

“Oh,” he said, and made another note in his folder. “I assumed, because it rots minds, sort of—never mind. Your way makes more sense. We’ve had to piece all this together from secondhand accounts and spotty surveillance, you understand. At any rate, once he acquired the retgun he began relocating his targets instead of killing them.”

This was some pretty world-shaking stuff as far as accusations go—we weren’t operatives of a secret utopian spy organization, Kirtley was a killer, what the eff—so I focused on the shreds of good news I could find. “I bet that drove you psychopaths crazy, Kirtley letting people live instead of slaughtering them as a warning to your enemies.”

“We’re pragmatic.” He shrugged. “Once we realized what Kirtley was doing, we stopped assigning him the people we wanted gruesomely murdered as grim tokens of our unspeakable power, and started sending him after people we just wanted removed, by whatever means. He was still a good asset, for a long time, in that capacity. And then… he met
you
.”

“You keep saying ‘he,’ but Kirtley’s not a he, Kirtley’s a
Kirtley
.”

“That’s true,” the Profound Imp said. “He comes from the planet Varley Eight, in the Russ node, and they outgrew gender binaries centuries before the Prime Army took over. Our organization is very progressive about social issues that don’t negatively impact our bottom line, and so we accept the fluid continuum of gender expression. I just say ‘he’ because I’m lazy and because it annoys you.”

“Oh, well, as long as
that’s
the reason. So Kirtley changed after meeting me, huh? Kirtley always said I had a good effect on Kirtley—”

“You certainly had
some
kind of effect. After he took you under his wing, he became an anarchist. Pried our surgical trackers out of his muscles, fried his blood-borne homing nanites with Vancean radiation from a dying sun, stole heaps of equipment, and did his best to vanish. And you know, we might have let him go, if he’d simply sauntered off to some unoccupied part of the multiverse to play house with you—the Prime Army is not vindictive, at least not when being vindictive has a poor cost-benefit ratio. But then Kirtley started kidnapping and relocating and retconning people we
collaborated
with, those useful traitors who help prepare the way for our arrival by turning over control of their cities and governments to us peacefully, removing the necessity to waste ammunition or destroy the resources we wanted to pillage in the first place—”

“Like Princess Stephanie.”

He winced. “You took out Princess Stephanie? That… will not improve your chances at trial. Things were in a very delicate stage with her node.”

I shrugged. “So Kirtley embroidered the truth a little when he recruited me.” (I was still holding out hope that there really
was
a SUE-ASH, an awesome super-science collective kept secret from the Prime Army, with Kirtley as some kind of tricky double-agent, but deep in my brain and somewhat deeper in my heart I suspected it was all bullshit.) “Kirtley’s still on the side of right and life and joy and chaos, and we’ll keep fighting until—”

“Don’t you even want to know who you
used
to be?” he interrupted. “Before Kirtley kidnapped you away to a foreign node and fired the retgun at you and made you believe you were ‘The Gen,’ sassy superheroine and platonic sidekick?”

“Not especially,” I said, because the very idea of the retgun being used on
me
opened up a spiraling howling void of profound discomfort at the center of my everything. I’d never even considered that my history might not be my own. If there’s one thing I’ve never lacked it’s self-assurance.

He shrugged. “Fine. Please yourself—I suspect you always do. All we really want, at this point, is to stop Kirtley from wandering around causing trouble—and of course we want the retgun, and the spatial-distortion technology Kirtley
also
found on that alien base. He made sure to blow it up on his way out, so all we recovered were non-working fragments of wrecked garbage.”

“You don’t have the retgun?” I laughed. “Because you can’t find the holster, of course. Because you don’t have Kirtley’s pocket-dimension/bag-of-holding technology. Oh, man, that’s hilarious. Kirtley will never give up the gun.”

“Oh, we think he will. He clearly has a weakness for you, so we’ll exploit that weakness. We’ll scoop out one of your eyes and slice off your ears in front of him, and from
there
—”

Well, fuck that noise, am I right? I reached into my own pocket-dimension access hatch, an invisible fist-sized square of nothing at my waist, and pulled something silver-shiny and lethally elegant out. The Pronounced Emptier started to shout, but come on, like I haven’t practiced this quick-draw shit in a million mirrors a billion times? I fired.

My gun wasn’t a retgun. Kirtley gets the retgun. My gun was a regular pistol, filled with blanks. But the blanks were tipped with short-term exotic matter bridge generators, keyed to specific useful universes—like miniature marbles, but they burn out after one use. I’m pretty sure the bridge I hit the Profound Imperator with took him to a world where even the grass is carnivorous. Kind of mean, but it can’t be all jellybeans and rainbows, even when you work for the non-existent secret service of an imaginary utopian/anarchic society.

I twiddled with the spatial field generator at my waist—the controls were invisible, just like the folded space it generates, but you learn to do things by touch—and stepped through an undimensional portal into a ten-by-ten room that’s pretty inexplicably walled in fake wood paneling, with water-spotted acoustic tile on the ceiling and a shag rug that looks like it’s been chewed by goats on the floor. As always, the place gave me the major-major creeps, because it was impossible not to think about what was beyond the walls, which was probably nothing. Not even empty space. And yet, sometimes, there was this horrible low-pitched buzzing, and things tapping on the walls from outside… There was a reason we didn’t use the inside of our bag(s) of holding as our lair.

In addition to heaps of miscellaneous crap in boxes, the marble and the retgun were there, hovering docilely in mid-air next to what looked sort of like the mouth of a ventilation shaft high up on the far wall, identical to the shaft on the other side, which I’d arrived through. I reached my hand through the far shaft and poked Kirtley hard in the gut. I heard him grunt. “You alone?” I said.

Another grunt, but it seemed pretty affirmative to me, so why not. I twiddled with the field generator and the ventilation shaft expanded to a me-sized rectangle, and I stepped through.

Kirtley’s holding cell was way scarier than mine, with gore-encrusted hooks on chains dangling from the ceiling and a tray covered in rusty tools and a cage full of mechanically-augmented rats with drillbit teeth. Kirtley was tied to a chair, with pretty limited mobility, which maybe explained why Kirtley hadn’t just snatched the marble from the bag of holding and jackrabbited off to an entirely other universe. Or maybe Kirtley didn’t want to leave me. Who knows?