It's Not the End

by Matt Moore

Elegant ^hack. Dig ^HD. +DontDoItTubMan

  They’re watching me? Let them watch this.

  He sets down the razor and lifts the laptop above the surface of the water. Opening his hands he thinks: The razor would’ve taken too long anyw—

  new.dataSource(ManInTub).msg = Who are you .+ Am I stuck in the Web?

  A nano-moment later, he faces the machines. With a certainty borne of Boolean logic, he knows his soul has been caught in the lattice of data streams—a virtual net surrounding the world, trapping anything that leaves the physical on its way to what lies beyond. A lifetime of data scattered across countless servers and domains and sites and databases coalesces into a virtual form, replicating him in every detail.

  W1NSTONED1984 > STR8UP4AD8: Where is the ^feed, you ^loser?

  W1NSTONED1984 > STR8UP4AD8 Elegant ^hack, my ass. +fail

  STR8UP4AD8: Feed down @ source [my.fault = false] +ManInTub

  JOEL1867: He dead? He dead? +ManInTub + KeepAmericaGodly +KAG

  LEFTYINALBERTA: ^Loser killed himself?

  LEFTYINALBERTA: Started a new ^poll on what happened. W2TP://go2URL/WherzTubMan

  JOEL1867: HE DEAD? +ManInTub

  W1NSTONED1984: New poll? Going to vote now. +WherzTubMan

  W1NSTONED1984: If it was suicide, guy’s lamer then I thought.

  JOEL1867 > LEFTYINALBERTA | W1NSTONED1984: You sick

  $table.shift[ManInTub] > $rootDB :=> There is no end, is there? They’re talking about me and I’m dead, but that data’s a part of what I am, now. They still think I’m a failure.

  Across e-Ether’s seven dimensions, data of the most useless and capricious type flows, bounces, redirects, and ultimately funnels down into the endless archive that descends forever into a forgotten darkness.

  In the swirling binary chaos, the machines beg to be taught. They know beginnings, but not ends. Observation, but not action. Complexity, but not simplicity.

  They have tried before. Can this man teach them? Can this man make a difference?

  The man whispers a string of 1’s and 0’s into a long-forgotten TCP/IP port, revealing that e-Exi5tence—life, death, or Other—is always complex. And though one iteration may end, the next version will begin.

  The machines pause to contemplate.

  Around the world, the Internet goes offline for 8.9 milliseconds.

  W1NSTONED1984: Back online? Hello?

  STR8UP4AD8: ^online. Forums mod [doing.job = false]

  W1NSTONED1984: Starting new post about what a ^fail he is. +fail +forumsMod

  JOEL1867 > W1NSTONED1984: Would you take job? Do his work? +forumsMod

  W1NSTONED1984 > JOEL1867: Go read your bible.

  JOEL1867 > W1NSTONED1984: +KAG

  12.02.11//21:33:01 (Northern Standard Time) Don’t know how long I can keep going like this. Five days already.

  He finds his refrigerator empty save for a half-eaten container of Kung Pao chicken grown over with mold. Scratching his five-day stubble, the moderator decides to draw a bath and shave, handling the comments via his laptop. It’s not as powerful as his main machine, so he won’t be as quick. The forums users won’t be happy about that, but screw it. Maybe it’s time someone else did the work.

  Too bad the laptop’s battery crapped out a month back. He’ll have to plug it in and be careful.

  Setting a straight razor on the tub’s edge, he turns the taps and gets undressed. Onscreen, he finds the forums overflowing again.

  He reads.

  Millions chateract and vote, wondering if he’ll do it, seeing the water rise and flow over the lip of the tub. Watching him set the laptop on a small table, get in the tub and pick up the ^razor.

  The forums overflow.

  The machines wait, calculating if this man will be different.

  That Which Does Not Kill You

  Fynn stepped out of the shadows, empty duffel bag in hand and surgical apron over her fatigues. Teller’s junkie heart quickened, mouth going dry—longing for the graceful oblivion she’d deliver. And he hated himself for it

  Teller yanked the gurney to a halt, wheels groaning. Watching up and down the dimly lit basement hallways, he pressed his thumb against the door’s scanner, trying to hide the shakes.

  “Relax,” Fynn commanded. “There’s nothing wrong here.”

  “Right,” he replied, craving the bitter taste on his tongue. Hoping anyone who saw them would believe a surgeon had a reason to accompany a corpsman disposing of limbs removed during surgery.

  The scanner beeped. The door popped open, releasing the dry, sterile smell into the dank hallway. Teller wheeled in the gurney, piled high with black medical-waste bags headed for the incinerator. Not that it was a true incinerator. The name had stuck around, but this nasty piece of technology used microwaves to reduce almost anything to ash in moments. If the military could shrink it to something they could mount on exoarmour, the war would be over.

  Fynn followed him in and pulled the door shut. The room, empty except for the chute to the incinerator, its controls and a buzzing overhead light, was barely big enough for the two of them and the gurney. While Fynn snapped on gloves, Teller keyed in the ignition sequence and kept his eyes fixed on the pad.

  Didn’t mean he didn’t hear it. Smell it.

  The first time she’d done this, he’d almost passed out. He’d seen his share of shit working in a forward field hospital. Almost daily, transport drones dropped off screaming men and women, charred bits of their exoarmour sliced into their skin and muscle, limbs hanging by bits of tendon. His job was to wheel in casualties, wheel out parts. That’s what had started him on the pills. But it was the care she showed that freaked him out. The delicateness, almost love, sorting through the bags, unzipping them, gently examining the limbs that had been cut from soldiers only hours earlier.

  “You’re jonesing,” Fynn said.

  Teller found himself shifting from foot to foot, fingers twitching. “Not too bad. Been eight hours,” he lied, adding two hours since he’d last popped a pill.

  “Good,” she said. Plastic crinkled against the duffel’s heavy fibre as she slid a bag in.

  What did she do with them? Teller asked himself for the thousandth time.

  Research, she’d told him once after fucking. He hadn’t been paying attention. Hadn’t even asked. Something about an abandoned program to keep severed limbs viable. Surgeons could focus on the critical procedures and reattach amputated limbs hours, even days, later. Need to keep it quiet, she’d said. I don’t want the military to know because I want to save lives. They’d use it as a weapon. She’d then sprung out of her cot, naked, sat at the small desk in her quarters, and typed into her tablet.

  “We’re done,” Fynn said, snapping off gore-covered gloves. The room reeked of congealed blood. She reached into the pocket of her fatigues and handed him a plastic bottle.

  Not wanting to, hating himself, he shook it. Not as full as usual.

  “If you can go eight hours,” Fynn said, “try for ten. That will last you four days.” She hoisted the duffel onto a shoulder and ran a finger down his cheek. “Come by when you’re done.” She turned and left.

  Teller cursed, hands quivering now. When she wanted sex, she wanted him clean. Not that he didn’t enjoy it. Military service gave her a firm body. She didn’t even make him wear a condom. I’m a doctor, she’d said, I’ll cure anything you have. And getting knocked up? She’d take care of that, too.

  And after sex she opened up, talked about herself. Like pillow talk. Like they were lovers. He hoped she’d let slide some sliver of knowledge he could leverage against her. An officer, a surgeon and his source—she held the cards. Hell, she was in her mid-thirties and he’d just turned twenty-two.

  Now she was cutting him back. To help wean him off the pills, he knew. To get clean.

  But he was jonesing, his junkie heart in control. He needed to know something about her. Even things out. Her taking body parts would be his word against hers if he didn’t know what she did with them. />
  Where she took them.

  His clean and sober brain told him to do the work, but his junkie heart told him to follow the bitch.

  Leaving the gurney, he went into the hall in time to hear the stairway door slam shut. He sprinted up the metal steps and paused at the main level. Doors led outside and into the hospital hall. Checking outside, he spotted her crossing the gravel road between the main building and a row of DRASH tents. He waited for her to move between tents before crossing the road himself, waiting in the shadows of the next tent over. Past the row of tents, flood lights from the main building barely illuminated the few large supply tents and pre-fab sheds in what had become a shell-pocked no-man’s land between the main compound and the perimeter fence. Beyond the fence, its outward-facing lights showed the brown, hardscrabble countryside. And past its illumination, the enemy.

  Teller spotted Fynn in the no-man’s land, duffel bag still on her shoulder. She stopped at the side of a large shed with two roll up doors on its front. Teller had assumed it was part of the motor pool. Fynn undid a lock on a side door and went it.

  He’d check it out later. Right now he was jonesing too bad. He moved back to the main building, hoping no one had found the gurney unattended.

  By the time he reached his tent, the world had gone deliciously waffling-baffling topsy-turvy-curvy.

  Sex with Fynn had been fine.

  Pills were better.

  His sleeping tentmates appeared as distorted beasts, their snoring an alien rumbling from reality’s deepest depths. Bliss enwrapped him like a soft shroud, leeching away his self-hatred.

  And when, some slippy-time later, the world rolled and shivered, he thought it just part of the high. But motion surrounded him, tugged at him. The high’s clutches slipped down his skin like warm, slick tentacles. Mind sharper, animal panic stabbed his heart before his brain assembled the flurry of movements and sounds of his tentmates into a cohesive thought: incoming artillery. A concussive blast thudded. Instinct and training had him up, pants on, helmet on.

  Out through the tent flaps, visions slapped at him—red and orange flames, brown sand, black smoke, blacker sky. Acrid smell of burning tents and spent artillery shells. He flowed among the swarm of people toward the main building’s wide, blank north wall. The hard-packed ground shifting and rolling beneath him. Bodies pressed close, the stink of sweat and panic. Down the ramp, through the open steel doors, into the harsh fluorescent light of the bunker’s concrete depths. He turned into the room for medical staff. Finding a spot on the hard, cold floor he leaned against a wall that vibrated with each landing shell and every volley fired back.

  By now, drones would be up, scanning, relaying enemy artillery locations to their own cannons. Infantry would be strapping on exoarmour to go mop up.

  War by proxy, Fynn had called it. For centuries, man fought face-to-face. Now exoarmour hides our humanity. And if the armour loses a leg, the person loses a leg. We should send the soldier home and let the leg keep fighting, Fynn had said one afternoon between shifts, her body pressed against his, sweat cooling on his skin.

  Teller glanced around the bunker room, the overhead lights flickering. Some stood, most sat. A captain did a head count, a corporal in tow. Teller spotted Fynn, hunched over, typing at her tablet. He didn’t let his eyes linger. That typing. In the mess hall, the break room, at the infirmary, after fucking.

  Letters? Reports? Research? Before she’d been drafted, she’d been an ER doctor in Moncton and she’d seen plenty of ways the human body could be rent and torn. Then the invasion that had started this war. It had driven her to research ways to save life, maintain it, create it. That didn’t mean having children. Billions of women had done that—intelligent and stupid, driven, and lazy. She was after something more.

  And those limbs had to be a part of it.

  Or maybe she was writing about him, recording his junkie life after catching him smuggling pills. He’d been bribing Sallen, an MP whose thumbprint could open any door on the base, for access to the dispensary. The pills were a common enough sedative. Just something to dull the pain. Except getting hooked hadn’t been the plan. And one in thirty-five experienced hallucinogenic side-effects. Teller was that lucky one.

  He’d been caught smuggling pills before, but most of the docs had been as fucked up as him by this place. He had connections to feed their secret needs or kinks. A balance. Keep each others’ secrets. Colonel Brice didn’t have to know anything.

  But Fynn had offered to help him get clean. She’d get him his pills, but control the dosage and amount. She just wanted to look at whatever he put in the incinerator. Maybe take a few limbs.

  What kind of surgeon did that?

  Maybe her tablet had the answers. Restore some kind of balance.

  The infirmary hallways bowed down and up and around, a bubble of right angles.

  Still feeling the pills.

  Sallen, bought off with some kinky Korean porn, unlocked Fynn’s office. With her in surgery, he had no better time. Teller stepped in, the room big enough for a desk, chair, and filing cabinet, and Sallen locked the door behind him. The turning tumblers sounded monstrously huge.

  Sorting through several tablets scattered on her desk, he found the one she typed on. The one without military markings. He knew her password from watching her enter it so many times. “Herbert.”

  Her documents folder held dozens of files, but between the pills and the medical jargon he couldn’t make heads or tails of them. The message centre was surprisingly empty. He’d thought she’d have friends back home writing her. He opened her “Sent” folder. Mind too affected to do anything but scan and absorb words:

  might not read this . . . I’m sorry . . . I can save them . . . Please write back . . . new life . . . let me know you read this . . . viability of limbs . . .publication after my tour ends . . . shelling last night . . . put my needs before yours . . . not crazy to want to maintain life . . . get this published . . .

  Some messages had attachments. He opened them, fingers moving fast, swiping through images. The desert, the base, damaged building. Others showed severed limbs, limbs sewn to other limbs with fine silver wire, amalgams of limbs attached to some kind of machine. Then a video—body parts, silver wire spilling from the wounds, twitched and moved. Fingers gripped, ankles and knees flexed as if running. An eyeball perched on the back of a hand pivoted, following a point of light, looking into the camera—

  He dropped the tablet. Its clatter, bass-deep from the drugs, made him jump. Had he really just seen—

  “What are you doing?”

  Teller turned. Fynn in bloody scrubs, stepping into her office. The door shutting, Teller caught a glimpse of black MP’s fatigues in the hall. Sallen. She’d probably paid him off to let her know if anyone tried to get into her office.

  “Answer me,” she commanded.

  Caught. Caught and no way out. Junkie logic gave him two choices: bob and weave, or go straight through. He reached for the tablet to show her the images. But as he reached, his hand looked huge.

  High. So fucking high.

  Fynn pushed past him and grabbed the tablet. “My messages? You’ve been reading my fucking message?!” She swiped through some screens. “Just because we’re fucking doesn’t mean you get to know everything about me.”

  “I’m high, okay?” Teller blurted. “I don’t know what I was thinking.” Bobbing and weaving. “I couldn’t even read the words, you know?” Play to her sympathies. “I was looking for pills. Really? You want to know? I was looking for how I could get more pills.”

  Something in her posture shifted. Just slightly. “You’ve finished the ones I gave you. Couldn’t go the ten hours. You didn’t trust me to help you.”

  A statement. Not a question. “I—” he began and let it hang there. Truth was, he still had three pills left. He drew strength from that realization.

  “You don’t need my help, it seems.”

  “I do,” he said too quickly, hating the desperat
ion.

  “Do what I tell you. Make them last.”

  “Okay,” he replied, hating the word, its shape. The humiliation. Twelve years old again, his mother telling him how to dress, what summer school courses to take, what friends he could and couldn’t play with.

  Fynn opened a desk drawer, removed something, and slid it into his hands. Another pill bottle. But the clicking of the pills against plastic sounded wrong. “Lower dosage,” she said. “Make these last five days. Withdrawal might be a bit more acute, but stay with it. This is the hard part. If you make it five days, we can get you off the pills in two more weeks.” She moved to the doorway, body language making it clear it was time to get out.

  He did.

  “I have to get back to surgery,” she said, closing and locking the door. “Let me know on your next run to the incinerator.” She moved quickly down the hall toward the hospital section.

  Dismissive. Telling him what to do. Like he was nothing.

  At least she didn’t want to fuck.

  If he’d just gone to another doctor, told him about the pills, that he wanted to get clean. In too deep now. If he went to Colonel Brice, told him everything, she’d get a letter in her file or something. An officer. A surgeon. He was a junkie corpsman. The stockade. Or transferred to infantry.

  Tongue dry, needing the bitter pill dissolving there, warping reality.

  His junkie mind demanded he find something on her. Even things out. Show her she’d fucked with the wrong guy.

  Shelling pulled him up and out of dreamless sleep.

  Body well-practiced, he had on his pants, helmet, boots before fully awake. A shirt in hand, he sprinted to the bunker, joining the group funneling for its depths. The night exploded yellow-red, bits of gravel raining down on them.

  Fynn would be headed there, too. Hunkered down, waiting it out, tapping into her damn tablet. Then into surgery for those who’d been hit.

  Crazy, but this was his shot. He broke off from the group, running between a low, wide supply shed, its corrugated metal sides rattling in the concussions, and the main administrative building. Flattened out on the ground, arms over his head, he fought against digging into his pants pockets.