by Brett Savory
Sometimes she looks. Most times, she doesn’t bother. Not that it’s boring—the direct word of God can be called many things, but hardly boring. If that’s what these are, that is—writings from God, channelled through ordinary people from every nation on earth.
She thinks that’s what they are, but there are other theories: Collective subconscious. Messages from aliens. Mass hallucinations. Whatever you believed, it hardly mattered. What mattered was that people dropped into some other state of mind when they wrote these manuscripts. They blipped out for minutes, hours, sometimes days at a time, wrote instructions, stories, parables, poetry, essays, in hundreds of languages. The occasional predictions were what made it hardest to discount the phenomenon.
Since its discovery, instructions and predictions have made up more and more of each manuscript. Less stories, less fables, less vague lessons. More hard truth, more concrete directions.
As if time were running out.
The coffee slides down Emma’s throat, warms her belly, makes her sweat, quickens her pulse ever so slightly. She sets the mug down, turns the first page over, her hand still shaking, but now under relative control.
Three pots of coffee later, she has read the entire manuscript.
Shivers rack her slight frame as she gets up from the table, head spinning, full of information that, in the hands of the other side, could destroy everything.
Certain things denoted authenticity, and they were incredibly hard to fake—hard, but not impossible. The President of the United States, the Prime Ministers of Canada and Britain, leaders all over the world, they sometimes see the originals, sometimes the doctored versions—depending on who died, depending on which side got the upper hand. These world leaders, though aware of this bizarre “automatic writing” phenomenon, do not know where the manuscripts come from. They just arrive, are reviewed for authenticity by staff experts, then are hand-delivered to them.
Emma’s organization has tried to warn them of the other side’s efforts to tamper with these manuscripts, but their messages are never received. They are always intercepted before they reach anyone on the inside who could be trusted with the information. Or, if they are received, they’re ignored as having come from an “unreliable source.”
Sometimes, at least, the manuscripts themselves get through. Untouched, unchanged. But more often than not, they arrive skewed, tainted, adjusted to perpetuate wars and greed.
Surely these leaders think they’re doing the will of their respective gods when they follow these words. Certainly they believe what they’re doing is right for their people. They really have no reason to believe otherwise. An inexplicable direct line to the Big Guy in the Sky.
But this manuscript . . . this one absolutely needs to arrive untouched. There are too many ways to manipulate what it says, too many gaps in the physical spacing of the handwriting.
What is probably the most important document in history, Emma thinks, is right here under my arm. She slips on her coat, makes sure her gun is loaded (this time she will use it, if necessary), and heads to the airport to pick up her brother, Seth. She glances at her watch, realizes she will probably be late.
She hopes the flight is a little behind schedule.
But the most important document in history is not under Emma’s arm; it is currently being written on Flight 762 to Vancouver, British Columbia.
The man in the dark blue suit watches Seth’s mannerisms, knows it should hit him soon—the fugue state he has seen so many times in his career. Seth fits the profile to the proverbial ‘T.’ Certain types of personalities are more susceptible to the phenomenon: lonely drunkards, societal freaks, geeks—anti-social types, in general. Behavioral experts working for the man in the dark blue suit’s organization have computers that calculate probability based on past fugue writers; they crunch numbers, input personal information about as many traceable humans on earth as possible, extrapolate the data, then tell the operatives who to watch and, subsequently—in nine cases out of ten—who to kill.
Once his name had popped up on their screens, they’d had their eye on Seth Philson for almost as long as they’d had their eye on his sister. But for very different reasons.
The man in the dark blue suit—so uncomfortable in his own skin that he often worries about having his own name pop up on his organization’s computers—thinks that most times things just go to shit for no good reason at all, just the natural entropy of the universe. But tonight . . . tonight, he feels like things might just work out.
He is just about to get up and go to the bathroom when Seth’s head nods.
Once.
Twice.
Drops completely, head resting on his chest.
When his head comes up again, this time very slowly, his fingers suddenly move swiftly over the keyboard, writing. Words not his own.
The man in the dark blue suit sits tight, waits to see if it’s going to be one of these “flash sessions,” as his organization calls them—a few brief insights into whatever power controls fugue writers. These synaptic blips usually produce indecipherable sentences—a bad connection, a cosmic wrong number.
But after fifteen full minutes of constant tapping on the keys, the man knows this one is real. He just hopes it isn’t a two- or even three-day marathon, else he’ll have nothing with which to assuage Joseph when he breaks the news about Jennings’ monumental fuck-up.
He rises to go to the bathroom, squeezes out into the aisle.
He does not turn his head in either direction on his way; if he had done so, he would have seen, off in the distance, a bright white flash of lightning.
The first of many.
In seat 15C, Seth Philson, gripped by something unknowable, continues to write.
After dinner with Jim—and her abortive attempt to quit her job—Emma drives to the airport through sheets of rain so heavy she thinks the glass will crack, splinter, and cave in before she gets anywhere near the airport.
She calls ahead and Seth’s flight is right on time, meaning she’ll be late picking him up. Perfect. A great foot to get off on with her brother, whom she’s not seen in at least six years. She wonders if she’ll tell him about her job this time. If ever there was a time she wanted to tell someone about it, get the burden off her chest, now was that time.
But she knows she won’t, no matter if it would help bring Seth and her closer. Their mother dead from an early age, and their father off travelling God knew where—apathetic about their existence, as he’d always been—they’d floated off to very different lives, drifting without much thought as to what they would do next. Content to depend on no one. Be with no one.
Emma slows down as the rain turns to marble-sized chunks of hail, drumming off her car roof. The sound is deafening, and Emma feels a headache winding its way through her spine, up into her brain.
She changes lanes. Closes her eyes for a moment.
When she reopens them, the night flashes white, lightning touches down not far ahead, near the airport. Thunder cracks—the loudest she’s ever heard it—and something explodes, bursts into flame.
Behind her, in the rear-view mirror, more lightning touches down, slices the dark, burns orange-blue afterimages into her retinas. More thunder, more buildings on either side of her exploding, filling the night air with the smell of ozone, the crackling of fire.
Emma slows to a crawl, terrified. She sees the airport, nearly half of it engulfed in flames, rise over the horizon. She watches as a plane coming in for a landing—unable to safely pull up once the airport exploded—bursts apart, lightning cleaving it in two.
She slams on the brakes, pulls the car over to the shoulder, opens the door, steps out onto the tarmac. She hugs herself, shaking in the rain, stares at the destroyed plane in the distance, glances quickly at the flames all around her.
Where are you, Seth? she thinks, looks skyward, her brain unable to move out of shock and into an appropriate panic response.
Thro
ugh the black rain, she sees a blinking light far off, glances at her watch, knows that Seth must be aboard this plane; the one that just exploded is too early to be his.
She tries to think of an explanation for the destruction around her, but is only capable of thinking one clear, useless thought: Stay up there, Seth. Please.
Stay up there.
When the man in the dark blue suit comes out of the bathroom, he immediately notices several passengers looking and pointing out the windows. He returns to his seat, leans across a sleeping woman next to him, peers out the window. Flashes of lightning crisp the night sky. Some of it looks pretty low to the ground, but nothing he hasn’t seen before.
He shrugs, glances over at Seth—still clattering away—and settles back into his seat. The plane suddenly hits some heavy turbulence. After a few seconds of rocky riding, the captain comes over the speaker, announces that they’ve hit some turbulence.
Thank you, Dr. Obvious, the man in the dark blue suit thinks.
The captain goes on to say that they’ll be starting their descent into Vancouver very soon, asks people to please return to their seats and fasten their seatbelts. What he does not say over the speakers is that in the cockpit there is some tension, as they’ve just lost radio contact with Vancouver International Airport. But the captain is confident that once they break through the heavier clouds below, radio reception will clear up.
Seth does not fasten his seatbelt. Seth continues to type.
The man watching Seth catches a glimpse of his document. Many different languages are displayed across the screen—some the man can distinguish, others he cannot. Fascinated, he unbuckles his seatbelt, goes out into the aisle, hangs back a few feet, trying not to appear nosy. He reaches up to an overhead compartment, rustles about with a few bags, hoping no one remembers that this isn’t where he originally stashed his carry-on luggage. But people are either staring down at the lightning storm, or closing their eyes to catch a few more Zs while the plane descends.
A few more pecks of the laptop’s keys, then Seth stops typing, drops instantly into a deep sleep, slumped over his computer. The man in the dark blue suit can only see the bottom half of the last page of the document.
The words are in English, as follows:
This is not, and never has been, about you. Any of you.
This is not, and never has been, about good and bad.
This makes no sense to you, I know.
I have taken all who are worthy.
There will be no further messages.
The man in the dark blue suit slumps against one of the seats in the aisle, as if having just had the wind knocked out of him. He has never known religion, never wanted to know it, but he feels, very distinctly, something leave him just then. The word “soul” comes to mind, but he does not feel that this word fits for him.
A burly male flight attendant bustles up behind him, escorts him to his seat, tells him to buckle his seatbelt.
Just then there is a bright flash, taking a snapshot of the turmoil in the sky. A loud thud rocks the aircraft. A fire blazes on the left wing. Another strike and the engine on that side of the airplane flames out.
Seth Philson wakes up to screaming.
Below the black clouds under the plane—clouds that Flight 762 has just broken through—Vancouver International Airport burns.
Emma sits on the hood of her car, drenched, sobbing, waiting for another glimpse of the blinking light to cut through the clouds, hoping the tiny light stays up there, or carries on to another airport to land. Surely, unlike the other plane, Seth’s will see the devastation below and have time to pull up.
Over the thunder and drilling rain, she hears a droning engine, searches the sky, sees a bright flash, a sharp crack, and her heart stops, kicks twice in her chest, flutters. The plane breaks through the low-lying clouds. She raises her right hand to her mouth at the same time that the fire bursts to life in the left engine: a tiny firefly weaving and bobbing far above her.
Unable to do anything but stare, Emma watches, wide-eyed, open-mouthed, as fierce winds batter the plane around in the sky for several torturous minutes. Nearly overhead, it tilts, rights itself, loses altitude, nose dipping, then straightens up again. Now directly above, another lightning strike sears its tail, temporarily blinding her.
Seth, she thinks, a strange calm coming over her. Where are you going? I’m here, Seth. Right here below you.
When the plane crashes into a forest about a mile away—continued lightning strikes from the overcharged air missing her by less than a hundred feet—she imagines she feels the earth shudder. Imagines she feels it ripple through her entire body.
She expects an explosion to accompany the plane crash, but there is nothing. Just silence after it disappears over the highest treetop.
She feels something inside her, some part of her, slip away, drift up into the night.
After calmly calling in the plane crash from her cell phone, Emma drives home. As soon as she’s a few miles away from the crash site, the weather abruptly clears up. The rain and hail stop, the lightning peters out, the winds grow calm.
The manuscript on Emma’s passenger seat—the one she thought would change the world forever if it wound up in the wrong hands—is now blank. Even as she leans over from the driver’s side, incredulous, flipping through the hundreds of pages, the words fade before her eyes.
A conversation she’d had with Jim Leeds at dinner earlier that night, after she told him she wanted to quit her job, comes back to her as she drives:
“So what do you think it is?” Jim asked.
“What do I think what is?” Emma said, still annoyed that Jim was so certain she would keep doing her job, even though she hated it.
“Where do you think they’re coming from? The words.”
Emma was silent for nearly a full minute. She swilled wine around in her glass.
“I think they’re coming from God.”
Jim snorted. “God? I didn’t know you believed.”
“I don’t. But I think that’s where the words are coming from.”
The next day, The Vancouver Sun runs a story about the disastrous crash of Flight 762, the obliteration of the airport, and the bizarrely focussed lightning storm that disintegrated every building and airplane within a twomile radius of the crash site.
There is also a smaller article about reports of disappearances throughout Vancouver. At press time, several hundred other missing-persons reports were coming in from around the world. Police, the paper said, were investigating.
Incredibly, Seth was safe. A little bruised and battered, but otherwise fine. As were all 114 of the other passengers aboard the plane. A “miracle,” the Sun said.
Seth’s laptop, however, was not so lucky; it was lost in the crash.
A week later, sitting across from his sister in her apartment, eating French toast and sipping coffee, Seth tells his sister what he remembers about the flight.
“I remember getting on the plane, and I remember some guy beside me asking if I was a writer. I told him no. Then I remember getting sleepy. That’s it.” Seth cuts into a piece of toast, jabs it with his fork, sops up some syrup with it, and pops it into his mouth.
“That’s it? Nothing about the crash?”
“Nothing.”
Emma gets up from her chair, heads for the shower. She stops at the doorway leading to the bathroom.
“You’re staying for . . . a while, Seth?” she says.
Seth looks up, sees something in his sister’s eyes he’s never seen before. He thinks it might be loneliness. He thinks he might have some of that right now in his own eyes.
“Yeah,” he says. “I’m staying for a while. As long as you need me.”
Emma smiles, steps into the bathroom, closes the door quietly.
The man in the dark blue suit dials Emma Philson’s number from a phone booth downtown. She sounds breathless when she answers, as if having had to run
to grab the receiver before it stopped ringing.
“Hello?”
“Emma Philson?”
Apause. “Who is this?” One hand dries her hair with a towel, the other holds the phone.
“There will be more disappearances,” the man says. “More reported each day. Probably millions.”
“Who the hell is this?”
“All the work we’ve done—none if it mattered, none of it changed anything, Ms. Philson. Good or bad, it didn’t matter at all. Judgement day has come and gone, and now we’re all just walking around, already dead. Just too fucking stupid to lie down.”
Perhaps having an idea who this might be, Emma says nothing. Just listens.
“Your brother. He wrote this. On the plane, just before it went down. I was there to steal his manuscript, kill him. He was a fugue writer. I’m surprised you didn’t know. Just listen: ‘This is not, and never has been, about you. Any of you. This is not, and never has been, about good and bad. This makes no sense to you, I know. I have taken all who are worthy. There will be no further messages.’”
Emma calls the man in the dark blue suit by his real name. Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.
“Yes, it’s me,” the man says, his voice rusted, hollowed out. “You know, I thought maybe there really was something to this whole good and bad thing. I thought maybe when I called you, there would be no answer. That maybe you’d have disappeared along with the others. Taken . . . wherever.” His voice trails off, and he feels the emptiness inside his chest more acutely now. It squeezes his heart. The man coughs once, looks across the street. His eyes drift up to his boss’s office window.
“Hello?” Emma says tentatively. The man hears her as a dead voice in a tin can.
“I’m here,” he replies. Breathes deeply, feels his chest tighten more. “There will be no more manuscripts, Emma. It’s over. All of it. We were never in control. Whether we believed in them or not, there were always other, bigger forces at work. God, the Devil, or something else entirely, what does it matter in the end?”