Broken: A Plague Journal

by Paul Hughes

  “How’s the book going?”

  “It’s going.”

  “Yeah.” West studied the weathered planks below. “It would’ve been okay for a while longer.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Something’s going to happen in just under six months. There’ll be a crossover. Something’s going to happen in this When that shouldn’t.”

  “And you’re here to tell me that it’s my fault, and I have to help you fix it?”

  “No.” The rain started. West pulled his collar up. “It can’t be stopped now. It’s going to happen regardless of your help.”

  Paul noted that the scarred man’s eyes tracked the running lights of a plane knifing takeoff through the rain above.

  “How?”

  “Tell me about silver.” Paul turned to Benton, still on the ground, still in stark shadow. An instant, an instant and those blues were something else, a tugging, and gone.

  “‘Au’ on the periodic table—”

  “‘Ag.’”

  “Art major.”

  “Your silver. Tell me.”

  “Invasive biological contaminant, airborne, replaces flesh with—”

  “No.” She got up. “Go back further. When did you first think of it?”

  He frowned. “Enemy? I don’t know; it’s been a long time since I really thought about—”

  “That’s the danger of revision.” She shook her head. “You lose track of the beginnings. It all merges into one.”

  “I don’t—”

  “The sixth revision was the first time you wrote about it. You shifted focus from the mystical nature of Shadow drives to a hard-edged quantum physical explanation for the technology. Original versions of the book barely contained the word ‘silver.’ Where did your obsession come from?”

  “It just…” He considered. “I don’t know.”

  West wiped rain from his brow, fingers lingering momentarily over his temple code burn. “We do.”

  And as the sun rose, he knew that he had to leave with them. Hope sat at his side, her head on his shoulder. He smoked his last cigarette. The storm had wet the beach; they were apparently alone on that strip. Clubs dead behind, early-morning traffic just beginning: an army of chambermaids and custodians. West stood down the beach, staring into the western remnants of night.

  “I remember you.”

  She looked into hazel. “I’m not her.”

  “Maybe not here.” Inhale, pause, exhale. “But somewhere.”

  Coffee, black, served in a chipped cup. There was sugar on the table, a dangerous little container of cream that he’d never trusted. He drank his coffee black.

  “Why this city?”

  Sip, cup to tabletop. He didn’t answer.

  “You were never specific in your locations. People wondered where Maire’s complex was. The only clue was the fact that the orbital gun rose from a body of water. Was it Seattle?”

  “No.” He answered too quickly.

  West nodded, looked away. Paul wondered what semantic thread he’d just uploaded to the Judith Mind-Essence.

  Late afternoon crowd. Outside: rain. Nirvana on the jukebox. President Jennings on the link.

  “It was always this same coffee house. Why?”

  Paul shrugged.

  “When did you first write it?”

  He considered. “The first book. One of the last versions, the final scene. I wanted to give some form of closure to the novel, not just let the characters cut off without some acknowledgement of a positive future.”

  “Ninety-eight? Ninety-nine?”

  “Let’s say ninety-eight.”

  A middle-aged man had come in since they’d arrived. He sat at the counter, spoke to the proprietress. She gave him a pack of smokes. Marlboro 100s.

  “You know anyone here?”

  Paul surveyed the crowd. “Simon. Maggie.” He stole a cursory glance of the woman behind the counter. “She looks familiar, but I can’t quite—”

  “We pulled you out of Fourteen-Seven before—Well, it’s amazing what the mind allows you to forget.”

  She rang up the bill for one of her customers. His girlfriend walked to stand next to him. There was a silver ring on one hand. The coffeehouse owner smiled, revealing one gunshot dimple.

  you know... you do.

  Paul blinked away the recognition before it could take hold in that stillness between the heart and memory.

  “Who else will I meet before our business is done?”

  West sipped. He took his coffee with one sugar. “Not all of the characters survived. Some were just too far away to rescue. Would have been impractical to rescue some of the others. We’re still tracking the major players. They’ll produce a more viable calculus.”

  “When do we go back to Judith Command?” Something about the owner... She’d laughed at something her cigarette customer had said. Something.

  West marked Paul’s gaze, uploaded new matrices into the Judith ME. “I think we’re done for the day.”

  “Right.” He sloshed coffee around the cup. “What’s your favorite book?”

  West’s hand moved instinctively to his codeburn. “The one you haven’t written yet.”

  of Samayel, of Katre, of countless others: Berlin, Frost, the Judiths, the Wests, the ocean of gods who were Michaels and Windhams, Hunter and Joseph. I could tell you of so many.

  I could tell you of their plans. Of purposes.

  I could tell you of the place they built in the stillness between times, that catalogue of the remnants, how it stretched away into universes filled with typing monkeys.

  when i close my eyes, who do i see there?

  Walking down the passages that looked like metal, a charge to the air of static and nothing. Heart beating in my throat. and i can’t even compose a single fucking coherent sentence anymore. I’d been taken from a beach and immersed in this: self-referential, indulgent bullshit. No discernible plot, no outstanding characters, no sympathetic developments. I asked myself if I could begin to explain that which I could never begin to comprehend.

  They’d been busy since I’d first written them into existence.

  And I realize now that what I’d seen in those sleepless hours and daylight moments paused over a cup of coffee, a cigarette, lightning in the gulf was a pale fragment of what I was supposed to have seen. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to have seen it at all; maybe it would have best been left hidden behind the clouds, hovering behind veils of shadow and doubt, in that place where hopes and dreams

  becoming so much more than this

  I’d developed the bad habit of masking any semblance of a plot in fancy metaphors.

  I exhaled when I first saw Judith Command, and I don’t know if I’ve ever again inhaled. How could I have written it so? It shocks and amazes, the fundamental mistakes a sleeping mind can translate into truth. A feeling of falling, the distracting and disturbing euphoria that accompanies a mind’s incapability to name or place or begin to understand.

  West walked me down the metallish corridors, introduced me to a fraction of the war machine of Command, the harvested systems powering its core, the fields and valleys of gods, the endless possibilities, each a complete specimen of a particular Judith. I saw the walls lined with host bodies, the breeders whose only purpose was to bear variants of the only god we had left. I watched the moment of cycle completion: bodies raised from nutrient baths, abdomens flayed by light, the wailing cargo removed by gentle silver strands, scanned, plunged immediately into their own variant chambers, their wails choked off by the thick biological slurry as the breeder process began again.

  Promising variants were taken from the chamber and grown to adulthood in personalized heavens.

  Is that too much? I could tell you of the host debris, the gaping caverns of fetid birth chambers, the bodies swept forcefully from the breeder rooms into waste tunnels, trails of blood and amniotic fluid still slurping from the wounds of Purpose, intestines reaching like fingers toward sex-less daughters. Judith
was a beautiful woman, but multiplied by forevers, split apart with cutting beams, the infant cargo removed, her bodies became ugly beyond explanation, not the classic demure beauty that the original God host had been but a bastardization of female form, a violation of reproduction and natural life cycles.

  It was disgusting, and I questioned which Purpose was truly the evil.

  West understood. He didn’t expect me to trust any of it. He knew that I’d been shown a different forever.

  “It’s just the way things have to be done here. It’s the only way of restoring the broken

  tomorrow we can go to the park. Sit on grass. Maybe go to the zoo?”

  “Or the jazz festival?”

  The man at the counter grinned. “Of course.”

  West stood as Paul got up to pay the bill. “Do it like I told you, son.” As Paul approached the counter, he heard snippets of conversation: but we just, so you see, I don’t know maybe we can, but if Hesse had meant to, and that’s why in the first book, music’s just, cookies are delish, and at the counter: “This is where the fish lives.”

  The owner smiled up at him: one dimple. The smile faltered, returned, a blink, a vague sense of

  The man at the counter turned. One white streak in his salt-and-cinnamon hair. Eyes narrow, a blink, a sense of

  “Keep the change.” Paul left a handful of silver dollars on the counter and began to walk away.

  “Wait.” The owner reached out her hand: silver band on her ring finger, pattern. “Do I—”

  Man: “You’re—”

  West watched.

  Paul cleared his throat, regarded the man. Stepped in, pulled him close, whispered. “Erase.”

  Pause. Play.

  The man gone, Paul sat down in his place at the counter, hands shaking. The owner, maybe seventy, maybe fifty, let her hand fall. Her ring was gone.

  He stumbled over words, eventually succeeded in voicing. “I hope—I know you can’t understand.”

  Eyes watered. Dimple retreated. “You’re—”

  His hand hovered over hers.

  “A bench outside a dorm. A box of cigars. A white t-shirt, paint-spattered hands, holes in the knees of my jeans, plastic-tipped cigars. Snow. It was cold. That’s all you’ll remember. Nothing more.”

  “Paul? Paul Hughes? How—”

  “It never happened. We never happened. I died on a beach before we met again. No ghetto apartment, no cigarettes in bed, no pears, no ice cream. No broken hearts, no broken tomorrows. You lived and loved. Without me.”

  In a pocket, two light blue marbles disappeared.

  Paul pulled back his left sleeve and saw a line of scar fade.

  “I’m sorry.” He reached out, placed rough hand against the dimpled cheek.

  “Paul?”

  He nodded, smiled with a sadness beyond stillness, beyond that yesterday.

  “I’m sorry.” A whisper, an approach, lips speak into a soft warm curl of ear. “Erase.”

  She faded.

  West studied the floor.

  “Get me out of here.” The author choked back something, swallowed those concepts and closed his eyes. “Program stop.”

  Time heals nothing by itself.

  Survival depends on forgetting. Excision. Formatting. Re-formatting.

  an exhalation, a lip upturned, the infinitesimal field of blonde, crow’s feet from a life too

  Pattern slams back into form. Hiss and release, a chamber door opens. Billowing steam. (Where does it

  The author cracked the release system of his helmet, which opened in a dozen places and peeled away to reveal a face studded by whiskers and scar. He wondered why helmets in science fiction novels were almost always big globes of glass. Vulnerable. The helmet he’d designed for this novel used direct sensory submersion behind an armored collapsible blade paneling system. Safer. No glass. In the armor, he breathed slurried nitrox gel, if you could consider it breathing at all.

  West, Benton. Displays. He slumped into a vacuum chair beside the girl.

  “It was a good run.”

  He looked up. “Guess so.” Ran fingers through hair. “Scissors?” And they were.

  “The triumphant warrior begins another transformative process?” She grinned, but her teeth didn’t show.

  That sound the scissors make on sweatened hair, the tickle just before depattern of the severed strands. Scentless flashes of

  “The helmet needs work.”

  “Could’ve saved time by thinking it away.” West walked to another display. “Drama queen.”

  The scissors paused in Paul’s hand. “I know.”

  Benton brushed some pre-snap curls from his shoulder. “Containment’s at ninety-eight over. Just a few more.”

  He grabbed her hand and removed it from his shoulder. “You’re hyperkinetic.”

  “And you don’t like to be touched. Sorry. I forgot.”

  Short squeeze of hand-to-hand. “No sorries.”

  Healing by primary intention: leaving the wound open to the elements, visible to all. Scab, scar. Public re-placement of flesh, of memory and heart, filling in the places between and

  Scissors disappeared. Hair stood on end, clumps, moist, a tangle of muddied fire burned up to nothing in particular.

  “Hugh Grant? Michael Madsen?”

  “Not quite. Terrible combination of neither.” He felt his cardiac shield twinge.

  “Come on, kids. Stop your grab-assin’.” Light traced a new code burn on his temple. “The boss wants a progress report.”

  feeling screams, burning ends in that night, and it was beautiful. the touch of self, the touch of alters, galaxies of altars, and trees, trees singing and flying, echoes before dawn, a moon, a gasp, the chill that midnight makes when inhaled, the loss of exhalation, the yearning to breathe that scent again, ever again, to be there ever again

  the way things break, the way tomorrows break, the way we struggle to correct yesterdays

  and in one she frowned as a nacelle tore from the craft, crew pulled to death between the planet and the star, and in one she fought robots made from wood and organic paste, wiring spun from the silk of system-sized spiders, and in one she had a twin, and in one she watched a planet cut cleanly in half by a light from the stars, and in one she found no enemy left, and in one she sipped a bitter liquid that would keep her awake for hours, and in one she slumped, exhausted from breathing, as a door opened and

  Judith sighed.

  They’d finally located that rock in the center of the silver infestation. Centuries of searching, centuries without form or substance or duration, they’d searched; they’d found. West had been in the original rescue fleet, tattered remnants gathered from the first Enemy war and the temporal refugees of the Forever Dust, the human residue of all broken Whens. Data cycle errors, reflexive overruns, cyclic redundancy checks, cache corruptions: humanity.

  The trouble with his stories is that they happen concurrently... People who were killed in the third chapter walk in and ask for coffee and a cigarette in the fifth. He can’t keep it straight; it’s not worth it to the reader to attempt to make sense of something so inherently flawed, something so innately incomprehensible.

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence, Jud.”

  “Come in.” The warm smile barely contained the acid tongue beneath. “You two fucking yet?”

  “Oh god.” Hope sat on the edge of the bench next to the author.

  “That’s what they used to call me. Where are we?”

  “Ninety-eight over. Last run was almost a complete success.”

  “Rad.” Hands went to face, fingertips traced temples as her smile fell off. “You have to get better at this, Paul.”

  “It’s not like I even know what the fuck I’m supposed to have lived in these Whens. You have the advantage of knowing everything already.”

  “If I could erase it myself, I would.”

  “I wish you’d find a way and let me get out of here.”

  “It’s not up to me anymore.
” Judith stood from her chaise, walked over to the window that showed the latest crop. “It’s up to one of me down there.”

  West cleared his throat. “Combat runs have been marginally successful in Fourteen-Three, Seventy-Nine-Nine, Two-Hundred—”

  “Stop.” Something behind a god’s eyes, something crawling and caustic. “They’re waiting for something before striking back. Secure our positions along the When—Ha!—Timestream and fortify the forward bases.”

  “You’re getting good at this.” West bit a nail.

  “That’s why they pay me the big bucks. Next time, you can have god inside of you and hand out the orders.”

  Benton activated the sheet of glass she’d carried into the room. “Theory reports that we have a 60/40 lock on Linear. A/O position lock expected within three runs.” Figures danced from the display across her chin, cheeks, half-glints in colorless eyes. “Static’s quiet, though. They could be ghosting our sensor fleets.”

  “No...” Judith shook her head. “This time they want us to find them.”

  “Could be a trap.”

  “They don’t have anywhere to run. This isn’t the first war. We’re in charge now.”

  “Right.”

  Judith turned to Paul. “Something smart to say, sugartits?”

  Layers of frown clouded with uncertainty. “I wouldn’t have made it so simple.”

  “You thought too much. Made a very messy existence for us to clean up.”

  “Yeah, sorry about that.” The author’s eyes narrowed. “Most books don’t become real.”

  the war was beautiful

  “Was it?”

  “Just slipped out.”

  Judith walked to Paul’s side, demure smile on her face. She goosed him. He jumped.

  “As long as we’re in your brain, Paulywog, try not to let things ‘slip out,’ alrighty?” She walked to Hope, took the glass from her hand. “60/40? We can do better. Get back in. Take some help. Take… Hope? You up for a field trip?”