Broken: A Plague Journal

by Paul Hughes

  ...]virtual world that I began and ultimately killed was one of intricate deceits.

  ...]that I have maligned and fabricated my art from subjective memory filtered through a rapidly-dissembling mind. What memories have I constructed of my best friend? “Best” friend? Is that because he was truly my best friend or just because he’s dead now and can’t disagree? What shames have I subjected her to? I loved her, but was that love as strong during our relationship as recall would have an audience believe after she left me? How much of this is a lie? I can no longer tell the difference between past and dream, and I fear that as long as I invite viewers, readers, strangers into my soul, I’ll never be able to discern truth. So much of me is performance now that[...

  ...]stealing words, shattering memories, placing words into strangers’[...

  I don’t know who I am anymore.

  ...]know what I have to do, what I’ve known for years. I will take this jihad to the[...

  ...]if I can only secure this reality, if I can only guarantee that this soul, these lives[...

  So I confess these transgressions. I will reclaim reality. I will[...

  It begins now.

  [/read]

  [/run]

  AUTUMN’S SCION

  Alina screams. She sobs, throwing herself against the display until her tiny hands wilt. West hears flesh split, fingers crack. She keeps beating against the glass, keeps beating, keeps screaming, even as he pulls her away, the stubs of fingers smearing that image with bloody letters; hers is a language written in despair.

  West holds her tightly, but she still struggles, her crumpled hands pressing against him only jarring loose more of that loss; she seeps through his shirt, and he feels warm copper run down through the hair on his chest, pause to circumvent his navel. She eventually relents, slumps into him, allows herself to bury her eyes under his jawbone, anything to force away the screen, to erase that image.

  West watches it all, even as he holds Alina so she can’t.

  Inhale: no lung, no mouth, but why the sensation of drowning, of choking, the scent of burning flesh when there is no nose, no body?

  All around him, silver. Waves still came back to slap at his shallow corpse, near-corpse. It burned; it froze.

  He struggled to sit up and remembered that things were no longer attached to him in the way he remembered. His starboard nacelle lazily rose, slammed back into the silver ocean, stirring the metal again, angering what sensors he had left operational.

  The nacelle crawled through half-crystallized mercury slurry until it met his main chassis. He was disturbed but not surprised to find that his pelvic fin had been shattered on the impact, and his caudal fin was twisted into an array of broken metallish.

  s

  paul hughes((?))

  come here ((?))

  cover my feet ((?))

  rupture rend rive split cleave

  Maire had pierced through his chest, heavy silver armor cracking and splintering before her. Reflex forced his head back; agony kept it there as spasms wracked his entire form. The hole in his hub was slick with his blood, mechanicals, the shimmer of venting containment chamber exhaust. He finally settled in the shallow silver, nacelles digging into the flooding ground.

  Too tired to move his port nacelle. Too broken.

  Starboard nacelle feels around the hole. The wingtip snaps off, falls to his belly, slides into the silver.

  Focus, but

  It’s flooding, that alien, that lifeblood. Choking, gasping. Somewhere, a line of code reminds him that there’s a human buried inside that ruined sculpture of metal.

  i’m sorry

  i’m

  His nacelle falls back into the ocean, the wingblades now useless.

  i’m

  and the ten years after the Unravel Moment saw the birth of a metageneration.

  In his divine wisdom, the Episiarch Paul Evan Hughes, beginning with that day of flights and flames, engineered a corridor into Upwhen, bringing order to all improbability.

  “And if your heart should wander, if someone more interesting should come along to fill up those places that I couldn’t reach with a bigger dick, a bigger brain, or a bigger heart, go to him; follow him to the place you’ll call home. Live in that new love, breathe him into and through yourself, cover your past in new memories and sights, new tastes and nights without sleep, just your gasping, grating, puddling, and love him; love him as you’d loved me, but deeper, faster, harder. Love him as if he’s forever, as if he’s home. Forget this… everything, this person, the moments we breathed as one, when I entered you and we felt fire, that tide, that blood. Love him with ease and joy, overwhelmed and filled up. Love him entirely, because know that someday I’ll find you.”

  He squeezed and felt her voice try to escape from beneath his thumb. Her neck was so thin.

  “Know that I’ll find you.”

  There are of course connections that imply a verifiable cosmology, a totality of phenomena constituting all of time and space. Beyond theoretical physics, string theory and the anthropic principle, there is a fundamental symmetry to existence that is better described through a defined set of characteristics in the known megaverse embodied in the form of a particular set of children born in the summer and autumn of the second year of the third millennium.

  At the St. Elizabeth Regional Medical Center in Lincoln, Nebraska, early on the morning of August 16th, 2002, a boy was born to Tyler Jennings and Jessamyn Smith. He emerged screaming, bloodied from the tear he had rent in his mother. His parents named him after his paternal uncle who had been killed eleven months prior: David.

  A midwife delivered a daughter to Judeh Hassan, widow of industrialist Antonio Cervera, at the Cervera estate in Los Angeles on September 9th, 2002, almost a year to the day Cervera had been killed. The couple had tried unsuccessfully for seven years to have a child, and fortunately, enough of Cervera’s semen had been cold-stored at a fertility clinic to allow an in-vitro fertilization to finally take place. Judeh Hassan named her daughter Antonia, in honor of the child’s father.

  At the Hyannisport Compound on September 15th, 2002, Kara Anne Kennedy and Michael Allen announced the birth of their third child, a daughter, Abrah Allen-Kennedy.

  Rhonda McClure gave birth to a fourteen-pound son on the night of September 16th, 2002 at the Keweenaw Memorial Medical Center in Laurium, Michigan. Rhonda had narrowed down the possible fathers to two suspects: Robert Hodge and Ray Shore, two members of the Harkness, Michigan high school baseball team. Her zippers had dispositions that forbade distinctions. She named her son Robert Ray McClure. She called him Buddy.

  Hank the Cowboy flickered to life in the mind of Los Angeles screenwriter Les Harris at 2:00am on September 17th, 2002 when the lights came up at the Dresden and Harris realized the girl he’d been talking to was a transvestite prostitute.

  Honeybear Brown’s final stitch went into place on September 21st, 2002 at a sweatshop on 7th Avenue in New York City. Creator Desree “Sugar” Williams quickly bundled him into a DKNY rucksack before her co-workers could steal her design.

  James and Destiny Richter’s first son arrived in the world on September 11th, 2002 in silence, his skin pallid, a caul covering his face. His parents were not allowed to hold him until three months later after extensive reconstruction of congenital birth defects to his respiratory system. Finally able to breathe on his own, his parents took baby James Richter, Jr. home to a suburb of Phoenix, Arizona.

  “How’re they taking it?”

  His wife, or the photon sculpture thereof, shrugged. “You know. Everyone had expected it for a while.”

  “Wish I could be there.”

  “I know.”

  “Tell them. It’s nothing personal.”

  “I know, hon.”

  “Caroline was a great woman. A great woman. The Council and Cabinet extends their deepest—”

  “David—” Abrah Kennedy-Jennings reached out. “You don’t have to get political.”

  He sigh
ed, slumped farther into his chair. “I’m—You know what I mean.”

  “I know.”

  Even through the jittery, static-veiled avatar, he sensed a deeper trouble, scrutinized the way his wife’s eyebrows begged a concern. “What’s wrong? Not your aunt. Something else.”

  “David, I—”

  The door to his office slicked open, lines of conversation emerging in mid-thought from the three, four men and women walking through.

  “Mister President, we have a situation.” How many times had he heard that these last few years? How many times had it not led to heartburn?

  Breine Frost sat down without invitation, turned to the hologram link. “Abrah, I gotta steal your husband.”

  “Of course, Mister Vice-President.” Jennings hated the resignation in the sculpture’s tin voice.

  “I’m sorry, baby. I’ll call you back after these bastards are done with me.” He smiled at his vice and secretaries. “Love you, Abrah.”

  He waved his hand to the cut wave.

  “David, I’m—”

  A carbon wedge severed the signal between Hyannisport and Washington.

  “Okay, Breine. What’s wrong now?”

  From the communications room of her family’s compound, Abrah Kennedy-Jennings completed her thought, a whisper; her hand unconsciously traced her navel.

  “I’m pregnant.”

  “Refer to the threat matrix from thirty-one August two-thousand thirty-six.”

  “Nothing big. Some rumbles overseas, a riot in—”

  “Refer domestic.”

  “Breach of security at LAX, mining accident in—”

  “Bingo.”

  “Wyoming?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “Why’s it even listed? No imminent—”

  “It’s imminent now.”

  Jennings frowned. “What’s going on?”

  Frost turned. “Tony?”

  Secretary of War Antonia Cervera lifted what appeared to Jennings to be a model airplane. “This is a print from our latest scans.”

  “Scans of what?”

  Frost took the model from Cervera. “Dave, this bird is in Wyoming. Buried under a mountain.” He handed the print to the president.

  “You’ve got—”

  “Not kidding.”

  “And we’re—”

  “We’ve got Milicom teams cordoning off the area.” Cervera clicked a data spinner into Jennings’ table display.

  Jennings exhaled audibly, his face reddened by the slowly-rotating image of a bogey buried under a transparent mountain, the path of mining tunnels overlaid in a pale blue grid.

  “Where are we now?”

  “We’ve cut an entrance. Found an access port. Took a hell of a beam to even scratch the surface. We have teams on standby, ready to insert at your go call.”

  “And we have no idea what this thing is?”

  Frost shrugged. “It’s not an airplane.”

  A tickle behind his eyes, not pleasant in the least.

  “Send them in.”

  “They’ll insert asap.”

  “Send the order and head to the bunker. Get my plane ready; I’m going to Wyoming.”

  “David—”

  “No buts. You should know that by now.”

  Frost cracked a grin. “Sure I do.”

  “But what if...” He sipped the fine Tempranillo, La Riota, vintage 2001. Full and rich in his mouth, a complicated density of flavor. “What if there’s so much more than this?”

  His date played through a stack of untouched dwarf asparagus stalks, swirling blood sauce into eddies, inadvertently scraping silver against bone. “Sorry.” Blush. “What do you mean?”

  James Richter wiped his mouth, draped the napkin back over his uniform slacks. His eyes, a disarming gray, swept left, right, focused ahead as he leaned over the table, closer to her, as if he were about to reveal a state secret to the girl his few friends had deemed “perfect” for him. At least his white friends had.

  “Your Deep Eyes have shown us what we’d expected all along: this galaxy’s alone out here, separated from all the other castaway birth matter of our universe by great deserts of—” Hands gestured, eyes squinted—

  “Nothing. The Eyes have confirmed the insulation of galactic bodies by expanses of immense probability collapse. Our present tech doesn’t even begin to approach traversibility survival. The distance between galactic clusters is so incomprehensibly vast... Our slowships would freeze up at the edge. Generation ships wouldn’t make it beyond a million solar measures. There’s just nothing out there to power on.”

  She enthralled him, this mathematician who worked for the Milicom Cosmotech. Hope Benton. He couldn’t have conversations this deep with anyone.

  “There’s two types of galaxies, correct?”

  “Spiral and elliptical. A few random distributions thrown into the mix.”

  “And how many has MC charted now?”

  She laughed, not in jest, but at the answer she was about to give. “We’re approaching a million billion charted galaxies.” Sip of wine: empty glass. “What you laymen might refer to as a ‘shitload.’”

  “And in this ‘shitload’ of galaxies the Eyes have seen, has there been any successful contact?”

  “Contact? With little green men?”

  “Green men, white men, brown men...”

  “Zero contact.”

  “Something happens to the signals.”

  “As they pass through the inter-galactic deserts.”

  “The signals bounce back?”

  “They come back flawed. The message is still there, but it’s distorted beyond translation. Something in the galactic barrier deserts fucks with our beams. Even our brightest, deepest lasers return to us sounding like underwater gibberish.”

  Richter raised his index finger. “Let me propose a hypothesis.” Devilish grin.

  “Here it comes.” Benton shook her head, bemused. “More of your Omega dogma?”

  “Maybe.” He pushed his plate away. “Maybe in each of those galaxies, there’s a system just like Sol’s—”

  Eyes rolled.

  “And in each of those near-Sol systems, there’s a planet just like Earth—”

  “I’ve heard it before, James.”

  “And on each of those near-Earths, at the exact moment your Deep Eyes broadcast the SETI beam, their near-Deep Eyes broadcast their near-SETI beams—”

  “Impossible.”

  “Not impossible. Your Cosmotech colleagues simply misinterpret the alien beams as garbled reflected transmissions. They try again, get the same result, eventually give up because there’s this big mysterious impossible barrier surrounding our galaxy, a desert of heat death cold, in which our galaxy and a million billion other galaxies are simply oases. Can you just consider the possibility? What that would mean for the nature of our existence? That we’re just one of a million billion trillion galaxies in which a million billion trillion of our worlds co-exist, albeit separated by cold, impassable distances?”

  “I—” She studied her empty glass, moved to fill it from the dwindling bottle. “I can consider the possibility. But the signals aren’t—”

  “They’re garbage. I realize. But with no common ground, no points of contextualization, how could you begin to recognize it as language, as communication? Of course your systems are reporting it as dicked-over return signal. Our machines jump to the conclusion that every attempt at communicating beyond the galactic barrier will fail because of an incomprehensible physical obstruction. But what’s out there, between the clusters? Nothing. We can’t begin to theorize why a beam of light would stop and come back to us. Doesn’t it make more sense to conclude that it’s getting through, that it’s reaching someone, and they’re talking back at us?”

  “Or maybe their Hope Bentons are frustrated and coming to the same conclusions?”

  “I knew I’d win you over.”

  “Win me over?” Her hand attempted to cover his, but his fing
ers still poked out underneath. “I said I’d consider it, James Richter, not that I’d convert.”

  “Once you go black, baby.” Eyes crease with hard-fought lines.

  “Oh, get over yourself!” A hand squeezes a hand. “Want to get out of—”

  An alarm chimes.

  “Shit.” Richter reached for his link. “I have to take this. Sorry. Bee are bee.” As he stood, the server placed the bill on the table. Richter pointed at Benton. “Don’t pay that.” He winked and left for the front of the restaurant.

  He ducked into the coat room and flashed his Milicom badge at the attending employee. “Out.” The young man blinked at the silver circle and trotted from the room, closing the doors behind him.

  Richter activated his link, which blanketed him in a privacy wall constructed from flickering photon discharge. Within the cylinder, a smaller holo sputtered to life, confident in its recipient’s identity after genetic identification and the glare of a biometrics heuristic.

  Benton watched as her date nearly jogged back to the table. Something crawled behind those eyes, those gorgeous gray eyes.

  “Sorry, Hope.” He placed the bill and a debit slip into the table’s scanner, at the same time ordering another bottle of the Tempranillo. “I gotta go, but you should stay. Call some friends. Put it on my numbers.”