Broken: A Plague Journal

by Paul Hughes

  “Some lives are cursed.” Teeth gritting, speech barely escaping, a graveled whisper.

  “Paul, you have to—”

  “Let all—” a stutter, frustration flaring across the edges of attack.

  “Paul—”

  “L-let all Earth buh—” A simple, passionate fury.

  “Paul.”

  “Let all Earth be a grave.”

  Slow, sad. The Omega shook his head. “All Earth? Or just the exile city?”

  Paul snarled inadvertently, the clenched jaw and upturned lip baring a V of teeth, giving him a decidedly deranged glare. Half a person shook with rage.

  “You might be interested to know, you have a lesion in your corpus callosum, a precursor to the pineal growth. Should have stopped smoking, son.” His smile was a mixture of pity and resignation.

  “D-Don’t call mmm—”

  “Such lesions can lead to the infamous ‘alien hand syndrome.’ It cleaves the mind, ruptures, rends it in half. Splits presence. Gives voice to id.”

  Paul’s right hand swept over the edge and slammed the tabletop.

  The Omega regarded it blankly. “There were compelling studies that suggested we have little control over action, that the body begins to take action against stimuli before it decides to tell the brain what’s happening. Not just reflex responses, burning or injury, but more complex reactions to a range of situations. Our sciences proved our divinity. Your flat affect was nothing more than an emotionally-autistic withdrawal response to precognition. You had a reach and couldn’t deal with it. Stuck in a feedback loop.

  “You want an answer for the loss? Want a target? Don’t blame the boy who killed himself, the girls who left you for the exile city. And don’t blame the city, Tzee-tzee-lal-itc or Sealth or Seattle, the little place where people cross over. Fitting title, considering the when and where of my crossing. Want a target?”

  Paul nodded. It was a gesture pulled to one side.

  “Maire.”

  Noise roared from the back room.

  “You couldn’t write her out of the picture if she got to you first. She does, eventually. She was there, whispering into an ear the day before your twentieth birthday. She pulled a love away from across three thousand miles. Helped secure the noose. Walked a step behind you each moment since the day you first typed her name. Extrapolate exponentially: in a Red Mount laboratory thousands of years from now, in a place that was once the focal point of your hate, a fourth-generation clone of a man named Michael Balfour, a former L-level Styx, will build a machine that will ensure the survival of the species. Maire will find it. She’ll use it to unravel everything. You’re responsible, having typed her into existence. She owes you a fundamental debt, but she’ll do anything to stop you from writing her out. She’ll do anything she can to widen the Delta bleed, to merge these two realities. She’ll combine the strength of the Purpose and the silver, and you’ll never be able to stop her. This is where it has to happen, right here, this innocent point of commonality between all possible realities, a little city on an insignificant rock in a backwater When no one cares about.”

  “She’s been behind all of this, the betrayals, making people leave for—” his eyes looked out across Seattle— “this?”

  “She’s bringing the pieces home. She hopes you’ll follow.”

  Paul shook his head in rejection. His fists settled into a bleak and horrifying surrender.

  “Hunt her down. You’ve quite a group of friends waiting out there for you, fictional and non.”

  Somewhere along the conversation, the shaking had calmed.

  “And—”

  “Alina?”

  “Yeah.”

  “She started pure, until you started writing into her. Can’t take Jud out now, but you can prevent something deeper.”

  “How?”

  “Don’t you dare write reality into her. Keep her here. Don’t see another in her. If you do, Maire will get her claws into her, and that’s it. Three strikes. You can’t control your real future. Just live with it.”

  “You didn’t.”

  “Paul, I’m just a character in a book. A meditation. I’m the alien hand, or maybe the lesion, or maybe the tumor. But I’m not here to hurt you—just to keep you alive long enough.”

  “Long enough for what?”

  “To win.”

  Grasping, reaching, screaming.

  love is the nearest unsteady light;

  a heart can only break so many times before you start

  to lose the most important pieces of yourself.

  “I’m sorry.”

  The statement didn’t so much flop as leap to the floor and grope around, seeking meaning.

  “That’s it?” West’s face was steel and stubble.

  “I don’t expect a simple apology to—”

  “You’re damned right you don’t expect. You’ve been in that fucking silver for so long, we didn’t think you’d ever come out. Didn’t think you’d ever finish writing.”

  “West.” Alina reached out.

  “And don’t you start, god damn it. Every minute he’s spent in that pool is another minute we’ve lost a ship, lost a fort. The bleed’s picking up speed, no thanks to the hours or months or fucking years he’s spent swimming.”

  “We can fix—”

  “Alina, the Delta’s at ninety over. Maire’s gained a lot of ground since the last confrontation in Seattle. Since we lost Hope and brought in the Lettuce Brothers. We need new modular calculus. She’s had a lot of time to infect both the Alpha and Omega lines. The code’s spilling everywhere.” Reynald pushed his glass forward across the table. It glowed with Delta gains. “We might be at a point where nothing we can do can—”

  “Judith can show us the way.”

  “She can show you the way, inside looking out.” West studied the window looking out onto stagnant birth fields. “And truth be told, I don’t trust you any more than I trust him.” He pivoted his head toward the author, met his gaze with no apology. “Hope was just the first to go. We can’t fucking find anyone out there anymore. Hunter and Lilith? Whistler and Hank tried sniffing them out for months. If anyone could lock those lines, it would’ve been them. But the Whens are emptying out. Everything’s blurred. Silver.”

  “What do you want me to do? How can I make it up to you?” Paul spoke through clenched teeth. “You think I was in there for the hell of it? You think—”

  “I don’t know what to think, boy.”

  Reynald cleared his throat. “I think what Adam’s trying to say... We’ve been sitting here too long. Losing too many good people to Maire’s armies. Waiting for a miracle to walk out of that pool. You. We’ve done what you asked, looked for more characters to bring in, reinforced the lines. We’ve done everything we could to seal off the merges. But none of it’s been enough. We’ve been waiting for a miracle, and you’ve been swimming. We’ve lost faith.”

  “Alina has been a good commander?”

  “She’s done her best.”

  “And you’ve expected more from her?”

  “I’ve expected more from you, Author.” Reynald was cool. “Fewer words and more action. We’ve held the line as long as we could, but we’re losing. Maire’s only growing more powerful, the more her forces consume, with each break between the lines she finds. Her forces are pouring through, and the war’s not just out there. We’re all fading. I don’t know who I am anymore.”

  “That neat little battle we saw at the initial bleed?” West remembered Frost’s fleet, the beauty of their easy victory over the Enemy assembly. That insertion had been the first hint at something fundamentally flawed in the timeline, the Judas and Enemy in a time and place they shouldn’t have been, a fragmented, shattered procession of reality from beginning to end starting to collapse upon itself, a blending of at first two distinct universes. “We’ve been losing steadily since. No matter who we bring in. All the main characters, all the forgotten plot points. None of it seems to matter. We’re out of optio
ns. No more fresh meat to bring in.” He picked Reynald’s glass off the table. “Delta’s propagating out of control, and we need to stop it now. We’re only holding on to ten percent of existence, and—”

  “Eight percent.” Reynald’s fingertips dropped from his subdermal.

  West just shook his head, and Paul could see the wetness of frustration glinting in his eyes. “Eight fucking percent. What’s that? Another three forts along the timestream? Another hundred fifty vessels?”

  “Adam—”

  “If you have a miracle, now’s the fucking time, boy. If you learned anything in the pool, you better teach us right fucking now.”

  “I did.”

  And he was silver.

  Maire was pleased.

  She realized she’d lived a lifetime of lie and hypocrisy. She’d embraced everything that formed the core of her hatred and attempted to manipulate it to her own ends. After the revelation, after encountering Michael Zero-Whatever in the Seychelles Drift, the tiny machine of night with its encoded civilizations that she could have held in her broken hand, after learning the nature of silver, she’d taken that possibility and used it to initiate the Forever Dust. She remembered Hannon’s collapsing vessel and a war machine named Gary and the gorgeous dissemination of silver powder throughout everything, everything, but perhaps the most poignant memory as her body ungrew, as she stood a child dissolving into infancy, was the sight of Hunter Windham and his gun, that beautiful gun so like her own, and the phased slug that had sheared off the side of his head, leaving his body to collapse next to the love of his life, the spent and murdered Lilith. In that moment, she’d experienced the base loneliness of the final survivor of her existence, but she knew it wouldn’t last. The child Maire, the infant Maire, grasped the Zero-Four probe in her palm, thought it to life, ushered it into silent expansion, gave meaning to loss and ruin.

  They whispered through her now, the trillion trillions of uploaded souls, merging with her, feeding yet sustaining, outside of times and places. She was a galaxy; she was everything.

  There had been a moment of abject solitude in the wake of Hunter’s parting shot. She struggled against her child mind’s instinctual reaction to sob, to plop down on that barren plain and grind tiny fists into the open sores of her eyes. She suspected that his body had held the possibility of immortality, if she could have gotten to it in time. Lying dead on the dust as the vessel collapsed around it, the corpse mocked her ambitions. She suspected a grin if there’d been enough face left to sculpt one.

  Great slabs of metallish flung down through the silver cloud, drawn gravitationally toward center, against the outward tide of her eternity of tiny machines. The hunks of vessel frictioned red and shot apart with rends that burst her eardrums. The child Maire calmly toddled to Hunter’s body, to Lilith’s. A slick lost in that cacophony, and she split Lilith’s chestplate, gutted her down. The child reached into the still-warm torso to her shoulder, searched, finally withdrew her crimson arm, her fist clenched around a tiny silver marble. The child smiled and grew up.

  She knew there were survivors. Had to be. The universe is too rich, too fecund an expanse to allow the extinction of it all. She remembered heaven and Michael: “I need you to kill a god.”

  And she had—she had, but she knew that it hadn’t been the god Michael had intended. She’d used the ocean of tiny machines to wage her war on Judith, and she’d succeeded, for the most part, but she’d left her existence a barren machine plane. She hated the stink of internal betrayal, the way she had used the machines to erase their darling, humble Jud. A wash of unreality and she heard in every fiber of her a word that meant nothing: Kilbourne. She felt an affinity, a sisterhood, with a concept she could never understand.

  To kill a god. Yes. Another. The god that gave voice to all others. Divinity is layered, and at the bottom, the Author.

  Because you must understand that her life of war had been lived with the distinct ambition of escape and manipulation. She had survived torture to exact revenge. She had forced herself to continue for the sole purpose of taking back all that had been lost to the machines and their collaborators. She’d seen the silver of the trees, the great black forms in the Drift, and she had known a higher purpose. Some people are the focal points of histories, and that realization was what had kept her always forward, always struggling. Weaker creatures would have given up, but hatred inspires. Maire was the embodiment of an intricate vengeance, a network of possible outcomes overlaid on an empty universe. When given the opportunity to take her jihad to the stars and across time, she welcomed the Enemy into her hearts, fusing them, reshaping her entirely, becoming something distinctly alien and alone. She felt a stronger Purpose than any those simple souls could dream.

  She would be their Omega. She would give voice and drive to their hive desires. They wanted to upload every possible When; she wanted an end, of sorts.

  And now it was happening. Those first forays into Alpha had whet her appetite; she’d eaten Hope Benton’s soul and had seen the break in the author, that god, that target of her new war. After his mental collapse and retreat, her forces had raided the timeline, pushing Delta further, slaughtering Judith and Judas before them. With Paul awol, it was only time, only time, before Maire rewrote all of existence, every possible, fragile strand, in her own image. And then— then she could rewrite the Enemy in her image. Delete.

  She had gathered an infinite number of strands and pulled them together into a cohesive plan of action. She had tasted the pattern cache, sampled its inhabitants, judged them beautiful and given them voice. She was more powerful than a god. She was

  silver hands before them, flickering and yearning. A flash, and they were his hands again, simple, too-big hands of callus and hangnail.

  Nobody said anything. The fear in the room was palpable and cloying.

  “I’ve absorbed it. The silver.” Something crawled behind Paul’s eyes, something dark and brilliant, in sum horrifying. Alina’s hand had gone to her chest, as if simple flesh and bone could have protected her from her lover’s silver. “I’ve overcome it.”

  “Paul...” West was as disturbed at the display as any of the others, but he was the only observer brave or stupid enough to speak. “The silver’s inside of you?”

  The author shifted again. “No.” His hands sparkled to translucence, and the fade crawled up his arms. His transformation was a visual assault of static and stark, frigid light, a billion frames a second. “I am silver.”

  “But it’s—” Reynald had leaned back in his chair, as if six additional inches could protect him. “We’re unshielded. Why isn’t it—”

  “I’ve surrendered to it. I let it in. At the first Delta bleed, we saw I could kill it. And now it’s a part of me. I can sustain it. It can sustain me.”

  Nobody responded to his smile. They weren’t used to smiles of any sort from him, and that smile was particularly disconcerting, one of madness and barely-controlled fury.

  “I surrendered to it. It’s so beautiful.” His form shifted further toward total mercury. The static became audible, the more the silver consumed him.

  “Paul.” Alina whispered, her fear soaking through and emerging through colorless eyes. “Come back.”

  “You asked for a miracle,” he growled. “Now you’ve got it. Afraid, Jud?”

  “No, it’s just—”

  “Don’t lie to me.” He walked to Alina’s side, crouched down so that his face was at her level. “You’re afraid. You should be.”

  “Paul, please.” Alina blinked back something. She recoiled from him, as if his touch would be fire, the coldest fire, one assembled from zeroes and ones, old gods forged from gold and alloys, universes of souls. “Come back to me.”

  He reached to caress her cheek, his hand shifting back to flesh and bone before surfacing. She felt its warmth, its utterly normal, familiar warmth.

  “I never left you.” He stood, palming a glass from the table as he walked to overlook the birth fields. “Asse
mble the remnants of the fleet. We’re assaulting Delta.”

  “It could take time to recall the forces containing the—”

  “Bring them home. Bring them all home.”

  “Yes, sir.” Reynald went through the motions of belief.

  “Now.” Stern.

  Reynald and West stood and walked from the chamber, West casting one backward glance. Paul nodded without emotion. He knew there could be no understanding.

  He was left alone in the room with Alina. It was the kind of occupation that rooms don’t forget, the tangible fear and confusion of impending battle or love gone tragically wrong.

  “I know what I have to do now.”

  She didn’t respond to him, just pulled her top closed over banana cleavage. There was a winter fuming from him. He turned to her, and she studied the black glass on the tabletop. She had nothing more to say.

  Because even the most passionate, ardent loves become unseated from passion and reality, replacing the underpinnings of possibility and hope with fragile experience. To see him shift—something had changed more than the underlying molecular layout of his physical form. Hearing his voice was like listening to every voice ever uttered screaming. They were inside him. He was plural. He was lost in the silver, the archive of lives he’d written into existences. Her fear manifested itself in an inability to speak out loud. His new, silver form resonated through the space, and she didn’t know if her fear was her own or purely Judith’s, if she was reliving a million Judith deaths or simply precognizing her own.

  “I do love you.”

  He wasn’t looking at her.

  “I know.”

  She didn’t.

  staring, but not seeing

  thinking of the thought (itself)

  breathing, but not living

  He stirred his coffee.

  What are the odds that we’ll find the right person out of six billion people? What are the odds that we’ll find anyone at all?