Broken: A Plague Journal

by Paul Hughes

  There was a quiet desperation to his madness, as quiet as the rhythmic clink of a stainless steel spoon against ceramic can allow. The sound was lost in the chaos of the place, orders shouted and steam escaped, the various startup beep-boop-beeps of laptop computers and the omnipresent tide of cell phone rings. Maybe a talent strummed a guitar in the corner. Maybe the world was falling apart.

  Sip. He spilled some coffee as muscles twinged.

  It was the wrong coast, the exile city, the embodiment of that place within us all, that darkest and most hidden place, the snarling, echoing graveyard hacked deeply into the most shielded hearts. He lit a cigarette and no one noticed. He hadn’t written them to notice.

  He felt the silver crawling through him, the ocean of machines still replacing flesh with metal. The body is strong and reluctant. It fights to the final beat.

  But he suspected that there was a measure of surrender in his being there, Cafe Bellona on those days and in those times, the intersections of impossible histories, the unbelievable coincidences. He had to see. Had to know. Maybe he didn’t know how to live if he couldn’t tear himself apart. Maybe it’s not really living if the heart is intact.

  He was beginning to feel the approach of the ending, knew that soon the machines would have finished their purpose. He wanted to see the bleed before it was gone. Needed Seattle, that coffee shop. Needed to know. Needed something, anything, to show him that this war was worth fighting.

  Reached into his pocket for his lighter and inventoried the contents, a glass ring, a blue, cracked marble, a tiny wooden puzzle piece shaped like Michigan. A silver bracelet he could no longer wear, couldn’t because he needed no gripping, constant reminder of loss.

  Lit another cigarette and stirred the coffee again.

  President Jennings was on the link. Joseph Windham walked in from the rain, brushing the wet from his black leather trench as he surveyed the establishment for Helen Lofton, who waved to him with one gloved, shielded hand. Simon Hayes was engaging in a lively discussion of Hesse with Maggie Flynn. Michael Balfour read the entertainment section of a newspaper. A headline: Hank the Cowboy Gets the Boot. A child walked by, carrying a Honeybear Brown. Helen Lofton looked up and through Helen Lofton, holding Hunter’s hand, Hunter’s hand holding Honeybear. Uncle led a parade of little boys; angels escorted the shielded Lilith child. James Richter and Hope Benton paused outside, long enough for James to point down the street and recommend a restaurant. Simon Hayes stumbled by, almost knocking into Hope, his mind working over one word: Brigid. Jacob guitared in the corner. Susan and her drummer came in. Her pants were covered in paint; his pants were stitched with Kente cloth. She grabbed a job application from the basket on the counter. Susan stood behind the counter and smiled at her. She merged with the poet, who stood behind the counter, who walked in, talking to old friends from Sussex and someone new, a stranger Paul couldn’t see but hated with what he had left. There would be a slam. She would win. Alina stared at him from behind the counter, and his heart was broken.

  He saw himself run by again, run by with West and Hope, on their way to locate the bear. Honeybear was under the couch. Hunter and Helen were dead. Hope’s cry echoed from a cave a world and lifetimes away as Maire murdered her. Alina grasped his hand.

  We are machines of a horrible beauty.

  Love is, after all, sacrifice, whether borne out in bitten tongues, arms wrapped around and stifling fears, nighttime combat over sheets and vying for higher percentages of a bed’s square footage. No one will admit to the fraction of hate rippling under love’s frozen surface, because to acknowledge that dichotomy would undermine the hesitant interplay that defines desire. Love is, after all, defined by loss.

  Suddenly you’re looking back and a week is gone, a month or a year, five, a decade, a lifetime, and it feels like a lifetime, a decade, five, a year or a month, a week, a day, hours, minutes, you’re here, seconds, you’re here and we’re together, instants, you’re here, moments, here, now, you’re here, now, here forever, here, walking together down thin paths into broken futures and todays and

  They’d all left him, all ended up here eventually, and he knew why, now. The bleed was palpable, the merging of everything he’d tried to write, from the adolescent crap a decade on to his last book. There’s danger in writing reality into fiction. It was time for him to unravel it all.

  Dregs. He still stirred. The rhythm and consistency of the sound just barely grounded him to that reality, a faint beacon as everything inside split apart and rewrote itself.

  And it was gone, the people and cell phones and hissing machines, and again the Bellona was the silence it had been with his Omega. The wind picked up across the empty city outside, and something was in the back room, scratching and crashing and coming.

  Everything he’d built, everything he’d erased, it’d all come down to this imperfect solitude. He thought of the poet and Alina, tried to separate the two, failed. He’d written her into fiction, or, worse, into nothing at all. Silences, silences. And in the perfect silence of the cafe, he knew how he’d end those universes of war.

  An instant, a perfect moment of sound, the echoes of the dead, the enemy and the end, all those he’d let inside, all those who’d left. He heard their voices and knew that madness is beautiful.

  Alina’s door spiraled open. She knew it was him.

  “Can I come in?”

  She walked from the door and slinked into her chaise. Paul could differentiate the habits of the women combined in Alina.

  She looked on in silence.

  “Let me talk to Jud.”

  Alina looked hurt. “Something you don’t want me to hear?”

  “Just let her out.”

  Alina’s eyes narrowed a huff, but she relented. A static flash, and Paul knew she’d been buried under the god.

  “Good to see you’re out of the pool, Paulywog.” Jud grinned with Al’s rabbit teeth.

  “I need a pilot.”

  Jud nodded slowly. “Well, thanks to your time taking a dip, pilots are in short supply.”

  “I have one in mind.”

  “Nobody’s been able to find Naught-Four or Simon.”

  “Not Michael.”

  “Hunter? And Lilith? Not exactly Judith or Judas material, kid.”

  “Alina.”

  Jud sat up at that. “Me?” She was suspicion and frown. “For why?”

  “If we’re going after Maire, I need someone to pilot—”

  “You’ll have your pick of the rides, Hughes.”

  “—me.”

  She let the statement soak in. Alina’s face broadcast Jud’s incredulity. “Pilot you? Pilot you?”

  No sound, no motion.

  “Unless I missed something being underneath Miss Becky Bananaboobs all this time, I don’t follow.”

  He grabbed her hands. The shift was frigid and instant, the silver working out through his pores as it rolled behind his eyes. Jud hissed an inhalation as Alina’s hands grew colder, pins and needles, the screaming, reaching need of the machine sea. The silver latticed up his arms and paved his shoulders, neck. He was growing. Increasing. Multitudes. Plates of metallish slammed down to define lines and planes. His form melted into something shiny and terrible.

  “I need a pilot.” His voice was static and distortion. It was still a growl.

  “Paul...” Jud’s voice was calm, and he could feel pieces of Alina shouting through.

  “I can use Sam’s shell. With Al in the pilot’s chair, with you there...”

  Jud stood up, pulled her hands from his with a tacking slurp. Head shaking, arms wrapped securely around herself, she walked to the window that looked out on the vacant birthing fields.

  “This is your chance to kill Maire.” He shifted back to skin and hair and scars.

  Jud scoffed. She couldn’t look at him.

  “You deserve that.”

  Another bark of scorn, this time, the edge of a sob. “Deserve what?” Her hand swept out across the fields. “Thi
s? What kind of a life is this? Cycling through millions of bodies just to survive—” She wiped her hands on her sides and thighs. “Just to survive that fucking silver. And now you’ve let it in. I’ve already died once, kid.” She finally looked at him. “You’re killing yourself, and you know it. Nobody deserves this fucking life. And you’ve become everything we brought you here to destroy.”

  “I never meant for—”

  “I know.” She swallowed back the rest of her words.

  “Help me.”

  “How? Follow you on this crusade? Watch you lose yourself in that metal?”

  “If that’s what it takes.”

  “She loved you.”

  He didn’t have a response.

  “And a part of her still does.”

  “She was never mine.” The heart is unable to unravel memory from lie.

  “She was yours, but the silver got you.”

  “You got her.”

  Jud bit back disappointment. “We merged so I could protect her.”

  “From me?”

  “From you. And the silver. Should have never learned to swim. She’s safe with me. It’s always been there, the silver, and it’s always worked its way through you. Writing people together. Should have kept her safe. You had a god damned obligation to keep her out of your head.”

  “I tried.”

  “Not fucking hard enough. Couldn’t you have seen her for who she is, just Alina? Such a sweet, kind girl. Half-crazy, sure, but. Maybe not much to look at, but beautiful. But the second you started merging her with others, that’s when you really lost her.”

  “Then give her back. Come with me. Be my pilot.”

  Jud stood silent. A billion empty birth chambers, a billion lives now impossible and fading. She’d been a god once, buried at the center of a planet. She’d been a god once, consumed by the silver contagion. She’d never felt so helpless.

  “Come with me.” Paul put his hand on her shoulder.

  Jud nodded.

  The Judith Mara smashed lazily into the winter plain, shearing both nacelles from its superstructure. The control hub bounced twice, three times, came to rest in a mile of drifted snow.

  Maire smiled. Continue the assault. The willing enslaved populations of the Enemy mind-essence obeyed.

  Her war was big. Across the solar system, galaxy, across the entire universe of the Alpha line, Enemy forces spidered on silver webs, consuming every soul that had been left behind. She had been hoping to catch one of Jud’s inner circle, but this kill would taste just as delicious.

  A dozen Enemy were already on the hub, cutting, prying apart the smooth black of it. They stood aside so she could clamber in. The hole was tight; she ungrew a decade until she was in the command chamber. She smoothed her jet black swathe of hair behind her ears.

  Sapphire West lay half crushed underneath the gauntlet interface chandelier. Loops of sputtering silver web draped her.

  “Children waging wars,” Maire said as she walked closer to the mess and grew back to her choice age. “They’re really running out of options, aren’t they?”

  “Fuck you.” Sapphire coughed a mist of blood. Her chest was crumpled under metallish black. Her left hand still hung in the air, suspended by her gauntlet. Maire tenderly released the mechanism and helped Sapphire’s arm to the floor. The girl was tangled in interface web.

  She reached immediately to her cardiac shield, fingers skittering over the surface, trying to pause and log out. Maire swiftly crunched down on Sapphire’s hand, feeling the bones of her break beneath. The girl didn’t scream, but two lines of tear were coaxed to the surface and out.

  “He’s sending little girls to do his job for him.” Maire bared her silver fangs as she crouched down to Sapphire’s tangled pieces. “Don’t cry, child. You’ll be with your sister soon.”

  “Don’t you fucking—”

  “Too late. Jade’s droptroops were among the first to go.”

  “You motherf—”

  Maire tore into the girl, her claws slicing into the cardiac shield and cleaving her breast into halves. Sapphire lurched, but she was trapped under the weight of the dead Mara’s umbilicals. She tried to scream, but a simple flick, and her vocal cords were split. Maire gutted her, the foul internals steaming out into the frigid air. She reached into Sapphire’s chest, groped around, and plucked a tiny silver marble from its resting place. She admired its design and saw movement from the corner of her

  Honeybear Brown smashed the side of Maire’s head with a hanging interface line, but teddy bears don’t have much strength. The impact elicited a quick jolt of pain and a bark of surprise from Maire, who whirled on the toy. He jumped at her throat and clawed there, but his paws were plush. Before she could throw him off, he scrambled down between her breasts and wrenched Sapphire’s marble from her hand. He landed on the floor with not much of a sound at all, tumbling to rights and activating his shield.

  “You motherfucker.” The bear sparked to static and disappeared back into Judith ME.

  Maire howled with rage.

  Children and toys.

  The war continued.

  “Does Adam know?”

  Paul nodded.

  Sam sipped tea, replaced the cup and leaned forward, hunched with arms hanging limply over his knees. “Did you ever think it’d come to this? That it’d all fall apart?”

  Paul didn’t have an answer.

  “You had to have some idea that this was coming. That Maire would use everything Hope knew. That she’d incorporate it into whatever Program the Enemy’s on now— Seven? Fourteen? Fifty-fucking-three?”

  “I wasn’t thinking.”

  “Neither was Alina.” He hadn’t meant it to cut, but it did.

  “I should have known, but... We forget the basics when we’re broken. Maybe a part of me knew that Maire’d upload Hope’s ME. Maybe I was afraid to think of what could happen when she did. That everything Hope knew, about our forts and maths and Judith Command, all of it would suddenly be crystal-clear. Maybe I didn’t want to believe that Hope could be the end of us.”

  “Maybe you were too busy locked in your chamber with Al to notice.”

  “I’m sorry, Sam. Sorry that I took her away from you for so long.”

  “You don’t need to apologize for—”

  “But I do. It wasn’t fair. We got tangled up in each other. But now, well, she’s all yours.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “She’s yours for the assault on the Delta bleed. I want her to be your pilot. Our pilot.”

  “Am I missing something, Mr. Hughes?”

  Paul’s face was caverned and ancient. His eyes looked nowhere. “You know I’ve looked up to you for as long as I can remember.”

  “I assumed that’s why you brought me in.”

  “You’ve been a mentor, an inspiration. You listened even when you didn’t know I was talking to you.”

  “Go on.”

  Paul’s right hand shuddered violently. He put it under the table. “If we’re going to end this, we need to merge.”

  “Are you implying—”

  He coughed a laugh. “Not like that.”

  “It’s the silver.”

  “You have the vessel structure. I have the silver. Together, we can... Maire will never have seen anything like it.”

  “Do I get to stick around for the drive?”

  The hand pounded against the underside of the table. The echo bounced in the empty construct. “I think it’s time you get out of here, Sam. Maybe it’s time for me to take over. To let you rest.”

  Sam sipped slowly, and the motion evolved into a nod as he lipped tea from his mustache. “I was wondering when you’d make this decision.”

  “It’s not that I want you to go. Alina loves you. Everyone does. I do. But maybe it’s time that I stand on my own for once. Everything you’ve done for me—I can’t pay that back. But I can set you free. Let you out of this. Maybe it’s time for you to go home.”

  “You
sure about this, son?”

  “No.”

  Their combined laugh was sad and knowing.

  “Well, then,” Sam stood and walked around the table, “no time like the present.”

  Paul stood. He shook with the fear of letting go. He extended his hand, and the solid shake became a bear hug, all slapping and gripping.

  Sam pushed him back and grabbed his shoulders. His gaze was direct and forever. “You do this. You win this.” His hand went to Paul’s stubbled cheek. “And you take care of Al for me, okay?”

  “I will.”

  Another hug, but it was something deeper; Sam’s beard tickled as Paul shifted into the silver, reaching out and snapping Sam’s phase tethers, the intricate web of memory and possibility that held him securely in the construct. Paul shook and coughed as he consumed Sam’s pattern, the silver coursing through the broken collection of them, the oceans of machines dismantling and uploading the strands in a flash, in static, and silence.

  Paul fell gasping, alone, to the floor, silver spilling out of him, a splash and a rebounding recall. He lay there into the night, categorizing and learning the complexities of the vessel. At some point, his breathing slowed. At some point, he pretended to sleep.

  When he woke up, he missed Sam, but he knew that there are some trips you have to take alone.

  He had that cigarette musk in his mouth. The touch, the feel of cotton wads jammed into his ears with a pencil tip, straight through into the decay. He had that taste of blood wrapped around his tongue, the muzzy veil of waking up. He had that indistinct disconnect that only comes from revision and abject fear.

  He cycled open the door to Jud’s chamber, saw Alina on the chaise, comforting a sobbing Honeybear Brown. His heart sank as his eyes slid to another silver projector marble in the bear’s paw.

  He half expected West’s blow, and that half allowed it to connect, knew that it had to. His jaw rocked away, feeling unhinged, locking as he reeled a stumbled step or three, righted, met Adam’s second swing with a steel grip and threw the larger man to the floor. He stood over the fallen soldier. He worked his jaw until the grating of bones and intricate workings released. A tooth was loose, three. He pried them from sockets with his tongue, let them fall to the floor as new grew.