Broken: A Plague Journal tst-3

by Paul Evan Hughes

  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 sighed, 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, b
ut 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 fingers 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.”

  “But—Where are you—”

  “Wyo—Fuck. Sorry, can’t give you details.” He stooped to give her an absent-minded hug, stood, then bent down again to kiss her cheek. “I’m sorry, it’s work. You look beautiful tonight.” He cradled her cheek in his hand.

  “Okay, well, when will you be—”

  “Don’t know. Listen, there’s transport waiting. I have to—I’m sorry. I’ll see you soon, I promise.” He turned and walked away, not thinking of anything but “work.”

  Hope Benton sat at the table until the bottle of wine arrived. The server poured her a glass, but when he’d left, she filled it to the top.

  Wyoming?

  She wondered if she would see James Richter again.

  In the fall of 2021, some things happened.

  David Smith Jennings, on leave from Milicom Arlington, visited the childhood home of his friend Gregory Bates in Roanoke, Virginia, with their fellow officers Antonia Cervera, Michael Balfour and James Richter. The Bates family home, a sprawling manse in the Neo-Plantation style, became the site of a weekend party before the Milicom soldiers had to return to base for a silver anniversary memorial. The Mayflower Hills Bates estate overlooked a tributary of the Roanoke River, and it was on those banks that one Robert Ray “Buddy” McClure attempted to rape young Lieutenant Cervera as the party raged on just behind them. McClure, a vagrant from Harkness, Michigan, who for almost a year had been hitching the east coast, making a living from itinerant roofing, and who had in fact been hired by the Bates family to renovate the roof of their guest house, suffered a fractured collar bone from Cervera’s self-defense, but still managed to successfully sodomize his victim after knocking her unconscious with a rock.

  Upon waking her hung-over colleagues the next morning and contacting the authorities, Cervera was able to successfully identify her attacker from a police lineup. McClure had been found and detained just hours after the rape by the Roanoke PD on drunk and disorderly charges.

  Because crimes against Milicom personnel were federal offenses, the McClure rape case went before the federal court located in Roanoke. Judge Hannah Kilbourne oversaw the case. Attorney Abrah Allen-Kennedy acted as McClure’s defense attorney. Allen-Kennedy, with the star power of her lineage and the sheer brilliance of her academic career, having graduated high school at age eight, Colgate at twelve and OU Law at fourteen, drew a crowd of several thousand reporters to the Roanoke courthouse. The proceedings were broadcast live on Court TV 1-7.

  No one was really surprised when Allen-Kennedy secured McClure’s release with a not-guilty verdict.

  The once-close friendship between Milicom colleagues David Jennings and Antonia Cervera effectively ended once Jennings revealed that he was dating Allen-Kennedy, whom he had met at a Roanoke bar on the last day of court proceedings in the McClure trial.

  Hounded by paparazzi as they left the bar, Jennings and Allen-Kennedy ducked into a toy store on the next block. In the back, stacked between displays of Let’s Eat Meat Elmo and Mistress Beasley dolls, Jennings found twenty small stuffed bears. Their design was charming in its simplicity, and the lack of a plastic nose nub gave the toys a humble demeanor. Jennings purchased one of the bears for the giggling lawyer. Outside of the store, he ripped the Honeybear Brown tag from the bear’s ear.

  She held his hand as they flagged down a cab and returned to her hotel.

  They watched the hotel room television under the preface of “just hanging out,” but the show didn’t hold either of their interests. They seemed more interested in exploring each other, and after half an hour, Jennings turned the “Hank the Cowboy” show off with the remote in his right hand as his left made the daring jump beneath Allen-Kennedy’s black silk thong.

  Network executives from CBS cancelled “Hank the Cowboy” the next week, citing demographic analyses that showed that even the rapidly-fading Boomer generation was sick of CGI retro-dramas. The program spent the next three years bouncing between the E!, Comedy Central and Sci Fi networks before being shelved for good. Unfortunately, all surviving digital copies and source material for the series were lost in the cave-in of a secure archive facility in Wind River, Wyoming, along with three original James McNeill Whistler paintings and an original paper copy of Paul Evan Hughes’s silverthought trilogy.

 
These things happen.

  “Cunt!” Les Harris, creator and former screenwriter for the “Hank the Cowboy” series, threw the framed photograph of his wife at the wall link. The frame snapped, the glass shattered, but the only damage to the link was a small divot the frame’s corner had inscribed into the plastic face. Harris went into the basement, unlocked his handgun from its safe, and shot himself in the right temple because his wife had decided to leave him after hearing that “Hank” had been cancelled and CBS was terminating Les’s contract.

  “Cunt!”

  Jealous co-worker Sandra Chappelle pushed Sugar Williams to the ground in an alley off of 7th Avenue and wiped Williams’ blood from her swishblade with a used tissue. Chappelle remembered friendly discussions over hurried lunches about starting a new toy line with Williams. When Sugar took Sandra’s “Honeybear Brown” design and secured a lucrative deal with Mattel, and when every tabloid in every newsstand in the city broadcast a photograph of Abrah Allen-Kennedy running from the photog with a Honeybear in tow, someone had to die.

  “Cunt!”

  Antonia Cervera remembered the word she’d spoken to Abrah Allen-Kennedy after she’d gotten rapist Buddy McClure off. Months later, Cervera saw Kennedy walking with David Jennings in downtown Arlington, their hands held. Already furious about the rumors that her former friend and that bitch lawyer were engaged, this seeming-confirmation of a relationship pushed her over the edge, and as the happy couple walked by, Cervera lashed out, swiping two deep, two shallow nail marks across the left side of the lawyer’s face. Cervera flicked the tiny bits of face from underneath her fingernails and spit at Jennings, who knocked her to the sidewalk with a reflex right hook.

  Fourteen years later, standing as Jennings was sworn into presidential office, Cervera saw the faint, poorly-concealed lines on the impending First Lady’s face. She smiled. Forgiveness only goes so far. Abrah was still a cunt.

  The site command center was situated in a volcanic bubble seven miles beneath the surface. Jennings noted the fresh fill of quickcrete that composed the center’s floor. Scientists, soldiers: the room hummed with activity, but that hum quieted to a tickling underwhine as he entered and three dozen people turned to salute.