“I don’t understand—”
“—and that’s the problem. You’re sitting there setting all these events into motion, having to retype the number 6 because your keyboard’s broken, not as badly as you, and I know, I know that you saw those things, never did the research, fought with the fact that no one believed you. I know you saw things before they happened and wrote them down, uploaded them, and everyone thought you were looking into places you shouldn’t, that your predictions were just snooping or luck, the falling towers, a hanging, a wedding, the silver. I know that.
“You’ve written things into existence, and I know you’ve struggled, tried to undo the damage done. And I know you’d sooner waste yourself away, surrender, than hurt the ones you loved again. I know you’ve seen the terrifying weaponry, the holland and hills, that you’ve walked beyond return to that edge, and you’ve tasted it, looked over and wondered. I know that. You’ve spent countless nights replaying the scenes in your head, wars fought between the worlds, great machines built of silver and light, the savage echo of billion-barreled shatter arrays, the silences, and there aren’t words for what you’ve seen; no typing can convey that.
“I know you were basically a good man made bad by the departures of others, unable to grasp the concept that you weren’t integral, were never integral enough to include, and the mathematics never worked: you wanted to be constant in a variable existence. You wanted—maybe deserved—a new calculus you never invented.
“You scared people.
“You’re scaring people, and that’s why they leave.
“I know you tried to fix it, the distance and the pills, hiding from the world while broadcasting the substance of their fear, flirting recklessly with their expectations of you, pushing away and surrendering, again, to your hate. You are a creature of hate. No forgiveness. When the world reacted negatively, you worked to dismantle it and rebuild it in your image. You fell into a place where no one could ever begin to understand.
“You weren’t a sympathetic character.”
Paul had been studying the city outside Bellona. People dissolved between ghosts. The sky darkened, an upload spire crashing to purchase in the distance, farther off, the orbital gun rising from the water, firing blinding phase slugs into the future. The sounds from the back settled dreamlike into a rhythm, a pounding heartbeat. A shiver worked its way up his spine, settled along his jawline.
“How do I fix it?”
The Omega shrugged. “You were a flawed machine, and it only ended once I—once you decided to silence the misfiring synapses. It’d been getting worse, the shaking, the thoughts at night. You were consumed, consuming yourself. A spectrum of innocent histories dredged into existence, trillions dead. Because of you.”
“You’re asking me to—”
“No. I’m just the end point of a statistically-significant percentage of histories. I’m not asking you to end yourself. You constructed characters, turning everyone whose hand you shook into fiction. You unlearned presence. You wrote people into plotlines and barely registered their realities. You filtered everyone through pasts. I’m asking you to recognize that you’re not the episiarch, assembling realities. You’re a character who doesn’t know how the book ends. You’re distracting what limited audience you have left with flowery language, never offering substance. They want resolution, a dogfight, a gun, not self-analysis buttered with delay tactics. Write the fucking book. Get it done.”
“You’re confusing them.”
“And that’s why I’m dead now. You don’t have to be. If I could take it all back, the vengeance, the worlds shunted into existence, I would. What you have to do is separate your realities. These characters aren’t the people you love or your mailman or the cashier at Price Chopper. Stop living inside of your book and start finishing it.”
It manifests itself in one side of the face, the body, the head turning to the right, that side’s eye clenching as closed as a fist, the subtle, uncontrolled flail of an arm against the table and its retreat to the lap, the foot tapping, not a symptom of boredom or nervous energy, just a manifestation of the worm that’s gripping his brain.
“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 int
o 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 options. 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.”
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