The buzzsects slowly woke from torpor, chewing Aliyah’s ’mancy, growing faster.
Her blazing star zoomed past Saturn, obliterated the asteroid belt, swept the atmosphere off Mars. She stood, trapped by her own rules, as the buzzsects split into flanking curves to surround her–
“Run!” Valentine screamed, yanking Aliyah out of her animation with a surge of counter-’mancy.
Aliyah stumbled backwards as the Nova Summon went off.
Aliyah’s ’mancy roared down from the sky like a nuclear missile, the clouds parting to make way for the star Aliyah had ripped from a distant galaxy and flung at the Earth.
It hit the buzzsects’ center mass dead on, sending Aliyah flying. The ground buckled around them, rocks hurtling into the air–
The buzzsects soared up in merry clouds to devour the rocks.
They gulped down the shockwave, shuddered, swelled, burst into fresh swarms.
Her ’mancy was aiding the buzzsects. They erased the laws of physics, and so did she – fighting a broach with magic was like fighting fires with gasoline.
Flux clogged her sinuses–
“I tried that once!” Valentine cried, hiking her shirt up to showcase the angry red buzzsect scars crisscrossing her flabby belly. “We can’t beat them.”
“Then how?”
“Valentine! Aliyah!”
Her mother’s voice rang across the battlefield like a gunshot – assured, confident. Despite the mayhem as the buzzsects wheeled around towards her, Aliyah felt at peace.
She knew her family: Dad had a vision. Mom had a plan. And Aunt Valentine had the firepower.
“Mom!” Aliyah squinted through the teeming madness, glad the buzzsects were so busy devouring her ’mancy they hadn’t wolfed down the laws of sound. “What do we do?”
“Get your father!”
“Is he–”
“He’s out cold!” Mom yelled, pointing beyond the wheelchair – Daddy must have been thrown to safety. Valentine hugged Aliyah hard. “I can’t revive him. But you can!”
“Dunno if you’ve noticed, Missus T,” Valentine yelled, “but we’ve got an aerosolized Cthulhu standing between us and Paul, and right now they’re Aliyah-seeking missiles! What’s your plan?”
“She made noise – you make more! Go over the top with bigger ’mancy and lead them off!”
“You mean–” A dreamy smile floated across Valentine’s face. “You’re finally authorizing me to go full super saiyan?”
“Yes!”
Valentine cracked her knuckles, turning to face a sky teeming with hungry invaders. “Years of ‘Play it safe, Valentine. We’ll bring you out when we need you, Valentine.’ I haven’t had a good scrap in ages!”
“Aunt Valentine! You…” Aliyah almost warned Valentine to be careful, realized she was still bloated with flux. She clamped down, blanking her mind before her flux made her worst Valentine-fears come true.
Valentine looked down at Aliyah with love. “No worries, kid. It feels good to be needed. Now link into my game.”
She put a finger over Aliyah’s lips, never looking away from the buzzsect hordes fighting to get at this cluster of ’mancy. Then she spread her arms wide, embracing the incoming chaos.
“If it takes the apocalypse to let your parents take the reins off, then I say ‘Good Morning, Gotterdammerung!’”
She snapped her fingers. A large red “S” with fluttering angel-wings dropped from the sky, bounced on the grass to land next to her. She stomped on it; the “S” shattered into gray metal shards that leapt up to swirl around her, knitting weaponry around her torso, fashioning a ludicrously large machine-cannon with three barrels pointing in different directions. It was so cumbersome the gun had to be strapped to her body – but she bore its weight proudly, sliding her finger through the trigger-guard as though touching a lover for the first time.
She let loose a disbelieving cackle as the buzzsects raced towards her.
“Contra spread-gun, motherfuckers! Anyone who’s not an extradimensional roach? Run for cover!”
Aliyah tore off in a long, looping end run as Valentine opened fire.
She couldn’t resist looking back. Magic was terrifying, a constant chaos.
But when Aunt Valentine went full-nuclear on someone, it was a work of art.
Howitzers boomed across the soccer field, flexing Aliyah’s eardrums. The three cannons unleashed a steady stream of bright orange grenades, each exploding into the clouds of buzzsects with a fiery thunderclap, sending them spinning away. She was a one-woman battleship, filling the air with obliteration.
The buzzsects split apart, confused – some battened upon the explosions, others gnawed at the ’mancy until they gave birth to shiny new ruptures spilling free with buzzsects, others fell upon their wounded compatriots to shred them alive. The rest homed in on Valentine. They came in such numbers, no way Aunt Valentine could dodge that many of them–
Valentine backflipped out of their grasp.
“I beat Gradius!” she cried. “R-Type! The greatest shoot-’em-ups in videogame history! You think you fuckers can overwhelm me?”
“Aliyah!” Mom cried. Aliyah looked away, clamping down on her fear that Aunt Valentine was making a last stand.
“I hope one of you fuckers is YouTubing this!” Valentine cried to the crowd, her gun strobing devastation, laughing as though blasting alien invaders to pixellated smithereens was the greatest pleasure anyone could have.
Still, Valentine hadn’t drawn all the buzzsects away, so Aliyah mentally hit the “Player 2” button, connecting with Aunt Valentine’s game.
She’d never played Contra, but videogames were made to be shared.
The gun dropped into her hands – a humming power glowing warm in her palms. She took high, arcing jumps over the Morehead soccer players, yelping with surprise from the joy of it, looking down in admiration.
The Gold, Silver, and Bronze fields had commandeered pickup trucks, driven them into the teeth of the swarm to rescue their own. Which, given their FOX News-inspired terror of magic, was a bravery Aliyah could not imagine. Aliyah blasted buzzsects away, protecting them, her heart boiling with conflicting emotions: pride in this town, despair she’d brought this mayhem upon them, anger at the overreaction that had caused the broach…
Mom looked grim. She cradled Daddy’s head; Daddy’s cheeks were a mottled red from where she’d tried to slap him back to consciousness. He was sprawled out on the grass, the bladelike sweep of his artificial foot poking through the tattered remnants of Aunt Valentine’s videogame pseudoflesh.
Aliyah flattened her hands against Daddy’s chest, relieved at the thump of his heartbeat, trying to remember what game mechanics revived an unconscious player.
What if we bring him back and he’s too brain-damaged to help? she thought.
That’ll do, said the flux, pouring down her arms, threading through the soft veins in Daddy’s brain.
No! Aliyah thought, pulling back. His ribs are broken! She focused the flux like a weapon, replacing her vague fears with firmer terrors it found irresistible. The flux raced down Daddy’s jugular, disappearing into his chest: there was a dull crack, as some hairline fractures sprung open.
Worse, that hadn’t drained her flux. If she panicked again, she’d–
She blanked the thought angrily before the flux had another channel to flow through.
Why was her flux so overwhelming now? She hadn’t shit the bed like this since she was eight. She hated how she could never predict how much flux she’d get – that’s why it was called flux. Aunt Valentine had gamed the system seven ways to Sunday and had resigned herself to the randomness. Whereas Daddy said the best way to reduce flux was faith – if you truly believed the world was better off for doing your magic, then the world would agree with you and the bad luck would slide away.
Problem was, you couldn’t bullshit the universe. She tried to tell herself soccer was more exciting with videogame flourishes, that she’d done crazier ’m
ancy with Aunt Valentine – but the universe knew how guilty Aliyah felt about inflicting a magically-flaming soccer ball on an unsuspecting crowd.
She tried to tell herself that Aunt Valentine burst buzzsects all day with her Contra-gun, and she barely had any flux, and so Aliyah should be flux-free. But Aunt Valentine destroyed the hordes with the conviction that she was meant to stare straight into the demon dimensions and give them the finger – and whenever Aliyah had pulled the Contra-gun’s trigger, she’d felt out of her depth.
Daddy said no one truly understood flux. Yet Aliyah sometimes thought ’mancers understood that flux measured faith – they just couldn’t acknowledge the secret conflicts stashed deep in their heart.
Right now, though she saw buzzsects, all Aliyah could remember was Rainbird, pyromaniac Rainbird. When she’d been eight, she’d accidentally sent Rainbird on a fiery murder spree through the Institute. He’d made her watch as he’d roasted her friends.
Once she’d put Savannah and Latisha and Mr Sheltowee in danger, her old guilts had condensed into a flux big enough to rip a broach open…
“Breathe, Aliyah.” Mom was always calm, no matter how bad things got. “Remember the exercises. Remember our lists. What videogames can help a downed agent?”
Aliyah resented her mother for a second – such a baby question – until she realized Mom was trying to distract her from her flux.
Mom treated their lives like their existence was a test she intended to ace, burying Aliyah underneath lists, notes, cheat sheets. Daddy planned a lot, but trusted Aliyah to an extent that terrified her. Aliyah had learned from Valentine, but not in any organized way, just by bullshitting with her on the couch.
Mom had no ’mancy, but they’d have fallen apart without her.
“Medpacks for critical injury,” Aliyah recited.
Mom raised a finger. “Medpacks are for temporary healing. They’ll break open as soon as the level ends. And your father’s not…” She grimaced. “Wasn’t hurt. So what else?”
“Phoenix Down potions if someone’s unconscious.”
“Is your father…?”
“Yes!” Aliyah was furious Mom was making a lesson out of this. Aliyah pulled up a menu, scrolling past Attack/Magic/Summon to Item, and selected “Phoenix Down.”
A feather coalesced onto Aliyah’s outstretched palm, lifted into the air to trace glimmering circles around her father’s unconscious body – and helping her father was exactly what she was meant to do, so her flux manifested as a mild set of hiccups.
The ’mancy hoisted Daddy up like a puppet; he blinked owlishly as the Phoenix Down potion set him back on his feet.
“Aliyah?” he asked. “Imani? What’s–”
lynchpin, the buzzsects roared, millions of insectile wings uniting into one eardrum-puncturing voice. devour him. now.
“Hey!” Valentine yelled, as the buzzsects peeled away from her. She fired heat-seeking missiles, chewing up their flanks – but every buzzsect headed straight for Paul. They lifted into the air, chewing up sunlight as they rose into the sky, a tsunami wave of extradimensional nightmares.
And Daddy…
…looked peeved.
It was the same look he’d given Aliyah when she’d spilled milk on Daddy’s new phone: irritation, inconvenience, a cost they didn’t want to incur, but salvageable.
He pulled out a handkerchief to dab the sweat off his forehead as the buzzsects smashed down upon him.
“All right,” Daddy muttered. “I can fix this.”
Five
Repairs and Despairs
Back in the days before Paul had fallen hopelessly in love with Imani, he would find himself seized by shameful urges in his dates’ apartments. His dates would urge him to sit down next to her on her messy bed, the college dorms so cramped they were practically spooning; Paul laced his fingers together to avoid temptation.
His dates always smiled when they noticed his discomfort. “Whatcha thinking?” they’d ask.
“Can I…”
“Yes?” They’d tilt their chins, all but begging to be kissed.
“Can I rearrange your bookshelves? They’re out of alphabetical order.”
The dates ended shortly after that.
But even on the occasions he’d suppressed his organizational desires for carnal ones, he’d glimpse those books over his date’s shoulder while they kissed – and those jumbled shelves would offend him.
It’s not that Paul didn’t want to kiss beautiful girls… but any disorder felt wrong. He couldn’t work until his files had been catalogued. He was drawn to forms because of how easy it was to bring order to blank space – write the address in that field, check that box, until everything that needed to be filled in was filled in. Allowing books to sit in random disarray when the A-Z system was at hand struck him as being…
Well, a disorganized shelf struck him like a wound that needed mending.
(Whereas Imani had countered that if one was to rearrange books, why not use the Dewey Decimal System instead? By the time they’d debated the overkill of utilizing such a large classification system for such a small sample size, Paul was rapturously in love.)
So when Paul saw the buzzsects chewing up the sky as they arced towards him, he barely noticed the buzzsects.
The chaotic physics they left in their wake maddened him.
The buzzsects ate the speed of light. Paul had no technical education in physics, but he’d spent his life living in a universe where the fastest that something could go was 186,000 miles per second. He felt that top speed instinctively, every molecule in his body functioning thanks to natural laws that cascaded inexorably down from that single axiom. Standing beneath this canopy of mangled constants, where the buzzsects had snipped speed from the universe, he felt the offense of theft.
A few inches away/a thousand miles away, a buzzsect gulped down the concept of linear space and landed on his left arm.
“No,” he repeated, mesmerized by how much there was to do. “I’m sorry, but no.”
He flicked the buzzsect away absently. “You are not aerodynamic.”
The buzzsect’s wings beat against the air, reminded of the impossibility of its flight – and the universe flowed through Paul’s certainty, reinforcing the necessity of air resistance, of the Bernoulli principle, of Newton’s laws of action and reaction.
“None of you can fly,” Paul snapped, and they dropped from the air in a hailstorm of nightmares.
The act satisfied. It was proper. There was an order to things, and Paul was reasserting that order. Gravity attracted other objects according to its mass. Atoms intertwined with each other according to established principles. Those principles gave birth to astrophysics, chemistry, biology, self-awareness…
This was not ’mancy; he wasn’t altering physics, but reestablishing them. He replaced these invasive, extradimensional rules with the tried-and-true concepts this universe had run on since its beginning.
And who was more qualified to enforce rules than a bureaucromancer?
He mended the broach, the buzzsects flopping on the ground as he undid the alien laws they excreted. They disintegrated in microbursts of compressed quantum forces as he squeezed them within Earth-standard physics.
As an encore, Paul sewed up the broach with Fermat’s Principle.
“Daddy!” Aliyah clapped her hands, jumping up and down. “You did it!”
“Almost,” he muttered, turning his attention to the smear of lightless sky above.
That broach was a messy tangle where the swarm had consumed the speed of light – thousands of wavering lines crisscrossing where the individual buzzsects had chewed our physics away. It reminded Paul of ants digging tunnels into the earth, individual crawlways of darkness opening up into excavated gaps where nothing moved.
He’d never let a broach get this far out of control before.
He reached out, probing at the violation’s edges – and recoiled.
It was worse than he’d thought. The speed of l
ight was the universe’s speed limit – but these extruded alien dimensions held no concept of speed. Which made no sense: the buzzsects had managed to move through there, yet their idea of motion held only superficial similarities to how anyone in this universe viewed it. They got from one place to another utilizing principles that gave Paul an instant migraine.
It made no sense. Worse, he had no time to comprehend these mind-warping physics. Someone here must have called SMASH by now. They had thirty-five minutes before the Unimancers arrived – he’d chosen Morehead because of its distance from SMASH response centers – but the local cops would arrive much sooner.
Still, regardless of the pressure, Paul felt a tingle of pleasurable anticipation. It was like looking at Valentine’s apartment, strewn with dirty clothing and old Burger King wrappers; he didn’t necessarily want to do the work, but it was going to feel so good to relax once he’d put everything back into order.
He traced the gap’s outlines, then reached out to the Earth dimensions – the clean ones that allowed biological life – to knead the idea of “speed” back into the violated area.
It resisted.
No, Paul thought, horrified – a broach had never resisted him. This violation defied him, having existed long enough to gain a dim sentience. It struggled to retain its own integrity, another universe jammed deep within ours.
It wanted to grow.
Panicked, Paul assaulted the broach with Bragg’s Law of X-rays, greasing the path with the slower velocities of Cherenkov radiation, dropping the crushing weight of the laws of relativity on it.
Still the violation refused to budge. It contracted, pulling in its strength–
Wave-particle duality Casimir effect Maxwell’s equations the Constancy Principle
Paul didn’t know the names of the physical laws he used to crush this violation – he understood them instinctively, a man who had mastered grammar not through studying language but through having read a thousand books. He bludgeoned the violation, making inchoate noises of terror, until–
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