Broken Hero

by Jonathan Wood

  It is a horror show for the clockwork robot crowd. A vast depravity. It is a bomb made of corpses. The ultimate expression of Lang’s disregard for his creations.

  “Holy shit,” I whisper. “It’s fucking enormous.” I’m never at my most eloquent when faced with imminent death. At least I’m accurate though. The Uhrwerkgerät would dwarf the average four-bedroom family abode. You could walk around in it, climb up its beams, and parade along boardwalks of mechanical corpses.

  And there is Friedrich. The architect of this travesty. He stands clear of the bomb near the foot of the curving stairs, pointing and shouting instructions I cannot understand. Uhrwerkmänner scurry to obey him, clambering over the corpses of their brethren. They fix vast girders in place, scaffolding to prop up the sheer bulk of it.

  “It is too big.” Hermann’s voice is a dull whisper. “It is too much. There are too many.”

  We are outnumbered to the most egregious extent. Five to one? More perhaps? And Friedrich’s Uhrwerkmänner, while they may be beaten and scraped, appear significantly healthier than the ones behind me right now. He has so many in fact, not all of them are working on the Uhrwerkgerät. He’s managed to post a ring of sentries around the bomb.

  This is not going to be exactly easy.

  What’s going on inside those Uhrwerkmänners’ heads? Is it horror? Do they see what they’re doing? Do they think it’s too late to fix it? Or are they sold on this? Are they zealots like Friedrich?

  I don’t know. I don’t even know if it matters. They are between us and the machine. We’re going to have to find a way through.

  “We cannot do this.” Hermann is hardly hitting the high notes of optimism right now.

  “There’s a way,” I say. “There has to be.”

  “No.” Hermann shakes his head. “To get to it… they will destroy us.”

  It’s true. Most likely they will. But survival was never really an option coming into this fight. Hell, we’re here to ensure a bomb blows up. It’s not like we’ll be heading out for a picnic and a quick game of footie afterwards. But I forget how long I’ve been living with the certainty of my own death. The others still have to disentangle themselves from their own hopes. It can be a painful process.

  “I’m sorry,” I say to Hermann. “I wish I could offer you more. But today is going to be a shitty day.” I smile a sad smile. “But what’s the alternative?” I look back down the corridor. And what do I have back that way? A girlfriend on the brink of leaving me. The collapse of MI37. “It’s not going to get any better back there,” I say. “As crappy as this is, it is the best of the bad alternatives.”

  Hermann looks back at me. His mechanical face is impossible to read. No emotions are truly capable of making their way through the thick metal of his face. And yet… there is something there, in the dull glint of his eyes. Some pathos? Some empathy.

  “We will die today,” he says. A great sadness resonates in his chest. “All of us. We have searched for salvation, but instead we have found this.”

  It’s not exactly a positive spin, but on the other hand I’m not sure this is really the time for an inspirational quote about life, and balance, and the importance of mimicking a meditative mongoose climbing an ice cliff.

  “We will die today,” Hermann says again, looking back at his thirty or so warriors, his friends, the last of his kin. “But it will not be meaningless. It will not be a slow collapse into dotage and madness. We will die stopping Friedrich. We will die stopping the monster he has become. We will die defeating Lang’s legacy. We will stop it all.” His gaze levels on me. “And you will help us.”

  74

  Kayla, always sensitive to the timbre of a dramatic moment, nods to Hermann. “All feckin’ right then.”

  Hermann chooses not to bother acknowledging her.

  “You know,” says Hannah from the other side of me. “Can’t say I’m totally sold on the whole suicidal charge thing here. No chance we have the slightest bit of a plan this time around, is there?”

  I nod, but only slightly. They are not going to like this part.

  “So… erm…” I start, filling them with the usual levels of confidence that I inspire. “Yeah, the thing about that is… well…”

  “We will destroy the bomb,” says Hermann decisively. “You and you.” He points to the two Uhrwerkmänner who seem to be twitching the least. “You will lead the charge down the stairs. We will follow behind you, forming a spear head to crush the machine.”

  The two Uhrwerkmänner take a step forward in unison.

  “No! Stop!” I hiss. “We can’t destroy it.”

  This proves an unpopular suggestion. Hermann lets out a derisive snort.

  “Maybe you cannot destroy it, little man,” he says, “but you do not have the might of German engineering on your side.”

  “No!” I splutter. “This is not about German engineering. Or English engineering for that matter.” A moment of national pride makes its misplaced way into the conversation. “Listen,” I say, and slowly I start to lay out the issues I am having with the destruction of the Uhrwerkgerät.

  “If it’s destroyed,” I conclude, “before it goes off, then those future echoes become paradoxes. It doesn’t matter if we destroy it or it destroys itself. We have to prevent any paradoxes. If it’s not going to tear all of reality apart, we have to let it go off.”

  I still do not seem to have brought anyone around to my way of thinking.

  “You are insane, little man,” says Hermann. “We must destroy it. It is the only way.”

  “Actually,” Clyde interjects. “Sorry to disagree. Well… I mean I’m not sorry about what I’m saying. Well… I am sorry about what I’m saying to the extent that it does not agree with what you’re saying. Erm… making a hash of this. Look, I agree with what I’m going to say. And I disagree with what you said. That’s true. Got to be clear about that. Wish I didn’t. But, you know, the facts being what they are and all… The thing is if we do destroy it, well, Arthur is right. And therefore, really, following on from that, you know, ergo, et cetera, you’re not. Sounds terrible when I say it out loud, but, well, if we listen to you then we will all be completely annihilated along with the rest of reality. Not what we want at all. And so, I think what we maybe should do is go with Arthur’s plan of not destroying the bomb and instead keeping it very safe indeed. Sort of like a puppy or small child. And not with your plan at all in any way, shape or form. Basically.”

  Hermann stares into the wake of this speech. “But…” he starts, more hesitantly than he’s managed so far, “this bomb. It will destroy this city, this country. It could… We don’t know what it could do.”

  “Yes,” Clyde concedes. “Potential world destruction is the detrimental aspect of the plan.” The way he says it, it doesn’t seem to bother him perhaps as much as it should. “But, you know, bigger picture, the rest of reality survives. Probably some nice blue-green planet out there somewhere raising sustainable life. I mean, we haven’t found it yet despite the Hubble telescope poking around. Very nosy device is the Hubble telescope, I always thought. Voyeuristic even. Never understood what all the fuss was about. But, well, even if we haven’t found the alien folk, they’re probably out there somewhere. Hopefully hiding behind some sort of intergalactic curtain so we can’t catch them with their pants down. But, you know, yes, they’ll survive. And it’s an admirable thing, I think, for us to save those unknown strangers. They may not really get to appreciate it, but morally, I think we’re getting to take the high ground.”

  Hermann shakes his head. “So you want us to lay down our lives for a plan that saves no one, that preserves nothing?”

  Hannah grimaces. “To the German fella’s point—” she nods at Hermann, “—this does seem to be a bit of an exercise in futility. I mean what exactly are we hoping to achieve here?”

  Kurt Russell never had to work this hard to sell saving the world to people…

  “The little blue-green planet,” Clyde puts in. “
The terribly modest people living upon it.”

  “Fuck those people.” Tabitha rather succinctly sums up the feelings of the group.

  I spread my hands. “Look, I’m open to suggestions. But the future echoes… This stuff is pretty much predestined.”

  “Wait!” The urgency in Hermann’s voice brings us up short. “The paradoxes. The echoes.” There is an edge of excitement to his voice. “Describe them to me.”

  He’s insistent enough that I go ahead and comply. I tell them everything. The appearance. The agonizing pain in my head. The blood.

  “The bomb hurts you,” Hermann says. “It may even kill you. But the detonation—that is not part of it, correct? Not explicitly?” He leans down to put his head close to mine. I feel small in the shadow of his mass.

  “I… I guess not explicitly,” I say. “But it’s a bomb. How else is it going to kill me?”

  Hermann’s mouth twists as much as it is able. An ugly approximation of a smile. “That,” he says, “is exactly what we need to figure out.”

  75

  “Wait, what?”

  Maybe it’s the imminent death thing, but I’m really not tracking.

  “Oh, I get it,” says Clyde.

  It’s an uncharitable thought, but I think I might have preferred if Clyde didn’t. The explanation would likely have been quicker.

  “See the future echoes aren’t paradoxes yet,” he continues. “That’s what Hermann’s getting at with this whole specificity issue. The echoes set up a certain set of conditions. But they don’t dictate the situation fully. And so we are left with a certain set of parameters that have to be fulfilled. But the detonation of the bomb isn’t the only potential way to fulfill them. If we can provide an alternate explanation, a sort of logical path of least resistance, then we can avoid both the detonation and the paradox.”

  “You know,” says Hermann, “you are not so stupid as you often appear.”

  “Why thank you.” Clyde bows slightly.

  A logical path of least resistance. At least it doesn’t sound stupid to someone. Still, I like the bit where the bomb doesn’t go off and reality isn’t destroyed.

  “The echoes,” I say, applying my gray matter’s pedal to the topic’s metal, “they always happened around the bomb. Around either injury to me or to it.”

  “Yes,” Clyde nods.

  “Anything else?” I ask.

  “Well,” Clyde hums, “I mean there are a lot of variables to consider—

  “Nope,” Tabitha supplies the answer. “You getting fucked. By a bomb. Pretty much it.”

  “Your nose bleeds a feck of a lot,” Kayla points out.

  “Head trauma,” Tabitha says, apparently eager to be helpful all of a sudden.

  I nod. “OK then.” I bite my lip, stare at the massive structure of the Uhrwerkgerät. “How the hell do we bring that down?”

  An Uhrwerkmänn standing a few paces away stumbles forward, nudges Hermann. He looks down at the Uhrwerkgerät, nods.

  “A structural weak point,” he says. “Near Volk. The intersection of those beams.” He points.

  I see it. Just left of the center of the thing. Two beams crossing each other. They don’t seem special though. Just… two beams. “You’re sure?” I ask.

  “Mechanical being,” says the Uhrwerkmänn in a low, almost embarrassed voice. “You get to know stress points pretty well.” He ducks back into the crowd before I can question him further.

  I shoot a quizzical look at Hermann. He nods. Fair enough then.

  “So,” I say. “Clyde, you send some great big spell, hit the stress point. The structure collapses. Destroy the bomb before it goes off. And I get in the way so I get my head injured.”

  And in the back of my skull, a small golden-winged bird called hope starts to flutter.

  There is a very palpable pause.

  “Well,” Clyde hedges, then seems to want to go no further.

  Oh crap.

  “You see,” Clyde starts, then stalls again.

  “Injury,” Tabitha says, like a blow from a blunt object, “may not exactly cut it.”

  Clyde won’t meet my eye. And at the last even Tabitha looks away. Only Kayla will meet my gaze head on.

  Actually if Kayla turned out to be the grim reaper then I wouldn’t be too shocked…

  I guess I’ll get to find out in a minute.

  Jesus.

  “We will die alongside one another,” Hermann intones. “We will share in each other’s glory.” He is rapidly becoming a little too enthusiastic about the certain death thing for my personal taste.

  “So,” I say. My voice sounds flat to me. Dead might be another way to describe it, but I’m not capable of really going there yet. “So we destroy the bomb and it falls on me, and it crushes me, and kills me. That’s about it, right?”

  Another pause.

  “Right?” I ask, my voice rising. And it’s not fair to be impatient, but goddamn it. The world suddenly seems full of things I haven’t done.

  “Well…” It’s Hannah. The little golden-winged bird of hope takes one look at her face and decides to hibernate until everything blows over. “I mean, what if it doesn’t?”

  I can’t work out what she’s talking about. I need plain talk. Or no talk. Or silence. Or another fucking plan where I don’t die. Jesus. Shit.

  “What if it doesn’t kill you?” Hannah continues. She at least has the decency to look unhappy as she talks. “I mean what if… I’m sorry, but what if you just shatter your pelvis or something. I mean you could end up pretty fucked up but also nominally alive. Human vegetable or something.”

  God, we’re trying to make sure I don’t end up drooling on myself and pissing into a catheter but for all the wrong reasons.

  “I mean,” Hannah says, staring at her hands, “it’s not that I want you to die. You just saved my life, like, five minutes back, and to be honest that goes a pretty long way, even if we did have some disagreements. But there’s this whole predestined by the universe thing.”

  “Yeah,” I say. It feels like the out of body experience is coming on a little early. “Yeah, we totally need to figure out a way to guarantee my death.”

  Laughter is bubbling at the back of my throat. The mad dog of fear is starting to bark in the back of my skull.

  “Oh God,” says Clyde and he suddenly wraps me in a tight hug. “This is awful.”

  “Yeah.” I push the laughter down, try to keep my voice flat.

  “She’s got a point,” says Tabitha, still not looking directly at me.

  “So someone needs to be killing me at the same time the collapsing bomb is killing me?” I check.

  “I’ll feckin’ stab you,” says Kayla with a shrug. “Done it before. It weren’t that hard.”

  I think I’m going to be sick.

  “No,” Hannah shakes her head. “You’d get crushed too. There’s no need for you to die as well.”

  Oh, so it’s fine for Kayla to survive…

  Which of course it is. I mean the whole point of the noble sacrifice move is to save people’s lives. If I wasn’t saving anyone then why the hell would I be sacrificing myself?

  The noble sacrifice move…

  Jesus. That’s meant to be something you decide in the heat of the moment. The flush of adrenaline sweeping you up into a moment of glory. This cold dispassionate discussion of how best to ensure my death… I think the only reason I’m holding it together right now is because nausea, hysterics, and madness can’t decide who gets to go first.

  “So how we going to feckin’ do it?” Kayla asks.

  “I can’t. I can’t. I just can’t.” Clyde is shaking his head. “I’m sorry. I really just can’t do it. I’m not that person.”

  And that’s a little more like it. I reach out, touch his arm. Try to reassure him.

  “You don’t have to,” I say. “You’ll be hitting the weak point so the bomb drops on my head.”

  Clyde sobs harder. And who am I kidding? Nothing is going to mak
e this OK.

  And so, even as I pat his arm, I look over at Hannah.

  “You do it,” I say.

  Her eyebrows make for the ceiling.

  “You’re the best shot here,” I say. “You won’t have to be close. Just close enough to hit me. We take out the bomb, and as it all comes down you plug me right between the eyes.” I tap the spot. “Head trauma. Do it right.”

  Hannah’s eyes flick left then right. Looking for an escape? This morning I think she might have leapt at this chance.

  Or is that unfair? I guess I’ll never have time to find out now.

  Finally Hannah looks back. Looks me right in the eye. “All right then,” she says. “That’s the plan. Let’s do it.”

  76

  I take another look over the lip of the stairs. Another look at my fate. Below me, Friedrich’s Uhrwerkmänner still scurry industriously, piecing together their personal doomsday device.

  Shit.

  “I wish Felicity were here,” I say, mostly to myself.

  “She’s going to be so pissed at us.” Tabitha peers over the ledge to my left.

  Clyde appears to my right. “I don’t know what to say.” He seems on the edge of tears. “I wish somehow, that maybe… Well, can’t be totally dishonest and say that I wish it was me. I don’t wish it was me. But I wish it wasn’t you either. Not sure if I’d wish it upon anyone really. I guess that’s what I’m trying to say. Terribly sorry that anyone has to die. And even more so that the person in particular has to be you. Don’t want it to seem like this is some general regret that doesn’t really affect me personally.” He sniffs loudly. “Obviously it is. Very keen on you actually, Arthur. Totally platonic of course. Wouldn’t care for any, ‘Kiss me, Hardy,’ confusion here at what is ostensibly presenting itself as the end.” Another sniff. “Just, you know, very good friends, and…” He descends into further sniffles and snuffs.

  “Bit fucked,” says Tabitha, nodding at Clyde with what might be significantly more affection than she has given him in a while. “What he’s trying to say.”