Broken: A Plague Journal

by Paul Hughes

  West’s chest heaved; his teeth were clenched in a snarl to match his eyes. Paul walked to the conference table, joined the remaining Judith Command. West stood slowly and sat across the table, kneading his hands back to feeling from the impact.

  Alina sat next to West, rolled the marble across to Paul.

  “‘Phire?”

  “I couldn’t get Jade’s.” The bear spoke as he settled into a chair. “There wasn’t much left of the droptroops.”

  West’s eyes reached across the polished wood with an unabridged fury.

  “I’m sorry, Adam.”

  “You’re saying that a lot, lately.”

  “They knew the risks.”

  “They were my—”

  “No.” Paul let the word echo. “They weren’t.”

  “Just another merge.” Reynald spoke from behind a stack of glass. He threw them to the table, a faint crack splintering the bottom display, a triangle of it spinning lazily toward Paul. Before it sparked out, he read: elta bleed 96-over. [A/O reports 04%. “Not his daughters, no. Not from the AE-line. Does it matter?”

  Paul snuffled back a drip of silver. His hands were under the table. He kept turning to the right.

  “Any luck finding your ship, Jean?” Alina had pulled Honeybear from his seat. Her arms were around him, stroking his sweatshop plush. His cardiac shield barely contained his broken heart.

  Reynald’s code burns flickered and rearranged across his temple. He barely noticed anymore; Maire’s siege of the Timeline rewrote histories faster than they could be lived. “We’ve not been able to survey deep enough. With all the traffic in the stream, we can’t get into the target Whens without Maire knowing. Hope was a close reader.”

  “You don’t need Maggie.”

  “She was part of the deal.”

  “The deal doesn’t matter now.” Paul lit a cigarette and let the smoke cloud the stillness between them. “They’re gone, Simon and Maggie. Hunter and Lily. We all know that. We would have found them by now if they were integral to the calculus. That leaves two possibilities—either Maire’s found them already, or they were never really the focus to begin with.” He ashed.

  “We’ll need as many ships as we can—”

  “We’re taking one ship.”

  Smoke drifted, not enough to conceal the shimmer.

  “Have to be a hell of a ship.” West reached to steal a smoke. Maybe it would help the moment.

  “It will be.” Inhalation, exhalation through words. Paul wiped a line of argent blood from the corner of his mouth. “Trust me.”

  “What are you planning, son?” Reynald took the cigarette from West’s offer, coughed through. He knew already. “I see Sam’s not here.”

  “He’s here.” An instant, a stark flash of reveal, and they saw Sam pressed into Paul’s eyes. An illusion, a lie, it was gone before it registered.

  Alina fumbled with the box of Marlboros. The battered gold Zippo ignited. She smoked as if she had before. Jud looked through her eyes but said nothing.

  These veils of dream we weave around ourselves, never knowing for certain, but knowing enough: this is all we have.

  “I’m flying. Al’s my pilot. Everyone else, you’ll be there for the show. Don’t worry.”

  He lit another smoke. Eventually, they all did.

  “You can go home. All of you. If you want.”

  The birthing plain pods were retracted, the sea of openings now closed forever, the expanse not worthy of a pin drop: a million or a billion, more, a trillion, more, everyone, everyone was there, all the possibilities he’d written, everyone who was left. Some near him sat. The shifts from foot to foot in anticipation alone was deafening, added to the murmur, but when he spoke, they heard.

  He shook. Wracked with coughs. The silver blood, once a trickle, was now a torrent. He wrote a faded blue handkerchief into the dream and mopped the corner of his mouth.

  West and Reynald flanked him. West’s hand rested in wait on his back.

  Another ripple passed through the assembly and a few thousand characters screamed away in bursts of silver. Somewhere out there, Maire’s army was reaching for them. The spaces filled in.

  Paul watched the empty. Alina grew concerned; his eyes were somewhere long ago. He was bending, collapsing. West held him up as silver pattered to the closed lid of a Jud cocoon. He regained his footing, wiped, straightened.

  Her hearts—her heart sped a rhythm she resented, but it’s not easy to forget better times and versions.

  “You can go home,” he whispered, but it carried. Another staggering ripple, seven million more disappeared. He could feel Maire out there, the grip of a projector marble slicked in blood, the windswept ice of the merge.

  “We’re collapsing the Timeline,” Reynald shouted across the metal and dust. “Dismantling this foothold. We’ll use the last resources of Judith Command to fuel one final assault on the Delta bleed. Anyone who doesn’t want to come with us, your time here is done. Go home to your Whens and wait it out. You’ve all made a remarkable sacrifice to be here. We can’t expect more of you. Go home to your families.”

  “What families?” A voice spoke out from the mass. “Most of us have nowhere to go!”

  A rumbled assent. Paul felt them slipping, all of them innocent, each soul the work product of his madness.

  “Then run.” West growled across the plain.

  Whispers, multiplied. The middle C of uncertainty, a resounding seiche wave of fear.

  “Those of you who choose to go with us,” Reynald continued, “will be loaded into a pattern cache aboard Alina’s ship. Our combined mind-essence will power the largest silver vessel ever...” he looked sideways at Paul, “assembled.”

  One ship? The unspoken concern was tangible.

  “Just one ship. Me.” Paul’s chest hitched with his body’s rejection of the silver.

  The cries of outrage drowned any hope for hope. Alina gripped herself tighter, feeling it all fall apart.

  “We’re taking the war to Maire. One last shot. One ship. As many of us as want to go.” West stepped forward, let the author stand alone as he choked something smoky and snarling back down. “We need to end this now!”

  The din was painful. Paul had never suspected such resistance to his plan, but—

  “You cowards.” Jud’s knife-edged voice cut through Alina’s tongue. “You fucking cowards!” Her words could have enraged the crowd, but a silent truce sputtered to life across them. “What else do you have to live for? If we lose this, there won’t be much living at all, kids. If Maire breaks through entirely, you think you’ll be safe? She’s erasing both the Alpha and Omega lines. This isn’t the Enemy rewriting history in their image—Maire’s erasing the image.”

  “We’ll begin loading the cache immediately.” Reynald scratched his temple; another three lines appeared. “Best of luck to those who stay behind.”

  “I’m sorry,” Paul managed as best he could. His hand went to the throb of his cardiac shield. “Please believe that.”

  They left the birth fields, the author limping along between Jean and Adam, Alina’s hand on his shoulder.

  “Gotcha,” Maire said, and Michael Zero-Four’s body streamered across the steel floor of the launch command center. The city’s trunk shuddered below as Enemy forces quickly put an end to the pathetic civil war between tribes that had necessitated the launch of the zero-four probe.

  She gutted him with a mechanical precision, popped his marble into her mouth and bit down. The sweet internals of the device pooled between her teeth and gums, and she knew. She knew.

  Dozens of miles away, the probe erupted in its Gauss tube. Maire’s Enemy companions flickered for an instant as their physics attempted to make sense of never having existed. Timesweep. She buffered them. She held them in place.

  Which gave her an idea.

  She walked quickly, eagerly to a console on one wall of the command, reached into the display and activated the upload link. Somewhere in the bowels of the roo
m, a churning began. The display confirmed: there was a full pattern trapped in the buffer. Someone’s soul hadn’t made it to the probe.

  She cooked him.

  Hours passed, and she threw the download tank’s hatch open. A tall, gray-eyed man crumpled to the floor with a splash and a thud.

  “James Richter.” Her grin was fangs and dimples. “Welcome to my future.”

  Richter wretched phased silica onto the floor. He tried to crawl to his hands and knees, but squeaked back down in a weak, naked pile.

  He looked up at her. “Hope?”

  “Walk with me?”

  “Paul...”

  “Please?”

  Judith Command was being systematically dismantled around them, the billions, trillions of soldats perdus uploaded into a pattern cache that Paul would carry. The bubble around the non-place had developed great cracks on its periphery, and in places, the blackness of the unknown beyond shined down through.

  They walked to the edge, the place where they could look down into the Timestream. The Alpha Point sparked an eternity below them. As they walked, his hand was close enough to Alina’s so that she could hold it, if she wanted. We know the distances between us; we test the lines and hope someone crosses.

  Theirs was a heartbroken silence built of everything that had gone wrong, all the fights over nothing, the context of them, the place and time out of time in which they lived. They were both machines built from life’s flickers.

  They sat on the edge and still said nothing. Their hands were still close enough to hold.

  Their feet dangled down over the universe.

  He said, “It was good.”

  She said, “I know.”

  A thousand other lives tried to crawl into that moment, a thousand other faces, but as he sat there dying, Paul looked only at Alina. The angle of her jaw, the patterns of her freckles, the flare of her nose, eyes that smiled, upturned, even when she was crying. A thousand other faces tried but failed to replace her.

  We can count down our final moments in the stillness between another’s heartbeats.

  We can search for a perfect moment and realize that we’ve already lived it.

  We can ravel a ball of silver, wear a filament of it on our wrists. We can hear the music across the water, the stars falling above, and we can dance, reach out for a hand. The world falling apart around us, and none of it matters. Life is a series of moments, of splendor, of misery, the finest line woven between. We can sit on the edge with the love of our lives and not say anything at all.

  He reached out, withdrew. They looked down at existence. He coughed.

  She turned back to the bubble’s center. “I think they’re ready.”

  He looked. Judith Command was empty, except for them. There was wind, and it was cold.

  “Are you?”

  “No.”

  They looked into each other’s eyes for the first time in months. Years. Time had no meaning at the edges.

  He held out his hand.

  She smiled. Her eyes were wet. He was bleeding metal.

  There were echoes.

  She took his hand and jumped off the edge.

  They fell, but in that scale, they were motionless. Judith Command raced away above them, the bubble’s edges cracking and releasing, great plates of metallish shattering down toward them, the whole of the last fort erupting and falling. And they flew, hands held, eyes open, as shards of Command danced around them. They wove, hands held, between the pieces.

  They pulled toward each other, arms frantic, grasping, bodies shuddering to relearn their symmetries, to reseat the way they fit together perfectly. They tumbled, hands held, down into the past, into the deepest night, the places hidden away for lifetimes.

  Paul wrapped his arms around Alina, couldn’t hold her close enough. He pulled back, looked into her colorless blue eyes, remembered the taste of her, gone so long now, tumbling, hands held, end over end, a dizzying, frightening descent, picking up speed, whirling, faster, faster, and Command was nothing above them, a cascade of countless fragments running alongside.

  He never looked away. Reached out, one hand shimmering, one hand clasping hers, so small and perfect. It was a beautiful hand that he couldn’t see, enveloped in his own, but he could feel it, contact, reached out, one hand shimmering, and called the silver to him, the detritus of Judith Command, and it came, an ocean of metal, swarming, singing around them, wrapping and protecting, enveloping, consuming. He would protect her. He would hold her close. And it formed around them, hands held, silver forming and reforming, merging with him, the finest silver web spidering through him. She didn’t look away from the horror of him as he shifted, merged, became something else. She was caught in an expanse within him. She was encapsulated inside of him, a ship, a living ship of silver, the last of Command, the machine sea, and an ancient silent song. She looked up and saw the last of the light before he closed around her, the pattern cache falling into place above, sparking to almost-life, his hand changing, snaking, draping. His face a distended mess of metal, and then flat, and then nothing. It was dark inside of him. It was quiet. She was cold. He never looked away.

  remember me

  remember me on the wind

  in the autumn

  please remember me

  the reflection

  The interface webs dug into her.

  and I loved you. Know that I loved you.

  They fell.

  OMEGA

  “Are you leaving?”

  She stood in the doorway, her back to him. Heard him roll over and crawl deeper into their bed, pulling sheets around him in the cool autumn morning. The window was open. He was asleep. He’d spoken in dream.

  She walked the short hallway to the bathroom, business, and returned. Levered comforters from him and wrapped herself. Draped an arm around him. He took her hand. Squeezed. He was asleep and she wasn’t.

  He’s writing me in.

  She felt his heartbeat, traced the scar on his chest.

  Something wormed within her, something without meaning, intangible and cold. She’d be leaving soon, but not yet. The layers of meaning in his sleep-mumbled question drew focus on lines in her heart. He expected her to leave—and she would, eventually. That something spoke through his dream, that something was aware of the future while his eyes were closed and his heart was slow, that was the break.

  So she held him tighter. She would leave tiny notes in hidden places. She would wake him up by crawling on top of him. She would smile into the window light, and he would fall in love in that moment. He would push her hair back from her eyes. She wouldn’t leave yet. The question echoed.

  Are you leaving?

  He lay there with his eyes closed, rolled to the left, his arm coming to rest on a pillow, a space, reached farther, and remembered that he was alone.

  Opened his eyes to find the cat staring at him from the banister bounding the landing. The cat resented him. He had been a cat person before he got one.

  Swung his right leg, muscled straight so as not to aggravate the shattered knee and its cap of scar tissue, to the cold tile. Wiped sleep from his eyes and craved a cigarette. Looped chicken legs into gray boxers and sat on the edge of the bed. There had been a picture on his nightstand. There had been books. Itineraries folded between pages. A booth photo. There had been many things.

  Stood and pulled cotton over his sex. Jeans.

  The stairs were narrow and tall, and he wondered the shapes of the people who had built them. The stairs were built to trip him. He’d bought replacement treads and two tubes of adhesive, but he’d forgotten to improve, and now there was no time.

  Down right angles into the kitchen, and he was still alone. There were birds outside. The cat made angry barking sounds and tried to trip him for food.

  Through empty rooms filled with many things into a cracked leather chair on wheels. The floor was tilted, and he could roll the length of the office with no effort. It was difficult to remain in place before the monit
or.

  Hooked glasses around his ears and there was an empty inbox. Grabbed yesterday’s used coffee cup, three grounds, not much of a reading, at its bottom. There was a spoon. It circled as he walked, its bottom edge gummed to the cup with the residue of hardened hazelnut creamer. She had been allergic. He could drink that now.

  His body woke him most days at 8:57, and he couldn’t remember what significance that time had or why it had been imprinted on his body.

  The paper was late again. He could tell because he looked out the patio door and couldn’t see it sopping mud water in the puddled divot that was the end of his driveway. Sometimes it was in the ditch. He felt like an adult, reading newspapers that were delivered to him three hundred sixty days each year. He kept them stacked in a milk crate in his kitchen, out of the reach of the cat, which had once mistaken that archive for its litter box. The highlight of most days was the bra advertisements in the sale papers.

  To the bathroom, still looking for tiny notes pressed into the edge of the mirror.

  Four Kinney Brand acetaminophen tablets. Water. Two more to be safe.

  He looked at pill bottles and ignored them.

  Watered the cat. Stared for too long at a small ceramic vase, two dried yellow shoots of bamboo. He’d soaked them in his dishpan. Spent hours pondering their revival. Had decided to let them die.

  Measured fifteen scoops of generic coffee into the twelve-cup maker, added water, waited, withdrew three. To the kitchen table. The first sip. The first smoke. He looked out the window and watched blue jays toss seed to the new concrete of the veranda. The cat wagged its tail and chattered. The coffee was hot and bitter. Considered the distance to the refrigerator to retrieve the creamer. Scratch flicker click. He breathed deeply of the smoke. It calmed him.

  There had been other mornings, other coffee, places without cats. Eggs. The Tony Danza show. No underpants and yes plaid shirts. Messy morning hair and breath. The way people intersect.