Fix

by Ferrett Steinmetz

  Distantly, they heard something bellow – the Thing’s rage. They stood on a thin soil outcropping battered by angry buzzsect swarms, bouncing off as ineffectively as moths off a lightbulb.

  They kept kissing – one slow kiss to fend off a million monsters.

  Our first kiss shouldn’t look like this, Aliyah

  No

  And Ruth’s hands slid down the small of Aliyah’s back just the way Aliyah had hoped and Aliyah nipped Ruth’s lips just the way Ruth wanted and the ground trembled underneath them because a kiss like this demanded ground and they remembered the feel of solid soil beneath them, they remembered the smell of high grass and the trees flowered back into green healthy beauty and the black pushed away from the sky and something roared but that didn’t matter everything should line up to make this kiss perfect.

  Flowers blossomed from the fresh soil, spat death to the buzzsects.

  The Thing in the sky smashed down. A rainbow nudged it aside, sent it sprawling back into its cage.

  The universe needed this kiss to happen, and Aliyah and Ruth felt the truth of it, their fears mixing and melding as they understood how much love they held, inside the Unimancer collective, inside Ruth, how goodness could drive back this darkness, and they sighed as Aliyah understood what Ruth had all along:

  She was born to be a Unimancer.

  They broke that first kiss, looking towards Bastogne, knowing they’d die to protect it.

  Their eyes jittered with love.

  Twenty-Nine

  Tsabo’s Decree

  “Cutscene!” Valentine yelled, as the crane lifted the shipping container out of the boat.

  Paul’s body was no longer under his control – his life had been transformed into a movie played between levels. The reference books on the shelves tumbled off in slow motion as heavy machinery hauled them skywards and Valentine’s videogamemancy kicked in, but he was used to this. She’d practiced her cutscene magic to get them through storms in the Atlantic. Whenever the oil lamps tumbled to the floor, “Cutscene!” – and magically, the fire went only where Valentine allowed it to.

  Player characters didn’t die in cutscenes.

  They got tossed around, but Valentine’s ’mancy ensured no one got hurt.

  He fell backwards onto the hard rubber mats; though the cutscene prevented damage, the impact still hurt like blazes. Weeks of hospital-grade antibiotics had barely dimmed his ravaging infections.

  Paul laid prone once the cutscene finished, trying not to breathe – whenever he breathed in more than a shallow whisper, he coughed, and coughing was like being stabbed.

  Not much further. A few hours, and this would be over.

  They’d been cooped up here for a month. Valentine had passed the days by playing Hatoful Boyfriend and other dating simulators on her Nintendo DS, cursing because she couldn’t boost her relationship scores high enough. Paul worked on an old-fashioned computer terminal, complete with thick black plastic keys and a monochrome green IBM 3270 monitor that glowed even though they had no electricity.

  Imani jumped rope for exercise, occasionally using Valentine’s ’mancy to practice her gunplay. In her spare time, she’d tended to ancient Grady in his wheelchair. He alone seemed content; after being trapped in the same room for decades, being confined to a new room was almost an adventure.

  “Jesus, Paul.” Valentine leaned him against the wall to stabilize him as the crane carried the shipping crate to the docks; Paul still moaned. “Where’ve you been putting your flux?”

  “Same as you.” He palpated his ribs. “In here.”

  He couldn’t risk his stray bad luck causing them to be discovered, so he’d pushed it inside. The flux fed his infections in painful ways.

  “Paul, Paul.” Valentine slapped her crotch like she was giving it a high-five. “It’s OK if I give myself a herpes flareup.” She had the same rueful look she got whenever she lost her true love on Hatoful Boyfriend. “I’m not using Little Priscilla anyway. But you?”

  “I’ve got my meds.” Robert had stocked the container with racks of painkillers. To dull his ribs took so many Oxycontin, sometimes Paul passed out on the keyboard.

  “This won’t do any good if you collapse halfway to Aliyah,” Valentine said sternly. “You gotta get that shit under control.”

  “A few hours,” he begged. “We’ll know where she is in a few hours.”

  “Cutscene!” Valentine yelled. The monitor toppled off the stand as the crane lowered the container onto the truck – but again, nobody got hurt even as everything crashed. Paul tried not to stay still, but he still had to breathe, so he sipped in a breath–

  Agony.

  He slipped another Oxycontin onto his tongue.

  Soon.

  The truck rumbled away from the docks, carrying the shipping container with it – Paul had contracted the shipping companies to drop it off at the edge of town. The driver wouldn’t bring them there, of course, but that betrayal was part of the plan.

  Imani blotted sweat off his forehead.

  He pushed the towel away. He hated being cared for.

  “Is this…” He swallowed. “Your plan’s gonna work, right?”

  “If you can do what you say you can do, baby.” She frowned. “You got the juice?”

  “Nothing can stop me.” It couldn’t. He had no doubts about that.

  Paul ignored the shooting pains as the truck bumped down a road. They were exiting Zwole, a large Netherlands city not yet encroached by the broach.

  He kept track of how far they’d travelled, accounting for the additional distance. Things would travel fast, but…

  “Should we do this?”

  Imani let go of his hand, uncertain. “What do you mean?”

  “Is this… Is this a good idea, sweetie? This is our last chance to back out.” He held up the Oxycontin prescription, displaying Robert’s name printed on the label. “He told me… He told me he didn’t approve. And me, I- I handed you this project to help you heal. Maybe that wasn’t fair. I made you into a weapon. And this is… It’s a big weapon. I don’t wanna fire it unless we’re all comfortable with it. So.” He gestured up at the sky, bringing his finger down in a final, fatal arc. “Should we?”

  She chewed her lip.

  “I don’t know, Paul.”

  He gave her the silence to process.

  “I’ve always been a corporate lawyer. It’s never been my job to set policy. I’ll tell people what’s prosecutable, inform them of their exposures, but… I don’t tell people what to do. Because me? I’ll do whatever it takes to win.”

  Paul smiled. Her sharp-toothed ambition had always filled him with pride.

  “You’re the moral center, Paul.” She tapped his chest. “So if you tell me this is what we need to do… then we do it.”

  “Valentine,” he whispered. “Could you come over here?”

  She crawled through the wreckage to plop by Paul’s side.

  “Still no luck contacting Aliyah, right?”

  She shook her head. “If she logged into our game networks, I’d know. She’s… “ She blew on her hand and spread her fingers like a dandelion giving up seeds. “Gone.”

  “Can you bring up a photo show?”

  “Yeah.” Valentine waved in the air, and a shimmering hologram emerged in a flare of videogamemancy; a teenaged black girl, her disheveled hair combed carefully over the burn scars on her forehead. Aliyah’s smile was defiant, tense; she held up her Nintendo DS defensively, like Thor’s hammer.

  Imani closed her eyes.

  “Earlier,” said Paul. “Way earlier.”

  A shot of a five year-old Aliyah, dressed in a frilly pink princess dress, shimmered into existence. Aliyah in the days before she’d been burned, before she’d been caught up in magic.

  There was such joy in that smile.

  “Back to the last photo.”

  Even though he’d snapped that picture when they were in no danger, her shoulders were hunched, her fingers white around the
controller. Her smile had curdled to a fierce don’t-fuck-with-me grin.

  Go live a quiet life somewhere, that horrible teenaged girl trapped inside the Unimancer network had told them. Yet they hunted people like Aliyah – as long as the Unimancers existed, there could be no quiet life.

  All the while, Paul felt that crawling certainty the black flux would brainwash his daughter. That young girl had threatened to use Aliyah to execute him. That soulless teenaged mockery would reshape Aliyah into her own image…

  YOU WILL LOSE YOUR DAUGHTER IN WAYS YOU NEVER IMAGINED

  “All right,” Paul said. “Let’s do this.”

  * * *

  Paul double-checked the GPS coordinates as the truck rolled to a stop.

  “Was she here?” Paul asked.

  Grady clambered down from his wheelchair to take a deep sniff from the container’s ventilation holes. “Yes. They brought her through here.”

  Paul relaxed. He hadn’t been sure if all ’mancers were abducted through the same European route.

  General Kanakia’s voice boomed down from speakers outside the container.

  “Please come out with your hands up, Paul. No ’mancy, please. I’m hoping this can be a quiet negotiation between equals.”

  Grady stiffened. “You promised, Mr Tsabo.”

  “I keep my promises.”

  “You know my brother’s gone. Without him, I…”

  “I know. I’d feel the same without Aliyah.”

  Grady closed his eyes, peacefully preparing for the end.

  “You’ve been betrayed, Paul. Mr Steeplechase called us, told us how even he thought you were out of control, told us how you were smuggling yourself into Europe – so we instructed your truck driver to deliver you to us.”

  To think Imani had doubted Grady Steeplechase’s acting ability.

  “Escape is not an option. Last time, you barely escaped fifteen ’mancers. Now? I’ve brought a hundred and fifty of our best trained men – and they are radiating normalcy at you, so the slightest ’mancy will create near-fatal flux. I’ve brought you to an isolated area where you can harm no one – and leaves you nowhere to run.”

  While Kanakia spoke, each of them hugged Grady in turn, thanking him.

  “Unlock the back doors?” Paul asked.

  Valentine unlatched the doors, the air crackling with the hum of prepared ’mancy. If they fired weaponry, Valentine would turn them into game-based annoyances.

  It didn’t matter.

  The bird was in the air.

  Paul stepped out into the light, shielding his eyes with his palm – after weeks locked in a container, it was so bright out here. But he made out the tangled barbed wire fences and bleachers and sniper towers, a miniature prison set in a country meadow.

  They’d parked the truck in the center of a hundred and fifty ’mancers, each armed with cutting-edge anti-’mancer weaponry.

  As Paul stepped forward, the Unimancers trained their sights on him. He saw the anti-’mancer landmines poking out of the soil, the yellow FRONT TOWARDS ENEMY lettering an implicit threat.

  “You came out to visit me personally, general?” Paul spoke up, ignoring the shredding pain in his side. “I suppose that’s an honor.”

  General Kanakia sat behind a thick, blast-proof plexiglass screen. Given that Kanakia had outwitted him so thoroughly, he’d imagined a lean, sharklike man, not plump middle management.

  Kanakia saluted Paul. “It is an honor, sir. Away from the United States’ eyes, we can talk as equals.”

  “Give me my daughter.”

  “Will you surrender?”

  “Where is my daughter?”

  “Aliyah is safe, and will remain safe. We’ve grown fond of her, Paul.”

  Was she in their thrall? He tried not to panic. A top speed of 550 mph meant Paul needed to stall four more minutes…

  “She’s not Unimanced. We have no need for videogamemancers, Paul. We need you – you, and your singular talent for healing broaches.”

  He spat laughter. “You’ll brainwash my magic away!”

  “No. We’ll incorporate your skills, Paul. You haven’t seen what we’ve faced yet. There are so few of us to combat it. You’re a genius at working with limited resources – and once you’ve seen what Aliyah’s seen, well… you’re a good man. I know you’ll help us…”

  “Where is she? I’m not asking a third time, Kanakia.”

  “I wouldn’t bring her into a war zone, Paul. She’s safe. Far away but safe.”

  Valentine cracked her knuckles. “Wrong answer.”

  Weapons clacked as the Unimancers shifted their aim to Valentine. Kanakia waved at them to stand down, which they did grudgingly; they glowered, radiating hatred.

  Oh yeah, he thought. You remember being scared.

  Let’s introduce you to terror.

  “Her location’s irrelevant, Paul,” the general said. “This is where it ends. We’ve assembled our best forces to stop you…”

  Paul whistled, looking up at the sky. “What if I wanted you to bring me somewhere you’d assembled as many troops as you could get your hands on?”

  Kanakia frowned. So did the Unimancers; they stiffened, hunting for any ’mancy Paul or Valentine might be weaving – but the only magic here was theirs.

  “There’s not a lot of ways to destroy a swarm consciousness,” Imani said conversationally. “They’re resilient against most attacks, because the knowledge is widely distributed among individual nodes. Only one way guarantees disabling a swarm’s functional capacity…”

  “No.” Blood drained from the general’s face.

  “…and that’s to destroy enough individual segments to cripple the mind’s connective tissue.”

  The Unimancers checked the shipping container, worried they’d missed something – but the container had been scanned back at the docking port to ensure it had no explosives. They captured Paul, puzzled by his lack of ’mancy, even more puzzled by his certainty.

  “Oh, I’m not doing any magic now,” Paul told them. “I couldn’t. This many Unimancers would swamp any ’mancy in flux; Unimancy only allows the usage of conventional weapons.”

  “What have you done?” Kanakia screamed.

  Paul pointed one finger up towards the bright blue sky. A dot appeared high, next to the sun, grew huge–

  “I did the magic that fired the missile nine minutes ago,” Paul said.

  * * *

  Paul did not own any subsonic cruise missiles, of course.

  But the USS Chicago SSN 721 patrolling the North Sea had twelve Tomahawk missiles ready to fire in vertical launching tubes. The crew of 118 men used a computer to monitor the missiles’ readiness, to set coordinates, to tell them when to launch.

  And what was computer code, if not the essence of record-keeping?

  Paul had studied programming on and off for years on the chance it’d become useful. But in the last month, he’d learned to speak code as computers interpreted it – starting with the language of C++, whose syntax used helpful half-sentences, then descending into the dark bare-metal assembly language and its barked-out single-word commands, and finally settling into the dense foliage of machine code – a human-hostile language of two words, “1” and “0,” with a few registers to shift them in and out.

  Machine code was the perfect place to hide changes no human could detect.

  It hadn’t been easy inducing a cataclysmic series of bugs into the missiles’ control software, so at a set time a missile would launch towards a set of GPS coordinates–

  –but in terms of maximum carnage for minimum effort, changing a handful of 0s and 1s was a bargain.

  * * *

  “Cutscene!” Valentine screamed, grabbing Imani and Paul as the world went white with fire.

  Obliterating Grady Steeplechase.

  Obliterating one hundred and fifty Unimancers.

  Thirty

  Kiss With a Dying Man’s Tongue

  Their minds were one. Their desires were not. />
  Let me touch you Ruth

  I’m not sure Aliyah

  Aliyah’s palms rested on Ruth’s ribs as they kissed, and to Aliyah the flurry of emotions felt like two experts playing Mortal Kombat – quick flurries of jabs and exchanges, a complicated dance trying to arrive at a conclusion.

  Except in Mortal Kombat, the goal was defeat, and in Unimancy, the goal was consensus.

  Aliyah longed to touch Ruth’s breasts, but Ruth countered with fears that they’d kissed, they should explore that more, and Ruth’s worries slithered through Aliyah as keenly as though she’d held those concerns herself. Aliyah coursed back up those fears to grasp the root concern that Ruth was worried Aliyah just wanted her for her body, and Aliyah filled Ruth with her understanding that yes though she brimmed with lust, Aliyah needed Ruth’s friendship above all else.

  Ruth dissected Aliyah’s understanding of “best friend,” revealing Aliyah’s only best friend had been Valentine. Within seconds, Ruth helped Aliyah unlock the realization that she wanted to experience sex partly because Valentine had tinted Aliyah’s worldview to view physical intimacy as an important step to becoming grownup – and when Ruth pointed out Aunt Valentine’s healthy sex life with Uncle Robert had plastered over deeper flaws in their relationship, Aliyah agreed maybe waiting to proceed physically was a fine call…

  …at which point Ruth relaxed enough to reveal her intense longing, and Aliyah flipped through every sexy dream Ruth had had of Aliyah, and Aliyah’s fingers unhooked Ruth’s bra, and their excitement doubled, quadrupled, multiplied until sex-thoughts filled their world…

  Oh, I see you made a new friend!

  Ruth’s mother’s voice rang through their heads with the cheerful happiness of a mom bringing sandwiches into the living room.

  Aliyah pulled away, feeling filthy under Ruth’s mother’s gaze–

  It took a moment before Aliyah realized Ruth’s mother hadn’t comprehended what was happening.

  Ruth’s mother – Olivia, her name was – still perceived Ruth as the seven year-old girl she’d been when she’d implanted herself into her daughter’s mind. That couldn’t change, would never change. The Olivia-construct could absorb new facts – Olivia had been an educamancer, after all – but emotionally, it was designed to provide support for a Ruth that no longer existed.