Fix

by Ferrett Steinmetz

  And like a seven year-old’s mother, Olivia-construct had no real concept of her daughter’s privacy. It barged in on its own schedule. Olivia-construct could not even comprehend this new Ruth would want to kiss a girl, and hence had misinterpreted their sexual negotiations as some form of patty-cake.

  None of which made Ruth feel any less shamed for having her mother tune into her intense need to have her breasts touched.

  Mom! Ruth yelled, but Aliyah felt Ruth’s resignation. Every conversation with Ruth’s Mom-construct was like calling a helpdesk without a ticket number: you had to start afresh.

  Well, I’m sorry, Mom-construct said prissily. It’s just nice you’re making new friends, what with all the lost Unimancers…

  Lost Unimancers?

  Aliyah surfed Ruth’s shock as she hooked back into the Unimancer network – which, to Aliyah, felt like a mastodon staggering back to its feet after a knockout punch, a beast so huge it was shocked to discover it could be hurt.

  Flickering connections reestablished themselves, thousands checking in on their friends – a complex dance of courteous protocols. She felt the butterfly-light touch of friends pinging Ruth, minds rushing outwards to map terrifyingly shrunken boundaries.

  We lost

  How many?

  Too many god too many

  Get out there they can’t die alone we can’t let them die alone

  Seven thousand people raced towards the one person who mattered most in this entire network – a horribly burned man who’d lost his legs in an explosion.

  Take his pain. A hundred masochists surged in to distribute the dying man’s anguish among themselves.

  Keep his heart beating. A hundred doctors overrode the dying man’s limbic systems, inventoried which organs still functioned, improvised stopgap measures to squeeze out another few minutes of life…

  Show him he’s loved. A chorus sang this dying man’s proudest moments back to him.

  Ruth pushed her way through.

  Why’s one man drawing our attention? Ruth asked. Aliyah realized the entire Unimancer network had stumbled to a halt to tend to this one man – SMASH teams stopping in mid-pursuit, conversations with mundanes trailing to silent halts, Unimancers in Europe-bound planes staring out the window.

  He’s the only one left at the site

  A hundred and forty-nine

  Vaporized

  The burned man’s eyes were half-blinded from the acrid gray smoke dissipating from an impact crater the size of a small stadium – but Aliyah saw how scraps of crumpled, jagged steel had been blasted deep into the pulverized soil. Bits of rubble still rained down around him, flopping severed limbs hitting the ground, shrapnel sticking out of smoldering bodies…

  NO

  As Ruth shouted her denial, Aliyah felt recrimination swelling like cancer as the Unimancers agreed Ruth was to blame for this disaster. They replayed one sentence, aiming it at Ruth:

  Set him free, and he’ll cut a path to hell to find her.

  Ruth climbed into the dying man’s eyes, escaping the avalanche of hatred rolling towards her–

  They must be wrong he couldn’t have killed them he was a stupid paper-pusher

  Except as Paul picked his way across the burning bodies, he didn’t look like a paper-pusher or her daddy.

  He looked rabid.

  Daddy walked out of the center of the shallow crater, his face gray and hateful. He breathed raggedly – yet he refused to let his injuries stop him as he staggered up across the corpses, clambering his way up the blasted slopes to yank General Kanakia up in one hand.

  “You thought to go to war with me?” Paul shouted. “Me?! When bureaucracy is the language of war?!”

  General Kanakia bled from a thousand cuts, kept alive by Valentine’s cutscene magic. He looked shocked, defeated–

  What happens if the general dies

  He’s the only one who can coordinate us against the broach

  Is there anyone else on site can we get the dying man to fire his gun

  We must kill the bureaucromancer

  Daddy shook the general. “I wanted you to live long enough to know how badly I beat you.” He sniffed back blood. “You fucked with the wrong ’mancer this time. The Unimancers need critical mass – and we’ll destroy them, stolen body by stolen body, until they fall apart.”

  Ruth knew she was responsible for this war. And when Ruth lamented she should have shot Daddy in the face, Aliyah agreed with her –

  “Now.” Daddy leaned close. “Tell me where my daughter is. Or I will tear you apart.”

  Daddy, no!

  Daddy?

  That hateful avalanche roared towards her, a massive howl of confusion and pain:

  Ruth what did you do

  She’s not supposed to be in here you know that

  She’s evil like her father tainted beyond redemption she killed Numbers she killed Shetra

  He raised her to be a weapon she had no idea of the damage she did

  She feels sorry for him she sympathizes with a murderer

  Of course she’s loyal to her father what else would you expect

  She’s loyal because he’s effective look at how he destroyed us

  He destroyed us because he’s soulless he’s entranced by magic he’s lost

  We need to love the bureaucromancer so he can heal the sky

  Forgiveness while the bodies still burn what are you

  Listen

  Listen

  LISTEN

  The general opened his mouth to speak – but collective had fragmented into a sandstorm of microarguments, their collective grief metastasizing into petty dispute – assaulting Aliyah as she felt both sides’ certainty in every confrontation, the shocked betrayal of long brotherhoods splintered.

  They’d seemed unified from the outside. But the slightest disharmony triggered civil wars.

  She tried to tell them her father meant well – but they barraged her with the last moments of the dead Unimancers, Unimancers dying when her father had triggered a broach, Unimancers crushed under rubble, and she loved him but oh God her father had torn Morehead apart and when she saw his rabid face she

  Rabid yes

  Out of control

  You understand

  She did understand.

  They feared her father because he’d beaten them.

  One man beating them implied unknown weaknesses in the collective.

  The Unimancers were the greatest catalogue of magical knowledge ever assembled: tens of thousands of ’mancers had contributed their expertise.

  Yet if Paul Tsabo – a single man – had uncovered some insight that the hivemind had overlooked, then maybe it was worth risking broaches to discover new healing techniques…

  No.

  The ’mancers turned their attention upon Aliyah.

  I can bring them back together, she realized.

  Her head was a mansion filled with memories; she invited them all in to look through her past. She showed them what it felt like to burn at her father’s hands, demonstrated what it felt like to murder because her ’mancy had gone haywire, laid her aching loneliness out for their perusal.

  He means well, she told them.

  But his magic destroys families. His magic burns children. His magic rips towns apart.

  She squeezed Ruth’s hand so the Unimancers could feel Aliyah’s strength – her certainty that Paul Tsabo is out of control.

  Who was better fit to judge him?

  They absorbed Aliyah’s knowledge of Paul Tsabo’s unthinking cruelty and used it to reforge alliances.

  And those alliances were reforged with bottomless love – a dazed amazement that they had fought so fiercely yet forgave each other, and consensus was good consensus was necessary consensus was

  Consensus is life, Aliyah thought with relief.

  She balled her fist over her heart, the words echoing throughout the hivemind: Consensus. Consensus. Consensus.

  Then Aliyah spoke:

  Le
t me talk through the dying man.

  They parted way, knowing they’d acquired a new skill for their collective:

  Aliyah could tug Paul Tsabo’s heartstrings.

  Her father was screaming at General Kanakia. Even in defeat, the general kept telling Paul he wasn’t evil, he didn’t need to do this:

  “Daddy!”

  Aliyah felt actors helping her to sound weak and terrified, doctors prioritizing the dying man’s speech and vocal chords.

  Daddy turned, shocked to see his daughter’s voice emanating from a dying Unimancer.

  “…Aliyah?”

  “I tapped into their network, Daddy.” A susurration of Unimancers muttered yes, yes, yes. “You have to rescue me. I can’t… I can’t stay for long, they’ll track me down–”

  He dropped the general, ran to her. “Where are you?”

  “In Bastogne.”

  The Unimancers relished watching Paul’s terror as he realized where he’d have to go next.

  “But Daddy – you have to bring the general. They need him. He’s your shield–”

  “Sweetie, are you OK?”

  Aliyah hummed with exhilaration. The righteous certainty of the upcoming battle filled her; she would be the bulwark upon which her father would be smashed and reborn.

  Cut him off, they advised her. Keep him panicked.

  “They’re–”

  Aliyah dropped the connection, mentally kissing the dying man as she returned him to his body to breathe his last.

  Will that draw him towards us?

  Oh yes, she said. They lifted her up in glorious approval.

  And when he gets here – a worried shiver splintered the harmony – you know how to defeat him?

  You’ve used his good intentions to trap him before, she told them. We’ll do it better this time.

  They examined her plan.

  They beamed consensus.

  Thirty-One

  Proof the World Wants You to Die

  Bastogne, Paul thought.

  That’s where he’d defeat the Unimancers: at the broach’s heart.

  The explosion had been intoxicating. After years of running from government patrols, Paul had unlocked his full power.

  Standing within that firestorm, shielded by Valentine’s ’mancy, all Paul’s uncertainties had been scourged away.

  Bureaucracy is the language of war. He hadn’t meant to say that. But striding across the ruined SMASH patrol, seeing the fear on the general’s face, he’d been flooded with realizations of his potential. He could sabotage supply lines at the source. He could forge communications to lead armies into traps. Wars had been lost on logistics.

  He would create a new, Unimancer-free world to protect his daughter.

  He would become the War Bureaucromancer.

  When Aliyah spoke through that dying body to tell him she was in Bastogne, he felt like a programmed missile. He had one concern: getting to her.

  All his fears were carried away on the smoke of burning bodies.

  As they made their way south, Paul kept listening for sirens. The noise from the explosion had to have reached towns miles away. Where were the cops, the firemen, the paramedics? Or at least curious passersby? Someone had to investigate.

  He’d heard sections of Europe had been abandoned as the broach advanced.

  Maybe no one was left to pay attention.

  They walked; Paul had filled his pockets with baggies of Oxycontin, but his ribs sawed into his lungs. He stumbled. Imani had to support him.

  Valentine had stolen a gun from the general’s holster, prodded him along. He walked with a stiff, mournful dignity. Whenever Valentine looked back to see the barbecue-sweet thread of smoke rising into the clouds, she’d poke Kanakia in the chest. She’d yell at him that he’d brought this upon himself, he should have known what happened when you picked a fight with a goddamned gamer, didn’t you know we’d have to escalate, you dumb motherfucker?

  Didn’t you know you left us no choice but to win?

  Paul pushed the thought away, swallowing another Oxycontin. Aliyah was in Bastogne.

  He would bring the war to her.

  They entered a wilderness so deep it seemed to erase the memory of man. Paul had never realized nights could be so black. There were no campfires, no city lights; just that shattered jigsaw of a broach-fractured sky.

  Imani found berries and fresh water, kept them going in the right direction.

  Paul gobbled pills to sleep on the cold, rocky soil. He had nightmares of black flux seeping out from his skin…

  Yet his flux had been burned away by his newfound faith in War Bureaucromancy. Firing that missile had been a gift from the universe, proof the Unimancers needed to die…

  Occasionally they pushed through thick growth into settlements – villages of ragged peasants who spoke a patois Imani couldn’t translate. They’d settled deep in the ruined cities, retreating inwards as ever-hungry forests had pulled down buildings at the town’s edge. They planted crops, but the vegetables looked sadly mutated.

  All of Europe wasn’t this degraded, Paul knew. Andorra had only been evacuated a decade ago, when the broach’s edge had squeezed across Spain’s borders. But he’d never realized how dire it had gotten in Germany, in Poland, in Austria.

  The isolated villagers were wary… But they brightened when they noticed General Kanakia, crying a happy “SMASH YES!” in thick foreign accents. Sometimes the villagers gave them horse rides to speed their way.

  “They would fight for you,” Paul asked the general. “Why don’t you tell them?”

  The general had given nothing but his name, rank, and serial number since the explosion. He’d stayed solemnly silent while Valentine blamed him for the Unimancers’ deaths.

  So Paul was surprised when the general said, “I’m protecting your conscience by minimizing your murders, Mr Tsabo.”

  “I would never kill a human being.”

  The general’s cold stare was merciless, accusatory.

  “There wasn’t anything left of those men to murder,” Paul snapped.

  “So why were there bodies?”

  Paul swallowed another Oxycontin. He had no time for arguments.

  Yet as they hiked closer to Bastogne, the general tensed; Paul realized that as a mundane, he couldn’t tell which areas were safe and which deadly.

  Yet the reality fractures were a high-pitched buzzing at the edge of Paul’s hearing – inexpertly reimagined laws of physics broadcasting errors. The Unimancers had sewn together a surface layer illusion of our world’s tenets, but they hadn’t appreciated the laws’ intricacy the way Paul did – they’d brute-forced a worldview into existence, but not the infrastructure necessary to sustain it.

  They’d forgotten subtle concepts, like the trillisecond pop of quantum foam – concepts Paul had no classical name for; they made sense to him because he thought it all the way through down to the tiniest layers.

  The demon dimensions were threaded through here like a dormant virus, hidden in atoms an angstrom too small.

  Walking near the broach was like walking through spiderwebs; laws were so fragile, it took more effort to keep them intact than it did to snap it. Crossing these unstable physics zones felt like traversing endless heaps of loose stone, each waiting to cascade into an avalanche–

  Paul realized he knew which stones to pull to trigger avalanches, if he had to.

  He could pull the world apart with a thought.

  The idea maddened him. They’d claimed to fix Europe, and instead had created a series of magical booby-traps. Each fracture could have been reset clean, if they’d had the skills to do it – or even if they’d asked him! – but in their arrogance they’d let this fracture spread for decades.

  Stop your fucking amateur hour magic.

  Unimancers were a scourge. How many talented ’mancers had vanished into their hivemind? How many unique magics had been erased? The broach had only erupted because mundanes had weaponized ’mancers. And SMASH was yet
another slipshod attempt to harness a million magical varieties into something mundanes felt comfortable with…

  Aliyah had never known a world where ’mancy was treasured. Where she was treasured. SMASH had destroyed Aliyah’s potential friendships–

  It felt so good, realizing who was to blame.

  Paul ached to fix the wrecked physics. Imani told him to slow down; sometimes he passed out from the pain. But the world needed repairing, Aliyah needed rescuing…

  They clambered up Bastogne’s slopes – a shrinking town reduced to a small hamlet cradled in decaying buildings. Above that, Something unthinkable crawled across the sky’s crazy quilt patchwork, slithering between the faultlines.

  They’d jailed her at the broach’s heart. Any tear in their ham-handedly patched physics would shower Aliyah in buzzsects – and they couldn’t fix rifts like he did.

  Paul clenched his fists.

  Yet as he and Valentine and Imani approached, the villagers called out to each other. They filed out in a half-circle, abandoning their campfires, facing him as though they’d expected him: grizzled survivors. Children and adults alike. All empty-handed.

  “Kaik!” an old woman with blistered palms cried. “Kaik!”

  They grabbed hands.

  The people of Bastogne shuddered, then looked up defiantly at their broken sky. It took them effort; the children cried. Some bore stumps from where rifts had shredded them.

  They trembled, staring at the roaring Thing crawling across the sky. It dwarfed their town. Paul couldn’t piece It together – he caught glimpses of flopping treetrunk limbs serrated with sharks’ teeth, pulsing maws the size of swimming pools, sprouting blossoms of insect eyes…

  It pulled at the rifts, trying to unlock them.

  Though Paul did not speak their language, he understood.

  Yes, he thought. Yes, I will save you. I will untangle the mess the Unimancers made, fix this the way it should have been fixed–