and all broken tomorrows: bracketing those dead to us, delineating the forms and histories of our desires, in a breath, in tears, in the pattern two opposing collections of striation compose in the catalytic reaction of palm to palm, all physics are bent, and all probabilities, all convenient presuppositions and extrapolations of futures not yet lived are erased: all we have is now, this moment, this beautiful, fragile moment, and
He inhaled.
“Storm’s coming in.”
“You sure this is him?”
She nodded. Across the gulf, lightning licked at waterspouts. She brushed the fine salt spray from her cheeks.
“Specifics?”
“Pattern confirmed. Subject is Fourteen-Seven When intact. Age twenty-three… twenty-three years and thirteen hours. REM signature confirmed; this is the author.”
“What’s a kid from the sticks of New York doing alone on the Gulf Coast on his birthday?”
“The library’s empty.” The mathematician shrugged. “Watching the lightning. Getting high. Running away?”
West nodded. “He wanted to die down here, away from everyone he knew. Tonight was the night.”
“Shit, he’s got another fifty years before—”
“That’s why we’re here.”
“It’s all there, everything we need?”
“It’s there.”
Benton sighed. “Hard to believe this kid caused it all.”
“Wasn’t really his fault.”
“What if we—”
“Hope, I’m disappointed.” West took a handful of sand, let the grains sift through his fingers. They danced with the wind. “You of all people should know that killing him wouldn’t stop this.”
“I’m just a mathematician.”
He scoffed. “Our best quantum X theorist.”
“Just a maths egg.”
He wiped his hands of the beach. “You ready?”
“Guess so.”
“Unlock the When.”
Benton tapped the subdermal in her throat. A halo sparked to life around her head. “Agents West and Benton, Fourteen-Seven When, request immediate unlock on my mark. Play.”
nav fix on your position. jog to play in three, two—
And I knew somehow that on that night in Lincoln, Nebraska, Abigail wasn’t sleeping well. Thoughts of tomorrow’s flight to Vermont, the uncertainty of a future spent mostly between airports and stages, behind cameras, and I knew that a baby was born, and his parents would name him David for his father, Smith for his mother’s side. The family lived three blocks east of Abigail, one block west of the recording studio where Lullaby recorded the album I couldn’t get out of my head.
All I saw was silver: in the lightning, in the waterspouts, in the sand. The stillness between stars.
“Paul?”
He jumped.
West studied the tension of muscles, hardening of jawline, narrowing of brow. Eyes lost somewhere between green and gray and mud went to one, went to other, went to one. Even in shadow, he saw the boy’s nose was sunburned.
“Eri—?”
“No.” She bent, extended her hand. Shake. “Benton. Hope. And you’re Paul?”
“Yeah.” Something crawled behind his eyes. Heartbeat and suspicion. Names of people and places and scents and tastes; this was…. This was. “Have we met?”
“No…” Benton looked to West.
“What do you want?” He stood; he brushed sand from cargo shorts filled with bottlecaps and cigarettes, golden discount cards to the strip’s most popular clubs. “I don’t have any money, and I’m not into—”
“We’re not here to hurt you. We’re just—”
“Spring break?”
“No.” West regarded the thousands amidst light and sound behind them. There was such stillness in the impending storm. “We’re here for you.”
The author stepped back. “I don’t know you.”
“You do, though.”
“I’ve never seen you be—”
“You have.”
Black coat flapping in the breeze over black uniform, burn fresh on temple. Gray eyes.
He smiled. “Great. So you’ve read the book, right? You’re a big fan. You tracked me down and want my autograph, right? Listen, this is flattering, but—”
Benton grabbed his arm. He looked into colorless blue eyes. “You know that’s not true. You know who we are.”
“I—”
“You see her in me. You’re right; she’s a part of me, but you knew the character wouldn’t be purely her. I’m a combination of many. The name Hope because she loved it, the name Benton because of that band. You feel it behind your eyes. You—”
He shrugged her off. “Don’t touch me.”
West pulled the pack of Marlboros from Paul’s chest pocket, withdrew one. Lit.
“They were right.” Exhale. “Every possible world that ever could have existed will someday exist in perfect emulation in machines. Every possible you that ever could have existed will.”
“Will you—”
“You’re carrying a virus. A contagion. You can feel it. You know it’s there. That’s why you write. You have the silver. You write about things from pasts and presents and futures that you shouldn’t be able to see.”
Paul was silent.
Benton squeezed his hand. “There are holes all over this When. You’re making it all fall apart. You’re ending so many worlds with each breath, and you have no idea. We’re here to take you out of this. We need you.”
“You aren’t real.”
“We are now.”
He took out a cigarette. West smiled.
“Let’s go out to the pier.”
I’d gone to the edge of the world and thrown myself against all that I knew: safety and solidity and the past. Life became a fluid somewhere out there in the thousands of miles between the stagnation of home and the brilliant, beautiful uncertainty of the edge. Life became metaphor: I walked wearily to the ocean after the long and dangerous station wagon journey across the country, just standing there in the sunshine and the gulf breeze, feeling the cleansing grit of sand beneath me, working its way into every pocket of my clothing, every hair-covered limb, underneath contacts and between toes and fingers and scouring the gold sheen from my Zippo. The sand worked its way into me, making me feel at once totally alien to that place and an integral part of the landscape. The sand would eventually blister my feet, itch my scalp, grit every last exposed bit of flesh with its silicon scour, but not before I’d simply stood there for a while to appreciate its exotic warmth.
Many tens of thousands of my generation had gone to that city of sand and sunrise. Few of them shared the reason that I had for being there…We all went to escape from life for a while. We all went to be the bad people that we were told not to be the other fifty-one weeks of the year: we drank and smoked and smoked and fucked and otherwise debauched on the beach at the edge of the world. We gathered in groups of thousands and flailed the primordial dance of existence to overplayed rap songs and paid too much for beer in plastic cups and smoked cowboy killers and bummed cowboy killers from a stranger with long hair and dark eyes that looked at and through you with his intricate, recording gaze.
i contain multitudes…
By the hundreds, by the thousands, I watched them. I detached. I separated myself from the organism that was humanity. Hovering over the crowd, poised against a wooden railing that had seen the sun set into the emerald coast too many times to count, carved a palimpsest with the initials of the past spring breakers who thought themselves cool enough to brand their love forever on the treated wooden logs of the upstairs bar of Harpoon Harry’s before moving on to the Fountainbleau or the Reef or the Chateau for a night of refrigerator beer cans and horny sorority girls free for the week from the confines of relationships and morality. I peered over the edge down into the beast of raw abandon, people by the thousands engaged in grinding, undulating, dripping sexual frenzy, arms in the air supporting beer in plastic cups and beads ripe for the swapping of bare breasts or muff shots, sometimes even supporting smoked-to-the-filter cowboy killers bummed from the dark stranger watching from above, ashes poised eerily outward, defying gravity to the beat of the music.
I could have made an army of them.
Jolted from that realization, a weakness, a thin nosebleed and a smile. I smiled once. I bled more than once.
I watched from above. That frenzy. Detached. Not a part of it. My generation. Not a part of it. At all. I was the cigarette man. I had the Cobra long-sleeved t-shirt. I made people smile. People told me to “Smile! It’s Spring Break!” I watched from above. And felt alone in a crowd of thousands. It was not for me…none of it. It never was for me. I was a voyeur. I thought too much. About. Things. There. In the midst of thousands. I was. Lost.
But I could use them. Stir them.
an army seven million strong by the time i
Walking. Along Front Beach Road. Sand grinding between pinkie and second toes on left foot. Grinding away flesh. Walking along the road because it was good for us. Walking faster than traffic, slow enough to be witness to any and all displays of flesh that we could find. Beads for tits, tits for beads. Instant cameras and Daddy’s hi-8s by the dozens. An experiment in humanity: i am not a part of this. There was cleansing and rebirth in that experience. Finding the correct outlet was the key to the success of the rebirth. Finding that place to be in the midst of that chaos that would channel the fury into creativity…
waves.
Sitting before that inescapable wall of water…Burning tobacco and burning flesh and thoughts of She and thoughts of the blank void that was the future burning away the Paul that I once was. A limit experience in the liminal zone: fire and water, humanity and the great impossibility of the edge of the world. Sitting on the sometimes-wet sand, grit in my eyes, staring blankly off into the world that we can never have, inasmuch as we think that we’ve conquered it with small wooden and metal constructs with which we can skim along and just under its surface. Place cigarette in mouth, extract golden Zippo from right pocket, flip open lighter, flick flick flick until the stubborn flame finally licks the delicious tip of the Marlboro 100. Smoldering. Deadly. Inhale, exhale. Pause. Inhale, exhale. Pause. Wind howling from the gulf, internal wind painting my respiratory tract blacker with my divine purpose of living up to the ouija board’s predictions.
Flood of thought, sunrise, sunset…Sitting in that place of beauty and edge and impossibility. That was the place that I had so yearned for…That was the place that embodies everything that I’d felt since the loss of. Of. Dark skies in the daytime: impending storm, impending downfall, impending torrent. Sleeves pulled up around tanned but not burned arms, left still exhibiting the eleven lines that had so defined the last five years of my life, eleven lines of scar tissue now barely discernible from the surrounding scarred tissue, except for the fact that the lines were a lighter shade of tanned. Barefoot, toes buried in the sand, absorbing warmth and grounding me in that world, as the fingertips of Sakyamuni called the earth to witness not his divinity but his enlightenment. Hand outstretched, fingertips touching the earth as the armies of Devadatta raged around him, hand outstretched to call the earth, all of existence, to be witness to his enlightenment. Toes dug into the sand as seagulls raged around me, wind blew through seabreeze-knotted hair, not brushed since November, sky above growing darker in defiance of any human definition of Spring Break.
i contain multitudes.
Moments of lucidity: the screams of the interior fell silent as the rage of the exterior filled me. Struggle for peace; struggle for silence. I’d gone to the edge of the world to do what every good metaphorical struggling author does: find himself. I sat before the kingdom and the power and the glory; I looked into the face of the closest thing I’d seen to god. I sat until the doubt and the rage and the mourning were replaced. I sat until I was filled up again. Beauty. Sitting before that amorphous canvas and watching the power of existence paint itself in waterspouts illuminated from behind by divine lightning. There was such a peace in submission to that divinity…Take me, destroy me, tear me apart so that I won’t have to return to the places I fear. Standing out on the pier, hundreds of feet out into the surf, wishing for the overhead lamps to extinguish into black…Waves crashing into the pier, swaying the massive construct, waves illuminated orange and pink by the garish strip of humanity stippling the beach with light. All of mankind behind me, alone in that journey out into nothingness…Perfection in that black. Perfection in the relentless cycle of waves crashing against the pier. Crash into me, through me. Destroy me in your wake.
I needed that. I needed to approach the edge of the world, to abandon everything behind me, to leave everything that mattered in the sand and walk out into the surf. On that last night, I spent a moment of solitude alone on the beach. Harpoon Harry’s raging behind me, thousands of generation enjoying the meat market that was the drunken bliss distilled in Panama City. I walked out into the ocean, took a final drag from my cigarette, launched it out with a flick of my fingers into the great black gulf until it hit the water and extinguished. How appropriate that gesture: the extinction of the spark. For years, I’d struggled with the knowledge that I’d once had a spark, and had lost it somewhere out there. What a symbolic move: killing that spark with the world screaming behind me, the noise of tens of thousands being slowly supplanted by the rage of the waves and the flood of voices that roared from within. I walked out into the waves without bothering to roll up the legs of my pants, without bothering to care about the couples swapping their own waves of fluid on the beach behind me, thinking only of that limit experience. Merging with the unknown, feeling it caress my skin, enveloping all that I’d given to it. Sound became nothing but heartbeat and voice and voice and
I thought. Of her. Out there.
The future was unwritten, but I was almost there. Accelerating into turns, plummeting into the future with each instant. Somewhere out there…I felt it, the falling, the gravity of our situation. I felt the desire, the need, the utter insignificance of
Guitar strings, nylon, strummed savagely, then gently, then the pure, resigned voice of yesterdays…Beauty in that submission. Minutes left before my ascension. Moments left, and
Almost there. I’m almost there.
West tossed his guttering cigarette into the gulf. “You’re a smart kid. You can handle it.”
The author’s hands gripped the guardrail. Palms pressed: texture of the names carved beneath. Fingers clawed down, nails on treated pine. Smell of brine. The wind brought with it fragments of the hurricane. A crack and lightning flared behind the veils of approaching rain, fell to black, uneasy, uncertain in that night. Music intruded from behind.
“It’s true?”
Benton sat between the railing and the overflowing garbage bin: popcorn boxes, beer cans, empty suntan lotion bottles, half-eaten barbecue, smokes, rubbers, detritus and evidence that people were here to play, to drink, to fuck, to burn. The shadow of the overhead pier lamp fell over her face. Arms draped around her knees, she focused on something in the gulf, something approaching with vicious silence and wind. “It’s true.” Voice barely audible, Paul didn’t know if she was answering or meditating. He felt what she saw behind blue eyes: the physics of immortality, the intersection of ineffable paths, the tangents, the blessings. He is knowing but he knew he wasn’t.
“How’s the book going?”
“It’s going.”
“Yeah.” West studied the weathered planks below. “It would’ve been okay for a while longer.”
“What do you mean?”
“Something’s going to happen in just under six months. There’ll be a crossover. Something’s going to happen in this When that shouldn’t.”
“And you’re here to tell me that it’s my fault, and I have to help you fix it?”
“No.” The rain started. West pulled his collar up. “It can’t be stopped now. It’s going to happen regardless of your help.”
Paul noted that the scarred man’s eyes tracked the running lights of a plane knifing takeoff through the rain above.
“How?”
“Tell me about silver.” Paul turned to Benton, still on the ground, still in stark shadow. An instant, an instant and those blues were something else, a tugging, and gone.
“‘Au’ on the periodic table—”
“‘Ag.’”
“Art major.”
“Your silver. Tell me.”
“Invasive biological contaminant, airborne, replaces flesh with—”
“No.” She got up. “Go back further. When did you first think of it?”
He frowned. “Enemy? I don’t know; it’s been a long time since I really thought about—”
“That’s the danger of revision.” She shook her head. “You lose track of the beginnings. It all merges into one.”
“I don’t—”
“The sixth revision was the first time you wrote about it. You shifted focus from the mystical nature of Shadow drives to a hard-edged quantum physical explanation for the technology. Original versions of the book barely contained the word ‘silver.’ Where did your obsession come from?”
“It just…” He considered. “I don’t know.”
West wiped rain from his brow, fingers lingering momentarily over his temple code burn. “We do.”
And as the sun rose, he knew that he had to leave with them. Hope sat at his side, her head on his shoulder. He smoked his last cigarette. The storm had wet the beach; they were apparently alone on that strip. Clubs dead behind, early-morning traffic just beginning: an army of chambermaids and custodians. West stood down the beach, staring into the western remnants of night.
“I remember you.”
She looked into hazel. “I’m not her.”
“Maybe not here.” Inhale, pause, exhale. “But somewhere.”
Coffee, black, served in a chipped cup. There was sugar on the table, a dangerous little container of cream that he’d never trusted. He drank his coffee black.
“Why this city?”
Sip, cup to tabletop. He didn’t answer.
“You were never specific in your locations. People wondered where Maire’s complex was. The only clue was the fact that the orbital gun rose from a body of water. Was it Seattle?”
“No.” He answered too quickly.
West nodded, looked away. Paul wondered what semantic thread he’d just uploaded to the Judith Mind-Essence.
Late afternoon crowd. Outside: rain. Nirvana on the jukebox. President Jennings on the link.
“It was always this same coffee house. Why?”
Paul shrugged.
“When did you first write it?”
He considered. “The first book. One of the last versions, the final scene. I wanted to give some form of closure to the novel, not just let the characters cut off without some acknowledgement of a positive future.”
“Ninety-eight? Ninety-nine?”
“Let’s say ninety-eight.”
A middle-aged man had come in since they’d arrived. He sat at the counter, spoke to the proprietress. She gave him a pack of smokes. Marlboro 100s.
“You know anyone here?”
Paul surveyed the crowd. “Simon. Maggie.” He stole a cursory glance of the woman behind the counter. “She looks familiar, but I can’t quite—”
“We pulled you out of Fourteen-Seven before—Well, it’s amazing what the mind allows you to forget.”
She rang up the bill for one of her customers. His girlfriend walked to stand next to him. There was a silver ring on one hand. The coffeehouse owner smiled, revealing one gunshot dimple.
you know…you do.
Paul blinked away the recognition before it could take hold in that stillness between the heart and memory.
“Who else will I meet before our business is done?”
West sipped. He took his coffee with one sugar. “Not all of the characters survived. Some were just too far away to rescue. Would have been impractical to rescue some of the others. We’re still tracking the major players. They’ll produce a more viable calculus.”
“When do we go back to Judith Command?” Something about the owner…She’d laughed at something her cigarette customer had said. Something.
West marked Paul’s gaze, uploaded new matrices into the Judith ME. “I think we’re done for the day.”
“Right.” He sloshed coffee around the cup. “What’s your favorite book?”
West’s hand moved instinctively to his codeburn. “The one you haven’t written yet.”
of Samayel, of Katre, of countless others: Berlin, Frost, the Judiths, the Wests, the ocean of gods who were Michaels and Windhams, Hunter and Joseph. I could tell you of so many.
I could tell you of their plans. Of purposes.
I could tell you of the place they built in the stillness between times, that catalogue of the remnants, how it stretched away into universes filled with typing monkeys.
when i close my eyes, who do i see there?
Walking down the passages that looked like metal, a charge to the air of static and nothing. Heart beating in my throat. and i can’t even compose a single fucking coherent sentence anymore. I’d been taken from a beach and immersed in this: self-referential, indulgent bullshit. No discernible plot, no outstanding characters, no sympathetic developments. I asked myself if I could begin to explain that which I could never begin to comprehend.
They’d been busy since I’d first written them into existence.
And I realize now that what I’d seen in those sleepless hours and daylight moments paused over a cup of coffee, a cigarette, lightning in the gulf was a pale fragment of what I was supposed to have seen. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to have seen it at all; maybe it would have best been left hidden behind the clouds, hovering behind veils of shadow and doubt, in that place where hopes and dreams
becoming so much more than this
I’d developed the bad habit of masking any semblance of a plot in fancy metaphors.
I exhaled when I first saw Judith Command, and I don’t know if I’ve ever again inhaled. How could I have written it so? It shocks and amazes, the fundamental mistakes a sleeping mind can translate into truth. A feeling of falling, the distracting and disturbing euphoria that accompanies a mind’s incapability to name or place or begin to understand.
West walked me down the metallish corridors, introduced me to a fraction of the war machine of Command, the harvested systems powering its core, the fields and valleys of gods, the endless possibilities, each a complete specimen of a particular Judith. I saw the walls lined with host bodies, the breeders whose only purpose was to bear variants of the only god we had left. I watched the moment of cycle completion: bodies raised from nutrient baths, abdomens flayed by light, the wailing cargo removed by gentle silver strands, scanned, plunged immediately into their own variant chambers, their wails choked off by the thick biological slurry as the breeder process began again.
Promising variants were taken from the chamber and grown to adulthood in personalized heavens.
Is that too much? I could tell you of the host debris, the gaping caverns of fetid birth chambers, the bodies swept forcefully from the breeder rooms into waste tunnels, trails of blood and amniotic fluid still slurping from the wounds of Purpose, intestines reaching like fingers toward sex-less daughters. Judith was a beautiful woman, but multiplied by forevers, split apart with cutting beams, the infant cargo removed, her bodies became ugly beyond explanation, not the classic demure beauty that the original God host had been but a bastardization of female form, a violation of reproduction and natural life cycles.
It was disgusting, and I questioned which Purpose was truly the evil.
West understood. He didn’t expect me to trust any of it. He knew that I’d been shown a different forever.
“It’s just the way things have to be done here. It’s the only way of restoring the broken
tomorrow we can go to the park. Sit on grass. Maybe go to the zoo?”
“Or the jazz festival?”
The man at the counter grinned. “Of course.”
West stood as Paul got up to pay the bill. “Do it like I told you, son.” As Paul approached the counter, he heard snippets of conversation: but we just, so you see, I don’t know maybe we can, but if Hesse had meant to, and that’s why in the first book, music’s just, cookies are delish, and at the counter: “This is where the fish lives.”
The owner smiled up at him: one dimple. The smile faltered, returned, a blink, a vague sense of
The man at the counter turned. One white streak in his salt-and-cinnamon hair. Eyes narrow, a blink, a sense of
“Keep the change.” Paul left a handful of silver dollars on the counter and began to walk away.
“Wait.” The owner reached out her hand: silver band on her ring finger, pattern. “Do I—”
Man: “You’re—”
West watched.
Paul cleared his throat, regarded the man. Stepped in, pulled him close, whispered. “Erase.”
Pause. Play.
The man gone, Paul sat down in his place at the counter, hands shaking. The owner, maybe seventy, maybe fifty, let her hand fall. Her ring was gone.
He stumbled over words, eventually succeeded in voicing. “I hope—I know you can’t understand.”
Eyes watered. Dimple retreated. “You’re—”
His hand hovered over hers.
“A bench outside a dorm. A box of cigars. A white t-shirt, paint-spattered hands, holes in the knees of my jeans, plastic-tipped cigars. Snow. It was cold. That’s all you’ll remember. Nothing more.”
“Paul? Paul Hughes? How—”
“It never happened. We never happened. I died on a beach before we met again. No ghetto apartment, no cigarettes in bed, no pears, no ice cream. No broken hearts, no broken tomorrows. You lived and loved. Without me.”
In a pocket, two light blue marbles disappeared.
Paul pulled back his left sleeve and saw a line of scar fade.
“I’m sorry.” He reached out, placed rough hand against the dimpled cheek.
“Paul?”
He nodded, smiled with a sadness beyond stillness, beyond that yesterday.
“I’m sorry.” A whisper, an approach, lips speak into a soft warm curl of ear. “Erase.”
She faded.
West studied the floor.
“Get me out of here.” The author choked back something, swallowed those concepts and closed his eyes. “Program stop.”
Time heals nothing by itself.
Survival depends on forgetting. Excision. Formatting. Re-formatting.
an exhalation, a lip upturned, the infinitesimal field of blonde, crow’s feet from a life too
Pattern slams back into form. Hiss and release, a chamber door opens. Billowing steam. (Where does it
The author cracked the release system of his helmet, which opened in a dozen places and peeled away to reveal a face studded by whiskers and scar. He wondered why helmets in science fiction novels were almost always big globes of glass. Vulnerable. The helmet he’d designed for this novel used direct sensory submersion behind an armored collapsible blade paneling system. Safer. No glass. In the armor, he breathed slurried nitrox gel, if you could consider it breathing at all.
West, Benton. Displays. He slumped into a vacuum chair beside the girl.
“It was a good run.”
He looked up. “Guess so.” Ran fingers through hair. “Scissors?” And they were.
“The triumphant warrior begins another transformative process?” She grinned, but her teeth didn’t show.
That sound the scissors make on sweatened hair, the tickle just before depattern of the severed strands. Scentless flashes of
“The helmet needs work.”
“Could’ve saved time by thinking it away.” West walked to another display. “Drama queen.”
The scissors paused in Paul’s hand. “I know.”
Benton brushed some pre-snap curls from his shoulder. “Containment’s at ninety-eight over. Just a few more.”
He grabbed her hand and removed it from his shoulder. “You’re hyperkinetic.”
“And you don’t like to be touched. Sorry. I forgot.”
Short squeeze of hand-to-hand. “No sorries.”
Healing by primary intention: leaving the wound open to the elements, visible to all. Scab, scar. Public re-placement of flesh, of memory and heart, filling in the places between and
Scissors disappeared. Hair stood on end, clumps, moist, a tangle of muddied fire burned up to nothing in particular.
“Hugh Grant? Michael Madsen?”
“Not quite. Terrible combination of neither.” He felt his cardiac shield twinge.
“Come on, kids. Stop your grab-assin’.” Light traced a new code burn on his temple. “The boss wants a progress report.”
feeling screams, burning ends in that night, and it was beautiful. the touch of self, the touch of alters, galaxies of altars, and trees, trees singing and flying, echoes before dawn, a moon, a gasp, the chill that midnight makes when inhaled, the loss of exhalation, the yearning to breathe that scent again, ever again, to be there ever again
the way things break, the way tomorrows break, the way we struggle to correct yesterdays
and in one she frowned as a nacelle tore from the craft, crew pulled to death between the planet and the star, and in one she fought robots made from wood and organic paste, wiring spun from the silk of system-sized spiders, and in one she had a twin, and in one she watched a planet cut cleanly in half by a light from the stars, and in one she found no enemy left, and in one she sipped a bitter liquid that would keep her awake for hours, and in one she slumped, exhausted from breathing, as a door opened and
Judith sighed.
They’d finally located that rock in the center of the silver infestation. Centuries of searching, centuries without form or substance or duration, they’d searched; they’d found. West had been in the original rescue fleet, tattered remnants gathered from the first Enemy war and the temporal refugees of the Forever Dust, the human residue of all broken Whens. Data cycle errors, reflexive overruns, cyclic redundancy checks, cache corruptions: humanity.
The trouble with his stories is that they happen concurrently…People who were killed in the third chapter walk in and ask for coffee and a cigarette in the fifth. He can’t keep it straight; it’s not worth it to the reader to attempt to make sense of something so inherently flawed, something so innately incomprehensible.
“Thanks for the vote of confidence, Jud.”
“Come in.” The warm smile barely contained the acid tongue beneath. “You two fucking yet?”
“Oh god.” Hope sat on the edge of the bench next to the author.
“That’s what they used to call me. Where are we?”
“Ninety-eight over. Last run was almost a complete success.”
“Rad.” Hands went to face, fingertips traced temples as her smile fell off. “You have to get better at this, Paul.”
“It’s not like I even know what the fuck I’m supposed to have lived in these Whens. You have the advantage of knowing everything already.”
“If I could erase it myself, I would.”
“I wish you’d find a way and let me get out of here.”
“It’s not up to me anymore.” Judith stood from her chaise, walked over to the window that showed the latest crop. “It’s up to one of me down there.”
West cleared his throat. “Combat runs have been marginally successful in Fourteen-Three, Seventy-Nine-Nine, Two-Hundred—”
“Stop.” Something behind a god’s eyes, something crawling and caustic. “They’re waiting for something before striking back. Secure our positions along the When—Ha!—Timestream and fortify the forward bases.”
“You’re getting good at this.” West bit a nail.
“That’s why they pay me the big bucks. Next time, you can have god inside of you and hand out the orders.”
Benton activated the sheet of glass she’d carried into the room. “Theory reports that we have a 60/40 lock on Linear. A/O position lock expected within three runs.” Figures danced from the display across her chin, cheeks, half-glints in colorless eyes. “Static’s quiet, though. They could be ghosting our sensor fleets.”
“No…” Judith shook her head. “This time they want us to find them.”
“Could be a trap.”
“They don’t have anywhere to run. This isn’t the first war. We’re in charge now.”
“Right.”
Judith turned to Paul. “Something smart to say, sugartits?”
Layers of frown clouded with uncertainty. “I wouldn’t have made it so simple.”
“You thought too much. Made a very messy existence for us to clean up.”
“Yeah, sorry about that.” The author’s eyes narrowed. “Most books don’t become real.”
the war was beautiful
“Was it?”
“Just slipped out.”
Judith walked to Paul’s side, demure smile on her face. She goosed him. He jumped.
“As long as we’re in your brain, Paulywog, try not to let things ‘slip out,’ alrighty?” She walked to Hope, took the glass from her hand. “60/40? We can do better. Get back in. Take some help. Take… Hope? You up for a field trip?”
“I’ve never—”
“It’ll be good for you. Apply some of those fancy theories.” She turned to Paul. “Get out of here.”
“Yes, dear.”
amidst rivers Lethe and Styx an enigma wrapped in lieshealing by primary intentionan enigma wrapped in truthswe are forgotten as easily as
“Paul, you need to—”
“Adam?”
West turned. “Hmm?”
“Can we have a moment?” Paul nodded toward Benton.
Eyes slit. “Sure.” West walked down the corridor. “But make it fast.”
Benton sagged against the wall. “What is it?”
“We’re at ninety-eight over. Sixty/forty lock. You know you don’t have to come in with us.”
Starlight in eyelight. “Are you saying you don’t need me?”
“It’s just—”
“Afraid of what you’ll find in there?”
“No.” He sighed. “But if we—”
“Paul.” Hand to shoulder. “I’ve seen it all before. You don’t scare me.”
“You should be scared.”
“I shouldn’t.”
“You will be.”
“I won’t.”
“Fighting with you is useless.”
“You wrote me.” Lips upturned.
“And you,” lips to cheek, “have no idea.”
Screaming.
Agony of broken bone within the face. He snuffled back blood, choked on copper, spat. Eyes slicked shut with
He ground earth from his vision, blinked. Sitting up from the mud and shit and snow, he pried his arms from the impact mark, rolled to free his legs. His helmet was gone. He heard the stutter and stammer of his cardiac shield attempting to lock on to
West at his side, face gouged by
“This isn’t good.”
“Hope?”
She crawled through the trench towards her partners. “Lock’s splintered.”
“Yeah.”
Stutter.
“Shit. Let me see that.”
Chest heaving, breath a whisper, the author rolled to his back. Benton checked the readings on his shield. “Okay, it’s stabilizing.”
“Where are we?” West held his riflescope to a silver eye.
“Over/under target, that’s for sure.”
“Okay.” He patted Paul’s cheek. “Can you move?”
“Yeah. Just a little headache.”
“Nose’s broken. Maybe your cheekbone. You’ll be fine.”
“I’m placing a beacon in the Stream. Should be able to lock in a few.”
“Good. Let’s head toward the ridge.”
Lights flickered in the valley around the lake.
Their landing in this time had been particularly rough. West now saw the probable cause of the temporal disruptions in the worldline.
There were scores of black vessels surrounding the lake. One had crashed into an island at its center. From the sky, the stiletto shapes of Judas warships strafed the ground with lances of white laser. Smoke and fire, screams and static snaps. A shattered upload generator struggled to connect to the Enemy mind-essence under a barrage of weapons fire. Judas and Enemy fought hand-to-hand by the thousands. Humans fading into the shift, humans downloading from the mind-essence, a sweep of snow and cutting wind. The lake was frozen. Ice splintered with shadow.
A squadron of Judas Mujahadin passed over the huddled Judith, dropping dozens of pattern-charges into the midst of the Enemy horde. One vessel slowed, a fan of zeros and ones sprinkling West, Benton, Paul. Landing struts descended, and retro-forces kicked up spatters of mud.
It landed.
I remember the throb of nose and right cheek, splintering into eye socket above and rattling teeth below. I don’t remember writing Judas or Enemy into anything else. It concerned me. More blood. I spit again. Breathing was getting easier, marginally, as my blood slowed and thickened. The cardiac shield was quiet.
I guess I’d never really seen a spaceship. I knew it wasn’t just that, but the tickle behind my eyes grew into suspicion and fear. A lucky shot from the valley below slammed into the starboard nacelle of the Muj and dissipated harmlessly into phase shielding. Returning fire from the craft ignited two of the disabled Enemy ships. Shards from the blast tore into and through the field of combatants.
I’d seen it all before…but I’d never seen it before.
A hull ramp descended from the Muj’s belly. Armed Judas soldiers ran down the plank, surrounded us. At least the weapons were pointing out, not in. That was a good sign. And one Judas—
“Commander West?”
The frown and flicker of confusion was unmistakable, but he proceeded to hide it well beneath his mask of coagulating blood and diced cheekbones.
“Yeah, I’m West.”
Silver eyes swept forth, back under furrowed brows, sculpted with laser precision, fixed on Adam’s again. “Sir?”
“Listen…” The firefight below and above intensified. “I’m not your West. Where are we?”
Realization. “Shit, sorry. Let’s get back to the ship.”
They ran.
That disconcerting joggle in the stomach as inertial dampening systems compensate in an alien atmosphere, butterflies: monarchs? and he felt the suck of the vacuum chair as they rose into a sky shot through with beams of light and plumes of black.
Beside him, Benton wiped beads of nervous sweat from her upper lip. One eye was developing an unpleasant bruise from their rough entry into the wrong When. She caught him looking and smiled quietly, looked toward the front of the cabin where the battle chamber elevator was falling to the floor. The Muj captain got off.
“Okay, let’s figure this out. I just checked with our batteries; nav’s taken us to strato, so we’re out of the battle for the moment.” She palmed the release mechanism on her armor, and silver blades retracted across torso, limbs, settled in seams. “You’re not Commander West.”
He pried himself from his seat, reached to shake her hand. “Not yours. We seem to’ve landed wrong.”
She shook. “It happens. Captain Mindel Frost, Judas Mujahadin Kate, out of Fort John Wayne.”
His eyes lit up. “Mindel Frost? You know Breine Frost?”
“My father.”
“He served with me in the first Jaguar war.”
“I know.” She shrugged. “Same here, too.”
“Is he—”
“Pattern erased two years ago standard.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
“So what’s your business in this When?”
“Well…” West looked over at Paul. “It’s complicated.”
Frost turned to the author. “You are..?”
“Paul.”
“Right.”
“We’re here to fix some things, but it might not be exactly here. Can we take a little trip north?”
“Where to?”
“Search Judith ME for coordinates for Lascaux.”
“Judith Em Ee?”
Fuck. Paul gave himself a mental slap to the forehead. “Can you find where France will be?”
“Yeah.”
“Good. Let’s go.”
the most painful of our memories jarred loose from the recesses and wrinkles of gray-pink flesh by that most poignant of our senses: scent, and I knew watching her wasn’t good for me. Smelling her was worse.
Scent and taste intrinsically linked: mouth-melting mints, fireplace logs, the claw-footed table, the brown ceramic cup into which he’d spit chewing tobacco juice and saliva, the taste of tongues and lips, teeth closed to bar entrance into mouths, adolescent, yearning, to be rid of the heat and roofing nails, the tear of white t-shirt and back, scars now, wounds then (and this is how we heal by primary) intentions uncertain: cigarette smoke and vodka? The pressure of three on a green flannel comforter, giggles, sisters, shaking hands move to breasts, necks, cheeks, and taste and scent collide in their spectrum, lost in themselves, the self a wondering observer from the periphery of my own world, taste and scent collide in the thrash of limbs, descent of clothing to tiled floor, callused fingers within softest folds, the shudder and gasp, the disconcerting slap of flat sweetness, sweat, the tang of exertion and desire, and desire across all senses, all pasts brought forward into tomorrows constructed solely of impossible memory and the loss of
“What’s in Lascaux?”
My attention snapped from Frost, now poised over viewscreens of the battle at Jaguar. Hope Benton beside me: her scent accompanied an entirely different spectrum flood of memory into the conscious. She was adjusting her armored left arm; a snap of her wrist and silver plates schhhicked forward.
“Snow. Wind.”
“You know what I mean.”
I knew what she meant. The Judas weren’t supposed to be here, weren’t supposed to be anywhere. Now we were aboard Judas Kate watching Mindel Frost assess the progress of her fleet’s attack against an Enemy insurgence force. Judas? Judith? Where could I have gone wrong? We’d been within two percentage points of A/O stability.
“Maire’s here.”
I saw her eyes flick to Frost and West at the screen. The Muj hit some slight turbulence. The scene required thunder. She leaned in. Whisper.
“That’d explain a lot.”
It didn’t require a response.
“Should we tell them?”
And a commotion from the screen: Frost’s hands moved over controls. “You should see this!”
Walls faded from non-reflective alloy to the snowflake-stippled battlefield around Jaguar. The vacuum chairs upon which Hope and I sat seemed intensely out-of-place from our vantage point in the sky above the battle, a parasite image drawn from the eyes of another Judas.
Frost’s hands clasped, unclasped. Eyes were drawn, slight smile. “Wait for it.”
Hundreds, thousands of Judas soldiers fled from the valley; Enemy stood motionless, flickering. Flocks of Judas focused fire on the upload generator sunk into the lake. Great black shards splashed to the surface, ice cracking from a glacier into frigid Arctic waters. Three focused phase bursts at the spire’s base and it shattered, a wave of purple and silver leveling the Enemy vessels and downloads across the valley floor. The Judas flocks arced to the sky to escape that explosion of stolen souls.
To be above it, to be within that wave of chaos and screams, was the closest I’d found to stillness.
Frost waved a hand and the image merged back to black walls, cold walls.
“We win.”
within
and within
shattered images: a star, an inhalation, silver and blood
the poetry of us loss is ruse, a delta converge, assess, act alpha. omega. hidden from and Delta purpose will be forgiveness; please forgive a gnashing of teeth, a rending of flesh stutterc:c It begins.
“You’ve won the battle, but not the war.”
“Nice. Cliché.”
“Thanks. I’m an author.”
Faint look of disdain from Frost. “We’re approaching Lascaux. Want to tell me why we’re here?”
Paul walked to the screen, still guttering with images from Jaguar: smoke, flame, stars. “Show me the Stream.”
Frost paused, looking skeptically into eyes torn between green and mud. Fingers slid over depressions and the image changed: the linear temporal path from Alpha to Omega, branches of charted Whens and alternities spidering out in the pipecleaner cartography of the collected knowledge of eons.
“Illuminate known Enemy progress in this fragment.”
Fingers: a pale blue-green field washed a majority of the time/space in the direction of Alpha from Omega. With few exceptions, blank areas on the Stream’s spine, the Enemy had already uploaded a majority of this universe.
“See those?”
“What?”
He pointed. “Magnify this.”
The area he indicated filled the screen; there was a noticeable fluctuation in upload success during that time.
“Bring it to two-dimensional.” The image flattened. It could have been a depiction of a recorded waveform. Just below his finger, there was a severe decrease in uploaded pattern. “There it is.”
“What am I looking at?”
“Delta Point.”
maybe it was the interlocking of those life strands that made the loss of both so poignant, so unbelievably painful.
I’d considered writing it into Enemy, but it was one of those ideas that just wakes me from hesitant sleep, accompanies me through a cigarette, two, three, and the hours of trying to return to dreams, only to have left in the morning (afternoon) light. Judith had told me of the next book I’d supposedly written; there was no mention of it there, either.
i met her again after two years at the first performance of his i’d seen in two years. the last time i saw him was with her. a month separated their physical and metaphorical deaths.
Writing histories into existence, writing men and women into life…
the most difficult part has been convincing myself that i’m not the focal point of these destinies, that i have no right to ascribe my ownership of these histories. i’ve been selfish and vain to assume that i linked anything together.
Alpha and Omega.. and Delta. How could I have forgotten that strand?
i’m not the focal point of history, but a simple man swept along within it. i don’t deserve to be the intersection of life paths; i’m just paul. just paul.
Maire. The name tasted like blood.
i am ugly in every way.i am bitter and selfish.i could take pills, but they’ll never help.i am incapable of love.i’m sorry. i’m so sorry.
“Don’t—Just stay back.”
West grabbed Benton’s elbow to stop her forward motion. She looked into his old gray eyes with cold precision.
She activated the panel above her right forearm. Blade shielding retracted from her hand and she—
“Stay shielded!” Paul shouted back from the impact crater. “I don’t know if it’s still active.”
Blades slid back into place.
Frost surveyed the frozen plane. “What are we dealing with here?”
“Silver.” West’s grumbled answer.
contained multitudes.
and I felt like weeping, knew that I couldn’t, forgot about it for a while.
what have i done?
Knowing that each time I put pen to paper, each time callused fingertips traced lightly over plastic lettered keys, a world began, a world died, knowing that each time I thought too much, that each time I woke from a nightmare, a daymare, knowing, just knowing that it was real, it was blood and bone, the gasp of terror or lust, the cry of pain or release of
I knelt next to the mark her body had made in the earth. In the Earth.
Imagine a bipedal alien, cold eyes and flowing hair, jettisoned from a galaxy whose death she’d guaranteed, thrust into the veil of black between galaxies, caught in the wake of a vessel: a glorified photographer, an artificial lover, a traitor with two broken hearts. Imagine the impact of a body, a body and the snow, ice, the wind between then and now, and silver.
I knelt by the human-shaped crater, dragged armored claws over the compressed snow. Ice. I carved faint paths across its surface.
I could see the silver crawling. Merging, diverging, coalescing. Still very much alive, still very much a threat. She’d been here recently.
The husk of Task’s vessel had stopped smoking. A path of footprints and blood stretched to it, around, to the caves beyond.
I stood. Melting silver dripped from my claws, puddled and danced across
“Frost?” Paul returned from the crater, holding his right hand before him. “You shielded?”
“Shielded? I—”
“Have phase armor on?”
“No, but—”
“Shift up. Just a little. Have something to show you.”
She flickered into the shift. Lazy light spilled over Benton and West.
“What is that?” She reached out to touch Paul’s silvered hand.
“Don’t.” The light from the shift bent toward his hand, shivered.
“But what—”
“Silver.”
Paul reached to finger the release mechanism at his neck.
“Don’t—!”
The helmet hissed and released, retracted into his clavicle armor. The silver leapt. He exhaled, closed his eyes.
Benton gasped as the silver blackened, fell to the packed snow in lazy swirls of ash.
Paul cleared his throat. “Adam, what’s your wife’s name?”
West blinked. “What?”
“What’s her name?”
Eyes narrowed and jaw clenched. “Abigail.”
“Right. Frost, what’s your West’s wife’s name?”
She looked from West to Paul, confused. “Patra.”
“Any children?”
“Two daughters. Twins.”
“West?”
“One son.”
“And therein lies the problem.” Pasts and futures intertwined in the knot of an impossible present. “How’d Abby die?”
West blinked. “In childbirth.”
“Right.” Paul flicked the last of the silver from his claws. “Judith and Judas, Patra and Abigail, West and West. Frost, have you ever met her before?” His outstretched hand indicated Benton.
“I don’t think so.”
“You wouldn’t have. She doesn’t exist here. West does, though…”
“What’s this mean?”
“Maire’s breaking through. She’s achieving Delta point completion.”
Paul’s cardiac shield began to beep. Benton rushed to his side, looked over the monitor. “They’re locking on to our signal.”
“Save these coordinates.”
“Done.”
“We’ll be back, Frost. As soon as we can. We’ll bring reinforcements.”
“But what if—”
“Just wait for
and all was static, shimmer, shift as the three soldiers of the Judith faded from the plain of snow and silver.
Frost, alone now, palmed her communications panel. “Get me Commander West.”
A formation of Judas Muj fighters screamed through the sky of perpetual winter.
“Great timing, Jud. What happened with our insertion?”
“Call it a short circuit. We don’t know yet.” An army of Judith technicians plugged, unplugged, analyzed, removed armor, placed nitrox masks over gasping mouths.
Paul felt the ache of reality begin to pound once again in the place behind his eyes. “There’s been a few developments. Do you have our output coordinates?”
“They’re locked. Rest for a while. I’ll debrief you after you’re reloaded.”
“Sounds like kink.”
“You wish.”
Paul smiled, sighed as he leaned back into the reload chamber. Technicians removed his armor. They slammed the chamber door shut above him. Through its clear metal cap, Paul observed Benton’s already-reloading figure in the oven next to his. Cutting lights moved in to flay her. His eyes crawled from peaceful, sleeping eyelids to gentle philtrum to supra-sternal notch, the placement of her nipples, the indentation of navel and the soft southern path to the pudendal cleft. Flesh flew away in the thinnest strips as the spinning whiteness recycled her body. Skin, fat, muscle, bone were removed and then rebuilt with untainted code from the Judith ocean. Hairless. It grew. Muscles toned. A wash of freckles, a mole, a scar. Breath of life and her eyes opened. She caught his gaze and threw it not ungently back.
He closed his eyes and felt his layers of offense and defense stripped from him by harsh, beautiful, sensual light.
“Feel better?”
“Like a summer’s eve.” He toweled tousled hair. “You’re looking better.”
Judith leaned against the chamber entrance, arms folded. She looked over the flesh constructs: the aged West, the hairy author, the ripe smoothness of Benton, brutal cardiac shield scar painfully visible above and between hanging breasts. She self-consciously suited up under the feminine gaze.
he has good taste
Paul reached out. so does she. now stop ogling her.
fair enough. “What’d you see?”
schlick of armor closing over his arms, legs, chest. Cardiac lock. “Your favorite one-hearted psycho is bleeding through into the Whenstream.”
“Fuck.” Judith slumped. “You’re the author. What’s this mean?”
“It means
two distinct universes colliding, splintering both along that fault to history-sized fragments: rupturing, rending, riving, splitting, cleaving. It meant that two distinct universes that I’d written into existence were merging into one.
dissolution
then strike in my name. Strike for all of those whose lives were shattered. For the trillions dead and broken. For those who still bear scars of flesh and thought. Strike because I don’t want my children to die for the Purpose. Strike because there is evil, and it is not me. Strike because history will remember the loss if you don’t.
fading
I’ve begun a war of desire. A war of technology.
All fears realized, all hopes questioned, all boundaries erased, all secrets of form and space brought forward into hesitant light.
None of us will survive this
intact, but it’s not a good chance. If she’s in the Stream already, chances are she’s started all over again.”
“And you’re convinced this Jag When is the crossover point?”
“It’s Delta. Silver is off the scale, and Enemy pattern exhibits a sharp decline. It’s where she broke through.”
“No good…No good.” Judith activated the display. A glowing representation of the Timestream flickered to life. “Okay, we can divert forces from—”
“It won’t be enough.”
“The Fleet’s—”
“She’ll equip the Enemy with silver. If she’s focusing on Delta Point, I wouldn’t be surprised if she has forces en route to the trees right now.”
“Shit, never thought it’d come to this.” West tapped nervous fingertips on the display surface. “Place any bets, Miss Maths?”
Benton thought for a moment. “Negative to at least five decimals.”
“That’s reassuring.”
“Enough.” Paul’s fingers went to his temple: throbbing with the silver ache. “We gather forces, we travel back, we take out the Zero-Four probe before silver infestation.”
“Easier said.” Judith smirked. “But you can do it. Get out of here.”
“See you tomorrow, Jud.” Paul rose with West and Benton. “Whenever tomorrow might be.”
“Watch your ass.” As the chamber door sizzled shut, something crawled between her hearts, took residence there, and began to gnaw. She shuddered.
They left.