Flatline.
affliction had been isolated and the source identified, it was far too late for the forward combat crews, who had been exposed to fatal levels of the alien metal as they
Do you know of blood? Of wind? Of loss, of ruin?
to the waft of black, bitter coffee and she followed them into the empty streets, finally moon-lit, finally casting aside the day’s embrace of mist and fog, the earlier downpour retreating into the
sound of their footsteps, his ancient black boots, her new black boots, a drift of laughter and conversation. She had hesitated before the cafe, finally allowing the door to swing shut to the bell’s call. The jingle brought the proprietress’s thin gaze from an emptying pack of Marlboros to the door. The jangle brought her customer’s thin gaze to his wife’s. Eyes locked as the bell settled; they would make love that
night that Hope was killed, West found Paul sitting alone in the construct. This time it wasn’t decorated with his typical college bar layout. It was gray and empty. Mostly empty. West thought most of the gray came from him. He thought in, saw Paul, and thought out. West knew the author needed time alone.
West talked to Jud, and she sent him back to a semblance of home. She’d handle the repairs.
Abbie was in bed already, the lights out. West had been downstairs reading a parenting magazine half-heartedly between paying bills and watching the game. She’d bought the magazine and many more like it and put them in a stack on the coffee table. West was younger, skinnier, his hands still callused. Before the war. Before she’d…
So he read the magazines, not that his wife put any faith in them. She knew they’d work it all out eventually. They wouldn’t learn how to love a child by reading articles on the right diapers to buy and proper vaccination schedules.
West crawled into bed next to her, and her weight shifted as his lowered. A whispered, slept inquisition to which she knew the answer: Adam? She moved into a spoon against him. As he gave her a goodnight kiss on the cheek, he smelled toothpaste and Noxzema and her shampoo, the expensive stuff she felt guilty buying on a farmer’s paycheck, but the stuff that he loved her to have and needed her to have.
It was a quiet night in Nebraska, away from his missing arm, Hope’s dead body, Paul’s emotionless face in that gray, empty room.
He didn’t want to go
back downtown after they’d watched moonrise by the water.
She was always just behind them, always close enough to taste them, once reaching out for Maggie’s halo of curls, her hand stopping just short of target. Not yet. She didn’t yet trust herself enough to not savage their
bodies all around her, an imperfect circle on imperfect sand.
Hunter’s body slumped to the ground, the shattered skull splashing gray and crimson on impact, the shiver gun cratering sand at his side.
It was in the perfect silence that she screamed, her wail growing younger faster as the silver spread through the sky, the stars, all
the energy they’d expended on the development of weaponized silver would be for naught if the test failed. Already, there were reports from the many fronts across shattered space that the lumbers were adapting, evolving, fighting back against the harvest fleets.
Ever cut your grass one day, and the next, you notice a foot-tall dandelion towering above the green, white fluffy seeds spreading in the phantom wind? The lumbers were just as hardy, just as determined to resist harvest.
You don’t know what freedom is until you’ve seen a system-sized school of trees, branches bare and brittle from the nothing of space, defensive spines bigger than continents firing from ridged, cavernous bark, tearing apart slithers with petrified wood.
The keening, the screaming: their calls weren’t answered in that void.
Their song was one of
morning West left the dream of Abigail’s arms and retreated to the horror that was the final book.
Paul was already in Jud’s chamber. When West greeted him, his hand waved him to silence as his head cocked toward the obscured cove of Jud’s sleeper. The lights were at work carving her apart, flaying layer after layer down to her silver core where god lived. West never got used to seeing that. Blood, guts, and a pretty little marble. The lights wrapped her in a new Jud body and sealed her up. She stretched, the incision lines still sealing on her face and chest.
“The answer’s ‘No.’”
“We need to get back out there.” Paul’s voice wasn’t.
“You need some time.”
“I don’t—”
“You need some time.” She wrapped herself into a robe and reclined. “It’s too soon.”
He spun, mouth curling to a snarl. “There’s no fucking time left. We need to get out there, full-force, and—”
“Paul.” She held out her hand. “Take this.”
West knew what it was already: Hope’s marble, now lifeless and useless. Paul snatched it from her grasp and stormed from the room. When the chamber door had cycled shut, Jud patted a place next to her on the dais and motioned for West to join her.
“He’ll be okay.” West didn’t believe it, but he said it because it was the only thing he could think of.
“Yeah.” She leaned her head against his shoulder. “I liked Hope.”
“There’s no way…?” He let the question fall.
“Not this time. Maire fucked the code. She’s lost to us.”
He didn’t want to think about the implications of to us.
“Who’ll be our third?”
“Fourth, with the bear.”
“I hate that bear. Who’s fourth?”
“Ever meet Banana Tits?”
This is where I take them when they’ve died:
Jacob was wrong. It’s not easier when nowhere feels like home. It’s easier when no one feels like home.
It was a close cousin to the first book’s Chicago crater, I suppose, a great gouge in the surface of the planet, the cliffs of the edge entirely too sharp on the periphery, the upload generator tilting precariously miles away at the impact’s center. The sky was empty.
I walked past the older graves, their shadows inking the glassed dust with darkness deeper than that feeble sunlight should have birthed. Simple stones, simple names. Each contained multitudes.
I buried her marble next to another.
I wanted to say something when I was done, as if vocalizing the loss would validate her importance to my life, to my sanity. I couldn’t find the right words. The words I did find were inappropriate and filled with a venomous mix of truth and emotion that I could no longer afford.
I remembered that first night: the beach, the shadows, the voice. Another life. The grating of sand across skin. Too many kisses on the cheek. All of that, all of that, now ruined by the corrupt code of a child, a monster.
I stood and walked away from my cemetery, certain that I’d visit it again before long.
There are no mechanics to a shiver gun.
The basic physics are those of particle acceleration and molecular resonance. The gun itself is nothing more than a shaped form of phase-ready metallish, available in any sculpt one could desire. In the history of her, she’d eventually see shivers like six-shooters, the traditional claw form of the inner worlds, the stylized driftwood grip and sliver barrel of the outer worlds, blocky extended cubes and tubular bells, rifles, billion-barreled shatter arrangements mounted on destroyers.
No matter the size or shape or taste, the shiver gun she remembered most was the pistol with which she’d been repeatedly raped after her capture and interrogation following the initial invasion of her homeworld. The Inner forces enjoyed such torture. They viewed her lifekind as barbarians; the condition in which they found her blockaded planet certainly helped that assumption. Continental fires, cannibalized cities, necromancy and sacrifice and an innate resistance to the machines.
She refused to talk. They enjoyed the aftermath.
A swift and brutal beating to tender her up, to get the juices flowing: blood from her broken nose, her split lip, her torn ears, tears, snot and spittle and vomit. A particularly brutal impact to her chest had split the bottom of her left breast open. They’d stopped the bleedout on that one even as they bit off her right nipple and carved and branded their marks on the soft gooseflesh of her belly, her descent to sex, her thighs. A broken finger, an extracted tooth, a clump of raven hair torn from her scalp and waved as a prize above: she still wouldn’t talk.
A thumb in her eye: an audible pop, but they kept her alive. She was beautiful.
The first at her sex was the commanding officer. The only lubrication between her legs was her own blood, the torn labia and excised clitoris providing her a semblance of new virginity, and the splash of seed he left behind, his pathetic penis quickly deflating and retreating below codpiece armor to the congratulations and admiration of his subordinates. The other officers took their turns, filling her, ripping, inverting and bypassing walls of flesh, cervix, uterus, bruising and abrading the softness, the holy tender profaned.
She screamed until she couldn’t catch her breath, blacked out, woke to new horrors. She’d bit into and through her bottom lip, which hung wordless and kissless in two pieces painting her chin and cheeks.
Still alive.
The stood in a circle around her, jerking their members to attention, ready for ensuing rounds, waiting for orders, waiting for questions and answers they knew she’d never give, as if they could fuck the truth from her, bring her to confessional orgasm, ply the coordinates and movements and statistics from her body with their pricks, slick with her truths, blood spattering the floor in revelations.
Her ears covered with rough hands, armored hands, the fury in his eyes capturing what attention she couldn’t hold dear and safe behind tear-wet eyelids, she couldn’t hear their barks and grunts, couldn’t realize her next coupling until the soldier shot, grinned, crawled out of and off and she saw him then, a former lover, a former underling in her resistance, standing with his hands bound behind him, matching bloods and tears masking his face, sobs because he saw what they’d done to her, what he was about to do to her.
He fell under the rifle stock. Unable to stop his collapse, his hands bound, he slammed onto her front, their collision producing a unison exclamation of pain. Soldiers adjusted his position, tore his pants down and from his legs. His tears dropped to her face, cleansing unremarkable tracks across tacking blood.
I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.
The soldiers laughed at him: flaccid penis and tears and the mutual sobbing he shared with her. She looked up to see the commander drinking from a flask, his foreign orders sending a scurry of soldiers to her lover’s sides and rear, a flurry of hands coaxing and encouraging, violating him as they’d violated her, forcing him to a half-erection with their manipulation of his shaft, his testicles, his prostate. His was a different form of resistance.
All through the rape of him, he remained still above her, his two eyes locked on her one, their inhalations and exhalations matched, the paths between their gazes and breaths a hesitant solace. He grimaced through the pain and when they judged him hard enough, one enterprising soldier guided him into her.
Through blood and the seed of a dozen others, she’d produced enough of her own wetness for him. Only for him.
The position wasn’t impossible, but difficult because of the bindings holding his hands at his back. They were chest-to-chest, and he whispered to her, knowing he was crushing her, knowing his weight took her breath, which he tried to replace with hitching whispers: i love you, i love you, please forgive me, i love you and she ground beneath him, pain spiking from the groove where her clit had been, where her vagina had been grated and gouged, where the blistering brands split across her navel and inner thighs.
He hated himself for building to orgasm. Her eye comforted, knew.
When he shuddered and released, she barely felt his cum splash within her. A last look and she definitely felt his weight release; they pulled him up by his hair and shot him in the back of the head with a shiver gun, the resonated needle of metallish emerging just below his left eye, covering her with chunks of his brain and skull and the cartilage of his nose, a rain of blackened blood.
His dead weight slammed back against her, and in his death his body opened, his penis shrinking with awful speed even as it pumped urine and remnants of his semen into her gaped hole, mixing with her blood and slick, his shit and sweat running against her thighs and buttocks, puddling in that puddle that surrounded her broken body.
The soldiers laughed and cheered as they dragged his corpse from her and began their rage again, being sure to keep her alive, just keep her alive.
Maire screamed out to no god in particular.
Some months, some times.
Jud tapped her fingers on the table.
“He’s the only god here, you know.”
“Well, fuck me in the ass, Frenchie.”
Jean Reynald shrugged his shoulders. “It’s true. You’re a name. A placeholder. You’re the focus of his divinity. Without him—”
“Without him, none of you’d be here today.”
West grumbled. “Stop this shit.”
Sapphire and Jade Jennings West sat on either side of their “father.” Like almost all of the others, they’d been retrieved from the enemy line just before the hells Paul had written. They both made to speak at once, both looked at West, both let mouths close and fingers interlace.
West, the twins. Jud and Reynald. Honeybear and Banana Tits. Arik Mandela, a circle of a dozen others, each noting the echo of staccato fingertaps across the chamber as Jud thought.
“He’s falling apart.”
“He knows we’re here right now.”
“Don’t be too sure of that. He never saw the Delta crossover coming. It was—”
“If he’d looked hard enough, he’d have seen it.”
“Stop.” West rose, paced. A thought and the A/O line appeared at the center of the table. “Only thing that matters is that it happened, we’re trying to fix it, and the focal point of our existences is losing his fucking mind. We can’t get a solid lock on Delta within fifteen points. We can’t—”
“You sure that’s not just the loss of your maths girl?” Reynald considered, turned to Alina. “No offense intended, dear.”
“None taken. I suck at ‘maths.’”
“How many times do we have to do this? Without even knowing how or why? He hasn’t told us nearly enough for us to succeed once he—”
“Once he loses it completely,” Jud sunk farther into her seat, “We’re dead. You know that. Simple as that. Once he forgets us, we’re gone.”
“Then what’s the point of this?” Alina looked up from troubled brows.
“Killing time.” Reynald cleared his throat. “We’re just killing time.”
“Lights.”
West’s whisper echoed out across the liquid expanse, his bootsteps following not far behind. The chamber door snicked shut behind him, adding to the building bounce of sound. He tried to walk quietly, but doubted it really mattered.
He sat down on the pool’s elevated lip, triple-checking his seals before making any contact. His atmosphere chilled; he could see his breath attempting to fog his lookers.
They’d started harvesting as much silver as they could filter from the combat zones. Paul hadn’t been taking many trips out of Judith ME. A lot of people had died to bring him his silver in drips and dots at a time. He thought there was an answer in the machine ocean; West thought it was a pointless indulgence.
Paul’s nose was the only thing breaking the surface of the pool. He didn’t appear to be breathing, but upon closer inspection, West saw the faint ripples of exhalations. More and more often, he’d find the young man here in the silver pool, his patented hawking Hughes Nose the only indication that he was there.
West knew Paul knew he was there. He needed no words; the tug and release was enough.
Paul lifted himself to a sitting position, swung forward to a crouch, the silver sliming from his nude form. When he stood, the fluid pool solidified under his feet, a mirror field. Trailing rivulets of the invasive metal dripped down from Paul’s ears, nose, eyes.
He always scared West after his swims.
“How’s the meeting?” His eyes were silver, were motion, were mud hazel. The last of the silver evaporated (absorbed) from (into) the tangles of his chest hair, pubic hair.
West shrugged, popped his seals and removed his helmet after the silver was gone. “Not a lot of faith.”
“Fuck faith.” Clothes over flesh. “Give me time.”
“That’s the thing, boy. We don’t have time.”
“We—”
“You’ve been in here more and more often. People are starting to talk. They think that shit’s getting into your head. They think—”
“It’s already in my head. Where do they think it came from in the first—”
“We’re ready to strike. With Reynald in now, good leads on Zero-Four and the Windhams—”
“That’s the wrong way to approach this.”
“That’s the only way we can approach this.”
“I just need more time.”
“I know.” A tender, fatherly gesture: a reassuring grip of Paul’s shoulder. “But—”
“Tell them I’ll be out soon. Rest up.”
“Yes, sir.”
Paul grinned. “Don’t call me that, old man.”
Alina shifted in the sling from right to left, from sleep to wake. Sandwiching her, the West twins inhaled in unison, a slow, tentative feeler into consciousness quickly overruled by collapse back into dream.
She didn’t know why the girls were so drawn to her.
Their extraction had been unpleasant. The Mara had been deep within a fleet of shredded and disabled Judas vessels, a horde of Enemy projections flashing in and out and through them. Jade had been a simple grab from the exterior; Phire had had to be pried from the can with Arik Mandela’s deft touch.
Paul hadn’t helped on that run. He was taking a silver bath again.
Alina wondered if he
and stopped.
She guessed they liked her because she was the only really approachable human female operating in the inner circle of Judith ME. Jud certainly wasn’t nice to kids, and that’s what they were, a decade younger than her twenty-five standards, a year younger than their respective enemy line deaths, Jade uploaded into Program Seven, Phire taking her own life just before the first Jag war. They couldn’t have known, so she never told them.
They were both so skinny. Pale. Children of the space between stars and times.
Alina was losing her Ft. Myers sunwindburn.
Each night, they’d cuddle with her in Sam’s command chamber, away from the cold halls of the ME, the sterile rooms and flayed god, the birthing fields, the libraries upon libraries of catalogued nevers.
They’d never known West. Although he tried at first to communicate with them, he was nothing more than an alternate to the father they’d left behind with their silver mother in a swarmed When. He eventually gave up; he’d never known their West, their Patra. His yesterdays were Abigail and the farm and the war, a different war, silver skies and children.
They inhaled as one, exhaled as one. Al had never before seen a twin bond so tangible, such a blessing. Such a curse? She could tell them of histories of loss, of ruin.
It was better that she just hold them both in the sleeping egg until morning came, bringing with it new insertions, new faces.
They were safer in her warmth, in what little comfort and solace she could provide, knowing what they’d been extracted to do, knowing what tomorrows would bring to shatter that gentle breath of dream.
Alina fell back into sleep.
If the Self is defined in its interactions and oppositions to and through external stimuli, and those stimuli are grouped in contextual accordance to the shifting nature of existence, we can define the Self as the opposition to environmental stasis.
How can we delineate and nominate that particular stasis? What collection of sensations and memory compose a being? How do we define Home? Is it the place where one exhales and doesn’t fear for the next breath? Is it indeed easier when nowhere and no one feels like home? Is home a place, a collection of interactions, a veil of memory constructed solely within?
To Maire, the concepts of home and pain were one. When something such as the concept of home, something so traditionally regarded with quiet desire, respect, even reverence becomes intrinsically linked with a deep, inherent negativity, things happen. As we now know, things happened to Maire.
It wasn’t that her planet was a bad home, but in the vast scheme of intergalactic destiny and solar-systemic politics, bad things happened there.
Sometimes a species outgrows its collection of rocks.
Would she have defined home as I did, as a loose collection of images and sensations, centered on those who inhabited that same space? In the sterile cool of the ME, I tried not to think about home. Tried. Hard. Didn’t work.
Home was unappreciated farmers, those sixty- and seventy-year olds still working eighteen-hour days, permanent sun across noses and cheeks, burst vessels beneath the skin, white whiskers poking through until the weekly shave before going into town: a new fencer, ten rolls of sisal twine, doses of Today and Tomorrow, defined not as divisors of time, but by the product names of dry cow and fresh cow treatments, slow visits by neighbors, sharing forecasts and anecdotes, busting through frozen bolts, tearing flesh on rust, the scent of sweat and hay and milk spoiling from where it spilled on ancient jeans ten hours before, then exposed those ten hours to sunlight, to humidity, to manual labor. Grease guns and kittens, hay hooks and goldenrod and vetch.
Home was the desolation of a post-industrial world, abandoned paper mills, a population displaced from suburban hold by the necessity of the commute in too-big pickup trucks, status-symbol sports utility vehicles, the embarrassment of the family mini-van, the occasional Freudian commentary that was the convertible, men who’d drive to service jobs, mill work in other towns, re-education as a mid-life crisis when plants closed, environmental regulations tightened, their wives taking jobs, nurses and day care providers, pathetic local politics of heightened local importance.
Home was hick bars and dirt tracks, girls knocked up before high school graduation, sexual assaults in the nearby barracks, Canadian dance clubs, the polarization and fragmentation that the adolescent clique system embedded: some spoke with accents, some struggled to excel in sports, some wore only black, fancied themselves gangs, just white kids with access to drugs and knives. Four had stabbed a middle-school friend half a hundred times; I’d sat at the other end of their lunch table: the outcasts, and later, some would embrace the mythos of bisexuality, homosexuality, painted nails and dabbling in their own sex, as if it were the popular thing to do, anything to distance themselves from tradition: jocks and cheerleaders, band geeks, farmer’s kids, racecar drivers and those who chewed tobacco in the parking lot, spitting brown into the previous weekend’s collection of floormat beer cans, the cheapest yellow shit marketed widely, and there were the sneakers, by brand they judged worth. I wore Voits.
Home was bonfires in the woods, cool kids fucking in Daddy’s sedan; they never escaped those early designations, and as such became a part of home: unchanging, stagnant, dead already, those who never wished to escape, those who never tried.
Maire’s home? Interwoven with that particular brand of revision that torture induces in the tortured, it came to me in razor-edged shards, horrible images, many without a suitable vocabulary with which to describe them.
Maire’s home? Just a rock, far out from One, far enough so that the first machine wars had barely scratched its surface, but close enough to experience the desolation of the century-long Silence during which the victors re-engineered the inner worlds to suit their desires, abandoning the outer worlds to their own devices: the horrors of famine, drought, pollution, a cultural and political isolation so devastating that planets burned out there, their own squabbles raging into limited conquests, subjugated populations put to the sword, the light, the dinner table. Taboo became norm in that vast starvation, that vast cesspool of decaying genes, mutation and stench, moons spun out of orbit in desperate gambits to win wars the underlying flashpoints of which no one any longer remembered.
Hunger has a special memory of its own.
Home to her was the taste of livers. Her own baby sister, dead just hours, put to the carving knife. What precious little flesh left hanging from the emaciated form roasting over one of the encampment fires, the smell and sting of bubbling fat giving voice to her empty stomach, rumbles inaudible under the night sky of combat. When the fuels ran out, even that fell to uneasy silence.
Fuels and missiles, bullets, poisons: none were renewable there, the planet just a mining outpost, the only ore of value shiny and gray. Craftsmen had worked it into jewelry once.
Tender and juiced, an arm pulls from torso, skin splitting and black. Chewing and swallowing: a denial of that child she’d held when her mother had died, attempted to nurse from pre-adolescent breast buds. The animal farms had been raided long before.
Those base desires in times of hunger and blood become base realities. She’d been a viable replacement fuck for her father and brothers after her mother’s death. She’d killed them each eventually, wondering what of her was left on them, in them, of the four babies she’d given them, the last a screaming mistake that had entered the world just long enough to exit in blessed suffocation. She’d wrapped its umbilicus around its neck and killed it to stop the noise. She tossed the lump of flesh to the eager onlookers, even helped them coax the afterbirth from her; some lapped blood from her lips and thighs.
After she’d first bled at age ten, she’d never stopped.
Home? For Maire, it was pain.
They knew he’d see them. It didn’t matter which he; he did. They all did.
The bell on the door rang from behind to signal their entrance. The patrons of the Cafe Bellona went about their business of coffeehouse intellectual discourse. There were so many of them. All blended and faded, became distinct, swam back into the moments. People overlapped.
Berg was the first to release the necksnap of his hardsuit. Leif and Roman followed his example, followed him to an empty table at first, then populated by two, three, seven for an instant. They sat and ghosts flickered. They became the sole customers of that table.
“We’re locked in. ME tether’s steady.”
Roman was the first by a blink to notice his new apparel: white lab coat, thick glasses. Clipboard on the table before him. Is this really how they looked to him?
“It’s amazing.” Leif, the youngest by a decade, let the eagerness and wonder of his age leak through.
“Not amazing.” Berg grumbled the words out. “Just a merge. Let’s get to work.”
Berg, Leif and Roman were the three best quantum-X physicists Judith had left. They’d been promoted and pressed into service after Benton’s death. They’d been kept a secret from the author because of the what and how of their inquiry.
The answer was, of course, Seattle.
“It’s true.” Leif poured over data presented to him on the papers bound by his clipboard. “It’s right here, right now, all of it, converging.”
Rumble from the sky; Paul, Benton and West ran past the front entrance of the coffee shop. The phase flak needled from the sky. They were just blocks from Helen Windham’s small apartment that she shared with her son and his teddy bear.
“Let’s get some samples.” Roman’s hand went into the air, a signal to the proprietress. She smiled and walked to their table.
“Sorry, didn’t notice you come in. What can I—”
Leif grabbed her forearm and stabbed it through with a metallish instrument he’d withdrawn from his lab coat. She gasped and exhaled, built up to a scream and
“Got it. Checking for—”
“Let’s get some coffee.” Roman’s hand went into the air, a signal to the proprietress. She smiled and walked to their table.
“Sorry, didn’t notice you boys come in. What can I get for you?”
“Three coffees, please.” Berg’s eyes met hers. She was warm; her smile caused a bullet-hole dimple. “Worked here long?”
“About a year. Have I seen you here before?”
“I don’t think so. Are you a student near here?”
“Yeah. Art major at Cornish, just down—”
“Sample confirms. Let’s get some coffee.” Roman’s hand went into the air, a signal to the proprietress. She smiled and walked to their table.
“Sorry, I didn’t see you come in. What can I—”
“Know any authors?”
Her smile dropped. “Excuse me?” Exquisitely sculpted eyebrows furrowed.
Leif looked over the people in the shop. An older version of the proprietress came out from the back room with a small package wrapped in gift paper. The man sitting at the counter unwrapped it: Marlboro 100s, now banned decades.
“Don’t look around, boy.” Berg shook Leif from his voyeurism. “Bad for business.”
“Let’s order some coffee.” Roman’s hand went into the air. A spectrum of proprietresses smiled and walked to the table, smiled and wiped the counter, frowned and ignored him, walked toward him, walked toward him and tripped, tripped and laughed, tripped and died, walked out the door, started screaming, aging, dying right there, then and then, a spectrum of everyones.
“Want some coffee?” The young blonde with the dimple put pencil to her pad and anticipated.
Paul saw them. He realized that Judith would assemble a crew of quantum-X kids to figure out that great hole in his thought.
He didn’t know why the Cafe Bellona had forced itself into everything of substance he’d ever written. Now that Judith had brought him in to repair the forevers he’d broken, he’d had to sit down and think it over, which is what he was doing right there, a cup of black coffee on the table, an unread newspaper and two packs of smokes in need of an ashtray.
He knew Berg, Leif and Roman from the hidden chapters of his existences. They were the team who’d eventually unraveled the silverthought lattice. Far in the future, they’d been able to crack the deadlocked omni-DNA code residue left behind in a ship named Gary after the second War of the Jaguar. A beautiful young brown man named Michael Balfour had based his forevership design on the Berg/Leif/Roman Lattice.
Paul watched them, all of them, across that dive. At the counter, older versions of himself and the coffee shop owner held hands. A mid-twenties future-version of the waitress served BLR coffee. Joseph Windham got down on one knee to propose to his Helen. Maggie Flynn and Simon Hayes talked shop over Demian and Deus ex Machina. Judith and god talked shit over Formica. There were others, so many others, but they were hidden to him, just blurs, all a spectrum of silver. He averted his eyes from the brilliance of that overlap.
The door jangled and he saw the enemy, in present form, a scruffy drummer with corduroy pants, Kente cloth sewn up the seams. Paul swallowed hard, scrambled for a smoke. The enemy kissed the young waitress. Paul smoked, looked out the door into the rain, into the sunset over the still water, over the lances of phase flak and the sight of himself and West and Benton running.
It was that moment, that moment, that moment forever, all moments in one, all thoughts pressed together into a tangible damnation. He reached into his pocket and didn’t find a marble. He did find some cash, which he placed on the table. He found a handful of silver coins, which he placed on the table. He found a wooden puzzle piece in the shape of Michigan. He found a pin: World’s Best Wife! He found absolutely nothing at all.
He had had enough of the Bellona Merge. He waved half-heartedly to BLR. They returned the gesture with guilt. They knew he hated being watched.
As he opened the door, she called to him from behind the counter: young again, standing alone, wiping dry a coffee cup. He saw paint stains on her hands, knew that on one finger he’d find a scar from when they’d removed a tumor from her bone, knew her scent from across the cafe, mixed with rain and smoke and blood, that spectrum, that spectrum, and for an instant, he remembered the way she tasted. Then it was gone.
“Come again!” Her smile widened to be polite, fell from her face when she realized who he—
Paul shut the door behind him and
threw the door open to Jud’s chamber.
“Stay out of my fucking head.”
The twins were there, Alina, the bear: a symmetrical arrangement: Alina flanked by the girls, the bear on her lap. Jud Indian-legged on her chaise; her words ended upon his entry.
“Guess you saw the boys.”
Paul scoffed, paced beside the window that looked out upon the birthing fields below. “Lab coats? Yeah, I saw them. Stuck out like an ingrown toenail. Try harder next time.”
“Sorry.”
“Fuck you. Bring her back.”
“You know I—”
“Bring her back!” Alina and the children flinched at his voice. The bear’s smile faltered. “You expect me to work with these?” He indicated the silent onlookers.
“Hope’s dead. Her code’s lost.” Jud shrugged. “Sorry.”
A breath and he was over the god. Lifted. Strangled. She grimaced, her face turning black from her suffocation. Paul walked her to the window, slammed her against the frame. A slizzle and his blades leapt forward, opening her chin to pubis, through flesh and bone.
He tore the silver ball from her heart and threw the corpse through the window. Glassish shards fell miles below to babies, babies.
Screams: Alina and the children.
He squeezed the marble in his right hand. It started to blacken.
“Find a way to bring her back.”
He tossed the marble to the chaise and stormed from the room.
Al did her best to comfort the sobbing girls. Honeybear frowned to himself.
The thick gurgle and flicker of silver, flesh, blood. The Judith ME sculpted a new body over the marble. Flash, snap to grid: Jud stretched and sat up.
“He’s broken.”
that savage transition back to the merge, the tickle and strain, dull beating behind my eyes, the pins and needles stippling up the spine and neck, around my head to settle at my temples, and West was there, all shoves and fists, beating me to the pavement, a knee on my chest: I felt ribs crack.
“Don’t you ever fucking do that again.” He got off me, extended a hand. I accepted and he pulled me up.
I wheezed through blood. “But—”
A swift crack across my face. Index finger extended. “Don’t do that again. I don’t care. I miss her, too. But it’s not Jud’s fault, not Alina’s. Not my daughters’.” He reached and wiped blood into the front of my shirt. “I loved her, too.”
We stood in a silence. The merge had flattened for the moment: one existence, no fragments or echoes. I knew it had been raining; the sidewalks reflected the emerging moonlight.
Jingle. Jangle.
I pulled West into the alley beside Cafe Bellona. I knew the door had opened and was now lazily swinging shut. She laughed, and four feet tapped paths past our hiding spot.
West’s eyes narrowed. He looked from the couple to me: lock. He’d known them.
“Welcome to the merge.” I felt my whisper had been too loud, but they didn’t seem to notice us.
“Simon and Maggie?”
“Yeah.” I looked out from the alley. They were much too focused on each other to notice me. “Let’s get out—”
“Quiet.” He pulled me back. “Listen.”
Another set of footsteps. A different sort of sound.
I felt it: that lance, that extraction, the energization of the metal now coursing through my blood, the place where my heart had once been, and I knew that Maire was there, somewhere.
“Close your eyes.”
“What?”
“Shut ‘em. You’re glowing.”
I shut my eyes and heard her draw closer to us. The footsteps stopped at the alley entrance, just a pause, but pause enough that I sensed West’s heart beat faster, knew he wanted to inhale, but like me, he’d retreated to silence.
She started walking again. When she’d passed, I opened my eyes.
“Let’s go.”
the theory that the self is the only thing that can be known and verified, the theory that the self is the only reality: solipsism.
He was solipsistic. He knew rejection, and that knowledge forced him within. That knowledge forced him apart.
She knew this because he knew this.
And children, and werewolves, and piano, and cheese. She’d never heard music. She’d never learn to sing, to dance. She’d never smell lilacs or taste Pabst Blue Ribbon. These things were good.
She’d managed to distract the girls from Paul’s break with a runtime environment resembling a beauty school dropout’s bedroom. There were giggles. The twins played with rouge. The blush brush tickled Alina’s cheek; she attacked them with bright-red lipstick, drew a smiley face on Phire’s forehead, a moustache above Jade’s mouth.
Confident that they were engaged enough in the trappings of teenybopperhood to relent the gosling imprinting with which they’d taken to her, she slipped deep into the Judith ME.
The source of that plague, that collective of shadow and doubt: she thought through the entry guardians and walked without footsteps into Paul’s refuge. She wasn’t good with maths, but she knew intuitions and rejections. The silver pool chamber was colder than she’d expected; her breath danced, and each painful inhalation, each wheezed exhalation echoed, bounced, and in return to her ears, heightened the loneliness of that place.
Reaching into, out and through: she knew their senses.
The silver should have killed her, lapping at the edge of the pool, exposed as she was, but she’d always known from that first breath after virgin birth that she wasn’t like the others. She wasn’t a fragile construct of flesh wrapped around bone; she was, and just was.
He’d made her to precision specifications, a fine silver blade hidden within a despised and uncertain framework.
Alina leaned over the pool’s edge, saw her shadowed face in near-perfect reflection, her awkward long neck drawing the eyes down to prominent collarbones and pendulum breasts, nipples erect from the chill and something deeper, darker, pointing parallel to the silver’s surface, and she cupped small hands (long, lithe fingers) and plunged in, retrieving, and she drank deeply of that metal, that mercurial fire, the burning like ice, carving through teeth, tongue and gums, into and down her throat, gasping, coughing, a flare and seizure of cold
though i know we be but dust
and she rolled into that mirror, let the metal pour into her, a frigid embrace, an inclusion and wrapping, and in that metal horror, she felt him, knew him, surrendered to that silver and that man, because that’s all he was: silver, and as the surface hardened above her, fine crystalline suffocation, she screamed without sound, her fingers plunged into her, frantic and yearning, her liquid, his liquid, all silver, all silver and
It wasn’t love, but it was something as painful.
When she was done, satiated, the surface released with crackle and splintering. She stood from the pool, let the rivulets of silver, of him, of loss and ruin retreat from her entries. She wrung the metal from her hair, for once a semblance of control, spiraled curls then escaping and drying, frizzing, accusing outward.
“You’d think,” Jud half-whispered from the edge, “he’d have told me about you.”
Alina jumped at the voice.
Snap and a towel. Jud flickered, threw the towel to Alina. “Dry off.”
“How can you—”
“The real question, I suppose, is how can you? It’s simple for me. Disposable body. ME’s cycling me through about sixty thousand Juds a second. That silver’s a bitch to withstand. But you’re different. You’re built from him.”
Alina stepped out of the pool and stood on the edge. The towel hung unused at her side. The silver dried by itself.
“Mr. Hughes is full of surprises.” Jud’s fingertip traced from Alina’s bottom lip down over the outcrop of chin, the valley of throat, between the fraternal twin peaks of her breasts, the gentle swell of her belly, and farther down to settle between and within the vegetative growth on her cleft. Settle and stammer, caress, drape, rupture, rend, rive. Split, cleave. Jud removed her finger, shining with silver and cum, hungrily licked it. “And so, it seems, are you.”
“I didn’t—”
“Shhh…” Jud put her finger to Alina’s lips, cut off her speech. The mouth opened, tasted. “We can use this.” A touch without touch: we can use this.
They left the silver pool.
those tenuous lines of commonality, and West wished that he was wrapped in a giant robot, a naval destroyer, one of the deep-black hatchets a different West had once used to carve apart the space between times and stars.
West thought Paul was having fun with it, but the concept of fun in that moment scared him more than the woman, the woman, the man, the man. He felt like he was intruding at a dance, the kid in the leg cast sitting on the sidelines watching the jocks grope his secret crush, plotting revenge, a bad eighties slasher film.
A controlled descent into madness: West felt his smile; spiral, spiral, uncontrolled, madness.
That city. That fucking city. Seattle. Seattle by moonlight. Couldn’t Paul see that it wasn’t real? A Seattle like that had never, could never have existed. His romanticized vision of a city he’d never see, a purposeful avoidance regardless of opportunity or adolescent dreams of visiting Kurt’s bridge, something in the way and that something was her, dead now to everything outside of the Merge, that spectrum of broken tomorrows, and it was like he wanted that pain, wanted to go into that shop and steal just a strand of blonde, a lip print from coffee cup, steal anything as proof that he’d not dreamt that life (he’d neither yet nor ever would live that), but proof? What proof could that place give them?
He hunted her.
From the cafe down dark streets, grunge lilting from afterhours bars; the streets were too dead, a perfect moment for her, but too dead: unnatural, as if the buildings lining each avenue barely contained a dream of life, as if the avenues themselves drew them into the center of the maze, and West knew Paul felt it, that merging, that convergence around Delta, around the witch Maire, her shadow form dancing between streetlights and footsteps: they followed the two (three).
Hesse and Deus. They were a cute couple, those ghosts. Maggie Flynn and Simon Hayes traced the edge of the city’s knife; by moonlight: a fog lifts as the desire and thirst of a madwoman descends.
Mr. Hayes, I—
Call me Simon.
That would have been her ultimate victory, to take them from the Enemy line. Paul had been proud of those characters, fucking around with their names until he got them just right in the tenth or so version of the book, that first book, nothing so presumptuous or gaudy as “Hunter” or the troublesome “Lilith.” Read into that what you will, but Paul liked them, liked their names. Simple names.
Maire made her mistake.
As the young couple walked innocently down East Roy, 714 (he knew the subtraction of four, the exact and precise number, but because of concern, lost love or stalking, but because he was thorough, solipsistic, self-involved and self-aware to a fatal flaw, and if we’re taking the story there, take it there, a reminder of loves wasted and loss, a ruin of a building now, if a building could signify a loss, [he never knew: bricks of what color, consistency, texture? some research is beyond safety and the ability of reuptake inhibitors to allay that desire]), Maire struck out, or tried, but his hand met her fist, and she spun to him.
It should have killed him, that touch; it didn’t.
And the city wiped away, a smooth transition to the non-space he projected. West was there; the couple wasn’t. Paul had saved them from Maire and brought West along for the ride. Maybe he needed a witness.
The horror of him, the astounding horror of him: becoming silver. West had first seen it on the ice, then in the pool, now in a muted substrata of the dead city. He could taste it, smell it, hear its screams; Paul stood before her, her small fist grasped easily in his hand. His face was empty. Eyes gray, then silver, then
And he’d mastered the laws of metaphysics and quantum maths, bent sciences and witching sight; he’d become more of her now than she could ever be. It was everything, everywhere: the crush of his mind as he grasped all probability, sent time and space down channels of non-exist that only he could envision. He’d trapped her, that sometimes child, that now-woman with the raven swathes. She snarled and hissed as she tried to tear her hand from his grip.
Simon and Maggie were safe. Gone. Maybe he’d erased them.
“You,” he whispered, and it was like tears, “never were.”
there’s a place in france where the naked ladies dance
it was a beautiful hand
the dust was thick…nothing had been touched since she left.
rupture
rend, rive, split.” Kisses grew frantic. “Cleave.” She pushed Alina down to her chaise.
Below, she was born again, a million new Judiths, a million short-term possibilities.
“Is this…”
“Shhh…” Lips drag. “It’s perfect.”
so textural, so sensual. inviting, but distant, the strong contrast of the white of the panties, human-made, human-patterned, to the natural bristly texture and dun color of the flowers, implied scent: the queen anne’s lace to the cotton to the gentle musk of skin
A tickle of something; she ignored it in favor of the tingle of fingers around and into and within.
Trapped for so long: god. Not that she minded the ancient housed inside of her, now one with every fiber, now one with every bioelectrical impulse, every desire; hers was a life shared with forevers. She remembered her first meetings with god fondly; she’d been chosen as a Medium at a young age, raised among her flux siblings in generation chambers beneath One’s surface, miles beneath, those first meetings with gentler deities: angels and saints forced into the slumbers in the time between machine wars, and that last time, the time she became one, only one with god through that tainted host body, the instant of realization, the burning of merging, merging: omniscience. Omnipotence. Enveloping, encasement, purge. The dark night of silvered space until rescue: Hannon.
Another book: another line.
To be resurrected: the boy author, in his subconscious collision of realities, his unknowing manipulation of probable realities, brought her from the deep of non: JudithGod, even before Benton and West were sent in to retrieve him. What pathways of thought, dream, and fear constructed this? What innate and incomprehensible combat of the soul had taken place to allow the forging of broken tomorrows from the space and times between bound paper?
Surprises, more and more: his immunity, his immaculate conception of the silver-proof Alina. Banana Tits could be her vehicle.
Judith’s was the Mind-Essence; she forced universes of analysis into motion. Galactic networks of circuits, planet-sized nano-pathways of bent energetics: a whim, a thought, and it was done, bursts of zeros and ones carved from continental shelves, zero, one, and the spectrum of realities contained between: her mind was forever, and the answer, not a city, a scent, a hair pulled from teeth, was silver, silver, and had always been silver, that ocean of machines, that alien viral agent, that scourge: an answer.
Alina had been born without the sin of risk.
It was extortion, excision, removal, usage. Sticky, honey-sweet, like blades, that union, her host, her hostess, as she’d been for too long, as take it from me, from me she’d been forevers. Jud seized at those cycling selves, new bodies and souls (or the precipitous lack thereof) flickering through the spacetime she grasped. That quickening, that shuddering as their bodies entwined; she felt it: silver, reaching, tearing from flesh to flesh. Alina above her, spread, outstretched, tissues stretched, her face: those arched eyebrows could have signaled pain, ecstasy, and they did, her mouth chewing on nothing but air, heated from their exchange. Her breath smelled of Judith.
Bleeding, gushing, neither red nor clear nor viscous: silver, coaxed and urged from her, across the bridge between skins, from every pore, every entry; it crawled into and through Judith, and it was fire, ice, a swift smack on the ass, a kick to the throat, a feather across nipple, and it was silver, tomorrow, everything, agony.
They became one.
Maire laughed.
“Never was?” She slapped her free hand down upon Paul’s, crushed. “Never was?” Her face morphed between grin and grimace. A hiss escaped between clenched teeth as her grip forced the author to his knees. They could have been the same age. Weren’t. West heard the crackle and splinter of metacarpal, phalanx. “I’ve always been.”
A flash and he’d swept her legs from beneath her, his hand still locked in an improbable vice. Maire was on the ground; he straddled her from above, his free hand flickering: silver: his eyes now burned. Hers matched his: free hand and eyes.
Strength he’d never suspected: she threw him off, over. He rolled, snapped up to a crouch. She matched his ready stance.
So it would be combat between them.
And it bent, everything, and it was beautiful for a moment, that bend. It wasn’t Seattle, had never been Seattle; the sky was gauze, and above it, something swam, that something black and writhing.
She’d summoned the Enemy.
entry: transgression function: noun definition: violation synonyms: breach, contravention, crime, defiance, disobedience, encroachment, erring, error, fault, infraction, infringement, iniquity, lapse, misbehavior, misdeed, misdemeanor, offense, overstepping, sin, slip, trespass, vice, wrong, wrongdoing concept: error
Buffer Overrun:
An attack in which a malicious user exploits an unchecked buffer in a program and overwrites the program code with their own data. If the program code is overwritten with new executable code, the effect is to change the program’s operation as dictated by the attacker. If overwritten with other data, the likely effect is to cause the program to
crash cart in here!”
“Hold on. Just fucking hold on!”
He heard, tasted the panic, felt the array of warming steel probes, that copper aftertaste, the scent of smoke displaced somewhere in front of his eyes, the sensation of warm water, warm red water. His fingertips sparked, he thought. He thought, but metal intrusions forced new pathways, new avenues of
and there was the hitching of chest, bubbling of what he assumed was blood from beneath a facemask: citrus, giggle, two or four tears escaped. Fists slammed; ribs broke, and he was
falling from the veil of silk, the upload generator struck the surface of the false city, dug, righted itself. Enemy warships swarmed.
i am silver, weaponized silver, humanized silver. i am
Alina appeared.
Mousy hair, weird knockers, a complexion that wasn’t sallow, wasn’t glowing, but was just intensely normal, and her eyes, colorless eyes. Breeder hips, a little beer belly, a connect-the-dots of moles, freckled shoulders, angled nose, big cheeks. She was the kind of girl who wasn’t hot, wasn’t really beautiful to anyone unless maybe they loved her. Cute in a way that felt like home. And there she was, suddenly there, somehow different, suddenly somehow different there.
Maire snarled at her, more animal than human, but then again, she’d never really been a human, had she?
“You again?”
“Us again.” Her voice embodied a confidence Paul had never heard in the girl.
Maire inhaled; lip corner upturned: grin. Judith, the realization melted into, swam through her breath. It’d gotten cold.
“Judith?” Paul stood. Confusion.
“Get away from her, Author.” Alina pointed. “Run.”
“You’re not shielded. Not shifted. How can you—”
how can you use that shampoo? the children who saw that it was blue, their dreaded hair beyond repair, ate nectarines on submarines.
“You wrote me.” Al turned away from Paul. A splay of fingers and Maire slammed to the ground. “West?” She didn’t look. “You shifted?”
“Yeah, girl. I’m up.”
“Hold your code.”
A flicker in the line, a snap to grid, and she was above Maire. The silver witch flinched as Alina struck her with a haze of metal. She jumped up, tangled with the girl. Another time, another place, Paul would have expected mud or jello, but there in the non, everything was gray, flares of static, that hum and tug of mercury. Their two bodies merged into a disgusting, flopping mess of limbs, hair, screams.
Maire tore away from Al, the sound of twisting metal.
“Why, Miss Alina, you have a secret.” Maire mimicked fanning herself, southern accent. “Do tell, honeychile.”
Alina swung, her hand silvered, but Maire dodged.
“What’s this about hope?”
Another swing, another easy dodge.
“Or is it— ‘Hope’?” Grin.
“Shut your fucking mouth.” Paul knew that voice: Judith, but it came from Al’s throat.
“What?” Paul. Almost a whisper. His face whitened.
“You didn’t know? She didn’t tell you?” Maire simpered. Giggled. “Oh, now this is rich.”
“What about Hope?”
“Don’t.” Alina breathed it as much as consciously said it.
“How long’s it been since our petite soiree in that cave? Days? Years? And you never figured it out? Some author you are.”
Paul shimmered.
“She killed her. Little ugly Allie killed your darling Ms. Benton.”
“It’s not true.”
They circled, the three of them, this slow dance of shimmer and merge. Paul stopped.
“You killed her, Maire. You—”
Flicker and thrash: he flew backwards, landed ungently on the non-ground. Maire didn’t stop. She shifted into and through Alina. Al shattered, dusted, re-formed. One hand to balance, one hand between breasts at the cardiac shield, she gasped for breath.
“Sam above, Allie within. Lots of soldiers to kill my children. Lots of shots. One wide shot. Guess where it went. Give up? Ms. Benton.”
“Paul,” she choked through wheeze, “it’s not true. I swear—”
And the sky opened up: incoming Judith fleet. They slammed into the Enemy horde, strafed the upload generator. Sam dipped down, tipped his nacelles. He swam back into the fray.
“Don’t believe me, Author? Who’ll you trust? Why don’t we ask Hope?”
Maire spun and wasn’t there. Wasn’t there, but she was. Not her, but her. The voice was different, the body splintering to a form West had etched behind his eyes long before they’d brought the author in, a form he’d met after re-birth from the Forever Dust: Hope. The body fell, meaty slap on non-pavement, but she wasn’t dead. Couldn’t be dead, because she gasped an inhalation.
Alina: “Don’t touch her! Jesus fuck, it’s not her, it’s—”
Paul, more lips and tongue than sound: “Hope?” He went to her, cradled her head in his lap.
“Paul—” Alina pleaded. Hands to fists to hair: frustration, weeping. “It’s not her. Don’t touch—”
And Benton spoke, if such a ruined form could speak. Paul’s mouth moved over the impossibility of sobs. She spoke.
“You’re letting your hair grow out.” Semblance of a smile. “But I liked it short.”
“Hope—”
“They’re all dead here.” Fingers interlaced with his. Her voice was becoming echoes, static, and “What’d you do to her? Why’d you write? Why…?” Two tears, more blood than water: “You’ve killed us all.”
Such ferocity barely contained in the sky: the upload generator shattered; a thousand vessels carved the earth.
He stroked her hair. “Hope, I—”
“There’s no Hope anymore. No hope. Nothing. But she’s with me.” A smile so bright from assemblages of flesh and muscle: impossible. “She’s saved me.”
“I’ll save you. We’ll save you!”
“Paul…” She pulled him closer, whispered. “The Purpose will be completed.”
He hatcheted an inhalation. Her eyes were silver.
He threw the body to the ground, clambered away and to his feet. The body shattered into blood and silver rivulets, dissipated with haze and static. Where Maire had been, where Hope had been: nothing.
The wind picked up.
Sam appeared above again. He folded from his vessel form, all shivers and digits, landed with a few stumbling steps as his human form.
“Allie? What happened? We got a beacon and…”
She didn’t answer. Wasn’t talking, wasn’t moving, just stood there beside Paul looking at the place where Maire had been.
“Paul?” No answer. “Adam?”
Silversens registered negative. West shifted to normal. “We found Maire. And Hope. And—” He shook his head. “I don’t fucking know.”
Alina looked up at the author. Caught his gaze down. A small hand grabbed a large hand. Just for a second, West could have sworn he had seen a merge in those hands.