Alina screams. She sobs, throwing herself against the display until her tiny hands wilt. West hears flesh split, fingers crack. She keeps beating against the glass, keeps beating, keeps screaming, even as he pulls her away, the stubs of fingers smearing that image with bloody letters; hers is a language written in despair.
West holds her tightly, but she still struggles, her crumpled hands pressing against him only jarring loose more of that loss; she seeps through his shirt, and he feels warm copper run down through the hair on his chest, pause to circumvent his navel. She eventually relents, slumps into him, allows herself to bury her eyes under his jawbone, anything to force away the screen, to erase that image.
West watches it all, even as he holds Alina so she can’t.
Inhale: no lung, no mouth, but why the sensation of drowning, of choking, the scent of burning flesh when there is no nose, no body?
All around him, silver. Waves still came back to slap at his shallow corpse, near-corpse. It burned; it froze.
He struggled to sit up and remembered that things were no longer attached to him in the way he remembered. His starboard nacelle lazily rose, slammed back into the silver ocean, stirring the metal again, angering what sensors he had left operational.
The nacelle crawled through half-crystallized mercury slurry until it met his main chassis. He was disturbed but not surprised to find that his pelvic fin had been shattered on the impact, and his caudal fin was twisted into an array of broken metallish.
s
paul hughes((?))
come here ((?))
cover my feet ((?))
rupture rend rive split cleave
Maire had pierced through his chest, heavy silver armor cracking and splintering before her. Reflex forced his head back; agony kept it there as spasms wracked his entire form. The hole in his hub was slick with his blood, mechanicals, the shimmer of venting containment chamber exhaust. He finally settled in the shallow silver, nacelles digging into the flooding ground.
Too tired to move his port nacelle. Too broken.
Starboard nacelle feels around the hole. The wingtip snaps off, falls to his belly, slides into the silver.
Focus, but
It’s flooding, that alien, that lifeblood. Choking, gasping. Somewhere, a line of code reminds him that there’s a human buried inside that ruined sculpture of metal.
i’m sorry
i’m
His nacelle falls back into the ocean, the wingblades now useless.
i’m
and the ten years after the Unravel Moment saw the birth of a metageneration.
In his divine wisdom, the Episiarch Paul Evan Hughes, beginning with that day of flights and flames, engineered a corridor into Upwhen, bringing order to all improbability.
“And if your heart should wander, if someone more interesting should come along to fill up those places that I couldn’t reach with a bigger dick, a bigger brain, or a bigger heart, go to him; follow him to the place you’ll call home. Live in that new love, breathe him into and through yourself, cover your past in new memories and sights, new tastes and nights without sleep, just your gasping, grating, puddling, and love him; love him as you’d loved me, but deeper, faster, harder. Love him as if he’s forever, as if he’s home. Forget this… everything, this person, the moments we breathed as one, when I entered you and we felt fire, that tide, that blood. Love him with ease and joy, overwhelmed and filled up. Love him entirely, because know that someday I’ll find you.”
He squeezed and felt her voice try to escape from beneath his thumb. Her neck was so thin.
“Know that I’ll find you.”
There are of course connections that imply a verifiable cosmology, a totality of phenomena constituting all of time and space. Beyond theoretical physics, string theory and the anthropic principle, there is a fundamental symmetry to existence that is better described through a defined set of characteristics in the known megaverse embodied in the form of a particular set of children born in the summer and autumn of the second year of the third millennium.
At the St. Elizabeth Regional Medical Center in Lincoln, Nebraska, early on the morning of August 16th, 2002, a boy was born to Tyler Jennings and Jessamyn Smith. He emerged screaming, bloodied from the tear he had rent in his mother. His parents named him after his paternal uncle who had been killed eleven months prior: David.
A midwife delivered a daughter to Judeh Hassan, widow of industrialist Antonio Cervera, at the Cervera estate in Los Angeles on September 9th, 2002, almost a year to the day Cervera had been killed. The couple had tried unsuccessfully for seven years to have a child, and fortunately, enough of Cervera’s semen had been cold-stored at a fertility clinic to allow an in-vitro fertilization to finally take place. Judeh Hassan named her daughter Antonia, in honor of the child’s father.
At the Hyannisport Compound on September 15th, 2002, Kara Anne Kennedy and Michael Allen announced the birth of their third child, a daughter, Abrah Allen-Kennedy.
Rhonda McClure gave birth to a fourteen-pound son on the night of September 16th, 2002 at the Keweenaw Memorial Medical Center in Laurium, Michigan. Rhonda had narrowed down the possible fathers to two suspects: Robert Hodge and Ray Shore, two members of the Harkness, Michigan high school baseball team. Her zippers had dispositions that forbade distinctions. She named her son Robert Ray McClure. She called him Buddy.
Hank the Cowboy flickered to life in the mind of Los Angeles screenwriter Les Harris at 2:00am on September 17th, 2002 when the lights came up at the Dresden and Harris realized the girl he’d been talking to was a transvestite prostitute.
Honeybear Brown’s final stitch went into place on September 21st, 2002 at a sweatshop on 7th Avenue in New York City. Creator Desree “Sugar” Williams quickly bundled him into a DKNY rucksack before her co-workers could steal her design.
James and Destiny Richter’s first son arrived in the world on September 11th, 2002 in silence, his skin pallid, a caul covering his face. His parents were not allowed to hold him until three months later after extensive reconstruction of congenital birth defects to his respiratory system. Finally able to breathe on his own, his parents took baby James Richter, Jr. home to a suburb of Phoenix, Arizona.
“How’re they taking it?” His wife, or the photon sculpture thereof, shrugged. “You know. Everyone had expected it for a while.”
“Wish I could be there.”
“I know.”
“Tell them. It’s nothing personal.”
“I know, hon.”
“Caroline was a great woman. A great woman. The Council and Cabinet extends their deepest—”
“David—” Abrah Kennedy-Jennings reached out. “You don’t have to get political.”
He sighed, slumped farther into his chair. “I’m—You know what I mean.”
“I know.”
Even through the jittery, static-veiled avatar, he sensed a deeper trouble, scrutinized the way his wife’s eyebrows begged a concern. “What’s wrong? Not your aunt. Something else.”
“David, I—”
The door to his office slicked open, lines of conversation emerging in mid-thought from the three, four men and women walking through.
“Mister President, we have a situation.” How many times had he heard that these last few years? How many times had it not led to heartburn?
Breine Frost sat down without invitation, turned to the hologram link. “Abrah, I gotta steal your husband.”
“Of course, Mister Vice-President.” Jennings hated the resignation in the sculpture’s tin voice.
“I’m sorry, baby. I’ll call you back after these bastards are done with me.” He smiled at his vice and secretaries. “Love you, Abrah.”
He waved his hand to the cut wave.
“David, I’m—”
A carbon wedge severed the signal between Hyannisport and Washington.
“Okay, Breine. What’s wrong now?”
From the communications room of her family’s compound, Abrah Kennedy-Jennings completed her thought, a whisper; her hand unconsciously traced her navel.
“I’m pregnant.”
“Refer to the threat matrix from thirty-one August two-thousand thirty-six.”
“Nothing big. Some rumbles overseas, a riot in—”
“Refer domestic.”
“Breach of security at LAX, mining accident in—”
“Bingo.”
“Wyoming?”
“That’s the one.”
“Why’s it even listed? No imminent—”
“It’s imminent now.”
Jennings frowned. “What’s going on?”
Frost turned. “Tony?”
Secretary of War Antonia Cervera lifted what appeared to Jennings to be a model airplane. “This is a print from our latest scans.”
“Scans of what?”
Frost took the model from Cervera. “Dave, this bird is in Wyoming. Buried under a mountain.” He handed the print to the president.
“You’ve got—”
“Not kidding.”
“And we’re—”
“We’ve got Milicom teams cordoning off the area.” Cervera clicked a data spinner into Jennings’ table display.
Jennings exhaled audibly, his face reddened by the slowly-rotating image of a bogey buried under a transparent mountain, the path of mining tunnels overlaid in a pale blue grid.
“Where are we now?”
“We’ve cut an entrance. Found an access port. Took a hell of a beam to even scratch the surface. We have teams on standby, ready to insert at your go call.”
“And we have no idea what this thing is?”
Frost shrugged. “It’s not an airplane.”
A tickle behind his eyes, not pleasant in the least.
“Send them in.”
“They’ll insert asap.”
“Send the order and head to the bunker. Get my plane ready; I’m going to Wyoming.”
“David—”
“No buts. You should know that by now.”
Frost cracked a grin. “Sure I do.”
“But what if…” He sipped the fine Tempranillo, La Riota, vintage 2001. Full and rich in his mouth, a complicated density of flavor. “What if there’s so much more than this?”
His date played through a stack of untouched dwarf asparagus stalks, swirling blood sauce into eddies, inadvertently scraping silver against bone. “Sorry.” Blush. “What do you mean?”
James Richter wiped his mouth, draped the napkin back over his uniform slacks. His eyes, a disarming gray, swept left, right, focused ahead as he leaned over the table, closer to her, as if he were about to reveal a state secret to the girl his few friends had deemed “perfect” for him. At least his white friends had.
“Your Deep Eyes have shown us what we’d expected all along: this galaxy’s alone out here, separated from all the other castaway birth matter of our universe by great deserts of—” Hands gestured, eyes squinted—
“Nothing. The Eyes have confirmed the insulation of galactic bodies by expanses of immense probability collapse. Our present tech doesn’t even begin to approach traversibility survival. The distance between galactic clusters is so incomprehensibly vast…Our slowships would freeze up at the edge. Generation ships wouldn’t make it beyond a million solar measures. There’s just nothing out there to power on.”
She enthralled him, this mathematician who worked for the Milicom Cosmotech. Hope Benton. He couldn’t have conversations this deep with anyone.
“There’s two types of galaxies, correct?”
“Spiral and elliptical. A few random distributions thrown into the mix.”
“And how many has MC charted now?”
She laughed, not in jest, but at the answer she was about to give. “We’re approaching a million billion charted galaxies.” Sip of wine: empty glass. “What you laymen might refer to as a ‘shitload.’”
“And in this ‘shitload’ of galaxies the Eyes have seen, has there been any successful contact?”
“Contact? With little green men?”
“Green men, white men, brown men…”
“Zero contact.”
“Something happens to the signals.”
“As they pass through the inter-galactic deserts.”
“The signals bounce back?”
“They come back flawed. The message is still there, but it’s distorted beyond translation. Something in the galactic barrier deserts fucks with our beams. Even our brightest, deepest lasers return to us sounding like underwater gibberish.”
Richter raised his index finger. “Let me propose a hypothesis.” Devilish grin.
“Here it comes.” Benton shook her head, bemused. “More of your Omega dogma?”
“Maybe.” He pushed his plate away. “Maybe in each of those galaxies, there’s a system just like Sol’s—”
Eyes rolled.
“And in each of those near-Sol systems, there’s a planet just like Earth—”
“I’ve heard it before, James.”
“And on each of those near-Earths, at the exact moment your Deep Eyes broadcast the SETI beam, their near-Deep Eyes broadcast their near-SETI beams—”
“Impossible.”
“Not impossible. Your Cosmotech colleagues simply misinterpret the alien beams as garbled reflected transmissions. They try again, get the same result, eventually give up because there’s this big mysterious impossible barrier surrounding our galaxy, a desert of heat death cold, in which our galaxy and a million billion other galaxies are simply oases. Can you just consider the possibility? What that would mean for the nature of our existence? That we’re just one of a million billion trillion galaxies in which a million billion trillion of our worlds co-exist, albeit separated by cold, impassable distances?”
“I—” She studied her empty glass, moved to fill it from the dwindling bottle. “I can consider the possibility. But the signals aren’t—”
“They’re garbage. I realize. But with no common ground, no points of contextualization, how could you begin to recognize it as language, as communication? Of course your systems are reporting it as dicked-over return signal. Our machines jump to the conclusion that every attempt at communicating beyond the galactic barrier will fail because of an incomprehensible physical obstruction. But what’s out there, between the clusters? Nothing. We can’t begin to theorize why a beam of light would stop and come back to us. Doesn’t it make more sense to conclude that it’s getting through, that it’s reaching someone, and they’re talking back at us?”
“Or maybe their Hope Bentons are frustrated and coming to the same conclusions?”
“I knew I’d win you over.”
“Win me over?” Her hand attempted to cover his, but his fingers still poked out underneath. “I said I’d consider it, James Richter, not that I’d convert.”
“Once you go black, baby.” Eyes crease with hard-fought lines.
“Oh, get over yourself!” A hand squeezes a hand. “Want to get out of—”
An alarm chimes.
“Shit.” Richter reached for his link. “I have to take this. Sorry. Bee are bee.” As he stood, the server placed the bill on the table. Richter pointed at Benton. “Don’t pay that.” He winked and left for the front of the restaurant.
He ducked into the coat room and flashed his Milicom badge at the attending employee. “Out.” The young man blinked at the silver circle and trotted from the room, closing the doors behind him.
Richter activated his link, which blanketed him in a privacy wall constructed from flickering photon discharge. Within the cylinder, a smaller holo sputtered to life, confident in its recipient’s identity after genetic identification and the glare of a biometrics heuristic.
Benton watched as her date nearly jogged back to the table. Something crawled behind those eyes, those gorgeous gray eyes.
“Sorry, Hope.” He placed the bill and a debit slip into the table’s scanner, at the same time ordering another bottle of the Tempranillo. “I gotta go, but you should stay. Call some friends. Put it on my numbers.”
“But—Where are you—”
“Wyo—Fuck. Sorry, can’t give you details.” He stooped to give her an absent-minded hug, stood, then bent down again to kiss her cheek. “I’m sorry, it’s work. You look beautiful tonight.” He cradled her cheek in his hand.
“Okay, well, when will you be—”
“Don’t know. Listen, there’s transport waiting. I have to—I’m sorry. I’ll see you soon, I promise.” He turned and walked away, not thinking of anything but “work.”
Hope Benton sat at the table until the bottle of wine arrived. The server poured her a glass, but when he’d left, she filled it to the top.
Wyoming?
She wondered if she would see James Richter again.
In the fall of 2021, some things happened.
David Smith Jennings, on leave from Milicom Arlington, visited the childhood home of his friend Gregory Bates in Roanoke, Virginia, with their fellow officers Antonia Cervera, Michael Balfour and James Richter. The Bates family home, a sprawling manse in the Neo-Plantation style, became the site of a weekend party before the Milicom soldiers had to return to base for a silver anniversary memorial. The Mayflower Hills Bates estate overlooked a tributary of the Roanoke River, and it was on those banks that one Robert Ray “Buddy” McClure attempted to rape young Lieutenant Cervera as the party raged on just behind them. McClure, a vagrant from Harkness, Michigan, who for almost a year had been hitching the east coast, making a living from itinerant roofing, and who had in fact been hired by the Bates family to renovate the roof of their guest house, suffered a fractured collar bone from Cervera’s self-defense, but still managed to successfully sodomize his victim after knocking her unconscious with a rock.
Upon waking her hung-over colleagues the next morning and contacting the authorities, Cervera was able to successfully identify her attacker from a police lineup. McClure had been found and detained just hours after the rape by the Roanoke PD on drunk and disorderly charges.
Because crimes against Milicom personnel were federal offenses, the McClure rape case went before the federal court located in Roanoke. Judge Hannah Kilbourne oversaw the case. Attorney Abrah Allen-Kennedy acted as McClure’s defense attorney. Allen-Kennedy, with the star power of her lineage and the sheer brilliance of her academic career, having graduated high school at age eight, Colgate at twelve and OU Law at fourteen, drew a crowd of several thousand reporters to the Roanoke courthouse. The proceedings were broadcast live on Court TV 1-7.
No one was really surprised when Allen-Kennedy secured McClure’s release with a not-guilty verdict.
The once-close friendship between Milicom colleagues David Jennings and Antonia Cervera effectively ended once Jennings revealed that he was dating Allen-Kennedy, whom he had met at a Roanoke bar on the last day of court proceedings in the McClure trial.
Hounded by paparazzi as they left the bar, Jennings and Allen-Kennedy ducked into a toy store on the next block. In the back, stacked between displays of Let’s Eat Meat Elmo and Mistress Beasley dolls, Jennings found twenty small stuffed bears. Their design was charming in its simplicity, and the lack of a plastic nose nub gave the toys a humble demeanor. Jennings purchased one of the bears for the giggling lawyer. Outside of the store, he ripped the Honeybear Brown tag from the bear’s ear.
She held his hand as they flagged down a cab and returned to her hotel.
They watched the hotel room television under the preface of “just hanging out,” but the show didn’t hold either of their interests. They seemed more interested in exploring each other, and after half an hour, Jennings turned the “Hank the Cowboy” show off with the remote in his right hand as his left made the daring jump beneath Allen-Kennedy’s black silk thong.
Network executives from CBS cancelled “Hank the Cowboy” the next week, citing demographic analyses that showed that even the rapidly-fading Boomer generation was sick of CGI retro-dramas. The program spent the next three years bouncing between the E!, Comedy Central and Sci Fi networks before being shelved for good. Unfortunately, all surviving digital copies and source material for the series were lost in the cave-in of a secure archive facility in Wind River, Wyoming, along with three original James McNeill Whistler paintings and an original paper copy of Paul Evan Hughes’s silverthought trilogy.
These things happen.
“Cunt!” Les Harris, creator and former screenwriter for the “Hank the Cowboy” series, threw the framed photograph of his wife at the wall link. The frame snapped, the glass shattered, but the only damage to the link was a small divot the frame’s corner had inscribed into the plastic face. Harris went into the basement, unlocked his handgun from its safe, and shot himself in the right temple because his wife had decided to leave him after hearing that “Hank” had been cancelled and CBS was terminating Les’s contract.
“Cunt!”
Jealous co-worker Sandra Chappelle pushed Sugar Williams to the ground in an alley off of 7th Avenue and wiped Williams’ blood from her swishblade with a used tissue. Chappelle remembered friendly discussions over hurried lunches about starting a new toy line with Williams. When Sugar took Sandra’s “Honeybear Brown” design and secured a lucrative deal with Mattel, and when every tabloid in every newsstand in the city broadcast a photograph of Abrah Allen-Kennedy running from the photog with a Honeybear in tow, someone had to die.
“Cunt!”
Antonia Cervera remembered the word she’d spoken to Abrah Allen-Kennedy after she’d gotten rapist Buddy McClure off. Months later, Cervera saw Kennedy walking with David Jennings in downtown Arlington, their hands held. Already furious about the rumors that her former friend and that bitch lawyer were engaged, this seeming-confirmation of a relationship pushed her over the edge, and as the happy couple walked by, Cervera lashed out, swiping two deep, two shallow nail marks across the left side of the lawyer’s face. Cervera flicked the tiny bits of face from underneath her fingernails and spit at Jennings, who knocked her to the sidewalk with a reflex right hook.
Fourteen years later, standing as Jennings was sworn into presidential office, Cervera saw the faint, poorly-concealed lines on the impending First Lady’s face. She smiled. Forgiveness only goes so far. Abrah was still a cunt.
The site command center was situated in a volcanic bubble seven miles beneath the surface. Jennings noted the fresh fill of quickcrete that composed the center’s floor. Scientists, soldiers: the room hummed with activity, but that hum quieted to a tickling underwhine as he entered and three dozen people turned to salute.
“As you were.” He approached the main display in at the bubble’s core. “Show me.”
Cervera nodded to three technicians. Lights dimmed and the projector spun to life.
“Jesus fuck.” Jennings knew his whisper wasn’t quite.
The design was simple: a flattened-egg hub connected two rounded triangular nacelles. The slowly-rotating display indicated breaches in the hulls of both “wings” where molten rock had infiltrated the form. The wings had presumably once pointed to sharp tips, but both had been sheared away in asymmetrical impact. Rock had filled the vessel with earthen cancer.
“How old?”
“Preliminary estimates? Sixty, seventy million years.”
Everything we know is wrong; everything we know isn’t.
“I get the distinct impression you’ve been hiding something from me, Tony.”
She hesitated. The command center filled with glances, cleared throats, busywork.
“Tell me.”
“David—It’s superblack. Need-to-know. We don’t—”
“Override.”
“I can’t—”
“Override, before I lose my temper. Named orders?”
“President Holmdel, but it’s deeper than that. It’s old.”
“Let me guess…Truman? Eisenhower? Override superblack. Release. I assume we’re all friends here?”
“They’re cleared.”
Jennings smirked. “Phantom government strikes again. Am I really the Commander-in-Chief?”
“David—”
“We’ve got a UFO in our soil. That’s some serious Chariots of the Gods shit. I think that makes me need-to-know. Holmdel’s dead.”
Cervera nodded and gestured toward the display’s touchpad. “Bloody up.”
Jennings’ eyes drew to slits, the line of sight between their eyes unbroken as he placed his palm on the machine surface. “Do it.”
“System, add user: Jennings, David Smith. President. Authorization: Cervera, Antonia. War Sec. Run: Holmdel Directive, re: Von Daniken, subsystems Peru, Bolivia: Nazca, Titicaca. Superblack release: mark.”
Jennings gritted his teeth as the sampler scraped genetic confirmation from his palm.
“Learn something new every day.”
“David—”
“Tell me.”
You want a story? I’ll tell you a story. I’ll tell you about Lago Titicaca, our HQ in La Paz, the three-chip whores just begging for a soldado americano quente’s company. Holmdel had been in office just six years when we found the pieces. After the annexation. Before the shit found the fan. Looking at that chamber under the mountain, I remembered. Why hadn’t we at least tried to piece the puzzle back together? I’ll tell you. Bodies. Dated to around sixty-five. Not age. Million years. Thousands of skeletons scattered throughout the lakebed, across the rocky plateau, between potato fields and Bolivia and Peru.
It’s dry. Freezing. That helped us date and sequence the bones. A million bones, a thousand patterns, each clavicle, each femur, each rib not scavenged by the Pucara or the Tihuanaco for their war gowns, each bone systematically rewrote our history and dented my lifelong assumption that I, James Richter, was a descendant of the cradle of man. I knew then no such privilege; those patterns were in all of us, in each and every one of us.
Imagine the impact: that ship who knows how fast, uncontrolled, damaged already, from what we saw in Wyoming. It left pieces across Uruguay, a few in Argentina, and the jackpot in Peru. Never found bigger pieces north. Guess we didn’t look hard enough. Or maybe shedding the pattern cache over Titicaca gave the ship just enough juice to try to escape. Didn’t make it. Welcome to America, ancient astronauts.
I shouldn’t tell you—Guess it doesn’t really matter. The author will probably edit this out if he ever gets his shit together and finishes this, but remember Benton? She put the pieces back together. Not the ship, but the pieces of me, all of those convenient assumptions that’d been shattered by my time in Peru. How’s a man supposed to keep a secret like that? Hey everyone, guess what. Everything you thought you knew about where we came from was wrong. There’re people just like us out there, and sixty-fucking-five million years ago, they paid us a visit. Left behind enough survivors to start this.
So the first time I saw the light, I was reasonably unreasonably afraid.
Holmdel superblacked the whole affair. Non-disclosure agreements all around, not that they could’ve done anything about it, not really, not to a man whose parents were dead and whose gee eff had been briefed on the surfaces before they’d even pulled out. I don’t think she believed it. Maths don’t care about evolution beyond its opposition to creationism.
The point is, no one could explain it, so they buried it and buried our eyescatch under penalty of death. Big threat. I was born dead. No paperwork necessary.
The way I see it, the bird dumped half its cargo over Titicaca after starting to bring them back. That’s the bodies. Imagine the biggest cemetery you’ve ever seen, but in this boneyard, the people were just thrown on the ground. No bodies at Diablo; I think they didn’t have time, or the damage was too severe to do that wing. Just dumped one wing, that coned-out ball with the human-shaped depressions in the walls. Some survived. If they hadn’t, we’d all be talking Kiswahili. Si jambo.
Jennings had Holmdel and his administration disappeared after the Populace coup. Buried under buried under buried. And after most of the southern hemisphere got glassed in the Quebec War (oops!), there goes a little thing called plausible deniability. Deniable plausibility? Not that he needed to know, but maybe things would’ve been different. Maybe the last centuries of my life wouldn’t have been spent thousands of years in the future, trying to fix this fucking mess. Guess I could take the blame, but why bother? Purpose be.
The point is, there’s more to this story than you’ll ever know.
“The agent in charge—”
“James Richter.”
“What?” A ghost rattled chains in Jennings’ attic. “Richter? From—”
“He was on your list to disappear,” Cervera paused, “but we took him off.”
“Any other undeletes I should know about?”
“A few. David, we just couldn’t—”
“I understand.” He didn’t. “We’re bringing him in?”
“Called him up. He’s in transit. I’m sure he’ll jump at the chance to puzzle a few more pieces together.”
A nobody chimed in. “Sirs, the entry team is prepped and ready.”
“Nothing’s alive in there…?”
“Nothing on scope. Just one big flickering power source in the vessel’s core.”
“Reactor?”
“Maybe.”
“Bomb?”
“…Could be.”
“Send them in. We have visual?” Jennings sat on the edge of an empty chair.
“Eyelines installed. Ready to roll.”
“Tell them to go, then.”
Assault Force A was hardly fit for assault, hardly a force, but they were completely qualified for the “A” position, a group of men and women impressed into Milicom after being particularly good convicts, patients, and ne’er do wells with nowhere else to go.
They weren’t issued guns.
Moore Chavez rubbed his eyes with gloved fingers, for a moment obscuring both the signal from Eyeline-17-A and the two teardrop prison tattoos a man he’d later raped and shivved had needled into his upper cheeks. He added that murder one artist to the tally he kept on his right thumb.
A romantic at heart, Chavez thought the rock seemingly growing from the metal hallway around him was beautiful. He held his spotlight like a gun, so far outside his conception of reality now than any reassuring contact with metal helped his feet move.
A lattice of passages, he followed the other members of A down what appeared to be a main shaft, his rubber soles grasping for purchase on the canted floor. Whoever had designed this bunker had a bad eye for level lines. Maybe it was art.
Up ahead, the hallway ended at a swingdoor. He thought it’d be the end of the line, but he saw that douche Monagan successfully pull the door’s halves apart. Someone had left it unlocked for them.
He watched Monagan take a few steps forward, his light back and forth, before he tumbled and disappeared, his shout of surprise interrupting the mortuary silence of the expedition.
People ran. A few more fell.
By the time Chavez got to the front, people had stopped falling, instead stood out on a landing within the chamber. The talking stopped even more.
“What’s the—Jesus.” He crossed himself.
The double-dozen spotlights swished around the chamber in near-solid lines. Even at the bottom of the room, the three men and one woman who had fallen were sitting up, their lights arcing forth and back across the expanse.
They’d fallen off the landing and slid harmlessly down a big metal bowl, slight depressions in its surface. Above, the room’s ceiling was that same bowl, mirrored. They were inside a gigantic sphere, or “spear,” as Chavez would have pronounced it.
At the center of the room, exact center, hung a dull gray orb. Free-floating. Just sitting there in the air. The four fallen soon realized there was nothing attached to that ball, and they tried to climb up the bowl’s slick sides, lest it fall on them.
“Fuck,” Moore Chavez said to no one.
“Fuck,” David Smith Jennings said to Antonia Cervera.
“Are we seeing this right?” She turned to an engineer running the playback. “Is that thing floating?”
“I—I don’t know, sir.” He zoomed. “Looks like—”
The screens became white.
Moore Chavez quickly yanked the melting communications band from his head, tried to slap out a dozen burning holes on his uniform. His eyes stung from the blackened, smoldering plastic. He found himself on his ass, slammed up against the back of the railing rim.
The room was brighter. He realized that the new illumination was coming from the nearest unsteady light at the chamber’s center, the floating ball of whatever the fuck.
He grappled with his own disoriented body and crawled to the edge of the walkway, looked down into the bowl. The four members of Assault A at the bowl’s bottom weren’t moving. Others around him were. More moaning and confused cries than moving.
“Hey,” he barely whispered down the bowl, but still it felt too loud. “You guys alright?”
He’d never forget the look on the woman’s face at the bottom of the chamber. Her mouth hung open and his beam revealed a wet line of spittle looping out. Her eyes were gray, and he wondered how he could possibly know from that distance, but
the floating ball flashed again, not as brightly, or maybe it was and he’d adjusted, but Chavez thought he saw a passageway open directly across the expanse, a passageway exactly like the one he’d used to enter the chamber. With the flash came a great tendril of energy that lashed out, down that passage. At the same time, the four people at the bottom of the bowl began to fly up. He didn’t believe it, but they did, flew up, flew through the floating ball of purest white light, a thin stream of their constituent parts splashing out the other side, guided down that passage, and then he died as he was pulled in and through and
“Assault A, come in.” The command center was a fury of chatter. “Assault A, report.”
“Eyelines are dead, sir.” The engineer watched the last of the head-mounted cams blink out.
What the array of cameras had displayed after the initial white had been confusing at best: twenty-four displays suddenly savagely displaced as twenty-four people were knocked back. Eyeline-04A lolled as if its carrier’s neck had been broken, but the image focused briefly on the center of the room, giving the assembly a brief glimpse at the floating orb, a swirling, building illumination, and then white nothing.
“Send in Assault B, god damn it!” Cervera had a way of barking orders that any dog would have envied.
“Tony, we—”
Jennings hated it when she narrowed her eyes at him, so she did. “We need to know what’s going on down there.”
“So we just keep sending in more troops? What happens when we run out?”
“You’re safe, Mr. President. Send in Assault B.” She repeated her command, and her underlings communicated wordlessly with nods and tappings. New eyelines snapped into life on the display. “Fancy up and filter that last transmission. And someone get me some fucking physicals! Are we in any danger here?”
“Physicals run, sir.” Another nameless engineer stuttered out from his panel. “Normal across the board—radiological, chemical—”
“Any change, you tell me.” Cervera had a way of gripping any situation and steeling herself. “Status, Assault B?”
“B ready, sir.”
“Insert. Get this to Richter.”
Somewhere above the planet flying roughly over Nebraska on a wedge of composite and titanium, James Richter responded to the chime. He removed his link from his wallet; his heart jumped a little at the incoming superblack icon.
He was the only passenger in the compartment, indeed, on that flight, so he slid the link into his seat’s display. He exhaled slowly, his eyes closed. He cleared his throat and opened his eyes to the second-long burst of data that flashed from the panel.
He gasped, his hand reaching instinctively to his heart as his latticed mindwork began to puzzle over and assemble probabilities and contexts. He thought the name Holmdel for the first time in one year and seven months, really devoted thought to Titicaca for the first time in three years and eight months. He’d learned to bury.
If it’s true—
It couldn’t be true.
But if it is—
He put his link back in his pocket and attempted to will the wedge forward to Wyoming.
“You what?”
Jennings at least attempted a look of the guilt he genuinely felt. Cervera just met Richter’s gaze and threw it back unused.
“We’ve sent more teams in.”
“How many?”
Without hesitation: “Five. We’re gaining valuable new data with each attempt.”
Richter just scoffed in disbelief. “Don’t we have robots for insertions in threat zones? You know, threat zones inside of alien fucking vessels buried underneath mountains? Little tank-tracked numbers, with instruments and cameras and weapons? Or did I just make that up?”
“Yes, sir. I mean—We have robots.” An engineer, listening in, turned from his console, surprised at his own volunteering of an opinion in the charged atmosphere of the command center. “But Secretary—”
“We thought it best to get a first-hand look.” A gofer handed Cervera another glass. She scanned it and threw it onto the growing pile.
“The Holmdel Directive specifically states—”
“There wasn’t any indication that the chamber was—”
“You didn’t think the big floating ball at the center might have been a threat?”
Neither Cervera nor Jennings had any response.
“No more.” Richter shook his head and waved his glass to black. “Shut it down. We’re not risking any more lives for something we can’t—”
“You don’t have the authority,” Jennings said quietly.
“The Directive hands final authority over any encounter scenario to the agent in—”
“Holmdel’s dead.”
Richter considered the possibility of his own disappearance if he didn’t tone down.
“Then at least slow down. Send machines into the chamber. Get a better idea of what that thing is before wasting any more people.” Richter tipped a glass from the table. It displayed the torn, bleeding pile of what had been Assault B. “Take your time with this. The vessel’s been buried for sixty-five million—”
“We don’t have the time.”
“You’re afraid of War Four breaking out? Neighbors to the north?”
“How did you—”
“Everyone knows. They’re up to something. And you want this alien technology—whatever it is—as a weapon. Then fucking research it first. Don’t just throw men at it.”
“And women.”
“And women.” Richter scanned through more images of bodies bent, twisted, pulped. “All I’m saying is slow down. We spent years going over every square inch of Titicaca. Give me a blueprint.”
A holoprint image of the buried vessel sparked to life on the main display. Richter walked to it, studied it.
“This area,” he pointed to the starboard nacelle, “is missing something. See the difference?”
Jennings and Cervera blanked.
“A smaller sphere. Not the floating one in the central chamber in the connecting hub. Note the conduits running through the twist points, the nacelle sockets.” Reynald poked the holo, which smudged and rebounded. “That floating ball is directly between two similar chambers, one on each wing of the vessel. One of those connected chambers has a spherical slug of metal secured inside. The other’s empty.”
“Not following.”
“We found what I suspect are pieces of that missing ball spread throughout South America. That thing shattered as it was ejected before impact. The ship is on a straight-line trajectory from the Titicaca site, and fragments of that shattered ball have been found from Uruguay to Peru.” He slaved a hemisphere map from his personal link.
“Why didn’t I fucking know this?” Jennings barely contained a lethal frustration.
“You didn’t need to know this.” Richter swiped a red line across the floating map, connecting the dots between Uruguay and Wyoming. “And I didn’t much feel like volunteering any information after you put me on your kill list.”
“Listen, James. All I knew was that you were close to Holmdel. After the Populace—”
“If you want my help, I’ll need to choose my own team.”
Cervera shook a no. “I don’t think—”
“My own team.”
“We can’t just bring in anyone you want…”
Richter glared. “Cosmotech has a math egg named Hope Benton. Bring her in. And no more of these,” he wagged the autopsy glass before them, “third estate types. Guinea pigs. Send in the robots, and then we’ll talk about sending people in again.”
Cervera and Jennings locked a look.
“Fine.”
“Me?” Adam West slid his only photograph of Abigail into his empty wallet. Milicom paid the bills. “Blood money. Early release from my contract.”
“How long?”
“Eight years left.”
The wheezing, jittery teenager huddled in the corner of the staging area. West saw the healing split of a lip. West saw the dusky haze of a Pearl addict. She shook her head. “World won’t last another eight years.”
“Sure it will. One last dance, and we’re both out, right? Have to stay positive, kid.”
She wracked a cough, enough to scare West marginally. Either she had been smoking three packs a day for the last forty years, or she was terminal Pearl.
“What’s your name, Irish?”
She looked him up and down, the distrust of a life of trauma.
“Come on. We’re gonna be here a while. Might as well get to know each other.”
“I’m called Maggie.”
West extended a hand, shook her collection of metacarpals. The drug had burned through her, leaving only a gaunt form topped with a blossom of orange curls, tied lazily back with a drab cord. The green of her eyes was diluted.
“Adam West.” He was relieved, even after a lifetime of dealing with the brutality of his name, that the reference was lost on the Irish.
He could have constructed a conversation around her age, the fact that she was obviously an outsourced asset, or the Blood Army tattoo he saw crawling up the left side of her neck, but Adam West’s parents had taught him tact.
He saw others among the group crawling over her, or wanting to, the dozens of eyes of the trapped coming to rest on a pretty young thing, vulnerable, slumped in the corner. He was immune to those restings. She was a cute little girl; he was a widower. He’d protect her, although he suspected that she needed no protecting. Each trace of the artist’s needle was a kill; each slough of lung tissue was a testament to her steel core.
The staging area had once been an upper-level office complex for the Diablo Mining company. Now, fifty soldiers, all of whom West suspected were there for their own escape plans, to get out of MSI early, to make recompense for some transgression, to be promoted, all waited in various states of anticipation and fear. They were poor, scrawny kids with bobbing Adam’s apples, a few with the lowbright slope of War Three’s fallout, the non-coms and executives among them standing straight and proud, doing fine jobs of hiding their uncertainty. This job would come with a price, and no one knew who could pay.
The room held the hushed murmur of conversation that only waiting emits.
“You been here—”
West cut off as the door cycled open, cut off as one of the more eager execs stood bolt-upright: “Uh-tennn-HUT!” One hundred legs extended, one hundred heels clicked.
“As you were.” The officer was a tall man, a dark man; his suit was tall and dark. He walked into the middle of the assembly, followed by two. “I’m James Richter, and this is Hope Benton and Michael Balfour. We’re here to apprise you of the situation.”
“Hope Benton, Quantum-X.” She tossed a projector marble into the air, where it spun to life, splashing a neon blueprint into the air. The assembly silently oohed and ahhed as they studied the display. She’d done a good job of forging a schematic; the grunts would never know the difference. “What you see is the layout of the Diablo Mine, sector fourteen, subsector seven. You’ve been contracted for an important mission, one that will release you from all previous obligations to MSI.”
There was a smiling anticipation in the air. People caught glances and grins. The fifty participants each had their reasons for obligation releases.
“It’s fake,” Maggie muttered under her breath. West heard.
“Quiet, please.” Benton continued. She sparked a pointer to life and began to indicate places on the blueprint. “The Diablo Mining Corp called in Milicom because they’ve had an incident downstairs. One of their fat-bore diggers snagged a thread of an unknown metal, and that caused the core of the tractor to seize up. It went a little critical.”
“This is a cleanup, plain and simple,” Michael Balfour took off. “I’m sure most of you have experience with cleanups. MSI doesn’t usually grant contract releases for mop work, so consider yourselves lucky. If you work hard, you’ll be out of here by the end of the week.”
“Sir?” A low-lev exec, probably accounts payable in some square-state branch, raised his hand. “What kind of core was it? I mean—Are we walking into a hot pop? I want to have kids someday, and—”
Balfour shook his head, chuckling. “No, no, I assure you all, you’re in no danger. The engine was a simple—Hope? Help me out?”
“It was a pebble bed reactor. Just a big splash of pyrolytic graphite and helium. The hot pocket’s halved down to almost nothing.” She circled an area of the projected schematic. “We waited six months to bring you in, to make sure it was safe. Diablo just needs the human touch before they can get back in and start digging again.”
West followed Maggie’s gaze. She stared at Richter. West could have sworn that Richter was acting. Some people can’t contain lies.
“The initial blast rocked the mine, so watch your step on entry. The walls and floors are a little tilted. You’ll be issued protective gear, so don’t worry about making babies.” Hope looked over and smiled at the low-lev, and a nervous laugh sputtered to life around the room. “And so—” she motioned to two guards at the chamber door, who cycled it open. A line of gofers carrying crates of rubberized protective suits came in. “Everybody suit up, so you can begin. Good luck, Assault K. Stay safe down there.”
West noted a glare behind Richter’s eyes as he looked at the woman.
The display blinked off, and Benton caught the marble. The three left the chamber to the sound of squeaking rubber being pulled over street clothes.
“Michael? We’ll catch up to you.”
Balfour winked at Richter as he continued down the shaft.
“James?”
“I can’t believe we’re fucking going through with this.”
Benton exhaled slowly. “There’s no other—”
“There’s plenty of other ways.”
“The probes didn’t tell us anything. We need human—”
“Rats. You need rats for the maze. We don’t know what that thing is, but we’re still sending people in to get slaughtered.”
She bristled at the word. “The last two groups—I wouldn’t call it a slaughter.”
“Still ended up dead.”
“No.” Her eyebrows narrowed defensively. “Two lived.”
“And then fucking died.”
She started walking again. “Why did you even bring me here? If you don’t believe in what we’re doing?”
He grabbed her hand and anchored her in place. “Because you’re brilliant. I thought you’d figure it out. I didn’t think anyone else’d have to die.”
“I’m sorry to disappoint you.”
He let go of her hand in frustration, raising his own helplessly. “You haven’t disappointed me.”
“Will you still say that when the K group comes out dead?”
“I don’t know.”
She walked away.
Jennings had gone home. Apparently his wife was sick. Cervera sat in his chair. None of the engineers seemed to mind.
“It can’t be easy for you, I know.” She said, half-watching the eyelines begin to light up. “Being here.”
“Hmm?” Michael Balfour turned away from watching a disembodied conversation between two of the fodders.
“It can’t be easy, seeing those two all over each other.” The unspoken implication.
“James needed help. You, too. It was the least I could do.”
“Who would have thought, all of us back together again?”
“Not all of us.”
The room was suddenly a torrent of chair squeaks and throat clears.
“You could have said no.”
“No. I couldn’t turn this down.” Couldn’t turn him down.
“Couldn’t turn her down?”
She has no idea. Michael smiled.
“Speak of the devil,” Cervera offered seats to the returning Richter and Benton. “Judas cow ready?”
“The herd’s getting suited. The lead’s been briefed. He thinks we’re after gold. Enthusiastic sort. They’ll follow him.” Benton sat between Cervera and Balfour. Richter noticed. He took a chair as far away as the room allowed.
“Eyelines?” Cervera performed a quick survey.
“Allll—up.” An engineer activated the last of the fifty.
“Good.” Cervera leaned forward. She was starting to like this dance. “Send in K group.”
“No good,” Maggie grumbled. “They’re lying to us.” She adjusted the tiny camera mount banded to her head. “And I don’t fuckin’ care if you’re listenin’.” She let the microphone boing back into place.
West grinned as he locked his bubble in place, the cool wash of canned air displacing his internal warmth. He grinned, but he felt it, too.
“All right, everyone. Ready?” The low-lev was a little too eager. West thought he knew something. “Assault K, move out.” Authority fills a void, especially at the prospect of gold.
Walking down canted corridors.
The groan of a metallish bulkhead.
“What the—”
The world became light, and Maggie fell to the ground.
Screaming, life in gaps, brilliant white light, brilliant white light. West knew he was screaming, knew it, but couldn’t hear himself, the room was so light. A ball at the center, a light, and fingers, reaching, grasping. He didn’t exactly have to throw himself to the ground; he fell beside Maggie. The last thing he saw was the light, that light, reaching out and through the fifty, K group, eyes open, lances of white erupting from the ball, the ball at the center, reaching, and
“I’m going down there.” Richter’s chair tipped as he stood up. “This has to stop.”
“James—”
“Don’t fucking James me, Tony. We have to stop this.” The door closed behind him.
“What do we—”
“I’m going, too.” And Hope Benton did.
The eyelines were dying, one by one by ten.
“Mike, get on the—”
“Sorry, Tony. I have to stop them.” Balfour ran.
Cervera wasn’t going anywhere.
It was a heartbeat.
West thought he was still alive.
Blood. Gushing from his nose, thin, hesitant trails from his eyes. The worst headache. He rolled to his side and vomited across the composite floor. There were bodies around him, and something had changed. There were bodies around him, and one was alive.
Maggie coughed beside him, a wracking, horrible affair. He crawled the feet to her, the distance seeming miles. Wiped vomit and blood from his face as he touched her. She started to cry.
“Did you see it?”
Cervera stood over the engineer’s glass, jaw dropped. There were lifesigns on two. Not flickering, strong. They were talking. Finally. A breakthrough. Two survivors who weren’t squealing bags of smeared flesh and agony. Finally.
West nodded, nodded and sobbed, stroking Maggie’s hair, wiping tears from her. He nodded. He’d seen the light. They’d both seen everything.
“James!” Her voice echoed down the corridor. Richter heard, but he kept running. “James, please!”
He came to the chamber door, slid to a stop across the slick, tilted floor. He could hear Benton running to catch up. He opened the door anyway.
Two people looked up. Gray eyes. Forty-eight corpses around them. The light at the room’s center throbbed.
Hope slammed into his back, grabbing his coat and pulling him into the corridor. She shoved him against the wall, stood between him and the thrumming, screaming ball of light.
He turned to her, his eyes distant, his mind lifetimes away. He saw Balfour coming down the corridor, the hallway of an alien vessel, forty-eight corpses, two survivors, the light.
“James—
A palpable thrust of brilliance tore from the light at the chamber’s center. West and Maggie clawed into each other, the song of the trillions broadcasting above them, the light reaching out, out, out
When Richter came around, one of the K group survivors was cradling his head. A girl. The other crouched beside Michael, whose head lolled toward him. Richter’s heart stopped an instant when he saw Michael’s cold gray eyes.
“Hope?” He coughed out, choking on something copper. “Hope?”
“She’s—” The girl’s cold hand was against his cheek.
“Hope?”
The man tending to Michael whispered something.
“What?” Richter tried to get up, found himself weak in the aftermath of the light, drained. Something was fundamentally different.
West turned around, a small motion of his head indicating the chamber.
Richter threw Maggie’s hands from him, crawled slowly, painfully into the orb room. Made it to the edge of the drop into the bowl. Saw what remained of Hope Benton curled peacefully against the corpses of Assault K.
Something broke.
There are of course connections that imply a verifiable cosmology, a totality of phenomena constituting all of time and space. Beyond theoretical physics, string theory and the anthropic principle, there is a fundamental symmetry to existence that is better described through a defined set of characteristics in the known megaverse embodied in the form of a particular set of children born in the summer and autumn of the second year of the third millennium.
David Smith Jennings died an old man in the far, far future.
Antonia Cervera was shot and killed by David Smith Jennings in Wind River, D.C..
Abrah Allen-Kennedy was killed in the Quebecois nuclear attack on Washington, D.C.
Buddy McClure broke his neck and drowned on the bottom of Lake Superior.
Hank the Cowboy was cancelled.
Honeybear Brown lives on, under the couch.
James Richter went into the future to find