Broken: A Plague Journal (12 page)

Sam loved her. She knew that because she knew everything he knew, but it just wasn’t the same being loved in that way. Besides, Samayel was a machine forged from metal and plastic and stars, and his soul, older than hers by at least four decades (he refused to tell her his real age), was forever and hopelessly queer.

She sighed a lot.

To one, it was a Paris cafe, filled with American expatriates of the fin de siecle. To one, it was a Laredo saloon, the rough-and-tumble crowd clustered around an overworked barhand. To one, it was an East Village dive where Bob Dylan had once been slated to perform as the opening act for a science fiction author. To Alina, it wasn’t much of anything. A few tables, a few smokers, a few glasses. She caught Sam’s beckoning smile and sat down beside him.

“Have a drink, little lady.” Hank tipped his glass to her. A smoldering Marlboro hung from his lips, the ashes considering the jump to the table. “It’ll help.”

“Not tonight, sugar.”

“I don’t know if you’ve heard,” Sam’s deep eyes swept the non-space construct, “but we lost Fort Myers today. Cleanup and collapse crews are en route.”

“Tragic.” Whistler hissed through his teeth. “Tragic, tragic. Sorry, my dears. It seems each day the Delta’s redrawn.” In his version of the projected construct, an attentive garcon placed another bottle of absinthe on the table. Whistler poured green over the sugar cube. “And each day, we lose more ground.”

“Shit, Jim. You know that ain’t true. Why, just last week we—”

“Which week?”

“Last week.”

“Which last week?”

Hank reddened. “You know what I mean. They’re doing their best to fix it all.”

“Bullshit.” Alina bummed a smoke from Sam’s pack, used Hank’s scarred Zippo to light it. “That kid doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing.”

Sam pushed his ashtray closer to his captain. “Sure that’s not the jealousy talking, Al?”

She blew smoke into and through his chocolate face, frosted with bushy vanilla beard. “You of all people should know there’s nothing to be jealous about.”

“And you, of all people,” he stole the cigarette back, inhaled, “should know there is.” He tousled her hair, which was already and perpetually tousled. “Benton needs some competition. It’s good for her. Keeps her maths pure.”

“It’s not her.” Alina blushed, a furious bloom of red across nibbleable cheeks and nose, neck and down through the periphery of her banana zone.

“Somebody’s got a crush!” Hank swigged back the last of his beer. “Ain’t it wonderful, Jimmy?”

Whistler’s eyes rolled under the swirl of his mane. “Charming. You dirty old men should leave the poor child alone. Intellectual badgering and Old West hullabaloo. You’re an episteme all your own, Messieurs.”

“Ally needs some competition. It’s good for her. Keeps her strats pure.” Hank grinned.

“Oh, fuck off. I’m out.” Alina snapped from the construct, leaving the three Judith emulations at the table.

“Aww. Something I said?”

Sam patted Hank on the back. “Not our fault. Just young love.”

“Has she ever even met the author?” Whistler dipped his sugar cube.

“Not really. A few words in passing here and here. But there isn’t a young woman this side of Omega who doesn’t have a hard-on for him.” Sam’s eyes indicated a group that had just arrived within the construct. “And not an inconsiderable percentage of the young men, too. Oh, to be young and foolish again. To feel—anything.”

At the entrance point along one of the far walls, three figures faded in. They shrugged off their blade armor and found an empty table. Metal retracted to reveal the old soldier, the author, the maths egg.

“To the young and foolish,” Sam raised his glass. “May they contain multitudes.”

“I still don’t get it.”

“What?”

“This.” She indicated the room. To Benton, the walls and tables were bare metal. Before her on the table, a simple flask of nutrient slurry steamed.

“Use your imagination. It’s a nice way to spend our recharge time. People need people. As long as we have the resources, we’ll keep this place running.” There was a Killian’s Red and a charred steak in front of Paul.

“I don’t need people.” Benton plugged the slurry flask into her arm. “It’s a waste of bandwidth.”

“Spoken like a true child of the Judith.” West took a fishstick from his plate, bit into it, wondered why he’d chosen fishsticks of all things; Judith knew there wasn’t a squirt of tartar sauce available for centuries around them. “If you’d known a world, a real world, you’d appreciate this place.”

“I appreciate it. There’s nothing trying to kill us here.” She adjusted the pack on her arm. “Most days, at least.”

Paul caught Sam’s wave from across the room. “I’ll be back.” As he stood, his hand traced across Benton’s shoulder.

West waited for a safe distance before he asked. “So?”

Benton leaned in. “A/O reports sixty-five/thirty-five. We’ve lost ground, and—”

“No, no.” West cleared his throat; his eyes locked hers. “What’s going on? With you two?”

Benton sat back in her chair. “How many times do I have to tell you? There is no ‘you two.’”

“Not the word on the street, kiddo.”

“What’s the word on the street, then?”

West shrugged. “Apparently Judith brought the author in from his When to fix all this shit, and now she sends him out on missions with that old man West and the delicious young Hope Benton. Word is that I’m a mere chaperone.”

“Bullshit, and you know it.” Benton scoffed. “One more reason for me to hate this construct. Gossip.”

West bit into a fishstick. Flecks of what could have been fish glinted in his grin.

“Good run today?” Sam offered a smoke. I accepted and sat down with the characters at a table that looked suspiciously like it had come from the old U Inn. I blinked and noticed the booths in the back, the chubby drunk sorority girls. Music from a wedding reception seeped through from the back room. Heard myself on the jukebox. Smoke, shadow, echoes: illusions, all.

“It was okay. How’re you guys doing?”

Sam did his best Burl Ives impression, but his grin faltered. “Lost Fort Myers. Al’s pretty upset.”

“Fuck.” I’m better with words in my head. “How about you two?”

“Still lookin’, son.” Hank scooped a slug of Red Man into his mouth. “Ain’t much out there, but we’re still lookin’.”

“What my dear cattleman is trying to say,” Whistler smoothed his lapels, “is that we’ve run out of promising leads, and we’ve not yet found anyone of significant tactical value.”

“There have to be more characters out there somewhere. You were.”

“So we were, but we’re not, shall I say, entirely
truthful
?”

I knew where Whistler was pushing the conversation. “Sometimes it’s hard to be truthful about people you never really met.”

“Perhaps you should have focused on biographical research. I would
never
have worn this ridiculous cape.”

Hank guffawed. “Sure makes you pretty, though, Jim.”

Whistler hissed at the cowboy.

Sam just shook his head. “Any leads on Delta yet? Anything new you can tell us?”

“It’s there.” And it was, a great stabbing tickle behind my eyes, a tugging toward and a pushing from and the words escape: it was. “Just haven’t excised it yet.”

“Word is we’ve slipped to Alpha seventy-over.”

“Sixty-five.” I hated how fast the Judith mind essence relayed everything to everyone, and how fast that relay distorted truth. “That’s the word. Watch my mouth and call me the horse.”

“Rough insertion today?”

Dirty old man. I drank, swirled the beer around my mouth, over bruised gums and a loose molar. “Could say that.”

“Meet anyone interesting?” He considered. “Again? Any words of wisdom from the Great Within?”

Thinking back to the shattered images I’d catalogued that “day”: “People shit when they die.”

Sam chuckled.

I pulled on the cigarette, exhaled through my nose. I vaguely remembered when that had used to hurt. “Just another day. Erased a few more post-silver characters.”

Hank spit tobacco juice into his empty bottle. “Seem to be getting better at that, buckaroo.”

It didn’t matter that he sounded artificial. He
was
artificial. His television show had never really existed. The dialogue did concern me, though. I knew I could do better.

“We’ve almost got a lock on the bear. Should be able to grab him in the next insertion.”

“You bringing him in?”

“Might as well. He’s a fragment we can use to get a better lock.”

Whistler sighed. “‘Fighting wars outside of time and space,’ with a cowboy, a painter, and a teddy bear. Whatever would the Hugo committee think?”

“Doesn’t matter. No one’s gonna read this when I’m done.”

“I know I wouldn’t.” Sam’s face broke from stern steel to friendly laughter.

“Ah, well.” Whistler pushed away from the table. “Ready to get back to work, my captain?”

Hank spit, gouged the spent tobacco from his lip. “You betcha.”

“On the morrow, gentlemen.” Whistler smoothed back his hair, twirled his white streak into the air. “One question, dear boy... Why does Hank get to be the Captain and I his mount?”

I shrugged. “Never really thought about it.”

“He just hates my spurs. Let’s go, Jim.” Hank tapped his subdermal and became static and nothing.

“Next time,” Whistler pointed his cane at me, “I’m the Captain.” He snapped and faded.

“Those two make a cute couple.” Sam thought another beer to the table.

“You think?”

We laughed.

“Just like you and...” His eyes indicated Hope, who was lost in conversation with West at their table, her glass displaying the day’s kill stats.

I’d heard it all before. “Sam, there is no ‘me and...’ Regardless of what you hear. This place is such a soap opera sometimes.”

“You sure about that?”

“Jesus, I’m sure, okay? She’s in love with her integers.”

“And you’re in love with impossibilities.”

“I’ve killed almost everyone I’ve ever loved.”

“And you’ll have to kill the rest before this is done.” Sam had a way of cutting not only to the chase, but to the end credits.

“Pretty much.”

I studied the table, my bottle. I knew he was staring at and through me.

“You should meet my Captain.” Some smiles, the most conspiratorial, evidence in eyes.

“Oh yeah? Why?” although I already suspected. I’d written her to cursory life, but my characters always had a way of growing into themselves, adapting, becoming people without any input from me.