Broken: A Plague Journal (26 page)

i love you, [...

[
signal faded.
]

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∆

 
[run]:
[read]:

author: [Hughes, Paul]
title:
publication:

[system interject]: [
deepblack
]: [ops:
eyes-only
]:
DESTROY AFTER READING.

Paranoid: Very High
Schizoid: Moderate
Schizotypal: High
Antisocial: High
Borderline: Very High
Histrionic: Very High
Narcissistic: Very High
Avoidant: Very High
Dependent: Very High
Obsessive-Compulsive: High

[recovery team notes signal shatter; text incomplete.]
[
la biblio[“o]mnithèque universelle
confirms textual probability to statistical significance +/-50%]

recovered excerpts:

 
...][I], Paul Evan Hughes, of sound body and questionable mind, do this sixteenth day of March, 2005 at 10:14AM, write this document in my own hand, which should be considered a holographic confession of my misdeeds and the wrongs for which I wish to repent. A fundamental confusion and misinterpretation of my intents this last decade has solidified my decision to subtract myself from this timeline and attempt to repair the damage that I have done. What follows is a brief account of the circumstances that effected this decision and the course of action I have undertaken to[...

...]was a desire to create a virtual space where kindred spirits could gather. Of course, the kindred spirits drawn to such a place were[...

...]transgressing the line between real and virtual spaces, hoping to validate that which I had created in a space that was not a space, a world outside of time and[...

...]and how much farther, how much further could we transgress? Maybe if I’d chosen a closer semblance of reality instead of that blurred[...

...]unrest appeared not long after the return to the digital world. Those drunken collisions of flesh, those muted penetrations and slicks of sweat[...

...]was complicit in that process. I am complicit in my own desolation. To surrender to temptation, to bridge the virtual and physical worlds, to give in to that desire to[...

...]giving in to loneliness. I knew then that it would all change, that[...

...][I] had birthed new notions of virtuality. Dissatisfied, I took it upon myself to destroy that world.

...]began the dissolution of the[...

...]before reaching the breaking point. It wasn’t long before[...

...]and yes, an ego the size of Sedna, an intense jealousy that at that gathering I hadn’t found the relationship that I suspected might arise from that breach of worlds. There are differences between electricity and flesh, heightened by observation from feet of air, not fiber. How many young men create and destroy empires of zeros and ones? How many young[...

...]speech almost a decade before, I had prophesied what would become the core of my unrest, urging my school to focus on the students, not on the then-new invention of the “information superhighway.” I sensed the impending societal shift from physicality to virtuality, and now, in these last days, I have seen the deadly results. Communicative technologies have created worlds that at first might appear to contain just as many inherent exceptions to truthfulness as reality, but I am now convinced that[...

...]asked me to define my concept of transgression. Is it my recurring practice of acquiring and exploiting others’ words and actions for my own purposes? Is it the desire to breach and destroy? Or is it perhaps the willingness to let strangers so far into my heavily-guarded, subjectively-constructed notion of history and “reality” that they can’t ever completely escape? I have no answers. I realize that I have lied, cheated, and stolen, as painter Jack Beal insisted I do in one of my first studio art classes in 1996, if I ever wanted to become anything in life.

...]virtual world that I began and ultimately killed was one of intricate deceits.

...]that I have maligned and fabricated my art from subjective memory filtered through a rapidly-dissembling mind. What memories have I constructed of my best friend? “Best” friend? Is that because he was truly my best friend or just because he’s dead now and can’t disagree? What shames have I subjected her to? I loved her, but was that love as strong during our relationship as recall would have an audience believe after she left me? How much of this is a lie? I can no longer tell the difference between past and dream, and I fear that as long as I invite viewers, readers, strangers into my soul, I’ll never be able to discern truth. So much of me is performance now that[...

...]stealing words, shattering memories, placing words into strangers’[...

I don’t know who I am anymore.

...]know what I have to do, what I’ve known for years. I will take this jihad to the[...

...]if I can only secure this reality, if I can only guarantee that this soul, these lives[...

So I confess these transgressions. I will reclaim reality. I will[...

It begins now.

[/read]
[/run] 

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.