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.
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.
His nacelle falls back into the ocean, the wingblades now useless.
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…
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.”
