MANAGEMENT. A bus ground to a halt at the stop down the street. The brakes sounded like screaming.
“Not better. Different.”
The coffee shop was empty save the two time-offset versions of the same man. Paul thought he heard a rustling behind the counter, through the door leading to the inner sanctum, coffee filters and the cash box and mops. Presumably, New Management was back there. Those hidden sounds were more frightful than they should have been, the creak of a floorboard, the swish of fabric, the clearing of a throat.
“Where is everyone?”
The Omega let the question hang and fall. He gestured toward the great windows at the shop’s front. There were people passing by, eyes as downcast as the day was overcast, no one diverting attention to Bellona.
Something crashed in the back. Paul jumped.
The link was dead. It was supposed to show the president.
Most of the tables’ chairs were still turned upside-down on their tops. The lights were off. Maybe it wasn’t open yet? Maybe Bellona had new hours of operation? The chair legs obscured the corners in dozens. Paul noticed that theirs was the only set table.
“Supposed to be people here. Simon and Maggie, Joseph and Helen, S—”
“Don’t.”
“How does it all end?”
“More with a bang than a whimper.”
“No.” Paul struggled over concepts. “Me. How does it end?”
“You developed a germinoma around your pineal gland at age twenty-four.”
“Brain cancer?”
“You died of an overdose of anti-seizure medication at age twenty-seven.”
“And you?”
The Omega smiled, an expression that reminded Paul of war. “That’s me.”
“I don’t understand—”
“—and that’s the problem. You’re sitting there setting all these events into motion, having to retype the number 6 because your keyboard’s broken, not as badly as you, and I know, I know that you saw those things, never did the research, fought with the fact that no one believed you. I know you saw things before they happened and wrote them down, uploaded them, and everyone thought you were looking into places you shouldn’t, that your predictions were just snooping or luck, the falling towers, a hanging, a wedding, the silver. I know that.
“You’ve written things into existence, and I know you’ve struggled, tried to undo the damage done. And I know you’d sooner waste yourself away, surrender, than hurt the ones you loved again. I know you’ve seen the terrifying weaponry, the holland and hills, that you’ve walked beyond return to that edge, and you’ve tasted it, looked over and wondered. I know that. You’ve spent countless nights replaying the scenes in your head, wars fought between the worlds, great machines built of silver and light, the savage echo of billion-barreled shatter arrays, the silences, and there aren’t words for what you’ve seen; no typing can convey that.
“I know you were basically a good man made bad by the departures of others, unable to grasp the concept that you weren’t integral, were never integral enough to include, and the mathematics never worked: you wanted to be constant in a variable existence. You wanted—maybe deserved—a new calculus you never invented.
“You scared people.
“You’re scaring people, and that’s why they leave.
“I know you tried to fix it, the distance and the pills, hiding from the world while broadcasting the substance of their fear, flirting recklessly with their expectations of you, pushing away and surrendering, again, to your hate. You are a creature of hate. No forgiveness. When the world reacted negatively, you worked to dismantle it and rebuild it in your image. You fell into a place where no one could ever begin to understand.
“You weren’t a sympathetic character.”
Paul had been studying the city outside Bellona. People dissolved between ghosts. The sky darkened, an upload spire crashing to purchase in the distance, farther off, the orbital gun rising from the water, firing blinding phase slugs into the future. The sounds from the back settled dreamlike into a rhythm, a pounding heartbeat. A shiver worked its way up his spine, settled along his jawline.
“How do I fix it?”
The Omega shrugged. “You were a flawed machine, and it only ended once I—once
“You’re asking me to—”
“No. I’m just the end point of a statistically-significant percentage of histories. I’m not asking you to end yourself. You constructed characters, turning everyone whose hand you shook into fiction. You unlearned presence. You wrote people into plotlines and barely registered their realities. You filtered everyone through pasts. I’m asking you to recognize that you’re not the episiarch, assembling realities. You’re a character who doesn’t know how the book ends. You’re distracting what limited audience you have left with flowery language, never offering substance. They want resolution, a dogfight, a gun, not self-analysis buttered with delay tactics. Write the fucking book. Get it done.”
“You’re confusing them.”
“And that’s why I’m dead now. You don’t have to be. If I could take it all back, the vengeance, the worlds shunted into existence, I would. What you have to do is separate your realities. These characters aren’t the people you love or your mailman or the cashier at Price Chopper. Stop living inside of your book and start finishing it.”
It manifests itself in one side of the face, the body, the head turning to the right, that side’s eye clenching as closed as a fist, the subtle, uncontrolled flail of an arm against the table and its retreat to the lap, the foot tapping, not a symptom of boredom or nervous energy, just a manifestation of the worm that’s gripping his brain.
“Some lives are cursed.” Teeth gritting, speech barely escaping, a graveled whisper.
“Paul, you have to—”
“Let all—” a stutter, frustration flaring across the edges of attack.
“Paul—”
“L-let all Earth buh—” A simple, passionate fury.
“
“Let all Earth be a
Slow, sad. The Omega shook his head. “All Earth? Or just the exile city?”
Paul snarled inadvertently, the clenched jaw and upturned lip baring a V of teeth, giving him a decidedly deranged glare. Half a person shook with rage.
“You might be interested to know, you have a lesion in your corpus callosum, a precursor to the pineal growth. Should have stopped smoking, son.” His smile was a mixture of pity and resignation.
“D-Don’t call mmm—”
“Such lesions can lead to the infamous ‘alien hand syndrome.’ It cleaves the mind, ruptures, rends it in half. Splits presence. Gives voice to id.”
Paul’s right hand swept over the edge and slammed the tabletop.
The Omega regarded it blankly. “There were compelling studies that suggested we have little control over action, that the body begins to take action against stimuli before it decides to tell the brain what’s happening. Not just reflex responses, burning or injury, but more complex reactions to a range of situations. Our sciences proved our divinity. Your flat affect was nothing more than an emotionally-autistic withdrawal response to precognition. You had a reach and couldn’t deal with it. Stuck in a feedback loop.
“You want an answer for the loss? Want a target? Don’t blame the boy who killed himself, the girls who left you for the exile city. And don’t blame the city, Tzee-tzee-lal-itc or Sealth or Seattle, the little place where people cross over. Fitting title, considering the when and where of my crossing. Want a target?”
Paul nodded. It was a gesture pulled to one side.
“Maire.”
Noise roared from the back room.
“You couldn’t write her out of the picture if she got to you first. She does, eventually. She was there, whispering into an ear the day before your twentieth birthday. She pulled a love away from across three thousand
