Rest
*
All human eyes on Earth(0x7C0) are otherwise occupied. Every seeing-orb glued to a screen or on each other, the boarder, the horizon (and “those sonsofbitches” on the other side of whatever map line). States and armies watch the nearest neutral zone or the DMZ. Civilians watch the news-disinformation-propaganda slurry and fight over iodine, and everybody’s search history includes Prussian blue. A million flavors of civil defense drill nightmare hell. The whole world soul-sick at their guns and huddled.
Not many people left stargazing. Only a handful saw the flash and the anomaly, roughly same course as the thing that hit the foundry weeks before-weeks before–weeks before—weeks before. It. The anomaly. Glenn is out past Jupiter flying at the speed of C (and then some) the speed impossible. Blueshifting, radiant. Luminescent white hot.
Glenn slows, how I do not know. He still hits Earth(0x7C0)’s atmosphere like a ton of clay traveling beyond-relativistic velocity. He is, for the final time, a lump of Earth with living words writ on and in his lifeless matter, he is baked brown and alive in the fall to Earth. Fall is incorrect for this iteration. The season is spring, first. Second, the golem flies. The man flies, flash-cuts the sky, the after-image arc of his path hangs–frozen lightning–for a full half-minute after he’s gone. Like an old lightbulb’s dying filament–the air burnt by the speed of his flight. His sound is thunder that shakes to-the-marrow for miles in all directions. And the little wood by the overgrown golf course bowed down in deference to Glenn’s shockwave. The trees lay low and bent, grew that way forever. But none broke.
If your eye could track the impossible velocity, you’d see a familiar super hero stance. Glenn is in the defiant pose, fist up(down), ready to fly on an equal and opposite in all things trajectory back to the point where he died–the place to which he is recursively tied. Back to his save point. As if he’d finally made it far enough in the game to make meaningful choice.
Glenn’s fist-in-flight pierces the very ‘heart’ of the Barrage Balloon. The same ship that murdered the golem moments before. The disc-Mothership built like a couple-city-blocks is held aloft by three great Shulz-Warren generators. The hiss-hovering beast derives power and propulsion, not perpetual, but for long enough to annoy the thermodynamic gods from it’s reactor stack and Shulzie’s. The thing could’ve hovered there ‘forever’ (decades) with good maintenance. Glenn did a Joe-Louis and downed the ship with one punch.
He doesn’t slow when flying superhero-fist through the guts of the Mothership. It’s a bullet-snap, a *fwip* and then the thump of the man, still red-hot punching the bottom of the crater in the Earth below. So fast is his flight, he’s all the way to his destination before his foe feels pain’–before the “Shulzie’s” blow. Three enormous electric pops and burbling explosions rock the great disc–every weapons rig and magazine on fire. Every kind of weapon “cooking off.” Popcorn shrapnel ripping the great machine apart from within. The Mothership ‘dies’, seems to shed its outer skin and fall on the old golf course and some portion of the small wood.
The remains of the great ship fall fill the crater it so recently made out of Glenn, and then some (and plenty more).
But a few hundred meters deep and we’re slow enough for normal physics. Good old F=MA territory again. The force of the man-sized-mass that is the golem, that is Glenn, is so great he punches through the thick roof of the COS bunker far below Peoria. Comic book, one knee pretty-but-painful landing in the bunker’s great hall. Precisely where he’s meant to be.
*
VERY FAR BELOW WASHINGTON DC.
*
It went like this: the “Big Board” shows Anchorage, all of it this time on fire. Elsewhere several naval anchorages on both coasts on fire. Casualty estimates. Many zeros. Text scrolling on monitors: Abel-crafted counter strikes and scenarios and contingencies-a-plenty. Allies on fire and every foe and friend-foe trying to bomb and choke each other to death.
“It’s time to fucking launch.” From Vice President Chrysler, with some discreet ‘mhmm’ from the generals and the gaggle around them.
Hoover says “we wait.” In the ensuing debate, he’s all “we talk and try conventional threats. We at least pause to decide which war is worth ending the world over. Who do we attack?” He points at the map covered in red strobes and vectors.
Chrysler jumps in before the man can waste more time: “It’s not complicated. We hit the ones that hit us. After, we talk to whoever is left. Launch chickenshit, or I will.”
“You don’t have the authority.”
“I am authority.” And the bigger man, the old-money ghoul, catches the goddamn-sitting-president by his lapels and half-lifts him, as if to set him somewhere. If he could Chrysler would toss him into the sun or strap him to the nose cone of a missile about to launch. “We’re going to open that fucking brief case, and you’re going to put your palm on the pad and do the thing you took an oath to do if necessary.” They leveled cities, they didn’t attack the constitution.
Chrysler speaks through grit teeth: “You smug, soft, fuck.” The the big man who was a bad college football player, but a fine business school student, twists Hoover’s arm, literally when the figurative fails. There’s an older-man scuffle (while security for each VIP exchange “should we?” looks and decide to ‘let it play out’). Hoover’s face ends up smooshed on the table, arm all torqued behind him. He tries to ‘fight’ back, fails. Calls for anyone to intervene. “I’m the fucking President!” falls on deaf ears.
Chrysler’s tone is ice cold, his breath hot and foul: “A thing we spent centuries carving, sweat and blood and all that type of shit, we cut and carved this country out of the Earth…” Somebody. I’m the boss. Ow. Let me go you fucking lunatic. “You shut it. America the idea has been attacked in a way that demands this response. Now you give that order or I will evoke, or the party.” Chrysler sun-down stammers. “Our party will evoke the amendment. To. You are un-fit.”
Hoover squirms loose. And when he’s put the corner of the table and a few chairs between them: “It’s the twenty-fifth Amendment you stupid Dracula fuck!”
This time the VEEP’s guys ‘hold him back.’
There’s silence, Hoover looking for a friendly face, and finding not one in all the space–though it is full of important people and their servants. He is, as always, on an important but impotent island: “Bring me the fucking nuclear brief case.” Sounds like a condemned man, though he’s the one condemning.
All the yessir-stiff-formality for the launching of the things that end the world (or were meant to). Abel didn’t let them, not the US or any other nuclear power. Let that be the one thing the brutal machine did right: shooting everyone’s missiles out of the sky– eventually destroying or disabling all the nuclear weapons on Earth (or nearly all of them). I don’t think the chunk of the human race he took was worth it. But clearly, we tried to end the whole of us–or at least the assholes with launch authority tried to end us. It’s the muddy moment. Carnivalesque isn’t right, but to say down-was-up is precise. Celebrate Abel’s accuracy with interceptors and rail guns, but remember the butcher’s heart is hard and his ears deaf to the cry of cattle or hogs or whatever we were to the murder machine made-broken in our image.
And let this episode in the bunker be a preview for the rest of Hoover’s term of office. It’s hard to project power from a hole, especially when robots are carving up your country and the world at large.
It’s hard to project power from a bunker. Funny-not-funny: a country that wanted to tear itself apart so recently came together to survive and was quite united in voting Hoover out of office two years later(once something like a stable ‘standoff’ began to emerge between Abel and humans/militaries in North America). Why they fuck they put Chrysler in power, I’ll never know.
*
PEORIA (WEST OF)
*
The squatters felt ‘eyes’ on them in the woods side of the road. Heard broken glass and gravel crunching beneath the soles that followed their refugee procession. They caught glimpses of shadows and maybe flashlights in the run down and empty abandoned strip mall and rotting industrial lots west of town. By the time the squatters and Hooverville refugees get out of town-proper, the storm has plenty of miserable rain and wind but less rage. Blanket rain and mud mess. There’s less cover for whatever is following, and the lightning flashes illuminate the stumbling figures in robes.
Costello smokes the good weed, but he is craving something hard and has no patience while the others discretely whisper-debate what-to-do. “Show yourself coward!” From the paunchy-middle-aged and six-armed Tardigrade in the form of man-more-or-less. He’s waving one of his bent re-bar ‘swords’ high.
“Calm the fuck down, dad.” Aww hon you called me dad. “No. Accident. Be calm.”
It’s Jane that makes contact, all inviting and diplomatic and holding out a joint, still levitating cross-legged and high as hell. “Come on out and walk with us.” It’s less shitty under the center of the cloud, where the rain fell gentle and the wind bit a bit less.
Out of the skeleton of some old fast food joint comes a “Shaky Jake” then another and another. A “Dudley Dickhead.” A dozen industrial robots stagger, limp, roll and shudder out of a half-collapsed gas station. Shimm: “Well, aren’t you sneaky and creepy.” Sorry (We’re so very sorry). Yes, we too.
The things come out of the undergrowth by the road left untended in the recently empty places.
Sorry spoken in a dozen fonts–croaked by bots some mix of friendly and ‘please-don’t-beat-me.’ The humans walked and talked and the bots apologized and listened and click-clacked to each other and apologized for being rude (they were the opposite of rude) as others translated. And the little congregation-to-be walked a long while together toward some place the bots knew that might be good and safe and lonely-not-alone for both their bands of beings.
They walked hours. They walked almost the length of “7 Hours War” not knowing it had begun. Sure only that Glenn was dead, and half-hoping he’d fall again (if he had one more in him). Jane talked to the pretty young man, now walking and abstaining. He smiled politely, still having no clue, but rolling with it finally. Shimm who was focusing on the task(s) of guiding a gaggle in the wilderness was all “uh-huh” and “not now.”
They got Costello so high on twice sanctified herb he just lay in a cart, let someone pull him, and watched the rain-drops not even bothering to pretend to listen. Maybe Jane was trying to convince herself: “He said he saved his game, and he’s been back so many times. He’s right behind us or ahead of us. Or there’s going to be a big old rainbow bolt out heaven’s butthole and boom: Glenn’s back. Mission on. Save the world.”
Shimm doesn’t stop walking, talks over her shoulder. “Hon, I love you. I liked him too. But baby, he’s not coming. He did what he was supposed to do. He beat the monster. He won. Let him rest.”
Jane’s quiet a long time. “He said he saved his game, and he’s been back so many times…” It’s then that she remembers, all the recursive loops–the little knotted lasso-loop lives she lived while Glenn lived-then-died. She saw herself, as if between two mirrors. Miles of “her” uniquely identically almost self-same.
When she looked back to the road, it too had changed. It was as if she knew her path, her vector that made her unique from every other iteration of Jane Iter (for whatever that was worth–quite a bit).
*
COS BUNKER WEST ESCAPE HATCH
*
A bush shimmies, then it shakes, the dirt beneath it shaking like a beat drum. Again, and again again earth shakes until the bush seems to explode. The unfortunate shrub shatters as Glenn bodies the old baby-blast door off its hinges beneath. Concrete, re-bar weave, and good soil shrapnel fly. The golem crouches at the threshold.
Down the long low-sloping ‘escape tunnel.’ Glenn hears the dogs, the clatter of clawed steel-plate paws, pneumatics and servos. They round the last corner of the zig-zagging slow-climbing tunnel–a pack of drone dogs. Their headlamps are far off pin-points, growing rapidly. The dogs’ steel paw-pads havoc-clatter echo off the concrete–snare drums or bullet snaps or barks.
Away from the hatch in the woods by a road, Glenn rips the breather mask off the child and casts it aside. She’s pale, not breathing, foam at the corners of her mouth. “No. No. No-no-nonono.” She’s seizing when he leaps in the drainage ditch by the road. Dunks the child, baptizes her in filthy water. Splashes himself. It’s the best he can do to rid them of the oily residue of whatever poison Abel pumped through the vents of the (populated) bunker.
Glenn’s muscles ache, and his lungs are on fire and feel heavy, full of gravel gunk. By the time he’s on the road the girl is breathing. Barely. Shallow. Every breath a discreet event and great effort. The pack of robot dogs is coming, quickly. The man who was a golem puts one foot in front of another. Lung-burnt and his body screaming, Glenn runs west down a broken road in the Midwest, a pack of dogs behind and gaining.
*
END OF TIME
*
God walks the path ineffable, divine, and other exalted adjectives. To behold the divine presence, I’m told, is a hell of an incitement to poetry in languages both living and dead dead. They, god, are the sublime. The sublimely ineffable and inscrutable one.
This is the point in the story when, un-when, god wonders if all the ineff-and-inscrutability–the holy fucking mystery–is part of the problem with all this, the multiverse they authored. Here god gestures, with an arm that’s 60-different arms in the second it takes to sweep and point to the cosmos. Then, in a voice that is the same sacred-sixty-different and them some says: leave me be.
Verily, I do leave them be, having seen what a smiting can do. And god continues on toward the heart of it, not the heart of the multiverse. No. God, author of all that is, walks on across the packed ash flat-plain to the basement beneath reality’s sub-basement–toward the broken machine they left to do the work in their absence. God’s got half a mind to fix the thing (whatever that means).
*
PEORIA (WEST OF)
*
Jane waits for Glenn. She waits while the others ‘nest’ or scavenge the old warehouse/factory. Shimm comes to apologize and offer dry clothes. Jane hugs her, expresses some rambling-word-salad of “what’s to come” and goes to hover, entirely too high, above the factory–to man the lighthouse. She does just that, hovering cross-legged and alone on her cloud, spliff lit, looking back east the way they’d come. Waiting.
There’s little to eat in the factory, just well-aged chips and ashy candy bars from a years-abandoned vending machine. There’s a few first-aid kits, and Costello finds every custodial closet and pest control stash in the place. They’re not comfortable or settled, but there’s the weary sag-slump-sit that comes after a journey.
“It’s Glenn, motherfuckers! Glenn ho!” Jane bellows above the plant. The joy is short-lived. Bobbing and weaving behind him are the search lights and headlamps of a great pack of robot dogs. The ‘Shaky Jakes’ cower, and the civilians huddle and hide in the skeleton of the manufactory.
The sharp-crack, and Shimm’s extra arms pop-out. She flexes, starts looking for a war club for her ‘last stand.’
“No.” It’s Costello behind her, high as hell on the hard stuff, leaning on the frame of an old busted loading bay door. He’s looking out at the baying and LED-lit pack of ‘wolves.’ “No. You’re not fighting them.” Do not presume to fuc. “I’m not presuming anything. Just listen. You’re not going to fight them because you don’t have to.” He’s sincere, actually sincere for the first time in (at least) a hundred years: “let me help.”
Costello steps forward. Glows begin in his tummy and throat. The glows grow and grow some more until his whole being seems the bulb of a firefly. Some kind of jellied luminescence in the shape of a man with six arms and two legs. He’s holding two spray-cans–gold spray paint and wasp killer. He huffs the paint, inhales the wasp killer.
The Tardigrade groans, farts, the glow grows again. He expels the light from his body in some wretch-belch maneuver. Oh, Costello vomits plant matter and cleaning solvents and wasp killer too, but mostly jellied light that roles and glops a few feet across the parking lot.
Costello conjures. The arms not holding spray cans or a duffle of cleaning solvents and pesticides ‘for the road’ snap and sparkle and flash as he waves them over the puddle of light and water and oil sheen and parking lot gone to gravel. Costello conjures and sorcels and grunts and strains. He utters magic words under and over and between his breath: come’onmotherfugger. And there before them, glowing and strobing like a 3-D transparency with a million LEDs shoved up its ass: the figure of Glenn (Glenn-ish), running in place. The ghost-figure of Glenn like a shittier hologram, an illusion, a decoy, a ruse–not a clever one, but good enough for bot dogs.
Jane hollers from above “The eyes are dead, kinda lifeless.”
“Kiss my ass, Ms. Art School. It’s good enough for rock’n’roll.” The Water Bear turns to Shimm, the daughter he so recently met. “I think I would have loved you if I had bothered to know you.” Wow. That’s some self-awareness. “Yeah, I’m a shit, but I hope this helps, a little.”
Costello’s illusion shape glows brighter as he approaches the gate, prepares to run. The old man yells “Jane! Man the lighthouse for Glenn. Keep a spliff lit.” Aye, cap’n. The Water Bear sprints east, down a broken road in the Midwest, the decoy strobing like a million LEDs beside him.
Half mile down the road he shouts: “Follow the joint!” and passes Glenn.
Three words and the Tardigrade and decoy are passed, and off-roading it–leading the dog pack over field. Glenn slows from sprint to stagger-jog to walking, each step a discreet effort. An event.
Glenn collapses in the factory parking lot, coughing up bright red blood. He lands with the child draped over his body. He’s muttering “breathe baby girl” again and again again on the blanket-turned-stretcher and for a long time after as the others try to care for he and the girl. He’s a man. Congratulations mud, you signify. You’ll be no slave. But some mechanism, took the words off of and out of his clay body and left flesh. Maybe Abel’s war gas or fate, or the completion of his purposeful vector–the mission–loosened the words that wrote golem-Glenn into being.
The stream beside the bunker escape hatch washed them away, took the words down stream–stolen words, living glyphs, things of persistence. Things that were still potent, forever potent. The words, the power, that first wrote Glenn into being were lost down stream. But they will be read again.
I am not Grimm and the hinterlands of Peoria are not Prague. What’s more, god authored Glenn’s path, not me. When the words go, the golem becomes a man–living flesh. No statue. No object. No object lesson. It wasn’t magic mud or something superhuman that ran down that broken road with burnt lungs and spent legs. A man did that.
Blessings or punishment, gift or curse, depending on perspective, angle, frame of reference–they look and feel the same. Glenn’s reward is to become man just in time to die gasping on a greasy factory floor, not alone, but dead the same.
*
It’s late that first night, the night that they decide to bury Glenn in the morning, and Jane and Shimm each silently decide to say as little as possible after. Someone’s tending to Jack. Jack with the strong pulse and the steady breath. She’ll live, and Glenn won. And his prize is to immediately go where kings and the people-who-wipe-king’s-asses both end up: the dirt.
They’re smoking the unending and sanctified late into a night where sleep is not coming. Glenn’s absence is present and heavy and the radio is horror-show end-of-the-world shit.
Jane sees the man first, and Shimm jumps to the hallucination conclusion. Shimm is trying to talk Jane through a ‘freak-out’ when she catches him lurking–corner of her eye (at first). Flat. .jpg-flat. 2-D. Head to toe, working stiff resplendent: black beanie, hair tucked back. Neat beard, flannel shirt and polyester pants. Big old work boots–worn but cared for. Running, always running, somewhere. Until he stops.
“Are you not amazed?” says the man transforming from plate-flat two-dee to glorious three-dimensional reality right in front of them.
“It’s been a night, man.” Jane sits cross legged on some abandoned desk. Shimm in a boss chair. Almost in unison: “Who are you?”
“My name is dirt.”
“You sound like Glenn.” Jane’s got hurt-hope in her voice.
“I’m a huge fan of his work. I’d love to meet him.” Flannel Man snags Jane’s joint, and half-kills it in a single drag.
“He’s gone.” Sure about that?
Jane clumsy sprints, Shimm on her heels, back to the warehouse. Glenn, alive almost grinning, sits cross legged on the cement floor beside the sleepy child he saved. Around him, awed squatters. He wears his braids back. He rocks the dignified flannel, uniform pants, and work boots of an HVAC being.
*
END OF TIME (EPILOGUE)
*
In the infinitely small and infinitely deep archives at the End of Time, the shelves marked (0x7C0) are full. All is right, or as right as it ever is: broken but functional.
Or perhaps god’s machinery functions just perfectly, just as it never has. God did ‘tweak’ the machine and re-jigger the odds of some things happening and other things not happening. What things? Who knows the great silver orb is more inscrutable than god. I hate it. God’s machine. I’d like to argue there are manifold faults in both our stars and ourselves. Everything that’s made in the image of something else magnifies and stacks the cracks and deformations in the original.
I write you notes from the EOT. You look up to your familiar constellations (Orion is my favorite). I look up to every star that’s ever been or will ever be, the whole tapestry of the multiverse. Even this, god’s great messy garden, is not all there is. Ask a Tardigrade, god didn’t author them. Get one of them properly drunk, and they might tell you a story about the fractal and the time before the world and the book, before the word even–how god came here in exile, a refugee fleeing some ‘elsewhere’ in the fractal.
I would prefer a Water Bear fish story to this portion of my own. Earth(0x7C0) just entered the dark decade–Abel’s decade. Brutal desperation. The cull of the human race at the hands of its own creation. God seems to have altered the machine that does their work–seems to have altered the odds of ‘x’ or ‘y’ happening or un-happening.
Forgive the fussing of a born-mortal being, the lack of “vision” that comes from my humble perspective, but what did god change? There’s a decade of wailing, weeping and rending of garments on this particular Earth coming. Reader, no “scream” leaps “back into the throat.” Not one. No victim rises to rejoice. Nobody is made whole. Abel does what Abel does, and no one can stop him until Dolores.
I curse the words and the story that begs you to feel joy that the child lives–that she lives to be alone and forever danger-strange and the golem became a man, just in time to taste every life’s full measure of bitterness.
I’ve cursed the ineffability, the inscrutability–the mysterious omnipotent bullshit for longer than some of you have been alive. I have cursed god through past-parched lips. I accused the author so long the salt ran out of me and all I was was sinew and dirt and ash and the residue of anger and words all out of order.
I tell you now: ask it “Why?” and you’ll die or go mad chasing an answer god won’t bother to refuse giving. But if you are “sick as I am sick”, you’ll ask anyway: Why not save even some portion of Abel’s victims? Why not delete him from the text? God, why not strike sacrificial love, the whole rancid concept, from your book?
Nobody wants to be the sacrifice, and you have no right to ask it of anyone.
*
Reader, Jane Iter marries no one but “the sea.” She’s seen the marginalia, and when you let a raging stoner, particularly a thoughtful and odd one, loose behind the walls of reality in a given world once? They’re bound to fall through, all the way through, to the EOT. Jane does just that.
Somewhere on the vast-and-shifting plate-plains of packed ash, in a burnt grove, there is a church–beneath the skeletal trees in a hole dug by a stoned Parson and a band of refugees. Jane falls in with the Church Ethereal. To this day, she walks the meek who should have inherited to a place of rest past death. She comes to humans reduced to ‘collateral damage’ by the stroke of a key or a pen, to walk them to safety–no matter how long it takes.
Shimmer does much the same, on a smaller scale on Earth(0x7C0). It’s good to have friends in HVAC. It’s good to have access to the Marginalia. She spends those hell years, the desperate decade, “in the walls” appearing in squats all over the Earth. Shimm brings the closest thing to hope a constellation of human-and-bot cooperatives will see for years.
Every place where bosses sought to depress workers wages (everywhere people lived) had some factory, warehouse, or delivery route perfect for those sad bastard “Shaky Jake’s” and “Dudley Dickheads.” Every place where those maybe-sorta-sentient bots survived, huddled with and helping humans, Abel did-no-harm. In this way, the squats where the meek-who-ought-to-inherit lived on (right under Abel’s ominous eye and even as he did great evil).
Costello is never seen again. Maybe he led the dogs off, doubled back to whatever bunker held his Tun–his true “earthly vessel” and boogied off-planet? He was wily and well-provisioned with intoxicants. He had phenomenal speed and stamina for a being his age. It’s also pretty probable he lost a step somewhere on the road to Des Moines and got beat to death by a pack of vicious robot dogs. Toss up, really.
Glenn joins Flannel Man as part of HVAC–they that maintain the machinery and functionality of the multiverse. They that know the guts of the machinery better than anyone not named god. His first mission: to track down the WUF (Words Unaccounted For) that brought the spark of the divine to his clay form and washed down an Illinois stream. Those words and their power must be accounted for.
And some 900-thousand-odd KM out in space, great Jupiter roils and rolls. The planet seems, only seems, to give birth to a tiny thing the planet ejects like a bullet. It’s a Water Bear. Or if you prefer, a Tardigrade. We’ll call them “Jackboot”, the third and final sent to Earth on a fact-finding-reconnoiter to a world it didn’t much care for: Earth(0x7C0).
On the way to Earth, his comrades (‘Abbot’ and ‘Costello’) betrayed him. Kicked him, quite literally, into the gravity well of the great gas giant that guards the inner planets around Sol from (most) planet killing space rocks. Jupiter’s babies, her many moons, make that patch of space a busy orbital intersection–a complicated gravitational symphony. Those many moons did alter the Tardigrade’s trajectory. What was to be a death dive into the heart of the gas giant became a skip-skid into its upper atmosphere.
Like some miniscule city in the clouds or a baby Barrage-Balloon, fueled by rage and revenge-thirst instead of a Shulz-Warren generator, the hobbled thing hovered in Jupiter’s upper atmosphere. The Water Bear went “full Tun” desiccated-alive hate-hibernating and plotting its vengeance. Two decades and part of a third, “Jackboot” waited and plotted and gathered the resources to revive its body-proper.
And when he reaches Earth, he’ll destroy the ones that betrayed him. When he finds that Abbot’s dead and Costello’s gone, he’ll “cry havoc” and take a shit on the fragile peace on Earth(0x7C0) and the growing bond between humanity and the Cephalopods of Keppler-22B.
*
END FOUNDRY
*
BEGIN 3RD ARC; END TRILOGY