Authors: Christopher McKitterick
“
Don’t let me die, Jonny! I don’t know how you did it, but now you know me, and I know you. I’m sorry, fucking sorry! I’ll do whatever you want
. . .
help!”
Blackjack’s face erupts from the strobing vortex of screens and wiring, shattered cabinets and cracked tubes. For the first time, it reveals a hint of emotion. Not fear, not anger, but the pure lax of childish anticipation.
“
I can change, Jonny, you know I can! Just wait. I’ve finally learned—”
The white star behind Blackjack’s face shrinks to a point, then flashes painfully bright in a transparent pulse that expands outward, engulfing the junkwhirl, igniting the equipment as the supernova shell grows, out out out until Jonathan has to pick the nearest scene from his own life and leap headlong into it—
Jonathan thrashes on the old laminate floor, kicking up chips of wood and plastic, until he gains his feet. Gasping, he pats his body. Intheflesh, intact, clothed. He looks up through a dusty swath of sun slanting in through a skylight overhead, which once had illuminated a grocery store for its employees.
Lucas—the boy, skinny and hunched forward, not the sharkform—stands against the bare wooden ribs of a wall, gaping at Jonathan. Half a dozen other Malfits, male and female, rise slowly from reclining positions and stare in silence.
“
What happened to Blackjack?” Lucas asks. His voice is small, scared, like a child’s when first told that he has no parents, that the man and woman who fed him and wiped his ass for years weren’t his parents, not even humans; like Blackjack at five years of age.
“
I. . .” Jonathan doesn’t know what to say. He tries to swallow. “He’s gone.”
The Lucas Sharkform appears before Jonathan, larger than usual, gleaming wet with bodily humors dripping from its flanks, the jaws set in a menacing way.
“
Can it!” Jonathan roars. He feels his meat shaking with shame and utter fatigue. “Leave me alone or I’ll do you, too! That’s what I’d planned in the first place.”
The shark vanishes. A pair of boots thud along the hollow floor, followed a second later by the sound of doors opening. The unclosed doorway passes the circus-sounds of an impending Mobile Hostile Zone, replete with a thousand-piece band, fireworks, and the ringleader announcement, “ATTENTION, ATTENTION. . .”
“
Gotta vex,” Jonathan says. “Good luck.”
He closes his eyes, clenches his hands and mind, then opens his eyes again. This time he’s staring into the face of Captain Jackson. The man and Pilot Librarse jump up from the edge of their round bed in the Hilton room, looking concerned.
“
You’re back,” the Pilot says. “We couldn’t we find you, even when we went into the mindspace.” She’s staring quizzically at his not-naked body.
“
Where’d you go?” the Captain asks.
A flush consumes Jonathan’s face; his stomach burns. “I
. . .
I. . .”
Captain Jackson composes his concern into a smile. “Well, we’re glad you’re back. We were about to—”
Jonathan begins to shake so badly that he can’t help it: He breaks down into tears like a stupid kid.
Two pairs of arms lightly encircle him. He fights the desire to throw off intheflesh existence and go with these two into the otherplace; there the Captain and Pilot had comforted each other—even made love in a way.
But that’s not for me. I don’t deserve that kind of
. . .
whatever it is
.
He feels the wave of self destruction roll heavy across him, blacking out his vision, filled with air bubbles that burst and force him to face who he is.
Flash-flash-flash
, even though he senses that he’s keeping himself in his meat, on the Earth, scenes from the past engulf him, crystalline memory unsullied by distance in time. Again and again, his mind wanders to érase—sweet érase, when she first held him—but here lay no comfort. No, what Nooa told him was right. Blackjack cracked open a vacuum-tube of memory especially to show Jonathan that érase had never really belonged to Jonathan, except for the few last days. . . .
As his rage rises again, the flickering scenes accelerate through his mind—now he’s Blackjack again; now he pictures Lucas, hunched in the Malfits’ ’board, looking scared and lonely and hollow. Jonathan has an epiphany:
I can’t ever do that again, rip someone open and leave him to evaporate in the vacuum of himself. Not even Lucas
.
The wave begins to subside, the images fade, though in the far distance, Jonathan still hears the wave crashing through his self hatred. All is still in his mind.
Jonathan opens his eyes. He shakes himself loose of the two adults and crosses to a plush chair. His head hangs against his chest.
“
What’s wrong?” Captain Jackson asks.
What’s wrong!
“I don’t know. Everything.” Jonathan perks up enough to cast a sharp glare at the man who had once been his hero, back in the simple times before Jonathan learned Jackson was just a human being, before he learned that the whole mundane world contains not one iota of heroism.
“
You could’ve been a father,” Jonathan says. He feels the accusation in the words and regrets that. One more regret, heaped on the compost pile of his psyche, more fuel for the wave should it return. He holds his breath and listens for it. Yes, there it is, a distant swelling thunder.
“
I mean,” Jonathan says, “do you think you would’ve been any different than the others? You know what I mean.”
Now it’s Captain Jackson’s turn to stare at the floor. He says nothing. Jonathan tries to avoid the Pilot’s narrow-eyed stare.
“
Jack’s a good man,” she says. “He wouldn’t treat a child the way—”
“
I’m sorry,” Jonathan says. “Crash it all, I’m sorry, sorry, sorry for everything. Fuck, I can’t do anything right!”
“
It’s okay,” Jackson says. He raises his face, this time wearing a tired smile. He stands and takes two steps toward Jonathan, then sits cross-legged on the carpet.
“
Focus your thoughts,” the man says. “You’ll go crazy if you keep lashing out in every direction. Tell us what happened.”
Jonathan sucks a deep breath, then another, until his chest no longer shakes. A single residue of thought remains in his mind, like nuggets of tin in the bottom of a pan after swirling away the sand and mud. He meets Jackson’s eyes.
“
Nobody loves their children anymore, nobody loves at all—not in the real world.” He tosses an arm to encompass Earth. “It didn’t happen all at once; the disease crawled into us slowly, like cancer, like a wound festering under the skin, devouring the organs and destroying the organism from inside. You see? Fucking adults have grown used to it! How can it be? How can you be so blind?”
Librarse is about to interrupt, so Jonathan continues. He feels something like warm syrup gushing through his mind, soothing him, lubricating the idea. Once or twice, he senses his grip on intheflesh existence waver.
“
And what does this make us? Beasts, alone and isolated, always rooting in the mud for pleasure and stimulation but never finding anything true to fill the emptiness.”
“
The artifact,” the Pilot says. “There’s our hope.” Her face, her dark eyes and smooth features, look so composed and calm. Jackson’s is tense and angular.
“
That’s just a toy,” Jonathan says, not really meaning it but not knowing what else to say. “Can it change human nature? No! Look at me—I’m just as fucked, suffering as much as ever. More, because now all my self-defenses are useless.”
The Captain runs a hand through his wavy hair and forces a smile. “Look what it’s done for you already. You’ve become aware of one of the problems in the world. Who you are has altered—can you suppress your feelings and thoughts anymore? Think of how our society will change when everyone undergoes our transformation. When they’ve become aware of the problems, they’ll no longer permit
. . .
evil to go on. We’ll have a focus and be able to fix all the wrongs.”
Once again, self-loathing wells up within Jonathan. He flicks on his standard revmetal subscription to fill the background mumble of his conscience.
“
Oh, yeah? Do you want to know where I went just now?” Pause. “I killed a man.”
That takes the wind out of his companions. They seem to recede from him. Jonathan chases after. “It was Blackjack, you know. I pulled him into his head. Into hell.”
The Pilot nods once. Jackson looks hurt, which makes Jonathan’s stomach fires roar like a furnace. But, instead of finding words to heal, he says, “Captain, what you said about taking everyone into the alien-place. . . .
How will we do that? Go around forcing people inside, destroying the evil ones? So we’ll become the judges and executioners of all of humanity?”
He feels so sick to his stomach that he gets up and walks to the room-service chute, placing a wall between him and the others. But his mind is too confused to order anything to eat.
“
I don’t think it’ll be necessary,” Jackson says, “to force anyone inside. All we need are enough people to shed their shells and find their cores
. . .
of love. Enough people to share their lives.” He grunts a single laugh. “Listen to me! Anyway, what I mean to say is this: Can you go on hating Blackjack now, after you lived his life. After he died? Can you ever hate anyone enough to want to kill again?”
Jonathan tastes bile and swallows hard. He stares at the finger-worn brass plate, behind which an assortment of foods are just waiting to emerge. But his mind has become a lump of paste.
“
Jonathan.” The Pilot’s voice, soft and smooth. “You’re not alone.”
“
I can still find hate if I need it,” Jonathan tells the smeary reflection of himself in the brass. “The artifact didn’t change a thing, only made my life more miserable, because now I despise myself whenever I feel hatred.”
“
It’ll destroy you, too, if you hate,” Jackson says. He sounds stern. “It’ll destroy you because you can’t bear that kind of burden anymore.”
“
Yeah, well,” Jonathan says, and cranks up the revmetal. Machines and humans blend in a shrieking, screeching cacophony set to musical score. No longer can he hear his blood gushing through his ears.
“
Well. . .” Unable to say anything else, unable to face these two who know too much about him, Jonathan turns and storms out of the room.
He amps the whine and pound of the music to full fivesen, and the old comfort of escape washes over him. The hallway passes him without notice, an elevator opens and engulfs him without any time seeming to pass. Orange balls of burning gasoline, their waxy scent; the
bam-bam-bam
of some huge machine pounds away the rhythm as four black-cloaked men scream lyrics
. . .
even with all this stimulation, Jonathan’s brain still finds room to realize something.
He can’t deny the truth behind his Captain’s words. Even so, he’s afraid. Afraid of himself—
What if I can’t stop the wave of self-hate?
Afraid of the unknown and what it means now that he can no longer deny reality while, at the same time, he can no longer idly stand by and watch the world consume itself and its new-rising generations.
The elevator lumnisheet flickers at the same time Jonathan falls to his knees. He cuts the revmetal and hears the tail end of an explosion—
The war
, he remembers.
“
Return,” he tells the elevator. “This is bullshit, my life has been nothing. I’m not running anymore.”
Janus tried to smile at Jack, who still knelt beside an empty chair. The expression felt like a grimace, so she shrugged it off and stood.
“
I guess transcendence doesn’t make a person perfect. Or even happy.”
Jack finally rose. As he stretched his big arms over his head, Janus noticed he had lost some of the fat accrued aboard
Bounty
.
“
How are we going to change a world,” he asked, “if we can’t help a single boy?” He sounded tired. Janus knew that all he needed was to be back in the role of leader—but this time a true role, not just acting.
“
Well, we have some plans, right? Don’t you believe in them anymore?”
Jack let his arms fall. He sighed, then walked toward her. A smile crossed his face as he rested his hands on her shoulders. “You’re right. Let’s go.”