The Fragile

by Luke Jackson

conclusion

* * *

The work continued. As the months passed, Egal’s simulation became increasingly complex and intricate. Some area of the reddish-yellow network was always on Egal’s screen, and he frequently projected aspects of the network into his office holographically. Egal’s eyes, magnified by his glasses, were often transfixed by these partial representations.

For the first time, Tim started looking forward to his work for the Party. But what he genuinely craved was to be meshed with the Flock, not the translation of the Flock model into simulation. These simulations could only seem somewhat pathetic, and wholly incomplete, to his empathic eyes. It was difficult to be excited about facsimiles of the Flock’s network, when he could directly participate in the real thing.

As he had done countless times before, Fitch led Tim down the identical tile corridors of the Quarantine from Egal’s office. Tim was learning to read the pensive Fitch, who was so careful to always erect mental barriers. As Tim came to know Fitch, he also came to know the cancerous black entity buried within Fitch’s belly.

“Why haven’t you left the Quarantine like the other telepaths, Fitch?” Tim asked, fishing for the cause of the blackness.

“Party pays good; good benefits,” Fitch replied noncommittally.

“But telepaths are in high demand out there. You could probably make more in the job market,” Tim replied. The black sphere inside Fitch throbbed, appeared painful.

“I worked tons of crap jobs before this,” Fitch replied. “Graveyard shift at convenience stores, movie usher... if the job sucked, I did it. This place is nice... you don’t have to see inside people’s heads all the time.” Fitch shrugged noncommittally.

“When you and Sergeant Verma first brought me in, he told me how important it was to capitalize on our powers,” Tim began.

“I’m not like Verma,” Fitch said, not looking at Tim beneath him. The blackness inside Fitch squirmed savagely. “I’ll never be a Learned One,” Fitch muttered and kept walking. Apparently, the conversation was over.

* * *

That night, Tim laid awake in his narrow cot, listening to the distant, hollow thrumming of Quarantine machines. Sometimes he heard the shouts and cries of para-children from long ago, when the “gift” was first discovered and people were still interested in Earth.

Lonely, he reached out. He felt absolutely nobody in the rooms around him, in the upper and lower levels, just a vast and absolute emptiness that threatened to consume him.

He kept pushing upward, growing desperate for contact. Finally, he started to feel the birds again, sharing in their cold prismatic gaze, and was glad. At least they were there for him, when nobody else was.

* * *

Fitch pulled Tim up from the chemical depths. Tim’s lungs spluttered on autopilot, but he felt as if oxygen was inconsequential; his body was still lit up with liquid light, spilling from his forehead and fingertips. He looked up at Fitch’s blank face, with Egal meditating in the distance.

He stared at his luminous limbs. He had never seen himself like this before. For some reason, Fitch and Egal were acting as if it was business as usual.

“It’s beautiful,” Egal said in his usual gleeful, self-absorbed tone, but he wasn’t even looking at Tim. “We should have it complete in a few months. I bet the guys at Emprojection can’t wait to get their hands on my model. I’d like to see the billies try to riot when we have this on constant feed,” he laughed. “This is way, way better than jacking up their endorphins or serotonin; there’s always some kind of physiological payback. Not with this. Our futures are assured.”

Fitch muttered something unintelligible under his breath, and led Tim from the room. Tim felt trapped in a prison cell with blind men, and wondered why they could not see the incredible ambience emanating from every nerve ending of his being.

The seething black entity within Fitch had grown, spreading within his being like a cancer of consciousness. Tim sensed that the entity had been born by a sense of wrongness in Fitch, whether with Fitch’s life choices, or everything in general, Tim couldn’t tell.

But as Fitch continued to follow his branching life path, rooted in past choices, he would only be brought further away from what he wanted for himself; the entity would only grow until it overwhelmed Fitch. This Tim knew.

Tim made a decision, making sure to shield his thoughts from Fitch. “We must go to the Flock,” Tim said abruptly.

Fitch only chuckled without any discernible humor. “That’s sure a quick way to get fired and/or killed,” he sneered.

“I’m serious,” Tim said. Tim knew that his light would fade in the dark sterility of the Quarantine and was desperate to re-engage the Flock. “Fitch, don’t you ever get tired of doing the same thing day in, day out, walking the same route to and from Egal’s office? We are paras, not normies. We are entitled to more than this,” Tim said, the words seeming to gush from a new breach in his reticence.

Fitch remained quiet for a few moments. “I know how to get out of here without anyone catching on,” Fitch acknowledged. “But why would I want to go to the Flock? They’re hardcore religious, not exactly a pleasure cruise. They think we’re all Mammonites anyway,” Fitch shrugged. “You should know emps don’t do well outside too. Stride by a homeless guy, it’s all over.”

Tim examined the darkness in Fitch. Tim knew that, alone, he could not remove the darkness and replace it with the radiating light he felt. But he felt that the Flock could do more, for both of them. Strangely, Tim felt that a struggle was not necessary; he would use the darkness in order to reach the light.

“I’ve been in constant contact with the Flock,” Tim said, the light filling his vocal cords, “and I know they’ll take care of us. You’d be surprised at how the Sheep of the Flock live. You’d be amazed by the things I’ve seen. That’s why they were sent off: the Party didn’t want the corrupting influence of their holiness. The Party only deals in power and control, but the Flock speaks in the language of the sacred and profane.” Tim exhaled, and his breath was pure sparkling radiance.

“You’re sure acting different,” Fitch said, waving his hand in front of Tim’s face. “That still you in there, Timmy? You a Sheep, a Flocker now?”

“I’m completely serious,” Tim said, looking up wide-eyed from his wheelchair.

“Really?” Fitch asked musingly, rubbing his acne-scarred face. He seemed to be thinking, but Tim could see the blackness rush into the opening Tim had created, and frantically squirm up Fitch’s spinal cord. This dissatisfaction craved difference, any difference.

“My car will be out back at 11. If you want out, you better be there.” Fitch waved him back through the door to his quarters, and shut the door on him with a booming clang.

Tim felt an electric ecstasy that elevated him above the spare furnishings of his quarters. This time, his light would not dwindle, smothered by the emptiness of his surroundings. He would make it directly to the source of the light. He realized that he had taken advantage of his empathic reading of Fitch, but he also realized that the Party was taking advantage of his reading of the Flock, which was an invasion on a much larger scale.

Tim also realized that he was rationalizing, but that he had no other way of reaching the Flock

* * *

They had left behind the garbage-strewn dirt roads of the billy-colony flatlands surrounding the Quarantine and had been driving through forested mountains for days. Fitch’s ancient economy car gasped up the mountains, and several times they feared the car would stall and begin sliding backwards to flat ground. Tim supposed that the car’s survival through the decades demonstrated the superior abilities of the Nipponese, and their entitlement to higher caste.

They had only made it this far because Fitch’s car had been retrofitted with a simple reactor that increased its fuel efficiency exponentially. Otherwise, they would have had to forage for gasoline among the billy camps, which was unsettling at best, life-threatening at worst, especially in light of Tim’s physical differences, which would always mark him as outsider.

When they had passed the pale street-slangers — wiry, twitchy figures in filthy trenchcoats with cowboy hats pulled low over their eyes — Tim had been careful to crouch lower in the darkness of the car. Not only to evade their gaze, but also to evade their menacing, radiating need.

Tim stared at the massive ridges and ravines, awestruck by the sight of distant snow-topped peaks after too many years of emptiness. After a childhood spent in a single home, the Quarantine had initially seemed vast and utopic, but Tim had never imagined that such natural spectacles lurked within so close a drive.

Fitch, however, was a soldier on a monomaniacal mission, completely uninterested in the surrounding scenery or the fact that their escape from the Quarantine had been far too easy.

“What are the gulls of the Flock like? What do they look like, I mean?” Fitch had constantly peppered him with questions that first night, covering every conceivable physical attribute of a woman.

“Incredibly gorgeous, and wholesome, saving themselves for men from outside,” Tim had replied, pushing the boundaries of the ludicrous to see how far Fitch would believe. “They truly believe that love is holy, and believe in spreading that love,” Tim had said.

Words like these sent Fitch into a rapture, imagining how we would woo the gulls with cases of cheap beer.

As the days passed, Tim’s humor faded. He couldn’t believe that Fitch couldn’t see through his transparent lies, and began to feel slightly disgusted by Fitch’s combination of lust and stupidity.

“Listen, I don’t know anything about ‘Flock gulls’,” Tim snapped after a few days of this inane conversation. His light was almost gone, a weak, synthetic glare that sparkled dimly, feminizing his fingertips. He needed that light more than anything and wished Fitch would just shut up and drive faster. “Sometimes you really epitomize the billy stereotype. Can’t you think of anything else? No wonder we’re treated the way we are.”

Fitch pulled over to the side of the road and yanked on his creaking parking brake. He turned his gaze full on to Tim, staring at him with a new awareness and incipient rage.

“You bullshitting me?” asked Fitch. “You know we’ve been gone too long to cover-up. My job’s gone. It was a good job. And they still might come after us.” The pink, wiry muscles of his arms tensed on the steering wheel.

“They won’t come after us,” Tim snapped. “I’ve been honing my skills, working on emprojection. How do you think we were able to escape the Quarantine?” Tim eyed Fitch while he thought for a moment.

“That’s not right, messing with people’s heads,” Fitch said, turning and holding Tim’s gaze.

Time slowed. The tiny interior of the car became a frozen photograph, Fitch’s lips in a static line. Tim felt his hands slippery with sweat, his weak shoulders twitching with nervous energy, as his metabolism accelerated. The light was weak in him, but some swirled in his head, sputtering out in mist driblets when he spoke.

“This is pointless. We’re going to keep going until we reach the Flock,” Tim barked, feeling every muscle in his face. “I’m going, with or without you.” He stared hard back at Fitch, and could actually feel his eyes bulging from their sockets, straining against their nerve appendages. His entire musculoskeletal system was tensed and primed. For what, he didn’t know, as his crippled body would be no match for Fitch.

Fitch just looked at him warily. Tim could read the black rumbling resentment within him, now losing its former sheen of vital lust and fading into a grey-black resignation.

“Okay, emp, okay. Have it your way,” Fitch said in a quiet voice, restarting the overworked car. “The outside voices are making you crazy, man,” he muttered softly. “Believe me, I know.” He looked ahead as he drove.

Tim scrunched his eyes tightly, praying that the light would touch him... and soon.

* * *

Tim strode through the black forest, swatting at the mosquitoes covering his exposed flesh. He didn’t know how he was able to move and walk, but he had learned not to question the blessings of the light.

The exposure had made his pale skin into a thin pinkish leather that barely covered his bones. His hair was wild and encrusted with dirt and leaves, and he felt his eyes rolling loose in his head. He had so much more to see than that directly in front of him, now that the light was so close. Every being, including the pestering mosquitoes, radiated its own small part of light, combining into a gorgeous, pulsing matrix of life. The creatures’ lack of higher mental faculties did not make them lesser; indeed, it made them more beautiful, cleaner and simpler.

He sensed a fat white grub lolling nearby. He projected a profound sense of gratitude to the creature, then consumed it directly, distasteful mush squishing between his teeth. He had to provide his body with enough fuel to live, but was no longer concerned with trivial matters like flavor.

He felt rather than saw the light emanating from a small cottage up ahead, nestled among the black, claw-like branches of winter trees. This was the destination he had sought for so long, for which he had sacrificed now-trivial creature comforts. It had been some time since he had detected other signs of humanity, however, and he took a few moments to adapt. He crouched in the darkness, behind the night-blackened brush of a small rise, orienting on the source with his dislocated eyeballs until it coalesced into a blinding white light.

This was it: the Light beyond light. This must be the fringe of the Flock, which he had sensed way back at the Quarantine, the dividing line between the faithful and the faithless. He felt the return of that feeling he had craved for so long. His frail, abused body, so long neglected, began to glow in transcendent illumination. His lean muscles were wracked by spasms in the power of the Light, virtually exploding from his body. He needed nothing but Light.

He hunched over and raced to the rough-cut wooden door, noting the ansate cross prominently carved into it. He tried the handle and it was locked, but he could hear voices murmuring softly inside. The Flock! He rapped his shaking hand against the unfinished wood, repeatedly, his dry knuckles breaking into red on the splinters.

The door opened, and holy Light spilled out onto Tim’s filthy body. He briefly considered what a strange figure he must make in the forest night, and hoped that the Flock would see through his material shell. A matronly silhouette appeared, and Tim embraced her with all of his deteriorated strength.

“I’m getting the gun,” he heard a gruff man’s voice say in the background. The woman he was holding tensed, and Tim broke away with reluctance.

“No,” the woman he was hugging replied, reaching out to hold onto his retreating hands. Now that Tim could see her face, he saw her large, misshapen head and pallid skin. Her eyes were a luminous green, wet with tears, like Tim’s, and her forehead bore the scar branding of the ansate cross.

“Can’t you see?” she asked quietly, whether to Tim or the man in the background he couldn’t tell.

Tim nodded violently. “Yes, I can see,” he rasped, “the scales have fallen.”

“I can see you, too,” she breathed, her beautiful face lighting up with a beatific smile. “It is the Fragile, who has always visited us in time of need. He is no longer ethereal, but made flesh. We are blessed,” she sighed, holding on to Tim’s filthy body. “The prophesied One, who will bring the foretold Miseries to the Mammonites.”

I hope that Fitch’s body isn’t found, flashed through a distant region of Tim’s mind — the part that was self-interest — before all thought was banished in the blinding white light of absolution. Tim knew that while Fitch’s body decayed, the black shroud of birds devouring the offering of rotted flesh, Fitch’s soul was invincible and eternal, merged with the Light. And after, when the birds were fully satiated, then the Miseries could begin.

From the beating of black wings in the trees around him, from the eruption of shrill caws, Tim knew that the birds remained hungry.

Originally published in Ethereal Gazette, Issue 4