Chapter 51: Trauma

Having burned Aeviternum, James, Richard, and Jessica stayed up all night. Serenity came to check in on them at one point, but left in drunken disgust when she saw them crowded around a computer screen.

“That ain’t living,” she said over her shoulder as she left. “That’s putting your life on lay-away.”

But the data they mapped out was too exciting to ignore. Richard painstakingly examined Jessica’s new Battle Engineer information, creating tables for components, googling the more esoteric ones in turn and confirming that none of them had existed prior to the advent of the apocalypse.

“Oh shit,” said Richard, fingers over his lips as he stared at the screen. “Will you look at that? Adamantino divinum is Latin for ‘divine diamond.’ Huh. Never would have thought.”

James leaned back in his chair. It was gone past 4 A.M., and the ballroom was mostly empty. Hazy indie-rock was playing quietly over the speakers, and bottles and glasses spoke to the party that had burned for ours. “So,” he said, stretching. “Question.”

Richard didn’t take his eyes off the screen. “Shoot.”

“Who we working with now? The mayor’s… well, dead. The comptroller apparently sucks, and the governor’s trying to put in the deputy, right? So who do we take this information to?”

“Might have to go federal,” said Jessica pensively. “Or to the governor. But from what I hear his office is in melt-down mode, and it’s impossible to get traction with his people.”

“FEMA?” asked Richard. “Maybe? Or Homeland Security?”

“Much as I hate to say it, we should probably go to the CIA.” Jessica held up a hand. “I know, I know. But they collate all the intel and prepare the President’s briefing each morning. As a clearing house for every branch of intelligence, they need to know this. They’ll forward it to the right people.”

“We should tell Hackworth first,” said James. “Right?”

“Right, yes, we’re military now.” Jessica smiled bitterly. “I keep reverting to old habits. Or perhaps it’s just that I don’t want to go full US Army. I have to admit that I’m concerned they’ll take ever more authority as the governments fail. Do we want that?”

“Do we have a choice?” asked James. “Better the military be in charge than just bloody chaos.”

Richard was frowning at this computer. “The military is showing up in force tomorrow morning to help prepare for the Fourth Wave. We can brief him then, yeah?”

“Yes,” said Jessica, and sat up. “Which reminds me. I need to review all our personnel files to ensure nobody’s been flagged as problematic and that everybody’s leveling up appropriately. This Fabricator development completely derailed me.”

“Hey,” said James. “Jessica?”

She froze, eyebrows raised. “Yes?”

“You all right?”

“You keep asking me that. I’m fine. I’m just - yes.” She closed her eyes briefly and rubbed at her temples. “I’m fine.”

“Maybe you should get some actual sleep.”

She shook her head sharply. “I just burned Aeviternum a few hours ago. I’m good till dawn.”

“And then?”

“And then?” She smiled with false cheer. “And then I’ll enjoy the miracle that is caffeine. But no, actual sleep isn’t an option. We need to have everything ready for the Fourth Wave.”

James frowned, but she rose to her feet, gathered her tablet, and winked at them both. “Don’t worry boys. I’m just a little frazzled. Getting things straightened out will do wonders. If you’ll excuse me?”

Neither of them spoke as she walked to a distant terminal at the far end of the ASOCC.

“Man,” said Richard. “You know? I used to have the wildest crush on her. Had these weird fantasies about how we’d strike a deal, and she’d agree to wear Bayonetta cosplay in exchange for continuing to work on her spreadsheets while we slept together. Like, the ultimate multi-tasking, you know?” He shook his head in admiration. “But then I wisened up. Being with her would be hell. She’s way too much sand for my little truck.”

James snorted. “I don’t need that imagery, thanks.”

“And then,” continued Richard, “I wonder why she works so damn hard, you know? Like what was the prime mover that got her this focused, this obsessed in the first place? Like is she OK, deep down? You can’t be that driven without trauma. That’s like, one of Newton’s laws.”

James pursed his lips. “I actually don’t know anything about her. She deflects any time I ask her anything.”

“She’s amazing at it. If we’d not been friends in college I’d probably know nothing about her. Well, not friends-friends, but she dated my best friend. Great guy called Matt. Swimmer, physicist/philosophy double major, handsome as fuck, I mean, kind of as overwhelmingly good at everything like Jess. But, well.”

“Hmm?”

“Matt died Junior year.” Richard looked down at his hands. “Hit and run just off campus. Matt was so fucking tough he hung in there for months after they said he should have died. Was… yeah. Jessica was by his side the whole time. I think she practically willed him to recover. I convinced her to go home one night, get some rest, and that’s when Matt passed. Like he couldn’t go while she was there.”

“Damn,” said James softly. “Richard, I’m sorry.”

Richard flashed him a brilliant but artificial smile. “Nah, I mean, I was proper fucked up, watched all five seasons of Babylon 5 back to back and nearly got kicked out of school. But Jess…”

“Yeah?”

“She took a weekend off by herself. Didn’t tell anybody where she went. And when she came back, she was like, spookily normal. Aced all her classes, exercised, ate well, the works. She pushed her friends away, though, at least, the one’s who tried to get her to open up. It was like she revved herself up to 11, and she’s never eased up since.”

James looked over at where Jessica was focusing on her work. “She just block it up?”

“Like, kinda? She’ll talk about Matt if I bring him up, but in this polite, patient kind of way, as if she’s just humoring me and ready to immediately change the topic. But it’s not as if she’s pretending he died. She just… I don’t know. I never figured it out. We lost touch there for awhile. Matt had been our connection, and when he died, we stopped talking, and then we went different ways. Wasn’t till a year ago that we reconnected. Google threw a fancy party, invited local government to come get drunk, and I saw her tailing some deputy commissioner, ready to provide information, take notes, whatever. She didn’t recognize me at first. I used to have more hair.” He grinned and passed his hand over his scalp. “But then it was pretty cool. I’ve become much more charismatic over the past few years. I don’t get hung up on what people think of me so much. So we got drinks, and, well, for a hot minute there I thought, maybe she was into me?”

James raised an eyebrow and Richard laughed. “Right? Ridiculous. But even though I couldn’t figure it out, she kept returning my calls, agreeing to meet up every month or so. She was too busy otherwise. We’d grab drinks, go to the arcade, do goofy stuff. But always, like, I felt as if she was soap bubble. You touch it, try to catch it, and it’ll just disappear on you. I dunno. She’s amazing. And she’d absolutely kill in Bayonetta cosplay. But she’s an enigma. Still. Has been, every since Matt.”

Again James studied Jessica. He appreciated the information even as he felt mildly guilty learning about her past.

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You can’t be that driven without trauma.

Who was she? James felt pretty sure he’d only seen the surface. The tip of the iceberg. She was too functional to be just totally frozen over the death of her boyfriend from years ago.

No, she’d found a new way to be. Part of that involved hyper-efficiency, but that had to balanced out by something else.

“Anyways,” said Richard, making a face. “I’ve got a new protocol to share for tomorrow. It builds off what we discussed last time. The goal is to get at least one member of each team to hit the new mysterious Level 1, and then transition to getting the back-up teams to level as much as possible. I’m calling it Operation Love Panda.”

“You’re not,” said James flatly.

Richard grinned. “I am! I want to see if the military will actually use it. I mean, they might, right?”

James just shook his head. “So the point team kills Nemesis 2’s till their leader advances, then falls back? Why not level the whole team to the new level?”

“I mean, the plan is inherently subjective, but I’m trying to balance general utility with some focused specialization. Best of both worlds. We’ve got over thirty Crimson teams. That means we’ll get at least that many new Level 1’s, enough to extrapolate a ton of data from, right? As well as getting everyone else pretty close, probably Supplicant 8 or 9. But, and this is key, we don’t leave the rest of the world behind. If we have three military squads of nine with each team, that means another twenty-seven soldiers ramp up to the low to mid-Supplicant level. Twenty-seven multiplied by thirty-four is… almost another thousand ranking fighters. We can’t let people fall too far behind. Seeing as we’ve no idea what the Nemesis 3’s are gonna be like, we need some elites, we need some high tier, and then a whole mess of mid-tier fighters. That’ll give us tactical options when the Nem3’s hit.”

“Nem3’s,” said James.

“Yeah, Nemesis 3’s is too much of a mouthful. Nem3’s, rhymes with enemies, good resonance. Anyways, we’re trying to interface with Joint Special Operations Command as they’re insisting on getting us to level up their existing spec-ops guys, which is cool and all, but they need to get here already if we’re going to use them.”

James patted Richard on the shoulder. “I’ll let you figure it out. I’m going to go do a walk-around, make sure everything’s as it should be. Sometimes…” He trailed off. How to explain to Richard how sometimes people fell apart when they finally felt safe, or how it was the middle of the night when traumas would rear their heads. “Anyways. I’ll be around.”

“Sure thing, Major major major.”

James did a slow loop of the ballroom, and smiled at his instinct to pick up nearly empty bottles and drain them. A few people had fallen asleep slumped over in their chairs or lying alongside the walls, and James roused them and got them oriented, sending them off to find rooms and patiently working at getting one particularly drunk dude to spend Aeviternum. When he finally did, the guy, a member of Ebon Mothman, apologized profusely and hurried away.

James rose, left the ballroom, and walked the hotel’s hallways. Light, pleasant music played from hidden speakers. The building was quiet. The air was chill, and everything gleamed as if freshly wiped or polished.

It felt like a dream. It was otherworldly to wander into the huge lobby and find it deserted. Outside the glass doors no cars drove down the avenue. It was as if the entire city had fallen asleep.

He found more drunk people here and there, even a couple that had passed out together while fucking. Patiently, gently, he got them all going, and one lady who couldn’t be made to spend Aeviternum he carried to lobby couch.

It was almost 5 A.M. when the first military guys showed up. Hummers lined up outside along with jeeps, and just like that the dream-like stillness was shattered. Efficient, loud-voiced soldiers filed in, officers and aids, some carrying portable communication units, others laptops, and quickly they began setting up shop right there in the lobby.

They recognized James, and he was introduced to a number of quietly dangerous men. They were to a man relatively wiry, lean, and possessed of alarming self-possession and steely-eyed confidence. All, he quickly gathered, had once been special forces themselves, but now had risen to overseeing operations.

Mostly it just washed over him, and he excused himself when Jessica emerged and retreated to his bedroom from the night before.

He showered, more to give himself something to do, then stood before the window and watched the sunrise. The city was still, and most of the buildings were dark. A blackout? Or had people abandoned their apartments? Far off to the east, perhaps in Williamsburg, a fire was burning. A thick plume of coal black smoke rose to tower in the air.

Would the fire department respond? Was there even a fire department? Out of curiosity, James picked up his phone and dialed 911.

It rang, and rang, and rang, and then an automated recording informed him he was being placed in a call queue and would be helped as soon as possible.

James hung up and tossed the phone onto the bed. Looked back out the window. Did he even know what world he lived in any more? How many of his assumptions had quietly become false over the past few days? 911 was backed up. The mayor was dead. Local government was frozen. Roads were mostly impassable. The Marriott was manned by a skeleton staff now, if that, and full of the military.

Would fires just rage till they burned themselves out? Nobody was picking up the trash - the streets were becoming choked with growing mounds of black plastic bags, but not nearly as many as he’d have expected.

Were people not even bothering to put out the trash any more?

How many of those dark buildings spread out before him were full of people living days of quiet desperation? How many had corpses in them? Where were the dead bodies going? Who was taking care of the comatose black gem victims?

Never before had society, civilization, all of it, seemed so delicate. A tenuous deal thoughtlessly agreed upon but which was now falling apart. All it took was people deciding to not work, not show up, not help, and the world would descend into chaos. Were it not for the Manna bread, they’d probably be facing a true catastrophe of biblical proportions.

The thought wearied James beyond measure. He leaned his brow against the cool glass. Project Blue Light was just under a thousand individuals. The squads backing them up were another thousand.

And yet out there were untold millions. Many of them dying, panicked, alone, terrified.

With only more death and destruction on the way.

Was it futile? Was he deluding himself, thinking what he was doing mattered? The world was so vast, so complex. He was just a failed EMT. What could he do?

James closed his eyes and thought of Laney and the girls. Felt that old twist of pain in his heart, but their expressions in his mind’s eye were trusting.

They’d trusted him once to take care of them, and he’d not been there when it counted.

Now others were trusting him. Counting on him.

James grimaced.

He’d not let them down.

Even if it felt futile, even if he felt hopelessly overwhelmed.

He’d just keep on trying till he had nothing left to give.

So thinking, he crossed the room, walked out the door, and headed back downstairs.

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