Ain't Talkin'

They’d gone a ways. It was difficult to put a pin in the exact distance in the ether, but they’d ridden hard for a good clip. Roche had neglected to take the A-Mat out of the saddle holster before confronting the construct. Markus had the high-powered rifle couched against his chest and was watching the white through the scope.

Markus spotted Roche a long ways off, and lowered the rifle for a minute, then realized he ought to watch the walker’s back while he approached. He almost held the rifle like a man who knew what he was doing. Safe bet the safety was still on though.

Lucky’s ears twitched towards Roche long before he was anywhere near them, but it was easy to see and hear a long ways when the world was made up of nothing at all.

Roche threw up a gloved hand, if for nothing else then to show Markus that he came in peace in case the idiot somehow had gotten the safety off and was holding the rifle with his finger on the trigger. `

“Where is it!?” Markus called, not setting the gun down a hair.

“Where’s what?” Roche lit a smoke, a stones throw away from his horse and Markus.

“The construct! Where is it?” Markus watched over Roche’s shoulders like a guard dog,

“Killed it.”

Markus almost dropped the gun. “What!?”

Roche gave the kid a ‘fuck-did-I-just-say’ look.

“How?”

By the time Roche stood in front of Markus atop his horse, hands in his pockets resting through the holes on the butts of his revolvers, burning down a smoke, boots shoulder width apart, he’d decided he’d placate the kid.

“I took my guns, loaded with bullets, and shot the thing, with my loaded-gun-bullets, until there were daylight-filled holes through it’s ether-carcass. I shot it, it died. Satisfactory for you, Markus?”

The kid didn’t answer right away. “But how?”

“Just told you how, dipshit.”

“That doesn’t make any sense, though.”

“Things bleed when they’re shot, when they bleed enough, they die. Makes plenty of sense to me.”

“But the constructs aren’t alive. Not in the way that they could be killed with bullets.” Markus shook his head.

Roche held his cigarette in front his face, trying to decide whether or not to throw it at Alex Markus, but the dipshit was still sitting on his horse. “So you let me fight something that you weren’t even entirely sure could be killed by reasonable means? After you told me that exact means might be wholly possible. Are you fucking out of your mind?” Roche took a step forward and held Lucky by her throat-strap. “Get off of my goddamn horse, I’m leaving you here.”

“What!? Hey, come on now! The hell-”

“Yep, off the horse.”

“You can’t, man!”

“Man? You left me to fight with a thing you created that you weren’t even sure could be killed? I’m done.”

“Wait! Wait!” Markus holstered the rifle in the saddle and held both hands up, as though Roche might shoot him. Truth, Roche was thinking about it. “This is big! This is important, please hear me out!”

“You’ve got a couple seconds before I shoot you.”

“Look, Roche! This is big. You’re saying you killed the construct?”

“Yep.”

“Then that’s the key. Listen we were never really sure whether they were animate and crossed enough into our plane to even have enough of a quality of life to be able to die. If you could kill it in the ether then maybe you could kill another on one of the Terra planes.”

“When they cross over? On December thirteenth?

“Yes, maybe. What if that’s the key? If the Ethercorp knows that to be the case.”

“Knows what?”

“That walkers are a bridge of the gap between the ether and the real as much as constructs are. But men with beating hearts and free will and the choice of who to fight for. If they know that then the Corporation is going to go way out of it’s way to make sure that the walkers either join their side or get executed before they have a chance to stand in their way.” Markus had gone on another of his pitch-to-sell tangents, he was out of breath and wide-eyed. Lucky just looked bored.

“If I can kill it then any walker can.”

“Maybe not though. I’ve been in the ether, and it’s been proven that once someone, anyone, has been through the white and come out the other side then they’re more perceptive to the bits and pieces of the ether that permeate into the real, the parts unknown that seep in, and can even have a discerning sense of who walkers are at all. Normal people don’t have that sense. It’s like once you’ve seen a house get built you have an appreciation for how much work goes into it. Before that all you ever see is just a house.”

“Not a time for analogies, kid.”

“No, maybe not. And that’s not a very good one either, but then what if only walkers who are as much a part of the ether as it is of them, like you. . .what if you’re the key to all of this. The walkers who could stand in the Corporations way. You know how to build it up, so you’re just that much better at tearing it down.”

Roche smoked quietly and thought.

“And the biggest part might be this. The Res might not even know about this. That a walker can kill a construct, the way you did. You killed it like it might have been anything else-”

“Bullets and trigger pulls, yep.”

“Exactly! If the res doesn’t know that yet, then we might have a chance here to change everything. We could fix what happens before it does. We could prevent another catastrophe, something terrible.”

Roche sat quietly for a minute. He lit another cigarette and patted Lucky on her bay nose. He turned and looked out into the white, wondering if and when the wolf might come. It usually did. Sad thing that an immortal wild animal had an infinite number of years between when Roche showed up and passed through. Maybe the only thing it even cared for anymore. Dog years too.

Thoughts distracted him. Roche turned back to Markus.

“Kid. You keep trying to sell me on this fight coming up between the Resistance and the Ethercorp. Picking sides before the next big thing. It may just be your misplaced conscience telling you to make up for what you helped start before it gets rollin’ in motion. That’s all well and good, kid.

Listen to me when I say this though. You’re spending all you’ve got, putting yourself out there and stringing that scrawny little neck of yours out there for anyone to cut. That’s admirable. But for what.

You’re trying to balance a complex equation, one that people been trying to figure out since ancient times. You’re doing all the math correctly and keeping track of the process like a diligent little schoolboy but your problem isn’t in your methods it’s in the problem itself.”

“What? How do you mean?”

“Problem with it is it’s an equation that uses a problematic number. It destroys whatever equation it’s entered in. That number is man.”

Markus was quiet.

“Let me tell you a little something. There is a city out there. In a place in the middle of the world that the history books refer to as the cradle of civilization. There’s a city that mankind has been warring over for millennia, since the dawn of civilization itself. It’s one of the few things. . .one of the very, very few things that are common across every. . .listen to me Markus. . .every facet of the Terra’s. Every plane. Jerusalem was there once, across the board in every parallel iteration of reality there was a Jerusalem. And countless people died trying to take it. Millions and millions and millions.

When the Catastrophe hit. Know what happened? Across every Terra, the folks who’ve been fighting over Jerusalem, almost simultaneously, bought back right into it. They went at it tooth and nail because of the rapture, or the end of days, or whatever. Like across every reality of mankind there were millions of people waiting for the excuse to break down and start one more bloodbath over a city that has passed hands between empires and civilizations from the days it was built. The holy land. The beginning and end of everything. Millions died, and know what Jerusalem is now?”

Markus stayed quiet, big eyes and listening.

“It’s a smoldering hole. It’s gone. In every Terra it’s just damn gone. Because when one side couldn’t hold it, and the other couldn’t gain it, it was better for neither to have it at all. the problem with what you think you can do for this world is that no matter what you do there will always be people involved. People will always be people and they will never change. Didn’t when I left earth. Haven’t since we evolved from flap-fisted mud puppy retards. Never have, never will. If you stop this one. . .just this one, kid. They’ll go back at it harder and harder just for the sake of proving you wrong and proving that nothing will stand in the way of mankind’s manifest destiny of progress towards the eventuality when the true accomplishment of our species is that we managed to wipe ourselves from existence in time for it to be cosmically funny.” Roche took Lucky by her reins. Markus had sallowed back in the saddle. Roche let his words sink in and started leading the mare further into the white, to where the three would re-emerge closer to Polkun county. From there he could pawn the kid off on to the Resistance or whoever decided to pay. From there the walker could buy a couple bottles, a full tobacco poke with some chew, and enough water to keep him hydrated before he took off into the desert again, free of the kids prattlings.

“Fuck you.” Was all Markus said somewhere between the speech and the moment they found the hole out of the ether and back into Terra 1. Roche let it slip over him and even for a while thought that maybe he had imagined the kid saying it at all.

Before he led Lucky through the holey doorway back to the real, Roche took a glance back at the ether. There was a wolf with white eyes sitting deep in the nothing, watching quietly as Roche left. It didn’t whine or bark, it just sat very still. When Roche stepped out of the white the wolf turned heel and trotted off into the ether with it’s tongue lolling out.