Orgonomicon (14 page)

Something in his brain was hot, and
terrified; he didn't know what he was becoming but he could feel
himself losing his grip.

He didn't care.

It was a baleful night, chilly and overcast.
A thunderhead rumbled; a trio of high-altitude jetliners crawled
across the top of the heavens, dropping long bushy tails behind
themselves that slowly spread out, covering the sky from horizon to
horizon in just under three hours. The trails matted out to a thin
greasy sheen that rippled in time to the radio waves transmitted
from the towers below, making a slow crawling coruscation like sand
dunes in a summer storm. The transmissions jumped from particle to
particle, surfing the ether and then casting their rides aside in a
haze of tan and brown particulates. The molecule-sized particles of
strange metals and stranger carbon crystals drifted into the clouds
and rained down upon the lands below. The sludge then collected in
the ground waters, and the crops, and had been bio-accumulating up
the food chain for two full human generations.

The plan was nearing completion. Humanity's
war against itself would reap death. The United States military had
formulated thirty-seven distinct chemical compounds and mineral
particulates for spraying, the last innovation of 1993 in materials
sciences of nano-carbons assembling the final gear in the clockwork
war machine.

The substance in its purest form behaved like
a liquid, but was actually a powder: the smallest stable
crystalline hydrocarbon molecule. Cow intestines rendered down to a
yeast-like protein yielded the base-material; it required a
cyclotron to cook it, in vast diamond-lined vats filled with the
super-heated carbon effluvia subjected to very finely-tuned
electromagnetic fields and allowed to cool. The resultant material
would be jogged in industrial hoppers until split into an ashy
serum.

When excited with ionizing energy, it would
conjoin and replicate into structures resembling Hydrozoan
Cnidaria
, the hydra; these structures would then lock
synaptic endings and continue their crystalline growth, evolving
wing-like appendages. When subjected exclusively to the
naturally-occurring low-intensity electrical fields of the earth,
it would energize enough to self-replicate and form small colonies
but would take no direction of its own; a mindless atomic reaction,
if bonded to aluminum particles and manipulated by the emanations
of the ubiquitous tower-network, it could be made to do many
interesting things, all carefully categorized, codified and codiced
in programmable sequences.

It was diluted to micro-potencies measured in
parts per trillion, and then mixed with certain batches of the
aerosolized jet-sprays; it was distributed as well in more
commonplace channels—at the grocer's, the boutique, pharmaceutical
dispensaries, water-filtration plants, the distributors of scented
chemicals and soft drinks and fast-food and weed-killing poisons.
Food-crops were genetically engineered to produce the nano-carbons
and sold to the hungry.

It was so deeply black-operation that even
its name disguised the exact formula, the molecule
HC
_x
-2H-C
_x
2H a secret evil engineered by humanity under
the direction of Outlander guidance. Hatred and fear conspired to
summon pain, and something from beyond had responded with the
perfect weapon.

Scott was being torn apart.

There was an
order
that all these
things needed to happen in.

Before he could go take care of the thing he
wasn't supposed to think about, he had to take care of something
else first. Mike had told him so.

He needed to see a doctor; something was very
wrong with him, he was sick.

How did he know the number for the free
clinic? But there it was in his brain, and the telephone was right
there in front of him and he had only to say a few special words
and he was scheduled right in. Funny, that.

They'd brought him all the way to the back of
the hospital; they
must
have. This doctor's office was all
white and steel, not like the regular clinic, with the browns and
greens and the magazines, that he could have sworn he'd passed
through to get to this office.

The doctor wore a cotton surgical mask over
his face and asked questions in a curt tone: How was his appetite?
His energy levels? Hair and nails? Were his stools black or green?
The questions didn't make sense and kept repeating themselves; he
answered "No" to everything, regardless of the wording. They
weren't going to trick him. Instead, he was going to make them
answer some questions of his own.

"Why do I keep having blank spaces in my
memory? Where do all my days go? Why do I hurt so much?"

The doctor looked in his ears and down his
throat but couldn't find an answer. Scott was given a bottle of
pills—"special prescription"—and told not to worry. The doctor
himself put the first pill out of the bottle into Scott's
mouth.

The hell he wasn't going to worry; this was
ridiculous. The pain in his head was intense.

The man turned around to sign a paper on his
desk and Scott spit the pill out and pocketed it. It was supposed
to help with his headaches—maybe he should have taken it. No pill
was going to help him—his problems were on the
inside—
there
was something very wrong with him.

The doctor turned back around with the paper
and tried to give it to him, tried to tell him to do something with
a prescription, but Scott couldn't concentrate on the man's words.
His head throbbed again and the pain wracked him and he grabbed a
double handful of hair, pulling it up by the roots. The strands of
hair in his fists writhed with a life of their own, twisting around
in his grip to seek purchase on his skin and burrow under the
tissue.

Scott howled.

Karen lay in her bed and scratched at the
rashes on her ankle and in her armpits; she didn't want to think
about how bad it had gotten. All she wanted to do was to go to
sleep. Three glasses of wine helped.

Sleep came in waves. The dark resolved into a
pastiche of rippling crashes that penetrated through her and
tumbled her someplace deeper underwater, where blighted kelp
undulated and the ulcerated fish wove between their long, choppy
strands. A cankerous, black deep-sea fish with lights on the ends
of its feelers swam past staring eyelessly at her, and then the
waters shook with a deep blast from behind her, a thunderous pulse
that accompanied a low, animal roar.

Karen struggled against the noxious seaweed
that clung to her and gripped with rubbery fingers, overwhelmingly
compelled to turn and face the oncoming danger, thrashing and
throwing herself from side to side, but only tangled herself up
further. But then a slow calm overcame her, and her sleeping body
stilled its tugging against the blankets, and her breathing slowed
again.

In her dream, a light shone from her breast,
illuminating and brightening the murky waters, and the tendrils
released her to face the beast approaching. It had hundreds of
tentacles, mile-wide and seething with beaks and eyeballs. Karen
feared, and the light within her dimmed. Now her body crawled with
questing suction pods, the tentacles caressing and invading her
everywhere.

And then she remembered a piece of music from
her childhood that brought her happy memories, and her light began
to shine again. Her body's exceptional immune system began to win
the battle against the infection invading her.

In the other world, where her sleeping body
lay, a being made of fiery light took its hand from her forehead
and streamed up through the ceiling in a shower of light.

"Do you love her?" The voices again. And
again and again. Scott was a mess; there was the mirror, and he
couldn't bring himself to look at it, and it would lie anyway, so
why bother? There were only monsters here.

He'd escaped the doctors, gone home to
bed—and then what? What next? Where could he possibly go? And where
could he hide? Too many things were breaking down. It was all his
fault; he was
such
a useless asshole.

His muscles twitched, spasming his legs and
forcing him to his feet with a jerking fluidity that defied normal
anatomy. He found himself standing, whether he'd decided to or
not.

"Do you love her?"

They wouldn't stop, reminding constantly of
his one redeeming reason to live, the one good thing in the world,
that he'd lost—because he was an asshole.

"Do you love her?" The voices were now
speaking themselves out loud, through his mouth. "Does it matter?"
Scott yelled back, shouting to the empty living room…

"Then set her free."

As soon as the words had passed his lips, he
knew what he was next to do.

Agent BUZ4937 detached the plastic clamp
attaching the vial of black goo to the rad-station and pulled the
headset away from his face, "And
that's
how you run a
successful hot termination order. Take notes. Write that down: hot
termination order. Just like that. Do it."

SEL6210 didn't respond. He didn't need to—his
brain chip chirped the recognition response and broadcasted it to
the central computer, and everyone knew that he knew, that he knew,
that he knew…

It was too much to acknowledge. It was easier
to go along.

"The subject agent will now terminate the
resistant subject. And have you made any progress with your
directive yet? I thought not. Get your fucking act together."

Again, SEL6210 didn't respond. He
couldn't—there was no appropriate response. He was supposed to have
completed his objective—a simple locate and terminate—a long time
ago and he hadn't even been able to get started. Every time he
thought he'd gotten a lock on this one target, the identity
changed, some time-stream diverged and merged into mainline
reality, fudging all the details so that the person he was trying
to find was one moment a thirty-year-old woman and the next a
seventy-year-old man, or even a dog. It was a world of infinite
probabilities and more with each moment he began to suspect that
someone was tampering with the odds. There were signature ripples
in the matrix.

"I believe I've identified an anomalous
unauthorized grade B reality disturbance tied to one of my
subjects. Requesting your verification."

SEL6210 allowed himself exactly one and a
third seconds to enjoy the satisfaction of knowing that he would be
vindicated, exonerated by circumstances entirely outside his
control. Reality fabrication was blackest of the black, the
deepest, darkest level of clearance, and Buzzsaw had only just
entered the field. There weren't many levels of clearance higher
than his own. He wondered if he could shake the man by alluding to
something above his pay-grade.

"Fan-fucking-tastic. I'll report this to
Central myself. You try to stay out of this."

Snubbed. Just like that.

No matter where along the planet's timeline
She turned the focus of Her arcane machinery, the Queen could not
locate a node where Her Hive had succeeded in establishing itself;
the planet's defenses were too strong. The many souls clinging to
its surface anchored the wretched dungball in the greater matrix
collectively, and would not give up their grip on its mangy hide.
Her kind had inserted themselves everywhere throughout the forward,
back and sideways jumps along its timeline, insinuated themselves
amongst its dominant life-forms and worked every protocol from the
Hive's memory banks, and could not incite them to
self-sabotage.

The ultimate, long-range plan of the Hive was
to overrun the planet with Her hybrids, to emplace Her subjects in
every arena of attention, and sway opinion through numbers until
the population invited Her in to rule.

A direct assault against a planet never
worked; the dominant life-forms would incarnate again in different
skins and retake the environment without constant overseeing that
taxed the greater Hive, and establishment had to be self-policing
in order to be maintained.

The monkeys had to
give
themselves
away.

The black fibers pulsed, twisted and ran like
liquid beneath Scott's skin, etching their channels between the
tissues and into his marrow; they lined his bones in constellations
like barnacles crusting the underside of a boat; they reached into
his brain and played movies there like lightning dancing over the
starving neurons.

In them, he sees:

An aluminum thread, dancing with static
electricity, attracted to the exposed end of a nerve cell-with a
Morse code tapping...

A deep-sea snail, the
Chrysomallon
squamiferum
, it's shell a bristling masterwork of armored
iron-mongering, chewing rust deposits off the mountains of
underwater volcanoes and excreting metal plates...

The aluminum thread finds the pulsing heart
of the nerve cell-and wraps around it like a noxious weed, creeping
back along the axons and dendrites to find its source in the
brain...

An ant falls prey to yeast, the fungus
invading its brain and taking control of its body; a spider wasp
infects its host; a retroviral infection contaminates the human
population in epidemic scale...

Scott fought the invader for his life, and
lost.

Ella had been used as a sex slave all her
life; first, when she was two, by her stepfather, and then later by
the US Army. The choice had been taken from her before she was
born; she came from a lineage of pedophilic incest, the habits of
coverup and violation written into her very tissues, and the
intelligence arm of the war machine looked to her family tree to
produce subjects easily trainable. Ella fit the profile; Ella
underwent the Monarch program.