Orgonomicon (16 page)

He'd finally gotten one of his routines to
run properly; his focus-node aligned with precise covalence, the
target had been locked and moved into position to either
self-terminate or suffer a terrible "accident," and then the charge
just simply… Dissipated. There was no other way to describe it, and
no explanation for it that he could find. BUZ4937 would certainly
blame it on him, and he was
not
looking forward to informing
the other man of his failure. If he'd been dangerously hostile
before, he could only imagine how the psychotic would react when he
told him that he'd failed again. He didn't get the chance.

"I've been monitoring you from my station.
Looks like you fucked up again, bozo. I've covered your ass,
though. Somehow, I suspect your ineptitude had something to do with
it, I lost focus on my target too. But I've taken care of it. My
target will now be going after yours. I'm taking that item over on
the docket. You are relieved of it from here on out, Agent
SEL6210."

"What am I supposed to do then?"

"I don't care. Monitor some chat rooms or
something. Make yourself useful. I'm sure HQ can come up with a
broom closet that needs organizing or something. I'm not your
fucking babysitter anymore."

"God, I hate you." He couldn't help himself;
he'd let it slip.

"Good. Use that."

SEL6210 knew better than to respond any more.
He was too embarrassed.

Ella picked at the scabs on her ankle with a
deep, pervasive sense of shame.

She was pretty much always covered in little
scabs—the rock did that to her—and she was used to it by now, but
these ones were a little different, darker around the edges with
trailing lines of black discoloration coming off them. And the ones
in her armpits, too. They felt bad, really bad, and
so
itchy. It was driving her crazy.

God, she just needed someone she could talk
to, someone who would listen.

She could accept the fact that she'd become
unlovable, not by anyone with any goodness in them, but it was
still so hard to accept the fact that she had to be alone
forever
. That could end up being such a long time.

Or maybe it would be a very
short
time. She didn't expect to have that much longer to live, the way
she'd taken care of her body and the terrible things she'd done to
it. She didn't feel like she could expect to live for very much
longer, really. It made the little time she probably had left all
that much more valuable.

If only she could feel like she were worth
it.

She put her cell-phone up to the side of her
head; the numbers, somehow, dialed themselves. She didn't
notice.

The phone rang; Emmanuel picked it up and
looked at the caller, drawing a blank.

It was immediately followed by disappointment
and suspicion when he realized who it was. He hadn't heard from the
woman in almost nine years and the only times he'd thought about
her had been when he was using. It had been in another life.

Still, there had been some good times. She
could be fun, when she was in a good mood. But that was
nonsense—he'd left that part of himself behind, become a better
person for it. It would be going backward, not forward, to have any
connection to this woman...

And where the hell were these thoughts coming
from, anyway? How could he even for a minute possibly consider ever
hooking up with
her
again? What the hell?

And then again maybe he could just reach out
to her in friendship, offering her a helping hand. Her reaching out
to him was a cry for help, probably, wasn't it? It couldn't hurt
anything to answer one phone call, could it?

"I see you're finally back on track, SEL6210.
Keep it up and you just might be able to avoid your early
retirement."

SEL6210 removed the headset and dropped it to
the coffee-table, sighing. He needed to get out for some fresh air,
to get away from this guy as quickly and discreetly as
possible.

"Quitting so soon?"

He took his hand off the doorknob and turned
to face his antagonist. "I can work by remote. Give me a break from
you."

"Suit yourself."

The man's cigarettes were overpowering, a
choking stink that pervaded their room; the night beyond was a
crisp contrast, the low hanging clouds thick with the promise of
rain that wouldn't deliver.

The air was sludgy with a toxic dew,
conglomerate micro-protein fibers with crystalline carbon deposits
and ionized aluminum atoms bound to them. These compounds had been
cooked in the boilers of state-owned processing plants scattered
throughout the country, loaded into vactor trucks and shipped to
airports to dispense in patterned sweeps, coagulating in drab
gray-brown clouds spread by the fleets of unmarked passenger
jets.

It was too unbelievable for the general
populace. No one could believe in the level of organization, the
depth of collusion among the major powers; and no one remembered
the bankruptcies and acquisitions of all the major airlines in
1998, and no one associated the proliferation of microwave towers
erupting like popcorn over the earth. They had been programmed not
to.

No one understood the mechanisms of science
because its true laws had been hidden and a crippling placebo-truth
peddled for its substitute, the technologies evolved according to
the laws of the true sciences so far beyond the general
understanding of the masses as to be indiscernible from sorcery.
The job did itself. He didn't really need to hide anything he was
doing; no one would believe it even if they'd seen it for
themselves, and any who did would never be taken seriously. There
was always plausible deniability, always.

Always.

They had the greatest lie-machine ever at
their disposal to support the illusion woven for the masses—a
television in every home and a steady parade of bread and circuses
so they never suspected what they were missing. The machine told
them all what to believe, who to love, how to think; it told them
up was down, left was right, in was out—and they believed it. They
paid
for the privilege.

And the job did itself, whether he chose to
take part in it or not. He wondered if the machine could have its
own wants, if the golem felt desire. It wouldn't surprise him at
all, considering.

He inhaled deeply, prepared himself for the
unpleasantness awaiting him, and returned to their temporary
central operations office. There was always work to be done.

Scott tried to catch his breath, and took the
beer Mike passed him. It was nice and cold.

They sat in Mike's living room and drank beer
and watched TV. It was good to forget where he'd been, what he'd
done.

"Hey buddy, guess what? We're going to a
party tonight, equinox." Mike always knew what to do.

He went, and did not come back; what returned
was not the same Scott.

He could tell, even through his alcoholic
stupor and the haze of pain, that something about this party just
wasn't for him; for one thing, there was no music. No music! And
hey, they were all dressed up—no one told him it was going to be a
costume party. He was already out of place, but with enough beer he
didn't have to care as long as it kept coming.

Then it got freaky.

He'd been moved to a terrace by the shoving
crowd, and there they'd murdered a small child.

Something in Scott's skull fizzed and popped,
and his eyes rolled up into the back of his head, and he hit the
ground in a faint.

An agent read his distress through the
satellite uplink and threw a switch; the sub-routine changed,
altered to fit the subject's rapidly-shifting engrams and fixed the
lock on the parent-node. The master program continued to progress
faithfully.

Mike led the rest of the party away from the
bloody altar to leave him alone on the terrace with the body of the
dead boy; the B.E.A.S.T. computer issued the command subprogram
activating the antennae poking up between statues of gargoyles on
the building's roof. The metal frameworks climbing towards the sky
tore a series of lines through the aethers, howling the
antediluvian mutterings of ancient trans-dimensional predators from
their panels and drums. Scott heard the satellites and sang with
the antennae, the nano-carbon parasite within him torquing his
frame and lifting him to his feet, forcing him to puppet-lurch
forward to the altar and kneel at the boy's side. Scott held his
outstretched palms over the boy's body and long black strings grew
out of his pores and stretched hungrily toward the red pool, and
drained the small body of all its life'sblood.

He remembered that this was something he was
supposed to remember—something he was supposed to embrace. He was
becoming something new.

Ella touched up her eyeliner; it didn't look
right in the corners, the flesh underneath bruising and becoming
irritated.

She looked a little like Frankenstein's
monster, she had to admit.

Fuck it—she washed the makeup off and decided
she didn't need it; her eyes were already shaded. The time and
effort would just be extra icing on a fallen cake, and anyways he'd
always known her not to wear makeup. It wouldn't be anything he
hadn't seen before, besides a few extra crows-feet. He'd always
accepted her for who she was.

She wouldn't need to be embarrassed of
herself with him.

Manny got up from his computer feeling guilty
about the agreement he'd made over the phone, and got ready to go
out to his illicit meeting.

If it wasn't one thing, it was the other—his
computer had been acting funny all day, worse than normal—and then
there was an emergency at the kid's school and Karen had rushed off
in a panic after laying into him for not being a good father—why
was it his fault? Who knew?—and then now he had this other crazy
lady to deal with.

Something didn't feel right. It was a day of
disaster, to be sure—you could bet on it.

At least he wouldn't have to explain where he
was going. If she got back before him, he could make up a story
about going to the corner store.

Yeah, that was good.

He would walk; it would take him fifteen
minutes to get there, say ten minutes to work out his karma with
Ella, and then fifteen to get back home... If it took her any
longer than an hour, he'd be completely in the clear. Karen
wouldn't have to know anything. She didn't
need
to know
anything.

He didn't feel the need to wonder where the
thoughts came from, neither did he get the chance; the roar of
traffic swelled around him and a car honked and drove up onto the
sidewalk, headed straight for him. He yelled something obscene and
dodged aside at the last moment, leaving the car to crash into a
newspaper vending machine, and split the scene in a hurry.

Cops were the last thing he wanted to deal
with, and it was none of his business; the fear flooded him, and he
ran through the crosswalk with the sign showing 'go' and dodged two
more cars and a flatbed semi that swerved to pinpoint him; a
sudden, last-minute change of direction got him out of their path
and he apologized to the fracas behind him, and kept on running
away from his problems. It appeared he'd left it behind.

To make things worse, he had some stupid
kids' song stuck in his head, over and over. Just whenever things
were starting to get hectic, there it would come again.

The next corner was an eerie change from the
high-pressure violence of threatening traffic and the sudden
life-or-death acrobatics to a sort of slow-motion freeze-frame. The
streets seemed oddly deserted, not a car in sight, no joggers or
cyclists, nobody walking their dog, just one person standing in the
middle of the sidewalk a block ahead of him, staring up at the sky
with his back turned. He seemed bent at uncomfortable angles and
oddly motionless and Manny didn't like the look of the man; he gave
every indication of being homeless and Manny didn't want to tell
him that he didn't have any money for him, so he crossed to the
other side of the street before he could get too close.

Without turning to look at Manny behind him,
without taking his gaze away from the sky, the man crossed the
street, too.

Manny kept walking down the sidewalk with a
growing discomfort, not knowing what to do about the man but going
ahead anyway, and then he was upon him, and the man turned his
awful liquid gaze with eyes like black marbles upon him; Manny felt
the palpable force of a deep rage and terrible sickness that
emanated from the filthy bum and burned into his face and skin, and
the man said to him, "You little bitch, you can't run from them.
They know everything about you."

Manny walked past the awful man sure he'd
just witnessed something from the twilit zone, and high-tailed it
further down the street until he felt himself safely out of reach,
where he stopped to catch his breath and light up a cigarette. What
the hell was wrong with the neighborhood all of a sudden? Why did
it seem like everyone was out to get him? Why? He dodged a falling
brick (someone fixing the chimney—of course, that was something
that happened all the time, right?) waved off the cries of "sorry!"
and went inside the building.

There she was. He didn't recognize her
immediately, but she knew him right away and was flagging him
down.

"Hey, Manny, long time no see! You look
great!" He felt rather than heard a distinct note of
insincerity.

A high-pitched whine that he hadn't noticed
suddenly ceased when she opened her mouth and spoke to him; the air
seemed to collapse in upon them, separating them off from the rest
of the bustling coffeehouse in a world of their own, and yet it
felt contrived, arranged somehow. The cloying aftertaste of fake
intimacy turned him off, and he began to question on a fundamental
level his reasons for having come to this rendezvous.