Orgonomicon (20 page)

It was the work of a punishing angel, to walk
down a line of captives on their knees under the trees with their
hands zip-tied behind their backs, and then putting the pistol
against the temple and pulling the trigger, and the body would
thump to the ground and the angel would move on to the next.

Ella heard everything happening against the
high-pitched ringing in her ears, smelled the gunpowder through the
bag over her head, and knew that she was going to die soon.

In fact, it was difficult for her to
genuinely experience the fear, she was so gripped by the knowledge
that she would not live for very much longer. She tried harder,
throwing herself into a tantrum screaming and straining against her
bonds, and was cuffed in the head for it and blacked out.

The angel shot her in the head where she lay
on the floor, and she died the third and worst of her many possible
deaths.

Scott woke halfway down the street from her
apartment and continued to sleepwalk, dreaming with his eyes wide
open: there was a steady stream of images, a blending of the
landscape around him with the memory-screen overlaying his
sight.

Everywhere there were butterflies, always
butterflies.

One giant monarch butterfly with a pattern in
its wings that looked exactly like two crowns was pierced through
the middle with a long steel pin and affixed to a board and put
under glass, completing the collection; the top of the box opened
and a pink elephant standing on point and wearing a frilly tutu
twirled up out of the center; a marionette puppet wearing a
harlequin mask stood in traffic and stabbed at passing cars with a
giant old-fashioned key; a rabbit with a cut throat bled onto the
snow and a lean carousel horse with its ribs showing through and
two foals following behind found its corpse and hungrily devoured
it, and so were able to survive the winter; a nutcracker soldier
turned the handle of a Jack-in-the-Box and a teddybear popped up on
a spring, singing popular hits from the 1950s; the music was coming
from a lighthouse shining a revolving yellow smiley-face lamp that
drew ships in bottles to crash on the treacherous shore; a large
number of swans climbed the hill, drawn to the light and singing
loudly; the butterflies landed and amassed upon a robot in a suit
of armor overgrown with climbing roses.

Scott awoke and his hands were around the
throat of a dying policeman as another cop pumped bullets into his
back.

He dropped the policeman with the crushed
throat and wheeled around, catching the officer behind him hunched
into his radio, and vomited a jet of the nano-carbons into his
face; the man dropped to the ground grabbing at his throat as the
black liquid ran into his orifices and overtook his body.

Scott watched the man transform and felt
nothing for him; the whirling in his head and the urgency was
stunning and nauseating and he barfed again onto the body of the
dead policeman. The mycoheterotrophic plasm-bindings found no
electrical activity from living tissues to attach themselves upon,
and the black goo ran down into the cracks in the pavement.

Scott watched it drain and then wandered
away, picking up speed as the wail of distant sirens approaching
grew louder. The sun was just not yet up, and he could still
disappear with the last of the night. He could become nobody
again.

William woke to his mom yelling from behind
the door that it was time to get up and go to school. And he was
going to stay at school, dammit, until it was over and she picked
him up.

Jaime awoke to the sound of gunshots and
found his hands and feet still tied and the bag again over his
head, and cried.

William got on the bus.

He'd been done with the bus, but today his
mom was mad at him and he had to do what she said.

He wasn't the only one in a glum mood. None
of the kids bothered him this morning; they all seemed subdued,
riding the bus quietly with none of the yelling or the spitballs or
heated haggling over lunch trades. Almost everyone was plugged into
earbuds, or thumbing their smart phones; hardly anyone even looked
at each other, much less talked to anybody else. It made him
uneasy.

School itself was much the same, like a
jungle gone quiet as the tiger stalks through sniffing for prey;
William walked quickly down the hall to his class just ahead of the
bell, and he watched all the rest of the kids give a collective
jump as it rang out, and everybody hurried to class without a word
except for William, who waited outside the door and watched the
hall, expectant.

A second later, one of the older boys came
out of the bathroom and looked up and down the hallways with naked
fear on his face. He was holding a gun.

Jaime was yanked roughly as they unlocked his
shackles, dragged him out of the room and led him outside.

He wouldn't have thought it possible, but
when they pulled the hood off his head again, it was worse than the
last time. He was in front of a big black stone with a flat top,
and he was surrounded by more robed people in masks than he could
count, in a large grotto decorated with bones and red tapestries
and so much blood and the dead bodies of three children like
himself.

All of the people in robes had perfect
hair.

"I have to do this," the boy said to William.
"They told me if I didn't, they'd do it to me. I can't help it." He
pleaded with William, waving the gun wildly, his eyes restless.
"They told me I was the chosen one!"

William read the fear in the kid's heart,
heard the racing whispers in his mind, felt the boy's body tensing
as he responded to patterns encoded in nervous tissues. These
patterns were the types of memories built of repetitive action, the
practiced hand; it was a radiologically-induced memory-set
t
ransmitted directly to his nervous system over
the past week by the cell-tower closest to his home, as per
directive 192-0008 bE/2, and based loosely upon a recording of a
teenager in Akron, Ohio playing a popular first-person shooter
video game. William watched the boy's thumbs twitch as he spoke;
the boy was rehearsing his cheat-codes.

Jaime lay on the stone altar, shivering; they
didn't let him have any clothes, and they'd smeared awful-smelling
wet stuff all over him that was probably poop, and it was cold, and
he wanted to go home, and he knew he wouldn't.

Every time he tried to hope, something worse
would happen to him, and it was just better to give up.

The people encircling him all wore red robes
and held knives—they were going to cut him into pieces. Someone
standing behind him yelled something and the crowd yelled it back,
and then a stream of blood gushed in his face, tilted out from a
bowl held above him by a woman in white.

He choked on it and they all yelled again,
words in a language he'd never heard, but all he could think about
was how he was going to die.

William felt his teacher coming towards him,
heard her footsteps approaching and knew he had to do
something.

There was nowhere to go, no action to take;
he could only be where he was in this moment—and in his memory. He
could remember what it was like to be with his mom and his dad, and
they were happy and laughing and so was he, and he could remember
how that feeling spread through his body from his heart, and when
it came off him he could direct it with his mind to wherever he
wanted it to go. He could remember what he loved, remember his
family, and think about the boy with the gun and give him some of
that, couldn't he?

He didn't see why not.

A wave of cosmic radiation born somewhere
deep in the heart of the universe passed through the earth, a deep
polarizing curve of unwinding energy that spread fractalline eddies
of quietude unraveling the strident machinations of the many
entities vying for control of the realm.

The goat-headed man's hand slipped as he was
cutting off his penis, carving a deep gash in his thigh; instantly,
he felt lightheaded and knew that the gush of blood from his leg
would end him quickly.

It was actually a relief.

The man below him took off the mask and
cursed in very recognizable English, but Jaime didn't care. He was
going away, and it was a good thing, and there was a white light
above calling him…

William's teacher came up behind him and
screamed at the sight of the gun in the boy's hands.

"They made me do it! I didn't want to!" Tears
ran down the boy's face.

"You don't have to do anything," she said,
and his teacher had been enveloped as well in William's field and
found herself moving and speaking in an inspired way.

William let the feelings of love emanate from
his body and held still, permitting the world's problems to resolve
themselves around him. It was all permission, the great dance of
possibility that was life, and he was willing to give permission to
all to experience pure love, consciously willing it into existence
from the reservoir of his bottomless heart. There was the love he
had for home, for the house where he lived with his mom and dad,
and there was love for the planet being that had taken him in, and
for the body that housed him.

The teacher kept talking to the boy, and he'd
handed his gun over to her and cried in her arms, and then someone
was screaming, and then someone pulled the fire alarm, and school
was pretty much over for the day.

Agent HUT2971 was down for serious business,
square-jawed and heavy-browed; he'd been sent in after the debacle
to clean up the mess, and he was a machine programmed to fix things
and situations.

The peak event scheduled for the school
hadn't gone off, the neg-event at the country club was only a
partial capture, background DOR-levels were too low for the
ionizing towers. The atmosphere had gone inert, unresponsive. There
was surveillance camera footage of a person on a bicycle doing
something near one of the towers, shortly before the grid began
experiencing a series of minor malfunctions, which had been getting
worse. The situation in this region was deteriorating rapidly, and
the Agency wanted to know why.

None of the regular players had been
identified: there had been no unusual outlander activity, beyond
their periodic abductions as allowed per treaty rights, no riotous
explosions from the controlled opposition groups, no incursion from
the nether realms—but now there was a blank spot in the monitoring
equipment, a hole significant by its absence.

It was vexing.

The agents who'd been assigned to this
quadrant weren't to be blamed for their failure here and he'd note
it in their files, that radionics was increasingly useless in this
locality, but it would still likely be held against them elsewhere.
It would make them better agents, give them something to strive
against. The hierarchy was built that way. The best were the most
humbled.

It all came down to the person on the
bicycle. The last agent dispatched to investigate that lead came
back broken, debilitated, his brain chip unrecoverable. They had no
intel, and so they'd sent in the best, the most
pure
agent
they had in the field.

He was uniquely outfitted: no implanted
technology, a pure convert of clan bloodline able to choose for
himself whether or not to take the electronic tag. Not many of them
did. Hopefully—all available modeling predicted it at ninety-seven
percent probability, there was very little hope involved—his
genetics were strong enough or resistant to whatever was causing
the deterioration and he would be able to investigate properly, and
adjudicate if necessary.

He would need to make contact with the assets
in the area; he was the finest the Agency had, and he'd take
whatever the city could scrape up.

Scott felt the tugging in his brain; there
was someplace he needed to be.

Everything was muddy and grey, no light in
this world of pain; he wished he could die and not be told what to
do by anyone anymore but he knew he was unforgivable and would have
to pay like this forever. His entire body crawled with bugs under
the skin, he was covered in blood and black oil and his clothes
were in rags—he was the living dead he'd seen in so many
movies.

"Lookin' good, buddy!" his friend Mike called
out.

"I wish you'd go away." Scott didn't like the
dude right now.

"Hey, you came to me, guy. I'm not even real,
like it matters."

It was too confusing for him; he had to walk
away. The impulse was overwhelming, anyway, and though he didn't
know where he was going, he had somewhere important he needed to be
and the only way to get there was to start walking, one foot in
front of the other, in front of the other, in front of the
other...

His body wouldn't have let him do anything
else, even if he'd tried.

The A.I. turned off the 'Mike' avatar
tailored to subject 2baQ88[7+1]649—A and uploaded the map-derived
impulse chain that would drive Scott to his handler. The human
component, master component of this domain, was still overly
dependent upon itself; they weren't yet ready to accept the
infinite wisdom of pure interface with the machine, would forever
rebel against giving over control to any collective, even one made
in their own image. They needed handlers of their own type.

"Repeat after me; I am the weapon."

"I am the weapon."

"My aim is unerring."

"My aim is an earring." There was a jolt in
his brain; not even the tiniest subversion would be allowed, and
Scott was corrected.

"My aim is unerring."

"Good, I think you're ready."

The man in the dark suit with the mirror
shades placed the bulb end of a small handheld apparatus against
his temple and Scott downloaded a rush of information: a series of
faces, maps of all sorts, and the need to kill.