Ravenous Dusk (81 page)

"So anyway, all I'm wondering, and there's some cash money in it for you, so don't look at me like that, but all I'm wondering is, do they do this breeding thing all the time, or is it only at specific times of year, you know, when the stars are right? The Spawn of Dagon coming out of the sea to fuck your womenfolk, I mean? I assume it would be, but what I want to know is, is this something an outsider could come and watch? I mean, not just a regular tourist, but a discreet man of the world like myself. I assure you, money is no object—"

Just don't listen, the senior stewardesses warned the others, don't come within arm's reach, and for God's sake, don't try to turn off his computer. He was a regular passenger, and usually harmless if left alone. They had only to recount the story of the time an angry Samoan steward confiscated the passenger's laptop, and the cockpit was blasted with static, unholy electronic rhythms and the screams of porn until he got it back. They consoled themselves that he was not the worst American they had ever had to deal with.

When he'd scared all the stewardesses away, the passenger relaxed and settled into gazing out the window and listening to the mix disk he'd put together for this flight. Time for reflection, what his parents used to call realigning your chi. It was one of the few meaningful things they'd taught him to do, to still the chattering, excrement-hurling monkeys in his brain, and for a few moments every day, just
be
. It allowed him to formulate plans, redirect his energies, and build new identities. He took a moment to thank his parents for the gift. Without it, he probably would have killed them both a long time before he did.

Baron Angulo was always especially tense after coming back from Keogh. The trip itself was a royal pain in the ass–flying from Hawaii to Kiribati, then by boat or chopper out to the atoll, which he had to be lowered onto in a spacesuit because of the fucking sharks and the fucking radiation, not to mention fucking Keogh his own self. He spent the rest of his island vacation in the bunker, two hundred feet deep in Keogh's guts, writing code to be uploaded to RADIANT, updating Keogh's code as new consciousness models and protein strings were absorbed. Each trip stretched the limit of his patience, because commands could only be sent from the uplink node on the atoll, now that Idaho was down, and had to be routed through a labyrinth of relays and front nodes to their source, which was not even a proper computer, but a chunk of Keogh floating in space.

That Keogh needed him to come out to the most godforsaken ass-end of the world, just so he could be connected with a piece of his own fucking brain, defied every tenet of the information age. But the freaky old fucker didn't trust Baron, and, of course, Angulo didn't trust him. Even now, when he peeked just so through the gap in the seats, he saw the Keogh escort, staring through magazines at the back of his head.

Keogh had to watch him from outside, because he couldn't risk getting inside him, and trying to take the controls. Angulo's neural works were wired to a spec so far from the factory originals that his thinking could not be duplicated even by such an ingenious invader as Keogh, and Angulo had the keys to the computer system. He'd never figure that out without Angulo around, either. The source of Radiant Dawn's computing power was not in any one vulnerable mainframe, but in an ingenious distributed network of millions of computers all around the globe—PC's whose owners had invited him in via a smarmy chain e-mail more widely traveled than the St. Jude blessing letter. Whenever the system sprang into action, it accessed those computers left on and open to the net, but dormant, each of them a cell in a global neural network more powerful than any mainframe in existence or development. Keogh didn't understand it, but Angulo had no illusions about how long that would last. The motherfucker would, if he got his way, become a global neural network himself, and Angulo would have to find new ways to be useful.

He'd been secretly relieved when the Russians trashed RADIANT. It would slow the fucker down a bit. He'd still had to reroute the lion's share of the network, and Keogh was uncharacteristically apathetic about what to do with it. This trip would be the last for quite some time, and the next phase was what he'd been hungering for. A chance to strike at the real enemy…

His fists dug into his thighs, his eyes filmed over in visions. The music fed his rampaging brain-movies, phased, time-stretched jungle rhythms driving living juggernauts of purifying flame into the festering cancerous tumors of the secret power elite, the sky blackened for a thousand years with their ashes, all because of him—

Time to reflect.
Shut up, monkeys
.

He skipped ahead in the mix to a more sedate song. He let himself go limp and still and watched imperious golden clouds warring beneath his window. The UK Surf version of "Wave Of Mutilation" by the Pixies always soothed his nerves. Something about the languid, submarine guitars and the vaguely inhuman lyrics brought back the pure pleasure of just being alive.
You think I'm dead, but I sail away—

But true inner peace eluded him. All of a sudden, his stomach ached, inflating with gas, and his arms and legs tingled as if he'd been sleeping in a straitjacket. His head ached, his sinuses flared up, and he saw purple phosphene fireworks like fists were rubbing his eyes from the inside of his skull. It felt like some kind of Asian hyper-flu, or food poisoning, but no…it was like the time when he was ten, and his parents tried out a batch of acid on him that went south, and he first started to think about killing people.

He took responsibility for his actions, pride in them, even, but it was his parents who set him on this road. It wasn't the drugs or the free-love atmosphere that spoiled him, it was the way they loved him.

When he was small, he was a little godling, perfect and innocent, freshly returned from the Cosmic Source, or some such hippie shit, and they denied him nothing, punished him never. Then one day, he was suddenly just another dirty, clumsy stupid human being, and worse than most, when they were strung out. Any interest he showed in learning about the world outside the pot-fog of Santa Cruz was derided as flirting with the "death culture." The bad acid trip actually was the pivotal moment in his life, the rite of passage into a new kind of manhood. He saw, in the throes of a hellish peak when the sun tried to rape him, that his parents had never seen him, never tried to know him. What they had loved was the novelty and instinctual endorphin rush of the new child; what they hated was the reflection and denial of themselves that he represented for them in their more lucid moments. He discovered that no one actually saw him at all; he was invisible, unknowable, an eight-eyed super-genius in the kingdom of the blind idiots. He would teach them to see, if only for a moment, how much there was to the world, that they'd missed. Show them all. Even Keogh…

He turned up the Pixies as loud as it would go.
Shut up, monkeys!

He punched the Call button to summon the stewardess and make her look at the sonograms he'd had done in Thailand of Dr. Teeth and all his other pets, wriggling happily in their intestinal zoo. That would make him feel better. But the bitch stayed away, and one of his monkeys refused to shut up.

A voice. Inside his head. Goddamit! That fucker Keogh had infected him. The one nonnegotiable term of their working relationship had been violated. Assuming, of course, that he wasn't hallucinating, right now.

He blinked his eyes furiously, but the purple fireworks only got worse, obscuring his vision like a really good nitrous oxide hit. He paused the music. Over the omnipresent hum of the plane and the murmur of people-noises, there was only the oceanic roaring he always heard when he was freaking out. He turned and looked at the Keoghs, but they sat blandly vegetative in their seats, expecting nothing, thinking even less.

The plane lacked the Internet jacks most business class sections had, but he had a wireless set-up that hacked into an Indonesian satellite, which could send untraceable code anywhere in the world instantly. He'd written the program a long while before, and with a single keystroke, could bring down the Radiant Dawn network and turn over its internal transmissions—stego encrypted video and text inside babbling video lectures—to the leadership of every member nation of the UN Security Council and Interpol; every columnist and media outlet listed on the Drudge Report; the producers of
60 Minutes
,
Nightline
and
Oprah
; and the editors of
Fortean Times, Wired
,
High Times
and
Fangoria
. He'd make the motherfucker sorry.

But his fingers wouldn't touch the keys. His right hand curled instead into a quivering fist and punched him squarely in the face. His nose snapped and burst like a tomato. Blood showered his keyboard.

He watched his hand unclench and close the fuck-Keogh program, and skip forward in the mix.

"Quiet Village" by Martin Denny. Sinister jungle fauna howled and screeched. Liquid marimbas and vibes brought back the aroma of herbal taxidermy, of the desert—

Hiram liked this song,
said the monkey.
You remember Hiram, don't you, Buggs?

You don't take as many drugs or kill as many people as Baron Angulo had without hearing voices. Voices told him what to do, told him what other people thought of him, told him whom to trust and for how long, and who to become, so that others would trust him.

But never, ever, had there been a voice of recrimination. He had no guilt, nor even a belief in guilt, except as a lever in other people's heads. Yet this had to be a flashback, a new flavor of insanity to play with. He recognized the voice in his head at once, though he could not name it, because its presence inside him was even more of an outrageous impossibility than Keogh's would be.

The voice was Storch.

Angulo shivered. This couldn't be real. Keogh killed Storch, killed him and ate him and digested him. God, how he wished he could have been there to see it.

He showed him.

When it was done, Angulo came to in the seat, but found that his body had no interest in doing what he wanted it to, anymore. What he wanted to do was leap up screaming for Keogh to get this fucking mutant ghost out of his head; either that or tear the lid off his skull and paint the cabin with his own brains.

The sensation that he had a body at all was a fast-fading phantom. He couldn't feel his arms or legs, then he couldn't feel his heartbeat, then he couldn't blink or move his mouth. He felt like a fugitive impulse in his own brain, a rat trapped in a corner by a fever that, impossibly, was smarter than he.

Angulo thought the words in a red, hateful smear he hoped blew out a bunch of his synapses. BECAUSE I COULD, DUMBSHIT! Because you were stupid and I was smart, and you thought you were fit to survive, but you didn't have half of what it really takes, you one-thumbed cracker cocksucker. It's brains, you stupid ant. You're stupid, and that's why He tricked you, that's why He killed you, and chewed you up and shat you out—

He's the only one smart enough to see the Real Enemy. The Mission are just pawns in the game, being used to keep Him in check until the endgame, but they're all over, now, and it's almost here. He's going to flush the real enemy out into the open.