Résumé With Monsters (22 page)

NO THANKS.

"Don't be like that, Philip. You haven't heard the whole package. I think a substantial salary increase would be in order, for one thing."

NO THANKS.

"Well it is not as simple as that, Philip. You are going to at least give it a try. You can do that for us."

Overhead the lights flickered and dimmed, then came back to full brightness. "Ah,"
Bickwithers
said, looking up. "I hear there is quite a storm brewing overhead. Nothing to worry about here though. The computers have their own generators—which are quite impressive. Let me show you."

Philip walked behind
Bickwithers
and in front of Hal Ketch, trying not to look closely at the grisly crew that sat at the rows of desks and manned the computers. They were in various states of decay. Plastic tubes in a dozen bright colors (yellow, red, purple) pierced their peeled bodies. Webs of sheathed electrical wire wound in and out of flesh, terminating in dangling integrated circuits, knots of microchips, capacitors, resistors. One elderly woman, whose gold wire-rimmed glasses seemed firmly embedded in her cheekbones, rattled violently as they passed. Her hair went up in a whoosh of flame.

"Oh my goodness, oh my goodness," the old woman howled, rocking back and forth. Her voice was a raucous shriek, mindless, a parrot set on fire.

"
Goddam
,"
Bickwithers
snapped. He whipped the radio from his belt and spoke into it.

"Overload at one nine two," he said. "This is
Bickwithers
. Overload. That's one nine two. Mrs. Lindsey has burnt out."

They moved quickly on,
Bickwithers
apologizing. "This sort of thing doesn't happen much anymore," he said. "And it is not the System that is to blame. We've fine-tuned the interview process, so we won't be getting any more folks like Mrs. Lindsey here. She was hired before we really had a good working model for an interview. We kept her on out of sentiment. I do believe a company has got to have a heart, but frankly I'll be glad when the last of these early hires is retired."

Bickwithers
opened a door and Philip followed him into a harshly lighted arena.
Bickwithers
leaned over a circling iron railing. "Down there," he said. WHAT IS IT?

"A
Shoggoth
,"
Bickwithers
said. He chuckled genially. "I believe you're familiar with the term. Your file shows that you are something of an authority on such matters, in fact."

It's a
Shoggoth
. These were the monstrous, viscous creatures that the Old Ones had created to do their bidding. This one, black and massive and surging with strange, internal lights (like a huge amoeba that had fed on lava lamps) was, no doubt, the creature of his nightmares. He had tried to obliterate its memory, but its unholy image had burned itself into his subconscious and returned in dreams. Various wires and cables extruded from the body which was being used as a giant, living battery.

THE OLD ONES THEMSELVES ONCE LOST CONTROL OF THE SHOGGOTHS AND PAID A TERRIBLE PRICE. WHAT MAKES YOU THINK YOU CAN CONTROL THEM?

Bickwithers
was unperturbed. He patted his shiny wig and preened. "The Old Ones assure us that these specimens are quite chastened. It is a shame, of course, that we have had to go back six hundred million years just to get good help. That says a thing or two about the sorry state of the world economy. It used to be that we could find cheap help just across the border. Well, don't get me started. Anyway, these
Shoggoths
are the first export from the Old Ones. We'll have the Old Ones themselves here in no time. Their transport is complicated; they are more sophisticated entities than
Shoggoths
, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if they arrived this very night. There is another Welcoming in progress as we speak, and no reason it shouldn't prove successful. Listen. Yes, I think you can hear the chanting. Hear it? Well, no matter. Soon we'll be rubbing elbows—or at least some sort of articulated appendage—with
Tsathoggua
,
Cthulhu
,
Yog-Sothoth
himself."

YOU WILL DESTROY HUMANITY!

"Any enterprise worth pursuing has some risk. The risk has to be measured against the potential gain. The gain here, for MicroMeg and its affiliates, is so immense that not acting, not seizing this opportunity, would be a sort of sin."

YOU CANNOT DO THIS. THEIR INTERESTS ARE NOT OURS.

Bickwithers
looked at his watch. "I would like to continue this discussion, but I have a meeting to attend. And, in any event, you have work of your own to do. We can't afford to pay you for your opinions. There's no market for opinions, Mr.
Kenan
."

Bickwithers
suddenly began to shimmer. An aura of blue light surrounded him. The world lost focus. Philip remembered. Hal Ketch had just gripped his left arm and shoved the needle in. He was losing consciousness. He closed his eyes.

Darkness.

#

"Philip, can you hear me?"

"Yes," Philip said.

"I am counting backward from ten. Between six and two you will begin to awaken. On one you will be fully awake."

"Okay."

"Ten nine eight seven six..."

"I don't think I will be able to come."

"Five four three two..."

"Sorry."

"One. Philip. Philip. Wake up."

"I'm sorry. I was afraid of this."

#

I was afraid of this. He came out of the darkness and blinked at the green cursor. The screen of his consciousness shifted. He saw his hands, resting over the keys.

"Ah, you are awake," a voice said. "Good."

He didn't turn his head. As he remembered, he couldn't.

A smiling, long-faced man in a lab coat leaned into Philip's field of vision. "Good to have you on board. We start new people out with a keyboard. It is much more efficient to direct feed, but we've found it is best to start folks out with input that is a little more familiar. We like to give you time to get used to the programs."

LET ME GO.

The man leaned forward, still smiling, and pressed a button on the keyboard. Instantly, the screen of Philip's vision shuddered. He was, he remembered, experiencing a profound pain, as though his entire nervous system were trails of gunpowder and someone had just ignited them with a match. The vibrating screen in front of him was, in fact, his own tormented and electronically bound body buzzing with agony.

"We have," the man continued, "really excellent motivators built into this program. I like to think that any employee who has worked here for more than three days is a team player. We would have one hell of a Softball team here if these workers were ambulatory." The man touched the red button again and the screen ceased shivering.

"Let's start you out with something simple," the technician was saying. "We'll log you on to the Necronomicon routines. Just type NECRO. There. We'll probably have you doing some simple translation comparisons for the next couple of weeks. We'll—"

Voices welled suddenly in the distance. The air seemed to grow luminous. Philip's field of vision shifted, and he saw the ceiling bulge and something made of molten silver writhing above him.

"Excuse me," the man said. "I believe a historic moment is at hand. We'll continue this lesson in a bit. I just want to take a peek in the Welcoming room. Back in a jiffy—"

What happens next?
Why couldn't he remember? Obviously, he had come through MicroMeg. How? There was a rending sound overhead. The voices continued to grow in volume, and it seemed that one voice, suddenly joining the others, was not human at all, was the strange, articulated speech of stone rubbing against stone. A scraping, scrabbling sound came from the ceiling, as though a plague army of rats were clawing their way through the plasterboard.

#

"Philip?"

"What?"

"Philip, this is Lily. Wake up."

"I can't. They are coining through. I think..." "Philip?"

"I think we lost this time."

"No, Philip. All you have to do is wake up."

"Well, I can't."

"I can help you. Tell me where you are?"

"I am beneath the basement of MicroMeg. I am electronically glued to a computer and the Old Ones are coming through."

"A computer."

"Yes."

"Perhaps—"

"Got to go."

#

The voices grew louder. Amelia! Amelia was in the hall, lying at the bottom of a mail cart and covered by a tarp. He remembered that, remembered how she had refused to let the incident go, how she had insisted that being bound and stuffed into a mail cart was symptomatic of a relationship on the skids. She had moved out—moved, indeed, all the way to Austin.

But the point was she had survived the incident. She had not been killed by
Cthulhu
or enslaved by
Yog-Sothoth
. Somehow, she had lived.

I rescued her
, he thought. But how? And perhaps what happened then was not relevant to this returning. Perhaps this time the doom was final, and the black shroud of destruction would enfold the earth. "Philip."

"Lily?"

"Philip, listen. MicroMeg was destroyed. You told me MicroMeg was destroyed."

"I can't remember."

"The kid in the mail room. He was going to destroy MicroMeg."

"And Hal Ketch blew his head off."

"How was he going to do it?"

"What?"

"How was he going to destroy MicroMeg?"

"Bombs. He had planted bombs throughout the building. But they killed him and removed the bombs."

"Maybe they didn't get them all. Maybe they didn't get all the bombs."

Above Philip, the rumbling intensified. His vision shifted, and he saw his coworkers, saw that their eyes were fixed on the computer screens, their fingers jiggling. Business as usual during Armageddon.

He heard Lily's voice again, but it was far away, faint, and he could not make out what she was saying. Something about the computer.

Any computer in MicroMeg.

F.F. had said, "It's all linked through the mainframes. I can go to any computer in this joint, execute the command, and
Kablam
! the Philistines are dust again, and Jesus is hugging Himself for joy."

What if they hadn't gotten every single bomb? Flatulent Freddie had been busy, busy as a beaver. He had that
smirky
, something-up-the-sleeve look, a trickster, a clever crazy. What if they hadn't cleaned out his stash?

If that were the case, Philip could just execute the command, and... and
Kablam
!

And what was the command? F.F. had not volunteered that information. It would be hidden, of course. It wouldn't be brazenly sitting on any directory. It might move around, might—

I know what the command is.
Was he remembering it or had he really figured it out? Well, if he was remembering it now, he had had to figure it out before, right? Again, reflections on the loop of time threatened to paralyze him. No time for that.

Voices roared. Silver shapes pressed against the ceiling. A large eye glared malevolently from a nest of bright,
wirelike
filaments.

"The Philistines are dust," Flatulent Freddie had said.

Samson
. The command was
Samson
. And Philip was powerless to execute it. He was a ghost inside his own mind.

SAMSON!

"Philip, can you hear me?"