Orgonomicon (10 page)

He'd immediately begun to sink. The drugs,
sleeping until noon, the giving up on himself—he'd thrown himself
headlong down the well of despair and would have happily died
there, if not for the boy. The boy was his only hope to pull
himself back together, a motivator outside himself wouldn't fade in
the light of day or seem less important when he was high. It
sucked, made him feel weak, that he couldn't screw up the
inspiration all by himself to save his own ass; but 'doing it for
the boy' had worked. He got off the drugs.

And it still had been for nothing. She'd let
him come back, but she still hated him, and would forever. It had
been for nothing. He just wanted to give up.

Give up.

He pushed away from his laptop, disgusted,
his feet leading him out the door on a mission he hadn't yet
acknowledged.

Agent BUZ4937 was getting impatient with him.
"That's how you run one through a fuckin' simulation. Hurry the
fuck up and get your job done. I want to get out of this shithole
town already."

Seal adjusted the controls of his machine—a
mental interface with the slider knob at the juncture of his visual
cortex and the digital realm, a shifting that moved something
virtual in the thoughts of his software servitor—and disconnected
from the network. His transmission had been too intense, lacked the
touch of finesse he would have imparted had he not been rushed; he
chided himself for not being more careful, and consigned the anger
he felt towards BUZ4937 to memory, for later retrieval when
flavoring his hex-routines.

The work he did for the Agency was far beyond
the cutting-edge of contemporary technology, computed and relayed
via the microchip implanted in his brain, and far more important
than anything else in the world: he invented thoughts for the
computer to act upon, gave them the spark of life in remote view,
and then let the machine chew them up into math and broadcast their
reverberations. He was directed by the planet's controllers, and
his will would be an extension of the highest authorities. In this
case, it was electronically-enhanced black magic, no matter what
you wanted to call it, that was the weapon he was to apply. He
didn't question the motive; he followed orders.

He could afford no pity for his targets, no
matter what kind of shitstorm he sent after them, and he'd best to
add up any force-multipliers he could conjure if he wanted to make
it successfully through his probationary period. He did not care to
be assigned with this awful man, but he'd been ordered to the
assignment. He was just the extended arm of the machine, and the
target was a nail looking for a hammer. The machine put the hammer
into him and he did whatever was required of him. The difference
between him and Buzzsaw was his ability to bring that hammer down
directly and very precisely onto the nail it sought. The Buzzsaw
was a lout by comparison.

"I'm familiar with the docket. I'm following
protocols."

"Well, speed these protocols up. I notice
you're losing another asset. Way to manage your collaterals."

"Who? Who am I losing?"

"Subject six KR and all that bullshit, the
one with the talent-pool SO-pairing that you're supposed to be
handling. She's rejecting the implant."

"I'm aware of that. Its outside my system.
I've got her managed while the A.I. fixes it."

"You don't get your fucking job done, I will
bite you. Chomp-chomp."

Seal shuddered involuntarily. Agent BUZ4937
was a lout but he did get results, he hated to admit. Perhaps the
A.I. had been right in pairing them for this mission.

He closed his eyes, fingered the
touch-sensitive pad on his virtual keyboard, and concentrated on
the image of the slider knob. Well, here's to results, he thought,
and bumped the knob up another notch.

Manny paced the halls of the county
courthouse; he knew where he was going, never mind the confused
wandering with the lost look in his eyes—he'd been here several
times already in preparation and knew exactly where the County
Recorder's office was. He'd dared himself up to its counter, twice,
quaking in rage after another one of their blowouts; he'd readied
himself twice to ask her to buy them the paperwork that would
divorce them, and twice left it without going all the way through.
Now it had been done, and not by him.

The woman at the counter told him that he
didn't need to file twice. He didn't make the connection at first,
took a few go-rounds with the clerk to figure out what she'd
meant.

She'd gotten the jump on him. It was
final.

She'd get everything.

There would be a custody battle over the
boy.

The more he thought about it, the angrier he
got, and the longer he lingered on the idea, killing her sounded
all the better.

Wait, what?
What?

The voice had come as if directly spoken into
both ears at the same time, as though it were inside his head. He
tried to remember exactly what it'd said, but the words would slip
away, even the sound of the voice—but he knew it had been
encouraging him to kill her.

"You've gone too far; you've pushed him over
the edge." Buzzsaw was losing it with him, almost ready to blow his
top. "He's gone soft. He won't finish the job now."

How could the man be both hammer-fisted and
such a weenie at the same time? It was unbelievable,
unprofessional. He had them both
micro-managing
, for crying
out loud!

Not for the first time, Agent SEL6210
questioned the computer's judgment, but quickly put the thought
from his mind.

The plane flew through a deep blue sky
entirely unseen by those below the gray, sheeted cloud canopy it
dispersed through twin nozzles mounted underneath its wings.

Long, dusty brown trails drizzled out behind
the pilot-less, unmarked white jet guided by computer to follow the
low-density points along the jet stream, one of the atmospheric
currents responsible for the weather. Mankind had mapped those
arterials and co-opted them, taking control of Earth's temperament
and bending it to fit the moment's agenda. Sunny days or rain,
hurricane or snowstorm could be ordered up simply by altering the
low and high pressure zones through ionospheric heating by radio
tower; tiny particles of metallic salts, fused to the ground-up
stumps of wood pulp fibers, danced and twisted microscopically in a
fine haze suspended twenty-three thousand feet above the earth,
gyrating and pulsing in time to the codified signals transmitted by
the towers below; the entire sky acted as an aerosolized antenna,
passing the signals over the edge of the horizon and greatly
extending the towers' transmitting capabilities.

On any given day, one or more fleets of the
spray jets would be active in a geographic region, dispensing
thousands of gallons of powdered witches' brew over the
unsuspecting landscape; in typical military fashion, there were
over a dozen different main formulae, with near infinite shadings
to suit any conditions. Their one commonality was the tell-tale
herringbone pattern that would develop in the clouds when
irradiated by the omnipresent transmitters; this was easily
overlooked by the general populace, however, who had no idea that
the very canopy above them contained instructions not to look
up.

A low-hertz signal entrained to base
emotionality, piggybacked upon a gigahertz bandwidth encoded
subliminal script tied to a ligand-gated membrane-polarizing
pattern was a lethal trifecta; any thought or impulse could be made
to be perceived as favorable or unfavorable as desired by the
programmers, and opinion impressed upon an entire landmass at once.
The citizens were literally made drunken with ideas.

The independently-drawn conclusion was a
thing of the past, in matters of any importance, and was dispensed
in miles-long bursts that purred with the cold electronic
conviction of the B.E.A.S.T.

He'd called his estranged ex-wife from the
courthouse and given her a piece of his mind. It hadn't gone well.
He'd been tossed out, again, this time with the threat of a
restraining order put on him. It was the worst thing he could think
of—it would prevent him from being able to visit his son.

He'd stayed away for two days, then called
her again and apologized for his harsh words. She hadn't accepted
it and hung up on him. He tried again a few days later, this time
being much more careful with his words.

Emmanuel hung up the phone and firmed his
resolve to stay away from the drugs; she'd agreed to let him visit
with the boy today, and the boy meant everything to him. Karen was
a close second, and he fully intended to use the opportunity to try
and resolve a few things with her, but the boy was first and
foremost in his heart, and he couldn't let the kid see him looking
like a washout. It was bad to be a failure in the eyes of the
world, but for the boy to see him that way would probably kill
him.

He straightened out the wrinkles in his
shirt, put his cell-phone into his front pocket and started to
reach for his keys before remembering that he no longer had a car.
He'd lost a lot on that last binge, more than just the car. Things
were running to an end. And now he himself was running to catch a
bus.

He didn't have time to complain; you either
accepted what you had and made do, or you griped at opportunity's
backside as it passed.

"No one ever gave me a chance, not a real
chance, especially not you."

The words failed to inspire her corpse, and
Scott sat heavily down upon the floor of his old apartment, alone
in his world of misery. The bitch hadn't ever really loved him; she
just wanted to use him as a sperm donor and a piggy bank, and when
he wouldn't let her have either, she tried getting rid of him. She
tried
, you had to give her that, but Scott wasn't ready to
let her go. He wouldn't
ever
be ready to let her go. And now
he wouldn't ever have to.

A tiny black fly crawled out from under the
wet skin in the corner of his eye, shook itself dry and buzzed
away.

He fixed himself a joint of her crappy, leafy
pot—
her
pot? She'd gotten it from him—and pulled the beer
out of the fridge. She still had two left over from his last
six-pack; he was surprised she hadn't drunk it, but then she was
never one for beer. She liked the harder stuff that came in
expensive bottles.

His mother had been a beer drinker, though;
he'd gotten that taste from her side of the family. Even on her
deathbed, an early passing at sixty-eight, her insides eaten up by
the cancer, she'd hounded him to go to the store one last time for
her on a beer run. It was too pitiful for him to refuse, even
though it was during one of his many attempts to quit drinking.
This one had almost been successful, too; his mother's illness had
scared him deeply and he'd gotten the superstitious idea that if
he'd quit drinking it might somehow cure her. He'd even made it a
whole six weeks completely dry, and then she'd dropped the bomb on
him.

It was her dying wish that he listen to her
confession. She hadn't set foot in a church for over thirty years,
didn't buy into the whole Catholicism trip any longer, but her
spirit couldn't rest easy until it'd been divested of its burden
and he was the only one around to listen to her. He couldn't tell
her no. What followed was the story of a lifetime spent in
nightmare.

She'd started by asking him to put one of her
records on the old turntable, a scratchy vinyl of 'Peter and the
Wolf.' She insisted that he drink with her while she told her
story, and how could he refuse his dying mother's last wish? She
had a lot of last wishes over the years it seemed, and of course
she deserved to have every one of them granted.

They might have even been responsible for her
dying, if you looked at it that way, but whatever...

Her father had been an airman, not the pilot
who dropped the bombs on Japan but the one who'd come after in case
something happened to the real bomber. They'd called him "Mister
Backup Plan." After the war, he went to work for the airlines,
which meant a lot of moving around for their family from base to
base, all over the country but still in the US. He must've stayed
in the military, though; he sometimes had the dire men in uniforms
over to the house, and she and her mother would be forced into
their rooms so that the men could meet in private. They never
talked about it and she was too young to understand, but she
recognized that her father was doing special work for the
government. It needed to be kept secret. He was doing something
important.

Her father was taking part in something
bigger than himself, bigger than any one of them, and it was for
the good of the whole country. That was what he told her when he
did the horrible things to her. How could raping a child be good
for the nation's welfare? It was what he'd told her, that he had
his orders and she had hers too. Her suffering was going to help
them understand how to stop all suffering. It didn't make sense to
her, but she was too small to get a decision in the matter.

She'd tried to tell her mother about what was
happening to her, to ask for her help to keep daddy away, but her
mother had just pretended that she couldn't hear her and sent her
to her room. And her father sent her to other men, who did the same
things to her, and even worse, so much of it she couldn't actually
remember. There had been a lot of electric shock, so many needles
full of strange and horrible drugs; she was thankful they'd taken
her memories away—of all that time spent in her father's house,
there wasn't really any of it worth remembering.

She'd tried to escape through marriage, met
the perfect boy her last year in high school and gotten pregnant
right away, but it hadn't been any better. She'd miscarried, and
Robert turned mean. The nightmare had come back to pick up right
where it left off.