Orgonomicon (12 page)

This was to be no easy accomplishment. He
could hear their thoughts, at first, much as it had been when he
was with the Hive, but fainter and without the sense of
unquestioning obedience. And the first thing they had told him had
been to stop listening. It was his first and greatest strength, and
they needed him to relinquish it. People were self-contradictory
like that, because you couldn't ever turn the silent inner voice
off completely—you could only learn to talk to yourself louder and
louder until you drowned it out. And you kept it up, always. It was
a draining experience. It was why humans were half-asleep all the
time. And it was what they demanded of each other, and of him.

William then went to school, where he
completed the process of his unlearning. Interacting with other
humans in a rigidly-structured environment wasn't any different
than the situation he'd come from, but the humans were chaotic
about it, schizoid and maladjusted. Sometimes a behavior that had
been expressly forbidden would instead be rewarded, or vice versa.
Often one thing would be said while another was meant. Approval and
condemnation came on an undeclared basis that was always changing.
There was never any
certainty
. But gradually William came to
expect this unreliability, even to think of it as normal and
pretend to find an order within the mess of human affairs, and to
accept it as his own.

If he was to be human this time around, he
would be the best human he could be. If humanity was a road leading
from past to future, he would be a paving stone; if history was a
machine, he would be its wheel, rolling into destiny.

And yet his fate was not entirely his own to
decide; there were still others who had designs upon him.

He couldn't remember when the first time was
that he'd seen the strange things he'd come to call the 'invisible
people,' and would have forgotten them completely like everyone
else around him, if they hadn't singled him out to interact with.
Why they'd chosen him wasn't obvious—it probably had something to
do with who he'd been, before—nor did he know what purpose they
thought he should serve.

The invisible people came and went according
to their own set of priorities which he was not privy to know,
would reveal nothing more of themselves to him than flashes of
light and darkness in his peripheral vision; they would be seen as
clear, shimmering outlines distinct against the landscape in the
corners of his eyes, but whenever he turned to face them, they
would vanish completely away. Only once did one remain when he
faced it down, and it was soon captured and taken off by other
unseen aggressors before he had any idea of what had happened. They
seemed to have a code of their own against interacting with humans,
which they reinforced as actively as the humans reinforced and
upheld their own.

After the first time he tried to tell his
mother about them he'd never brought them up again. The look of
horror, the judgment, the naked, raw disapproval she'd shown him at
the mention of
those things which did not exist
left such a
deep impression that to avoid ever feeling such a hurt again, he
would keep his silence.

But the creatures themselves would not let
him put them out of his mind. They continued to appear to him,
always remaining an untouchable force just outside his reach.

And then one day one stopped for him, and
stared at him with golden eyes. For a while, it became his
world.

They were the djinni, the first people, an
ancient race of advanced serpentines that had grown and evolved on
the earth long, long before any of the hairy ones had spawned. This
the being had told him, and much more besides.

Where humankind had established the
boundaries of possibility through their belief in what was real and
sealed their dominion in bonds of glass and iron, the djinni had
known no such limitation. Their sorcerers had imagined a world of
truly limitless permutations, and thus given away their own
solidity; they had become masters of dreaming who lost themselves
into the dream and did not want to find their way back. Without the
restraint of a physical shell, the djinni had freed themselves to
become anything they could conceive of and had lost to the ability
to retain who they once were, and had so given the earth over to
those who came behind them. They were in the Earth, but not
of
the earth.

This the being had told him, speaking
directly into William's mind as the boy slowly but surely lost
himself into the human collective, shedding forever his past among
the Outlanders. It waved its hands around his body and drew away
long streamers of a thin plasma that rapidly evaporated, leaving
him vertiginous as the remains of his alien heritage went. William
had been a being enslaved by the groupthink of its last incarnation
and resisted with mixed feelings his assimilation into the
unfamiliar body of beliefs and behaviors that his new species
shared, but these limitations were to become the basis of his
strength, according to what the djinni would have him believe.

They were dinosaurs, as best as William could
tell, a sort of lizard man that had grown up millions and millions
of years ago and become stronger than even the human men of today,
with brighter minds and farther-reaching vision. They'd lived in
the world long enough to learn all its laws, and then long enough
to recognize the aspects of themselves that weren't bound by those
laws.

It was an idea so big the creature fed it to
him in the form of pictures:

A fog cleared and William saw a pink and blue
fringed lizard walking upright in a tunnel; it dropped to all fours
and skittered at breathtaking speeds through the underground
network until it came to a brightly-lit chamber housing a large
stone wheel that spun with a noise like a waterfall, infusing the
air with static and shooting great arcs of electricity from its
axle to splash into the walls and away.

The lizard held up a claw and absorbed a
passing spark, taking the energy into its body as nutriment, and
then left the chamber again to continue its run through the
tunnels.

Soon it came to its own chamber, a small
cubicle with a nest of papier-mâché in one corner. The lizard had
laid its last clutch of eggs many years ago, but it now longed to
share the old nest where it slept with another. It kicked backward
against the wall of its cubicle, punching a small hole through to
the next room over.

The lizard in the other cubicle was not in
the mood for company, did not want to share domiciles. It gnashed
its jaws and hissed.

The pink-and-blue lizard's dorsal spine
drooped and its chest sunk; it let out a deep sigh, allowed its
shoulders and fore-claws to droop, and then sunk dead to the
ground. Immediately, another form just like the first stepped out
of the inanimate shell and the lizard stood back up, coldly
regarded William watching it, and then leapt upwards and
disappeared through the ceiling.

The second lizard watched the apparition
disappear and then set about devouring the body slowly and
noisily.

It finished its meal and swallowed the bones,
then lay down to sleep, snoring loudly; William watched the second
lizard step out of its body and give chase after the first,
scenting its unique identity lingering on the shells of quivering
atoms. It gave a quick, quizzical look at William's astral form and
then chased after its departed mate, with William close behind.

The lizard-person didn't seem to mind the
outsider's presence as William followed it through unfamiliar
landscapes of towering fauna and jagged, newly-formed hillsides.
William was not aware how he managed to keep pace with the
creature; it seemed to be no more complicated than to simply keep
his attention fixed on it and it would drag him in its wake; he
followed it in its pursuit until it caught up and overcame the
other. What followed was some kind of dogged interrogation which
William was not allowed to witness—the two creatures joined
together the strength of their collective will and pushed him back
into the blackness of the void by himself.

The being returned him to his body, and then
asked him to forget, and William came away changed.

Scott sunk deeper into the couch, putting his
arm up around his wife's shoulders and pressing buttons on the
remote.

The channel switched over to one of the
endless news broadcasts, this one reporting on the latest in a
string of deaths around the country of microbiologists; the only
connecting factor appeared to be their professions, as most had
died by accident, two by suicide. The death in the news was the
most recent and noteworthy only because it had been a murder, and
had happened locally. As the reporter read out the name and cause
of death (coincidentally, the twelfth microbiologist to die in the
past year) a picture displayed briefly on the screen and Scott gave
a start.

They said he fell off a train, but Scott knew
better.

The twelfth such death in less than a year,
but no one thought it was odd…

Scott turn to Ella, "Hey, does that seem
weird to you? What does a microbiologists do, anyway?" His wife
didn't answer him, and Scott pressed the button on the remote,
changing the channel away again.

It was a show about ants, but Scott wasn't
entirely interested. These ants were sick, they were infected with
a fungus that made the ants do things they wouldn't normally do, a
coarse, stringy mushroom that grew through the ant and took over
its brain… A zombie ant.

The ants were boring to him, but Scott found
himself unable to change the channel. Something in him was making
him watch the TV, was making him available to the information
exposing itself for him; Scott was mesmerized by the images of the
struggling ants, hairy with the fibers of the parasitic fungus, but
aggressively bored with it at the same time, repulsed from within
by something in its presentation. It horrified him, and he looked
away on his inside and un-saw it again.

Now he could change the channel. It wasn't on
the screen anymore, and he didn't have to think about it anymore,
either. He was done with it. Ella didn't have anything to say.
Suddenly, he became very tired and lay down on the couch, stretched
out upon it next to her; she sat there with him very still, and
Scott relaxed quickly and fell asleep.

He dreamed of the ants, of taking the hairy
little insects off the ground and holding them up to his eye. He
saw the fibrous growths stretching out from the ants' bodies and
burrowing under his own skin, felt the fibers crawl under his flesh
and multiply. He was sure he was going crazy, that the
creepy-crawling in his organs and the dark streaks in his veins
would drive him insane. The strings worked their way through his
entire body and then began to flex, causing Scott to shudder
against his will. The fungus was making him dance, jumping like a
puppet on the end of a black metal cord.

It was too much; he shuddered and snuffled
himself awake, batted sleepily at the side of his head, and then
fell back into fitful sleep.

This time he was the ant.

He couldn't know what it actually felt like
to be an insect, but he was sure this wasn't it. The nausea, the
pain in his head and raging throughout his entire body, the vertigo
and the urge to vomit but with nothing on his stomach—something was
terribly wrong with him.

It was all he could do to keep putting one
foot in front of the other, in front of the other, in front of the
other, and yet it was indeed all he could do. His entire purpose
was locked up in the idea of finding the leaf, and climbing until
he could go no higher, and there to wait. He would die before he
let anything interrupt his singular purpose (the leaf, the climb,
the wait) but he might also die in all reality before he got to
fulfill that purpose and still he was sure that death itself would
not interfere.

His eyesight was failing, was growing dim and
fuzzy more and more with each step, and still he kept his six feet
going, marching toward the soft green light somewhere lying ahead.
He knew that he would find in that green glow the leaf, just as he
knew that he wouldn't make it, that the thick gray fibers and their
black roots running through him had drained the last of the life
out of him and sucked out his fluids and he would die, he would
die, he would—

He died, and his foot took a step, and his
other foot took a step, and his other foot took a step, and his
other…

And then he was out of his ant-body, the poor
lifeless thing gone over to fungus and plodding along mindlessly
forward to its appointment with the sheep. He watched the body that
had been himself, trudging along in zombification and knew with a
great horror that something similar was going to happen to him.

He drew a deep breath and coughed, bringing
up a black lump of something foul that he immediately spat out. It
hit the ground and crawled away. Scott didn't have the energy to
chase it.

The Queen had been losing mobiles one after
the other, in ever-increasing numbers. Infinitely greater was the
loss of the drones inhabiting the unrecoverable mobiles lost on
planetside missions.

This was one of the darker thought-chains,
usually restricted even from the highest-ranked member of a Hive,
the Queen: it was the knowledge of Herself. The clones were never
to think of themselves as individuals—no drone was to distinguish
itself as different in any way from any other drone that had come
before. The Queen was one of many, who were one. She could never be
distinct from the Hive, nor any of its nestlings, and neither She
nor the Hive could ever be rent asunder.

Redundant multiple memory-chains were encoded
into each mobile, from Queen to drone and all forms in-between,
with perfect replication of the information-laden protein-chains
from body to body, effecting immortality. In this way the Hive had
maintained perfection for millennia. A review of species with
greater internal variation found that they often achieved
interstellar congress much quicker than the group-minds, if they
survived self-annihilation; the Hive had achieved its slow but
total mastery of the elements through sheer persistence, repetition
and memory. Its strength was in its consistency.