Orgonomicon (13 page)

After Her meeting with the spirit entity
representing the intelligence of the Terran planet, She had begun
to worry that She might be losing more than just gene-stock from
the clone vats, that entire sectors of memory-storage may have been
compromised by Her arch enemy. The Queen could only guess the uses
to which Her adversary would pit the stolen soul against its former
master.

It was one loss after the next; it was
unacceptable.

William had seen colors that didn't exist, or
at least he was to find out that they weren't
supposed
to
exist, and then they would exist no more.

They were colors like the distorting rainbows
made of oil-slick sheen seen in the afterimages of things, flashing
and brilliant and occluded and occulted all at the same time. The
time he'd barely avoided being eaten by the giant dog when he was
four years old—there had been a cloud of dark reds and purples that
faded at his touch; when his mother and father were getting a
divorce, the house had choked him with sticky browns that oozed
depression; the most beautiful colors he'd ever seen had been
around two people in love.

The colors were a thing of relaxation,
permission—a phenomenon only seen when one gave up control. They
were there until you tried to look directly at them and then they
went away, remaining only at the edges of one's vision or
disappearing behind closed eyelids. That was how come they were so
easy to forget, to pretend they never existed.

The one time he'd spoken to his father about
the colors, he'd been offhandedly reprimanded, scolded for saying a
wrong thing and made to feel ashamed—in such a short while after,
the colors had all but gone away. They became difficult to see, and
he had to remember to look for them instead of relying on them to
show themselves. They were a secret language he did not want to
forget, but in time their brightness would dim and then fade
altogether.

He'd still been very young when one day
William was left to play with the other children on the banks of
the streambed, to beat the water with his long sticks while his
mother sat at the clumsy picnic table and stole away her secret
cigarette. No one was watching him.

The other kids had all shied away from him,
aware that something about him was off, and William found himself
in the center of an empty space on the shore while the screaming
and the horseplay went on all around him. He didn't mind.

There were insects scuttling in the mud and
the muck down close to the water; he'd held his open palm over them
and watched them gather in response to the opalescent cascade
coming from it, bemused at how they formed a seething mass that
responded to his gestures. He'd pulled his hand away and smiled,
and they'd dispersed as if they'd never been there.

His mother had been standing behind him,
angrily stubbing out her cigarette. "
Don't
do that!
Bad!"

The smile receded, but did not go away. A
potato bug crawled off his fingertip and tumbled between some
rocks.

"I'm sorry mother, I didn't mean to scare
you," he'd said. He hadn't.

"Why are you talking that way? What's wrong
with you? You're freaking me out. Come on, let's get you home and
get some dinner into you and put you down for bed." They'd left the
park and gone home.

They'd had spaghetti for dinner that
night.

Lee straightened his tie, tightened the tuck
of his spotless white dress-shirt and adjusted his glasses. He
hadn't gotten a chance to mentally prepare himself ahead of time
for what he was about to endure—department heads never personally
called for the IT staff unless something had gone drastically
wrong, like international crisis wrong. Nothing good would come of
this. Sometimes, if someone had screwed up
really
bad—or was
a spy for a foreign nation—they'd quietly disappear and never be
seen in the workplace again.

It was never good when the brass wanted to
see you; they were all ex-military, and he was and always would be
a civilian contractor. He supposed that was why he never landed any
of the big tickets and was always stuck in maintenance. He didn't
mind that. He just wanted to keep his job, which he'd always tried
to do to the best of his ability, and his life, for one more
day.

He swallowed a couple tablets for the
headache and pushed the door open.

It turned out to be nothing more important
than replacing some server banks in the restricted wing.

Normally they'd have given it to Jensen, but
he was out sick again today and there'd been no one else qualified
to do it on duty; they were HomSec computers and he was the only
other one on staff with the security clearance to enter the
building. It was a simple swap and drop, but you had to have a
badge card and an armed escort or they wouldn't let you anywhere
near it. The gate had a laser-beam that stabbed you in the eye to
take retinal prints.

So much ado for the collecting of people's
emails. He hoped the Agency enjoyed looking at pictures of
sandwiches as much as he did, and hoped they had to look at every
last single damn one of them.

Walking down the long rows of towering
stacks, the noise and heat and vibration from the machines set his
head buzzing again.

"Hey, do you mind if I take some aspirin?" he
asked his guard, feeling stupid.

"What do I care? Knock yourself out." The
guard was unimpressed by his willingness to cooperate with
authority. His headache was killing him.

His doctor had diagnosed him with cancer, an
aggressive tumor the size of a lemon squatting on his frontal lobe.
He hadn't suffered any permanent visual loss yet, beyond one
short-lived incident the day before, but the doctor had told him to
expect it. He hadn't even told his wife yet, much less his boss.
This was supposed to be his last day, before he went into surgery
the following morning. They didn't want him taking any chances. It
was going to be now or.... It was going to be now.

The guard brought him to the end of a bank of
machines, the last of them darkened and silent, then turned away
and started walking back toward the door.

"I'll be in the hall," he said, without
turning around.

He put the spare server units down on the
ground and fiddled for the screw that mounted the burnt component
to the framing. A sudden throbbing caused him to stop, put his hand
up to his sweaty forehead, and wince away from the popping sparkles
flashing in his eyes. He kneeled in front of the computers frozen
with pain, and when his vision cleared it left behind a man-shaped
patch of sparks that loomed up immediately next to him and appeared
to be staring at him intently. His mouth gaped in wonder and he
began to recoil, when he thought, rather than heard, the voice
directly in his head: "It sees me?"

Lee called out, "Oh, hell no!" and backed
away from the creature of molten light, crab-walking into the wall
behind him and bouncing to a stop. The creature didn't move. He
panicked in short, gasping breaths as the images overwhelmed, a
flood of information gushing from the creature and washing through
him.

Before the rise of the mammalian hominid, the
world had been populated by spirit only, sparkling things not
confined to form. Some of these beings had eschewed the Fall and
remained in their non-corporeal bodies, their lives separated by an
invisible dimension from the common plane, yet enabled still to
interact with it. These creatures were known in some lands as the
djinni, and in others as poltergeists or wendigo, the fae and the
katchina nation, the chitahuli and nephilim. They were able to
insert their thoughts into men's minds, thinking them their own,
and thus exerted influence over worldly affairs. In the true
timeline of the Earth, these creatures had existed whether humanity
had developed into civilizations or not, had been and had remained
as they were, whether the alien grays tampered with their causality
or bypassed the planet entirely. Rebuffed and unable to conquer,
the grays attempted alliances with them against the planet's other
inhabitants, but found them too unreliable. Enmity was sworn.

He knew this all and more, in great detail
for exactly four seconds before the invisible person grabbed him by
the face and slammed the back of his head into the wall of server
computers until it left behind a bloody smear. A spark passed from
the base of his skull into the metal framework of the tower and was
gone.

Lee's body was found the next morning, the
death deemed unremarkable—the security footage was reviewed and it
was disturbing, but what had shown up looked like nothing more than
a man having a rather violent epileptic seizure. The office opened
for business; the everyday work of observing the world commenced in
everyday fashion; electronic bits peppered the grid and papers
changed hands. Business as usual.

Scott held the papers in his hands and
pointed his face at them, but was unable to make heads or tails of
it. Mike handed him another letter.

"Dude, this one looks even worse. Says you
owe the government twenty-seven thousand dollars and eighteen
cents. What the fuck have you been doing, Scott?"

"I don't know," Scott answered, running his
fingers through his beard. "I feel like I'm missing a lot of time.
What day is this?" He took another pull off the bottle.

"Thursday. The twelfth. You've missed three
appointments with the welfare office and the taxmen are on your
ass. And that hospital bill. You're fucked, dude."

"Dude, I
am
fucked. What am I going to
do?" The panic was setting in again and he squirmed in his chair.
There wasn't enough whiskey left in the bottle for this.

"Something's wrong with me. I gotta figure
this out."

"Yeah you do. I got a doctor you can go to, a
head shrinker."

"I ain't going to no head shrinker!"

"You got to. He'll get you set up with the
welfare people, tell them you're crazy and you'll get set up. You
can fix this."

"I don't want nobody screwing with my head!
I'm bad enough off as it is!"

"You'll see, this guy is all right. He'll
take care of you. You need it."

Scott didn't answer right away; he pulled an
image through the fever cloud and brought it close to him, of a
moment from his life when he wasn't in constant pain, filled with
loud and painful voices, a time when he'd been clear and happy.
Maybe someone
could
help him. Because he needed it; things
were bad now.

Real bad.

"All right, I'll go."

"Good boy. You'll see. I know what I'm
talking about. Sigma teddybear over and out, Scott. Good
night."

Scott felt the warmth of the couch, felt the
warmth of sleep suffusing his body, the warmth of the whiskey and
the warmth in his lap as he pissed his pants and passed out.

Scott woke up itching.

His arms were covered in broken hives, and
when he pulled off his sodden, stinking pants he found that his
legs were too. The crawling sensations under his skin were enough
to drive him mad. A quick, dazed look in the mirror showed blood
leaking into the corner of one eye, staining it red.

He moaned, then ran the faucet and splashed
cold water on his face. When he pulled back the mirror to look for
pills, he caught the reflection of a monster standing behind him, a
beast with his features but broken and muddy, run together and
poking out at odd angles. It was gone when he looked again.

His life was turning into an actual
nightmare.

Aboard the Hive-ship, deep in the hellish
darkness and damp of the generator station, a human coupler-unit
malfunctioned and broke apart; two bodies, a man and a woman, that
had been organically fused together tore apart along the seams. The
man's tongue detached from the woman's, the nano-interface wires
slipped out of their stagings between their throats, and the two
naked bodies dropped to the layer of filth that covered the floor,
leaving the condenser coil that had wrapped around their join now
to suck feeble ions from empty air. A shudder passed through the
system and two more units dropped out, leaving the slick floor
littered with six withered, thankful corpses.

Their bodies dead, they were now
free
,
and the lights from the departing souls shown all the brighter for
their joy. From their singing came a wave of white light that
burned away the filth of the alien energy harvesters, but then the
souls were gone, and the gray aliens came in swarming numbers to
investigate the source of the alarms and soon the broken pairings
were replaced, the unit restarted and everything returned to
normal.

Scott woke up and checked his surroundings:
his mom's apartment, on the couch, the lights were off but the LEDs
of the entertainment center shed an eerie glow, he was alone. He
turned on a lamp. There would be a beer somewhere on the coffee
table next to him, amongst the threatening letters and cigarette
cartons and empty glasses and all the litter that never got thrown
away.

Something about one of the letters caught his
eye—not the one from the lawyers, not the one from the state, a
bright glowing one he hadn't seen before—and he fished it out from
between the others and squinted at it.

He caught himself reading it out loud. "The
rabbit's fur is soft. The rabbit's fur is wet. The rabbit's fur
is…"

And then his mom was yelling at him to be
quiet, she was an old lady and needed her sleep. Scott read the
rest of the letter to himself in a quieter voice, and knew what his
instructions were, and where to find the weapon.

He rose, glanced into the mirrored frame of
the flower print on the wall, and saw the blossoming stains of
ruptured blood vessels in the corners of both his eyes, and the
deep black circles going all the way around them. He didn't care.
He scratched absentmindedly at the scabs around his wrist, catching
a fiber under his fingernail and dislodging a fine, bright blue
thread. He pulled at it, and it pulled back, and curled away back
under his skin.