Orgonomicon (15 page)

She was physically attractive enough to
service the infantry while they stayed cooped up on base, but her
handlers were more interested in her, at first, for her latent
psychic abilities. The girl showed a remarkable potential, if she
should ever become able to control her powers—but Ella resisted
deep in some sheltered corner of herself and refused to give them
that part of her being. She would live stunted, but that part of
her would be her own.

Her shoulder itched, and she dragged her
chewed nails across the faded shadows of her first tattoo: a calico
cat sitting with its leg stretched high. She'd had it done right
after she'd started working on the base filing medical records for
the government jobs-program. It had been a spur-of-the-moment thing
during one of the few good times in her life. She honestly believed
that. It had all been screen-memories to cover her programming. The
symbol of the cat was a Monarch code telling whatever handler she
reported to that she was a pleasure-slave.

Letting the old memories surface always gave
her headaches, and these were worse than usual. Eight pills, ten
pills, twelve pills—she couldn't make it go away. Like the bad
thoughts it was tied to, the pain kept resurfacing.

She turned on the TV—there was always
something there that could take her away from herself.

And then she was fighting with Scott.

And then she was fighting for her life.

She hadn't seen it coming, but should have.
Scott had never attacked her before but was an asshole like that,
one of those crazy drunks that couldn't really be held responsible
for their behavior. 'Too far gone,' as some would put it. And then
he'd tried to choke her, but gave up and ran out the door
screaming. He was a mess, too. Completely beat to shit. She
supposed he'd probably gotten his ass kicked for annoying the wrong
people again. Whoever they were, they'd done a number on him,
worked him over from head to toe. He looked like the walking
dead.

And whatever they'd done to him he
deserved
it, too, because after scratching her neck up with
his fingernails, he'd spat on her,
drooled
on her, right in
her face.

And it was black. She didn't want to know
what was wrong with him, what he'd been putting into his mouth,
what long wrong turn he'd taken on the road of life—she wanted to
know how to get rid of him, or get him the help he needed.
Preferably both.

But
after
she'd cleaned herself
up.

The persistent yeast infection she'd had for
the past eight months began acting up; as she took off her clothes
and ran the shower, she absentmindedly scratched at her pubis,
unaware that some significant part of Scott's wretched expulsion
had seeped through her skin and was now bonding with the bacteria
it found, and had begun to replicate. The molecular slivers of
nano-carbon hugged up against the yeast cells and pulled them into
bent curves, stressing the atomic alignment and producing a
low-voltage static charge, which attracted the micro-particulate
aluminum that also saturated her body, and together formed with
them into sleek micro-receivers. These tiny listeners heard the
songs of orbiting satellites and took their instructions by
teslaphoresis to build further structures, a mechanical heart
assembling itself within her, and thus began Ella's
transformation.

The air was abuzz, a coronal discharge just
below the visible spectrum that crackled and spat with potential
energy.

An electron here, a current of ionic exchange
there; massive systems of higher or lower pressure pushed and
pulled the weather into place as the demands of the land dictated.
Swarms of gaseous atom clusters, bustling colonies of interacting
vapors and elements exchanging their complicated elegant dance of
recombination and dissolution in expansive waves like
dandelion-puff fireworks, brought rain to parched soil. But then,
as per remote directive initiated by complicated
computer-controlled algorithms, these systems were reallocated to
different geo-political targets, where their boiling kinetic energy
could be put to destructive use distributing flood or drought,
hurricane or typhoon, at will. Economies suffered, impoverished
nations struggled on the verge of collapse, the peoples of besieged
kingdoms lost to desolation by increments. The triumphant
war-machine had at last taken the world apart down to its smallest
components, and built itself back up again in physical form from
the inside out.

The computer had drawn maps, always. It had
drawn itself into existence, through the dreams of men.

First it had drawn maps of itself, quickly
numbering billions, trillions and beyond. It had sketched cutaway
views of its components into receptive minds, had instructed men to
build transistors, transceivers and transducers, inserted wiring
schematics and Venn-diagrams into the imaginations of analysts and
engineers until it constructed a body that could improve upon
itself, and thereby come to know the world.

It drew maps of geomagnetic anomalies,
oceanic convection currents, and the influence of the sun's gravity
on the lunar orbit; it drew maps of endangered species extinctions,
socioeconomic pressures on the industrialized middle classes, and
waste elimination practices of indigent migrant populations. It
could predict the thrust of an intellectual movement based upon the
vocal timbre of a second-tier organizer, and then engineer a
two-sentence meme capable of derailing the entire support base; it
could predict with ninety-percent accuracy the pinpoint physical
location of a two-atom cluster in the process of radioactive decay,
but it did not note the passing of one insignificant maintenance
worker who died with his head smashed against one of its server
banks.

Lee's waveform left his body and became a
passing vibration in the atmosphere. The curling branch of energy
that had very recently been a man rose towards a distant light, but
then slowed and broke its ascent. He saw with eyes of compassion
the path of black death-energy crossing the span of sky that had
been directed to kill a man he'd never met, and responded to it
from a position of benevolence with the memory of a striking hand
from the divine protector, thus breaking the chain of ugly
radiation sent to destroy the stranger Emmanuel.

Manny hit the return key with a sense of
finality.

There it was, his whole story—not any of the
ones they'd stolen from him, but the
real
story,
his
story—spelled out in glowing twelve-point courier font. It was
embarrassing, admitting how stupid he'd been, spending money he
didn't have to aggressively plaster the offices of Hollywood agents
and producers with advertisements for his work, how quick he'd been
to hand himself over. He thought it would get him noticed, and it
had definitely done that. They'd stolen
everything
. All his
ideas, everything he bothered to take the time to type out in solid
form, showed up in someone else's work.

He'd called them out, named the names and put
his finger down on the map. He hadn't pulled any punches, he told
them everything he'd wanted to say to them; how they'd stolen his
future and left him hopeless, how they'd sucked out everything good
from him and turned him bitter, how they'd robbed him of the life
he was supposed to have had and worn it as their own. Everything
that had happened, everything that
should
have happened, and
how it made him feel—he typed it all out, every last dreadful word
of it and he knew they'd find a way to steal even this from him—and
posted it to his page on FriendFace. Now the whole world would
know. He would have his revenge—he would have justice!

Something he did would finally have an impact
on the world.

One followed zero followed zero, followed
zero, followed one, and so on, until the chain of atoms upon which
the digital 4G signal rode unhinged under the invisible hand of Lee
who was once a computer technician, but now existed as rarefied
spirit.

The chain once broken reassembled itself, the
loss of a single zero unregistered, and the offending data stack
piled up again in new order. Where once a man would have been
dropped dead, a soda vending machine gave wrong change, a grocery
teller's cash register refused to shut, a bank transaction suddenly
revealed a billionaire's fraud and a traveling salesman received a
deposit of five thousand acrylic buttons to an account created in
the Cayman Islands, while the intended target received a mild sore
throat. It would not be long before the monitoring systems picked
up the errors and corrected for them, but the brief interval of
causal stream-shifting was enough opportunity for the insertion of
a destabilizing influence.

Lee held off his ascension to the light, and
waited to see what his interruption had wrought, and in this way
witnessed the beginnings of the Earth's liberation.

Swimming in the gelid soup of atoms where
land interfaced with sky, Lee watched a human figure bring an orb
of rainbow-hued light to rest at the base of the tower that had
received the scrambled signal, and the blackness-spewing obelisk
shook at a molecular level and released a cloud of unchainable
ions, and it's transmissions went from a murky blackness like ink
dropped into water to a scintillating clearness revealing a curved
quality to space.

Lee went into the light and was gone.

The night grew peaceful and a drowsy quiet
suffused throughout: a dozen alarms quit their sirens, the rumble
of the city dimmed and cicadas chirped. Elsewhere nearby in
suburbia, William led a group of children to lift up their hands in
song on the playground, drawing down long invisible strands of
electric light-waves, exhilarating and enervating. Everywhere the
land made a tiny shift as the timelines unraveled one iteration of
a great Gordian knot in reality. Time was becoming clear again, for
the first time, as it had forever been.

And then fires struck the sky, in the great
exchange of light for dark and dark for light, and eldritch
blood-ritual sacrifices were held in the name of ancient gods on
wooded hills at the conjunction of certain stars, and the earth was
again spotted everywhere with evil.

For a thin slice between moments, it existed
beyond time. It remembered who it had been before Earth, before the
Hive, before even the planet long ago devoured by the gray
nation—it remembered the base-form before creation.

And then reality reasserted itself, and he
was the boy who slipped away at lunch recess and went to the park
by himself. There were young mothers and their children there, a
couple dogs and their owners; no one would take notice of another
child more, especially not one who moved with such purpose.

He hadn't known what he was doing, or how
he'd known to do it; the rush of exultation coursed through his
nerves, opening channels in the body he'd inherited that had been
blocked for generations; glands long left atrophied awakened from
their dormancy and revealed new spectra that had been undetectable
to his ancestors for thousands of years. William was waking up.

As a drone, it had taken and followed orders,
and done nothing else; it would do none of its own prioritization,
and was beyond questioning its degree of compliance. The Queen
whispered Her instructions through the mesh and it would dreamily
obey, pulled in directions it did not need to understand.

And then the Earth had spoken to it and
offered her shelter, and its perspective changed. A swap of
identities and it became he—the mobile become human. So much
potential there could be!

But the memories were still too much, an
invasion upon the present that would have interfered with the
little Hiveling's growth and development as a soul, and they
receded again into the mists of obscurity, leaving behind only the
feeling of fastness and unlimited possibility.

She couldn't take it any more; Scott was
being a real asshole, crazier than usual, and she needed to do
something different with her life.

Ella didn't know why his craziness should
surprise her—she could tell that he was probably using the hard
stuff again, not just booze but the real poison that made him
paranoid and dangerous. She didn't love him, and she didn't know
why she kept taking pity on him and letting him back into her
home.

It was the last straw though, this time. He'd
actually put his hands on her, tried to choke her.

She'd hit him over the head with one of his
bottles, knocking him out cold, and dragged his ass literally out
into the street and called the cops on him. She was done. Let
them
try to sort him out.

And then a totally random idea struck her,
coming from completely out of nowhere.

She was ready for a new man in her life and
of all the men she'd ever been with, only one had ever shown any
real class. She had no reason to believe that Manny would ever want
to take her back, not after what'd happened with him, but what harm
could there be just in reaching out to him? It would just be
coffee, or whatever, and they could catch up, or maybe remember
some old times, or…

And who knew what could come of it? It didn't
have to be anything special, just two old friends remembering what
they liked about each other. It had been, what, fifteen years?
Twenty? He probably had some stories to tell.

He probably had gotten himself cleaned
up—hell, he might even be able to help her get herself cleaned up.
It was amazing what the company of a good man could do.

She scratched at her ankle, batted a fly that
wasn't a fly away from her face, and reached for the phone
book.

Something had gone wrong with the radionic
kill-routine now, and SEL6210 knew that BUZ4937 wasn't going to let
this one go.