Orgonomicon (18 page)

Jaime was terrified.

He'd been walking home from school, just like
he'd done every day for the past two years since he'd left primary
for middle school and admitted that he hated riding the bus, when
the windowless white van pulled up beside him.

The door slid open and two men with ski masks
over their faces jumped out and put a bag over his head and threw
him roughly into the van. Jaime was small for his age and lacked
confidence, and the two men overpowered him easily. They jabbed at
him with a buzzing rod, and he fell unconscious in a burst of
pain.

The next time he opened his eyes, he was
being carried under someone's armpit up some steps into a building.
It was night, he had no idea where he was or what was going to
happen to him. He didn't understand the language the men spoke or
what they wanted him to do. They sounded Russian.

He was thrown against a wall and fell down,
and they clamped shackles on his legs.

Somewhere deep in the pulsing heart of the
Hiveship, the Queen disengaged the uplink-cabling from Her central
brain and flexed her long limbs, and screamed.

She was frustrated. The planet-body still
hadn't succumbed to Her countless onslaughts and infiltrations
along the time matrix, had insisted upon defying her invasions. The
Earthlings were slow to accept interbreeding with Her kind.

She hated their fleshiness. She hated their
dumb empathy, a remnant of the true telepathy She couldn't breed
all the way out of their genes, no matter what alterations She made
to them. It was suspected to be an effect of the planetary field,
subject to the whims of an inorganic being, and possibly related to
the strangeness effect that inconvenienced Her so. It was a game, a
battle of wills, and She would not allow herself to be taken for a
sore loser. She hated their stubbornness, their idiot will to
resist.

The game had begun with the stripping of
human genetics.

Upon first finding the system, The Hive had
traveled forward and back through its timeline, observing from a
hidden position how it would evolve and how it had become, and what
beings would ride closest to its heart. She'd almost been
prematurely discovered then, by the rough creatures inhabiting the
densest areas, discovering them to possess psychic vision at least
as strong as Her own, if not more powerful. They'd chosen as a
species to leave temporal alteration alone for the most part,
however, unlike Her and the Hive, and so now suffered powerless
against its effects.

And so she'd gone into their distant past and
taken from them a fiber of their beings, and the planet was remade
more closely in Her shape. Their eyes grew dim and they became
blinded to Her true nature, and some were to become fooled and
accept Her gifts. They gave away their power to envision; in
ever-greater numbers, they chose to garb themselves in Her flesh
and so lose their birthright heritage. The interblending of human
and alien DNA benefited none but the Queen and Her brood.

They gave Her their minds, and still there
was an element that resisted her. All they had to do was to
choose
, of their collective freewill, to give over the
planet to Her. It would be good for the Hive; it would be
best
. For the Hive, for whoever was left to become everyone.
And they would be with Her, and would know the wisdom of becoming
one. It was such a simple thing, it was to be expected. And the
green mother had shown that it would shed its skin, and kill almost
everything that walked, flew, swam or crawled upon it and begin all
over again in fresh flesh, in order to shirk Her embrace.

Cycle after cycle, the Gaian titan and the
Hive Queen fought for control of the physical dimension, and the
earth was scarred with Her many wars against it. Humanity rose and
fell and rose and fell, and built great wonders only to destroy
itself in war, and the erasing hand of history's censors would pass
over traces of alterations that couldn't be completely
dispelled—monolithic constructs of stone in impossible
arrangements, buried deep in dense jungles or beneath mile wide
sheets of radioactive glass under desert sands, or high atop frozen
peaks where the air was too thin to breathe, or in sunken ruins
below the ocean's waves. The Queen's interferences with the planet
were many and pointed, and their wounds deep, and still it would
not yield, and the piled-up encrustation of Her evidence would
threaten to reveal Her design.

But then the tides of battle would turn again
and the Queen reached into the bodies of those who shared Her
physiology, rewriting their minds and their memories and making
them forgetful and blinded. They began to aid Her in their
conquest. The machine they'd built under her guidance had been
functioning almost perfectly,…

And then something had disrupted the
system.

The small hairy things were fighting back
again
.

"I'm going to run a quick check on that last
routine. I won't be a minute. You don't need to supervise." Agent
SEL6210 sat in the front of the car next to BUZ4937, who drove like
he was the last man on earth.

"Leave it alone. We're off mission. There
haven't been any psi-directives issued since. Sit your ass in your
seat and enjoy the drive."

"I'm the one who has to be stuck in a car
with you. Open a vent or something. I'll only observe the progress,
I won't take any action. I just want to see how the next agent
deals with it. I'd like to figure out where I went wrong."

It was a sentiment he preferred to revealing
his true motive, and if he focused solely on that one thought, he
might be able to get in his action before being found out…

The Buzzsaw rolled his eyes and tsk'ed at
him, but did not deny. It was good enough for him.

He much preferred the new laptop-based
hardware; amongst the updates had been software that included a log
function so he could pull up old sessions from a native storage
file without having to be on a local network. He could work on the
go, and he could work alone, with a machine like this. And he could
do it without being monitored in real time by a suspicious sysop.
Too bad they'd just been proscripted. He wouldn't run any routines,
would only catalogue events; he wouldn't technically be breaking
the rules. It would be a shame not to use a machine as fine as this
one. He took the dark gray rectangle and flipped open its lid, drew
the sleek, newer, smaller headset over his brow and plugged the
cable into the jack on its side.

The machine booted and SEL6210 looked out at
the road ahead, concerned for the string of failures he'd suffered
on this last mission. The entire thing, for him, had been a botch.
Until very recently, his success rate had been one hundred percent.
He'd supposed that was why he'd been picked for this mission; he'd
heard rumors that it was a difficult case, a tangled knot of
unpredictable causality, the worst type of unknown: the
unforeseeable.

The Agency didn't like to admit that these
anomalies existed, though they were studied the most exhaustively,
for they tended to yield breakthrough results. Assimilation of the
new paradigm, however, was to be carefully shepherded, so that
dangerous new ideas could sweep nothing away with them in their
passing. Truth was sanitized before it was disseminated. He would
remember anything he was told to remember, forget what he was told
to forget.

It was just a tiny displacement of mind—and
that must be why he was okay with putting another little part aside
for himself, for what he was doing. It was only fair that he should
get to keep one little sliver of the fractured psyche they'd left
him.

He concentrated on his wrongness, on how he'd
failed so miserably and how it might be possible to redeem himself,
and opened the focal interface.

He liked this machine so much better.

His last case, a geographic disturbance
marked by three fluxing change-nodes, was on top. He'd just look
and see how it had progressed, what readings had been taken, what
actions if any had been committed since last he'd tried his hand at
it.

"Background DOR is steadily on the rise…
Looks like my goodbye gift had its intended effect. At least it
wasn't a total loss."

BUZ4937 didn't say anything, but pressed the
gas pedal to the floor and drowned him out with the roaring of the
engine. He went back to studying his workstation.

"There's a DOR-pulse scheduled for just under
four hours from now. Maybe I'll be redeemed after all."

"I wouldn't count on it. Relying on luck!
You're a real asshole, you know that."

SEL6210 put the laptop to sleep and glared
out the side window; once again, his zeal for the work was spoiled.
The night rolled by in miles per hostility with no one speaking and
the cigarettes burning one after the other. He just missed by
seconds a perturbing spike in the data, and a fluctuating wave of
interference that spelled uncharted consequences.

He was too scared to think about what was
going to happen next, but it was obvious there was no way it could
be anything other than tragedy.

Jaime was surrounded by old men in dark robes
who had taken over for the gunmen in torturing him. Unlike the
gunmen, these men did not look down on him in contempt—they had
true hunger in their eyes.

He'd been pinned to the ground in the middle
of a painted circle by men who held his hands and feet. They
brought in a goat on a rope and cut its throat, sacrificed it right
there in front of him and adorned the walls and floor with its
blood, and he knew that nothing good would be coming for him. The
coppery smell choked him and his eyes watered—could it be a trick
of the terrible lighting, that it looked like the bloody runes
glowed with a light of their own?

And the men chanted together and then
violated him horribly, wounding him and leaving him alive. He was
pretty sure he was still alive.

He didn't want to be.

The torture, the terror—it was too much to
bear. He dissociated and left in his astral form, fleeing the
painful prison to a singing emptiness calling him home, but one of
the old men saw him leaving and pulled him down away from the
ceiling with the tip of a curly dagger and shoved him back into his
body.

The man smeared a foul paste on his lips and
forehead with his thumb, sealing him into his tortured bones, all
the while muttering in a language Jaime didn't know but which spoke
of death and things older than death that waited their turn to rule
the planet again, for the first time.

"Yes!"

"Do you love her?"

"Yes!"

"Do you love her?"

"Yes, yes, yes already!"

"Then you must kill her."

The voices had let up on him then for a
little while, and the quiet he hadn't known since forever settled
upon him, so that his horror had been blended with peace of mind,
and a kind of detachment stole over and through him, and he could
accept his destiny.

Getting to that destiny would go by in a
dream; he'd shambled along the sidewalk in a bulb of invisibility,
and those who had seen him had pulled away from him in horror and
erased his image from their minds.

The one guy who actually did notice him on
the street was just a small, middle-aged nobody who shrank when
yelled at and tried to get away from him by crossing the road, but
Scott hadn't wanted to let the little guy get away. Something about
him made you want to yell at him, and Scott's whole body hurt like
an ingrown toenail banged against a brick, and he was ready to let
off a little steam on someone, and so he spat out the first words
that popped into his head:

"You little bitch, you can't run from them.
They know everything about you."

Scott watched him pick up his feet and run
away and decided let the man go—he was ready to just get this all
over with. Let the windstorm take him wherever it will.

He had the streets to himself, and they
passed in a blur of sameness until he found one in particular whose
lights dazzled him, and the laughter in the shadows called him
further, and the tilt-a-whirl of everything nudged him still
further forward, until he found himself on a familiar doorstop.
This was where it all began. This was where it ended. This was
where he was to do it, where he was to fulfill his destiny.

The apartment was unlit, quiet; Ella was
either out or asleep. He went around to the back of the building
where there was a wooded copse, hid among the shrubs and watched
her bedroom window for a few hours, or a few minutes, it was hard
to tell.

She didn't show up, and after another few
moments Scott took off his jacket, held it against the window and
punched the glass out. Despite his precautions, a large piece left
hanging in the frame slipped out and sliced him across the forearm.
A light turned on in the next unit over, and Scott screamed in a
pitch just below human hearing, and the light turned back off.
Scott pushed the rest of the broken window out of the way and
climbed over the sill.

She wasn't home. He sat down in the middle of
her bedroom floor, in a puddled trail of blackened gore leading to
him, and waited in the dark while the binding threads sewed him
back together from the inside out.

The Gaian time-knot was unraveling, slipping
its hitches and shaking its fibers loose.

A clot in the causality responsible for its
form, and the shapes of all those clothed in her skin, was forming
and reforming, becoming and dissipating, its essence waiting to
coalesce in the body it would be given. Strings of the alien Hive
poked and prodded at its edges, probing for any entrance given from
within, mounting the embryonic reality and inserting tentacles of
Her essence—and then it would vanish again, and She would be left
hanging, sucking on empty space.