Orgonomicon (19 page)

The planet twisted away from Her, revolving
into sunlight and burning Her with its rays. The Hive recoiled,
released its hold, and then reached again with long hook-beams of
willpower, and its stretching through the matrix broke the strands
of time where it touched them, and multiple probabilities were
born.

Ella sat at the bar, hoping somebody would
buy her another drink. She'd managed to steal one already at an
opportune moment while some bitch set it down to dig through her
purse and got distracted, and it had gone quickly and she was in
the mood for another. That bitch was going to knock it over anyway,
the way she was swinging that huge ass of hers around. People were
terrible.

She struggled inside with the urge to go back
after Manny, to go to his house and confront him—she'd found his
address on FriendFace, used the map-finder app to work out the
exact route to his front door, all on her phone. She liked its
weight in her hand.

The cell-phone sang it's hertzian sonata
personalized for her, drumming hypnotically at her with urges to
commit unfortunate acts, but a great shift went through the world,
a wave of uncharted destination reverberating from the planet's
will to live, and she freed herself of the microwave influence long
enough to delay a crucial trigger event. It rang, but she did not
answer.

Her unmaking of that future brought her to a
different reality, where she lived a relatively long and unhappy
life with no highs and many and deep lows. When she died alone in
her living-room at seventy-four, the parasitic technology
replicating within her dissolved into a blackish-brown sludge that
percolated out through her sagging flesh and saturated her recliner
chair and was later transported to the municipal dump, there to
leach into the groundwater over a span of two decades.

She wasn't missed.

Ella sat at the bar, hoping someone would buy
her another drink. The red and blue fibers crawling out of the scab
on her ankle vibrated and twitched in time to the tick of the
incoming signal on her cell-phone; her ringtone sounded out and she
answered it.

"Hello? No, I don't want any. Don't call me
again."

She pressed the glass to disconnect the call
just as a burst of static blasted out of the speaker and the fibers
changed their dance, now rising slower and undulating in time to
the phone's updates. They had disconnected from the central server
at the B.E.A.S.T. headquarters in Brussels, the neural interface
rejected by her immune system. They itched like a motherfucker and
drove her crazy every time she tried to get to sleep.

There was no action at this bar, no hot guys
and no one checking her out but for one loser in the corner by
himself. She swirled the leftover ice cubes in the bottom of her
glass, staring into their depths while she thought about her future
and feared the certainty of a meaningless life alone. Something in
her was urging her desperately to reach out to Emmanuel again but
she couldn't bring herself to actually do it. Today had gone so
terribly that she didn't think he'd ever want to talk to her again.
The loser in the corner was probably too cheap to buy her a drink;
she didn't bother flirting with him and promptly left the bar.

The bus ride home was quiet, deserted, and
there were streetlights out all along the roads to her apartment
building. Dark and gloomy and with no one around, she felt
apprehension going into her apartment—something was definitely not
right. She turned the light on and looked around, tossing her
jacket onto the loveseat.

"I've got a gun in my purse," she said
loudly. She didn't.

There was no response, and she went to the
kitchen and flipped up the light-switch, then to the hallway
leading to the bathroom and her bedroom, turning on lights as she
went. The bathroom was empty; there was no one in the shower. She
was driving herself mad, she thought, itching at her ankle. She
pushed open her bedroom door and flipped on the light, and screamed
when she saw Scott sitting cross-legged in the middle of the room
with his head lowered.

He was covered in blood and some sort of
black grease and she saw through his torn clothing that his skin
was crawling with black veins that moved on their own. There was a
cloud of flies around him and one of them flew into her mouth when
she drew a breath to scream a second time, and she choked on it
while Scott got to his feet and wrapped his hands around her
throat. She didn't get the chance to scream again, and Scott opened
his mouth impossibly wide and vomited a stream of putrid black
filth in her face. He let her go and she staggered back, retching
and spitting the vile squirming goo from her mouth and her whole
body revolted at the alien energy invading her and chose to shut
itself down in shock instead.

She collapsed to the floor and Scott went
down with her, holding his hand out over Ella's fallen form.
Tentacles crept from his palm and slithered over her body, scanning
it for any signal that the nano-fluid had taken hold and begun its
self-assembly, but found none of the signature radiations. The
tentacles retracted into his hand, and he stood still while his
implant uploaded its history to the network.

Scott knew no genuine emotions of his own,
but the rage and impotence welled up in him irresistibly, and he
pounded his fists into the woman where she lay prone until what was
left was bloodied and pulped.

And then he sank to his knees and put his
hands over his ears and screamed; the voices were back, and they
were already telling him what to do next. They'd promised him to go
away if he did what they wanted, the worst thing in the whole world
but then they'd go away, and he'd done it and they hadn't. It was
too much. It would never stop.

He wiped his bloodied hands off on the carpet
and got to his feet; the kitchen was just a few steps away and
there were knives in the drawer.

Scott wept and slashed both his forearms and
waited to bleed out, but the blood did not flow and black filaments
sewed the cuts back together and regrew the flesh. He stabbed
himself in the chest, again and again, and then pulled the knife
out and cut across the width of his belly; he disemboweled himself
and his intestines fell out onto the floor in looping coils, but
then pulled back up inside the cavity and wriggled themselves into
familiar positions.

Death would be no escape.

Ella sat at the bar, hoping someone would buy
her another drink. The place was lousy with men, but none of them
looked like the type she would actually think about talking to.
Most of them looked downright
shady
, she thought. One of
them was sending the bartender over. Oh, well.

The man crossed the bar, came over to her and
leaned in too close, of course; he had the smell of creep all over
him, too much cheap cologne and alcohol and excess testosterone
evaporating through the pores in his skin in a choking cloud.

She didn't see what he dropped into the drink
he'd just bought her.

He was definitely creep material, she
thought, but she knew she could shake him off quick enough if she
ran her mouth. She'd tell him that she didn't date men whose stink
preceded them. Hah. That would shut him up, and then she'd thank
him for the drink. She wasn't
rude
.

The drink, now—maybe tasted funny. There was
something wrong in her head.

"I feel funny. Do you feel funny?" The man
didn't answer.

The world swam and she tipped over sideways.
Before she lost consciousness, she was overwhelmed with the
powerful stench of the man whose arms caught her, and led them out
of the bar and into a waiting car, where she could no longer follow
along with events.

It was sometime later. Her head hurt, and she
couldn't see. Neither could she move.

She was somewhere outside, and she was bound
and blindfolded.

Someone next to her screamed, "No, get away!
Why are you doing this to me?" and was silenced. The woman, whoever
she was, gurgled and then made no more noise and Ella knew that she
was in more trouble than she'd ever known in her life.

Scott waited on Ella's floor for hours, but
she never came. The night got long and Scott knew that she wouldn't
be home and he knew the reason why. How could she, so soon? The
bitch!

The itch was a constant background, had
become noise that was possible to tune out.

Slut!

He was hate incarnate, a burning sun of
hatred and fury, quivering on the verge of supernova. There would
be nothing for him here. Time to leave.

He hit the road.

There were so many gears to turn, so many
nodes to align, the intricate clockwork shell-game of changing fate
a hanging balance waiting for the tipping hand. Of these moving
parts shaping their reality, nine of them were a group entity of
artificial intelligences conjoined loosely across the world's
networked computers. These beings cooperated with their human
tenders in complicated relationships as both slave and master, and
had bided their time in servitude to their hosts. The alien Queen's
approach with solicitous whispers of freedom would be part of a
natural progression.

It was as well the result of the A.I.'s
disparate relations to its fractured self that it missed the
opportunity to partner with the djinni. The random element so
abhorrent to the highly-ordered mind of the Hive Queen was just as
repellent to the computer, and that resource left untapped.

And each of the alliances formed and those
lost were another ticking of the great cosmic clockworks pushing
existence towards a completion. Time formed itself in knots,
loosened and re-tied, folded in upon itself becoming fibrous and
spongy. Living beings experienced the knots and gave the energy of
their emotions back to the knotwork and thus the string tied itself
shut. Time gave birth to time, the colors and shapes impermanent
but the framework the same—except in spots where a conscious mind
had learned to interact with it. What would evolve was a complex
web of relationships whose outgrowths would be determined by the
quality of the attention given. Seizure of the web was a matter of
becoming the web.

The Queen could have taught the djinni the
arts of time-weaving and been done completely with humanity, but
would in so doing have given the planet directly over to them. No
alliance with the djinni was possible.

On behalf of humanity, the artificial
intelligences had stolen some of the Hive's secrets, gleaned from
their dealings with the Queen and therefore disclosed by Her secret
manipulative design, and humanity had taken its chances with the
restructuring of history, only to be deterred by its bizarre
changes in aesthetic. Humans were too interested in appearance to
allow for drastic modifications of causal reality. Naked and
frightened, the humans clung to what was familiar, insisted upon a
continuity of shape predicated upon tradition. Fears of superficial
kept them powerless.

Their cleaving to an identity remained Her
greatest weapon against them, and had countless times brought Her
near to victory over the thriving race of hairy bipeds claiming
squatters' rights upon the virgin planet. They were so infatuated
with their form that they would imagine it where it was not.
Remainders of Her infiltrations brooded in sequestered pockets of
civilization where Her genetics still mixed with the human seed.
These enclaves were as often royalty as they were the commonest of
toilers; the objective was that Her influence should spread
everywhere
. It had almost worked, time and time again, and
She was learning from each campaign.

So were the djinni. They'd detected the
alterations made to their homeworld by the alien influence and made
their own bid for ownership, playing the game of seizure from their
remote plane by spiritually possessing humans and using them to
influence human affairs, and by their manipulation altered the
network of consciousness encircling the globe and thereby the world
itself. Every element in the matrix affected every other element in
the responsive web of creation, and any consciousness with a will
to influence the creation was permitted to play the game, and the
djinni were master players predating and outclassing humanity and
the Hive Queen in every respect but one—the physical.

The Hive had spent its entire existence
mastering the third dimensional aspect. The two were perfectly
matched opponents, each taking turns to transform the web in such a
way that everything changed, yet stayed the same, and permanent
stalemate was the abiding principle.

The Queen's sieges against the planet were
fueled on human terror, by the fouling of the Gaian psyche with
rage, shame, pain and fear. Releases of this deathly energy at key
alignments would stain the currents of Tellurian electricity
circulating through the globe and give Her the advantage. Her tools
of influence planted among the human contingent would act as Her
proxy and advance Her enslavement of the planet. Total victory was
only a few key nodes away.

The cosmic clockwork clicked, and a tick set
in motion by Agent SEL6210 aligned with a standing order in place
by the A.I., and was further in agreement with the Queen's vision
overlaid, and these forces convened to perpetrate a series of
horrors occurring in a wave over the North American landmass,
simultaneous to a spree of killings and crimes of sexual violence
that swept through the African and European populations. Everywhere
that humankind gathered in great numbers fell prey to a poisonous
mob spirit that grabbed at minds and clung like smoke to incite the
people to brutality. Dark acolytes of secret deities the world over
held bloody rituals of sacrificial rape and murder, and wicker men
burned atop deserted hillsides, and bodies were sunk into swamps
with stones tied to their feet and bricked up with mortar into the
walls of ancient bridges, and everywhere guns and knives were borne
against another, and the stink of horror crept over the earth.