Orgonomicon (5 page)

And she'd gone on contraceptives for him,
even though she hated the thought of it, and hated him for making
her do such horrible things.

A year went by and she ran out of her
birth-control pills. She didn't bother getting any more, thinking
that the new motivator would be the push he needed to finally get
moving and do something with himself, do something for his
family
, but when she told him about her scrip running out,
all he'd said was “Okay." Just "Okay." like he didn't care or
didn't believe her. Just "Okay." It
wasn't
okay.

Two months later when she knew for sure, she
told Scott about how she'd stopped taking the pill. Didn't he
remember? He'd said he'd thought she'd get more. Typical. She told
him she was pregnant again. The look he got on his face told her
everything.

This time they let her see the cart, and the
little white package with the red labeling on the side, as it was
loaded on to the back of the van; she knew she was meant to see it,
because the driver and the men loading the van all stopped what
they were doing at the same time, just as she was leaving the
clinic, and paused to stare mutely at her for a full two minutes
before just as suddenly going back to their business. She'd let out
a wordless, animal scream at them, but they'd ignored her and
carried on as though they'd heard nothing. She was sure she'd made
a noise, but just to make sure she screamed again. They didn't even
look up. Maybe they were used to that kind of thing. The memory
brought a blush to her cheek.

She'd wanted that child.

She was sure that cocaine wouldn't solve the
problem, but it would help her stuff it down for another
minute...

Christ, she was going crazy thinking about
this shit. It occupied most of her day, thinking about it all over
and over and over and all of it and more, and the crying. All the
crying. In the bath, on the couch in front of the TV, on the bus on
her way to school. Shit, she was a middle-aged student nurse, and
she was crying in public. She needed a breath of fresh air; she
could take all the drugs in the world and turn her brain into
sludge and it still wouldn’t make the crying stop. What she needed
was to clear her head, and she needed wide open spaces for
that.

What was she going to do? Without Scott, how
was she going to pay the rent? How was she going to...

There were ways.

All she had to do was take another pill, and
await further instructions.

She looked at the trees on the hill and took
a deep breath, and the air tasted something like kerosene; the
skyline was ragged with tall buildings, distant skyscrapers, the
flashing beacons of radio-towers; a jet plane coursed over the
horizon, leaving a long string of exhaust fumes that stretched back
off into the distance as far as the eye could see.

It had never had a name before, in any of the
bodies it had known, only ever a batch-number; had it possessed a
name then, there would have been no one calling it. But this time
would be different.

It had gone into the light, had seen a
magnificent brilliance and chosen to leave behind everything it had
ever known, and become a part of that light. The voice of the Queen
had gone, leaving a engulfing silence in its wake, but it had found
another voice to take Her place. This other voice was quiet, so
quiet HfX7qe2179A9 had to still its own internal chatter in order
to hear it, and gentle, like a soothing hand on the side of its
face. It had never known such tenderness in any of its other lives.
The Queen had been harsh, demanding of total obedience never to be
questioned; this other presence was soft and suggested where the
Queen would have commanded.

"William."

It would be called "William."

The light had taken it to strange beings,
pinkish and mushy, looking at it with an expression that it had
cataloged endlessly but never fully understood, or experienced.

Love.

These creatures were its parents, and it was
now human. Hands that had once been claws stretched too many
fingers towards its new guardians; they made unrecognizable sounds
at it and HfX7qe2179A9 knew only a profound frustration. Weren't
these creatures supposed to upload the knowledge-base immediately
upon its containment in a new mobile? How else was it supposed to
know its function? All the information it was receiving right now
was unintelligible.

One set of phonemes stood out from the rest,
however, two-and-a-half syllables that seemed to resonate through
its entire newfound frame: "William." It supposed that would have
to do. If not its function, it would at least serve as an
identifier, something to help it distinguish itself from every
other mobile around it.

Around
him
. It was now a
he
.
This would take some getting used to.

Ella woke up on the couch with a twitching
leg, the TV droning some psychotherapist's views on bullying in the
classroom, and the bong tipped over and drooling brown water onto
the carpet.

"Oh shit," she said, and got up to fetch a
dishtowel.

As she stood, a muscle in her thigh cramped
up with an agonizing stiffness, as if she'd walked a great distance
uphill or overdone her squats; "What the hell?" she asked, rubbing
her sore legs. The ache refused to lessen.

The dishtowel hung on the oven door handle
and she tugged it free with a quick jerk and twisted around to
return to the spill; as she did so, she became aware of a new pain
on the bottom of her heel. "What the hell?" she asked again,
grunting her way down to the floor to check the damage done to the
bottom of her foot. The perforation was relatively fresh, not very
deep, and still had a piece of splinter embedded in it, with green
in the wood. It had to be at least a few hours old, judging by how
the blood had blackened and congealed, but she couldn't for the
life of her figure out how she could have gotten it.

"What the hell?" she asked a last time, and
then promptly blanked it from her thoughts.

As the being who'd once been known as
HfX7qe2179A9 acclimated to the new body, the thoughts and memories
from its last life folded in upon themselves like ancient origami
flames and disappeared, burning their way to oblivion as they were
used up in its dreams.

It remembered:

The Hive was simple; when the mobile was
active, the mobile performed its duties to the Hive. There was
off-time, the dormant cycles, but that too was for the Hive, for
the rejuvenation capsules. The mend-pods were painful but it was a
small price to pay for the mobile's upkeep, and it was usually
deactivated for the experience, such as that was. The pods were
full of piercing metallic tentacles that knew a body intimately and
all its imperfections; they knew which cells to remove and where to
encourage growth. The mobile that encapsulated the drone was gift
from and parcel of the Hive. There was nothing that was not for the
Hive.

It was standard procedure for a drone to turn
itself off while the mobile was repaired during rejuvenation, but
HfX7qe2179A9 had developed a deviant desire to remain conscious
through the process, a glitch in the core programming that led it
wandering dangerously close to self-affirmation.

It settled into position, squatting in the
snug-fitting tank with the questing tentacles, while the cavity
filled with amniotic jelly; there was nowhere else to go. Its
pupils clenched sideways and closed to slits; HfX7qe2179A9 shut its
eyelids and let them seal over, closed off its nostrils and
audial-ventricles one by one, and folded its foreclaws over its
chest, preparing for a long cycle spent ruminating in the vat.

Its quiet reflections were broken with an
invasive slither, as two new probes extruded from the wall and
socketed into HfX7qe2179A9's occipital nodes. Its spine arced and
interfaced with the golden mesh of wires embedded in its brain, and
HfX7qe2179A9's entire memory banks were uploaded in an electric
jolt. The wash—it had been taken unexpectedly by the wash, and at
the worst possible moment, when its guard was at its lowest.
Quickly, thoughts of sedition were to be tucked away, far from
where the Queen or the overseers could find them. HfX7qe2179A9 kept
a special place, locked away even from itself, a place where
memories could be held secret and retained, and later replayed in
private.

In private. It was the ultimate crime,
keeping something from the Hive; not only did it deprive the
greater body of its rightful due, but to do it required separation
of self and non-participation was a crime demanding immediate and
final termination with no chance of reintroduction. There was no
individual—there was the Hive, there were those yet to receive its
embrace, and there was nothing else. HfX7qe2179A9 had introduced
countless numbers to the greater body, had witnessed firsthand many
extinguishings of individuality; an active search of the collective
memory banks would surely recover any of the times HfX7qe2179A9 had
assimilated others, but HfX7qe2179A9 had never dared. Doing so
would be unauthorized activity and certainly have drawn the notice
of an overseer. It had chosen to remain content with the knowledge
left behind after the wash: a body of instructions, its next
mission, and the hidden memories which were only accessible when it
was alone. It spent much of its time alone.

The wash was the absolute antithesis of
solitude: for a very brief moment, all memories, knowledge and
experience of every member of the Hive belonged to it, as it
impressed its tiny mind into the whole. The experience was
terrible, beautiful and addictive, and left behind a great
nothingness in its wake. The pure immersion into the totality of
the known Universe was unbearable to common drones. For this
reason, a near-total wipe of everything but for its immediate
mission-parameters would be necessary—to ensure compliance, and to
keep it from premature, uncontrollable dissolution. The full weight
of the Hive could be borne by one being alone, the Queen, and even
She could not do it unaided. She was not all-powerful.

She was not all-powerful.

These thoughts were crime, and HfX7qe2179A9
tried to hide them away with the others, but was too late.

The summons came, transmitted through the
liquid metal cables to the mesh and directly into its brain, an
order which could not be refused. The tentacles retracted early,
the rejuvenation unfinished, and the sides of the vat split open
and retracted, spilling the clear jelly through the perforated
grating below. HfX7qe2179A9's knees wobbled and it gingerly stepped
off the grate, dreading its summons to the Queen's chamber and the
implications. Why hadn't it been allowed to finish the
rejuvenation-cycle?

It never made it to the Queen's chamber.

Outside Her entrance, an overseer fitted
another questing tentacle to the back of its neck and HfX7qe2179A9
was taken again by the wash, this time infinitely more urgent and
personal, raping its brain for very specific information.

HfX7qe2179A9 remembered that Earth-drop so
long ago, the house where the boy lived, the caged parrot in the
living-room, the way the parrot screeched and shouted at him.
HfX7qe2179A9 had used the wand on it, but the bird had somehow been
immune to its effects.

"Awrk! Those who bore us came before us!
Squawk! Biscuit! Embrace! Embrace! Squawk!"

The bird was the only sound in the
noise-dampened house; its raucous cries disturbed none of the
artificially-pacified humans. HfX7qe2179A9 had come to mark the boy
for extraction but the bird, with its brilliant coloring and
refusal to be anaesthetized, had engrossed its attention and it
pondered freedom and beauty while the air grew thick and greasy
around it.

There was a field-anomaly—a strangeness
effect—that settled wherever the alien presence lingered on this
planet. It wasn't known whether the source was something in the
Hive-physiology, an after-effect of causality-manipulation, or
something endemic to the planet itself; the problem had evidenced
itself very shortly after the Hive's arrival and had been studied
with paramount interest but to no outcome. It caused endless
complications and was seemingly unsolvable—the only way to mitigate
the problem was constant movement, to never stay in one physical or
temporal location long enough to allow the effect to build in
strength. Too much strangeness inevitably brought mishap, as the
chain of synchronicity engendered inevitably favored the human
component. Hive-theoreticians, for this reason, attributed its
probable cause to something in the planet's geologic makeup, though
they were unable to pinpoint anything unusual in its mineral
content that would set it apart from any of the billions of other
planets the Hive had already, long ago, subsumed.

It was a problem for the mentats.
HfX7qe2179A9's consideration of it was outside its operational
parameters; perhaps this had been the reason for its unexpected
summons.

The receptacles loosened and the probes
pulled out of its neck; the overseer turned it forcibly around with
claws full of a painful light, and took HfX7qe2179A9's head
instantly away from its body.

HfX7qe2179A9 was next aware of rebooting into
a fresh mobile of lesser substance than its last. This one had had
its memory scrubbed clean, with new channel-blocks overlaid into
the dominant profile. It was a sweep of the old, incorrect
patterns, a re-alignment more in synchrony with the ideals of the
Hive. HfX7qe2179A9 was to finish its mission, and would be grateful
for the opportunity to serve.

The ride back down Earthside felt scratchier
than HfX7qe2179A9's memories suggested; perhaps it was the rawness
of a freshly-spawned mobile, but something about the translation
down along the beacon seemed inordinately jarring. Something itched
deep under the scales.