Orgonomicon (6 page)

The parrot once again refused to
decommission; HfX7qe2179A9 reached into the cage and snapped its
neck. The fewer living beings there were to witness the presence of
the outlanders, the slower would be the spread of the
field-anomaly. The higher the order of intelligence witnessing, the
greater was the degree of magnitude. It was a simple ratio, and yet
it was all the Hive understood, nothing close to true knowledge of
the problem. Protocols had been developed and the situation studied
further, but it was as far as the Hive had gotten.

Protocols. Protocols demanded the killing of
the strange, beautiful creature with the voice of a distant galaxy
collapsing. Protocols which enabled the drone to carry out its
duties for another one million, five-hundred seventy-seven
thousand, eight-hundred and forty-seven-point-six minutes
Earth-time, before the mobile would become unusable and it would be
recycled. HfX7qe2179A9 held the bird in its three-fingered claw,
held the prismatic rainbow of soft feathers in its cold, grey
claw.

The boy slept soundly in his bunk.

The two other children had been harvested
already; HfX7qe2179A9 had not been able to complete the harvesting
of this one. There would need to be another demerit added to the
tally; Hive-records were nothing if not exhaustive.

But could they ever come to a complete
knowledge of even a single human being? These creatures were
incredibly complex for such a simple-minded species. The chemical
interactions within the boundaries of a single unit were in
constant flux, unpredictable if left alone, and complicated beyond
measure when taken on an interactive basis with others of their
kind. To make a complete map of the subtle networks between even
two humans was still an impossibility; group dynamics of three or
more were manipulable only at the trend-level and were subject to
innumerable permutations.

Would there be consequences for its sparing
the boy?

These thoughts expanded one upon the other,
leading HfX7qe2179A9 once again to dangerous thinking.

The singular unit, however, the lone human—if
not fully understood, these were perfectly controllable, down to
the very last nuance in the wrinkling mouth of a facial tic. The
boy's mind plied open to a stroke of blue light from the wand;
HfX7qe2179A9 read the events of his past activity-cycle.

In many ways, they were alike: the human's
schedule was rigidly programmed and outside his influence, his
perceptions and opinions carefully managed by meticulous overseers
and their talking-box technologies. The boy's Queen—his
'Mother'—was the absolute power in their hierarchical family
structure.

The father had been removed some time prior
to the events covered in the scan of the boy's memory, and
HfX7qe2179A9 knew that the human had strong reactions to the
other's absence. There were complexities, and still further
complications when the boy's mother lied to him about the man's
going away—the boy knew she was being untruthful and permitted
himself to withhold the truth from her in return, when she asked
him a simple question: "Do you understand me?"

The question itself was a double-bind, not
asked to verify the boy's general comprehension but instead meant
as a threat. She'd repeated the question once, with an escalatory
tone and frightening countenance, and the boy had chosen to give
her what she'd wanted without actually giving anything. It had been
the boy's first lie. He'd said, "Yes."

HfX7qe2179A9 was curious.

This phenomenon, of the purposeful falsity,
was not in order. There was a rebound, as the boy responded to the
lie with another lie, which was accepted with yet another, an
unbroken chain. The spin-offs were out of control, causality a
tangled unpredictable—

These thought-processes were not available to
drones. HfX7qe2179A9 was to complete the mission and return.

It stood at the foot of the child's bed,
watching the human sleep; the boy frowned and then rolled away onto
his side and clutched the blankets up around his neck, and then
went perfectly still. HfX7qe2179A9 lay the wand down at its
leathery side, tilted its head and clattered its incisors in
puzzlement, and the shadows in the room grew deeper. A patter of
rain struck against the open window and the curtain rippled
wave-like in the breeze in slow-motion, and a single raindrop
landed on the boy's nose, but he didn't wake up.

HfX7qe2179A9 put a claw on the boy's
forehead, tilting the head back so his jaw cracked open and his
breath came through his mouth, but he didn't wake up.

The moonlight glinted off the silvery surface
of the alien's instrument as HfX7qe2179A9 pushed the wand deep into
the boy's nasal cavity, but he didn't notice. The end of the wand
slid open and a thin silvery hair squirmed out and buried itself in
the mucous membrane, attaching its fine lines and wrapping
splintering sheaths around an available nerve-ending to fuse itself
with the boy's autonomic nervous system, but he didn't wake up.

Circuitry interfaced with nerve, with
electricity; a charge drawn from the sleeping body would fill the
storage-capacitors in the wand's handle. Too much drawn would leave
behind a mummified non-regenerative, but regular harvests could be
sustained and were for most. The boy began to deflate.

The shadows deepened further into black until
they split and brilliant points of light shone through. The
outlander's presence had become an invasion upon reality, and local
space was about to accommodate.

HfX7qe2179A9 could not allow itself to do it.
The boy had done nothing to deserve being gelded; the beauty that
was life could not so easily be snuffed out to burn at half its
brightness—it stopped the wand's cycling and held onto the metallic
branch growing out of the boy's face, letting the charge pulled
from the sleeping child seep back along the circuitry into his
body.

A cascade of electricity rode the house-mains
powerline, popping transformers down the street in a blazing line
that ended at the boy's home and plunged the neighborhood into the
blackness of prehistory. The wand broke off, leaving behind a
deposited spiderwebbing of silvery threads lining the inside of his
nose, and the boy still slept. Against the sparkling patina of
stars and the line of blazing telephone-poles, the outline of a
large ovoid shape was a deeper black pulsating in the sky.

The boy's eyes flew open, but he kept
perfectly still, in spite of the terrible feeling that something
had almost been taken away from him, something turned off that
should have been left on.

Trembling, he looked around the too-dark
room, at the curtains blowing in the wind, at the open doorway, at
the little man standing at the foot of his bed. The man was skinny
and moved strangely, and he held a glowing wizard's stick in a hand
that didn't fit it right.

Jaime wanted to scream then, wanted to cry
out for his parents, but he couldn't bring himself to make a noise.
The man raised his wand and pointed it at him and it changed
colors, turning first green and yellow and then purple and red and
finally spraying omni-colored lights that danced around his head
and made him feel happy.

The little man, who would never ever hurt
him, was his friend.

He'd given him a gift.

Jaime's mother was in stasis in the bedroom
above him, lying next to her unconscious husband in the old
double-bed and the liquid-blue night, when something popped in the
air above her.

She got out of the bed, leaping to her feet
and grabbing a bathrobe, shouting "They're back! Help! Help!" but
instead lay in bed without the rise and fall that would indicate
breath. She tried to shake the sleeping man awake but her hands
passed right through him; her body still did not move. Torn between
finding her son and reviving herself, she stood paralyzed while the
lights rose up around her.

A tiny man told her to go to sleep and she
did.

There was a boy, and there was the lie. The
boy maintained the lie though it brought him no gain...but that
wasn't true. The gain was a temporary dismantling of the threat
mechanism. It was exactly what HfX7qe2179A9 was going to do to the
boy. It was exactly what HfX7qe2179A9 had always done on the
harvests; it was the protocol. The protocol was exactly the lie. It
was the same.

These were the most forbidden of thoughts,
and HfX7qe2179A9 quickly learned to turn off a part of its mesh,
for to do anything else would have meant discovery and a total
dissolution. A concentration upon the mechanism, a concerted
squeeze, something that went 'pop!' and part of the mesh would
begin to corrode. It would self-repair, but in that time the memory
would have been encoded in the fleshy material without having been
mapped. The mesh was not all-powerful.

The returning beam did not bring HfX7qe2179A9
back to its designated pod; upon rematerialization, it appeared in
the middle of a strangely familiar chamber, vast and teeming with
all of its kind, upon which it had had never before set eyes.

Towering over the drone was the Queen, her
eight tentacled pseudopods stroking its head and shoulders. All the
forbidden thoughts flashed through its mind but one: the lie to
'Mother'. Yes, he understood. HfX7qe2179A9 understood, too. A space
of separation was born.

HfX7qe2179A9 was once again disassembled, its
memory edited and recompiled, and sent back to Earth with missions
parameters now again clearly defined and precise.

Karen was used to taking care of the boy by
herself.

Nine years of marriage had come to nothing
long ago and she'd learned to accommodate. She'd been
way
too accommodating. No one was going to help out with the housework,
no one was going to help her watch the kid, no one was going to
help her with a goddamned thing. And she didn't need the help—she
hadn't known back then that everything was going to come down to
her, to how well she could cope in a world alone, surrounded by
enemies, but found that she was a well of resourcefulness with
inestimable depths.

And she did it all on her own. The lazy
good-for-nothing had been happy enough to get her knocked up, not
so with dealing with his responsibilities. Now he was getting a
full taste of cause and effect.

Manny went to work every day, for whatever
that was worth. He could work a hundred hours a week at his crappy
little minimum wage job and it still wouldn't be enough to take
care of his family the way they needed. It took a certain degree of
certainty to raise a child in the world today, certainty Emmanuel
and his lazy good-for-nothingness just couldn't provide for them.
She'd demanded he go back to school and learn a real trade, she'd
put the want ads down in front of him with meaningful circles drawn
in red ink, she'd even called him in appointments with employment
agencies; she'd threatened, cajoled, pleaded and harassed him and
all the best she'd ever gotten had been empty promises and
see-through lies. Manny would never amount to anything and they
both knew it.

The early years of their marriage had been
full of big talk about getting the deals, how he was going to write
the Great American screenplay and make Hollywood fall in love with
him—it had all been bullshit. The months turned into years and the
money never materialized; he quit or got fired from one crappy job
after the other, never earning much more than the minimum wage.
She'd kicked him out, then; he stayed away for three months and
came back with a brand new manuscript and a handful of promises,
desperate and swearing that he'd 'finally done it with this
one.'

She'd been stupid enough to believe him about
how it was going to change everything and let him come back. She
needed it as much as he did; she was now pregnant again and behind
on the bills but if he was under the belief that his performance
alone would decide whether or not he got to stay, well then who was
she to deprive him of his illusions? She needed the money, plain
and simple, but quickly found out that it wasn't quite enough.

There was, of course, always the possibility
of roping another man to take care of her, but there were problems
with that. For one, the pregnancy had been hard on her and her body
wasn't the same: there had been a breach, which hadn't been caught
in time, and unusual tearing, and the cesarean. The surgeries had
left her an ugly mess, and she'd never lost the extra weight. And
she was about to have another kid. She wasn't the pretty young
thing she used to be and the only kind of man she could attract now
would be no better than what she was trying to leave behind. It was
amazing just how many shiftless men there were in the world.

You had to look out for yourself.

She hung up the telephone. Another client was
late paying his bill. The newspaper didn't just give away
advertising for free–how could they expect to give her nothing but
excuses and still expect to take up space in the pages? It was
typical, typical man behavior. They all wanted something for
nothing. Good Lord, it was dismal.

Emmanuel took his fingers off the keyboard,
pushed away from his thrift-store desk and let out a long sigh.
This was his thirteenth screenplay but it was still no easier than
the first; in fact, it was harder. It seemed like the more effort
he put into yet another project that would go nowhere and bear no
fruit, the less he wanted to keep trying. And being ignored wasn't
the worst of it.

He took a sip of his coffee; it was
bitter.

So bitter.

He'd tried and tried over the years. Good
lord, he'd tried, and found out the hard way that negative
attention was indeed not better than no attention at all. The fall
had cost him everything.

His first movie script had been about a boy
and his seeing-eye dog, a plucky canine with psychic powers who
helped the boy at every turn but was never noticed for it, and
finally put down when he started to get old. The boy realized at
last how much the dog had done for him, but by then it was too late
and all he had left of his friend was an old whistle that could
summon the dog's ghost. It had been named 'Blowing for Bongo'—Bongo
was the dog's name—and Manny had felt sure that it was going to
knock down all the walls between him and great fortune, would open
the forbidden gates and buy him a new life. It was good.