Orgonomicon (7 page)

One by one, every last studio representative
to whom he'd submitted the thing returned it with a polite but
discouraging form-letter thanking him for sharing his work but it
wasn't right for their needs, and ended their letters with
variations on the theme of 'Please be aware that we receive lots of
material and some of it might even resemble your own, but trust us:
if we want anything of yours, we'll let you know.' They were all
pretty much the same; he didn't bother reading them anymore beyond
that 'Please be aware' part—he knew what was coming. And still he
remained hopeful, and sent out one solicitation after the next with
the only response being another letter like the last. There was
nothing else to do but try, and keep on trying; if at first you
didn't succeed…

So he'd made his pitch to the world. Alone
with the workers in an all-night copy-shop, Manny inundated every
agent on every major agency's email roster, the street addresses of
every guild and union, every producer's fax-machine and the private
phones of reclusive directors, a long list of contacts culled from
trade magazines and underground websites. He saw himself as
ambitious, believed someone would find the quality in him and the
gambit admirable and would want to take him on as a client. He did
not at all foresee it backfiring on him.

The onslaught of negative responses took him
completely by surprise. He'd received a pile of angry faxes,
messages screamed into his phone, a handful of emails that
smoldered with rage and more new and interesting spam than his
inbox could accommodate, and the universal invitation for him to
take their names off his mailing list and go fuck himself. After
that, his computer began acting funny, taking forever to boot up
and running sluggishly. The screen would occasionally flash a solid
black. He swore he caught the cursor moving on its own one day when
he'd come back from the kitchen, but it stopped as soon as he moved
the mouse and never did it again.

Of all his inquiries, only one refused the
script he'd submitted but encouraged him to try another; he counted
it as a success and sent off a copy of 'Bongo', retouched and
freshly-printed on sparkly white paper with three brass brads to
bind it. They didn't want it; he tried another. And another. And
then some more. The hope began to fade.

Then, one night sitting on the couch with his
family and his dinner tray in front of him, the TV played a
commercial for the next summer blockbuster due to hit the theaters
in a week. It was only thirty seconds and he wouldn't even have
noticed it because it looked so incredibly stupid, if it hadn't
have started with the image of the dog whistle. The boy on screen
called for his dog, "Bingo! Bingo!" and blew the whistle again, and
something very much like dread began to settle on top of his
cheeseburger. When the child on the TV began stroking the air
behind a floating collar worn by an invisible dog, he knew. He
knew
. It was put out by the same studio he'd been sending
his work to.

"That's your story, isn't it?" She asked him,
and he slapped his palm against his forehead for the first of many
times.

There was no way he could prove anything, of
course, but he knew. He'd been robbed. It had taken them a year to
do it, the whole time encouraging him to keep trying, keep
submitting, to keep biting the hook. He'd sent them eight, in all;
as the months followed, he saw them appear one after the other, in
slightly re-written form, but familiar enough to recognize his own
work. He'd fed that beast eight of his best screenplays, one by
one.

And then he found his other works showing up
in the marketplace, things he'd written but hadn't sent out to
anyone yet. They'd gotten his smell, tasted his blood and would
never again leave him alone; he found his home computer infested
with a persistent virus and his machine took on a life of its own.
Soon enough, everything he'd typed out and stored on his computer
was showing up around him, on television and in the movies. And his
identity had been stolen to commit bank fraud. And things were
disappearing off the hard drive at the most inopportune
moments.

He'd eventually given up and thrown the
machine away, but the next one he bought was compromised the first
time he checked his email.

What else could he do? He gave up completely,
and started drinking and arguing, and became a person he didn't
like. Everything went downhill. So now he was out on the street,
his miniscule savings account rapidly draining, no family, no
money, no hope. When he ran into his old friend from high school,
he didn't refuse the glass pipe offered to him. He had nothing else
left to lose.

The profits made from his stolen enterprise
went towards defraying the costs of three minutes' worth of
screen-time in a big-budget war-department propaganda piece
marketed as a feature film in a popular toy-franchise, and half the
price of a submarine sandwich at the craft-services table in a
network studio shooting a daily children's show. To his victors,
his contribution was small, anonymous and essentially
meaningless.

Jaime's mother had a feeling that something
was wrong. Really, though, when
wasn't
there something
wrong?

He was acting out more than usual and had
begun wetting the bed again. He was too old for this. Sure, she and
his stepfather were fighting more often than they used to, but did
that cause a child to develop night terrors and bizarre phobias?
They seemed to her to come at random: elves, dentists, worms,
nothing that made sense. And he'd started having regular nosebleeds
when he slept.

Nothing in the world sounded as good to her
right then as a glass of wine, or three, and a mindless lay down on
the couch with some mindless TV. She needed to turn off for a
while.

Turn off.

She put the pill in her mouth and washed it
down with half a glass of red without even noticing what she was
doing.

Thirty minutes later, she was feeling warm
and comforting. The boy was suffering; what he needed most was his
mother. She went into his bedroom to watch over him as he slept,
standing at the foot of his bed. He began shifting nervously and
making an uncomfortable whimper.

He hadn't been the same since his father
left, poor kid. She went to the side of his bed and stroked his
hair, but he still wouldn't settle down and sleep peaceably.
Something really
was
wrong.

And then she sat up rigidly straight, and
stared directly at the wall in front of her as her hands shot
quickly forward to grip the boy by the sides of his head.

Her gaze never left the same spot on the wall
above the boy's head as she tipped it back and plunged her pinky
finger into his mouth, questing upward and dislodging something
with the nail. Only when she'd pulled the bloody device out of his
sinus cavity did she shift her eyes to look at it, before pinching
it tightly and rolling it between her fingers, crushing it. The
metal liquefied in her grasp and gathered together into a silver
droplet, which slithered off her hand and disappeared. The broken
device which had exempted the child for the past eight years from
the regular harvestings removed, Jaime's absence from the tallies
was noted and new directives issued.

"Jaime, honey, it's all right. We're just
having another bad dream. Let's both go back to sleep." The boy
wouldn't calm down for anything. What must it be like, to be at his
age and have to watch his parents go through this kind of thing?
And his brothers always picking on him. The world was hard
enough...

She couldn't imagine.

Agents BUZ4937 and SEL6210 put down their
gear, removing their headsets and unplugging them from the
workstation. Since the events of the year before with MON2985, no
field agent was allowed to work a rad-station alone, and for no
longer than two-hour intervals without submitting to rigorous
checks and protocols. The new restrictions were onerous,
heavy-handed and redundant, a source of aggravation to anyone
working radionics on-the-go. The resentment of the other's presence
was palpable in the small motel room.

"Did you get that recorded?" Agent BUZ4937
was terse, the hostility in his voice a cutting edge.

"Of course I got it recorded. So what?"
SEL6210 wasn't used to working under a superior any more, least of
all semi-competents questioning his judgment. He'd been commanding
officer of his team in Afghanistan, where no one so much as
questioned his orders if he sent them on what was an apparent
suicide mission. Now he was being double-checked on his ability to
press the record button. It was ridiculous.

"'So what' is that I don't want any screwups
on this mission. My ass is on the line and I don't trust it to
someone I've never worked with before."

"Just do your job and I'll do mine."

"I'm C.O. on this mission and you'll do
exactly what I tell you to do. Is that perfectly crystal fuckin'
clear?"

Good lord, the man was a savage. "Clear as
ice. No need for civility."

"What was that last part? I don't think I
caught it."

"Nothing, sir. I didn't say a thing."

"Yeah, that's right. Now get this place
scrubbed before we go again. Copy that, Agent?"

Agent SEL6210's only reply was to wind the
cables around the headsets and plug them into the charger. The man
was a savage but he didn't merit another disciplinary action.
Buzzsaw wasn't the only one with his job in jeopardy; he couldn't
afford to be called up for review again. They'd decommissioned his
chip once before and the consequences had been significant; his
immune system still hadn't recovered and possibly never would.

If the chip was rejected a second time, his
brain would be fried just like the Mongoose's had been before him.
People talked smack about Mongoose, said he'd gotten old and weak,
but SEL6210 had known the man and saw that there was nothing really
different about him from any other agent he knew. It could just as
easily happen to any one of them.

Buzzsaw hated the man sitting next to him at
the table. SEL6210 could work the rad-station like nobody's
business, but that still sure as hell didn't make him a good agent.
There was a damn good reason command-and-control made him C.O. on
this mission—the son of a bitch was unreliable. The Seal had
botched his last mission going off on his own, acting without
supervisory approval. The man was broken, but in a bad way. Free
play to improvise meant that you could play around within the
restrictions they gave you, not that you could rewrite the rules to
suit yourself. SEL6210 was going to have to be taught a lesson
about 'chain of command'. Still, you had to hand it to the man—he
was one of the best rad-operators in the field. He could make the
puppets dance like nobody's business, that was for sure.

That was exactly how they'd gotten stuck on
this assignment together. They'd both been hotshots who'd fucked
up, in their own ways; it made sense, in a twisted world, that they
should be assigned to rehabilitate one another. At least, that was
what Buzzsaw was assuming had been on the computer's mind.

Agent BUZ4937 laughed to himself, short and
bitterly. The computer had a mind, to make its own decisions and
dictate the fate of those who weren't its programmers, sure. Why
the hell not? If it decided that putting two screwups together
would be the way to push them back into line—they were supposed to
reinforce each other's programming, to help steer each other back
onto the proper course, Buzzsaw knew how it worked from his own
time as a slave handler, they policed each other—then that was how
it was going to go, barring intervention from someone higher up.
Buzzsaw was happy to go along with the computer's plan; no more
attention from Central was necessary, thank you very much. His last
gaffe, at the goddamned grade-five aquarium last year, had earned
him more attention than he'd ever wanted. One entire county's worth
of inductees lost because of his inattention; he was lucky they
hadn't decommissioned him outright and sent him off to early
'retirement,' somewhere in the desert digging his own grave by
moonlight. Or just turned him off. Getting put on rad-detail was
too good to be true; it was almost as if they were rewarding him
for forgetting to flip the switch at the right time. Almost.

"I'm still concerned about that spike in her
response when she pulled the kid's club. Something there wasn't
right." SEL6210 wasn't smart enough to leave him alone. The man
couldn't read his colleagues for shit.

"Of course you are. None of this is going
right. Focus on your work. Don't make me tell you again or I'll
have you decommissioned. I'm the fuckin' commander here, right?
Fucking CO means fucking carry-on or fucking clear off, got it? Get
this place wiped and let's get this shit done with. Pronto!"

If the people who cut his checks were going
to decide that a computer was smarter than he was and would be
issuing the orders, then he was going to do what the computer said.
He didn't have a choice in it, anyway.

Buzzsaw would let the man get on with his
scrubbing and then sit back down and try to clear away some of the
complications in his routines, and he would do it before the
weasely little man they'd paired him with drove him crazy and
forced him teach an unforgettable lesson in manners and diplomacy.
Fuck that little rat bastard.

Jesus, the man had a foul mouth; it indicated
a weak character, to Agent SEL6210's way of thinking. It made no
sense at all to him how the man could have been put in charge of
this mission. It couldn't have been very high-priority or Central
wouldn't have chosen them, for sure, but still… You'd think they'd
want a higher chance of success.

SEL6210 felt the Agency's judgment, the
condemnation, the self-loathing and the yearning for redemption in
the eyes of his superiors and knew that it was what he was supposed
to be experiencing, that it had all been ordered most likely by the
B.E.A.S.T. computer and that it was for the best. But Agent
Buzzsaw? Really? Every other agent in the field knew him to be a
liability, a man given to impulsive cruelty and not entirely
reliable. Maybe Buzzsaw was supposed to be cutting his teeth on
him, too.