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.
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 u
p 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.
While he took the green light around the room burning all organic traces of them away, SEL6210 muttered these painful, uncomfortable thoughts to himself and wondered if the computer would approve.
He didn't see his partner sighting down the barrel of his gun at the back of his head.
SEL6210 packed the sterilizer away into his briefcase, turned to report his progress to his commanding officer, and saw only an angry middle-aged man preparing to kill a woman who hadn't been following her programming, using a human puppet who loved her as the weapon. The docket assignation yielded multiple results, some of which were intriguing from an intellectual standpoint: background DOR-levels needed to be maintained at a certain level or the machinery failed and every murder contributed to the local field; the RomInt's mode of extermination may or may not confuse the subject's programming and this operation would give the chance to study that; the act itself would initiate Omega-level programming and bring the subject to graduation. The RomInt had undergone standard Monarch trauma-base procedures as per protocols, and somehow self-corrected. The computer recorded that she'd been through the whole torturous rite and role, and still would not disengage when ordered.
Orgonomicon Page 5