She woke up on her couch, in front of the TV; there were a handful of damp bills crumpled in her hand. She didn't think about them. She had her rent taken care of for that month. That was all that mattered. The man on the TV, too, was reassuring; he held the woman tightly in his arms, stroking her hair and the sides of her face, passionately whispering to her over and over the words: "No matter if you fall, you will not be hurt." It was exactly the words she needed to hear–it seemed like there was no limit to how far she could fall.
And then the phone rang again, and Scott said he was coming over. He made up some lie about needing some of his junk, but of course it was lies, he just wanted to get in and mess with her head. He only wanted to use her up until she had nothing left—that was what all men ever wanted from her. How could he be any different? It was the way men were, all the men who were attracted to her. And still she told him to come over. Of course she did.
When Scott got there, she almost didn't recognize him. It was amazing how much difference three weeks could make in a person's life; in his case, those three weeks had beaten the shit out of him. His face was a lumpy mass of scratches and bruising; his clothes were torn and bloody. "You look like shit. More than usual," she said to him, regretting it immediately. She didn't need to kick him when he was down; it was just so damned easy. He invited it.
"Yeah, same to you. I don't know why you always have to be so mean."
"I'm not being mean, you look like you've been dragged down the street behind a truck. What have you been doing?"
"What do you care? I look like this because you threw me out!"
He was exasperating. "Look, Scott, it's not my fault you can't take care of yourself."
"Don't give me that. You like seeing me suffer. You've been looking forward to this, when I come crawling back all beat to shit and you get to laugh at my misfortune."
Not only exasperating, but a crybaby. "You're such an asshole. When are you going to start taking responsibility for yourself? I don't want you crawling back, and I don't want you to suffer. I don't want you at all. How many times do I have to say it before you get it through that stupid head of yours?" And then something clicked in her head, and clicked again and again and again and again and so many times and so rapidly, and it set up a bad vibration that brought on her headache and with it the urge to hurt. "All right, dickhead, time to pick up your shit and get the hell out of here. Do what you came to do. You can't hurt me anymore so you must be fucking useless otherwise. Get your shit and get your stupid ugly ass out of my house, you fucking leech. Do what you came to do and get. The fuck. Out! Get! The fuck! Out!" She hadn't realized it, didn't know how it had happened, but she was striking him repeatedly, punching him in the chest, in the stomach, the face. He never raised a hand to her.
The whole time they'd been together, he'd never raised a hand to her, the whole entire time, even when she knew she'd deserved it. She had to admit: some of the shit she'd pulled on him, if it had been between two women (or two men!), somebody would have gotten their ass laid out. But he'd never so much as threatened her with a harsh look. She'd actually once clubbed him over the head with a meat-tenderizer until she'd knocked him unconscious. He'd kept his hands to himself the entire time.
"Do what I came to do," Scott said, and wrapped his sick, thick fist around her throat.
He looked deep into the eyes of the woman who'd brought him into the world.
"Do what I came to do," he said again, squeezing his mother's throat until he was sure he was cutting off not just her breath but the circulation in her veins, too. The awful bitch had to die, for what she'd done to him growing up, but there was no need for extra suffering…
Was there? She'd given him over to the doctors; she'd been the one who gave them permission to take his whole life away from him and turn him into an experiment… Of anyone in the world, didn't she deserve to suffer, even just a little bit?
She continued to strike out at him, the flailing of her weak arms against him getting weaker by the second. Scott loosened his grasp, just for a moment, to let her draw in one ragged breath, and regretted it immediately.
"Go on, kill me, you dickless motherfucker! Big man, I bet you can't even get that right!" She tried hitting him in the face but couldn't connect and got ready to scream again, and Scott lifted her off the ground by her throat and slammed her into the wall, again and again, until she stopped moving. The woman who'd given birth to him lay in a small pile by his feet, and Scott questioned the worth of what he'd just done. He'd killed his…
Mother?
But then the red fog cleared from his eyes and he saw, at last, who it was he'd just killed, and he began to moan, and the moan turned into a howl, and the howl became a full-throated wail.
He'd done everything but what he'd sat down to do. The pencils were sorted, his email was all read and the miserable hopeless want-ads skimmed. Listening to music distracted him, but then he always found himself drifting back to thoughts of what he should be doing.
But Emmanuel wasn't in the mood to create.
He tried to feel inspired, to let the ideas flow through him and down his fingers and onto the page the way they always had, but the well had run dry. It was the result of failure and discouragement, he knew it; too much negative conditioning piling up on him made the effort more painful than the results would merit.
And what would the results be? If he came up with the best story in the world, if he put all his heart and soul into creating something totally unique and fully immersive, an entire universe for others to discover and explore, with all its intrigue and surprise, what would happen at the end? Someone with better tools and a wider reach would somehow tell his story, with their name on it in massive letters of flame and glory, before he could ever get the chance to open his mouth about it.
Over all the years he'd struggled to get the right people to notice him, only Karen had seen it happen time and time again, and he was sure it was part of the reason she'd lost respect for him in the end. How many times could someone let their most prized possession get snatched out of their hands while they did nothing but watch it happen, before you came to blame them, just a little, for letting it happen? And he kept at it, to the exclusion of everything else; he never went to school, never learned a trade, never learned to make anything of himself.
He was, of course, to blame for everything that had gone wrong in his life, in the whole miserable span of it, especially in the mockery that had been his marriage. In life, you had to have a job and you had to have a plan; for the longest time he'd had neither. Yeah, okay, odd jobs, side gigs and the occasional hustle, but nothing regular, nothing reliable, nothing like a career. And they'd suffered for it. Karen had quickly lost respect for him and his inability to provide for his family, and gotten mean. Being the breadwinner wasn't supposed to be her job and it meant that she would have to wield fantastic and awful powers: if something happened under her roof which she did not approve of, it was her responsibility to make sure the wrongdoer was brought to swift and effective justice, in order that her roof be secure. And it was her roof—if it sprang a leak, she was the one who'd pay for it to be repaired, and she would hire the men to do it and she'd be the one to see they finish to the job right. Manny didn't know about any of that stuff; he was useless for anything but his stories, and those weren't his to benefit from, either. He'd let her down; he'd let them both down. He was useless.
Useless.
And she had done the only sensible thing in her position: she'd made him leave, cut him off from her support network and severed ties. She had been amazingly thorough and efficient at it, as if she'd been coached. He couldn't wiffle out of this one. He would sink, or he would swim.
He'd immediately begun to sink. The drugs, sleeping until noon, the giving up on himself—he'd thrown himself headlong down the well of despair and would have happily died there, if not for the boy. The boy was his only hope to pull himself back together, a motivator outside himself wouldn't fade in the
light of day or seem less important when he was high. It sucked, made him feel weak, that he couldn't screw up the inspiration all by himself to save his own ass; but 'doing it for the boy' had worked. He got off the drugs.
And it still had been for nothing. She'd let him come back, but she still hated him, and would forever. It had been for nothing. He just wanted to give up.
Give up.
He pushed away from his laptop, disgusted, his feet leading him out the door on a mission he hadn't yet acknowledged.
Agent BUZ4937 was getting impatient with him. "That's how you run one through a fuckin' simulation. Hurry the fuck up and get your job done. I want to get out of this shithole town already."
Seal adjusted the controls of his machine—a mental interface with the slider knob at the juncture of his visual cortex and the digital realm, a shifting that moved something virtual in the thoughts of his software servitor—and disconnected from the network. His transmission had been too intense, lacked the touch of finesse he would have imparted had he not been rushed; he chided himself for not being more careful, and consigned the anger he felt towards BUZ4937 to memory, for later retrieval when flavoring his hex-routines.
The work he did for the Agency was far beyond the cutting-edge of contemporary technology, computed and relayed via the microchip implanted in his brain, and far more important than anything else in the world: he invented thoughts for the computer to act upon, gave them the spark of life in remote view, and then let the machine chew them up into math and broadcast their reverberations. He was directed by the planet's controllers, and his will would be an extension of the highest authorities. In this case, it was electronically-enhanced black magic, no matter what you wanted to call it, that was the weapon he was to apply. He didn't question the motive; he followed orders.
He could afford no pity for his targets, no matter what kind of shitstorm he sent after them, and he'd best to add up any force-multipliers he could conjure if he wanted to make it successfully through his probationary period. He did not care to be assigned with this awful man, but he'd been ordered to the assignment. He was just the extended arm of the machine, and the target was a nail looking for a hammer. The machine put the hammer into him and he did whatever was required of him. The difference between him and Buzzsaw was his ability to bring that hammer down directly and very precisely onto the nail it sought. The Buzzsaw was a lout by comparison.
"I'm familiar with the docket. I'm following protocols."
"Well, speed these protocols up. I notice you're losing another asset. Way to manage your collaterals."
"Who? Who am I losing?"
"Subject six KR and all that bullshit, the one with the talent-pool SO-pairing that you're supposed to be handling. She's rejecting the implant."
"I'm aware of that. Its outside my system. I've got her managed while the A.I. fixes it."
"You don't get your fucking job done, I will bite you. Chomp-chomp."
Seal shuddered involuntarily. Agent BUZ4937 was a lout but he did get results, he hated to admit. Perhaps the A.I. had been right in pairing them for this mission.
He closed his eyes, fingered the touch-sensitive pad on his virtual keyboard, and concentrated on the image of the slider knob. Well, here's to results, he thought, and bumped the knob up another notch.
Manny paced the halls of the county courthouse; he knew where he was going, never mind the confused wandering with the lost look in his eyes—he'd been here several times already in preparation and knew exactly where the County Recorder's office was. He'd dared himself up to its counter, twice, quaking in rage after another one of their blowouts; he'd readied himself twice to ask her to buy them the paperwork that would divorce them, and twice left it without going all the way through. Now it had been done, and not by him.
The woman at the counter told him that he didn't need to file twice. He didn't make the connection at first, took a few go-rounds with the clerk to figure out what she'd meant.
She'd gotten the jump on him. It was final.
She'd get everything.
There would be a custody battle over the boy.
The more he thought about it, the angrier he got, and the longer he lingered on the idea, killing her sounded all the better.
Wait, what? What?
The voice had come as if directly spoken into both ears at the same time, as though it were inside his head. He tried to remember exactly what it'd said, but the words would slip away, even the sound of the voice—but he knew it had been encouraging him to kill her.
"You've gone too far; you've pushed him over the edge." Buzzsaw was losing it with him, almost ready to blow his top. "He's gone soft. He won't finish the job now."
How could the man be both hammer-fisted and such a weenie at the same time? It was unbelievable, unprofessional. He had them both micro-managing, for crying out loud!
Not for the first time, Agent SEL6210 questioned the computer's judgment, but quickly put the thought from his mind.
The plane flew through a deep blue sky entirely unseen by those below the gray, sheeted cloud canopy it dispersed through twin nozzles mounted underneath its wings.
Long, dusty brown trails drizzled out behind the pilot-less, unmarked white jet guided by computer to follow the low-density points along the jet stream, one of the atmospheric currents responsible for the weather. Mankind had mapped those arterials and co-opted them, taking control of Earth's temperament and bending it to fit the moment's agenda. Sunny days or rain, hurricane or snowstorm could be ordered up simply by altering the low and high pressure zones through ionospheric heating by radio tower; tiny particles of metallic salts, fused to the ground-up stumps of wood pulp fibers, danced and twisted microscopically in a fine haze suspended twenty-three thousand feet above the earth, gyrating and pulsing in time to the codified signals transmitted by the towers below; the entire sky acted as an aerosolized antenna, passing the signals over the edge of the horizon and greatly extending the towers' transmitting capabilities.
On any given day, one or more fleets of the spray jets would be active in a geographic region, dispensing thousands of gallons of powdered witches' brew over the unsuspecting landscape; in typical military fashion, there were over a dozen different main formulae, with near infinite shadings to suit any conditions. Their one commonality was the tell-tale herringbone pattern that would develop in the clouds when irradiated by the omnipresent transmitters; this was easily overlooked by the general populace, however, who had no idea that the very canopy above them contained instructions not to look up.
A low-hertz signal entrained to base emotionality, piggybacked upon a gigahertz bandwidth encoded subliminal script tied to a ligand-gated membrane-polarizing pattern was a lethal trifecta; any thought or impulse could be made to be perceived as favorable or unfavorable as desired by the programmers, and opinion impressed upon an entire landmass at once. The citizens were literally made drunken with ideas.
The independently-drawn conclusion was a thing of the past, in matters of any importance, and was dispensed in miles-long bursts that purred with the cold electronic conviction of the B.E.A.S.T.
He'd called his estranged ex-wife from the courthouse and given her a piece of his mind. It hadn't gone well. He'd been tossed out, again, this time with the threat of a restraining order put on him. It was the worst thing he could think of—it would prevent him from being able to visit his son.
He'd stayed away for two days, then called her again and apologized for his harsh words. She hadn't accepted it and hung up on him. He tried again a few days later, this time being much more careful with his words.
Emmanuel hung up the phone and firmed his resolve to stay away from the drugs; she'd agreed to let him visit with the boy today, and the boy meant everything to him. Karen was a close second, and he fully intended to use the opportunity to try and resolve a few things with her, but the boy was first and foremost in his heart, and he couldn't let the kid see him looking like a washout. It was bad to be a fail
ure in the eyes of the world, but for the boy to see him that way would probably kill him.
He straightened out the wrinkles in his shirt, put his cell-phone into his front pocket and started to reach for his keys before remembering that he no longer had a car. He'd lost a lot on that last binge, more than just the car. Things were running to an end. And now he himself was running to catch a bus.
He didn't have time to complain; you either accepted what you had and made do, or you griped at opportunity's backside as it passed.
"No one ever gave me a chance, not a real chance, especially not you."
The words failed to inspire her corpse, and Scott sat heavily down upon the floor of his old apartment, alone in his world of misery. The bitch hadn't ever really loved him; she just wanted to use him as a sperm donor and a piggy bank, and when he wouldn't let her have either, she tried getting rid of him. She tried, you had to give her that, but Scott wasn't ready to let her go. He wouldn't ever be ready to let her go. And now he wouldn't ever have to.
A tiny black fly crawled out from under the wet skin in the corner of his eye, shook itself dry and buzzed away.
He fixed himself a joint of her crappy, leafy pot—her pot? She'd gotten it from him—and pulled the beer out of the fridge. She still had two left over from his last six-pack; he was surprised she hadn't drunk it, but then she was never one for beer. She liked the harder stuff that came in expensive bottles.
His mother had been a beer drinker, though; he'd gotten that taste from her side of the family. Even on her deathbed, an early passing at sixty-eight, her insides eaten up by the cancer, she'd hounded him to go to the store one last time for her on a beer run. It was too pitiful for him to refuse, even though it was during one of his many attempts to quit drinking. This one had almost been successful, too; his mother's illness had scared him deeply and he'd gotten the superstitious idea that if he'd quit drinking it might somehow cure her. He'd even made it a whole six weeks completely dry, and then she'd dropped the bomb on him.
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