It was her dying wish that he listen to her confession. She hadn't set foot in a church for over thirty years, didn't buy into the whole Catholicism trip any longer, but her spirit couldn't rest easy until it'd been divested of its burden and he was the only one around to listen to her. He couldn't tell her no. What followed was the story of a lifetime spent in nightmare.
She'd started by asking him to put one of her records on the old turntable, a scratchy vinyl of 'Peter and the Wolf.' She insisted that he drink with her while she told her story, and how could he refuse his dying mother's last wish? She had a lot of last wishes over the years it seemed, and of course she deserved to have every one of them granted.
They might have even been responsible for her dying, if you looked at it that way, but whatever...
Her father had been an airman, not the pilot who dropped the bombs on Japan but the one who'd come after in case something happened to the real bomber. They'd called him "Mister Backup Plan." After the war, he went to work for the airlines, which meant a lot of moving around for their family from base to base, all over the country but still in the US. He must've stayed in the military, though; he sometimes had the dire men in uniforms over to the house, and she and her mother would be forced into their rooms so that the men could meet in private. They never talked about it and she was too young to understand, but she recognized that her father was doing special work for the government. It needed to be kept secret. He was doing something important.
Her father was taking part in something bigger than himself, bigger than any one of them, and it was for the good of the whole country. That was what he told her when he did the horrible things to her. How could raping a child be good for the nation's welfare? It was what he'd told her, that he had his orders and she had hers too. Her suffering was going to help them understand how to stop all suffering. It didn't make sense to her, but she was too small to get a decision in the matter.
She'd tried to tell her mother about what was happening to her, to ask for her help to keep daddy away, but her mother had just pretended that she couldn't hear her and sent her to her room. And her father sent her to other men, who did the same things to her, and even worse, so much of it she couldn't actually remember. There had been a lot of electric shock, so many needles full of strange and horrible drugs; she was thankful they'd taken her memories away—of all that time spent in her father's house, there wasn't really any of it worth remembering.
She'd tried to escape through marriage, met the perfect boy her last year in high school and gotten pregnant right away, but it hadn't been any better. She'd miscarried, and Robert turned mean. The nightmare had come back to pick up right where it left off.
She'd paused in her rambling story to make Scott get her another drink and insisted that he have one too; his six weeks down the drain, he felt he might as well. He owed it to himself for doing such a good job, and he needed it to be able to listen to her.
Robert had been in the military, too, an Army grunt; he, too, had taken orders for the good of his country and done things he'd never wanted to and never dreamed he was capable of. She'd blamed her miscarriage on him, on the way he'd beaten her and knocked her down the stairs, but eventually she'd gotten pregnant again and had Scott. She wasn't completely sure that he was Robert's son, but Robert hadn't said anything and she didn't feel like it really mattered. Only once, when Robert was too drunk to control himself, was she able to get him to answer why it was so important that she be raped all the time; he told her it was so she was never able to collect herself up all together again, and she'd believed him. It made sense.
Scott didn't want to hear any more of it, and she told him he needed to listen, that there was more of it that he needed to hear. He tried his best to let her go on.
Buzzsaw called out to the other man, "You wanna see how it's done? I'll show you how to get results. I got a nasty mess cooked up for this one. Tune this in."
SEL6210 hesitated—of course he did, that was how he was—and Buzzsaw yanked at the cable that connected his headset to the rad-station. The man made it no secret that he despised him, and Buzzsaw didn't care.
SEL6210 re-attached the electrode above his right temple that activated his ocu-receptors and allowed him to see the data flowing across the featureless black screen of his visor. SEL6210 was familiar with the radionic workstation's curse-routines and so quickly made out what the man had dialed in for his victim—Buzzsaw caught the other man reacting and chuckled in anticipation of the grief he was about to inflict.
"You realize that's probably going to kill her," SEL6210 asked him and Buzzsaw shrugged.
"Omelets, breaking eggs. Hah. Who cares anyway?"
"We're supposed to manage the assets, not destroy them."
"I'll take that chance. You just sit back and watch the show. Not much longer now." Buzzsaw watched the man squirm uncomfortably and loathed him for his squeamishness. "Buckle up, jerk, you're in for a show. Hey, you might want to take a recording of this one for later. I get the feeling it's going to be a tasty lethal."
Good Lord, thought SEL6210, the man's actually enjoying this.
Manny took the paperwork back to the old house; the boy came running out the door and down the steps to greet him. Karen stood in the doorway, hands on her hips and a frown creasing her puffy face—she looked like she'd been crying—but her depressing gloom wasn't enough to put him off the joy he was feeling at finally getting to see his son again. Nothing was going to take that away from him.
He caught the boy up in a hug as the little guy came hurtling across the sidewalk to him and a quick flash of light, some subtle vibration, passed between them; Emmanuel felt as if a great weight had been lifted from his shoulders, as if a giant oil-saturated rug had been peeled off his head and shoulders and left him free and clean. Karen seemed to have noticed something too, because the glare in her eyes had softened and she seemed to him a little less sharp-edged.
"I brought the paperwork you asked for."
"Yeah, that's fine. Do you want to come inside and talk about it? I've been thinking about things. Come on inside." Manny didn't believe what he was hearing—it didn't sound like the normalized hostilities he'd gotten used to—could she have actually come to some kind of realization? He had to find out.
He followed her inside and took the cup of coffee she offered, refused the poundcake, and asked her what she wanted to talk about.
"Always getting straight down to business, eh? Shouldn't surprise me by now. It's just that I've been doing some heavy thinking lately. I've been in and out of the doctors a whole bunch of times now and it's got me thinking about how I might want to spend the rest of the time I've got left to me."
Manny had the million expected questions and she fended him off the best she could—how did you answer questions that had no answers?—swallowed her anger and searched his eyes for some hint or remnant of what had made her fall in love with him in the first place. He was handsome, and he was the father of her child, but that wasn't enough, was it? There had to be love… She could tell that the boy felt it for him, and that was important, but did he have any feeling left for her, after what they'd just been through, after what she'd done to him?
He didn't look like he hated her, when she looked into the big brown eyes she'd known for the past nine years. She made her pitch: he cover his half of the rent and the bills, kick in some money to take care of the kid, and help out with the housework every now and then and he could set up on the couch. It would be better than anything else he could afford out there in the real world and it would help her to raise their kid. They could decide later if they still wanted to finalize the divorce, but she was not about to share a bed with him again anytime soon and he shouldn't get any ideas to the contrary. He was barely welcome again in her house, and only on the condition that he keep paying his fair share, but she was going to give him this much of a chance and he'd better not mess it up. He could start showing his gratitude right away by driving her to the doctor's
office the next morning.
Manny slept fitfully that night, troubled by bad dreams of invisible enemies. In them, he was protected by a clear light that came from his body yet wasn't his own; the threatening forces weren't actually after him so much as they were simply attacking anything that moved, and the clear light made him invisible to them. The boy was around somewhere but didn't need protection; if he'd been more aware, he might have noticed that the boy was protecting him.
The next day, Manny was wakened by his ex-wife kicking his feet; it was not a pleasant way to wake up, and she wasn't being sweet with her words, either. He was going to get his ass up off her couch and then drive her down to the doctor's office. It was weird to be in the old car again. He hadn't felt okay letting her just take it when she'd kicked him out, but what could he do? He'd put all the work into it and paid for all the gas and the insurance but the title was in her name—therefore it was her car. He'd drive her around like a chauffeur and be happy he got the chance to do so. It was starting off to be a day of tongue-swallowing.
There had been no breakfast. After kicking him awake, she'd let him shower and get dressed and then it was off to her appointment. It was more than he needed, certainly more than she owed him, which was nothing. Now he was getting the chance to pay off some of his debt to her.
Whatever. That was a white rabbit best not followed.
Manny took the directions she gave him and didn't press her as to why she needed the appointment; he tried once asking her where they were going but she'd shut him up pretty quick and firm and he'd taken the hint. It was certainly about time he'd gotten something right.
She couldn't bring herself to tell him that she was being checked for cancer, that there was the very real possibility that she was going to die soon. Death had been on her mind a lot, lately; it wasn't something she felt comfortable sharing with anyone, least of all him. She was trying to get him further out of her life, not deeper in. But then she'd seen him with the boy, and she felt the love the boy felt for his father and remembered a little of what she'd seen in him, and the uncertainty of life and death became even more real still to her, and then she wasn't so sure at all what she wanted to do about him. The itch on her leg had gotten worse, was spreading. Everything was falling apart.
When she'd first gone in, it had been to have her irregular periods examined. The doctor had taken a look at her insides, and then a second, and then scheduled her a couple appointments with different specialists. Then the strange moles had shown up, scattered over her body but mostly on the skin over swollen lymph nodes, and she'd started to get really scared.
They couldn't figure out what was wrong with her; one doctor speculated about complications from ovarian cancer and that had been the last straw for her. She hadn't been speaking with Manny for months but maybe it was time. They'd biopsied several of the moles, a painful coring-out process that left behind big, weeping holes that took forever to heal. It was the perfect metaphor, she thought, for the rest of her life and it's awful process of removal. She was afraid they'd just keep cutting her away, like Swiss cheese, until there was nothing left of her and she died. Death hung always over her.
She scratched absentmindedly at the crusty patch near her ankle; it had been bothering her for weeks and hadn't responded to anything she'd put on it. She'd tried aloe vera gel, arnica and aluminum stearate, zinc oxide and hydrocortisone, flaxseed oil and coconut—nothing did any good, it just wouldn't heal, remaining scabbed over and irritated and red. She tried to be careful about not picking the scabs off, but after a while all the itching at it would inevitably pull the corner up somewhere and drive her nuts with the need to scratch. It was absolutely crazy-making.
She picked at the oozing, reddened skin and felt something tickling her fingertip, something thin and questing that slid up under her fingernail. She shrieked involuntarily and pulled her hand quickly back, pulling away with it a six-inch length of blue thread that clung to the wound as it tore out from under her skin. She screamed, and then promptly put it out of her mind, just as she was supposed to.
Scott couldn't take it anymore—his mom's horror story was too much, the beer going to his head after not drinking for all this time was too much, the oppressing dankness of the whole shady apartment was too much. He needed to get out.
"Get more beer!" She'd yelled at him; he took a ten-dollar bill out of the cookie jar and grabbed his old bicycle off the back porch. Trusty old bicycle, you could count on an old Schwann, they were from back in the days when people knew how to make things right. The old bat hadn't thrown it away; he supposed he was lucky. He pushed off into the night, headed for the gas station, and slowly picked up speed. He never saw the black sedan coming around the corner and careening into him, never saw the blood and the stark fear in the drunk driver's eyes as he squealed away from the accident.
The red glow of the taillights receded into the distance and Scott pushed himself up onto one elbow. He was pretty sure he had broken bones but surprisingly little of him actually hurt. He held his hand up to his face and watched the blood absorb back into the skin; in just a few seconds, the tissues had re-woven and most of the smaller cuts and gashes had already healed.
"What the hell is happening to me?" Scott moaned into the indifferent night as another white jet liner streaked across the sky, leaving twin rows of a thin, dissipating haze that spread slowly out to obscure the face of the full moon.
Agent Buzzsaw held the vial of black liquid up against the thin moonlight and shook it, slooshing the oily contents against the insides of the glass tube.
"That isn't what I think it is? What the hell are you doing with that, BUZ4937? Field agents aren't allowed to get anywhere near that stuff! We're not even supposed to know it exists? Where did you get that?"
"I got it. That's all that matters. I use it for various things, and that's all you need to know."
"Various things like what?"
"Like it makes a good focus for rad-work, for instance. Now fuck off. I'm not answering any more of your questions."
"You'll answer to internal affairs when they find out. How did it not come up in briefing?"
"Yeah, makes you wonder, don't it? Maybe they wanted me to have it, asshole."
SEL6210 couldn't take the man any longer. "I'm going out for some air. I'll finish up when I get back. We've got all night."
"Don't expect me to take up your slack."
"Not expecting anything of the sort, just need to get out and stretch my legs."
And get the stink of your awfulness off me, SEL6210 thought to himself. He didn't even care if the neural net passed the thought along to the man, so long as the precious few seconds of lag time were enough to get him out of his presence.
One got used to having a chip embedded in their brain after a while. He'd come to think of it as his emergency flight recorder, like the black box on an airplane, a lifeline back to the system that kept him alive and safe. And he was never lonely—it talked to him all the time.
It had been awkward at first, invasive, but he'd gotten used to it pretty quickly. He'd never had any privacy growing up with his authoritarian father and snooping mother, so he was already pretty used to the feeling; it was only a difference of degree.
It was such a slight difference to give your whole self away.
William was three years old when he began losing the memories of what he'd been in his last life. This time around, he was going to be a little human boy, like those around him. He wanted to fit in, to be accepted as one of them. This time, he wanted all on his own to do what they said, if it meant he could belong.
This was to be no easy accomplishment. He could hear their thoughts, at first, much as it had been when he was with the Hive, but fainter and without the sense of unquestioning obedience. And the first thing they had told him had been to stop listening. It was his first and greatest strength, and they needed him to relinquish it. People were self-contradictory like that, because you couldn't ever turn the silent inner voice
off completely—you could only learn to talk to yourself louder and louder until you drowned it out. And you kept it up, always. It was a draining experience. It was why humans were half-asleep all the time. And it was what they demanded of each other, and of him.
William then went to school, where he completed the process of his unlearning. Interacting with other humans in a rigidly-structured environment wasn't any different than the situation he'd come from, but the humans were chaotic about it, schizoid and maladjusted. Sometimes a behavior that had been expressly forbidden would instead be rewarded, or vice versa. Often one thing would be said while another was meant. Approval and condemnation came on an undeclared basis that was always changing. There was never any certainty. But gradually William came to expect this unreliability, even to think of it as normal and pretend to find an order within the mess of human affairs, and to accept it as his own.
If he was to be human this time around, he would be the best human he could be. If humanity was a road leading from past to future, he would be a paving stone; if history was a machine, he would be its wheel, rolling into destiny.
And yet his fate was not entirely his own to decide; there were still others who had designs upon him.
He couldn't remember when the first time was that he'd seen the strange things he'd come to call the 'invisible people,' and would have forgotten them completely like everyone else around him, if they hadn't singled him out to interact with. Why they'd chosen him wasn't obvious—it probably had something to do with who he'd been, before—nor did he know what purpose they thought he should serve.
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