Before the rise of the mammalian hominid, the world had been populated by spirit only, sparkling things not confined to form. Some of these beings had eschewed the Fall and remained in their non-corporeal bodies, their lives separated by an invisible dimension from the common plane, yet enabled still to interact with it. These creatures were known in some lands as the djinni, and in others as poltergeists or wendigo, the fae and the katchina nation, the chitahuli and nephilim. They were able to insert their thoughts into men's minds, thinking them their own, and thus exerted influence over worldly affairs. In the true timeline of the Earth, these creatures had existed whether humanity had developed into civilizations or not, had been and had remained as they were, whether the alien grays tampered with their causality or bypassed the planet entirely. Rebuffed and unable to conquer, the grays attempted alliances with them against the planet's other inhabitants, but found them too unreliable. Enmity was sworn.
He knew this all and more, in great detail for exactly four seconds before the invisible person grabbed him by the face and slammed the back of his head into the wall of server computers until it left behind a bloody smear. A spark passed from the base of his skull into the metal framework of the tower and was gone.
Lee's body was found the next morning, the death deemed unremarkable—the security footage was reviewed and it was disturbing, but what had shown up looked like nothing more than a man having a rather violent epileptic seizure. The office opened for business; the everyday work of observing the world commenced in everyday fashion; electronic bits peppered the grid and papers changed hands. Business as usual.
Scott held the papers in his hands and pointed his face at them, but was unable to make heads or tails of it. Mike handed him another letter.
"Dude, this one looks even worse. Says you owe the government twenty-seven thousand dollars and eighteen cents. What the fuck have you been doing, Scott?"
"I don't know," Scott answered, running his fingers through his beard. "I feel like I'm missing a lot of time. What day is this?" He took another pull off the bottle.
"Thursday. The twelfth. You've missed three appointments with the welfare office and the taxmen are on your ass. And that hospital bill. You're fucked, dude."
"Dude, I am fucked. What am I going to do?" The panic was setting in again and he squirmed in his chair. There wasn't enough whiskey left in the bottle for this.
"Something's wrong with me. I gotta figure this out."
"Yeah you do. I got a doctor you can go to, a head shrinker."
"I ain't going to no head shrinker!"
"You got to. He'll get you set up with the welfare people, tell them you're crazy and you'll get set up. You can fix this."
"I don't want nobody screwing with my head! I'm bad enough off as it is!"
"You'll see, this guy is all right. He'll take care of you. You need it."
Scott didn't answer right away; he pulled an image through the fever cloud and brought it close to him, of a moment from his life when he wasn't in constant pain, filled with loud and painful voices, a time when he'd been clear and happy. Maybe someone could help him. Because he needed it; things were bad now.
Real bad.
"All right, I'll go."
"Good boy. You'll see. I know what I'm talking about. Sigma teddybear over and out, Scott. Good night."
Scott felt the warmth of the couch, felt the warmth of sleep suffusing his body, the warmth of the whiskey and the warmth in his lap as he pissed his pants and passed out.
Scott woke up itching.
His arms were covered in broken hives, and when he pulled off his sodden, stinking pants he found that his legs were too. The crawling sensations under his skin were enough to drive him mad. A quick, dazed look in the mirror showed blood leaking into the corner of one eye, staining it red.
He moaned, then ran the faucet and splashed cold water on his face. When he pulled back the mirror to look for pills, he caught the reflection of a monster standing behind him, a beast with his features but broken and muddy, run together and poking out at odd angles. It was gone when he looked again.
His life was turning into an actual nightmare.
Aboard the Hive-ship, deep in the hellish darkness and damp of the generator station, a human coupler-unit malfunctioned and broke apart; two bodies, a man and a woman, that had been organically fused together tore apart along the seams. The man's tongue detached from the woman's, the nano-interface wires slipped out of their stagings between their throats, and the two naked bodies dropped to the layer of filth that covered the floor, leaving the condenser coil that had wrapped around their join now to suck feeble ions from empty air. A shudder passed through the system and two more units dropped out, leaving the slick floor littered with six withered, thankful corpses.
Their bodies dead, they were now free, and the lights from the departing souls shown all the brighter for their joy. From their singing came a wave of white light that burned away the filth of the alien energy harvesters, but then the souls were gone, and the gray aliens came in swarming numbers to investigate the source of the alarms and soon the broken pairings were replaced, the unit restarted and everything returned to normal.
Scott woke up and checked his surroundings: his mom's apartment, on the couch, the lights were off but the LEDs of the entertainment center shed an eerie glow, he was alone. He turned on a lamp. There would be a beer somewhere on the coffee table next to him, amongst the threatening letters and cigarette cartons and empty glasses and all the litter that never got thrown away.
Something about one of the letters caught his eye—not the one from the lawyers, not the one from the state, a bright glowing one he hadn't seen before—and he fished it out from between the others and squinted at it.
He caught himself reading it out loud. "The rabbit's fur is soft. The rabbit's fur is wet. The rabbit's fur is…"
And then his mom was yelling at him to be quiet, she was an old lady and needed her sleep. Scott read the rest of the letter to himself in a quieter voice, and knew what his instructions were, and where to find the weapon.
He rose, glanced into the mirrored frame of the flower print on the wall, and saw the blossoming stains of ruptured blood vessels in the corners of both his eyes, and the deep black circles going all the way around them. He didn't care. He scratched absentmindedly at the scabs around his wrist, catching a fiber under his fingernail and dislodging a fine, bright blue thread. He pulled at it, and it pulled back, and curled away back under his skin.
Something in his brain was hot, and terrified; he didn't know what he was becoming but he could feel himself losing his grip.
He didn't care.
It was a baleful night, chilly and overcast. A thunderhead rumbled; a trio of high-altitude jetliners crawled across the top of the heavens, dropping long bushy tails behind themselves that slowly spread out, covering the sky from horizon to horizon in just under three hours. The trails matted out to a thin greasy sheen that rippled in time to the radio waves transmitted from the towers below, making a slow crawling coruscation like sand dunes in a summer storm. The transmissions jumped from particle to particle, surfing the ether and then casting their rides aside in a haze of tan and brown particulates. The molecule-sized particles of strange metals and stranger carbon crystals drifted into the clouds and rained down upon the lands below. The sludge then collected in the ground waters, and the crops, and had been bio-accumulating up the food chain for two full human generations.
The plan was nearing completion. Humanity's war against itself would reap death. The United States military had formulated thirty-seven distinct chemical compounds and mineral particulates for spraying, the last innovation of 1993 in materials sciences of nano-carbons assembling the final gear in the clockwork war machine.
The substance in its purest form behaved like a liquid, but was actually a powder: the smallest stable crystalline hydrocarbon molecule. Cow intestines rendered down to a yeast-like protein yielded the base-material; it requi
red a cyclotron to cook it, in vast diamond-lined vats filled with the super-heated carbon effluvia subjected to very finely-tuned electromagnetic fields and allowed to cool. The resultant material would be jogged in industrial hoppers until split into an ashy serum.
When excited with ionizing energy, it would conjoin and replicate into structures resembling Hydrozoan Cnidaria, the hydra; these structures would then lock synaptic endings and continue their crystalline growth, evolving wing-like appendages. When subjected exclusively to the naturally-occurring low-intensity electrical fields of the earth, it would energize enough to self-replicate and form small colonies but would take no direction of its own; a mindless atomic reaction, if bonded to aluminum particles and manipulated by the emanations of the ubiquitous tower-network, it could be made to do many interesting things, all carefully categorized, codified and codiced in programmable sequences.
It was diluted to micro-potencies measured in parts per trillion, and then mixed with certain batches of the aerosolized jet-sprays; it was distributed as well in more commonplace channels—at the grocer's, the boutique, pharmaceutical dispensaries, water-filtration plants, the distributors of scented chemicals and soft drinks and fast-food and weed-killing poisons. Food-crops were genetically engineered to produce the nano-carbons and sold to the hungry.
It was so deeply black-operation that even its name disguised the exact formula, the molecule HCx-2H-Cx2H a secret evil engineered by humanity under the direction of Outlander guidance. Hatred and fear conspired to summon pain, and something from beyond had responded with the perfect weapon.
Scott was being torn apart.
There was an order that all these things needed to happen in.
Before he could go take care of the thing he wasn't supposed to think about, he had to take care of something else first. Mike had told him so.
He needed to see a doctor; something was very wrong with him, he was sick.
How did he know the number for the free clinic? But there it was in his brain, and the telephone was right there in front of him and he had only to say a few special words and he was scheduled right in. Funny, that.
They'd brought him all the way to the back of the hospital; they must have. This doctor's office was all white and steel, not like the regular clinic, with the browns and greens and the magazines, that he could have sworn he'd passed through to get to this office.
The doctor wore a cotton surgical mask over his face and asked questions in a curt tone: How was his appetite? His energy levels? Hair and nails? Were his stools black or green? The questions didn't make sense and kept repeating themselves; he answered "No" to everything, regardless of the wording. They weren't going to trick him. Instead, he was going to make them answer some questions of his own.
"Why do I keep having blank spaces in my memory? Where do all my days go? Why do I hurt so much?"
The doctor looked in his ears and down his throat but couldn't find an answer. Scott was given a bottle of pills—"special prescription"—and told not to worry. The doctor himself put the first pill out of the bottle into Scott's mouth.
The hell he wasn't going to worry; this was ridiculous. The pain in his head was intense.
The man turned around to sign a paper on his desk and Scott spit the pill out and pocketed it. It was supposed to help with his headaches—maybe he should have taken it. No pill was going to help him—his problems were on the inside—there was something very wrong with him.
The doctor turned back around with the paper and tried to give it to him, tried to tell him to do something with a prescription, but Scott couldn't concentrate on the man's words. His head throbbed again and the pain wracked him and he grabbed a double handful of hair, pulling it up by the roots. The strands of hair in his fists writhed with a life of their own, twisting around in his grip to seek purchase on his skin and burrow under the tissue.
Scott howled.
Karen lay in her bed and scratched at the rashes on her ankle and in her armpits; she didn't want to think about how bad it had gotten. All she wanted to do was to go to sleep. Three glasses of wine helped.
Sleep came in waves. The dark resolved into a pastiche of rippling crashes that penetrated through her and tumbled her someplace deeper underwater, where blighted kelp undulated and the ulcerated fish wove between their long, choppy strands. A cankerous, black deep-sea fish with lights on the ends of its feelers swam past staring eyelessly at her, and then the waters shook with a deep blast from behind her, a thunderous pulse that accompanied a low, animal roar.
Karen struggled against the noxious seaweed that clung to her and gripped with rubbery fingers, overwhelmingly compelled to turn and face the oncoming danger, thrashing and throwing herself from side to side, but only tangled herself up further. But then a slow calm overcame her, and her sleeping body stilled its tugging against the blankets, and her breathing slowed again.
In her dream, a light shone from her breast, illuminating and brightening the murky waters, and the tendrils released her to face the beast approaching. It had hundreds of tentacles, mile-wide and seething with beaks and eyeballs. Karen feared, and the light within her dimmed. Now her body crawled with questing suction pods, the tentacles caressing and invading her everywhere.
And then she remembered a piece of music from her childhood that brought her happy memories, and her light began to shine again. Her body's exceptional immune system began to win the battle against the infection invading her.
In the other world, where her sleeping body lay, a being made of fiery light took its hand from her forehead and streamed up through the ceiling in a shower of light.
"Do you love her?" The voices again. And again and again. Scott was a mess; there was the mirror, and he couldn't bring himself to look at it, and it would lie anyway, so why bother? There were only monsters here.
He'd escaped the doctors, gone home to bed—and then what? What next? Where could he possibly go? And where could he hide? Too many things were breaking down. It was all his fault; he was such a useless asshole.
His muscles twitched, spasming his legs and forcing him to his feet with a jerking fluidity that defied normal anatomy. He found himself standing, whether he'd decided to or not.
"Do you love her?"
They wouldn't stop, reminding constantly of his one redeeming reason to live, the one good thing in the world, that he'd lost—because he was an asshole.
"Do you love her?" The voices were now speaking themselves out loud, through his mouth. "Does it matter?" Scott yelled back, shouting to the empty living room…
"Then set her free."
As soon as the words had passed his lips, he knew what he was next to do.
Agent BUZ4937 detached the plastic clamp attaching the vial of black goo to the rad-station and pulled the headset away from his face, "And that's how you run a successful hot termination order. Take notes. Write that down: hot termination order. Just like that. Do it."
SEL6210 didn't respond. He didn't need to—his brain chip chirped the recognition response and broadcasted it to the central computer, and everyone knew that he knew, that he knew, that he knew…
It was too much to acknowledge. It was easier to go along.
"The subject agent will now terminate the resistant subject. And have you made any progress with your directive yet? I thought not. Get your fucking act together."
Again, SEL6210 didn't respond. He couldn't—there was no appropriate response. He was supposed to have completed his objective—a simple locate and terminate—a long time ago and he hadn't even been able to get started. Every time he thought he'd gotten a lock on this one target, the identity changed, some time-stream diverged and merged into mainline reality, fudging all the details so that the person he was trying to find was one moment a thirty-year-old woman and the next a seventy-year-old man, or even a dog. It was a world of infinite probabilities and more with each moment he began to suspect that someone was tampering with the odds. There were signature ripples in the matrix.
"I believe I've identified an anomalous unauthorized grade B reality disturbance tied to one of my subjects. Requesting your verification."
SEL6210 allowed himself exactly one and a third seconds to enjoy the satisfaction of knowing that he would be vindicated, exonerated by circumstances entirely outside his control. Reality fabrication was blackest of the black, the deepest, darkest level of clearance, and Buzzsaw had only just entered the field. There weren't many levels of clearance higher than his own. He wondered if he could shake the man by alluding to something above his pay-grade.
"Fan-fucking-tastic. I'll report this to Central myself. You try to stay out of this."
Snubbed. Just like that.
No matter where along the planet's timeline She turned the focus of Her arcane machinery, the Queen could not locate a node where Her Hive had succeeded in establishing itself; the planet's defenses were too strong. The many souls clinging to its surface anchored the wretched dungball in the greater matrix collectively, and would not give up their grip on its mangy hide. Her kind had inserted themselves everywhere throughout the forward, back and sideways jumps along its timeline, insinuated themselves amongst its dominant life-forms and worked every protocol from the Hive's memory banks, and could not incite them to self-sabotage.
The ultimate, long-range plan of the Hive was to overrun the planet with Her hybrids, to emplace Her subjects in every arena of attention, and sway opinion through numbers until the population invited Her in to rule.
A direct assault against a planet never worked; the dominant life-forms would incarnate again in different skins and retake the environment without constant overseeing that taxed the greater Hive, and establishment had to be self-policing in order to be maintained.
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