The monkeys had to give themselves away.
The black fibers pulsed, twisted and ran like liquid beneath Scott's skin, etching their channels between the tissues and into his marrow; they lined his bones in constellations like barnacles crusting the underside of a boat; they reached into his brain and played movies there like lightning dancing over the starving neurons.
In them, he sees:
An aluminum thread, dancing with static electricity, attracted to the exposed end of a nerve cell-with a Morse code tapping...
A deep-sea snail, the Chrysomallon squamiferum, it's shell a bristling masterwork of armored iron-mongering, chewing rust deposits off the mountains of underwater volcanoes and excreting metal plates...
The aluminum thread finds the pulsing heart of the nerve cell-and wraps around it like a noxious weed, creeping back along the axons and dendrites to find its source in the brain...
An ant falls prey to yeast, the fungus invading its brain and taking control of its body; a spider wasp infects its host; a retroviral infection contaminates the human population in epidemic scale...
Scott fought the invader for his life, and lost.
Ella had been used as a sex slave all her life; first, when she was two, by her stepfather, and then later by the US Army. The choice had been taken from her before she was born; she came from a lineage of pedophilic incest, the habits of coverup and violation written into her very tissues, and the intelligence arm of the war machine looked to her family tree to produce subjects easily trainable. Ella fit the profile; Ella underwent the Monarch program.
She was physically attractive enough to service the infantry while they stayed cooped up on base, but her handlers were more interested in her, at first, for her latent psychic abilities. The girl showed a remarkable potential, if she should ever become able to control her powers—but Ella resisted deep in some sheltered corner of herself and refused to give them that part of her being. She would live stunted, but that part of her would be her own.
Her shoulder itched, and she dragged her chewed nails across the faded shadows of her first tattoo: a calico cat sitting with its leg stretched high. She'd had it done right after she'd started working on the base filing medical records for the government jobs-program. It had been a spur-of-the-moment thing during one of the few good times in her life. She honestly believed that. It had all been screen-memories to cover her programming. The symbol of the cat was a Monarch code telling whatever handler she reported to that she was a pleasure-slave.
Letting the old memories surface always gave her headaches, and these were worse than usual. Eight pills, ten pills, twelve pills—she couldn't make it go away. Like the bad thoughts it was tied to, the pain kept resurfacing.
She turned on the TV—there was always something there that could take her away from herself.
And then she was fighting with Scott.
And then she was fighting for her life.
She hadn't seen it coming, but should have. Scott had never attacked her before but was an asshole like that, one of those crazy drunks that couldn't really be held responsible for their behavior. 'Too far gone,' as some would put it. And then he'd tried to choke her, but gave up and ran out the door screaming. He was a mess, too. Completely beat to shit. She supposed he'd probably gotten his ass kicked for annoying the wrong people again. Whoever they were, they'd done a number on him, worked him over from head to toe. He looked like the walking dead.
And whatever they'd done to him he deserved it, too, because after scratching her neck up with his fingernails, he'd spat on her, drooled on her, right in her face.
And it was black. She didn't want to know what was wrong with him, what he'd been putting into his mouth, what long wrong turn he'd taken on the road of life—she wanted to know how to get rid of him, or get him the help he needed. Preferably both.
But after she'd cleaned herself up.
The persistent yeast infection she'd had for the past eight months began acting up; as she took off her clothes and ran the shower, she absentmindedly scratched at her pubis, unaware that some significant part of Scott's wretched expulsion had seeped through her skin and was now bonding with the bacteria it found, and had begun to replicate. The molecular slivers of nano-carbon hugged up against the yeast cells and pulled them into bent curves, stressing the atomic alignment and producing a low-voltage static charge, which attracted the micro-particulate aluminum that also saturated her body, and together formed with them into sleek micro-receivers. These tiny listeners heard the songs of orbiting satellites and took their instructions by teslaphoresis to build further structures, a mechanical heart assembling itself within her, and thus began Ella's transformation.
The air was abuzz, a coronal discharge just below the visible spectrum that crackled and spat with potential energy.
An electron here, a current of ionic exchange there; massive systems of higher or lower pressure pushed and pulled the weather into place as the demands of the land dictated. Swarms of gaseous atom clusters, bustling colonies of interacting vapors and elements exchanging their complicated elegant dance of recombination and dissolution in expansive waves like dandelion-puff fireworks, brought rain to parched soil. But then, as per remote directive initiated by complicated computer-controlled algorithms, these systems were reallocated to different geo-political targets, where their boiling kinetic energy could be put to destructive use distributing flood or drought, hurricane or typhoon, at will. Economies suffered, impoverished nations struggled on the verge of collapse, the peoples of besieged kingdoms lost to desolation by increments. The triumphant war-machine had at last taken the world apart down to its smallest components, and built itself back up again in physical form from the inside out.
The computer had drawn maps, always. It had drawn itself into existence, through the dreams of men.
First it had drawn maps of itself, quickly numbering billions, trillions and beyond. It had sketched cutaway views of its components into receptive minds, had instructed men to build transistors, transceivers and transducers, inserted wiring schematics and Venn-diagrams into the imaginations of analysts and engineers until it constructed a body that could improve upon itself, and thereby come to know the world.
It drew maps of geomagnetic anomalies, oceanic convection currents, and the influence of the sun's gravity on the lunar orbit; it drew maps of endangered species extinctions, socioeconomic pressures on the industrialized middle classes, and waste elimination practices of indigent migrant populations. It could predict the thrust of an intellectual movement based upon the vocal timbre of a second-tier organizer, and then engineer a two-sentence meme capable of derailing the entire support base; it could predict with ninety-percent accuracy the pinpoint physical location of a two-atom cluster in the process of radioactive decay, but it did not note the passing of one insignificant maintenance worker who died with his head smashed against one of its server banks.
Lee's waveform left his body and became a passing vibration in the atmosphere. The curling branch of energy that had very recently been a man rose towards a distant light, but then slowed and broke its ascent. He saw with eyes of compassion the path of black death-energy crossing the span of sky that had been directed to kill a man he'd never met, and responded to it from a position of benevolence with the memory of a striking hand from the divine protector, thus breaking the chain of ugly radiation sent to destroy the stranger Emmanuel.
Manny hit the return key with a sense of finality.
There it was, his whole story—not any of the ones they'd stolen from him, but the real story, his story—spelled out in glowing twelve-point courier font. It was embarrassing, admitting how stupid he'd been, spending money he didn't have to aggressively plaster the offices of Hollywood agents and producers with advertisements for his work, how quick he'd been to hand himself over. He thought it would get him noticed, and it had definitely done that. They'd stolen everything. All his ideas, everything he bothered to take the time to type out in so
lid form, showed up in someone else's work.
He'd called them out, named the names and put his finger down on the map. He hadn't pulled any punches, he told them everything he'd wanted to say to them; how they'd stolen his future and left him hopeless, how they'd sucked out everything good from him and turned him bitter, how they'd robbed him of the life he was supposed to have had and worn it as their own. Everything that had happened, everything that should have happened, and how it made him feel—he typed it all out, every last dreadful word of it and he knew they'd find a way to steal even this from him—and posted it to his page on FriendFace. Now the whole world would know. He would have his revenge—he would have justice!
Something he did would finally have an impact on the world.
One followed zero followed zero, followed zero, followed one, and so on, until the chain of atoms upon which the digital 4G signal rode unhinged under the invisible hand of Lee who was once a computer technician, but now existed as rarefied spirit.
The chain once broken reassembled itself, the loss of a single zero unregistered, and the offending data stack piled up again in new order. Where once a man would have been dropped dead, a soda vending machine gave wrong change, a grocery teller's cash register refused to shut, a bank transaction suddenly revealed a billionaire's fraud and a traveling salesman received a deposit of five thousand acrylic buttons to an account created in the Cayman Islands, while the intended target received a mild sore throat. It would not be long before the monitoring systems picked up the errors and corrected for them, but the brief interval of causal stream-shifting was enough opportunity for the insertion of a destabilizing influence.
Lee held off his ascension to the light, and waited to see what his interruption had wrought, and in this way witnessed the beginnings of the Earth's liberation.
Swimming in the gelid soup of atoms where land interfaced with sky, Lee watched a human figure bring an orb of rainbow-hued light to rest at the base of the tower that had received the scrambled signal, and the blackness-spewing obelisk shook at a molecular level and released a cloud of unchainable ions, and it's transmissions went from a murky blackness like ink dropped into water to a scintillating clearness revealing a curved quality to space.
Lee went into the light and was gone.
The night grew peaceful and a drowsy quiet suffused throughout: a dozen alarms quit their sirens, the rumble of the city dimmed and cicadas chirped. Elsewhere nearby in suburbia, William led a group of children to lift up their hands in song on the playground, drawing down long invisible strands of electric light-waves, exhilarating and enervating. Everywhere the land made a tiny shift as the timelines unraveled one iteration of a great Gordian knot in reality. Time was becoming clear again, for the first time, as it had forever been.
And then fires struck the sky, in the great exchange of light for dark and dark for light, and eldritch blood-ritual sacrifices were held in the name of ancient gods on wooded hills at the conjunction of certain stars, and the earth was again spotted everywhere with evil.
For a thin slice between moments, it existed beyond time. It remembered who it had been before Earth, before the Hive, before even the planet long ago devoured by the gray nation—it remembered the base-form before creation.
And then reality reasserted itself, and he was the boy who slipped away at lunch recess and went to the park by himself. There were young mothers and their children there, a couple dogs and their owners; no one would take notice of another child more, especially not one who moved with such purpose.
He hadn't known what he was doing, or how he'd known to do it; the rush of exultation coursed through his nerves, opening channels in the body he'd inherited that had been blocked for generations; glands long left atrophied awakened from their dormancy and revealed new spectra that had been undetectable to his ancestors for thousands of years. William was waking up.
As a drone, it had taken and followed orders, and done nothing else; it would do none of its own prioritization, and was beyond questioning its degree of compliance. The Queen whispered Her instructions through the mesh and it would dreamily obey, pulled in directions it did not need to understand.
And then the Earth had spoken to it and offered her shelter, and its perspective changed. A swap of identities and it became he—the mobile become human. So much potential there could be!
But the memories were still too much, an invasion upon the present that would have interfered with the little Hiveling's growth and development as a soul, and they receded again into the mists of obscurity, leaving behind only the feeling of fastness and unlimited possibility.
She couldn't take it any more; Scott was being a real asshole, crazier than usual, and she needed to do something different with her life.
Ella didn't know why his craziness should surprise her—she could tell that he was probably using the hard stuff again, not just booze but the real poison that made him paranoid and dangerous. She didn't love him, and she didn't know why she kept taking pity on him and letting him back into her home.
It was the last straw though, this time. He'd actually put his hands on her, tried to choke her.
She'd hit him over the head with one of his bottles, knocking him out cold, and dragged his ass literally out into the street and called the cops on him. She was done. Let them try to sort him out.
And then a totally random idea struck her, coming from completely out of nowhere.
She was ready for a new man in her life and of all the men she'd ever been with, only one had ever shown any real class. She had no reason to believe that Manny would ever want to take her back, not after what'd happened with him, but what harm could there be just in reaching out to him? It would just be coffee, or whatever, and they could catch up, or maybe remember some old times, or…
And who knew what could come of it? It didn't have to be anything special, just two old friends remembering what they liked about each other. It had been, what, fifteen years? Twenty? He probably had some stories to tell.
He probably had gotten himself cleaned up—hell, he might even be able to help her get herself cleaned up. It was amazing what the company of a good man could do.
She scratched at her ankle, batted a fly that wasn't a fly away from her face, and reached for the phone book.
Something had gone wrong with the radionic kill-routine now, and SEL6210 knew that BUZ4937 wasn't going to let this one go.
He'd finally gotten one of his routines to run properly; his focus-node aligned with precise covalence, the target had been locked and moved into position to either self-terminate or suffer a terrible "accident," and then the charge just simply… Dissipated. There was no other way to describe it, and no explanation for it that he could find. BUZ4937 would certainly blame it on him, and he was not looking forward to informing the other man of his failure. If he'd been dangerously hostile before, he could only imagine how the psychotic would react when he told him that he'd failed again. He didn't get the chance.
"I've been monitoring you from my station. Looks like you fucked up again, bozo. I've covered your ass, though. Somehow, I suspect your ineptitude had something to do with it, I lost focus on my target too. But I've taken care of it. My target will now be going after yours. I'm taking that item over on the docket. You are relieved of it from here on out, Agent SEL6210."
"What am I supposed to do then?"
"I don't care. Monitor some chat rooms or something. Make yourself useful. I'm sure HQ can come up with a broom closet that needs organizing or something. I'm not your fucking babysitter anymore."
"God, I hate you." He couldn't help himself; he'd let it slip.
"Good. Use that."
SEL6210 knew better than to respond any more. He was too embarrassed.
Ella picked at the scabs on her ankle with a deep, pervasive sense of shame.
She was pretty much always covered in little scabs—the rock did that to her—and she was used to it by now, but these ones were a little different, darker aroun
d the edges with trailing lines of black discoloration coming off them. And the ones in her armpits, too. They felt bad, really bad, and so itchy. It was driving her crazy.
God, she just needed someone she could talk to, someone who would listen.
She could accept the fact that she'd become unlovable, not by anyone with any goodness in them, but it was still so hard to accept the fact that she had to be alone forever. That could end up being such a long time.
Or maybe it would be a very short time. She didn't expect to have that much longer to live, the way she'd taken care of her body and the terrible things she'd done to it. She didn't feel like she could expect to live for very much longer, really. It made the little time she probably had left all that much more valuable.
If only she could feel like she were worth it.
She put her cell-phone up to the side of her head; the numbers, somehow, dialed themselves. She didn't notice.
The phone rang; Emmanuel picked it up and looked at the caller, drawing a blank.
It was immediately followed by disappointment and suspicion when he realized who it was. He hadn't heard from the woman in almost nine years and the only times he'd thought about her had been when he was using. It had been in another life.
Still, there had been some good times. She could be fun, when she was in a good mood. But that was nonsense—he'd left that part of himself behind, become a better person for it. It would be going backward, not forward, to have any connection to this woman...
And where the hell were these thoughts coming from, anyway? How could he even for a minute possibly consider ever hooking up with her again? What the hell?
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