And then again maybe he could just reach out to her in friendship, offering her a helping hand. Her reaching out to him was a cry for help, probably, wasn't it? It couldn't hurt anything to answer one phone call, could it?
"I see you're finally back on track, SEL6210. Keep it up and you just might be able to avoid your early retirement."
SEL6210 removed the headset and dropped it to the coffee-table, sighing. He needed to get out for some fresh air, to get away from this guy as quickly and discreetly as possible.
"Quitting so soon?"
He took his hand off the doorknob and turned to face his antagonist. "I can work by remote. Give me a break from you."
"Suit yourself."
The man's cigarettes were overpowering, a choking stink that pervaded their room; the night beyond was a crisp contrast, the low hanging clouds thick with the promise of rain that wouldn't deliver.
The air was sludgy with a toxic dew, conglomerate micro-protein fibers with crystalline carbon deposits and ionized aluminum atoms bound to them. These compounds had been cooked in the boilers of state-owned processing plants scattered throughout the country, loaded into vactor trucks and shipped to airports to dispense in patterned sweeps, coagulating in drab gray-brown clouds spread by the fleets of unmarked passenger jets.
It was too unbelievable for the general populace. No one could believe in the level of organization, the depth of collusion among the major powers; and no one remembered the bankruptcies and acquisitions of all the major airlines in 1998, and no one associated the proliferation of microwave towers erupting like popcorn over the earth. They had been programmed not to.
No one understood the mechanisms of science because its true laws had been hidden and a crippling placebo-truth peddled for its substitute, the technologies evolved according to the laws of the true sciences so far beyond the general understanding of the masses as to be indiscernible from sorcery. The job did itself. He didn't really need to hide anything he was doing; no one would believe it even if they'd seen it for themselves, and any who did would never be taken seriously. There was always plausible deniability, always.
Always.
They had the greatest lie-machine ever at their disposal to support the illusion woven for the masses—a television in every home and a steady parade of bread and circuses so they never suspected what they were missing. The machine told them all what to believe, who to love, how to think; it told them up was down, left was right, in was out—and they believed it. They paid for the privilege.
And the job did itself, whether he chose to take part in it or not. He wondered if the machine could have its own wants, if the golem felt desire. It wouldn't surprise him at all, considering.
He inhaled deeply, prepared himself for the unpleasantness awaiting him, and returned to their temporary central operations office. There was always work to be done.
Scott tried to catch his breath, and took the beer Mike passed him. It was nice and cold.
They sat in Mike's living room and drank beer and watched TV. It was good to forget where he'd been, what he'd done.
"Hey buddy, guess what? We're going to a party tonight, equinox." Mike always knew what to do.
He went, and did not come back; what returned was not the same Scott.
He could tell, even through his alcoholic stupor and the haze of pain, that something about this party just wasn't for him; for one thing, there was no music. No music! And hey, they were all dressed up—no one told him it was going to be a costume party. He was already out of place, but with enough beer he didn't have to care as long as it kept coming.
Then it got freaky.
He'd been moved to a terrace by the shoving crowd, and there they'd murdered a small child.
Something in Scott's skull fizzed and popped, and his eyes rolled up into the back of his head, and he hit the ground in a faint.
An agent read his distress through the satellite uplink and threw a switch; the sub-routine changed, altered to fit the subject's rapidly-shifting engrams and fixed the lock on the parent-node. The master program continued to progress faithfully.
Mike led the rest of the party away from the bloody altar to leave him alone on the terrace with the body of the dead boy; the B.E.A.S.T. computer issued the command subprogram activating the antennae poking up between statues of gargoyles on the building's roof. The metal frameworks climbing towards the sky tore a series of lines through the aethers, howling the antediluvian mutterings of ancient trans-dimensional predators from their panels and drums. Scott heard the satellites and sang with the antennae, the nano-carbon parasite within him torquing his frame and lifting him to his feet, forcing him to puppet-lurch forward to the altar and kneel at the boy's side. Scott held his outstretched palms over the boy's body and long black strings grew out of his pores and stretched hungrily toward the red pool, and drained the small body of all its life'sblood.
He remembered that this was something he was supposed to remember—something he was supposed to embrace. He was becoming something new.
Ella touched up her eyeliner; it didn't look right in the corners, the flesh underneath bruising and becoming irritated.
She looked a little like Frankenstein's monster, she had to admit.
Fuck it—she washed the makeup off and decided she didn't need it; her eyes were already shaded. The time and effort would just be extra icing on a fallen cake, and anyways he'd always known her not to wear makeup. It wouldn't be anything he hadn't seen before, besides a few extra crows-feet. He'd always accepted her for who she was.
She wouldn't need to be embarrassed of herself with him.
Manny got up from his computer feeling guilty about the agreement he'd made over the phone, and got ready to go out to his illicit meeting.
If it wasn't one thing, it was the other—his computer had been acting funny all day, worse than normal—and then there was an emergency at the kid's school and Karen had rushed off in a panic after laying into him for not being a good father—why was it his fault? Who knew?—and then now he had this other crazy lady to deal with.
Something didn't feel right. It was a day of disaster, to be sure—you could bet on it.
At least he wouldn't have to explain where he was going. If she got back before him, he could make up a story about going to the corner store.
Yeah, that was good.
He would walk; it would take him fifteen minutes to get there, say ten minutes to work out his karma with Ella, and then fifteen to get back home... If it took her any longer than an hour, he'd be completely in the clear. Karen wouldn't have to know anything. She didn't need to know anything.
He didn't feel the need to wonder where the thoughts came from, neither did he get the chance; the roar of traffic swelled around him and a car honked and drove up onto the sidewalk, headed straight for him. He yelled something obscene and dodged aside at the last moment, leaving the car to crash into a newspaper vending machine, and split the scene in a hurry.
Cops were the last thing he wanted to deal with, and it was none of his business; the fear flooded him, and he ran through the crosswalk with the sign showing 'go' and dodged two more cars and a flatbed semi that swerved to pinpoint him; a sudden, last-minute change of direction got him out of their path and he apologized to the fracas behind him, and kept on running away from his problems. It appeared he'd left it behind.
To make things worse, he had some stupid kids' song stuck in his head, over and over. Just whenever things were starting to get hectic, there it would come again.
The next corner was an eerie change from the high-pressure violence of threatening traffic and the sudden life-or-death acrobatics to a sort of slow-motion freeze-frame. The streets seemed oddly deserted, not a car in sight, no joggers or cyclists, nobody walking their dog, just one person standing in the middle of the sidewalk a block ahead of him, staring up at the sky with his back turned. He seemed bent at uncomfortable angles and oddly motionless and Manny didn't like the look of the man; he gave
every indication of being homeless and Manny didn't want to tell him that he didn't have any money for him, so he crossed to the other side of the street before he could get too close.
Without turning to look at Manny behind him, without taking his gaze away from the sky, the man crossed the street, too.
Manny kept walking down the sidewalk with a growing discomfort, not knowing what to do about the man but going ahead anyway, and then he was upon him, and the man turned his awful liquid gaze with eyes like black marbles upon him; Manny felt the palpable force of a deep rage and terrible sickness that emanated from the filthy bum and burned into his face and skin, and the man said to him, "You little bitch, you can't run from them. They know everything about you."
Manny walked past the awful man sure he'd just witnessed something from the twilit zone, and high-tailed it further down the street until he felt himself safely out of reach, where he stopped to catch his breath and light up a cigarette. What the hell was wrong with the neighborhood all of a sudden? Why did it seem like everyone was out to get him? Why? He dodged a falling brick (someone fixing the chimney—of course, that was something that happened all the time, right?) waved off the cries of "sorry!" and went inside the building.
There she was. He didn't recognize her immediately, but she knew him right away and was flagging him down.
"Hey, Manny, long time no see! You look great!" He felt rather than heard a distinct note of insincerity.
A high-pitched whine that he hadn't noticed suddenly ceased when she opened her mouth and spoke to him; the air seemed to collapse in upon them, separating them off from the rest of the bustling coffeehouse in a world of their own, and yet it felt contrived, arranged somehow. The cloying aftertaste of fake intimacy turned him off, and he began to question on a fundamental level his reasons for having come to this rendezvous.
In the end, he told her he was deeply involved with another woman and had a child with her, and really shouldn't be meeting with her in such circumstances. He hadn't expected the scene she would make, with the hitting and the table-flipping and throwing of glasses. He fled the place in as much of a hurry as he'd arrived, with his ears deeper in his shoulders and a brain doing its best to shake off the bad crazies. Was literally nowhere safe?
Was he himself unsafe?
Whatever it was that he was supposed to have done in the park, he'd done it.
William turned to leave the other children and thought of his dad. He remembered his smiling face, being picked up and swung around, reading him his favorite bedtime story, a string of moments when love flowed freely between them, and felt a warmth in his chest that spread outwards and then left his body. William had touched the universe and, through it, his father. He was ready to go home now. The people at his school would be mad at him, his mom would probably ground him, but he knew his dad would understand why he had to do it. He didn't know how he'd known to do it, or what it was exactly he'd done, but he'd known that it was absolutely necessary. His dad would know why.
The long walk home was longer and lazier today, knowing that there would probably be a lecture at the end of it.
"William, where the hell have you been? I've been looking everywhere for you! Your school called me—what have you been doing? What the hell's gotten into you?"
"Mom, I had to go out to collect the light."
"Don't sass your mother, boy. You tell her what she wants to know."
Karen shot his father a dark look, and then went back to work on the boy. "Don't lie to me. What was so important you had to leave school for it?"
"Dad, dad tell her, dad!" This wasn't how it was supposed to go.
"Don't lie to your mother. Go to your room."
"I'll tell him when it's time to go to his room. You go to your room, young man, until you can decide to start being truthful with me. Now!"
William felt betrayed, abandoned in a world of misunderstanding, alone. He went to his room. The shadows grew around him.
"I need him."
The voice whispered itself into Ella's auditory nerves, microwave bursts at inaudible frequencies that manifested as subconsciously-received inner dialogue. It sounded like her talking to herself. She believed it. It was easy to.
"I can't let him go."
If she thought about it, she could come up with a number of reasons why this would be true, and it was the logical way her brain worked, making connections between what was known. The programs wrote themselves. She knew that he'd gotten his life back together, that he'd gotten off the drugs, that he was safe… She wanted that kind of safety in her life. She needed it.
"I have to get back to him."
The urgings wouldn't leave her alone with their constant goading, and neither would the itch on her ankle. It had gotten to other places, too, her armpits and the folds of her thighs—though it was the ankle that had it worst. It had turned into a long scab, oozy and dank, that didn't want to set right.
Worse, she was starting to notice an unexplainable foul taste, constant, in the back of her mouth. It tasted like pennies and mushrooms.
She was coming apart, and needed a saviour.
Scott lay on the ground, shaking, the memories of what he'd done giving way to the memories of what had been done to him. There had been so many doctors, so many tests…
The machines messed with his head, taking away his memories…but scraps still remained to him. There were pills, and acid baths that had washed his body away for the scientists to study the crust remaining; there were injections and electrodes and chambers that hummed and left him sunburnt. There are was always a ringing in his ears.
And then there was the itch. A rash of hives had erupted on his chest and spread outwards over his entire body, tiny red welts with black centers that stank and itched like crazy. Scratching only spread them, and then they'd ooze out long black tendrils under his skin, his roadmap to hell.
Scott didn't know where he was, or how he'd gotten there. But he'd met the monster. And he was seeing the dead, his victims, everywhere.
He opened his eyes to a concrete landscape tilted sideways; the world collapsed around him and he reoriented, lifting himself up off the ground, and stumbled out of the alleyway. He needed to get home, to force his way through the fog and the dragging rays from above and move, move, move! Back home to his bed so he could sleep it off, keep himself together, try to get back to normal.
He reached up to scratch his scalp and his fingernails peeled off in his hair. He chewed at the raw ends of his fingers, stalking the street as a mindless revenant horror. He was covered in blood, most of it not his own, and guided by an inner sense of knowing delivered by microwave.
He'd lost the will to resist. It made the hallucinations stop, to go along with the voices, and it was so much easier to go along now that he'd seen what he was becoming. He was becoming something more than human, a symbiote piloted by an electro-responsive hybrid mycoplasm. It wasn't his fault.
"Do you love her?"
The voices penetrated even the fog of agony that attended his transformation. "Do you love her?"
"Yes! No! What do you want me to say?" He screamed the words and, miraculously, the pain stopped.
"Do you love her?"
"Yes, I love her! Arrrgh!" It came first as a headache behind his eyes, shot to his gut with an acidic roil, and then quickly spread through the rest of his body.
"No! No, all right, I hate her!" The pain got somehow worse. "I give up!" He curled up into a ball lying on his side, whimpering. "I give up, okay? I don't know anymore. I'll say whatever you want me to say."
The pain left him again, and Scott wept, not with relief.
"Mission success. My phase of it, anyway."
BUZ4937 was gloating; SEL6210 couldn't allow himself to hate the man for it. His triumph was short-lived, though, for no sooner had the rad-station beeped to notify him of his success, yet his chip beeped to tell him that HQ had noted his work and was sending him a message.
They were to be reassigned t
o different cases. Equipment and ordnance was to be decommissioned at the nearest field-office and no more radionic work was authorized.
SEL6210 couldn't believe his good luck. He'd been too long running radionics against targets that refused a lock, while this man micromanaged and bullied with the calling of rank. He was starting to hate the work, and that wasn't right. If the world couldn't rely upon him to do the hard job of saving it from itself, upon whom could it rely? And now he was being ordered to call in his losses and give up. Still, he'd be getting away from his coworker.
"I'll sure be glad not to have to look at your assface anymore, either."
SEL6210 was shocked the man had picked up on his thoughts so quickly, then returned, "Just how did you join the Agency, again?"
"I was a prison recruit. One of the headshrinkers there recognized my psi-talent and I earned myself an instant pardon from the government. Call it work-release. Only served two-and-a-half out of my forty. And fuck you for asking. I got a better return rate outta here than you did, chum. What you got to say for yourself? Get that shit off your head and packed and let's get the fuck outta here. I'm done with this."
SEL6210 was not. "I'm almost there. Let me just… There. Done."
"With what? We've been reassigned. Get over it already."
"I'm over it." He'd sent one last set of orders out into the causal matrix, the last item on a docket he was supposed to have turned over to the next agent, a chaotic tolling of the deathknell in the form of a school shooting requisitioned from local resources. It was a strategic loss-quotient of some importance, and the thought of letting it go galled him.
He wouldn't let it pass without the last word. "And why were you in prison?" He wanted to see the other man sweat.
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