"Hedge funds. Predatory lending practices. I killed a lot of people. With my business practices—I specialized in hospices. Foreclosures. Loan fraud. Why the hell do you need to know?"
"No need, just asking. I'm done."
That'd schooled him.
He'd listen to the news channels in the morning and look for any sign he'd accomplished the DOR-event; he could still recover something of his reputation. The vortex of failure wasn't something he wanted to get used to; he had to have a success somewhere.
And then he'd leave it alone. At least one.
Emmanuel congratulated himself on a job well done—he'd gotten back to the house before Karen and the kid.
He'd ejected that crazy woman from his life, again. She'd scratched his face, though—he didn't know how he was going to explain that.
Think. Think, think, think.
He swabbed the scratch with alcohol and smeared ointment over it, covered it with a band-aid. He'd go banging up a shelf in the closet real quick, and say he'd hit himself with the hammer. Yeah, that would work.
It would sure suck to get hit with a hammer in the face.
The metal impacts the skin; the layers of tissue rend; the bone shivers and crunches.
He could feel what it would be like, to break in such a way, to come apart at the touch of something hard. It was his brain, sending him messages from his DNA in the form of pictures; he'd been infected.
Karen knew that Manny was lying to her about something, she just didn't know what. He was acting weird.
"So, what did you do today while I was out dealing with our child? You know he skipped school today." Too late, she hadn't meant it to come out that way. Or maybe she did. He could stand to help out a bit more.
He's a useless bum. He doesn't deserve to live.
Yeah, he was a real asshole, she thought, the conversation inside her head taking place on a subsonic level. The back-and-forth coming from her throat impacted Emmanuel on subaudible frequencies, stunning him. At least he shut up.
As she thought the individual words in her internal monologue, she contracted her vocal chords as though she were actually speaking, but without the bellows-action of her lungs that would have vibrated them audibly. He heard the words on a subliminal level, and was immediately overtaken with shame. She could smell it on him.
"I'm sorry, I got called away today by a friend who needed help."
She didn't have to think about it, she could easily read the thoughts on his mind. He was thinking: Dammit, he hadn't wanted to give that away! He'd thought it would make him look good, doing a friend a favor—what the hell was he doing? He was throwing himself directly into the lion's mouth! He was transparent.
"Friend? What friend? Who's this friend? What's her name? And what'd you do to your face?"
"Her name is Ella. She's just someone I know from long ago. She's nobody."
"If she's nobody then why is she more important than your kid? Tell me that."
"I didn't know he'd been skipping class, nobody tells me these things!"
"I'm telling you now! And don't raise your voice in front of the child! What's wrong with you?!" She straightened herself out while Emmanuel cowered. "Who is she? Were you using again? 'Cause if you're using again, I don't want you in my house or anywhere near my kid."
"I'm not using! Your kid? What the hell, he's our kid, Karen! You said so yourself!"
I hate you.
Uggh, he was hard to deal with. She came at him from so many angles, and he still kept it up. He was good, she had to give him that.
"And what did you do to your face? I asked you a question—you never answered me!"
"I hit myself with the freakin' hammer while I was putting up a shelf! What do you care?" He was really starting to squirm now.
Manny wouldn't be able to keep his secret for long, whatever it was, she knew it. Whatever it was. She knew he was just a parasite, how could she have let him trick her like this, again? She felt trapped.
William watched his parents fight, listened to everything they said to one another, his mother tightly gripping his wrist. He felt afraid, lost in a world out of control; and then his eyes softly unfocused, and he saw the black rays and clouds emanating from them, long piercing feelers of antipathy that dashed against each other, the two people he loved most in the world engaged in deadly phantom combat.
He'd seen it so many times before, not only between his parents but almost everyone he'd ever met. Sooner or later, everybody showed their true colors, and they were dark.
But they didn't have to stay that way; everything changed.
William didn't want his parents to fight.
There was a place in his chest, a massive glowing sun in the cave of his heart, where he kept his secret pictures of times when they didn't fight and instead got along, and he let the love he knew for his parents shine brightly there; and he directed his thoughts of his parents to them and sent the feeling along that corridor, and relaxed as their tones toward each other mellowed and became conciliatory, and the words they exchanged rang of empathy, and William was no longer scared.
Jaime was terrified.
He'd been walking home from school, just like he'd done every day for the past two years since he'd left primary for middle school and admitted that he hated riding the bus, when the windowless white van pulled up beside him.
The door slid open and two men with ski masks over their faces jumped out and put a bag over his head and threw him roughly into the van. Jaime was small for his age and lacked confidence, and the two men overpowered him easily. They jabbed at him with a buzzing rod, and he fell unconscious in a burst of pain.
The next time he opened his eyes, he was being carried under someone's armpit up some steps into a building. It was night, he had no idea where he was or what was going to happen to him. He didn't understand the language the men spoke or what they wanted him to do. They sounded Russian.
He was thrown against a wall and fell down, and they clamped shackles on his legs.
Somewhere deep in the pulsing heart of the Hiveship, the Queen disengaged the uplink-cabling from Her central brain and flexed her long limbs, and screamed.
She was frustrated. The planet-body still hadn't succumbed to Her countless onslaughts and infiltrations along the time matrix, had insisted upon defying her invasions. The Earthlings were slow to accept interbreeding with Her kind.
She hated their fleshiness. She hated their dumb empathy, a remnant of the true telepathy She couldn't breed all the way out of their genes, no matter what alterations She made to them. It was suspected to be an effect of the planetary field, subject to the whims of an inorganic being, and possibly related to the strangeness effect that inconvenienced Her so. It was a game, a battle of wills, and She would not allow herself to be taken for a sore loser. She hated their stubbornness, their idiot will to resist.
The game had begun with the stripping of human genetics.
Upon first finding the system, The Hive had traveled forward and back through its timeline, observing from a hidden position how it would evolve and how it had become, and what beings would ride closest to its heart. She'd almost been prematurely discovered then, by the rough creatures inhabiting the densest areas, discovering them to possess psychic vision at least as strong as Her own, if not more powerful. They'd chosen as a species to leave temporal alteration alone for the most part, however, unlike Her and the Hive, and so now suffered powerless against its effects.
And so she'd gone into their distant past and taken from them a fiber of their beings, and the planet was remade more closely in Her shape. Their eyes grew dim and they became blinded to Her true nature, and some were to become fooled and accept Her gifts. They gave away their power to envision; in ever-greater numbers, they chose to garb themselves in Her flesh and so lose their birthright heritage. The interblending of human and alien DNA benefited none but the Queen and Her brood.
They gave Her their minds, and still there was an element that resist
ed her. All they had to do was to choose, of their collective freewill, to give over the planet to Her. It would be good for the Hive; it would be best. For the Hive, for whoever was left to become everyone. And they would be with Her, and would know the wisdom of becoming one. It was such a simple thing, it was to be expected. And the green mother had shown that it would shed its skin, and kill almost everything that walked, flew, swam or crawled upon it and begin all over again in fresh flesh, in order to shirk Her embrace.
Cycle after cycle, the Gaian titan and the Hive Queen fought for control of the physical dimension, and the earth was scarred with Her many wars against it. Humanity rose and fell and rose and fell, and built great wonders only to destroy itself in war, and the erasing hand of history's censors would pass over traces of alterations that couldn't be completely dispelled—monolithic constructs of stone in impossible arrangements, buried deep in dense jungles or beneath mile wide sheets of radioactive glass under desert sands, or high atop frozen peaks where the air was too thin to breathe, or in sunken ruins below the ocean's waves. The Queen's interferences with the planet were many and pointed, and their wounds deep, and still it would not yield, and the piled-up encrustation of Her evidence would threaten to reveal Her design.
But then the tides of battle would turn again and the Queen reached into the bodies of those who shared Her physiology, rewriting their minds and their memories and making them forgetful and blinded. They began to aid Her in their conquest. The machine they'd built under her guidance had been functioning almost perfectly,…
And then something had disrupted the system.
The small hairy things were fighting back again.
"I'm going to run a quick check on that last routine. I won't be a minute. You don't need to supervise." Agent SEL6210 sat in the front of the car next to BUZ4937, who drove like he was the last man on earth.
"Leave it alone. We're off mission. There haven't been any psi-directives issued since. Sit your ass in your seat and enjoy the drive."
"I'm the one who has to be stuck in a car with you. Open a vent or something. I'll only observe the progress, I won't take any action. I just want to see how the next agent deals with it. I'd like to figure out where I went wrong."
It was a sentiment he preferred to revealing his true motive, and if he focused solely on that one thought, he might be able to get in his action before being found out…
The Buzzsaw rolled his eyes and tsk'ed at him, but did not deny. It was good enough for him.
He much preferred the new laptop-based hardware; amongst the updates had been software that included a log function so he could pull up old sessions from a native storage file without having to be on a local network. He could work on the go, and he could work alone, with a machine like this. And he could do it without being monitored in real time by a suspicious sysop. Too bad they'd just been proscripted. He wouldn't run any routines, would only catalogue events; he wouldn't technically be breaking the rules. It would be a shame not to use a machine as fine as this one. He took the dark gray rectangle and flipped open its lid, drew the sleek, newer, smaller headset over his brow and plugged the cable into the jack on its side.
The machine booted and SEL6210 looked out at the road ahead, concerned for the string of failures he'd suffered on this last mission. The entire thing, for him, had been a botch. Until very recently, his success rate had been one hundred percent. He'd supposed that was why he'd been picked for this mission; he'd heard rumors that it was a difficult case, a tangled knot of unpredictable causality, the worst type of unknown: the unforeseeable.
The Agency didn't like to admit that these anomalies existed, though they were studied the most exhaustively, for they tended to yield breakthrough results. Assimilation of the new paradigm, however, was to be carefully shepherded, so that dangerous new ideas could sweep nothing away with them in their passing. Truth was sanitized before it was disseminated. He would remember anything he was told to remember, forget what he was told to forget.
It was just a tiny displacement of mind—and that must be why he was okay with putting another little part aside for himself, for what he was doing. It was only fair that he should get to keep one little sliver of the fractured psyche they'd left him.
He concentrated on his wrongness, on how he'd failed so miserably and how it might be possible to redeem himself, and opened the focal interface.
He liked this machine so much better.
His last case, a geographic disturbance marked by three fluxing change-nodes, was on top. He'd just look and see how it had progressed, what readings had been taken, what actions if any had been committed since last he'd tried his hand at it.
"Background DOR is steadily on the rise… Looks like my goodbye gift had its intended effect. At least it wasn't a total loss."
BUZ4937 didn't say anything, but pressed the gas pedal to the floor and drowned him out with the roaring of the engine. He went back to studying his workstation.
"There's a DOR-pulse scheduled for just under four hours from now. Maybe I'll be redeemed after all."
"I wouldn't count on it. Relying on luck! You're a real asshole, you know that."
SEL6210 put the laptop to sleep and glared out the side window; once again, his zeal for the work was spoiled. The night rolled by in miles per hostility with no one speaking and the cigarettes burning one after the other. He just missed by seconds a perturbing spike in the data, and a fluctuating wave of interference that spelled uncharted consequences.
He was too scared to think about what was going to happen next, but it was obvious there was no way it could be anything other than tragedy.
Jaime was surrounded by old men in dark robes who had taken over for the gunmen in torturing him. Unlike the gunmen, these men did not look down on him in contempt—they had true hunger in their eyes.
He'd been pinned to the ground in the middle of a painted circle by men who held his hands and feet. They brought in a goat on a rope and cut its throat, sacrificed it right there in front of him and adorned the walls and floor with its blood, and he knew that nothing good would be coming for him. The coppery smell choked him and his eyes watered—could it be a trick of the terrible lighting, that it looked like the bloody runes glowed with a light of their own?
And the men chanted together and then violated him horribly, wounding him and leaving him alive. He was pretty sure he was still alive.
He didn't want to be.
The torture, the terror—it was too much to bear. He dissociated and left in his astral form, fleeing the painful prison to a singing emptiness calling him home, but one of the old men saw him leaving and pulled him down away from the ceiling with the tip of a curly dagger and shoved him back into his body.
The man smeared a foul paste on his lips and forehead with his thumb, sealing him into his tortured bones, all the while muttering in a language Jaime didn't know but which spoke of death and things older than death that waited their turn to rule the planet again, for the first time.
"Yes!"
"Do you love her?"
"Yes!"
"Do you love her?"
"Yes, yes, yes already!"
"Then you must kill her."
The voices had let up on him then for a little while, and the quiet he hadn't known since forever settled upon him, so that his horror had been blended with peace of mind, and a kind of detachment stole over and through him, and he could accept his destiny.
Getting to that destiny would go by in a dream; he'd shambled along the sidewalk in a bulb of invisibility, and those who had seen him had pulled away from him in horror and erased his image from their minds.
The one guy who actually did notice him on the street was just a small, middle-aged nobody who shrank when yelled at and tried to get away from him by crossing the road, but Scott hadn't wanted to let the little guy get away. Something about him made you want to yell at him, and Scott's whole body hurt like an ingrown toenail banged against a brick, and he was ready to let off a li
ttle steam on someone, and so he spat out the first words that popped into his head:
"You little bitch, you can't run from them. They know everything about you."
Scott watched him pick up his feet and run away and decided let the man go—he was ready to just get this all over with. Let the windstorm take him wherever it will.
He had the streets to himself, and they passed in a blur of sameness until he found one in particular whose lights dazzled him, and the laughter in the shadows called him further, and the tilt-a-whirl of everything nudged him still further forward, until he found himself on a familiar doorstop. This was where it all began. This was where it ended. This was where he was to do it, where he was to fulfill his destiny.
The apartment was unlit, quiet; Ella was either out or asleep. He went around to the back of the building where there was a wooded copse, hid among the shrubs and watched her bedroom window for a few hours, or a few minutes, it was hard to tell.
She didn't show up, and after another few moments Scott took off his jacket, held it against the window and punched the glass out. Despite his precautions, a large piece left hanging in the frame slipped out and sliced him across the forearm. A light turned on in the next unit over, and Scott screamed in a pitch just below human hearing, and the light turned back off. Scott pushed the rest of the broken window out of the way and climbed over the sill.
She wasn't home. He sat down in the middle of her bedroom floor, in a puddled trail of blackened gore leading to him, and waited in the dark while the binding threads sewed him back together from the inside out.
The Gaian time-knot was unraveling, slipping its hitches and shaking its fibers loose.
A clot in the causality responsible for its form, and the shapes of all those clothed in her skin, was forming and reforming, becoming and dissipating, its essence waiting to coalesce in the body it would be given. Strings of the alien Hive poked and prodded at its edges, probing for any entrance given from within, mounting the embryonic reality and inserting tentacles of Her essence—and then it would vanish again, and She would be left hanging, sucking on empty space.
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