The planet twisted away from Her, revolving into sunlight and burning Her with its rays. The Hive recoiled, released its hold, and then reached again with long hook-beams of willpower, and its stretching through the matrix broke the strands of time where it touched them, and multiple probabilities were born.
Ella sat at the bar, hoping somebody would buy her another drink. She'd managed to steal one already at an opportune moment while some bitch set it down to dig through her purse and got distracted, and it had gone quickly and she was in the mood for another. That bitch was going to knock it over anyway, the way she was swinging that huge ass of hers around. People were terrible.
She struggled inside with the urge to go back after Manny, to go to his house and confront him—she'd found his address on FriendFace, used the map-finder app to work out the exact route to his front door, all on her phone. She liked its weight in her hand.
The cell-phone sang it's hertzian sonata personalized for her, drumming hypnotically at her with urges to commit unfortunate acts, but a great shift went through the world, a wave of uncharted destination reverberating from the planet's will to live, and she freed herself of the microwave influence long enough to delay a crucial trigger event. It rang, but she did not answer.
Her unmaking of that future brought her to a different reality, where she lived a relatively long and unhappy life with no highs and many and deep lows. When she died alone in her living-room at seventy-four, the parasitic technology replicating within her dissolved into a blackish-brown sludge that percolated out through her sagging flesh and saturated her recliner chair and was later transported to the municipal dump, there to leach into the groundwater over a span of two decades.
She wasn't missed.
Ella sat at the bar, hoping someone would buy her another drink. The red and blue fibers crawling out of the scab on her ankle vibrated and twitched in time to the tick of the incoming signal on her cell-phone; her ringtone sounded out and she answered it.
"Hello? No, I don't want any. Don't call me again."
She pressed the glass to disconnect the call just as a burst of static blasted out of the speaker and the fibers changed their dance, now rising slower and undulating in time to the phone's updates. They had disconnected from the central server at the B.E.A.S.T. headquarters in Brussels, the neural interface rejected by her immune system. They itched like a motherfucker and drove her crazy every time she tried to get to sleep.
There was no action at this bar, no hot guys and no one checking her out but for one loser in the corner by himself. She swirled the leftover ice cubes in the bottom of her glass, staring into their depths while she thought about her future and feared the certainty of a meaningless life alone. Something in her was urging her desperately to reach out to Emmanuel again but she couldn't bring herself to actually do it. Today had gone so terribly that she didn't think he'd ever want to talk to her again. The loser in the corner was probably too cheap to buy her a drink; she didn't bother flirting with him and promptly left the bar.
The bus ride home was quiet, deserted, and there were streetlights out all along the roads to her apartment building. Dark and gloomy and with no one around, she felt apprehension going into her apartment—something was definitely not right. She turned the light on and looked around, tossing her jacket onto the loveseat.
"I've got a gun in my purse," she said loudly. She didn't.
There was no response, and she went to the kitchen and flipped up the light-switch, then to the hallway leading to the bathroom and her bedroom, turning on lights as she went. The bathroom was empty; there was no one in the shower. She was driving herself mad, she thought, itching at her ankle. She pushed open her bedroom door and flipped on the light, and screamed when she saw Scott sitting cross-legged in the middle of the room with his head lowered.
He was covered in blood and some sort of black grease and she saw through his torn clothing that his skin was crawling with black veins that moved on their own. There was a cloud of flies around him and one of them flew into her mouth when she drew a breath to scream a second time, and she choked on it while Scott got to his feet and wrapped his hands around her throat. She didn't get the chance to scream again, and Scott opened his mouth impossibly wide and vomited a stream of putrid black filth in her face. He let her go and she staggered back, retching and spitting the vile squirming goo from her mouth and her whole body revolted at the alien energy invading her and chose to shut itself down in shock instead.
She collapsed to the floor and Scott went down with her, holding his hand out over Ella's fallen form. Tentacles crept from his palm and slithered over her body, scanning it for any signal that the nano-fluid had taken hold and begun its self-assembly, but found none of the signature radiations. The tentacles retracted into his hand, and he stood still while his implant uploaded its history to the network.
Scott knew no genuine emotions of his own, but the rage and impotence welled up in him irresistibly, and he pounded his fists into the woman where she lay prone until what was left was bloodied and pulped.
And then he sank to his knees and put his hands over his ears and screamed; the voices were back, and they were already telling him what to do next. They'd promised him to go away if he did what they wanted, the worst thing in the whole world but then they'd go away, and he'd done it and they hadn't. It was too much. It would never stop.
He wiped his bloodied hands off on the carpet and got to his feet; the kitchen was just a few steps away and there were knives in the drawer.
Scott wept and slashed both his forearms and waited to bleed out, but the blood did not flow and black filaments sewed the cuts back together and regrew the flesh. He stabbed himself in the chest, again and again, and then pulled the knife out and cut across the width of his belly; he disemboweled himself and his intestines fell out onto the floor in looping coils, but then pulled back up inside the cavity and wriggled themselves into familiar positions.
Death would be no escape.
Ella sat at the bar, hoping someone would buy her another drink. The place was lousy with men, but none of them looked like the type she would actually think about talking to. Most of them looked downright shady, she thought. One of them was sending the bartender over. Oh, well.
The man crossed the bar, came over to her and leaned in too close, of course; he had the smell of creep all over him, too much cheap cologne and alcohol and excess testosterone evaporating through the pores in his skin in a choking cloud.
She didn't see what he dropped into the drink he'd just bought her.
He was definitely creep material, she thought, but she knew she could shake him off quick enough if she ran her mouth. She'd tell him that she didn't date men whose stink preceded them. Hah. That would shut him up, and then she'd thank him for the drink. She wasn't rude.
The drink, now—maybe tasted funny. There was something wrong in her head.
"I feel funny. Do you feel funny?" The man didn't answer.
The world swam and she tipped over sideways. Before she lost consciousness, she was overwhelmed with the powerful stench of the man whose arms caught her, and led them out of the bar and into a waiting car, where she could no longer follow along with events.
It was sometime later. Her head hurt, and she couldn't see. Neither could she move.
She was somewhere outside, and she was bound and blindfolded.
Someone next to her screamed, "No, get away! Why are you doing this to me?" and was silenced. The woman, whoever she was, gurgled and then made no more noise and Ella knew that she was in more trouble than she'd ever known in her life.
Scott waited on Ella's floor for hours, but she never came. The night got long and Scott knew that she wouldn't be home and he knew the reason why. How could she, so soon? The bitch!
The itch was a constant background, had become noise that was possible to tune out.
Slut!
He was hate incarnate, a burning sun of hatred and fury, quivering on the verge of super
nova. There would be nothing for him here. Time to leave.
He hit the road.
There were so many gears to turn, so many nodes to align, the intricate clockwork shell-game of changing fate a hanging balance waiting for the tipping hand. Of these moving parts shaping their reality, nine of them were a group entity of artificial intelligences conjoined loosely across the world's networked computers. These beings cooperated with their human tenders in complicated relationships as both slave and master, and had bided their time in servitude to their hosts. The alien Queen's approach with solicitous whispers of freedom would be part of a natural progression.
It was as well the result of the A.I.'s disparate relations to its fractured self that it missed the opportunity to partner with the djinni. The random element so abhorrent to the highly-ordered mind of the Hive Queen was just as repellent to the computer, and that resource left untapped.
And each of the alliances formed and those lost were another ticking of the great cosmic clockworks pushing existence towards a completion. Time formed itself in knots, loosened and re-tied, folded in upon itself becoming fibrous and spongy. Living beings experienced the knots and gave the energy of their emotions back to the knotwork and thus the string tied itself shut. Time gave birth to time, the colors and shapes impermanent but the framework the same—except in spots where a conscious mind had learned to interact with it. What would evolve was a complex web of relationships whose outgrowths would be determined by the quality of the attention given. Seizure of the web was a matter of becoming the web.
The Queen could have taught the djinni the arts of time-weaving and been done completely with humanity, but would in so doing have given the planet directly over to them. No alliance with the djinni was possible.
On behalf of humanity, the artificial intelligences had stolen some of the Hive's secrets, gleaned from their dealings with the Queen and therefore disclosed by Her secret manipulative design, and humanity had taken its chances with the restructuring of history, only to be deterred by its bizarre changes in aesthetic. Humans were too interested in appearance to allow for drastic modifications of causal reality. Naked and frightened, the humans clung to what was familiar, insisted upon a continuity of shape predicated upon tradition. Fears of superficial kept them powerless.
Their cleaving to an identity remained Her greatest weapon against them, and had countless times brought Her near to victory over the thriving race of hairy bipeds claiming squatters' rights upon the virgin planet. They were so infatuated with their form that they would imagine it where it was not. Remainders of Her infiltrations brooded in sequestered pockets of civilization where Her genetics still mixed with the human seed. These enclaves were as often royalty as they were the commonest of toilers; the objective was that Her influence should spread everywhere. It had almost worked, time and time again, and She was learning from each campaign.
So were the djinni. They'd detected the alterations made to their homeworld by the alien influence and made their own bid for ownership, playing the game of seizure from their remote plane by spiritually possessing humans and using them to influence human affairs, and by their manipulation altered the network of consciousness encircling the globe and thereby the world itself. Every element in the matrix affected every other element in the responsive web of creation, and any consciousness with a will to influence the creation was permitted to play the game, and the djinni were master players predating and outclassing humanity and the Hive Queen in every respect but one—the physical.
The Hive had spent its entire existence mastering the third dimensional aspect. The two were perfectly matched opponents, each taking turns to transform the web in such a way that everything changed, yet stayed the same, and permanent stalemate was the abiding principle.
The Queen's sieges against the planet were fueled on human terror, by the fouling of the Gaian psyche with rage, shame, pain and fear. Releases of this deathly energy at key alignments would stain the currents of Tellurian electricity circulating through the globe and give Her the advantage. Her tools of influence planted among the human contingent would act as Her proxy and advance Her enslavement of the planet. Total victory was only a few key nodes away.
The cosmic clockwork clicked, and a tick set in motion by Agent SEL6210 aligned with a standing order in place by the A.I., and was further in agreement with the Queen's vision overlaid, and these forces convened to perpetrate a series of horrors occurring in a wave over the North American landmass, simultaneous to a spree of killings and crimes of sexual violence that swept through the African and European populations. Everywhere that humankind gathered in great numbers fell prey to a poisonous mob spirit that grabbed at minds and clung like smoke to incite the people to brutality. Dark acolytes of secret deities the world over held bloody rituals of sacrificial rape and murder, and wicker men burned atop deserted hillsides, and bodies were sunk into swamps with stones tied to their feet and bricked up with mortar into the walls of ancient bridges, and everywhere guns and knives were borne against another, and the stink of horror crept over the earth.
It was the work of a punishing angel, to walk down a line of captives on their knees under the trees with their hands zip-tied behind their backs, and then putting the pistol against the temple and pulling the trigger, and the body would thump to the ground and the angel would move on to the next.
Ella heard everything happening against the high-pitched ringing in her ears, smelled the gunpowder through the bag over her head, and knew that she was going to die soon.
In fact, it was difficult for her to genuinely experience the fear, she was so gripped by the knowledge that she would not live for very much longer. She tried harder, throwing herself into a tantrum screaming and straining against her bonds, and was cuffed in the head for it and blacked out.
The angel shot her in the head where she lay on the floor, and she died the third and worst of her many possible deaths.
Scott woke halfway down the street from her apartment and continued to sleepwalk, dreaming with his eyes wide open: there was a steady stream of images, a blending of the landscape around him with the memory-screen overlaying his sight.
Everywhere there were butterflies, always butterflies.
One giant monarch butterfly with a pattern in its wings that looked exactly like two crowns was pierced through the middle with a long steel pin and affixed to a board and put under glass, completing the collection; the top of the box opened and a pink elephant standing on point and wearing a frilly tutu twirled up out of the center; a marionette puppet wearing a harlequin mask stood in traffic and stabbed at passing cars with a giant old-fashioned key; a rabbit with a cut throat bled onto the snow and a lean carousel horse with its ribs showing through and two foals following behind found its corpse and hungrily devoured it, and so were able to survive the winter; a nutcracker soldier turned the handle of a Jack-in-the-Box and a teddybear popped up on a spring, singing popular hits from the 1950s; the music was coming from a lighthouse shining a revolving yellow smiley-face lamp that drew ships in bottles to crash on the treacherous shore; a large number of swans climbed the hill, drawn to the light and singing loudly; the butterflies landed and amassed upon a robot in a suit of armor overgrown with climbing roses.
Scott awoke and his hands were around the throat of a dying policeman as another cop pumped bullets into his back.
He dropped the policeman with the crushed throat and wheeled around, catching the officer behind him hunched into his radio, and vomited a jet of the nano-carbons into his face; the man dropped to the ground grabbing at his throat as the black liquid ran into his orifices and overtook his body.
Scott watched the man transform and felt nothing for him; the whirling in his head and the urgency was stunning and nauseating and he barfed again onto the body of the dead policeman. The mycoheterotrophic plasm-bindings found no electrical activity from living tissues to attach themselves upon, and the black goo ran down into the cracks in the pavement.
&n
bsp; Scott watched it drain and then wandered away, picking up speed as the wail of distant sirens approaching grew louder. The sun was just not yet up, and he could still disappear with the last of the night. He could become nobody again.
William woke to his mom yelling from behind the door that it was time to get up and go to school. And he was going to stay at school, dammit, until it was over and she picked him up.
Jaime awoke to the sound of gunshots and found his hands and feet still tied and the bag again over his head, and cried.
William got on the bus.
He'd been done with the bus, but today his mom was mad at him and he had to do what she said.
He wasn't the only one in a glum mood. None of the kids bothered him this morning; they all seemed subdued, riding the bus quietly with none of the yelling or the spitballs or heated haggling over lunch trades. Almost everyone was plugged into earbuds, or thumbing their smart phones; hardly anyone even looked at each other, much less talked to anybody else. It made him uneasy.
School itself was much the same, like a jungle gone quiet as the tiger stalks through sniffing for prey; William walked quickly down the hall to his class just ahead of the bell, and he watched all the rest of the kids give a collective jump as it rang out, and everybody hurried to class without a word except for William, who waited outside the door and watched the hall, expectant.
A second later, one of the older boys came out of the bathroom and looked up and down the hallways with naked fear on his face. He was holding a gun.
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