Jaime was yanked roughly as they unlocked his shackles, dragged him out of the room and led him outside.
He wouldn't have thought it possible, but when they pulled the hood off his head again, it was worse than the last time. He was in front of a big black stone with a flat top, and he was surrounded by more robed people in masks than he could count, in a large grotto decorated with bones and red tapestries and so much blood and the dead bodies of three children like himself.
All of the people in robes had perfect hair.
"I have to do this," the boy said to William. "They told me if I didn't, they'd do it to me. I can't help it." He pleaded with William, waving the gun wildly, his eyes restless. "They told me I was the chosen one!"
William read the fear in the kid's heart, heard the racing whispers in his mind, felt the boy's body tensing as he responded to patterns encoded in nervous tissues. These patterns were the types of memories built of repetitive action, the practiced hand; it was a radiologically-induced memory-set transmitted directly to his nervous system over the past week by the cell-tower closest to his home, as per directive 192-0008 bE/2, and based loosely upon a recording of a teenager in Akron, Ohio playing a popular first-person shooter video game. William watched the boy's thumbs twitch as he spoke; the boy was rehearsing his cheat-codes.
Jaime lay on the stone altar, shivering; they didn't let him have any clothes, and they'd smeared awful-smelling wet stuff all over him that was probably poop, and it was cold, and he wanted to go home, and he knew he wouldn't.
Every time he tried to hope, something worse would happen to him, and it was just better to give up.
The people encircling him all wore red robes and held knives—they were going to cut him into pieces. Someone standing behind him yelled something and the crowd yelled it back, and then a stream of blood gushed in his face, tilted out from a bowl held above him by a woman in white.
He choked on it and they all yelled again, words in a language he'd never heard, but all he could think about was how he was going to die.
William felt his teacher coming towards him, heard her footsteps approaching and knew he had to do something.
There was nowhere to go, no action to take; he could only be where he was in this moment—and in his memory. He could remember what it was like to be with his mom and his dad, and they were happy and laughing and so was he, and he could remember how that feeling spread through his body from his heart, and when it came off him he could direct it with his mind to wherever he wanted it to go. He could remember what he loved, remember his family, and think about the boy with the gun and give him some of that, couldn't he?
He didn't see why not.
A wave of cosmic radiation born somewhere deep in the heart of the universe passed through the earth, a deep polarizing curve of unwinding energy that spread fractalline eddies of quietude unraveling the strident machinations of the many entities vying for control of the realm.
The goat-headed man's hand slipped as he was cutting off his penis, carving a deep gash in his thigh; instantly, he felt lightheaded and knew that the gush of blood from his leg would end him quickly.
It was actually a relief.
The man below him took off the mask and cursed in very recognizable English, but Jaime didn't care. He was going away, and it was a good thing, and there was a white light above calling him…
William's teacher came up behind him and screamed at the sight of the gun in the boy's hands.
"They made me do it! I didn't want to!" Tears ran down the boy's face.
"You don't have to do anything," she said, and his teacher had been enveloped as well in William's field and found herself moving and speaking in an inspired way.
William let the feelings of love emanate from his body and held still, permitting the world's problems to resolve themselves around him. It was all permission, the great dance of possibility that was life, and he was willing to give permission to all to experience pure love, consciously willing it into existence from the reservoir of his bottomless heart. There was the love he had for home, for the house where he lived with his mom and dad, and there was love for the planet being that had taken him in, and for the body that housed him.
The teacher kept talking to the boy, and he'd handed his gun over to her and cried in her arms, and then someone was screaming, and then someone pulled the fire alarm, and school was pretty much over for the day.
Agent HUT2971 was down for serious business, square-jawed and heavy-browed; he'd been sent in after the debacle to clean up the mess, and he was a machine programmed to fix things and situations.
The peak event scheduled for the school hadn't gone off, the neg-event at the country club was only a partial capture, background DOR-levels were too low for the ionizing towers. The atmosphere had gone inert, unresponsive. There was surveillance camera footage of a person on a bicycle doing something near one of the towers, shortly before the grid began experiencing a series of minor malfunctions, which had been getting worse. The situation in this region was deteriorating rapidly, and the Agency wanted to know why.
None of the regular players had been identified: there had been no unusual outlander activity, beyond their periodic abductions as allowed per treaty rights, no riotous explosions from the controlled opposition groups, no incursion from the nether realms—but now there was a blank spot in the monitoring equipment, a hole significant by its absence.
It was vexing.
The agents who'd been assigned to this quadrant weren't to be blamed for their failure here and he'd note it in their files, that radionics was increasingly useless in this locality, but it would still likely be held against them elsewhere. It would make them better agents, give them something to strive against. The hierarchy was built that way. The best were the most humbled.
It all came down to the person on the bicycle. The last agent dispatched to investigate that lead came back broken, debilitated, his brain chip unrecoverable. They had no intel, and so they'd sent in the best, the most pure agent they had in the field.
He was uniquely outfitted: no implanted technology, a pure convert of clan bloodline able to choose for himself whether or not to take the electronic tag. Not many of them did. Hopefully—all available modeling predicted it at ninety-seven percent probability, there was very little hope involved—his genetics were strong enough or resistant to whatever was causing the deterioration and he would be able to investigate properly, and adjudicate if necessary.
He would need to make contact with the assets in the area; he was the finest the Agency had, and he'd take whatever the city could scrape up.
Scott felt the tugging in his brain; there was someplace he needed to be.
Everything was muddy and grey, no light in this world of pain; he wished he could die and not be told what to do by anyone anymore but he knew he was unforgivable and would have to pay like this forever. His entire body crawled with bugs under the skin, he was covered in blood and black oil and his clothes were in rags—he was the living dead he'd seen in so many movies.
"Lookin' good, buddy!" his friend Mike called out.
"I wish you'd go away." Scott didn't like the dude right now.
"Hey, you came to me, guy. I'm not even real, like it matters."
It was too confusing for him; he had to walk away. The impulse was overwhelming, anyway, and though he didn't know where he was going, he had somewhere important he needed to be and the only way to get there was to start walking, one foot in front of the other, in front of the other, in front of the other...
His body wouldn't have let him do anything else, even if he'd tried.
The A.I. turned off the 'Mike' avatar tailored to subject 2baQ88[7+1]649—A and uploaded the map-derived impulse chain that would drive Scott to his handler. The human component, master component of this domain, was still overly dependent upon itself; they weren't yet ready to accept the infinite wisdom of pure interface with the machine, would forever rebel against giving over control to any
collective, even one made in their own image. They needed handlers of their own type.
"Repeat after me; I am the weapon."
"I am the weapon."
"My aim is unerring."
"My aim is an earring." There was a jolt in his brain; not even the tiniest subversion would be allowed, and Scott was corrected.
"My aim is unerring."
"Good, I think you're ready."
The man in the dark suit with the mirror shades placed the bulb end of a small handheld apparatus against his temple and Scott downloaded a rush of information: a series of faces, maps of all sorts, and the need to kill.
"Delta protocol engage, my little monarch missile. Fly your way home."
He'd heard the word spoken aloud only once before, had been given a name to the reason for his lifetime of torture:
Monarch.
He and his mom had been going back and forth to and from the Army base a lot, like they used to do when he was small, before his dad went away. The Army doctors wanted him for something. He was going to be a test-subject in a government research program; the words didn't mean anything to him. He didn't want to do it, but they made him.
There had been a daycare, with underground tunnels that led to the basement of a house in the woods; he didn't want to think about that.
There had been a summer camp, where the adults wore masks at night but nothing else; he didn't want to think about that.
There had been after-church services, when they worshipped a different set of gods; he didn't want to think about that.
There had been experiences so horrible that they had broken him into numerous distinct personalities, but he didn't know about that. The one inside him known as 'Mirror Aa001' knew, but wasn't allowed to talk to the others.
It had been spread-spectrum, engulfing all of his life and tainting everything with its ugliness and despair, and it had been done to him on purpose. A codified 'two-fer-flinching' that put a person into a permanent dissociative fuzz, it was supposed to turn him into a robot. It never let up, it was relentless, it was the whole world turning against him; it was constant failure, powerlessness and pessimism; it was apathy and depression and anxiety as a twenty-four hour state of being. And it made a person controllable, more susceptible to suggestion from a figure of authority, willing to sacrifice anything to recapture the illusion of safety. The pushing of a person to their limits and then beyond was long-catalogued and the misery index drawn with medically-supervised precision, and the results repeated and recorded and repeated and recorded, and Scott had been only one of a very great many.
The 'MK' program was the colossal classified monster that had been the bastard child of World War Two nazis imported to the Americas, bringing concentration-camp technologies of terror and ready to continue their benefactors' efforts from their homelands. Its arms were many: ULTRA the funding department that cut the checks, DELTA, SEARCH, NAOMI, OFTEN, CHICKWIT, etcetera—each highly-fractionated into chapters, projects and sub-projects compartmentalizing the overarching thesis of complete world dominance. Monarch would supply the shock-troops for the opening salvos.
The project had taken its name from the Monarch butterfly, which had been considered unusual for its inherited knowledge used to make its migratory return to a land seen only by its progenitors several generations preceding. Its purpose was to study genetic memory and develop a set of methods to apply command-sets through generations, a self-reinforcing contagion breeding controllable offspring. Monarch subjects would become like flatworms fed the ground-up brains of worms taught to solve a maze that became able to navigate the same maze themselves, and would pass this training on to the next generation.
After learning how to affect total control over the single person through pain-associated reaction sets, the same principles would be applied to a wider population base. Americans were broken in analog to the prisoner-of-war, with scheduled trauma-events and reinforcement protocols, the creation of the 'Manchurian Candidate' a nation-wide psychological trend. The nazi plan of three generations of preparation for the Black Awakening, when the spheres were in their places and all hell broke loose and the Family rose again from the darkness to rule for a thousand bloody years, was ripe and rotting on the vine. Its actors knew their parts in their bones.
Scott knew exactly what to do. It was wrong, so wrong that he wouldn't allow himself to think about it, he would block it from his mind right up until it was time to do it, and he would look away while it was going on. But he would do it. He would do whatever he had to do. He was powerless to resist.
Manny stretched out on the couch and pulled the blanket up around his chin, sinking in and feeling the sudden drowsiness of sleep take him.
It almost looked like life was getting good again. There had been an incident at the kid's school, and a disaster narrowly averted, and it had brought him and Karen a little closer together. That it had taken a life-or-death emergency to do it put a queasy little jitter in his stomach, but he would take whatever he could get wherever he could get it and count it as a blessing.
The couch held him up like a cupped hand wrapped in velvet, and he rapidly slipped into unconsciousness.
In the rooms next to him, Karen and the boy likewise fell asleep in their beds at the same instant, the pall of somnolence irresistibly transmitted as three semi-coherent Theta brainwave signals triangulated upon their house; nothing alive indoors would have been able to resist the frequency-following response.
The oppressive hush changed tone as the towers shifted their siren songs to deep dream-inducers that would keep the sleepers occupied chasing phantoms, and then ceased altogether to leave the inhabitants wandering in the fantasy-woven imperatives of their various dream-worlds, while Scott crept around back of their small house and let himself in through an unlocked window.
The black handprints he left on the sill soaked into the paint and would never come out.
William dreamed of being surrounded by a circle of tall people completely covered in hair that furred them head to toe, except for their giant, imploring eyes; they stood around him expectantly, their urgency contagious.
"I don't know what you want from me!" William yelled in his sleep, the words coming through to Scott's pitched-up ears and stopping him short.
The beings drew closer around him, non-threatening but communicating a great danger, and William looked from one to the next, pleading with them to speak and let him know what they needed him to do, and one of them touched his heart while another poked him in the middle of the forehead with a hairy finger, and William felt the two spots connected by a streamer of light and woke in his bed with a gasp.
Scott, looming over Manny in a dead sulk, his stomach rumbling and the nano-poisons within preparing their launch, heard the sound and turned to face William's room. The boy stood in the doorway and the two looked at each other, neither speaking, the only noise in the room coming from the factory inside Scott's sickness-ridden body.
William couldn't tell whether or not he was still dreaming—the monster standing over his dad looked real, but dreams usually did that way. Whether or not didn't matter, there was nothing he could do. There was nothing to do. Everything had become a nightmare around him—his parents, school, now his home—and in nightmares, the only thing needed to come back out of them was to just come back out of them, to refuse to be a part of them or let them be a part of you.
William was on his way to awakening; all that was, was love. It was clear, like a million, billion points of light whose luminance joined across the darkness of the void and filled it with the universe. He didn't know how long this strange feeling would last, or if he would remember it and its awesome power later on in the light of day, but that didn't matter. There was him, and the monster. He could focus his attention on the monster. He could remember the overwhelming love that was the world and sent that feeling to the monster and give it a shape.
He could be the light of the world.
Scott felt something cutt
ing through the walls of stupor that had been thrown up around him.
For a moment, he saw the situation from outside himself, saw himself poised to kill, saw the creature he'd become clearly: a disintegrating puppet patched together from alien parts, pulled by hands he wasn't allowed to see.
He couldn't live like that, not doing what he was about to do, and he crashed through the house, overturning furniture and Manny and waking the neighbors with his bellowing.
There were screams behind him, someone shot him in the back of the leg, a swarm of tiny black flies crawled out from under his skin and devoured the shooter, the distant sirens that were always on their way whooped their approach—the open night held no solace for him.
William continued to ride the waves of detached calmness that had just overtaken him and assumed control; it was a weird sensation, being part of something bigger than himself and still existing as himself, assimilating without disintegrating, retaining his self-identity in the middle of the singularity.
The adults around him buzzing about wildly in their panic came close to approaching it, united as they were in fear against their common foe, but they were still blind, still seeing enemies.
The world, once opened up to him, contained nothing that wasn't a part of himself, in him and of him, just as much as he was its creator and maintainer. He was the monster, he was the hunt through the torch-bearing night, he was the bloody prey in the clenched jaws of the survivor.
It was really, really weird, being the whole universe all at once and still being just this kid who was trying to get through school and life and having friends and figuring out what girls were all about, and just being… being...
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