Orgonomicon (21 page)

"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 cutting 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...

Normal.

This was the opposite of normal.

But it was okay.

Scott was not well, not well at all.

Everything he was supposed to do, he'd failed
at. His instructions had been clear, and hadn't included what to do
in case he didn't succeed…

Or had they? He couldn't remember them
now.

He didn't know where to go, what he was
supposed to do; he noticed that he was lost, and that the voices
had faded out and were no longer offering their advice. Even his
own inner voice, long pushed to the back behind the dominating
presence of the computer's non-stop whispered shouting, had gone
quiet and left him alone with his perception and the environment
and no filters. It was just the world, and what he'd chosen to do
with it.

He couldn't take the judgment he'd leveled
against himself, or that the world made against him, or whatever…
No! He didn't need to be, he'd done what he'd done and there was no
going back and it was already too late for him.

Maybe now that he was truly alone, he'd be
allowed to kill himself; there was a freeway overpass just ahead of
him, and a long drop to pavement and plenty of oncoming traffic,
and there was a hole in the fencing that kept people on the
footpath. It couldn't have been more clear what he was supposed to
do, now.

The jump didn't kill him; the car smashed
into his broken body and the driver flew through the window and
died on the freeway next to him, but the crash didn't kill him.
Scott's body reconstructed itself, more and more of the tissues
replaced with the black endoskeleton woven by the programmed
intelligence of the nano-devices, at last becoming more machine
component than man. What actual flesh remained was raw and bloody
and held together with black strings and emitting sparks of static
electricity. He rose jerkily to his feet, lurched out from behind
the smashed car into the next lane, and was struck again by another
passing car. He went into the black.

When Scott last woke, his chest was flayed
open and a man in a plastic bodysuit had his glove buried deep in
his rib cage; the man gave a great yank that Scott felt from
inside, and pulled out a throbbing blob of gristly black tubes and
nodules with blinking lights rooted in it.

"You're lucky the transponder was still
working. We almost lost you to the tabloids there. That would have
been a real circus."

The man slopped the alien organ into a metal
pan and rattled it at him, the words coming stilted and hollow
through the hazmat suit, "You've been decommissioned. Good work,
soldier. You're going to your final reward." He pulled another
black glob of pulsing goop out of Scott's intestines and hoisted it
into another pan, cutting the trailing cables embedded in his torso
with a laser scalpel. The stink and the pain were overwhelming and
dark fuzziness crept in at the edges of his vision, and Scott knew
that his wish was finally being granted, and that all he wanted now
was to live.

"We've taken the boy who was responsible for
somehow deprogramming you, so you'll be in good company. You won't
be dying alone today."

He didn't want to die.

Now, finally that it was inevitable, he did
not want to give up his life, however horrible it may have become.
Change was always possible. There would always be another
tomorrow.

"Please, I don't want to die," he tried to
say, but the man's hands were pushing his voicebox aside and it
came out in a gurgle.

"Good night, sweet prince," said the man, who
then pulled out the remains of his brainstem and killed him.

William wasn't afraid. He'd seen it all,
forward and backward, through all possibilities and the
entrenchments made by myth; he saw the hero killed an infinite
number of ways, saw the necessity for the sacrifice written into
the system and dared to dream otherwise. He'd been taken from his
parents and locked away, unable to call for help and completely at
the mercy of the man with the dark sunglasses, but his spirit had
been one with the universe, but…

But his body had been taken. He was
dissociating, slipping away into his own mind to escape. He had to
keep the feeling, but come back. He didn't completely want to. It
was painful back there.