Oganheimer's Angel (Science Fiction at its BEST!)

[NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: I was hiding in the back room of our abandonned office building, where I go to meditiate the horrors of the world away. The room's A/C vents are closed to save money. The stuffiness clears my mind. So there I was, sweating against the sealed window like a suffocating fly, when a series of images thrust up from the blackness with all the brilliance of a lightning storm. I saw a man changing history, and another, darker form stalking behind him. I saw things that could have helped us as a race, forgotten under blankets of dust. I saw fear and misunderstanding. And so, from Friday night to Sunday morning, I wrote this little diddy. A ballad to the lightning storm. *Snaps his fingers and taps his foot to keep time* "And it goes'a somethin like this..."] 


Oganheimer’s spine ached; his hips felt packed with molten glass; his colon flexed like a gasping fish. But for all his body’s failings, his mind remained alert.

Three hours now he’d hunched over the microscope, watching the serum undulate. Pale green, it danced around the tissue samples. The state of mitosis remained aggressive, quadrupling since this morning, and now resembled a wall of bubbles, pulsing every so often toward the confines of its dish.

“It has to work.” His clenched his swollen knuckles. “It must.”

*

The Sweeper sat still before his screens. The subterranean complex beyond his office was vast, though its compartmented walls and lowered ceilings gave each Miller the feeling of privacy while they canvassed the world for its patterns.

The Sweeper depressed a button on his desk. “What’s the status, 44?”

There was no static in the interim of silence, and when Miller 44’s calm voice answered, the transmission was smooth and crisp. “Oganheimer’s made no progress, sir.”

“He will.”

“He seems well stumped, sir. Extrapolations have been wrong before.”

“I imagine many things went wrong before.”

The Millers didn’t like him; had preferred the old boss Hendrix, with his sad eyes and apologist mannerisms, as if The Operation were a plague for which no excuse could ever be offered.

“Data does not lie, 44. The shift will occur within 16 hours. Now watch.”

“Yes s—”

The Sweeper killed the transmission before the rat could finish squeaking. The infrastructure had weakened, no longer taking pride in keeping secrets. And Hendrix had been the degeneration’s posterboy. The Sweeper had a mind to think the entire Operation’s ethos had been an inadvertent plague in leadership, pushed out day by day in the man’s weepy gestures.

But Hendrix was on Containment now, dirtying his hands to prove his loyalty. Which was a joke, of course. It would only be a matter of time before he slipped. And when he did … the Sweeper would be there to crush him.

*

Hendrix sat in the Containment van, reading the illustrated poetry of William Blake. There were tears in his eyes; for Blake had seen the cruelty of the world, the fatalistic pressure that would perforce crush dominion into a paste capable of generosity. Blake had understood The Operation before ever the organization had been hatched.

Hendrix’s colleagues weren’t evil. After so many years spent grinding information, puzzling algorithms, and divining patterns, they had simply forgotten the purpose of their task: to stop the fated eating of the sacred fruit, and thus keep humanity innocent. Only then might they turn from their war machines and look into the sky to see a universe moving without permission from the feeble race beholding it.

Hendrix closed the book and stared up the driveway. The light was on in the second story. From here he could see the bent and frozen back, the white hair matted with grease above the microscope. He could almost smell the doctor’s desperation.

“I hope, for your sake, you do not find what you are looking for.”

*

“Darling? Are you awake?” 

The sound of Oganheimer’s spine stiffening was like a stick being dragged along a washboard. Cold needles pricked the back of his legs as he hobbled through the laboratory, into the must-smelling hall. Close to the bedroom door the air became medicinal, a sterile odor of plastic sheets and unguents.

“My love, you should be sleeping.”

“I could say the same of you.” A paper whisper from the room.

He stepped inside, feeling his heart break anew. That the organ still beat was a wonder. His lower lip trembled, then broke into a smile. Beneath the decay and degeneration she was still his wife. “I am closer.” He nodded. “Very close. I can feel it. Something’s in the air.”

“You look half a ghost.” The thin creature in the bed patted the mattress. “Come. Sit next to me. I am cold.”

“Then I shall bring you blankets.”

“Your body will do. Come, Fredrick.”

Oganheimer bowed his head and obeyed, a loyal dog to the last. He saw the cold food on the night table, untouched and acrowd with flies. “You are not hungry?”

“My stomach is rotting, dear. In case you have forgotten.”

He turned his pale face toward hers. The seventeen-year-old Italian winery brat was still in there, wild and outspoken. Through all the perverse cruelties inflicted by Stella’s sickness, it had not touched her eyes. Deep and inquisitive, the color of sunlit wheat. He wanted to crawl inside them now, to coo himself to sleep so they might sink into the darkness together. “You must eat, my love.”

“I hunger only for you.” The claw of her hand brushed his cheek. “There is no man sweeter.”

He blushed, couldn’t help himself. “Soon you will be well. We will go to Tuscany, to the village where first I saw you. We’ll walk the orchards hand in hand, like we did when we were young. Just wait. Hold on. And for the love of the world, eat.”

“Ah, Tuscany.” She looked into the blackness beyond her window. “How nice that would be.”

“Will be,” he corrected. “I am near understanding the serum. It won’t be long. As of yet, it cannot bridge the cellular wall, but stands outside like a waiting army. In vermin the breach occurs. But a protein is missing for human compatibility. An amino acid. Something. I just have to watch it. When I watch, I understand. I need to…”

He saw that she had drifted off, and fell silent. Oganheimer patted her hand and rose to leave. His hand hesitated on the light switch, then fell away.

No creature so beautiful should be left in darkness.

*

The Sweeper paced, watching the digital countdown chew seconds. Miller 44’s last report had confirmed the same: Oganheimer had not yet changed history. There were four others under surveillance, spread wide across the globe, but according to the data, Oganheimer still possessed the greatest probability of success.

Such equations still eluded him. The forbearers whose great work had fueled the genesis of The Operation had been the only men to truly understand it, and all of them were dead. What remained was an algorithm not much different than a holy relic that’s history remains glazed in superstition. Hendrix had told him as much before surrendering his position. 

“You think you know what we do here,” he’d said. “But the Godheads and their vision are dead. What remains is a fuzzy memory. A fading dream. Have you ever tried to recreate a dream? I mean, in its exactness. The first twenty minutes are the easiest. But in an hour, five hours, a day? The pictures muddle. The chronology collapses. The Operation has been awake too long to remember its dream. What remains is a mistake.”

The Sweeper clenched his fists to remember it. The knuckles were scarred bulges from his days working Containment. But within his mind hid scars far deeper. Entire pieces of what functioned to create happiness for other human beings had been severed beyond repair.

He was a company man.

A doer.

Hendrix had been too soft for this position. He’d told the Godheads as much.

“He weeps in his office, cringing at the approach of every Shift. Can such a man be trusted to keep balance?”

“What do you propose we do? Hendrix is too valuable to terminate.”

“Termination would be a boon for such a sufferer. I propose we harden him.”

“How?”

“Put him in the field. Make him shape his loyalty with his own two hands.”

After much lithe maneuvering, the Godheads had complied. And here he was, running things, smoothing the ripples of humanity before they could distort the ordered reflection.

All this thought of Hendrix made him furious. He wanted the man to fail. He wanted to show the Godheads that their loyal dog was crippled. The Sweeper fixed his eyes to the countdown clock and pressed the intercom switch. “Miller 44, do you have a status update on the other targets?”

“Yes sir. Brecht is sleeping. Karkavich is walking his dog. Um …” The sound of clicking keys. “Myantha is in the Hindu temple, deep in meditation. And Remly…” A slight hesitation. “Sir, Remly appears to have just suffered a stroke.”

“It’s Oganheimer, then. Is Containment on site?”

“Agent Hendrix is 100 yards from the target’s home, with a full visual.”

The Sweeper straightened his spine, looking off into nothing. “Do you trust him, 44?” It was an unusual question for a line of work in which opinions were seldom exchanged.

“Sir?”

“A simple answer, 44. Do you trust Hendrix? With this?”

But the man hesitated too long.

The Sweeper cut off the transmission and picked up the phone. “Command, this is The Sweeper. I need transport to Hannibal, NY. Four soldiers should do. Yes.” A beat. “What do you mean their dispatched to other locations? The threat is Oganheimer! The other four targets are—” He paused, listened. “Her?”

The Sweeper smiled. “She will do. Have her topside in four minutes. I’m leaving now.”

*

Hendrix watched the old man until his eyes blurred. The dark green surveillance screen chewed into his retinas. He needed air, movement, life. It was against protocol to leave the surveillance vessel. But protocol was an invention for less self-governing men. He opened the door quietly, turning the dome light off.

Winter was in the air, a cold that crawled into his bones to lay its eggs. The sky was a cloudless purple, bruising its way toward dawn. It was still too dark to see anything, save the jagged teeth of naked trees that marched in all directions. In a month or two the woods would be covered in snow, the animals all fled or else deep in hibernation. And the world would never know what had become of the old doctor and his sickly wife.

Hendrix wanted to weep then more than ever. For the world. For the Operation and its blind lieutenants. But mostly for himself, the young fool who had been so eager for glory that he’d allowed himself to become an old fool in the process.  The pressure built until he felt a dry snap within his soul.

But when his eyes opened they were dry and fixed and proud.

He looked up at the window, at the old determined shape bent before its microscope.

Then he got into the van and sped away.

*

“You’re reputation precedes you,” The Sweeper held out his hand. “They call me—”

“The Sweeper,” she finished, taking it in a firm grip. “You are a legend in the field.”

“Legends shine ever brighter than the fools that inspire them. I bleed like the rest of you. And one day I’ll die.”

She smiled like a viper, lips full of poison, plump to hide the fangs. “Not tonight, I hope.”

“Hope is the tool of lesser creatures. We deal in data, soldier.”

“That we do.” She buckled herself into the chopper, as it lifted from the landing pad. They continued the conversation through their headgear. “I was told that a Containment agent is already on site.”

“That dog is rabid, I’m afraid.” And it was then, with the Sweeper scanning the bosom pronounced beneath the soldier’s tactical suit, that his transmitter began to vibrate. He lifted a finger to her and leaned toward the pilot, handing him the device. “Patch this in so both of us can hear it.”

The pilot nodded.

In an instant he heard the frantic voice of Miller 44. “Sir. Mr. Sweeper, sir.”

“What is it, 44?”

“Agent Hendrix has evacuated the site. We had him heading northbound for three miles. Then the signal stopped.”

The Sweeper met her eyes. “What do you mean it stopped?”

“It’s just sitting there.”

“Call me if it moves.”

“Yes, sir.”

“We’ll be there in three hours. What’s the countdown?”

“Six hours, sir … but they’re only markers. The Shift could be occurring now. We have no way of knowing without a field agent on the ground. We have no way to—”

“Control yourself.”

“Apologies.” 44 sniffed. “I just, well … Hendrix was always a good boss. A loyal boss. I can’t imagine why he’d break protocol.”

“Because he’s weak. Now take care that you don’t follow in his footsteps.”

The Sweeper killed the transmission, grabbing the back of the pilot’s neck. “I want these engines at full power. MOVE!”

* 

Oganheimer watched the magnified wall of cells, bubbling as they multiplied. The green serum pulsed under the magnifying light, a field of glowing seaweed. Sometimes he fancied images in the swirls. Two lovers holding hands. Quiet woods suspended in a timeless sunset. A world made happy and complete. The serum was a thing of dreams.

He could not say how he’d stumbled upon it. It was an accident. For forty-seven years he’d been a leader in the field of microbiology. Only when his wife sickened had he turned his sights upon oncology, and the dark avenues yet unexplored. Stella’s illness had spread into his life, his morals, his ‘absolutely nots’, until the singular hunger of her recovery outweighed any fear of medical misconduct.

He’d spent his considerable savings traveling the world, writing to every mind in the field of exotic medicine, leaving no stone unturned. And then a cryptic letter, slid through the mail shoot with no stamp or return address, had changed everything.

Inside had been a single piece of paper, tri-folded and neatly typed.

You seek the answer to Wasting. Love outlives the vessel which contains it. It swells in death and drowns the ones who worship at its shore. But there are places without shores. Places once drowned by oceans that have since risen to staggering heights.

At the temple of Han-ku your answer waits.

Where the snow burns hot.

So it was the Oganheimer found himself at in a village, high between the seething nations of India and China, in a place virtually untouched modern comforts. The temple was cut from the stone of the mountain, carved right into its side. Snow dusted the pathways, and strange white birds circled high in the frozen winds.

The high priest smiled and led him to a field on the eastern side. Snow touched the thin grass, and though the cold had numbed him on the rocky outskirts, there was a supernatural warmth within the draw. He stared on in amazement. An entire sea of purple white flowers shivered in the wind, stretching on for miles.

 The old monk picked a handful and held them up, smiling to reveal his gums. When Oganheimer asked the translator how old the man was he thought the boy was teasing him.

“That’s impossible,” he’d whispered.

“It is not impossible,” the translator said. “He is the youngest of his order.”

“One-hundred and forty three, and he’s the youngest?”

He’d taken all he could carry of the exotic snow orchid, and had spent the last six months isolating its compounds. It healed rats. It healed dogs and cats. It had even healed the deer he’d trapped and infected with the rare strain of leukemia. But the tissue in the dish, his wife’s tissue…

“I’ve failed her,” he whispered. “I’ve crawled through half the world, and failed her.”

The tears welled in his eyes, blurring the lens, pooling and slipping down the metal housing as he collapsed onto a stool and wept. He was too drowned in anguish to notice that his tears had breached the dish…

And that a soft purple light now filled the room.

*

Hendrix sped across stark countryside, chewing his inner cheek. It was a nervous habit, born of his early days in The Operation. The compound’s doctor had warned him, but the taste of blood made him conscious of his own inevitable death, and therefore careful to avoid it. 

He kept his eyes on the rearview, scanning for lights. But for a County Sheriff snoozing under a peeling billboard, the roads remained empty. He cracked the window, listening for the staccato thump of approaching choppers.

The Sweeper would be on his way. Hendrix had removed the magnetic tracker from the engine block, thrown it in a ditch not far from Ogenheimer’s farm. But he’d done it too late. The vision had come with the force of a pulse blast, and in the swirling ash of his moral dilemma a path had been blasted clean. He’d understood what must be done, what he should have done years ago, with the Millers still under his control.

“No matter,” he whispered, cutting a muddy arc as he skidded left onto the unpaved road. “Let him come.”

The woods thickened with each foot. With the speed of the van and the play of his highbeams against the darkness, it lent the appearance of movement, gnarled oak and hickory and conifer transformed into scores of hungry guards.

The image made him smile. It had been too long since he’d imagined. The Operation’s complex, with its low ceilings and sterile air, spared no room for dreams. It was why they feared The Shift and sought to contain it. But it was natural. That was sin of it all. To harness the power of brute force against mutations predestined to take shape.

They were the firemen of human consciousness, gathering beneath the lightning storms with axes and hoses at the ready. Until now, they had been successful. Each time the collective conscious puckered in the birth throes of a new idea, the data had allowed them to contain it. He had always wondered why. And not until his pre-demotion meeting with the Godheads, seeing their gold rings and tailored suits and freshly barbered hair, had he understood.

They were afraid.

Instead of open admission, they buried that fear beneath a price tag, auctioning each Shift’s containment off to the bidder that would most benefit from its quiet death.

Thousands of treasures had been robbed from the world, shelved and quickly forgotten. There were so many items stockpiled that the Godheads had lost track of their depots. But not Hendrix. With his mind sharp from poetry, and his heart alive with shame, Hendrix knew them all.

He stopped the van before the rusted silo and killed the lights. With the engine running, he stepped up to the rounded base and felt along the stones. When his fingers found the hidden slate, he pressed them equally along the surface.

A deep click buzzed behind the wall. Dirt mounded near his feet, piling and rolling to allow the passage of a polished steel column. It was the thickness of his thigh, flat on top with an analog keypad. The engineers of such caches had ensured accessibility, with or without power.

His fingers moved deftly along the keys.

1. 9. 8. 4. *.

Even the power-hungry mad had a sense of humor.

The silo’s interior smelled of dust and oil. A winding staircase led him up into a faint glowing chamber. The wall nooks housed every breed of contraption. Hydro-fuel engines. Oxygen-condensing lightbulbs. Time-particle isolators. Casks of healing rubber that could never stay punctured for long. Anti-weapon weaponry. Spiritual texts and objects that revealed the true place of man within the cosmos. His eyes welled with tears to behold them, these unglimpsed relics.

And when he found the chrome crowns fused by an umbilicus of wires, he slipped it in his duffel and descended.

He stared at the open silo door. The piece of him that had given twenty years to the The Operation wanted to go back and close it. But the smaller, stronger part of him stayed his hand.

“Let them find it.” He whispered, backing out and cutting down the road. “They deserve to know.”

*

“There!” The Sweeper pointed into the black countryside. “Put it down there.”

The pilot nodded, nosing the chopper down into a field. The naked trees thrashed against the current. The Pilot saw the small farmhouse with its upper lights on. From where he sat, it appeared that an old man was dancing with a thin woman clutched in his arms. Her gray hair swung in disheveled arcs and she was smiling.

The Sweeper opened the doors and jumped out behind the female soldier. There was something innately menacing about both of them, the same feeling he got from wild dogs.

The Sweeper turned to him, fixed to bite. “Wait here. Alert me if anything looks off. Anything.”

The Pilot nodded, glancing in time to see a white van pull behind the farmhouse with its lights off. He turned to say something.

But The Sweeper and his wolf were already running across the field.

*                      

Oganheimer couldn’t believe his eyes. The glow, the pulse, the beauty. Soft undulating light brushed violet fingers over every surface of the lab. He stood on numb legs, his lips trembling, and staggered to the microscope.

The sheen of his tears upon the metal was plain to see. As he watched, another drop trickled on the view dish, breathing fresh light into the room.

“Impossible,” but he was smiling. “Stella? STELLA!”

He grabbed a bottle of the compound and unscrewed the lid beneath his eye. He thought of his wife, her beautiful face, her smile under the Tuscan sun, the green of orchards and rolling mountain roads. He thought of war and loss and the whimper of dogs. He imagined her cold, pale form slowly dropping into the earth, leaving him here to wander … until the sound of trickling broke him from his dream.

Tears dripped into the open bottle.

Light bloomed around his fingers, a penetrating warmth. He laughed out loud, throwing his head back. How long had he collapsed to weep for the wife he could never save? How many nights had he spilled the secret into his own two hands?

“Darling, what is it?”

Oganheimer turned, saw her weak form leaning in the doorway. He moved with his entire soul and came to her, feeling as if he were floating. “Salt,” he smiled. “It was sodium all the time.”

“Sodium?” She looked unsure, the purple light dancing in her eyes. “Dear, you’ve been weeping.” She held his cheek. “Not for me. Oh, not for me.”

“Yes.” He held her closer, dancing back and forth “Tears of joy, my love.”

“Joy?” She looked at the bottle again, uncertain now. “What are you saying?”

“Your pain is at its end. Look,” he carted her to the microscope. “Just look.”

Stella had to place her palms on the table for support. She pressed her eye to the view glass. “I see nothing. Only purple light.”

“Exactly. Not five minutes ago that dish was filled with your cancer.”

Her body stiffened. She clutched her chest. Oganheimer understood her shock. He still felt it now himself, a blood fever foaming in his ears. He could hear crackling, and what he mistook for footsteps. His heart was a thunder. The joy nearly crushed him. To watch her venture so close to the Boatman’s clutches, and to snatch her back before the fiend could cart her away.

“Drink this,” he said, stepping closer.

But she fell onto the floor, rolling on her back, where a bright red blossom was bleeding into her nightclothes.

“STELLA!” He dropped to his knees as the next bullet flew. It slammed into his shoulder, shattering the bone. He growled like a wounded lion, falling to his stomach, dragging the rugs beneath him as he clawed out for his wife. “STELLA!”

And then the footsteps were right behind him, a cold, dead voice. “Congratulations, Doctor. You’ve just cured cancer.”

The old man looked up, saw the barrel of a gun pointed at his head, and then the beautiful woman behind it. He snarled at the dark-haired man standing at her side. “Cowards! MONSTERS! My wife! You’ve killed my wife!”

*

The last two shots flashed in the high windows across the field, followed by purple light.

The Pilot didn’t know the nature of this assignment—only that there was a threat to be contained. What menace an old man and woman could pose to a syndicate as large as The Operation mystified him, but it wasn’t his job to think. He flew birds where they told him, deployed missiles when they told him, and, on occasion, watched people die.

So it goes.

It took longer than expected. But eventually, they returned, walking slowly, as if shocked and ashamed. There was a third man with them. As the Pilot watched, the third man got into his van and drove it directly through the garage door. The loud crash was drowned out by the whirring blades, strangely beautiful in the silence.

The three came toward the field, then turned. The third man lifted his hand and pressed a small switch.

Spears of red-yellow fire punched up through the roof. The windows coughed into a thousand glimmering diamonds. Rafters spun high into the air, burning as they fell. The walls pushed out then fell, taking the roof with it, until the entire driveway and the woods beyond were burning. The female soldier fell to her knees and seemed to be wailing. She stayed that way for a moment before the Sweeper lifted her up, throwing an arm around her shoulders and whispering in her ear.

The Pilot swallowed, looked down, and prepared the engine for take off.

When he looked up again the third man was pointing a rifle at his face.

*

They stood under the hot summer sun, dressed in cotton. They held each other close, nuzzling when the spirit took them and looking off into the hills.

“How could this be?” Stella whispered. “I still can’t believe it.”

“It was the Angel.” Oganheimer had taken to calling Hendrix by this name. “I want to be sad … to have lost such a miracle.” He looked down at her, his new young body tight and firm against her. “But then I remember how you looked there on the ground. Thin. Bleeding. I remember feeling my entire world collapse. I couldn’t bear to live without you. What is a cure without one to save?”

She kissed his neck. The breasts of the soldier had been much bigger than hers. She didn’t like them on her body, preferred the lithe frame with which she’d dashed across these hills as a youth. But she supposed it was a small price to pay. “We are lucky.”

“Lucky?” Oganheimer flexed for her, the Sweeper’s arms defined and bulging. “I could sweep you in my arms and run a mile.”

“So why don’t you?” she teased, and laughed loudly when he did, throwing her over his shoulder and galloping up the dirt road with the vines of orchards whipping at their sides.

At a small rise he stopped, sweating and covered in a fine sheen of dust. He kissed her, long and sweet, knowing it could be their last, that the strange machine The Angel had used on them as they lay dying upon his laboratory floor could have a fluke or miscalculation. He had told them as much.

“Enjoy it while you can, doctor. Life is too short for weeping.”

Oganheimer could still envision it, the twin crowns of pale alloy fused with braided wires, the way the cold hot spikes had lanced his brain when first Hendrix had set it upon his brow. “This will hurt, I’m sure. Be brave.”

And then the current, ripping him up from himself, flattening him until his senses were ground into a single thread, winding up and out into a chewing blackness. He heard the screams of the other man they’d called The Sweeper, images of war and death, and then he saw the darkness, passing him as the hazing snow sometimes passed beyond his window, until he was looking at his former self from across the room, his old dying body wearing the pale crown, and the new man watching him through its eyes.

Oganheimer kissed his wife, and drew her into the orchard. “You are my world. Without you, I am nothing.”

They made love upon the hill, with grass pressed between their young, firm bodies and a Tuscan sun burning high and hot in the sky. Lying naked, with Stella asleep against his chest, Oganheimer thought about The Angel, about his sad, drawn face, and wondered why the man had looked so sad.      

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