Orgonomicon
him from any other agent he knew. It could just as
easily happen to any one of them.
     
    Buzzsaw hated the man sitting next to him at
the table. SEL6210 could work the rad-station like nobody's
business, but that still sure as hell didn't make him a good agent.
There was a damn good reason command-and-control made him C.O. on
this mission—the son of a bitch was unreliable. The Seal had
botched his last mission going off on his own, acting without
supervisory approval. The man was broken, but in a bad way. Free
play to improvise meant that you could play around within the
restrictions they gave you, not that you could rewrite the rules to
suit yourself. SEL6210 was going to have to be taught a lesson
about 'chain of command'. Still, you had to hand it to the man—he
was one of the best rad-operators in the field. He could make the
puppets dance like nobody's business, that was for sure.
    That was exactly how they'd gotten stuck on
this assignment together. They'd both been hotshots who'd fucked
up, in their own ways; it made sense, in a twisted world, that they
should be assigned to rehabilitate one another. At least, that was
what Buzzsaw was assuming had been on the computer's mind.
    Agent BUZ4937 laughed to himself, short and
bitterly. The computer had a mind, to make its own decisions and
dictate the fate of those who weren't its programmers, sure. Why
the hell not? If it decided that putting two screwups together
would be the way to push them back into line—they were supposed to
reinforce each other's programming, to help steer each other back
onto the proper course, Buzzsaw knew how it worked from his own
time as a slave handler, they policed each other—then that was how
it was going to go, barring intervention from someone higher up.
Buzzsaw was happy to go along with the computer's plan; no more
attention from Central was necessary, thank you very much. His last
gaffe, at the goddamned grade-five aquarium last year, had earned
him more attention than he'd ever wanted. One entire county's worth
of inductees lost because of his inattention; he was lucky they
hadn't decommissioned him outright and sent him off to early
'retirement,' somewhere in the desert digging his own grave by
moonlight. Or just turned him off. Getting put on rad-detail was
too good to be true; it was almost as if they were rewarding him
for forgetting to flip the switch at the right time. Almost.
    "I'm still concerned about that spike in her
response when she pulled the kid's club. Something there wasn't
right." SEL6210 wasn't smart enough to leave him alone. The man
couldn't read his colleagues for shit.
    "Of course you are. None of this is going
right. Focus on your work. Don't make me tell you again or I'll
have you decommissioned. I'm the fuckin' commander here, right?
Fucking CO means fucking carry-on or fucking clear off, got it? Get
this place wiped and let's get this shit done with. Pronto!"
    If the people who cut his checks were going
to decide that a computer was smarter than he was and would be
issuing the orders, then he was going to do what the computer said.
He didn't have a choice in it, anyway.
    Buzzsaw would let the man get on with his
scrubbing and then sit back down and try to clear away some of the
complications in his routines, and he would do it before the
weasely little man they'd paired him with drove him crazy and
forced him teach an unforgettable lesson in manners and diplomacy.
Fuck that little rat bastard.
     
    Jesus, the man had a foul mouth; it indicated
a weak character, to Agent SEL6210's way of thinking. It made no
sense at all to him how the man could have been put in charge of
this mission. It couldn't have been very high-priority or Central
wouldn't have chosen them, for sure, but still… You'd think they'd
want a higher chance of success.
    SEL6210 felt the Agency's judgment, the
condemnation, the self-loathing and the yearning for redemption in
the eyes of his superiors and knew that it was what he was

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