Orgonomicon by Boris D. Schleinkofer Page A

he caught the cursor moving on its own one day when
he'd come back from the kitchen, but it stopped as soon as he moved
the mouse and never did it again.
    Of all his inquiries, only one refused the
script he'd submitted but encouraged him to try another; he counted
it as a success and sent off a copy of 'Bongo', retouched and
freshly-printed on sparkly white paper with three brass brads to
bind it. They didn't want it; he tried another. And another. And
then some more. The hope began to fade.
    Then, one night sitting on the couch with his
family and his dinner tray in front of him, the TV played a
commercial for the next summer blockbuster due to hit the theaters
in a week. It was only thirty seconds and he wouldn't even have
noticed it because it looked so incredibly stupid, if it hadn't
have started with the image of the dog whistle. The boy on screen
called for his dog, "Bingo! Bingo!" and blew the whistle again, and
something very much like dread began to settle on top of his
cheeseburger. When the child on the TV began stroking the air
behind a floating collar worn by an invisible dog, he knew. He knew . It was put out by the same studio he'd been sending
his work to.
    "That's your story, isn't it?" She asked him,
and he slapped his palm against his forehead for the first of many
times.
    There was no way he could prove anything, of
course, but he knew. He'd been robbed. It had taken them a year to
do it, the whole time encouraging him to keep trying, keep
submitting, to keep biting the hook. He'd sent them eight, in all;
as the months followed, he saw them appear one after the other, in
slightly re-written form, but familiar enough to recognize his own
work. He'd fed that beast eight of his best screenplays, one by
one.
    And then he found his other works showing up
in the marketplace, things he'd written but hadn't sent out to
anyone yet. They'd gotten his smell, tasted his blood and would
never again leave him alone; he found his home computer infested
with a persistent virus and his machine took on a life of its own.
Soon enough, everything he'd typed out and stored on his computer
was showing up around him, on television and in the movies. And his
identity had been stolen to commit bank fraud. And things were
disappearing off the hard drive at the most inopportune
moments.
    He'd eventually given up and thrown the
machine away, but the next one he bought was compromised the first
time he checked his email.
    What else could he do? He gave up completely,
and started drinking and arguing, and became a person he didn't
like. Everything went downhill. So now he was out on the street,
his miniscule savings account rapidly draining, no family, no
money, no hope. When he ran into his old friend from high school,
he didn't refuse the glass pipe offered to him. He had nothing else
left to lose.
    The profits made from his stolen enterprise
went towards defraying the costs of three minutes' worth of
screen-time in a big-budget war-department propaganda piece
marketed as a feature film in a popular toy-franchise, and half the
price of a submarine sandwich at the craft-services table in a
network studio shooting a daily children's show. To his victors,
his contribution was small, anonymous and essentially
meaningless.
     
    Jaime's mother had a feeling that something
was wrong. Really, though, when wasn't there something
wrong?
    He was acting out more than usual and had
begun wetting the bed again. He was too old for this. Sure, she and
his stepfather were fighting more often than they used to, but did
that cause a child to develop night terrors and bizarre phobias?
They seemed to her to come at random: elves, dentists, worms,
nothing that made sense. And he'd started having regular nosebleeds
when he slept.
    Nothing in the world sounded as good to her
right then as a glass of wine, or three, and a mindless lay down on
the couch with some mindless TV. She needed to turn off for a
while.
    Turn off.
    She put the pill in her mouth and