by Dave Stone
Hadn’t it been lucky, Eddie thought that GenTech had been right on hand to throw up containment when the Rapture bug, whatever it was, had hit Des Moines?
Wasn’t it just so fortunate that this Professor Zarathustra had been able to reverse-engineer, tone down, tweak and reproduce the effect in a manner that was (a) useful to GenTech itself, and (b) resulted in a rejuvenation product that every rich old scumbag under the sun would be falling over themselves to buy.
It couldn’t have worked out better if GenTech itself had loosed the Bug in its prototypically virulent state, using the unfortunate citizens of Des Moines as experimental subjects…
Eddie decided that he’d rather like to learn a bit more about GenTech aims. He was only following Masterton’s orders, after all.
A few moments later he had stumbled on the command-codes for the various surveillance cameras dotted around the corridor-complex that Trix Desoto had referred to as the Factory.
There was a security station with its complement of armed guards.
There was a refectory space, and the medical technician-dressed, alas, in a decidedly less exciting manner than had been Trix Desoto in her comedy-nurse costume-who periodically came to administer the sedative hypos that, apparently, were intended to regulate Eddie’s sleeping patterns and which worked insofar as they knocked him out like a light.
There was a room remarkably like the one Eddie had imagined on first waking up here-brightly lit and walled with antiseptic while tile. On a surface that looked disquietingly like a mortuary slab lay a thin, pale figure that Eddie recognised: the old guy from New Mexico. The body stirred. Obviously still not dead, then.
A Suited figure instantly recognisable as Masterton was conferring with a medical technician Eddie didn’t know as she plugged cables into a sensor-unit, suspended on a gimbal-rig over the old guy, and ran the self-diagnostics. Then they nodded together and the technician activated the unit.
Eddie couldn’t believe what happened next. Or rather, he believed it… he just wished that he couldn’t.
8.
And for a while he:
Didn’t feel like doing anything but fly, pinwheeling through the air over the abstract mesh of tendrils, alive to nothing but the rush of kinaesthesia. The simple joy of it.
Eventually, he:
Regained some grip on himself and on his mind; if he was here yet again then is was probably important. There was something his mind was trying to tell him. There was something here for him to learn.
On the extreme edge of perception, he caught a glimpse of:
Creatures of some kind, hanging in the air, sculling lazily through the gulf with cilia-like pseudopodia. Their bumbling course drew them closer to him. They appeared to have noticed him.
He:
Decided to hurry things along and meet them halfway. He was actually, to be frank, some small part of his mind was telling him, getting a bit tired of the obliquity. He wanted to know what this was about once and for all. He rotated himself laterally in the abstract air and accelerated toward the creatures.
As he drew closer, more of the:
Creatures became evident, in tens, and hundreds, thousands… and at last millions. There was a swarm of them. As he drew closer, individual details became distinct-and something inside him began to scream. The same word. Over and over again.
Say it three times and it’s true.
A barbed and chitinous hook shot for him, a length of slimy cord trailing in its wake and attaching it to one of the bulbous creature-masses. The hook punched into his horrified and gaping mouth, burrowed through to burst from the back of the neck with a clunch.
The pain was immense; it:
Hauled him, the creature, on its line, towards its mass. In human terms, in waking terms, the bulk of it would have been miles across. A seething chaos of forms and textures that suggested some weird mix of corruption and clockwork, bone cogs and escarpments ticking through a black and churning mass of diseased bile.
The:
Creature hauled him, spinning on his line, into the foetid mass of itself. Buried him inside himself. Engulfed him.
Eddie Kalish shook himself awake. He had to be awake and ready for this. Like the old joke, it was almost time for him to go to sleep.
At least, it was almost time for the medical technician to come in with the hypo. Eddie had wondered, more than once, what the purpose of it really was; it wasn’t as if he didn’t spend the days and nights drifting in and out of dreams in any case.
Maybe the staff needed the routine of knowing that there were certain hours when patients were guaranteed to be sparked out.
In any case, the procedure would prove useful now. Eddie spent a minute or two with his datapad, accessing the surveillance systems and keying in a number of commands he knew how to enter like they were written on the back of his hand-without ever quite knowing how he knew them.
Presently, the technician came bustling in. Under her somewhat generic-looking GenTech staff uniform she was a cheerful girl, in her late teens, named Laura Palmer, if you could believe the little polycarbon plaque clipped to her lapel. To the extent that he have her any consideration at all, as a person, Eddie quite liked her.
“Evening, Mister Kalish,” she said cheerfully. “And how are we this evening?”
She always called Eddie Mister Kalish with a kind of joking parody of respect, like he was an old guy who kept pissing himself and had to be led around by hand and jollied along. Maybe it was just what the people running hospitals always did with the people in their care-Eddie Kalish had no basis for comparison.
And not that even thinking about the idea of old guys didn’t open up a nasty can of worms, for Eddie, at the moment.
“Don’t feel well,” Eddie mumbled, trying for what he imagined as sounding ill-but succeeding merely in the sort of voice that people used to use when phoning the office on the day of a really important event like the sun being out and feeling like going fishing. And then they cough.
“Feel bad…” Eddie continued, breaking into a cough and waving his right hand randomly and vaguely in an attempt to indicate something about his left shoulder. “Look at this…”
“Don’t you worry,” medical technician Laura Palmer said, producing the hypo from its ziplock case with cheerful briskness. “A good night’s sleep and you’ll be right as rain.”
Automatically, though, she had leaned in, inclining her head toward the shoulder Eddie had indicated. Eddie Kalish reached up and grabbed her head and smacked her face into the wall.
He’d merely planned to knock her out, but he didn’t know his strength. The force of it pulled Laura Palmer physically off her feet to the extent where she literally left one shoe behind.
There was a sharp crunch that Eddie Kalish would subsequently spend years trying to forget and fail. A spray of blood.
The motion had ripped out several of the tubes plugged into Eddie’s arm. Now he grabbed the other tubes and contact leads attached to and plugged into him and pulled them off and out. He had no idea what this was gonna do to him, at this point in whatever Zarathustra procedures were going on, but at this point he didn’t give a shit.
Time to move. Time to get the hell out. That was all that counted.
He spent a few seconds, though, checking the body of Laura Palmer. He thought he’d crushed her skull, but in the end it seemed that he had merely broken her nose. Her breathing was ragged, and Eddie had no idea of how much he might have hurt her in an ultimate sense, but at least she was still alive as of now.
He fumbled through her uniform until he found the keycard which had given her access to his room, then bundled her up in the polythene sheeting that had so recently covered his own body and left her on the bed, arranging the various tubes and leads so that they might or might not appear to be connected to her. If anyone were to look in, it wouldn’t pass even a cursory glance, but what the hell, you never knew.
The anaesthetic hypo lay where Laura Palmer had dropped it, its
ziplock case containing several more to one side. Eddie picked them up and got the hell out of there.
Eddie jammed his stolen keycard into the slot. A panel readout pulsed from red to amber and the door slid open onto darkness. The faint smell of someone else-and someone, or some thing, that might or might not be entirely human.
Eddie had never, really, been in a room used by a single person as entirely personal space. He had no idea if what he could make out of the contents, in the light spilling from the doorway from the corridor outside, was usual or not.
A scattering of discarded holo-vid disks, data-wafers and actual bound paperback books which must have cost a fortune to whoever had paid for them, decomposing in some abstract sense to informational mulch. Visible tides, in the second-hand light, included: Briefing for a Descent into Hell, A Cure for Cancer, The Eye of the Lens, The Odyssey, Paradise Lost, The Medusa Seed -that one quite obviously torn to shreds with some anger, and hurled away with some force-and Camp Concentration.
A collection of dolls-or rather, a collection of broadly humaniform figures ranging from proprietary children’s toys to an antique, jointed, wooden artist’s marionette. Each of these figure had been twisted into postures suggestive of agony, laughter, orgasm, some particular and telegraphic emotional state.
All had been modified in some manner. A stuffed rag doll, for example, had been meticulously skinned with hand-stitched thin black leather. Scrawled in bright pink lipstick across something that looked like a huge egg with diminutive arms and legs stitched on (Eddie had never heard the nursery rhyme Humpty Dumpty) with poppy eyes, stringy hair and an approximation of green velveteen pants, was the word SUCK.
A brightly-keyed technocrome poster of the old movie goddess, Anna Nicole Smith, arching her back in a pose and gold lame borrowed from the even older movie goddess, Marilyn Monroe.
Mismatched four-colour facial features, ripped from other sources and pasted, turned her smile into something insane and rictive, her eyes burning holes of psychosis.
The sleeping form of Trix Desoto on the somewhat foetid expanse of a mattress. She was half-transformed into… well, whatever the hell it was she transformed into.
Something between a rumble and a growl came from her, in rhythm with sleep-breathing. Something that might or might not have been words. She might or might not be saying the word “mouth”, for some reason, over and over again.
In terrified silence, Eddie slipped into the room. Something slithered under his foot-something hard and thin and slippery like the cover of an antique glossy magazine-and for a moment he stumbled, arms pinwheeling in an attempt to regain his balance.
Something in her alerted by the shift in the air, the partially transformed Trix Desoto stirred and grunted. Then she settled down again.
Somehow, at the expense of crushing a fold of inner cheek between his molars, Eddie preserved his silence. The taste of fresh blood, The sickening feel of crushed mucus-membrane in his teeth.
At last he made it to the sleeping form. There was an area of skin below her left scapula that looked to be more human than otherwise. So Eddie used his purloined anaesthetic hypo on that.
Trix Desoto’s breathing slowed. She relaxed further into sleep. It might have been Eddie’s imagination, but he was sure that, for a moment, the transformation of her body had kicked into reverse, leaving her form looking visibly more human.
Last of the brilliant escape-plans, here; a simple case of trading up.
Eddie rooted through the various possessions and clothes on the floor until he found the thing he needed.
There was also a pair of generically nondescript jeans and a shirt, no doubt used when just generally slobbing around, that served at a pinch to fit Eddie due to Trix Desoto’s somewhat overstated curves. When in a halfway human form, at least.
The timeclock in Eddie’s head-another enhancement courtesy of Prof Zarathustra, he supposed-ticked off the patrol-pattern changes in the guards in the corridors outside. Not particularly good or easy to get past them, here and now, but it wouldn’t get any better. It was time to move.
Eddie Kalish went steppin’ out.
9.
He no longer recalled a specific point of origin. (Some big stone egg spat uterine slick from a fissure in Mount Fuji? Hatched by sun and acid rain; autonomic, anthromythic monkeyman.) The strings of RNA detached and shifted, the meme inside the meat machine supplanting and segueing, supplanting once again like a set of nested cones twisted through Dimension X (where the loathsome cilia-things squatted and watched, at this particular and palsied section of the Millennium, through their fiendish and segmented telescopes) in a recurring and perpetually re-evolving loop. (The canisters were coming.)
He could no longer remember a name. Not to feel it. He inhabited a world without sequence or names.
And the meat machine like a philosopher’s axe; replace the head and change the pole. The same man every time or someone new?
In Barranquilla, in 3017, they had done coca cut with methyl-dex and pigshit ’til hearts stopped cold, sold still-warm suka for the upkeep on their own implants, caught the uplink to the Hook for hypoxia and calcium depletion and polycarbon substrates shot through bone. Converted airborne oestrogen in the geodesies on the Mare Iridium, our swollen glands and our burst and haemorrhaging eyes. Kamo had died there, he recalled. (Kamo who?)
Took the freezer up and out for cryogenic renal shutdown. That was 2434. Took the infra to CI and it excised the CNS and ate it. Worked the meat rax of the Malay Chain, up on poppers built from Bhopal ketones; in the mouth for food and airspace, up the butt for credit for lymphatic system-swap before the virus went syndromic (I don’t recall.) Periodic inert plugs of biomass to plug the minor spirochaetal holes…
If we were to live in these new quasi-spaces, he supposed, we had to leave the very idea of our bodies and our physical brains behind, shearing off in little dislocated fragments under an abstract acceleration, perpetually renewing, a perpetual disconnected death of memory-attrition (of which we are the sum).
And so, at last, after several major refits and a conceptual rebore, after several empty centuries of wandering, the patchwork mariner comes at last again to Eden, a misnomer, where the coffins gawp like open presses. Searching for something lost and gone, that he cannot name but wants. They killed a world, here. Men, I mean. I think. They killed it and they kept on killing it and then they stopped. No big story, no big deal. They just stopped when it was dead.
There are people, obi-people in the wreckage, who restore the memory and thus a name, the price is that everybody dies, the result is that, of course, at some point, everybody comes.
Everyone came back to Planet Earth. At some point. Back to Planet Earth in the past, when it was still there…
Trix Desoto came across Masterton, in the sparely furnished and vaguely monastic chamber that served him, here in the Factory, as his office and living quarters combined, in the process of flipping through a one-shot disposable LCD data-wafer, of the sort that had entirely supplanted bound paper books in the last decade and a half.
A twentieth-century eye might have been puzzled, insofar as an eye can be puzzled, at a piezoelectric unit being more disposable than paper, but these days it wasn’t even an issue. Sand and synthesized chemical crystals were plentiful and cheap. Trees were on the ragged edge of extinction and priceless.
Masterton had a faint and absent sneer on his face that spoke ill of the half-hour to come.
“Do you know, I think it’s at this point,” he said, confirming it, “that I think the whole intrinsic structure of the thing falls spectacularly apart.”
Masterton, Trix knew, had pretensions to being a man of literary sensibilities-and that he sometimes played that up to type. He used it as a petty form of minor torture; pontificating endlessly on the subject of something meaningless and banal when he knew that there was something you were desperate to talk about.
“I mean,” he said, tapping the data-wafer meaningfully, “I like
a somnambulating prolapse of coruscating bog-postmodernist elliptical prose as well as the next guy, but this is just completely disappearing up its own ass. We now have a grand total of three oblique but ultimately ambiguous explanations as to what’s going on-alien intervention, interdimensional incursion, and now even time -fracture references for fucks sake-all to explain the big news that some guy meets this girl and they end up screwing. I really do have no idea why I read this crap.”
“Masterton…” Trix Desoto said, hoping to God she wasn’t sounding apologetic. “We really need to talk about the situation.”
“And you can just see how it’s all going to end up, right,” continued Masterton, seemingly all oblivious. “Our confused and battered and power-imbalanced male-principle guy is gonna end up sorta merging in the heat of passion with our dominant but ultimately power-uncorrupted female-principle girl in a million little variegated twinkly lights, there to produce some sort of mythical and metaphorical hybrid; some fabulistic gestalt that-Jesus, but it’s all so goddamn old…
“Screw it, let’s hunker down. Have you any idea about what it was set Johnny Fucko off?”
“…” For a moment Trix Desoto experienced a clash of mental gears before realising that Masterton was suddenly back on the job. “Best we can work out,” she said, “it was just a confluence of events. Nothing sinister as such. No outside factors. The certain… peculiarities of his Zarathustra treatments-you know, because of the thing-had him developing his techno-mesh skills well ahead of schedule. This allowed him to get into the systems, and the nearest thing we guess is that he came across this… ”
Trix Desoto crossed to the playback-monitor on Masterton’s desk and punched up a playback. On the screen, the pale figure of an elderly man was in the process of being cut into bloody slices by a laser-cutter unit.
