by Dave Stone
His:
Skin felt loose and gelid. Without pain it sloughed off from his bones and streamed behind him as he fell and (sloughing and reforming, hauling itself back in and tangling, twisting around, transmuting into something bright, so bright, and metametallic that he…)
He:
Hit the floor of the cavern headfirst. Again, there was no pain, merely the abrupt cessation of motion. He lay there for a moment, face buried in a soft and decomposing mulch of what might be meat—or the idea of meat—then hauled himself up.
The skeletal remains of hands attached to forearms sprouted from the fleshy cavern floor, rotted to bone that was a bright and absolute white—far whiter than any bone one might encounter in any real world. The hands were shrouded in a haze of branching microtubular filaments—it was as if something had rotted the flesh away with such peculiar precision as to leave the neural matter intact.
The hands moved. They clutched and scrabbled at him, grabbing at him with a cloying intimacy that seemed to slide around inside his head. Something hot and clotted bursting in his head…
And he:
Screamed. Screamed so hard he thought his lungs might painlessly burst. And from him came a Big Light—like a reflex-sting, a burst of white-hot plasma, blasting the clutching hands away from him and burning them to nothing.
He:
For a moment he stood in the smoking crater of charred meat, staring ahead dumbly. After a while he realised that he was holding his hands in front of his face, realised what he was looking at: mirror-bright, his hands were, his whole body was, as though sculpted from solid but nevertheless in some sense fluid chrome.
The sense of cool air on his face.
The explosion of plasma that had come from him had ripped a hole in the membrane-wall of the cavern. Bright light came from it, bright shapes moved beyond.
Feet slipping in grease, crunching on the burned remains of clinging hands, Eddie Kalish walked towards the rip.
“There you go. That’s a boy!”
Eddie Kalish opened a bleary eye to see something he had never seen before.
Well, he had, but the transformation of it was of such a nature that it left the pattern-recognition areas of the mind temporarily wrong-footed.
When you thought of Trix Desoto, you thought of her in a comedy-nurse costume, wounded, close to death—and about to turn into some diabolical monstrosity from the very lowest reaches of Hell. If Hell actually existed, of course, which of course it didn’t.
Looking at her sitting there, now, on the edge of the hospital bed, relaxed and cheerful in an underwired patent-leather catsuit that would do wonders for the self-esteem of any girl, and so on Trix Desoto contrived to be spectacular, it took the mind a moment to adjust.
“Now, my advice to you,” said Trix Desoto,”would be to get the ‘what happened’ and ‘where am I’ out the way with the minimum of fuss. Everybody tries to find a new way of saying it, and it never works.”
Eddie looked blearily around the room. Some part of him vaguely expected it to be a sterile environment, white-tile walled and lit by harsh and buzzing fluorescent tubes. Instead, it was just the kind of neat little room you might find in an expensive private nursing home called Sunny Gables or the like. Plaster walls and cornicing. Drapes over the window. Discreet little oil-pastel landscapes dotted around.
(And it would only be later, much later, that he would finally work out what had been wrong with this. It was simply that the very idea of “A private nursing home called Sunny Gables” would have never occurred to him in his real life. It was simply not in his mental lexicon. Somebody, or something, must have actively put it into his head.)
At the time, though, the room just seemed prosaic and comforting. This was probably to offset the tangled horror of the items that were currently plugged into him, by way of tubes and what appeared to be actual electrical flex.
The med-units seemed to be some hybrid mix of the inorganic and decidedly organic—hearts and livers held in steel and polycarbon rack-cages, stimulated by servo-motors and pumping liquids which, by the colour, could be anything except saline fluid and blood.
The units seemed to twitch and fibrillate, like insects with their carapaces split open and their insides laid out.
“The fuck ..?” Eddie Kalish managed to croak at last. “Wh’ happened? Fuck am I?”
“You see?” Trix Desoto said with a small smirk. “Nobody ever finds a new way of saying it.”
She stood up with a creak of patent leather. The catsuit covered her belly and midriff, but was sufficiently tight and clinging for Eddie to see that the flesh under it was flat and toned, no sign of a wound of any kind.
The ragged and blood-matted hair that Edie remembered from the van in New Mexico now fell in platinum-blonde curls that suggested regular washing in a rejuvenatingly herb-steeped stream next door to a chemical plant.
Trix Desoto crossed the room, with quick scissor-steps, and activated a wall panel by the door. “He’s awake now. You can come in.” Then she turned to regard Eddie with a not unkindly smile.
“You’re safe enough, in the relative scheme of things,” she said to him. “We’re in the San Angeles Sprawl, in a GenTech facility. Welcome to the Factory.”
The door slid open, and a Suit came in.
That wasn’t mere colloquial hyperbole. The Suit was a dead and perfect black so that, for example, if an arm was laid across the chest, it was impossible to see the distinction between them; you could only see the Suit in one-piece silhouette.
Protruding from the neck of the Suit, by means of the usual human arrangement, was the neatly groomed head of a man—and once again, neatly-groomed was not mere hyperbole. The hair and beard were cropped and shaped in a manner so precise that one could imagine it having been done follicle by follicle, by micromanipulator, under the direction of a team of design consultants, in an operation costing tens of thousands of dollars.
The effect, however, was somewhat spoilt by the fact that there are some men who simply cannot carry off cropped hair and beards. And there are some men, frankly, who are con-genitally unsuited to waiting a suit. Or even a Suit.
Later, Eddie would learn that the ensemble was basically a uniform, the standard outfit for GenTech field-management of a certain level—and you damn well wore what was given to you—but for the moment the main impression was a little like that of a child somewhat ineptly dressing up.
This new arrival in the Suit grinned at Eddie—a little shiftily, Eddie thought. The effect might have been due, though, to the black wraparound shades that gave no idea whatsoever of what the eyes might be doing underneath them.
“So you’re our mystery wonder-boy,” he said, leaving no doubt that wonder-boy actually meant: some little squit I don’t particularly give two shits about. “Eddie, is it? Eddie Kalish? Doesn’t quite seem to fit with anything, if you get what I mean. Doesn’t fit right with where you were. Where we found you. Where does it come from?”
Eddie shrugged, rattling a couple of tubes.
Far as he could recall, that was just always what he had been called. He had simply never thought about it. And he certainly wasn’t going to start thinking about it now at the behest of this individual, who he was already beginning to dislike intensely.
(And just when and where, he would wonder later, had he started thinking in terms of this “behest of individual” crap?)
The man shrugged himself, utterly unconcerned rather than sullen. The matter was simply not worth bothering about.
“Call yourself whatever you want,” he said. “What do I care? You can call me Masterton—and I’ll tell you right now that’s not what you might call my real name. That, you’ll never know. The important thing is… do you read at all, Eddie?”
“I can read,” Eddie Kalish said, shortly. He was getting seriously tired of this guy Masterton’s somewhat overly familiar manner. “I can write words, too.”
Masterton sighed.
“Good for you,” he
said. “What I meant was, do you read many actual books. No? Well colour me surprised.
“In any case, in a lot of books, you get what they call exposition. Some guy tells you what’s been happening and what is going to happen. He might be lying like a bastard, and making it up off the top of his head, but the point is that he makes it all hang together and makes it work. He tells you what to do, and what you’re gonna do next.
“I want you to think of me as your exposition, Eddie, yeah? I’m the one who tells you what you’re gonna do.
“Now, a little while back you blundered in on the retrieval operation we were running on Ms Desoto here, and the package she was transporting. You didn’t know what you’d got into, and you certainly didn’t know any command-identification codes, so our guys just shot you to hell and back. Shot you dead. You’re dead.
“Fortunately for you, being dead isn’t quite the handicap it once was. We here at GenTech have the technology. We can rebuild, and all that happy crap. Resurrection-and-regen processes courtesy of the good Doctor Zarathustra. It’s one of the things we do… and the conditions happened to be right for us to do it to you.
“Now at this point, Eddie, you must be thinking: gee, wow, what’s so special about me that I get the Zarathustra treatment? Well, let me tell you, you’re goddamn nothing. You’re just some sorry sap who happened to be on the spot. The upshot of that, what with all the expense and all, is that we now own your sorry ass. You’re just stone cold nothing and we get to do what we like with you.”
Eddie Kalish realised that Masterton had stopped talking, and was just grinning at him in the manner of one having successfully completed a recitation. There was an air, indeed, that he had been subjected to a polished and often-repeated spiel.
Off to one side, he noticed, Trix Desoto was watching him, too, with a sense of expectation. Eddie wondered how many times they had put someone in this situation, whether they had a bet on how he would now react.
Well, screw ‘em, frankly. Eddie wasn’t going to give them the satisfaction of any reaction at all. He just looked dumbly down at himself—and for the first time caught sight of his own body. In this he was aided, in that it was covered with a slightly cloudy but mostly transparent polythene sheet, rather than a bed sheet.
People tend not to consciously examine their own bodies without some external impetus in the manner of, for example, pain. This is for the simple reason that—barring the obvious effects of working out, or having an arm lopped off by a rotary saw or the suchlike—there are certain fundamentals that the mind absolutely refuses to recognise might change.
Now Eddie Kalish stared down at himself, positively goggle-eyed, as rafts of certainty broke apart and sank behind his eyes. “Jesus fucking Christ!”
Off to one side Trix Desoto smirked maliciously.
“That’s a fin you owe me, Masterton,” she said.
7.
He was in:
A limitless, deprisensory gulf, strung though with bright tendrils of some drifting gas that seemed to twist and curl in on itself resolving itself into discrete and dislocated images. Lantern fish of the bulbously misshapen sort one finds in ocean trenches, twisted so that the mouths of comedy-and-drama-mask faces yawned on their flanks; the masked face of a surgeon, a light clipped to his temple blazing as a scalpel flashed across it; the sliced and encrusted remains of some horse-like creature, with two heads, wrapped within rusting coils of razorwire; an antique roll-top desk with something horrible inside; snipping windshield and a hole under the wall and the red wet razors sliding soft inside the…
All of this was:
Background. All of it. He drifted through it feeling the actual physical slicing of something sharp-edged flowing in his head; drifted from the slit he had made and the red wet tunnel and those cloying skeletal hands…
It was some time before he realised that he was flying.
Eddie Kalish jerked awake, under his transparent polythene sheet, dream-images still crawling through his head. There was definitely something happening in there, something inside actually shifting into some new alignment.
He couldn’t escape the feeling that, somewhere in their narrative, the dream-hallucinations were actually trying to tell him something. Something was being downloaded into him, the nature of which at this point he could not quite grasp.
Well, if things were shifting around in his mind, no less inside the body on the bed in this twee little hospital room packed with insectoid biopacks. You never knew, on waking up, what might have changed: the length of a finger here, the fleshing out of muscle-texture there.
The biorganic implants which had resurrected Eddie’s lifeless corpse, kickstarted and maintained his metabolism, Masterton had explained, were now being mimicked and supplanted by the entirely organic Zarathustra processes.
It would be several days before they completed the job, leaving Eddie Kalish in better shape than he had ever been before. Physically stronger, with reflexes and mental faculties enhanced.
Residual processes would greatly enhance his damage-resistance and healing factors, in much that same way that they had allowed Trix Desoto to survive after a gunshot wound that had left half her guts spilling out.
Eddie had asked if he was going to turn into a superman or something because, quite frankly, he had kind of liked the idea of that.
Masterton had snorted, and told him not to be such a tool. The human world was designed and built to human tolerances and dimensions—an actual superhuman would be forever braining himself on ceilings and crushing things he tried to pick up. It would be pointless—at least so far as the purposes of GenTech were concerned.
Masterton had suggested, since Eddie was going to spend the next few days lying there and being about as useful as a spare prick, that he orientate himself as to the aims and expectations of his new GenTech masters by way of the datanet. This Eddie had dutifully done, by way of a wireless display pad found for him by Trix Desoto, and pretty much simply for the sake of having something to do.
Eddie Kalish had never used the datanet in his life, having spent most of it only vaguely aware that such a thing existed. Little Deke had been extremely jealous of his access and had never let him have a look.
It struck Eddie as slightly weird that, given that, he had taken to it so readily. Of course, this might have had something to do with the fact that the datanet, by its very nature, was so simple to navigate that it could be used by a concussed ant—but no, Eddie thought, there was more to it than that.
In some strange way he was able to see the hidden shapes behind the data. Well, alright, it wasn’t that he actually saw what password-clearance codes were or anything like that; it was just that he was somehow able to make the right moves to get himself inside so-called classified files that he’d decided to have a look at.
It must have been some side-effect of the resurrection implants and the Zarathustra regen-procedures, he thought. The things downloading into his head that he was reacting to in dreams.
Pity he couldn’t have had a taste of that before a complete lack of knowing about command-codes had had him shot. Bit of a tautology there, of course, he supposed, but so what?
In any case, it was in this way that Eddie came across a slightly fuller explanation for the Zarathustra processes, currently at work on his own mind and body, than Masterton had given him.
The basis for the Zarathustra processes had come from the “disaster” that had, notoriously, struck the city of Des Moines a decade before—the nature and origin of which had never been satisfactorily explained.
The specific and targetted nature of what came to be known as the Rapture Bug suggested that it had been actively designed, but no human agency had ever stepped forward to take responsibility for the effect.
Besides, designed or not, the mechanisms of the Bug seemed far in advance of any technology available on planet Earth. Speculations as to some extraterrestrial—or even extradimensional—origin were endless and ultimately fruitless. The
simple fact remained that it was as if the Rapture Bug had come from some entirely other world.
Initial investigation of the effect suggested—erroneously—that the Bug had operated by means of nanonetics. In fact, as it was later learned by a process of back-engineering, it operated on the subatomic level: a quantum-level self-propagating construct that, in effect, rewrote the base code of the world. It was designed to target itself upon, incorporate itself within and radically alter the individual, living humanoid form.
Its basic nature meant that when released, it proliferated something like a virus but instantly—or at least at the speed of light—saturating its target area in a matter of seconds. The vast majority of those caught within its sphere of influence never even had the luxury of waking up to find their world had changed.
The initial effects had been quite impressive to say the least. The pores of every human body opened like industrial vents and began pumping out a sludge and spray of deconstructed pathogen-components and accumulated toxins.
Foreign bodies like artificial hearts, hips or small items lodged in some inextricable location as a child were physically ejected, often at velocities of several thousand metres per second. There were cases, in particularly crowded situations, of some largish hunk of matter being fired into someone else, ejected in its turn to hit some other body and the process continuing on for up to an hour.
Old scars and fresh wounds healed themselves in a matter of seconds. Calloused tissue went, too, being the product, effectively, of cumulative minor injury—with the result that fingertips and the soles of feet ended up as soft and pink as those of a baby. The Rapture Bug would counter further damage to this otherwise vulnerable new flesh, of course—though unfortunately without suppressing the pain reflex.
