Golgotha Run

by Dave Stone

  Bit of a suspicious coincidence, that, you say? Well, for one thing, there were one hell of a lot of bomb tests in the Fifties and Sixties, so you might say that we were due. If there was something hanging around down there and waiting to be found.

  But more importantly you’re talking about what we’ll call a false congruity, a confusion between cause and effect. The only reason that we’re here to talk about the confluence of events—any confluence of events, for that matter—is that they happened in the first place.

  You might was well say: isn’t it lucky trousers have two legs, otherwise they wouldn’t fit. Isn’t it lucky we have all these dogs to eat all the dog-food people make. When people actually had dogs as pets and didn’t eat them, anyway. Sometimes shit just happens, basically, to make a profoundly original philosophical point, and you simply have to deal with it.

  As for the Artefact itself. You say it’s obviously a Ship, and that’s good. Very good, in fact. That’s the whole point of what we… well, we’ll get to that later.

  The thing about that is that the first investigators on the scene didn’t see a Ship of any kind at all.

  They saw any number of things, from a churning glob of protoplasm, to an insanely complicated mass of clockwork, to the Living Christ nailed to the cross, somehow transported through time and actually there. A giant telephone wrapped in barbed wire. Someone’s fat ugly mother dead and lying in state. A set of animated nest-tables dancing to “La Cucaracha” but not actually doing it…

  It was different for everyone, what they saw—save for those who for some reason simply didn’t see a thing at all, and who went into spontaneous psychopathic fits when others insisted that there was, indeed, something there.

  Film footage and, later, video, had the same general effect; nobody could agree on what they were seeing. Digital photography, on the other hand, interestingly enough, just shows a haze of dead pixels to everyone.

  The Artefact was, simply, Other. It came from Somewhere Else. Some place where human words and concepts simply don’t apply. And the upshot was, of course, that the US Government found itself in sole possession of something supremely powerful and unique… with not the slightest idea of what it was.

  So they decided to damn well find out.

  Disinformation operations were set up, more or less along the lines of Roswell and the like to keep those who might be drawn towards the whole idea of “aliens” the hell out of the way.

  Samples were taken, by way of the discovery that… well, samples were taken, anyway. Study of those samples led to quantum jumps in any number of fields, from the processes informing the Rapture Bug field-test in Des Moines and the subsequent Zarathustra procedures, to Al-grade transputer technology, to the containment fields that made hydrogen fusion in vehicles a practicality. The basis for our world, in fact, such as it is.

  All very nice, if that’s the sort of thing that floats your boat… but none of it led to a breath of understanding as to what the Artefact actually was.

  A partial breakthrough came just after the turn of the century, when a programme was instituted of exposing live subjects to minute traces of Artefact material.

  This was while the US Government was engaged in what was called a War on Terror. Complete and utter nonsense, of course; you might was well declare a War on Literacy—which they were also doing, believe you me; they just didn’t come right out and say it.

  Anyhow. The thing about waging a war on a methodology, as opposed to anything concrete, was that you could target anyone who you pretty much liked, and pretty much get away with anything in the name of it.

  Initially, the live subjects were suspected so-called “terrorists”, who at the time were busily being detained and stockpiled without due process. The experiments were… not a success, unless you count spontaneous mutation into something abominable, feculent and dead to be successful.

  It was believed that the material itself was in some way attempting to adapt those to whom it was exposed, so they could survive the exposure, and spectacularly failing.

  The theory was then advanced that, since the experimental subjects were mostly adults, the altered genome was fighting against an already established phoneme to catastrophic effect. It was suggested that the procedure be tried using infants.

  I know, I know, but remember that the US was fighting, so it said, monsters who would cheerfully murder American babies—and if the cost of fighting them was to do likewise then what were the odds?

  In any case, once the idea was mentioned, some bright spark remembered some research that had been done more than twenty years before, in that previous period of venal Republican numbskullery, the 1980s.

  The precise same experiments, it transpired, had been conducted under something called the Janus Project, under the aegis of a Secret Service offshoot calling itself Section Eight. And yeah, but of course, didn’t that lead to a lot of bureaucratic confusion. Intentionally so. It kept the Project buried under disinformation.

  The Janus Project had been reckoned to be a failure, too. The subjects either spontaneously mutated into monstrous et cetera, or absolutely nothing seemed to happen to them at all. Those who survived were dispersed in a manner that wouldn’t arouse undue attention, as opposed to merely killing them, and the Project was quietly wrapped up.

  Twenty years later, when they went through the files and tracked down the survivors, the government found a small surprise. The science of genetics had advanced more than somewhat—and they found some really freaky things happening with the survivors’ junk DNA. And the interesting thing about that was that it was generational. The survivors had passed the modifications on to their kids.

  So, of course, there was nothing for it but to haul that second generation of kids in and start the whole procedure of exposing them all over again.

  The problem was that, once again, the Project failed. Oh, fewer of the kids actually died, but nothing much else happened either. The Government gave up, dumped people like you out in various out-of-the-way shitholes, decided to go back to being a glorified gun-runner and washed its hands of the whole sorry business.

  So, basically, after all that work and effort, all that suffering, the whole thing just turned out to be totally without meaning and pointless. Oh, well. You gotta laugh, eh?

  20.

  The communications lockdown of Arbitrary Base did not, of course, extend to official GenTech traffic. In his spartan quarters in the San Angeles Factory, Masterton was now in the process of conversing with Trix Desoto via secured and scrambled satellite phone.

  “So you put our Mister Kalish together with the Talking Head?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” said Trix Desoto. “He was getting somewhat vehement. Seemed like the best thing to do at the time.”

  “Well, I’m just thanking Christ that I remembered to seriously downgrade its access and capacity,” said Masterton. “He should get enough of the truth to satisfy his curiosity, give him some idea of the actual state of play on top if he’s lucky and asks the right questions—but it wouldn’t do for him to learn… absolutely everything, now, would it?”

  “If you’re talking about what I think you’re talking about, then no,” said Trix Desoto on the other end of the line. “You’d have no hold on him whatsoever if he happened to learn that particular little titbit. I think it’s safe to say that Eddie learning that particular little titbit would end up very bad for you indeed.”

  “Why, do my ears deceive me, Trix,” said Masterton, “or do I hear a note of cunning speculation in your voice?”

  “I’m just saying that I know for a fact that there’s some stuff you’re not telling even me,” said Trix Desoto. “You’ve got my loyalty in this—but don’t forget that I’ve got what Eddie’s got. We’re not like… basic humans, and you’re basically human, and I know the sort of deviousness that basic humans get up to. The games within games you like to play.

  “I’m telling you, Masterton, that if you try to pull any of that shit with us,
then Eddie Kalish learning an interesting little particular titbit is going to be the least of your worries.”

  After Trix Desoto had cut the connection, Masterton just sat there for a while, doing and thinking nothing in particular. Then he raised his hands to his black wraparound shades and pulled them from his head.

  The shades were inset with remote-feed microcams, hooked to an implant in his visual centre.

  Masterton turned the shades around and used them to examine the strange new growths taken root and growing in the involuted ruins of what had once been his eyes.

  “Basic human…” he mused to himself. “Ah, Trix, Trix, if you only knew.”

  For what seemed to be a long time, Eddie just stood there looking at the Talking Head.

  “And that’s it, is it?” he said at last. “That’s all there is?”

  “You got your special secret origin,” said the Talking Head, “plus an explanation for why you don’t quite seem to fit into the world. Why you have problems relating to other human beings on even the most basic level. What more do you fucking want?”

  “Well for one thing,” said Eddie. “You’ve just gone out of your way to tell me what happened to me as a kid and then pull the rug out from under me and tell me it’s totally meaningless.

  “You and—well, you—never seem to lose an opportunity to tell me how insignificant I am in the greater scheme of things, how I’m basically nothing but an ambulatory tool… but that’s not strictly true is it? There’s something more that you’re still not telling me.”

  “Do you realise,” said the Talking Head, “that you managed to get through that entire little speech without saying the word ‘fuck’ once? I have to admit that I’m rather impressed.”

  “Fuck being rather impressed!” Eddie shouted. “Stop trying to deflect the question and answer! Tool I might be, but I’ve got a function that for some reason is incredibly valuable to you and GenTech—and you’re gonna fucking well tell me what the fuck it is!”

  “Well, if you’re going to be like that,” said the Head, “then I’m telling you, yet again, that you simply don’t Need to Know. All you need to know is how to do what we tell you, when we tell you. We have… ways of teaching you, if you can’t get that little fact through your head.”

  “Oh yes?” said Eddie, softly. “I’d like to see you try.”

  (It would be later, looking back, that he would realise that this was the point that several technicians in the Command Module started backing away from him in startled alarm. Pressing themselves against the walls in the cold fear of prey finding some predator suddenly dropped into the middle of their enclosure. Replaying the scene, mnemonically, he would recall image-flashes of the muscles of his arms visibly swelling and bulking, his hands elongating into claws. At the time, he simply didn’t notice.)

  “Let me guess how that might work,” Eddie continued, all unaware that his voice was roughening into a snarl. “You threaten to overdose me with the Leash to the point where I simply can’t flip out whatsoever happens, then shoot me in the head if I don’t follow orders. I suspect that either way—and whether you shoot me in the head or not—that would mess up whatever it is you want me for.”

  “Shooting you in the head would definitely end your usefulness,” said the Talking Head, “For a while, at any rate, I admit. There are other means that might be brought to bear to ensure your compliance and keep you useful, however.”

  “To the point where, if I was absolutely and persistently determined to screw up whatever it was you want me to do, you’d be able to stop me every single time?”

  “Can this be the itinerate and inveterate fuck around who we’ve come to know and love speaking?” said the Head. “You don’t have persistence and determination in you, boy.”

  There was a slightly odd set to the Talking Head’s synthetic features, Eddie thought, but he couldn’t quite work out what it was.

  It would only be later that he pegged it: somebody who was well aware of the effect a foot-long talon might have on a lump of relatively fragile biogel—and who was doing their very best not to bring the matter up.

  “Do you want to try me?” Eddie said. “Just tell me, okay? And I’d be grateful if you stopped ripping the piss out of me and the way I talk while you do it.”

  For a few moments the talking head was silent. Then:

  “I’d do a little exasperated sigh, at this point,” it said, “if I had the lungs.

  “All right, already. Okay. I’ll let you in on one of the somewhat larger secrets, if it’ll stop the pissing and moaning and get you at least halfway back in line…”

  21.

  It was twenty-four hours later.

  Eddie, for his part, was finding his time-sense becoming uncomfortably acute in that respect. The way that something inside him now incremented the passage of time in multiples of twelve. There was something about having the day bisected by the twelve-hourly shots of the Leash that gigged in him.

  There were any number of people in the world, he supposed, people with straight jobs in the Multicorps, say, who lived their lives to a regimen of getting up at a certain time, eating at fixed other times, doing some one particular thing for hours on end… but until he had got mixed up with GenTech he’d had nothing in common with the sorry jerks living drone-lives like that. Whatever else he had been through and done, he had never done that.

  It was an imposition. The simple fact of living to a schedule not his own. And if he ever got himself into the position of, what, finding himself with a lifetime supply of the Leash and with nobody to dole it out in return for a favour of any kind, wouldn’t that just simply mean that GenTech had in a certain sense won after all? They’d have left their mark on him—and would be leaving needle-marks on him for the rest of his goddamn life.

  Over twenty-four hours the chamber under Shed Seven containing the Artefact—or the Ship, or, apparently, Eddie had recently learned, the Hammer of God—had changed markedly. The butterfly wing blast hatches in the main elevator shaft had been retracted and locked back; cables snaked down from the Brain Train Command rig and hooked to servomanipulators.

  The elevator platform itself had been disabled, meaning that human access to the chamber of the Artefact was now limited to the emergency maintenance shafts off to one side.

  The canisters containing the Brain Train’s cargo were now being lowered down the elevator shaft by way of what was basically an automated bucket-chain. Then the manipulators took them and cracked open the canisters. Then a collection of other, specialised mechanisms took care of the rather more horribly organic containers thus revealed.

  “It’s an old pathologist’s joke, apparently,” said Trix Desoto. “The human brain is a remarkably delicate and slippery little customer to deal with. Fortunately it comes in a padded case. With handles.”

  She didn’t seem one bit distressed at all the busy servomechanical activity as the heads were shelled and discarded in untidy piled, their contents slopped onto conveyor-belts that trundled them off, through an intake hatch, into the dark bowels of the Ship. She just stood there, relaxed, the case she had brought from the Command rig hanging from her hand.

  The case was of around the same size and construction as might be suitable for carrying a snare drum around, built from rib-reinforced aluminium with polycarbon impact-pads.

  Eddie had an idea of what might be in it. All the clues were there. He shuddered, and recalled what the Talking Head with the persona of Masterton had finally told him.

  Now the thing you have to bear in mind (said the Talking Head) is that almost everything you think you know, everything you’ve been told so far, is basically a lie.

  Oh, do stop growling at me like that. It’s not impressing anyone. What you’ve been told is technically factual, so far as such things can be known, given that we’re dealing with things that nobody sees the same way and everyone has a different opinion about. You’ve been told the truth, just not all if it—which is, of course, the very best kind
of lie there is.

  The He, er, lies in the ambiguous nature of the Artefact itself. The fact that in a certain sense it lies outside the bounds of human comprehension has given the impression that the very issues that surround it he outside the bounds of human comprehension. This isn’t actually so. The issues themselves are really quite simple. Ridiculously so, in fact. You’ll laugh when I tell you. Oh, go on.

  The fact is that there are many… well, let’s call them Factions in this world. And, whoops, that’s a tricky one right from the start. Let’s just say that by world we mean, you know, maybe it’s not just this world and leave it at that, all right? That’s not the point.

  The point is that these Factions are real. Now, it’s not like you can categorise them as Light and Dark—while remembering that “light” doesn’t necessarily mean good any more than “dark” means evil. You need to think in terms of team colours for some sport or other. And think of their supporters as being like the soccer fans the Brits have over the pond, who aren’t exactly charmers, whichever team they root for.

  They’ve existed as long as man has walked the earth. Even before the early humans learned not to walk with their knuckles scraping the ground, they were forming up into tribes and marking their territory and hunting grounds. Not unlike how things are today, it’s just that the hunting grounds have changed somewhat. Instead of an acre of fertile soil, today’s territories are the airwaves, the boardrooms, the human spirit, the space between your ears and other less tangible frontiers that you just wouldn’t be able to get your head around.

  But what is important, and what you can comprehend, is that everything that happens of any importance on this planet is a direct result of a Faction’s influence. If two African nations go to war because one side doesn’t like the shade of the other side’s skin, it’s because one Faction or another made it happen. If a young starlet at the peak of her career is brutally slain in her Beverly Hills mansion, you can bet there’s Faction involvement somewhere along the line. And if the Colombian coffee crop fails for three consecutive years then you can stake your house on its cause having something to do with a Faction. It’s just the way of the world and it’s how it’s been for thousands of years.