Golgotha Run (11 page)

There was, however, a vague and crawling feeling in his stomach, which worried
Eddie until he realised that he was so hung up on checking for something wrong
that he had failed to recognise that he was hungry.

The diner itself was a burnt-out shell, long since abandoned in the general
exodus to the corporate compound-blocks and of no use whatsoever to whatever
No-Go denizens might remain. There was certainly no food here; it had just
been a place to hole up.

Eddie Kalish had gone out through the access-hatch of the Factory expecting to
find himself on some floor or other of a compound-block. He’d expected to have
to deal with more security systems and corporate uniforms and people demanding
to know who he was, what his job was, why he wasn’t doing it and then calling
for the guards.

They’d have shouted things like “imposter!” and “seize him!”, too, in the
imagination of one Eddie Kalish.

In fact, he had emerged to find himself in a run-down complex of warehouse-spaces in the wreckage-strewn wasteland of the No-Go itself. Whatever it was
that GenTech was doing, here in what they called the Factory, they obviously
wanted to keep it at arm’s length.

Off to the north—and Eddie had found that something inside him now knew,
precisely, which direction Magnetic North actually was—the lights of the
multicorporate hives shone.

In the No-Go, lights of a more sporadic and fitful kind burned as those who
still lived there went about their nocturnal business.

Eddie’s plan, such as it was, had been to simply get out. There was no way
he’d ever have worked for GenTech in the first place, and definitely no way
for an asshole like Masterton.

Catching sight of the old guy getting sliced to hell and back had just moved
his schedule up.

Out here in the No-Go at night, he was entirely out of his element. He hadn’t
been up for anything more than avoiding the light guard presence in and around
the warehouses—GenTech trying to keep attention to a minimum—and look
for somewhere to hole up and hide.

Now, in daylight, Eddie Kalish was feeling better. Time to make some actual
plans. Find food, boost some transport and just get the hell away.

Spanky reconditioned body and a brain with stuff in it that it didn’t have
before. Plus you could spot the bad things coming a mile off in
daylight—nothing really bad could happen in daylight, right?

Eddie Kalish loped from the shelter of the burnt-out diner, completely unaware
of how the flesh on his bones, quite suddenly, slid and pulsed into a new
configuration.

He just felt hungry. He needed to eat.

“It’s gone overt,” said Trix Desoto, matter-of-factly, her eyes unfocussed, most
of her attention still on operating the tracker.

“This soon?” Masterton was surprised. But not
too
surprised, or he would
never have attempted to set up a trace this early in the first place.

“It’s a virulent strain,” said Trix. “Or maybe it’s just general panic-reflex,
you know?”

An entire wall of the Factory’s intel-and-communications suite was taken up
with Tracksat monitors and readouts. The room was packed with tactical-command
consoles and general logistically interpolative technology of a sparse and
functional, quasi-military design.

Trix Desoto, however, was plugging into a unit of a different kind: a bulbous
pod of fleshy matter, its skin of a similar colour and texture as that of a
human, which pulsed as though in some self-contained way alive.

Literally plugged. A length of what appeared disquietingly like intestine ran
from the pod to her forehead, there to disappear into a socket that looked
disgustingly like a sphincter.

Personally, Masterton thought she was showing off; she could just as easily,
after all, have interfaced with the tracking pod by laying her hands on it.

“Estimated flip-out into Conversion in three minutes,” Trix Desoto said.

“Do you have a vector on him?” Masterton asked. “Where’s he going to hit when
he flips?”

Trix Desoto rattled off a string of coordinates. Masterton punched them into a
console and examined the result.

“Typical,” he said wearily. “Just the job. Fun for all the family. Do we have
anybody on the ground who can run a stage-one intercept?”

“So what you reckon, Lenny? We made our quota?”

Lenny made a pointed little pantomime of totting up the inventory on his data-pad, and sighed. “No, we haven’t made our quota, Karl. We haven’t made our
quota at all. Would you like to know why we haven’t made our quota, Karl?”

“Why haven’t we made our quota, Lenny?” asked Karl, a little meekly.

“We haven’t made our quota, Karl, because some trigger-happy asshole keeps
blowing off people’s heads or burning them to shit with incendiary rounds.”

“Sorry, Lenny,” sad Karl.

For all that the majority of the San Angeles Sprawl lived in the corporate
compound-blocks, where such things as food and sanitation and medical services
were supplied as a part of that particular deal with the devil of commerce,
there were a number of small satellite communities out in the No-Go itself.
Pockets of independent and what might, with charity, be called semi-criminal
activity, of which the multicorps themselves made use.

Communities of data-hackers, chemical-crackers, an entire and busy sex-industry—people who would never be let inside the compound-blocks in a
million years, but to whom were extended an elaborate system of protection and
supply. The multicorps needed those people who lived and worked out on the
edges—as a source of innovation, recreation and even in some cases
experimentation—so they made at least some effort to keep them alive.

The San Angeles Paramedical Service was, ostensibly, funded by a
multicorporate consortium to bring—as the name suggests—paramedical
services to those remaining in the No-Go zone. Medical treatment was free…
provided you agreed to donate such biological material as might be
appropriate, to the organ-banks or for biomedical research, should you be
unfortunate enough to die despite the very best of paramedical efforts.

The end result of this was obvious. You didn’t call the SAPS in if you were
attached to your bodily parts and wanted to stay that way. And if you caught
sight of one of their Meat Wagon hovercraft, you rabbited and hid before they
could draw a bead on you.

In the violent and casually lethal world of the No-Go, the SAPS, at best,
performed the general function of vultures.

“So, you know what I’m thinking, Karl?” said Lenny.

“What are you thinking, Lenny?” said Karl.

“I’m thinking, Karl,” said Lenny, “that it’s time we had ourselves another
little hunting party. Seems that I happen to recall some folks with a small
lab not far from here.”

“Chemical lab, Lenny?” asked Karl. “Not, uh, a chemical lab doing stuff that
might be, you know, important to the Big Guys?” He pronounced the name as
though it were significantly capitalized, as indeed it was.

“Nothing of the sort, Karl,” Lenny reassured him. “Jerkoffs are strictly
retro. They’re just brewing up a little line in crystal-meth.”

“Just the sort of cowboy operation, Lenny, that could explode from under them
at any time…” Karl said thoughtfully. “Total loss of life in a deplorable
and sickening if not entirely tragic manner.”

“And a nice little windfall for us, Karl,” said Lenny. “Always provided that
certain people remember to go easy on the incendiaries.”

Lenny fired up the fans, and the big SAPS Meat Wagon hovercraft was in the
process of hefting itself up on its skirt when the comms unit broke in.

“
Code twenty-three alert from GenTech…
” the SAPS dispatcher said, then rattled off a string of coordinates that would be utterly meaningless to anyone who did not know what a Code Twenty-three meant. Then:

“
All available units required. Do not—repeat, do
not
—engage the primary directly. Standard clean-up and contain, and await suitably qualified assistance…
”

Lenny turned the Meat Wagon in the air, and punched the crash-course
coordinates they had received into the autopilot.

“Looks like we’ll make the quota after all,” he said. “And then some. We’re
off to Mimsey’s World of Adventure.”

In most commercial processes there is something which might be thought of as
the Window of Illusory Desirability—as is well known by anyone who has bought
a piece of apparently high-powered computer equipment, at what seems to be an
unbelievably knock-down price, only to have the manufacturer roll out a vastly
improved version, at a lower price, the very next day (ie anyone who has ever
bought a piece of apparently high-powered computer equipment in their lives).

What the Window of Illusory Desirability boils down to, basically, is that
when some product or service is becoming obsolescent, there is a window of
opportunity when a drastically reduced price will still convince some suckers
to buy it.

To take the classic example of buggy-whips: with the sup-plantation of
horse-drawn carriages by the automobile, it’s not impossible to imagine the makers
of such secondary articles as whips resorting, for a while, to increasingly
desperate measures to sell the damn things. Two-for-one offers and the
like—which of course resulted in the consumer merely ending up with two completely
useless things instead of one.

Of course, the manufacture and selling of whips survives and thrives, now, in
certain limited and specialist markets. And the allusion might be seen to be
quite apposite in this current case.

During the collapse and consolidation of populations into corporate compound-blocks, the owners of any number of pieces of what had once been prime
real-estate realised that what they owned would seen be effectively abandoned and
worthless. During that Window of Illusory Desirability, however, they were
able to sell off various tracts of land at what appeared to be a bargain
price.

Amongst these was a theme park originally the property of a corporation once
mighty indeed but long since subsumed into one branch or another of the
GenTech Corporation.

In any case, the new owners redressed their acquisition at the minimum of
expense—more or less just basically plastering the name
Mimsey
over every
occurrence of the name of the previous owners, and tried to rake in as much
cash as possible before the world around them finally collapsed.

In this they failed spectacularly, until coming up with a bright if not
particularly original idea:

Rather in the same way that whips and so forth had come to change their
nature—or at least, had changed the nature of the things they commonly hit—the
Mimsey World of Adventure came to cater for a somewhat different market than
for which it had first been intended.

The overregulated environments of the compound-blocks had no provision for
what might be termed as
adult
entertainment—and only adults, these days,
were allowed out into the dangers of the No-Go zone to look for it.

This led an entirely new dimension to the business of dressing people up in
costumes.

And certainly to the uses to which animatronic rodents might be put.

Footage from the swarm of free-floating securicams that blanketed the Mimsey
World of Adventure, hooked into the pattern-recognition routines of the
security systems—and also, incidentally, gathered material for a wide
range of Mimsey brand porno-disks—first showed the intruder as a warped and
somewhat bulky but humanoid form blundering in a kind of shuffling
lurch amongst the crowds on Bestiality Avenue.

This did not trigger an alert of any kind because there had been no reports,
at this time, of the Mimsey World electro-wire perimeter having been breached.
And besides, amongst a crowd of tourists, hookers and other performers
variously cosmeticized and costumed, there was nothing inherently out of the
ordinary about this figure at all.

Security tracking-systems picked this figure up again, with the first overt
overtones of suspicion, in Panchakamara Street, in the shadow of the Wheel of
Frottage, overturning a dog-burger stand, swatting the canine-costumed
proprietor out of the way and attempting to gorge itself on the uncooked meat
extruding from the patty-ejection tanks.

This, apparently, was not to the figure’s taste. It projectile vomited with
such force as to knock several bystanders from their feet, then ran into the
crowd—security tracking-systems now following it with some quite actual
degree of alarm.

It might be noted that the creature did not seriously hurt anyone, in its
erratic path through the Mimsey World crowds, until it reached the Grotto of
Sanguinary Delights.

Possibly the nature and scent of the fluids involved here maddened it. Far
more probably, it is because Mimsey World security staff had by now at last
caught up with it, and at this point one attempted to take it down with a
taser-discharge.

In any event, it was at this point the creature—now unquestionably a
creature
rather than a human figure of any kind—transformed in a blaze
of light so bright that it knocked out several of the recording microcams.
Those that survived, on the periphery of the blast, reported images of a
shifting, hulking mass. There were vague suggestions of writhing tentacles,
and far more definite suggestions of teeth and claws.

No two microcam reports—and certainly no two human reports, from those
humans on the ground who remained alive—quite agreed as to the creature’s
ultimate form. There seemed to be some aspect to its very shape in the world
that rendered on areas of the human visual cortex as simply null.

Security-tracking now reported the creature pelting from the Grotto of
Sanguinary Delights in a blur of speed almost impossible for the unassisted
human eye to catch. While the crowds exploded apart, quite literally, at its
passage, it was possible that there was no actively vicious intent, and that
the creature was merely attempting to find some means of escape.