Golgotha Run (18 page)

Eddie became aware that the gathered multitude—every single one of them—had begun to hum sonorously, as though in preparation for a rendition of an
entirely different nature from an inept and sappy perpetration of “Kumbaya”.
There was a low solemnity to the voices that spoke of absolute and fervent
seriousness.

And, now, they began to sing:

”
Ohhh… we’re off to see the Elder,
The glorious Elder Seth!
We hear he’s built a whiizz of a place
And called it Deseret…
”

Eddie felt it was time he made his excuses and left.

“Hey, it’s been fun,” he began,”but I really must be…”

“Oh but I
insist
that you join us,” said Father Barnabas, a new light of
intensity igniting in his eyes, in the sockets of the smiling mask of his
face. “For a while, at the very least. And, who knows, when you hear the Good
News we have to offer, and hear it for long enough, perhaps you’ll be
amenable
to—“

It was at that point that the Testostorossa powered itself up with a blaze of
headlamps and a roar. It powered towards Eddie and Father Barnabas and spun to
halt, racking open a door.

“
I’m up and running,
” it growled. “
Get your kicks sucking men in dresses off some other time, yeah?
”

“Fuck you, you prototypical piece of shit,” snapped Eddie. And it must be said
that he said it with a small sense of relief.

A second before he had been pinioned by the eyes of Father Barnabas; now it
was as if some spell had been broken.

“It’s been, uh, real, you know?” he said to the somewhat nonplussed Father
Barnabas, hauling the door shut. “Catch you in the church newsletter funny
pages.”

“
So who were those jerks, anyway?
” the Testostorossa demanded as they swung
back out onto the main highway. “
There’s a bunch-of-jerks shaped hole in my
database and I don’t like it.
”

“Just this bunch of religious whackos,” Eddie told it shortly. He really
needed to get some sleep. “Josephites, they called themselves, heading on to
some loon-factory called Deseret. It’s not important. No big deal.”

It would only be later, and elsewhere, that he would learn the truth about how
wrong he was—and how close his escape, here and now, had been.

The next time Eddie woke, without remembered dreams of any kind, it was to
find the Testostorossa sitting inside what appeared to be a military compound,
with various US Cavalry troops surrounding him. They were on the point of
lowering their guns, which had previously been aimed directly at him through
the Testostorossa’s windshield.

Behind him the Brain Train was rumbling through the perimeter gates, the
Behemoths fanning out to take up parking-position on a parade ground which had
probably been someone’s pride and joy of order before getting churned up by
Behemoth wheels.

A few minutes later, when she came over to deliver the latest shot of the
Leash, Trix Desoto told him that the Testostorossa had come slewing in through
the perimeter on pre-programmed autopilot out of the blue. And it had only
been someone on the Brain Train remembering to break communications-silence,
and inform Arbitrary Base of their arrival, that had prevented him from being
summarily taken out as a potential terrorist suicide bomber.

On the whole, Eddie was slightly more relieved than otherwise that he had been
asleep for the whole thing.

And then, from an open window beyond the bed, a roscoe coughed “Ka-chow!”… I said, “What the hell—!” and hit the floor with my smeller… A brunette jane was lying there, half out of the mussed covers… She was as dead as vaudeville.

[The following excerpts are from a pgp-secure email sent from one Dexter
Corncrake, a so-called “Research Consultant”—read freelance cracker—for
the New York Times, to Detective Inspector Ronald Craven of the NYPD Missing
Persons Unit on 07/06/2005. See relevant NSA-intercept archives. These
excerpts are provided FOR BACKGROUND-INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY, on the
basis that subsequent dormanting of both Corncrake and Craven fall outside
the remit of this agency. No further action required.]

I’m gonna print this out and then I’m gonna zero the hard-drive and burn my
notes and then just try to forget about this whole shitty mess. It probably
won’t do any good; there’s probably a quiet little transponder bug, on the
lowest level of the operating system, discreetly reporting every keystroke back
to its masters even as I type. I’m telling you, I’ve never really thought of
myself as a coward, but all this is just too—

I’ve made up this guy in my head and called him Stanley—just like the
psychotherapist from that godawful book about multiple personalities. (I mean,
the bitch had supposedly sixty-four separate automemes operating, one of whom was apparently this, like, total
literary genius on the level of Shakespeare or Joyce. So why didn’t
he
write
it, instead of bringing in some schlock-hack crap who wouldn’t know connected
prose if it crawled up his, her, its or their collective backside?)

Anyhow. I’ve made up this guy in my head and called him Stanley, and I’m going
to write this to him, in the hope that I don’t let anything slip about, well,
you, even by implication. That all right there, Stanley? Are you sitting down
comfortably? Then let us begin:

Federal-based systems were like this total dead end. The clearance procedure
overrides were built right into the hardware when the Central Registry was
consolidated. Utterly integral to it.
Any
ID-check flagged as “Special
Services Section Eight” comes up clean, no actual data-exchange involved save
for some rather high-powered context checking to preclude the obvious
confusion with servicemen being invalided from the armed services on the
grounds of mental health.

No joy with the old NSA either—until I took off the time-lock and trawled
back through the trash logs of the dormanted stuff. The stillborn junk that
never got off the ground in the first place, so never needed to be capped at
the end…

Long story short, I found a way in.

There’s some
weird
shit back there, Stanley. Did you know, for example, that
back in the Eighties there was a serious proposal to covertly modify the TV
receivers of certain notable left-wing militants so they pumped out hard
X-rays through the cathode? The intention, simply, was to increase the number
of cancer deaths among left-wing firebrands.

The project foundered when some bright spark realised that left-wing
firebrands, as a group, tend to watch a lot less TV than the population as a
whole.

Whole lot of stuff like that—some of it even going as far back as 1945 and
the reports of death camp experimentation unearthed during the Liberation. And
some of these are front-reffed to our old friends Special Services Section 8
and something called the Janus Program. Janus was, of course, the Keeper of the Gate and such crap. The god of doors and portals—go and look
it up in a book on comparative mythology if you even care.

The Janus Program was set up maybe thirty years ago and ran for about ten,
based in and operating from a number of disused sewers and maintenance-tunnels
running roughly parallel with the Greater Metropolitan Subway. Various plans
and schematics attached. There are references to a Bunker of some
kind—always capitalized—but I was never able to track it down definitively.
I’ve marked one or two most likely locations on the plans attached.

I also found specs for some seriously heavy duty processing equipment,
apparently based upon optical-switching technology—years ahead of its
time.

Who the controllers of the concern were, who its operatives were, of their
aims and objectives and ultimate remit, I still have no idea. I’ve found the
skeletons of personnel files, salary scales and so forth, that allow me to
hazard some basic guesses on the overall picture, but every hard-data specific
has been wiped.

One thing, however, is abundantly clear, from working back from the gaps and
looking at the shapes the holes make. They were experimenting on kids,
Stanley. Kids procured by a seemingly random process of informing mothers that
their infants had been stillborn and then just spooking them away. More than
seven thousand of them over the course of a decade.

Exposing them to something. Infecting them with something. With what,
precisely, and to what purpose, I have no idea. Again, there are skeleton
records to suggest that the effects of this infection, whatever it was, were
studied over a period of years, but no hard data remain.

Whatever the nature of the infection was, the mortality rate was high, running
from seventy-five percent at the start to maybe fifty percent by the end.

Those who survived, and were old enough by this point to remember the
procedures, were given post-hypnotic blocks and reintroduced to the general population by way of foster homes and adoption
services. It’s not outside the bounds of possibility to imagine that a number
of mothers got their supposedly deceased infants back under a new guise.

In any case, Stanley, it struck me that these kids are now old enough to have
children of their own. That got me thinking, so I ran some comparisons and
extrapolations from such data as remains extant.

Your missing kids, Stanley, the disappearances you’re investigating, are the
children of the Janus Program subjects.

I think somebody, somewhere is covering his tracks. Like I said, the
background material on this thing goes as far back as the death camps—and
like the death camps, I suspect that all of this was done for no consistent or
coherent reason at all. It was done for the simple reason that someone could
do it and get away with it.

It hasn’t ended, Stanley. It hasn’t stopped. The disappearances of the kids,
the murders in
[section deliberately defaced from source]
are just the
visible tip, for the simple reason that this was where the victims were most
concentrated. Is the same thing happening, to some less noticeable extent,
throughout the entire country? The entire world ..?

This is all too big for me, Stanley. It’s just too big. I said I’d never
thought of myself as a coward, but I’ve been lying awake nights, just
wondering what people with those kind of resources—people capable of even
countenancing these things—are capable of doing to me.

You, too, Stanley. My advice to you is to drop it. Leave it alone and walk
away. Find yourself a rock or something and crawl under it and hide.

They’re just going to do this, and do it, and keep on doing it—and you can
try to pretend it’s not happening or you can stand in their way and let them
roll right over you.

There’s just no way you’re ever going to stop it.

“This is WWAXXZY News, every hour, on the hour. But first, an important
message from the First Evangelical Church of PractiBrantics…

“There’s so much neat stuff you can do with your Ka. There’s lots of stuff to
do. But first, of course, you have to release its awful mystic power.

“In olden times you had to trepan yourself and peel back your skull with a
claw hammer, something that only the bravest of Ancient Visionaries could
countenance themselves to do, what with the influence of Evil Humours,
prehistoric germs and all.

“Now, at last, there is an easy way, with the FIRST EVANGELICAL CHURCH OF
PARAPRACTIBRANTICISM.

“(Don’t let the name fool you. PARAPRACTIBRANTICS is a well known and respected
Science, respected by such Scientists as Albert Einstein, Galileo, Planck and
Dr Leonard Trolltrundler—the inventor of the chrononambulatory ambulator,
the inflatable goitre and the galvanistic cheese drive himself!

“The FIRST EVANGELICAL CHURCH OF PARAPRACTIBRANTICISM is classed by US Law as a
religion, purely so our funds can be channelled into the areas where it does most good, rather than diverted to its own ends by a Government composed of those without the Enlightenment that comes from even the most basic MENTAL FLENSING.)

“Once our highly trained technicians hook you to the patent-pending FLENSING
BOX and flood your brain with the healing purple power of orgone energy, the
true potential of you Ka will be released—the mystic twinkling entity that
exists within us all, and has done so for trillions upon trillions of
centuries. Immortality awaits YOU—not a moment too soon! And here’s
why…

“Dr Trolltrundler himself, in his fine and Scientific data-wafer
The Last
Body in the Shop: How PARAPRACTIBRANTICS Can Help You Keep It
, that what with the
demographic time bomb, impending Catastrophic Climactic Shift and with half
the male population of the world functionally sterile due to cumulative
endocrine contamination, there will soon be too few human bodies to go around.
People will have to share, or come back as rocks, or be transplanted into such
monstrous forms of solid-state cybernesis and cultured fungus that it would
drive them mad. Do you hear me? Mad!

“Is this a risk you are prepared to take for yourself? For your loved ones? Of
course not. So call this number and learn the FACTS. It’s the most important
call you’ll make in this or any other lifetime.

“Send no money now. Our flying PARAPRACTIBRANTIC team will be more than happy
to deal with such trifles when they arrive at your door…”

“And our top story of this cycle must be the tragic collapse of the Golden
Gate Bridge, killing seventy-five thousand. The death-count is so high because
this once-historic construction was at the time blockaded by a coalition of
demonstrators protesting US involvement in the Congolese War.