Golgotha Run (8 page)

(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.

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.