“I mean,” he said, tapping the data-wafer meaningfully, “I like a somnambulating prolapse of coruscating bog-postmodernist elliptical prose as well as the next guy, but this is just completely disappearing up its own ass. We now have a grand total of three oblique but ultimately ambiguous explanations as to what’s going on-alien intervention, interdimensional incursion, and now even time -fracture references for fucks sake-all to explain the big news that some guy meets this girl and they end up screwing. I really do have no idea why I read this crap.”
“Masterton…” Trix Desoto said, hoping to God she wasn’t sounding apologetic. “We really need to talk about the situation.”
“And you can just see how it’s all going to end up, right,” continued Masterton, seemingly all oblivious. “Our confused and battered and power-imbalanced male-principle guy is gonna end up sorta merging in the heat of passion with our dominant but ultimately power-uncorrupted female-principle girl in a million little variegated twinkly lights, there to produce some sort of mythical and metaphorical hybrid; some fabulistic gestalt that-Jesus, but it’s all so goddamn old…
“Screw it, let’s hunker down. Have you any idea about what it was set Johnny Fucko off?”
“…” For a moment Trix Desoto experienced a clash of mental gears before realising that Masterton was suddenly back on the job. “Best we can work out,” she said, “it was just a confluence of events. Nothing sinister as such. No outside factors. The certain… peculiarities of his Zarathustra treatments-you know, because of the thing-had him developing his techno-mesh skills well ahead of schedule. This allowed him to get into the systems, and the nearest thing we guess is that he came across this… ”
Trix Desoto crossed to the playback-monitor on Masterton’s desk and punched up a playback. On the screen, the pale figure of an elderly man was in the process of being cut into bloody slices by a laser-cutter unit.
“He wouldn’t have known what was happening,”Trix Desoto said. “He wouldn’t have known that the package was just, in the end, a clone, schematic data cytoplasmically encoded into its neurotecture. He must have thought that this was what we’re in the business of doing to, uh, real people.”
“Well, yeah,” said Masterton. “We are in the business of doing that sort of thing to real people. The Harvesting programme out there in the No-Go…”
“Granted. But he never got the chance to be acclimatised and indoctrinated. He just rabbited. He took down the med-tech, Laura Palmer-“
“How is our lovely Laura, by the way?” Masterton asked, seemingly all concern. You’d have to know him to realise that he didn’t give a shit and was just saying it for the sake of sounding even remotely human.
“Give it some years,” Trix said, “and she might be able to eat with something other than a spoon. Anyhow. He took down Laura Palmer, boosted what he thought of as a sedative hypo and her keycard-“
“Which only opens internal doors,” said Masterton. “Medical staff aren’t permitted to carry anything else for just this reason.”
“Right. So maybe he tried the main access hatch with it and then had to rethink, or maybe he knew that in the first place. It’s impossible to tell since he blinded the securicams.
“Whatever. He ended up in my quarters. I suppose he really bought the idea that the hypo contained a sedative and just gave it to me to keep it down-pure luck that it put me down and out, you know, because of the thing.
“Then he just picked up my personal keycard-which of course works on the main hatch-and just strolled out. He’s out there in the No-Go, now. He could be out there anywhere.”
“Hmf.” Absently, Masterson tapped the pulp-fiction data wafer he had been reading against the edge of his desk. Then he threw it over his shoulder. It hit the wall and shattered into dust.
“Maybe we’ll get lucky quick,” he said. “Maybe a SAPS squad’ll come across him and realize what they have before it’s too late.
“In any case, it won’t ultimately matter. The second the… peculiarities of his Zarathustra processes go from latent to overt, we’ll draw a bead on him the same way we tracked you out there in New Mexico. You know. Because of the thing.”
And it’s 2914. An Underlevel backroom in the southern continental colony arcologies, hermetically sealed from the irradiated gravepits. I’m looking and thinking human, now; more human than I’ve approximated in a while, since the fashion’s swung away from it and I like to buck the fashion: ectomorphic, parchment-pale and worn black suit and stovepipe hat. Curled around my neck the remnants of a modified spider monkey, picked up exactly where I can’t recall, its remaining flesh desiccated and partially mummified. It can still move, and think, but there’s nothing much inside. Other things are here, all entirely unlikely. I think-process they’re human, but how does one tell?
One is human in precise and absolute detail, down to the DNA. An aboriginal, in the present sense, obviously. There are still some left. Her disguise is complete. I’m trading half-hearted favours, secret, sweet and precious with Mine Host’s late wife (he laughing fit to bust, a ready chorus, she pendulous and greasy and long-since sloughed and stuffed and mounted).
And she’s looking at me ‘cross her glass of Soma sunshine (3-methyl-4.5-methylinedioxyamphetamine spiked with strychnine for that little extra body, natch) with eyes simultaneously dark and flaring, like polished onyx. A deep one, this; a strata angel, impact-fractured. You can see down to the animal core.
Change the senses by a conscious act of relay-switching will. You’re male, I think, she said. Have you always been male?
I can’t remember. It’s true; I can’t.
This is all conducted by way of the eyes. One never knows, quite, how it happens; the transition point between apperception and appreciation; mumbled inanities that remain unmemorable and inane; tracing tissue hard and arabesqued and hitting something engorged and slippery (is this mine?).
Mandible-glands extend into the throat, skeening complex and febrile, pumping a thin sugar-syrup down a gullet that swallows, convulsively, on its sweetness, and something inside fractures…
Eddie Kalish came to in what had once been the restroom of a Mister Meaty burger franchise.
It was daylight outside, but with the shifting quality of day moving on towards night. He must have been asleep for hours.
The tenor of his dreams had shifted since busting out of the Factory, possibly in response to the simple fact of his change of circumstances in real life.
Something inside was trying to tell him something new. He tried to remember what the dreams had actually been about.
Eddie took stock.
The face in a surviving scrap of mirror, which had once covered an entire restroom wall, was pretty much the same as Eddie remembered, if rather more lined and drawn, and he felt a bit relieved about that.
He’d had the horrible suspicion that the Zarathustra processes might resculpt his face into something like that of a movie star-and while a lot of people would have probably preferred that, or at least welcomed some slight reduction in the general rattiness-quotient, then it just wouldn’t have been him anymore.
The body-and Eddie wasn’t quite ready to call it his body, yet-was lean and well-toned, certainly not muscle-bound, which was a bit of another relief on account of how Eddie didn’t really feel like coming it with the dickless fuck in a posing pouch.
Premature unplugging from GenTech medical devices did not seem to have affected it unduly. Indeed, the puncture wounds from the unplugging had already healed to small white scars which would themselves fade to nothing in a matter of hours.
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.