“That’s because you’re part of an experimental project, classified on absolutely the highest level. The people you killed in the sex-park, they’d be dead anyway now if you hadn’t killed them. As are maybe a couple of hundred who caught direct sight of you and survived.”
The enormity of this took some little while to sink in to Eddie. “How can you…” he managed at last.
“We threw in a lot of wet-team resources and didn’t care if it got messy,” said Masterton, artfully failing to get the point. “You know, in an extremely prejudicial sort of way. We doctored the microcam-evidence, too, to remove anything distinctive or identifiable about you, even in your transformed state. Any detail that might possibly trace you back to us.
“And speaking of which: the point of the programme, so far as you and your dreams are concerned, is that we’ve added a certain… extra little something to your Zarathustra mix. From a whole other source. And it’s to do with the way the world’s been getting weird these last few decades.”
“You don’t have to tell me about the world getting weird,” said Eddie, more or less for the sake of something to say.
“Oh, I don’t mean just the low-grade madness you’d have encountered back in Cracker Ridge, New Mexico, or wherever the hell it was,” said Masterton. “There’s stuff happening out there now that makes the shit that happened to Des Moines look sick.
“The big flip-over happened sometime around the turn of the millennium-I mean, before that, you could take a through-line through history and with a bit of work, and rather like dreams, you could see how it all sorta fit together and worked even if only with hindsight.
“That just doesn’t fly any more, on anything other than a limited and local basis. Things are becoming discontinuous-like the informational Singularity they predicted we’d be living in as far back as 1972, but bleeding into the physical and actual level. Reality-glitches, temporal-perception-glitches, mass-hallucinations.” Masterton sighed. “Ask anybody who knows, they’ll give you a different take. A different explanation for it. Contact with alien entities, or extradimensional entities, has disrupted the world on a fundamental level-or human perceptions of it, which pretty much amounts to the same thing so far as humans are concerned.”
Masterton moved back around to the other side of the bed. Eddie gave up on trying to keep him in sight and stared at the ceiling instead.
“Or maybe we’re seeing the first evidence of time-travel, the first wave of contact from the future impacting on the timeline. A bunch of the more fundamentalist whackos are convinced that we’re just living in the Last Days, with the Maw of Hell opening up and demons coming through to clear the way for the Great Beast…”
“So what’s your theory?” Eddie asked.
“What?” said Masterton.
“What do you think is really happening to the world? You know, personally.”
“Well, you know, personally I think it’s to do with four-dimensional space,” said Masterton. A little defensively, Eddie thought. “The three-dimensional construct we perceive of as Space is falling through the fourth dimension of Time-that’s why travelling through time doesn’t take any actual effort, yeah? Thing is, we’re not just travelling through time at a second-per-second, we’re accelerating at a second-per-second-per-second.
“Things are speeding up as we come closer to whatever temporally-gravitational source we’re falling towards and we splash like a watermelon thrown off a compound-block. The cracks are beginning to show. Or maybe we’ve smacked into something on the way down…”
Masterton visibly took control of himself, then shrugged.
“I have to admit that I haven’t quite worked it all out yet,” he said. “I was, like, totally stoned when I thought of it. I also thought, for a while, that the three-dimensional construct that we know as the world, seen from outside, was bright purple and shaped like a walrus.”
Eddie Kalish nodded, understandingly. It seemed like the only way, at this point, that someone would eventually get around to loosening the polycarbon straps.
“Anyhoo,” said Masterton. “The primary cause doesn’t matter, any more than you need a thorough grounding in atomic theory to know that if you bang a couple of pounds of enriched plutonium together you get one big bang.
“The plain fact is that cracks are appearing in the world, allowing the incursion of elements from some other reality, like the way you sometimes get references and ideas from somewhere entirely else dropped into a book.
“What we’re trying to do, here in the Factory, is to patch elements of that new… call it subtext… into the existing structural coding of the Zarathustra lexicon. We call the end result the Loup.”
“The Loop?” said Eddie, completely failing to get it.
“Ell-oh-you-pee,” said Masterton. “Scots for leap, apparently. Quantum jumps and so forth. Plus it’s French for wolf -bringing in the whole idea of lycanthropy. For obvious reasons.”
Half-buried memories of the carnage in the Mimsey San Angeles Adventure surfaced with a vengeance. Eddie gulped and shuddered as he tried to force them down. He strained his neck again to face Masterton.
“What happened out there?” he asked, when he could more or less speak again. “What did I turn into?”
“Near as we can tell,” said Masterton, “the Loup opens up a… portal, let’s call it, and something comes through. The precise nature of it is still unclear. It doesn’t seem to think in what we imagine of as human terms, though it certainly has impulses and reactions.
“The Loup converts energy from the life-forms around it, seemingly at random, and uses it to transform the host. We think it’s trying to build the equivalent of a pressure-suit, so it can survive in this world…”
Eddie Kalish was following all of this. It was just that he couldn’t believe it.
“Why the hell would you do this to me?” he said at last.
Masterton frowned. “I told you, you’re nothing. You just happened to be on hand.”
“No, I mean why would you do it to anybody? What possible use would it be?”
“It’s useful if it’s contained and controlled,” said Masterton. “Trix Desoto was the first test subject who developed techniques for controlling it. You wouldn’t believe some of the things that girl can do.”
Abruptly, his expression clouded into one of bad-tempered spite.
“But there’s no point telling you now,” he continued. “We were gonna stream those hard-earned control-techniques to you, on the subconscious level, but you went off the damn script and bugged out. Now you’re going to have to learn them the hard way-if you end up learning them at all. Look familiar?”
Masterton, Eddie saw, was holding up a hypo of the sort with which Eddie was being periodically tranqued.
“This contains a compound we call the Leash,” said Masterton. “And don’t even bother to try working out what that means. The name describes what it does, not what’s in it or how it works.
“It keeps the thing inside you dormant. You go twelve hours without a booster-shot and the thing goes overt. Then it tears everything it can get its claws on apart, which is sort of an inconvenience for anything it gets its claws on. And plus it gives out a psychic trace like you wouldn’t believe.
“We don’t get there in time to haul it back, it tears itself apart under its own internal forces-which is certainly going to be an inconvenience for you…”
“I seem to recall,” said Eddie, “you’ve already told me you own my ass. So what difference does all this make?”
“Just emphasising the point,” said Masterton. “I let you loose, you’re still on a choke-chain. There’s a reason why we’re inoculating people with the Loup, a specific job we need them to do.
“Haulage and delivery to… well, let’s just say that where you’re going, where you’re going to end up, only someone infected by the Loup has any chance of surviving.