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.
Final Quadrant: Arbitrary Base
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.
“Brunette Bump-off” Spicy Detective May 1938
Supplementary Data: File Retrieval
[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.