Golgotha Run (dark future)

by Dave Stone

  Possibly the nature and scent of the fluids involved here maddened it. Far more probably, it is because Mimsey World security staff had by now at last caught up with it, and at this point one attempted to take it down with a taser-discharge.

  In any event, it was at this point the creature-now unquestionably a creature rather than a human figure of any kind-transformed in a blaze of light so bright that it knocked out several of the recording microcams. Those that survived, on the periphery of the blast, reported images of a shifting, hulking mass. There were vague suggestions of writhing tentacles, and far more definite suggestions of teeth and claws.

  No two microcam reports-and certainly no two human reports, from those humans on the ground who remained alive-quite agreed as to the creature’s ultimate form. There seemed to be some aspect to its very shape in the world that rendered on areas of the human visual cortex as simply null.

  Security-tracking now reported the creature pelting from the Grotto of Sanguinary Delights in a blur of speed almost impossible for the unassisted human eye to catch. While the crowds exploded apart, quite literally, at its passage, it was possible that there was no actively vicious intent, and that the creature was merely attempting to find some means of escape.

  If this was so, it was particularly unfortunate that the path of intended escape lead directly to the House of Autoerotic Strangulation, one of the Mimsey World’s most popular and crowded attractions.

  And from this point on the carnage had to be seen to be believed.

  And you can see it now for only $79.99, on When Vacations Go Bad: Extreme. Press your red interactive button now.

  Lenny and Karl, the SAPS paramedics, had truly died and gone to heaven. Phrases involving the words happy, pigs and shit came to mind-though it was probably more akin to a pair of vampires after an explosion in a slaughterhouse.

  They had landed their Meat Wagon on the scene to find a number of SAPS units already there, but that didn’t matter. There were enough pickings for everybody. Forget about making the quota-they were well into bonuses and overtime here.

  Frantic happy minutes were spent filling up their storage units to capacity. They didn’t even need to fill the cracks with limbs or other organs.

  Market conditions, at the moment, were for some reason placing a premium on human heads-and there were more than enough of these available without so much as looking at the other smalltime stuff twice.

  Possibly they had become a little delirious, high on the fact of this totally unexpected and lucrative windfall, but when Karl had suggested checking out the House of Autoerotic Strangulation, Lenny had not argued too much.

  “Code twenty-three,” Karl had said. “That means a Classified Test Subject on the loose from one of the Big Guys. I never seen anything like that. I bet it’d be a fuckin’ sight to see.”

  “Yeah, right, Karl,” Lenny had said. “If we lived long enough to fuckin’ tell about it.”

  “We won’t get close or anything,” Karl had assured him. “Close enough to get a look and then we just duck the fuck out.”

  He became thoughtful.

  “You never know, though. Maybe it’s filled up on whatever it eats. Maybe we could get a chance to pull it down ourselves. I can think of lots the Big Guys could do for two guys who manage to pull it down.”

  At the time it had seemed, if not a plan, then at least something worth checking out just to see if it might be possible. Now, in the reeking chamber that had once been the House of Strangulation, Lenny just didn’t think so.

  Lenny’s working life didn’t lend itself much to squeamish-ness, but the current circumstances were definitely heading into the country of the too much.

  Possibly it was all the evidence of what the hanging bodies, those who had not managed to join the mass exodus on the arrival of the Code 23, had been about before they died.

  The basic purpose of the chamber had precluded bright lighting in the first place; now even the blacklights ‘were out. In the foetid darkness, Lenny half-expected to hear the rasp and rumble of some Great Beast’s breath.

  He’d have preferred that to the clink of chains in what was otherwise silence, come to think of it. At least that might give some clue as to what was lurking in the dark, and where.

  He realised that he lad lost contact with Karl.

  “Karl?” he rasped, casting about with his SAP-issue flashlight. Flashes of variously depending bodies catching the beam. Nothing more.

  Then, off to one side-and literally in the space of half a second-the sound of something scything through flesh, the clunch-clunch-clunch of impossibly busy mastication, and then dead silence again.

  Whatever had just happened, had happened too fast for Lenny’s mind to process.

  “Karl?” he called again, still casting somewhat bemusedly around with the flashlight.

  Something bony and razor-sharp swung in out of the darkness. Before it lopped his head clean off, Lenny caught the impression that it seemed to be attached to a tube of fleshy and possibly living matter.

  Lenny’s body spasmed and keeled over, the head spinning off into the dark, to rebound off a chain and fetch up wedged against one of the hanging bodies in a manner that would have almost certainly startled the owner of it, had they been alive.

  All of this had happened so suddenly, though, that it was some time before the impulses in his brain shut completely down. Thus, with the last of his dying perceptions, he was able to perceive the sudden flash of alien light from nearby, the subsonic-loaded roar of something in pain and the thump of something big hitting the ground.

  He was able to hear the cheerful, female voice saying: “You see what I mean, Masterton? I told you it was a good idea to arrange things so some of the dumb SAPs went in first.”

  11.

  … And we’re outside (I don’t know how we got here), shot from the geodesies to the gravepits, and she’s leading me, sylph-like now, albified. She’s shucking non-essentials left and centre as she hauls me through the mud and ruptured coffins, past the thieves new-gutted hanging from their ropes; past the shamen with their mortified and wormy hearts. The schimiraras an th’ tomajawks an knifs with grey hairs stick to the heft. She’s positively glowing.

  You made this, she’s telling me. Do you see? You made it and you own it and it’s yours.

  I slipped on something (momentarily). Ointment made from monkshood, nightshade, hemlock blended with the fat of children. They use it, apparently, to fly.

  She dips a wafer in the stringy half-clotted mess (it’s something else, now, and something not entirely pleasant) and proffers it (I’m kneeling, now, before her; begging for something that I cannot now recall). The monkey still hanging from my neck, enraged, attempts to snatch it away.

  She avoids the little clutching hands. Looks down on me. You really don’t, she says. You have no idea. You made yourself forget.

  Her fingers taste of earth and shit and chemicals as she shoves them into my mouth, and works it open, and at last administers the eight-pointed communion wafer.

  “The process of living,” said Masterton with relaxed and somewhat weaselly smugness, “is one of dynamic recursion. We do all this crap, all manner of crap, and like as not it comes to nothing and we just end up back where we started.”

  Eddie Kalish scowled around himself at the Factory medical-centre room.

  Everything was as he had left it, save that Laura Palmer’s blood had been cleaned from the wall-and for the flexible yet stout woven polycarbon straps, around his forearms and shins, that now secured him to the frame of the bed.

  “Screw you,” he said. Whatever the Zarathustra processes had done for him, in this form at least, they hadn’t made him strong enough to break loose from woven polycarbon straps.

  “And the wit just keeps on scintillating,” Masterton said, still with that same shit-eating grin.

  “Imagine it as similar to the processes of any other life, if it makes you at all happier,” he continued. People wake up, they do stuf
f and then they go to sleep again. Wake up, do stuff and go to sleep all over again. We just run through the iterations over and over again, with minor variations, until we get to the point where we’re doing things more-or-less right. Like that computer program about an ant, or whatever it is, that blunders around erratically for a while and then starts progressing on a line.

  “Now, are you finally going to stop thrashing around and screaming abuse and injuring yourself long enough so I can give you the true skinny? It really won’t take that long, and at the moment you’re just wasting everybody’s time, including your own.”

  Eddie considered this. When he had first woken up-again-here in the Factory an indeterminate number of days before, the knowledge of his recapture, together with disjointed half-memories of what he had done in the interim, had alternately plunged him into hysteria and catatonic shock. The latter, of course, being exacerbated by an increased regimen of anaesthetic hypos.

  Things had not exactly been improved by the fact that Masterton had insisted on showing him, in more lucid moments, securicam footage of the events that had occurred out in the No-Go and the Mimsey World of Adventure.

  The thing that Eddie Kalish had turned into. The things that he had done.

  Now it seemed that, temporarily at least, the sheer hysteria had burned itself out. It was time to start thinking again. Time to think in terms of formulating a plan. And for that Eddie needed hard information.

  “So why don’t you tell me all about it?” he said. “Pretty please, with sugar and shit on top?”

  “Screw you,” said Masterton, without apparent rancour. “First thing I gotta tell you-which you probably worked out yourself already-as that as a part of the Zarathustra process we’ve been electromagnetically pulse-pumping data into your head. Uploading you with all manner of useful info, including an enhanced vocabulary-and hard though it is to imagine, it’s pretty much working. What’s a Benedicta? ”

  “An angel-girl,” said Eddie, automatically. “The sort of girl who, when you see her for the first time, she’s like some evidence of God. Baudelaire wrote a prose poem about it-“

  “And there you go,” said Masterton. “You didn’t get it right, but it was a reasonable guess, and a while back you couldn’t read the caption under a Hustler cartoon without moving your lips. And I’ll bet you dollars to day-old dogshit you never even heard of Baudelaire.”

  Eddie thought about it. “What good does me knowing about Baudelaire do?”

  “Cause we’re turning you into a fag, all right?” Masterton shrugged. “It doesn’t have to mean anything, and a lot of it’s just random. The more you know, the more you have to think with, you know? Bang it around into new shapes in your head.

  “Anyhoo. The process messes with your dream-imagery as the brain tries to sort it all out-but you’ll have noticed how your dreams are getting seriously out of whack, you know what I mean?”

  Masterton moved around the bed forcing Eddie to strain his neck to keep him in sight.

  “If you sat down and tried,” Masterton continued, “knowing all the stuff that we’re streaming you, knowing the stuff that happened in your life, there’s still shit coming in from somewhere entirely else. Information there’s no possible way you should know. Some whole other world.

  “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 flipover 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 Ed
die, 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.