by Dave Stone
“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.
The diner itself was a burnt-out shell, long since abandoned in the general exodus to the corporate compound-blocks and of no use whatsoever to whatever No-Go denizens might remain. There was certainly no food here; it had just been a place to hole up.
Eddie Kalish had gone out through the access-hatch of the Factory expecting to find himself on some floor or other of a compound-block. He’d expected to have to deal with more security systems and corporate uniforms and people demanding to know who he was, what his job was, why he wasn’t doing it and then calling for the guards.
They’d have shouted things like “imposter!” and “seize him!”, too, in the imagination of one Eddie Kalish.
In fact
, he had emerged to find himself in a run-down complex of warehouse-spaces in the wreckage-strewn wasteland of the No-Go itself. Whatever it was that GenTech was doing, here in what they called the Factory, they obviously wanted to keep it at arm’s length.
Off to the north—and Eddie had found that something inside him now knew, precisely, which direction Magnetic North actually was—the lights of the multicorporate hives shone.
In the No-Go, lights of a more sporadic and fitful kind burned as those who still lived there went about their nocturnal business.
Eddie’s plan, such as it was, had been to simply get out. There was no way he’d ever have worked for GenTech in the first place, and definitely no way for an asshole like Masterton.
Catching sight of the old guy getting sliced to hell and back had just moved his schedule up.
Out here in the No-Go at night, he was entirely out of his element. He hadn’t been up for anything more than avoiding the light guard presence in and around the warehouses—GenTech trying to keep attention to a minimum—and look for somewhere to hole up and hide.
Now, in daylight, Eddie Kalish was feeling better. Time to make some actual plans. Find food, boost some transport and just get the hell away.
Spanky reconditioned body and a brain with stuff in it that it didn’t have before. Plus you could spot the bad things coming a mile off in daylight—nothing really bad could happen in daylight, right?
Eddie Kalish loped from the shelter of the burnt-out diner, completely unaware of how the flesh on his bones, quite suddenly, slid and pulsed into a new configuration.
He just felt hungry. He needed to eat.
10.
“It’s gone overt,” said Trix Desoto, matter-of-factly, her eyes unfocussed, most of her attention still on operating the tracker.
“This soon?” Masterton was surprised. But not too surprised, or he would never have attempted to set up a trace this early in the first place.
“It’s a virulent strain,” said Trix. “Or maybe it’s just general panic-reflex, you know?”
An entire wall of the Factory’s intel-and-communications suite was taken up with Tracksat monitors and readouts. The room was packed with tactical-command consoles and general logistically interpolative technology of a sparse and functional, quasi-military design.
Trix Desoto, however, was plugging into a unit of a different kind: a bulbous pod of fleshy matter, its skin of a similar colour and texture as that of a human, which pulsed as though in some self-contained way alive.
Literally plugged. A length of what appeared disquietingly like intestine ran from the pod to her forehead, there to disappear into a socket that looked disgustingly like a sphincter.
Personally, Masterton thought she was showing off; she could just as easily, after all, have interfaced with the tracking pod by laying her hands on it.
“Estimated flip-out into Conversion in three minutes,” Trix Desoto said.
“Do you have a vector on him?” Masterton asked. “Where’s he going to hit when he flips?”
Trix Desoto rattled off a string of coordinates. Masterton punched them into a console and examined the result.
“Typical,” he said wearily. “Just the job. Fun for all the family. Do we have anybody on the ground who can run a stage-one intercept?”
“So what you reckon, Lenny? We made our quota?”
Lenny made a pointed little pantomime of totting up the inventory on his data-pad, and sighed. “No, we haven’t made our quota, Karl. We haven’t made our quota at all. Would you like to know why we haven’t made our quota, Karl?”
“Why haven’t we made our quota, Lenny?” asked Karl, a little meekly.
“We haven’t made our quota, Karl, because some trigger-happy asshole keeps blowing off people’s heads or burning them to shit with incendiary rounds.”
“Sorry, Lenny,” sad Karl.
For all that the majority of the San Angeles Sprawl lived in the corporate compound-blocks, where such things as food and sanitation and medical services were supplied as a part of that particular deal with the devil of commerce, there were a number of small satellite communities out in the No-Go itself. Pockets of independent and what might, with charity, be called semi-criminal activity, of which the multicorps themselves made use.
Communities of data-hackers, chemical-crackers, an entire and busy sex-industry—people who would never be let inside the compound-blocks in a million years, but to whom were extended an elaborate system of protection and supply. The multicorps needed those people who lived and worked out on the edges—as a source of innovation, recreation and even in some cases experimentation—so they made at least some effort to keep them alive.
The San Angeles Paramedical Service was, ostensibly, funded by a multicorporate consortium to bring—as the name suggests—paramedical services to those remaining in the No-Go zone. Medical treatment was free… provided you agreed to donate such biological material as might be appropriate, to the organ-banks or for biomedical research, should you be unfortunate enough to die despite the very best of paramedical efforts.
The end result of this was obvious. You didn’t call the SAPS in if you were attached to your bodily parts and wanted to stay that way. And if you caught sight of one of their Meat Wagon hovercraft, you rabbited and hid before they could draw a bead on you.
In the violent and casually lethal world of the No-Go, the SAPS, at best, performed the general function of vultures.
“So, you know what I’m thinking, Karl?” said Lenny.
“What are you thinking, Lenny?” said Karl.
“I’m thinking, Karl,” said Lenny, “that it’s time we had ourselves another little hunting party. Seems that I happen to recall some folks with a small lab not far from here.”
“Chemical lab, Lenny?” asked Karl. “Not, uh, a chemical lab doing stuff that might be, you know, important to the Big Guys?” He pronounced the name as though it were significantly capitalized, as indeed it was.
“Nothing of the sort, Karl,” Lenny reassured him. “Jerkoffs are strictly retro. They’re just brewing up a little line in crystal-meth.”
“Just the sort of cowboy operation, Lenny, that could explode from under them at any time…” Karl said thoughtfully. “Total loss of life in a deplorable and sickening if not entirely tragic manner.”
“And a nice little windfall for us, Karl,” said Lenny. “Always provided that certain people remember to go easy on the incendiaries.”
Lenny fired up the fans, and the big SAPS Meat Wagon hovercraft was in the process of hefting itself up on its skirt when the comms unit broke in.
“Code twenty-three alert from GenTech…” the SAPS dispatcher said, then rattled off a string of coordinates that would be utterly meaningless to anyone who did not know what a Code Twenty-three meant. Then:
“All available units required. Do not—repeat, do not—engage the primary directly. Standard clean-up and contain, and await suitably qualified assistance…”
Lenny turned the Meat Wagon in the air, and punched the crash-course coordinates they had received into the autopilot.
“Looks like we’ll make the quota after all,” he said. “And then some. We’re off to Mimsey’s World of Adventure.”
In most commercial processes there is something which might be thought of as the Window of Illusory Desirability—as is well known by anyone who has bought a piece of apparently high-powered computer equipment, at what seems to be an unbelievably knock-down price, only to have the manufacturer roll out a vastly improved version, at a lower price, the very next day (ie anyone who has ever bought a piece of apparently high-powered computer equipment in their lives).
What the Window of Illusory Desirability boils down to, basically, is that when some product or service is becoming obsolescent, there is a window of opportunity when a drastically reduced price will still convince some suckers to buy it.
To take the classic example of buggy-whips: with the sup-plantation of horse-drawn carriages
by the automobile, it’s not impossible to imagine the makers of such secondary articles as whips resorting, for a while, to increasingly desperate measures to sell the damn things. Two-for-one offers and the like—which of course resulted in the consumer merely ending up with two completely useless things instead of one.
Of course, the manufacture and selling of whips survives and thrives, now, in certain limited and specialist markets. And the allusion might be seen to be quite apposite in this current case.
During the collapse and consolidation of populations into corporate compound-blocks, the owners of any number of pieces of what had once been prime real-estate realised that what they owned would seen be effectively abandoned and worthless. During that Window of Illusory Desirability, however, they were able to sell off various tracts of land at what appeared to be a bargain price.
Amongst these was a theme park originally the property of a corporation once mighty indeed but long since subsumed into one branch or another of the GenTech Corporation.
In any case, the new owners redressed their acquisition at the minimum of expense—more or less just basically plastering the name Mimsey over every occurrence of the name of the previous owners, and tried to rake in as much cash as possible before the world around them finally collapsed.
In this they failed spectacularly, until coming up with a bright if not particularly original idea:
Rather in the same way that whips and so forth had come to change their nature—or at least, had changed the nature of the things they commonly hit—the Mimsey World of Adventure came to cater for a somewhat different market than for which it had first been intended.