He no longer recalled a specific point of origin. (Some big stone egg spat uterine slick from a fissure in Mount Fuji? Hatched by sun and acid rain; autonomic, anthromythic monkeyman.) The strings of RNA detached and shifted, the meme inside the meat machine supplanting and segueing, supplanting once again like a set of nested cones twisted through Dimension X (where the loathsome cilia-things squatted and watched, at this particular and palsied section of the Millennium, through their fiendish and segmented telescopes) in a recurring and perpetually re-evolving loop. (The canisters were coming.)
He could no longer remember a name. Not to feel it. He inhabited a world without sequence or names.
And the meat machine like a philosopher’s axe; replace the head and change the pole. The same man every time or someone new?
In Barranquilla, in 3017, they had done coca cut with methyl-dex and pigshit ’til hearts stopped cold, sold still-warm suka for the upkeep on their own implants, caught the uplink to the Hook for hypoxia and calcium depletion and polycarbon substrates shot through bone. Converted airborne oestrogen in the geodesies on the Mare Iridium, our swollen glands and our burst and haemorrhaging eyes. Kamo had died there, he recalled. (Kamo who?)
Took the freezer up and out for cryogenic renal shutdown. That was 2434. Took the infra to CI and it excised the CNS and ate it. Worked the meat rax of the Malay Chain, up on poppers built from Bhopal ketones; in the mouth for food and airspace, up the butt for credit for lymphatic system-swap before the virus went syndromic (I don’t recall.) Periodic inert plugs of biomass to plug the minor spirochaetal holes…
If we were to live in these new quasi-spaces, he supposed, we had to leave the very idea of our bodies and our physical brains behind, shearing off in little dislocated fragments under an abstract acceleration, perpetually renewing, a perpetual disconnected death of memory-attrition (of which we are the sum).
And so, at last, after several major refits and a conceptual rebore, after several empty centuries of wandering, the patchwork mariner comes at last again to Eden, a misnomer, where the coffins gawp like open presses. Searching for something lost and gone, that he cannot name but wants. They killed a world, here. Men, I mean. I think. They killed it and they kept on killing it and then they stopped. No big story, no big deal. They just stopped when it was dead.
There are people, obi-people in the wreckage, who restore the memory and thus a name, the price is that everybody dies, the result is that, of course, at some point, everybody comes.
Everyone came back to Planet Earth. At some point. Back to Planet Earth in the past, when it was still there…
Trix Desoto came across Masterton, in the sparely furnished and vaguely monastic chamber that served him, here in the Factory, as his office and living quarters combined, in the process of flipping through a one-shot disposable LCD data-wafer, of the sort that had entirely supplanted bound paper books in the last decade and a half.
A twentieth-century eye might have been puzzled, insofar as an eye can be puzzled, at a piezoelectric unit being more disposable than paper, but these days it wasn’t even an issue. Sand and synthesized chemical crystals were plentiful and cheap. Trees were on the ragged edge of extinction and priceless.
Masterton had a faint and absent sneer on his face that spoke ill of the half-hour to come.
“Do you know, I think it’s at this point,” he said, confirming it, “that I think the whole intrinsic structure of the thing falls spectacularly apart.”
Masterton, Trix knew, had pretensions to being a man of literary sensibilities-and that he sometimes played that up to type. He used it as a petty form of minor torture; pontificating endlessly on the subject of something meaningless and banal when he knew that there was something you were desperate to talk about.
“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.
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.