“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.
The overregulated environments of the compound-blocks had no provision for what might be termed as adult entertainment-and only adults, these days, were allowed out into the dangers of the No-Go zone to look for it.
This led an entirely new dimension to the business of dressing people up in costumes.
And certainly to the uses to which animatronic rodents might be put.
Footage from the swarm of free-floating securicams that blanketed the Mimsey World of Adventure, hooked into the pattern-recognition routines of the security systems-and also, incidentally, gathered material for a wide range of Mimsey brand porno-disks-first showed the intruder as a warped and somewhat bulky but humanoid form blundering in a kind of shuffling lurch amongst the crowds on Bestiality Avenue.
This did not trigger an alert of any kind because there had been no reports, at this time, of the Mimsey World electro-wire perimeter having been breached. And besides, amongst a crowd of tourists, hookers and other performers variously cosmeticized and costumed, there was nothing inherently out of the ordinary about this figure at all.
Security tracking-systems picked this figure up again, with the first overt overtones of suspicion, in Panchakamara Street, in the shadow of the Wheel of Frottage, overturning a dog-burger stand, swatting the canine-costumed proprietor out of the way and attempting to gorge itself on the uncooked meat extruding from the patty-ejection tanks.
This, apparently, was not to the figure’s taste. It projectile vomited with such force as to knock several bystanders from their feet, then ran into the crowd-security tracking-systems now following it with some quite actual degree of alarm.
It might be noted that the creature did not seriously hurt anyone, in its erratic path through the Mimsey World crowds, until it reached the Grotto of Sanguinary Delights.
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 small-time 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.”