Eddie was awakened by a discreet chime from the dashboard HUD. At least, he would have been wakened by a discrete chime, had it not been drowned out by the Testostorossa shouting.
“ Wake up, fucker! ” the Testostorossa was bellowing. “ I got problems. ”
“What?” said Eddie. “What problems?”
“ Do you want the short explanation, or the technical one that’ll leave your brain running out of your ears? ”
The thought crossed Eddie’s mind that he could tell the Testostorossa to just go screw itself. There was nothing technical the Testostorossa could tell him that he wouldn’t understand, with the possible exception of the radio, courtesy of the Loup.
Then again, he was just too tired. “Give me the short explanation.”
“ A number of my fusion-compensatory systems have drifted out of alignment, ” the Testostorossa said. “ We need to get off the road and stop so I can run a self-diagnostic recalibration. ”
“What?” Eddie said. “Now, hang on, GenTech must have spent millions on you-you’re telling me that, after all that, you have to stop for repairs after only a few hundred miles? What sort of shitty quality control do they have back there at the factory?”
“ Hey, they made you, fucker, yeah? ” The Testostorossa’s belligerence seemed a little defensive. “ I’m just saying that this is my first time out of the box, and there are some things you have to tweak when you’re on the actual road. To a certain extent I’m still prototypical; this is a shakedown-operation in more ways than one. I need to get off the road for a while, and for some reason doing it isn’t flagged as mission-critical-you have to tell me to do it. ”
Eddie thought about this. That was the first time he’d had the upper hand. The idea of cracking the electric whip, as it were, was a little bit tempting.
“Supposing I say no?” he asked. “Purely for the sake of argument, you understand.”
“ Ever seen a hydro-fusion explosion from ground zero? ” the Testostorossa said.
“Do it!” Eddie snapped. “Do it now!”
The Testostorossa segued off onto a slip road and ramped its power down, gliding to a halt.
“Is this gonna take long?” Eddie said. “Cause I’m telling you I don’t like this. We’re out of contact with the Brain Train, stuck alone in the middle of nowhere and-oh fuck. There’s something up there.”
Off to the side of the road, firelight and the bulky, silhouetted forms of vehicles.
“Just my luck,” Eddie muttered to the Testostorossa. “You go wrong just in time to drop us in the middle of a gangcult camp.”
Uncharacteristically, the Testostorossa remained silent. Presumably it was devoting its run-time to performing the self-diagnostics it had mentioned.
Eddie fired up the microcams and cut in the image-enhancement. The monitor showed a collection of parked vehicles ranging from ancient pickup trucks to’ sixteen-wheeler RVs, daubed with cruciforms and what Eddie recognised as Burning Hearts and what, he presumed, were quotations from the Bible.
This latter presumption was confirmed by the HUD, which ran the configurations and attempted to pull an ID from its database. All it came up with was UNKNOWN
and a potential threat-factor of, likewise, UNKNOWN.
“Shit,” said Eddie.
He was left with two choices. He could just sit there and pray that nobody noticed him, or leave the car and try to get a handle on what was going on.
After maybe twenty minutes, however, Plan A began to pall. It was the sheer uncertainty that was the worst thing; sitting in the dark and waiting for God knew what to fall on him. At length, Eddie eased open a door and snuck towards the firelight, taking advantage of what ground-cover he could.
Eddie made his cautious way around the bulk of a bulky sixteen-wheeler, wondering what gangcult-related horrors might meet his eyes. In the event, and horrific enough in its own way, he was utterly unprepared for a bunch of bearded, bespectacled freaks in jumpers, sitting around a campfire, strumming on guitars and singing “Kumbaya”.
And, as the old joke goes, that was just the women.
Actually, he saw, as his eyes accustomed themselves to the new lighting conditions with Loup-accelerated speed, that was just the group around the campfire that just happened to be near him. Around other fires, dotted around the patch of desert corralled by the various RVs, there were other figures.
There was a confusing mix of attire and demeanour, but each of the people seemed to be what Eddie vaguely thought of as religious types. Prim church-ladies and Lutheran pastors rubbed shoulders and broke bread with ascetic and somewhat ragged figures in monk robes that looked more like what Rasputin would have worn-as opposed to those worthy Trappists who brew delicious beer to the glory of God, the aid and benefit of the Walloons, and walk in truth and beauty all their days.
In fact, these robed figures seemed… not out of place exactly, but more definite and distinct than all the other religious types. In every group, they seemed to be the centre of attention. It was as if they had been imposed on the others, in the sense of stripping some new element into a photograph, and were guiding them.
Shepherding was the word, Eddie supposed.
“Greetings, brother,” said a voice behind him. “And how might we assist you this fine night?”
Eddie nearly swallowed his tongue. There was just no way that someone could have come up from behind him like that, not with his well-known rat-line, and not to mention Loup-enhanced, senses alert for danger.
He turned to see one of the thin robed figures. It was as if the man had simply materialised out of thin air.
“I’ve, uh,” Eddie said, “I had a bit of car trouble. Nothing to worry about, it’s being… and then I saw your fires.”
“A decided boon against the chills of the desert night,’” said the man. “Father Barnabas at your service. Might I invite you to warm yourself, a little, before going on your way?”
“Uh…” Eddie didn’t have anything much against the religious types of the world; he didn’t bother them so long as they didn’t bother him. But there was something about this Father Barnabas that just creeped him out. He seemed entirely affable and harmless on the surface-but Eddie got the distinct impression that was what it was. The face was absolutely composed in a friendly smile, but there could be anything behind it.
Of course, Eddie’s unease might have been due to the small fact that all those gathered here-every single one-had stopped their guitar-playing and breaking bread and whatever else the fuck it was they had been doing, and had silently turned towards him with similarly fixed and gnomic smiles.
Eddie wondered about that, too, until the Loup supplied the information that the word “gnomic” had nothing whatsoever to do with gnomes.
“Hey, listen,” he said. “I don’t want to… say, who are you guys, anyway?”
“Josephites, for the most part,” said Father Barnabas. “A small cross-denominational sect, to be sure, but gaining some small degree of significance of late.” He gestured to take in the assembled multitude. “As it is, we are currently on our way to Utah, there to gain admittance to a certain seclusionary at the behest of our great leader. I have, myself, made a small hymnal to this most wondrous endeavour…”
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.
Exposing them to something. Infecting them with something. With what, precisely, and to what purpose, I have no idea. Again, there are skeleton records to suggest that the effects of this infection, whatever it was, were studied over a period of years, but no hard data remain.
Whatever the nature of the infection was, the mortality rate was high, running from seventy-five percent at the start to maybe fifty percent by the end.
Those who survived, and were old enough by this point to remember the procedures, were given post-hypnotic blocks and reintroduced to the general population by way of foster homes and adoption services. It’s not outside the bounds of possibility to imagine that a number of mothers got their supposedly deceased infants back under a new guise.
In any case, Stanley, it struck me that these kids are now old enough to have children of their own. That got me thinking, so I ran some comparisons and extrapolations from such data as remains extant.
Your missing kids, Stanley, the disappearances you’re investigating, are the children of the Janus Program subjects.
I think somebody, somewhere is covering his tracks. Like I said, the background material on this thing goes as far back as the death camps-and like the death camps, I suspect that all of this was done for no consistent or coherent reason at all. It was done for the simple reason that someone could do it and get away with it.
It hasn’t ended, Stanley. It hasn’t stopped. The disappearances of the kids, the murders in [section deliberately defaced from source] are just the visible tip, for the simple reason that this was where the victims were most concentrated. Is the same thing happening, to some less noticeable extent, throughout the entire country? The entire world..?
This is all too big for me, Stanley. It’s just too big. I said I’d never thought of myself as a coward, but I’ve been lying awake nights, just wondering what people with those kind of resources-people capable of even countenancing these things-are capable of doing to me.
You, too, Stanley. My advice to you is to drop it. Leave it alone and walk away. Find yourself a rock or something and crawl under it and hide.
They’re just going to do this, and do it, and keep on doing it-and you can try to pretend it’s not happening or you can stand in their way and let them roll right over you.
There’s just no way you’re ever going to stop it.
Radio None
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“The FIRST EVANGELICAL CHURCH OF PARAPRACTIBRANTICISM is classed by US Law as a religion, purely so our funds can be channelled into the areas where it does most good, rather than diverted to its own ends by a Government composed of those without the Enlightenment that comes from even the most basic MENTAL FLENSING.)
“Once our highly trained technicians hook you to the patent-pending FLENSING BOX and flood your brain with the healing purple power of orgone energy, the true potential of you Ka will be released-the mystic twinkling entity that exists within us all, and has done so for trillions upon trillions of centuries. Immortality awaits YOU-not a moment too soon! And here’s why…
“Dr Trolltrundler himself, in his fine and Scientific data-wafer The Last Body in the Shop: How PARAPRACTIBRANTICS Can Help You Keep It , that what with the demographic time bomb, impending Catastrophic Climactic Shift and with half the male population of the world functionally sterile due to cumulative endocrine contamination, there will soon be too few human bodies to go around. People will have to share, or come back as rocks, or be transplanted into such monstrous forms of solid-state cybernesis and cultured fungus that it would drive them mad. Do you hear me? Mad!
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“Send no money now. Our flying PARAPRACTIBRANTIC team will be more than happy to deal with such trifles when they arrive at your door…”
“And our top story of this cycle must be the tragic collapse of the Golden Gate Bridge, killing seventy-five thousand. The death-count is so high because this once-historic construction was at the time blockaded by a coalition of demonstrators protesting US involvement in the Congolese War.
“We here at WWAXXZY News fully support freedom of speech and the expression of ideas of all kinds, however repugnant they might be to right-thinking citizens of this great country of ours.
“We have to ask, though, in the light of such an appalling tragedy-should we not be thinking of curtailing the free expression of ideas to gatherings of no more than, say, three men and a dog? We here at WWAXXZY News say yes, and if Amendment 7054 is passed, you won’t be able to say anything other than yes either.
“What makes the atrocity doubly vile, White House sources say, is that there are strong suggestions that it can be traced to Congolese-backed terrorists themselves, loosening the cables, as opposed to simple faulty maintenance. Despite the White House’s statement, rumours are already circulating some of the more scurrilous datanet sites that it may actually have been carried out by rogue elements within our very own government. The conspiracy theory goes that they wanted to kill two birds with one stone by inflaming the Congolese situation and removing opposition in one fell swoop.
“The terrorists responsible are still at large. They could be anywhere. They could be anyone, even people known to you. Stay in your homes. Stay off the streets. Stay in your blocks. Report any suspicious activity-any activity at all-to representatives of your local officially designated Black Squad.
“In other news, the body of controversial rap music, action figure and sex industry entrepreneur Big Master X was found floating in New York’s Hudson River today. Although a suicide note was found pinned to his body, the boys at NYPD Inc. are refusing to rule out foul play. Our love and thoughts go out to the family and friends of Big Master X during this difficult time. To read the suicide note in full, log into the WWAXXZY datanet using the keyword ‘floatingfatboy’ and remember to have your cashplastic at the ready.
“And on a lighter note, old William Hicks is at it again. Originally intended to address the Golden Gate rally himself, the senator was discovered last night, wandering Times Square in New York, without his trousers and muttering that he had seen proof that both the US Government and the Multicorps are colluding to cover up the fact that we are all of us living in a recursive virtual reality which vast and unimaginable Entities from outside space and time are playing like a game.
“Well, if that were true, it’s certainly game over for Mr Hicks in this presidential race. Relentless indeed, Bill.
“That was WWAXXZY News, every hour, on the hour. And now, in memory of Big Master X, we’re devoting the rest of the afternoon’s programming to some of the best music released on his Big Black Beats label starting with his very own remix of Freak-E’s ‘Be My Pimp’…”