He was:
Caught and killed and falling through darkness, tumbling head-over-heels with his heart in his mouth; boogiemen in the dark, their juju light shining bright behind the ragged holes of their eyes; still he continued to fall and it was heard to breathe… razor-shards in his lungs and blood on the walls and sick, slick mucus on the walls and something was happening to his-
He was:
Plunging through a cavern of membrane, tubular clusters of matter clinging to the sides and small lights flashing among them in a manner reminiscent of readouts. Here and there the membrane walls were ripped open to expose a darkness in which hideously distorted images of human faces were projected: white circles with black-circle eyes and screaming yaws of mouths.
His:
Skin felt loose and gelid. Without pain it sloughed off from his bones and streamed behind him as he fell and (sloughing and reforming, hauling itself back in and tangling, twisting around, transmuting into something bright, so bright, and metametallic that he…)
He:
Hit the floor of the cavern headfirst. Again, there was no pain, merely the abrupt cessation of motion. He lay there for a moment, face buried in a soft and decomposing mulch of what might be meat-or the idea of meat-then hauled himself up.
The skeletal remains of hands attached to forearms sprouted from the fleshy cavern floor, rotted to bone that was a bright and absolute white-far whiter than any bone one might encounter in any real world. The hands were shrouded in a haze of branching microtubular filaments-it was as if something had rotted the flesh away with such peculiar precision as to leave the neural matter intact.
The hands moved. They clutched and scrabbled at him, grabbing at him with a cloying intimacy that seemed to slide around inside his head. Something hot and clotted bursting in his head…
And he:
Screamed. Screamed so hard he thought his lungs might painlessly burst. And from him came a Big Light-like a reflex-sting, a burst of white-hot plasma, blasting the clutching hands away from him and burning them to nothing.
He:
For a moment he stood in the smoking crater of charred meat, staring ahead dumbly. After a while he realised that he was holding his hands in front of his face, realised what he was looking at: mirror-bright, his hands were, his whole body was, as though sculpted from solid but nevertheless in some sense fluid chrome.
The sense of cool air on his face.
The explosion of plasma that had come from him had ripped a hole in the membrane-wall of the cavern. Bright light came from it, bright shapes moved beyond.
Feet slipping in grease, crunching on the burned remains of clinging hands, Eddie Kalish walked towards the rip.
“There you go. That’s a boy!”
Eddie Kalish opened a bleary eye to see something he had never seen before.
Well, he had, but the transformation of it was of such a nature that it left the pattern-recognition areas of the mind temporarily wrong-footed.
When you thought of Trix Desoto, you thought of her in a comedy-nurse costume, wounded, close to death-and about to turn into some diabolical monstrosity from the very lowest reaches of Hell. If Hell actually existed, of course, which of course it didn’t.
Looking at her sitting there, now, on the edge of the hospital bed, relaxed and cheerful in an underwired patent-leather catsuit that would do wonders for the self-esteem of any girl, and so on Trix Desoto contrived to be spectacular, it took the mind a moment to adjust.
“Now, my advice to you,” said Trix Desoto,”would be to get the ‘what happened’ and ‘where am I’ out the way with the minimum of fuss. Everybody tries to find a new way of saying it, and it never works.”
Eddie looked blearily around the room. Some part of him vaguely expected it to be a sterile environment, white-tile walled and lit by harsh and buzzing fluorescent tubes. Instead, it was just the kind of neat little room you might find in an expensive private nursing home called Sunny Gables or the like. Plaster walls and cornicing. Drapes over the window. Discreet little oil-pastel landscapes dotted around.
(And it would only be later, much later, that he would finally work out what had been wrong with this. It was simply that the very idea of “A private nursing home called Sunny Gables” would have never occurred to him in his real life. It was simply not in his mental lexicon. Somebody, or something, must have actively put it into his head.)
At the time, though, the room just seemed prosaic and comforting. This was probably to offset the tangled horror of the items that were currently plugged into him, by way of tubes and what appeared to be actual electrical flex.
The med-units seemed to be some hybrid mix of the inorganic and decidedly organic -hearts and livers held in steel and polycarbon rack-cages, stimulated by servo-motors and pumping liquids which, by the colour, could be anything except saline fluid and blood.
The units seemed to twitch and fibrillate, like insects with their carapaces split open and their insides laid out.
“The fuck..?” Eddie Kalish managed to croak at last. “Wh’ happened? Fuck am I?”
“You see?” Trix Desoto said with a small smirk. “Nobody ever finds a new way of saying it.”
She stood up with a creak of patent leather. The catsuit covered her belly and midriff, but was sufficiently tight and clinging for Eddie to see that the flesh under it was flat and toned, no sign of a wound of any kind.
The ragged and blood-matted hair that Edie remembered from the van in New Mexico now fell in platinum-blonde curls that suggested regular washing in a rejuvenatingly herb-steeped stream next door to a chemical plant.
Trix Desoto crossed the room, with quick scissor-steps, and activated a wall panel by the door. “He’s awake now. You can come in.” Then she turned to regard Eddie with a not unkindly smile.
“You’re safe enough, in the relative scheme of things,” she said to him. “We’re in the San Angeles Sprawl, in a GenTech facility. Welcome to the Factory.”
The door slid open, and a Suit came in.
That wasn’t mere colloquial hyperbole. The Suit was a dead and perfect black so that, for example, if an arm was laid across the chest, it was impossible to see the distinction between them; you could only see the Suit in one-piece silhouette.
Protruding from the neck of the Suit, by means of the usual human arrangement, was the neatly groomed head of a man-and once again, neatly-groomed was not mere hyperbole. The hair and beard were cropped and shaped in a manner so precise that one could imagine it having been done follicle by follicle, by micromanipulator, under the direction of a team of design consultants, in an operation costing tens of thousands of dollars.
The effect, however, was somewhat spoilt by the fact that there are some men who simply cannot carry off cropped hair and beards. And there are some men, frankly, who are con-genitally unsuited to waiting a suit. Or even a Suit.
Later, Eddie would learn that the ensemble was basically a uniform, the standard outfit for GenTech field-management of a certain level-and you damn well wore what was given to you-but for the moment the main impression was a little like that of a child somewhat ineptly dressing up.
This new arrival in the Suit grinned at Eddie-a little shiftily, Eddie thought. The effect might have been due, though, to the black wraparound shades that gave no idea whatsoever of what the eyes might be doing underneath them.
“So you’re our mystery wonder-boy,” he said, leaving no doubt that wonder-boy actually meant: some little squit I don’t particularly give two shits about. “Eddie, is it? Eddie Kalish? Doesn’t quite seem to fit with anything, if you get what I mean. Doesn’t fit right with where you were. Where we found you. Where does it come from?”
Eddie shrugged, rattling a couple of tubes.
Far as he could recall, that was just always what he had been called. He had simply never thought about it. And he certainly wasn’t going to start thinking about it now at the behest of this individual, who he was already beginning to dislike intensely.
(And just when and where, he would wonder later, had he started thinking in terms of this “behest of individual” crap?)
The man shrugged himself, utterly unconcerned rather than sullen. The matter was simply not worth bothering about.
“Call yourself whatever you want,” he said. “What do I care? You can call me Masterton-and I’ll tell you right now that’s not what you might call my real name. That, you’ll never know. The important thing is… do you read at all, Eddie?”
“I can read,” Eddie Kalish said, shortly. He was getting seriously tired of this guy Masterton’s somewhat overly familiar manner. “I can write words, too.”
Masterton sighed.
“Good for you,” he said. “What I meant was, do you read many actual books. No? Well colour me surprised.
“In any case, in a lot of books, you get what they call exposition. Some guy tells you what’s been happening and what is going to happen. He might be lying like a bastard, and making it up off the top of his head, but the point is that he makes it all hang together and makes it work. He tells you what to do, and what you’re gonna do next.
“I want you to think of me as your exposition, Eddie, yeah? I’m the one who tells you what you’re gonna do.
“Now, a little while back you blundered in on the retrieval operation we were running on Ms Desoto here, and the package she was transporting. You didn’t know what you’d got into, and you certainly didn’t know any command-identification codes, so our guys just shot you to hell and back. Shot you dead. You’re dead.
“Fortunately for you, being dead isn’t quite the handicap it once was. We here at GenTech have the technology. We can rebuild, and all that happy crap. Resurrection-and-regen processes courtesy of the good Doctor Zarathustra. It’s one of the things we do… and the conditions happened to be right for us to do it to you.
“Now at this point, Eddie, you must be thinking: gee, wow, what’s so special about me that I get the Zarathustra treatment? Well, let me tell you, you’re goddamn nothing. You’re just some sorry sap who happened to be on the spot. The upshot of that, what with all the expense and all, is that we now own your sorry ass. You’re just stone cold nothing and we get to do what we like with you.”
Eddie Kalish realised that Masterton had stopped talking, and was just grinning at him in the manner of one having successfully completed a recitation. There was an air, indeed, that he had been subjected to a polished and often-repeated spiel.
Off to one side, he noticed, Trix Desoto was watching him, too, with a sense of expectation. Eddie wondered how many times they had put someone in this situation, whether they had a bet on how he would now react.
Well, screw ‘em, frankly. Eddie wasn’t going to give them the satisfaction of any reaction at all. He just looked dumbly down at himself-and for the first time caught sight of his own body. In this he was aided, in that it was covered with a slightly cloudy but mostly transparent polythene sheet, rather than a bed sheet.
People tend not to consciously examine their own bodies without some external impetus in the manner of, for example, pain. This is for the simple reason that-barring the obvious effects of working out, or having an arm lopped off by a rotary saw or the suchlike-there are certain fundamentals that the mind absolutely refuses to recognise might change.
Now Eddie Kalish stared down at himself, positively goggle-eyed, as rafts of certainty broke apart and sank behind his eyes. “Jesus fucking Christ! ”
Off to one side Trix Desoto smirked maliciously.
“That’s a fin you owe me, Masterton,” she said.