He was in:
A limitless, deprisensory gulf, strung though with bright tendrils of some drifting gas that seemed to twist and curl in on itself resolving itself into discrete and dislocated images. Lantern fish of the bulbously misshapen sort one finds in ocean trenches, twisted so that the mouths of comedy-and-drama-mask faces yawned on their flanks; the masked face of a surgeon, a light clipped to his temple blazing as a scalpel flashed across it; the sliced and encrusted remains of some horse-like creature, with two heads, wrapped within rusting coils of razorwire; an antique roll-top desk with something horrible inside; snipping windshield and a hole under the wall and the red wet razors sliding soft inside the…
All of this was:
Background. All of it. He drifted through it feeling the actual physical slicing of something sharp-edged flowing in his head; drifted from the slit he had made and the red wet tunnel and those cloying skeletal hands…
It was some time before he realised that he was flying.
Eddie Kalish jerked awake, under his transparent polythene sheet, dream-images still crawling through his head. There was definitely something happening in there, something inside actually shifting into some new alignment.
He couldn’t escape the feeling that, somewhere in their narrative, the dream-hallucinations were actually trying to tell him something. Something was being downloaded into him, the nature of which at this point he could not quite grasp.
Well, if things were shifting around in his mind, no less inside the body on the bed in this twee little hospital room packed with insectoid biopacks. You never knew, on waking up, what might have changed: the length of a finger here, the fleshing out of muscle-texture there.
The biorganic implants which had resurrected Eddie’s lifeless corpse, kickstarted and maintained his metabolism, Masterton had explained, were now being mimicked and supplanted by the entirely organic Zarathustra processes.
It would be several days before they completed the job, leaving Eddie Kalish in better shape than he had ever been before. Physically stronger, with reflexes and mental faculties enhanced.
Residual processes would greatly enhance his damage-resistance and healing factors, in much that same way that they had allowed Trix Desoto to survive after a gunshot wound that had left half her guts spilling out.
Eddie had asked if he was going to turn into a superman or something because, quite frankly, he had kind of liked the idea of that.
Masterton had snorted, and told him not to be such a tool. The human world was designed and built to human tolerances and dimensions-an actual superhuman would be forever braining himself on ceilings and crushing things he tried to pick up. It would be pointless-at least so far as the purposes of GenTech were concerned.
Masterton had suggested, since Eddie was going to spend the next few days lying there and being about as useful as a spare prick, that he orientate himself as to the aims and expectations of his new GenTech masters by way of the datanet. This Eddie had dutifully done, by way of a wireless display pad found for him by Trix Desoto, and pretty much simply for the sake of having something to do.
Eddie Kalish had never used the datanet in his life, having spent most of it only vaguely aware that such a thing existed. Little Deke had been extremely jealous of his access and had never let him have a look.
It struck Eddie as slightly weird that, given that, he had taken to it so readily. Of course, this might have had something to do with the fact that the datanet, by its very nature, was so simple to navigate that it could be used by a concussed ant-but no, Eddie thought, there was more to it than that.
In some strange way he was able to see the hidden shapes behind the data. Well, alright, it wasn’t that he actually saw what password-clearance codes were or anything like that; it was just that he was somehow able to make the right moves to get himself inside so-called classified files that he’d decided to have a look at.
It must have been some side-effect of the resurrection implants and the Zarathustra regen-procedures, he thought. The things downloading into his head that he was reacting to in dreams.
Pity he couldn’t have had a taste of that before a complete lack of knowing about command-codes had had him shot. Bit of a tautology there, of course, he supposed, but so what?
In any case, it was in this way that Eddie came across a slightly fuller explanation for the Zarathustra processes, currently at work on his own mind and body, than Masterton had given him.
The basis for the Zarathustra processes had come from the “disaster” that had, notoriously, struck the city of Des Moines a decade before-the nature and origin of which had never been satisfactorily explained.
The specific and targetted nature of what came to be known as the Rapture Bug suggested that it had been actively designed, but no human agency had ever stepped forward to take responsibility for the effect.
Besides, designed or not, the mechanisms of the Bug seemed far in advance of any technology available on planet Earth. Speculations as to some extraterrestrial-or even extradimensional-origin were endless and ultimately fruitless. The simple fact remained that it was as if the Rapture Bug had come from some entirely other world.
Initial investigation of the effect suggested-erroneously-that the Bug had operated by means of nanonetics. In fact, as it was later learned by a process of back-engineering, it operated on the subatomic level: a quantum-level self-propagating construct that, in effect, rewrote the base code of the world. It was designed to target itself upon, incorporate itself within and radically alter the individual, living humanoid form.
Its basic nature meant that when released, it proliferated something like a virus but instantly -or at least at the speed of light-saturating its target area in a matter of seconds. The vast majority of those caught within its sphere of influence never even had the luxury of waking up to find their world had changed.
The initial effects had been quite impressive to say the least. The pores of every human body opened like industrial vents and began pumping out a sludge and spray of deconstructed pathogen-components and accumulated toxins.
Foreign bodies like artificial hearts, hips or small items lodged in some inextricable location as a child were physically ejected, often at velocities of several thousand metres per second. There were cases, in particularly crowded situations, of some largish hunk of matter being fired into someone else, ejected in its turn to hit some other body and the process continuing on for up to an hour.
Old scars and fresh wounds healed themselves in a matter of seconds. Calloused tissue went, too, being the product, effectively, of cumulative minor injury-with the result that fingertips and the soles of feet ended up as soft and pink as those of a baby. The Rapture Bug would counter further damage to this otherwise vulnerable new flesh, of course-though unfortunately without suppressing the pain reflex.
The question of biological organ transplants had been somewhat problematic, on the basis that the Rapture Bug was, in the end, something of a misnomer. It did not, as such, resurrect the dead; it merely transformed the living into something effectively immortal and invulnerable.
Hearts, livers, lungs and so forth with a dissimilar genetic coding from their hosts were ejected and replaced, but being living humanoid matter in their own right couldn’t die. The “homing” mechanisms of the attendent to the Bug meant that they would gravitate together with the other such items transplanted from the original donor. Piles of living offal, sitting there forlornly and without the ability to regenerate further.
The primary biological transformations that made sexual reproduction instantly obsolete, among the good citizens of Des Moines, had occurred with the same speed as the regeneration of original hearts and lungs and renal systems… with the result that a lot of those actively engaged in copulation at the time ended up being catapulted across the room. Pregnancies spontaneously aborted, the reaction driving several thousand sudden mothers into the air to bury their heads in any available ceiling.
Fortunately, as coherent living humanoid matter, the offspring came under the remit of the Bug and would survive to grow, just as those children whose entrance into the world had been slightly less dramatic.
Twins, though, were and are the worst known cases on record. Or triplets, or quads… those separate human beings, in any case, sharing an entirely similar DNA pattern-signature. With them, the “homing” mechanisms of the Event operated with a vengeance…
And better, Eddie thought, to forget about those shrieking, boiling, continually exploding and imploding lumps of matter that were the end result of two, or three, or any number of human-sized objects trying to occupy a single human space. Better to forget the fact that, for all of it, they were still by all accounts alive. The enhanced insight, the thing inside that let him pull the real meaning out of stories, chose this moment to cut in.
Hadn’t it been lucky, Eddie thought that GenTech had been right on hand to throw up containment when the Rapture bug, whatever it was, had hit Des Moines?
Wasn’t it just so fortunate that this Professor Zarathustra had been able to reverse-engineer, tone down, tweak and reproduce the effect in a manner that was (a) useful to GenTech itself, and (b) resulted in a rejuvenation product that every rich old scumbag under the sun would be falling over themselves to buy.
It couldn’t have worked out better if GenTech itself had loosed the Bug in its prototypically virulent state, using the unfortunate citizens of Des Moines as experimental subjects…
Eddie decided that he’d rather like to learn a bit more about GenTech aims. He was only following Masterton’s orders, after all.
A few moments later he had stumbled on the command-codes for the various surveillance cameras dotted around the corridor-complex that Trix Desoto had referred to as the Factory.
There was a security station with its complement of armed guards.
There was a refectory space, and the medical technician-dressed, alas, in a decidedly less exciting manner than had been Trix Desoto in her comedy-nurse costume-who periodically came to administer the sedative hypos that, apparently, were intended to regulate Eddie’s sleeping patterns and which worked insofar as they knocked him out like a light.
There was a room remarkably like the one Eddie had imagined on first waking up here-brightly lit and walled with antiseptic while tile. On a surface that looked disquietingly like a mortuary slab lay a thin, pale figure that Eddie recognised: the old guy from New Mexico. The body stirred. Obviously still not dead, then.
A Suited figure instantly recognisable as Masterton was conferring with a medical technician Eddie didn’t know as she plugged cables into a sensor-unit, suspended on a gimbal-rig over the old guy, and ran the self-diagnostics. Then they nodded together and the technician activated the unit.
Eddie couldn’t believe what happened next. Or rather, he believed it… he just wished that he couldn’t.