And for a while he:
Didn’t feel like doing anything but fly, pinwheeling through the air over the abstract mesh of tendrils, alive to nothing but the rush of kinaesthesia. The simple joy of it.
Eventually, he:
Regained some grip on himself and on his mind; if he was here yet again then is was probably important. There was something his mind was trying to tell him. There was something here for him to learn.
On the extreme edge of perception, he caught a glimpse of:
Creatures of some kind, hanging in the air, sculling lazily through the gulf with cilia-like pseudopodia. Their bumbling course drew them closer to him. They appeared to have noticed him.
He:
Decided to hurry things along and meet them halfway. He was actually, to be frank, some small part of his mind was telling him, getting a bit tired of the obliquity. He wanted to know what this was about once and for all. He rotated himself laterally in the abstract air and accelerated toward the creatures.
As he drew closer, more of the:
Creatures became evident, in tens, and hundreds, thousands… and at last millions. There was a swarm of them. As he drew closer, individual details became distinct-and something inside him began to scream. The same word. Over and over again.
Say it three times and it’s true.
A barbed and chitinous hook shot for him, a length of slimy cord trailing in its wake and attaching it to one of the bulbous creature-masses. The hook punched into his horrified and gaping mouth, burrowed through to burst from the back of the neck with a clunch.
The pain was immense; it:
Hauled him, the creature, on its line, towards its mass. In human terms, in waking terms, the bulk of it would have been miles across. A seething chaos of forms and textures that suggested some weird mix of corruption and clockwork, bone cogs and escarpments ticking through a black and churning mass of diseased bile.
The:
Creature hauled him, spinning on his line, into the foetid mass of itself. Buried him inside himself. Engulfed him.
Eddie Kalish shook himself awake. He had to be awake and ready for this. Like the old joke, it was almost time for him to go to sleep.
At least, it was almost time for the medical technician to come in with the hypo. Eddie had wondered, more than once, what the purpose of it really was; it wasn’t as if he didn’t spend the days and nights drifting in and out of dreams in any case.
Maybe the staff needed the routine of knowing that there were certain hours when patients were guaranteed to be sparked out.
In any case, the procedure would prove useful now. Eddie spent a minute or two with his datapad, accessing the surveillance systems and keying in a number of commands he knew how to enter like they were written on the back of his hand-without ever quite knowing how he knew them.
Presently, the technician came bustling in. Under her somewhat generic-looking GenTech staff uniform she was a cheerful girl, in her late teens, named Laura Palmer, if you could believe the little polycarbon plaque clipped to her lapel. To the extent that he have her any consideration at all, as a person, Eddie quite liked her.
“Evening, Mister Kalish,” she said cheerfully. “And how are we this evening?”
She always called Eddie Mister Kalish with a kind of joking parody of respect, like he was an old guy who kept pissing himself and had to be led around by hand and jollied along. Maybe it was just what the people running hospitals always did with the people in their care-Eddie Kalish had no basis for comparison.
And not that even thinking about the idea of old guys didn’t open up a nasty can of worms, for Eddie, at the moment.
“Don’t feel well,” Eddie mumbled, trying for what he imagined as sounding ill-but succeeding merely in the sort of voice that people used to use when phoning the office on the day of a really important event like the sun being out and feeling like going fishing. And then they cough.
“Feel bad…” Eddie continued, breaking into a cough and waving his right hand randomly and vaguely in an attempt to indicate something about his left shoulder. “Look at this…”
“Don’t you worry,” medical technician Laura Palmer said, producing the hypo from its ziplock case with cheerful briskness. “A good night’s sleep and you’ll be right as rain.”
Automatically, though, she had leaned in, inclining her head toward the shoulder Eddie had indicated. Eddie Kalish reached up and grabbed her head and smacked her face into the wall.
He’d merely planned to knock her out, but he didn’t know his strength. The force of it pulled Laura Palmer physically off her feet to the extent where she literally left one shoe behind.
There was a sharp crunch that Eddie Kalish would subsequently spend years trying to forget and fail. A spray of blood.
The motion had ripped out several of the tubes plugged into Eddie’s arm. Now he grabbed the other tubes and contact leads attached to and plugged into him and pulled them off and out. He had no idea what this was gonna do to him, at this point in whatever Zarathustra procedures were going on, but at this point he didn’t give a shit.
Time to move. Time to get the hell out. That was all that counted.
He spent a few seconds, though, checking the body of Laura Palmer. He thought he’d crushed her skull, but in the end it seemed that he had merely broken her nose. Her breathing was ragged, and Eddie had no idea of how much he might have hurt her in an ultimate sense, but at least she was still alive as of now.
He fumbled through her uniform until he found the key-card which had given her access to his room, then bundled her up in the polythene sheeting that had so recently covered his own body and left her on the bed, arranging the various tubes and leads so that they might or might not appear to be connected to her. If anyone were to look in, it wouldn’t pass even a cursory glance, but what the hell, you never knew.
The anaesthetic hypo lay where Laura Palmer had dropped it, its ziplock case containing several more to one side. Eddie picked them up and got the hell out of there.
Eddie jammed his stolen keycard into the slot. A panel readout pulsed from red to amber and the door slid open onto darkness. The faint smell of someone else-and someone, or some thing, that might or might not be entirely human.
Eddie had never, really, been in a room used by a single person as entirely personal space. He had no idea if what he could make out of the contents, in the light spilling from the doorway from the corridor outside, was usual or not.
A scattering of discarded holo-vid disks, data-wafers and actual bound paperback books which must have cost a fortune to whoever had paid for them, decomposing in some abstract sense to informational mulch. Visible tides, in the second-hand light, included: Briefing for a Descent into Hell, A Cure for Cancer, The Eye of the Lens, The Odyssey, Paradise Lost, The Medusa Seed -that one quite obviously torn to shreds with some anger, and hurled away with some force-and Camp Concentration.
A collection of dolls-or rather, a collection of broadly humaniform figures ranging from proprietary children’s toys to an antique, jointed, wooden artist’s marionette. Each of these figure had been twisted into postures suggestive of agony, laughter, orgasm, some particular and telegraphic emotional state.
All had been modified in some manner. A stuffed rag doll, for example, had been meticulously skinned with hand-stitched thin black leather. Scrawled in bright pink lipstick across something that looked like a huge egg with diminutive arms and legs stitched on (Eddie had never heard the nursery rhyme Humpty Dumpty) with poppy eyes, stringy hair and an approximation of green velveteen pants, was the word SUCK.
A brightly-keyed technocrome poster of the old movie goddess, Anna Nicole Smith, arching her back in a pose and gold lame borrowed from the even older movie goddess, Marilyn Monroe.
Mismatched four-colour facial features, ripped from other sources and pasted, turned her smile into something insane and rictive, her eyes burning holes of psychosis.
The sleeping form of Trix Desoto on the somewhat foetid expanse of a mattress. She was half-transformed into… well, whatever the hell it was she transformed into.
Something between a rumble and a growl came from her, in rhythm with sleep-breathing. Something that might or might not have been words. She might or might not be saying the word “mouth”, for some reason, over and over again.
In terrified silence, Eddie slipped into the room. Something slithered under his foot-something hard and thin and slippery like the cover of an antique glossy magazine-and for a moment he stumbled, arms pin-wheeling in an attempt to regain his balance.
Something in her alerted by the shift in the air, the partially transformed Trix Desoto stirred and grunted. Then she settled down again.
Somehow, at the expense of crushing a fold of inner cheek between his molars, Eddie preserved his silence. The taste of fresh blood, The sickening feel of crushed mucus-membrane in his teeth.
At last he made it to the sleeping form. There was an area of skin below her left scapula that looked to be more human than otherwise. So Eddie used his purloined anaesthetic hypo on that.
Trix Desoto’s breathing slowed. She relaxed further into sleep. It might have been Eddie’s imagination, but he was sure that, for a moment, the transformation of her body had kicked into reverse, leaving her form looking visibly more human.
Last of the brilliant escape-plans, here; a simple case of trading up.
Eddie rooted through the various possessions and clothes on the floor until he found the thing he needed.
There was also a pair of generically nondescript jeans and a shirt, no doubt used when just generally slobbing around, that served at a pinch to fit Eddie due to Trix Desoto’s somewhat overstated curves. When in a halfway human form, at least.
The timeclock in Eddie’s head-another enhancement courtesy of Prof Zarathustra, he supposed-ticked off the patrol-pattern changes in the guards in the corridors outside. Not particularly good or easy to get past them, here and now, but it wouldn’t get any better. It was time to move.
Eddie Kalish went steppin’ out.