Free Golgotha Run by Dave Stone

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.

7.
    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