Free Golgotha Run by Dave Stone Page A

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