Schismatrix plus - Bruce Sterling [113]
They both lay back on their waterbeds, waiting as the helmets' neck units soaked through predrilled microholes in the seventh cervical vertebra. The mi-crothreads grew their way harmlessly through the myelin casings of the spinal axons in a self-replicating gelatin web.
Lindsay floated quietly. The PDKL was taking hold. As the spinal cutoff proceeded he felt his body dissolving like wax, each sensory clump of muscle sending a final warm glow of sensation as the neck unit shut it off, a last twinge of humanity too thin to be called pain. The Shatter helped him forget. By rendering everything novel, it was intended to rob everything of novelty. While it broke up preconceptions, it heightened the powers of comprehension so drastically that entire intuitive philosophies boiled up from a single moment of insight.
It was dark. His mouth tasted of cobwebs. He felt a brief wave of vertigo and terror before the Shatter aborted it, leaving him suddenly stranded in an emotional no-man's-land where his fear transmuted itself bizarrely into a crushing sense of physical weight.
He was crouching next to the base of a titanic wall. Before him, dim sheens of radiance gleamed from a colossal arch. Beside it, jutting balustrades of icy stone were shrouded in thin webs of sagging dust-covered cable. He reached out to touch the wall and noted with dulled surprise that his arm had transmuted itself into a pallid claw. The arm was jointed in pale armor. It had two elbows.
He began crawling up the wall. Gravity accompanied him. Looking out with new perspective he saw that bridges had transformed themselves into curved columns; loops of sagging cable were now vicious, stiffened arcs. Everything was old. Something behind his eyes was opening. He could see time lying on the world like a sheen, a frozen blur of movement chopped out of context and painted onto the surface of the cold stone like alien shellac. Walls became floors, balustrades cold barricades. He realized then that he had too many legs. There were legs where his ribs should have been and the crawling feeling in his stomach was a literal crawling: the sensations from his guts were transmuted into the movement of his second pair of limbs. He struggled to look at himself. He could not curl forward, but his back arched with fantastic ease and his lidless eyes gazed at armored plates thick with intersegmental fur. A pair of wrinkled organs protruded on stalks from his back: he brushed his muzzle against them and suddenly, dizzyingly, he smelled yellow. He tried to scream, then. He had nothing to scream with. He flopped back against the cold rock. Instinct seized him, and he scuttled headlong across acres of porous gritty stone toward the safe darkness of a huge jutting cornice and a racklike checkerboard of rust-eaten bars. Proportion left him as he crouched there, wobbling in a hideous burst of intuition, and he realized that he was tiny, infinitesimal, that the titanic mortared blocks that dwarfed him must themselves be small, so small that... He jabbed at the porous stone with a raking flex of his foreclaw. It was solid, solid with a weary durability that had waited out uncaring eons, painted with the feeble dust of huge groaning machinery run past the point of useless-ness into an utter exhaustion of grit.
He could smell the age of it,