Jack Yeovil - Krokodil Tears

"She's somewhere in Arizona, we believe. You might try to look up a Dr Simon Threadneedle in a township called Dead Rat."

"Dead Rat? Downer of a handle. Those vibes are negatory, Rog."

"I'm sure you can get on top of it."

"That's a charlie A-One breeze-from-the-freeze affirmative-to-the-max topside positive situation in the black column roger, Roger," Manolo chirruped.

"You mean yes?"

Manolo looked hurt. "Yes."

This is ZeeBeeCee, the Station That's Got It All, and here with The Bathroom Break Bulletin is luscious Lola Stechkin…

"Hi, America. It's November the 9th, 1996, only 47 shopping days to Christmas, and this is Lola, inviting you to share a shower. Here it is, folks, all the news you can handle…

"Sunnydales, Iowa. Dr Ottokar Proctor, "The Tasmanian-Devil,' today took up residence in the high-security wing of this semi-private mental hospital. Experts remain divided on the question of Dr Proctor's state of mind during the period when he is confirmed to have been responsible for seven hundred and fifty-three homicides, but the Supreme Court has ruled him insane and irresponsible. It has been suggested that President North intervened in the judicial progress with a plea for clemency on the grounds that Dr Proctor is too essential to the shaky economy of the United States to be executed. Dr Proctor, already a wealthy man, has received an eight figure sum for the movie rights to his forthcoming autobiography What's Cookin, Doc?, and director Kim Newman has already announced his intention to cast either Jeremy Irons or Steve Martin in the leading role.

"The Sea of Okhotsk. The sinking last week of the GenTech exploratory submersible Yukio Mishima remains a source of controversy. The craft, designed to scan the seabed for mineral deposits, was raised today by a joint Soviet-GenTech team and brought ashore at Kitashiretoko.

Misaki, Sakhalin. Premier Yeltsin himself has announced that he intends to cooperate fully with the GenTech experts in an effort 'to get to the bottom of this tragedy.' Kentaru 'Barracuda' Ishii, GenTech's deepsea disaster specialist, has not as yet ruled out the possibility that the Mishima went down due to 'hostile action.' The Blood Banner Society, the shadowy Japanese ultra-nationalist group, have issued a declaration to the effect that the Mishima, coincidentally named after one of the heroes of the movement, was lost through an unprovoked sneak attack, and that it would be avenged. The 102nd Russian submarine fleet at Petropavlovsk has been alert ever since the international courts overruled the Soviet appeals and gave GenTech the right to conduct its surveys in the area.

"Cloudbase, Earth Orbit. Daniel Digby, provost of the G-Mek Orbital, has issued a formal denial to allegations by Ayatollah Bakhtiar that fugitive graphic novelist Neil Gaiman has been in hiding in the facility, and has requested that the Pan-Islamic congress stand down the Inter-Satellite Ballistic Missiles currently targeted on them. 'You can come up and look around,' Digby has said in a personal message to the Ayatollah, 'he's not here. I don't even like comic books.'

"On a lighter note, the Battle of the Bands in Fairport, Rhode Island, during which heavy metal groups Deathtongue and the Mothers of Violence played simultaneous sets in the same auditorium for thirty-eight straight hours has been resolved in single combat between the rival lead singers. Fuh-Q Charlie of Deathtongue and Sonny Pigg of the Mothers are expected to be out of the Reconstruction Wing of Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in time for their big Christmas 'Freak the World' concert at the Hollywood Bowl next month.

"This has been Lola Stechkin at ZeeBeeCee, soaping my back and signing off. If it's all right with you, it's all right with us…"

Next, we go live to the Nikita Kruschev Ballrooms in Moscow for the semi-finals of The 1996 Warrior Chess Tourney, with a special guest appearance by the Samovar Seven. But first, here's a message from GenTech…

Jessamyn lay flat on the contoured table as the Doc sliced away the facial bandages, still relaxed from the morph-plus shots she had been taking every day. Doc Threadneedle was humming "The Girl in Gorki Park" as he wielded his scalpel. He was an artist with the knife, she had heard, and had apprenticed with the great Zarathustra at GenTech BioDiv before his "suspension." His field was bio-improvements engineering, and he had been placed in charge of some hush-hush military project that had racked him up a rep as the Frankenstein of his generation. She had never heard the whole story, but apparently some of his ideas were considered a little too daring for the traditionalists in Tokyo, and he found the rug pulled from under him. A few years ago, he had replaced her squished left eye with her first optic implant. At that time, he had offered to give her more extensive treatments—apparently, he found her a promising subject—but she hadn't had the cold kish to lay out. Now, after some shrewd scavving and a touch of inventive accountancy, she had more than the price of the pudding.

She had been undergoing treatment for over six months now. She wondered how much of what she had been bom with was left. She probably wasn't even legally the same person any more. A few weeks ago, she had spent her eighteenth birthday in a drug-induced coma, with her back opened up as durium shieldlinks were laid around her spine. She had even let Doc Threadneedle into her greymass to plug a few loops, although she didn't want too much done in there. She didn't hear voices much anymore, but Seth was still whispering dangerously, and sometimes she would dream his memories, vividly recalling some trivial incident from the remote past.

In a mud hut on an endless plain, she sorted through the bones of unrecognizable animals. Shackled to an oar, she strained in a galley as an oiled mountain of flesh beat a huge drum. In the depths of a monastery, she toiled by candlelight, laboriously copying out a crumbling manuscript, translating from one unrecognizable language to another. In a jungle whose oppressive steam-heat made sweat run inside her steel breastplate, she cut the throats of three befeathered priests. On a battlefield, she robbed a dead general of a leatherbound book grasped so tightly in his frozen fingers that two of them came away with it. In a shelter under London, while bombs exploded overhead, she coupled in a frenzy with a dead-faced young woman.

But that wasn't her. That was him. Nguyen Seth, the Summoner. Elder Seth, the Unspeakable. The more she picked up about his past, the more she realized how inadequate her vision of the world had been. She had been born to a life of violence, desperation and death, but she had never believed corpses could walk, manshaped creatures could endure for thousands of years, or that another person's mind could leak into your own.

"Don't open your eye yet," said the Doc. "I have the lights on."

The bandages were lifted from her face. Free at last, she wriggled her nose.

The Doc whistled through his teeth.

"Hmmnn, even if I do say so myself, that is quite some job. You could pass for a musickie model."

Jessamyn raised her hand, and felt her face. The dents in her forehead were gone, and her nose was reset. There was some flesh over her cheekbones again. Her chin was straight. And the improved optic was a solid lump under her left eyelid.

"It's not just a burner," Doc Threadneedle had told her as he unwrapped it from its tissue like a sugared almond. "GenTech have upgraded the product to include a kind of bat-sonar, and a heat sensor. You won't be able to see through it, but it will increase your field of perception. One model contains a micro-camera for surveillance, and the DeLuxe Tripball can filter light patterns and transmit them to the brain as psychoactive impulses. At last, a high with no side-effects. You can trip on Christmas Tree Lights."