Hellcats: Anthology

by Kate Pickford

  Albert curled his lip and turned his back on her.

  He didn’t speak. Made her wait. Power games, all the way.

  One day, she thought. One day I’ll be YOUR boss and YOU’LL have to listen to ME.

  Albert hovered over the replacement technician who was programming the precise moves Darcy had to make in order to dive into the computer-generated lake and swim through the weeds just as Colin Firth’s double had, decades earlier.

  They’d had complaints, the last time a live version of P&P had run, that the weeds, “Looked soooo fake” and, “Ruined my favourite scene.” (Even though, as Vi liked to point out to anyone who would listen, the “wet white shirt” scene wasn’t even in the book.)

  It was a simple case of the Darcy clone not hitting his mark. His hand had trailed through the underwater forest as if it wasn’t there and the viewers had totally lost their minds. Watch This Space’s stock had plummeted that day and they’d been struggling ever since.

  Hence the private remakes of Caligula which was totally not what they were known for.

  They were the “clean and wholesome” entertainment space station, not some low-rent porn shack. Watch This Space ran the classics, inserting you into the film or TV series of your choice (for a hefty fee, of course; just getting to the space station was a cool three hundred-grand) to live out your “celluloid fantasy.”

  F☆ agreeing to play Lizzy was the company’s chance to get themselves back on the entertainment map.

  Albert straightened and turned back to face Vi.

  She braced herself. If the bots came for her she was going to fight. She’d studied Fing Foo and Crack Magray on the tubes back on Earth and knew how to land a kick.

  Albert sneered then waved her away with a gesture so imperious Vi half-hoped he’d order her removal so she could punch him on her way out. Death would be a small price to pay to see him writhing on the floor. How could anyone be so vile and power-mad that no one liked them? How? It wouldn’t have cost him a dime to be decent to the people around him. But, no. He was an ass. Without end. A Mobius butthole looping in on itself through all eternity.

  “You still here?” he said.

  Vi nodded.

  “Well, get another one.” He spat the words at her. “Seriously? Do I have to do everything around here?”

  Her heart leapt in her chest. “Another one?”

  “Jeez. Don’t they teach you kids anything on intake? Yes, another one. Level D. Clone department. They have scads of Darcys. You don’t think we’d rely on a single clone, do you? What do you take us for? Idiots? There’s a backup. And a backup to the backup. Make yourself useful and go get me one. We launch in two hours.” He shook his head and turned back to the digital weeds. “Amateurs.”

  If Viola had been the happy-slappy skipping type she would have hopscotched all the way to the elevators, tap danced down to Level D, and Fred Astaired her way into the clone department.

  But she wasn’t that type.

  She was a serious, Jane-Austen-loving nerd who’d landed her dream job working on Space Station Watch This Space and she was not about to lose it. She hadn’t known about the nightmare boss when she applied, but she wasn’t going to allow one Tinpot Dictator to ruin it for her.

  She waved her hand over the screen outside the Clone Section and was greeted by the standard hologram, Princess Leia in her metal bikini.

  Vi winced. She had majored in Entertainment History with a minor in Cult Classics. She knew what she wanted to see. “Jason Momoa interface, please.”

  The hologram whipped through the twenty-first Century heartthrob’s major roles. Vi stopped him on Aquaman.

  Aquaman lifted an eyebrow. “How can I be of service, Viola Campbell?”

  “A Mr. Darcy, please? Colin Firth edition.”

  The doors to the pods slid open and Jason, dripping wet and rippling his muscles the way he’d been programmed to do, strode ahead of her, humming snatches of tunes she didn’t know but which landed like a tornado of butterflies, tickling her synapses. Someone out there—a programmer who wasn’t paid nearly enough—knew their stuff. Jason Momoa was so tantalizingly real Vi almost reached out a hand to stroke his back.

  A flash of grey-black fur, streaking along the massive pipes that ran the length of the ceiling, snapped her back into the real world. “No way.”

  “Viola?” Jason turned, all solicitousness and charm. He’d switched from ‘sexy-authoritative, but-doing-your-bidding’ to ‘I-hear-and-listen’ mode. “What ails you?”

  “The cat’s here. Right here. In Mr. Darcy’s pod room.”

  Jason smiled. He was a couple of inches taller than her, which was a rarity. He leaned in close. His scent was a mix of pine trees and crashing surf and musk; things Vi had only ever smelled from a can. He puckered his lips as if to kiss her. “No one can hear you meow in space.”

  Well, that was off topic. Funny, but off topic. Vi took a step back. “Sorry?”

  Jason ran a finger down the middle of her blouse. Even in holograph form, Jason had the goods. A lesser woman might have broken into a sweat, but Vi kept her cool. After all, a hologram might appear to be touching her, but she’d unhooked most of her neural network from the firm’s implants so the computer delivered no sensation. The twentieth-century heartthrob was just a ghost in the machine and nothing more.

  Jason lowered his head, tossed back his hair, and then ruined the illusion. “Meow.”

  Vi shuddered. The hologram was way off script. She took another step back. “Jason, out.”

  Jason pouted as he faded to a single point of light.

  Vi was sad to lose the eye candy but not so sad she was going to let an infected hologram try to seduce her. She surveyed the pipes for a furry assailant. The last thing she needed was an ambush from above. “Stay away, kitty. Please. Let me do my job.”

  The kitty made no reply. The little blighter had probably snuck into an air vent and slunk away to add chaos to someone else’s day. Good. At least he wasn’t on her patch.

  There were ten Mr. Darcys, each suspended in their own gelatinous pods. They were perfect reproductions, down to the tapered mutton chops. Vi approached the Darcy closest to her. The Colin Firth-Darcy was her height. She stood, staring into his eyes, for a good two minutes before ordering the pod to dissolve and the clone to take his place at her side.

  Her day had just gotten infinitely better. They were in the clear. The show could and would go on. It wouldn’t hurt anyone if she had a little fun in the meantime, would it?

  “Proposal scene,” she whispered. “And, action.”

  Colin Firth reached for the door handle to Charlotte Lucas’ parlor.

  “Fast forward. Verbal only. No gestures.”

  “You must allow me…” His face was slack, impassive. Not effective. “…to tell you how…”

  She needed that Colin Firth-Mr. Darcy anguish to make it right. She held up her hand. “Sorry. No pacing or sitting or opening doors and putting down hats, but I want the facial…” She waved her hands about while she tried to find the word. “…contortions. Frown and scowl and do all the faces for me.”

  Darcy shook his curls. “In vain I have struggled. It will not do.”

  Vi snickered. She would never be able to afford a reenactment, they were for the uber-rich only, but here she was with a naked Colin-Firth-Darcy proposing to her. Delish.

  “My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.” The clone continued reciting one of the most famous proposal scenes in literature.

  Vi mouthed along. She knew all the words. The 1995 adaptation was her favourite because it cleaved so closely to the original text.

  “Skip ahead to the second proposal scene,” she said “…to ‘You are too generous to trifle with me…’”

  The clone obliged, delivering the Firth-Darcy lines with such precision Vi could almost believe she was walking that tree-lined lane in Elizabeth Bennet’s shoes. No wonder the rich paid so mu
ch to be inside these reenactments. It was heady, thrilling, intoxicating. She was Jennifer Ehle as Elizabeth Bennet. The man of her dreams had listened, learned, and changed, just for her.

  The book made it very clear: Darcy changed because Lizzy called him on his shit. It was the stuff of fantasy, pure and simple. Jane Austen had written the perfect man: Someone who took you seriously enough to deal with their crap and force themselves to do better. To be better.

  Vi sighed. She’d never met a Mr. Darcy in real life. The guys she knew were all scrabbling to get off-world and once they did, fixated on not going back again. There was no room for reckless romance or personal growth or chasing down the cad who’d eloped with your sister and forcing him to do the honorable thing.

  Firth-Darcy had stopped reciting his lines without her instructing him to. “Did I do something wrong?” He cocked his head to one side.

  Vi frowned. The actor-clones were programmed with their lines and nothing else.

  He cupped his hands over the mound where the family jewels would have lived had he been a man and not a gonad-free clone. Not that she’d checked him out (there were no goods to check), but the gesture itself was wrong. Clone-Firth-Darcy should have had no awareness of his own nudity.

  “You don’t look happy. I fear I’ve displeased you,” he whispered.

  “Analyze.”

  The walls buzzed to life, scanning Darcy and producing a report which hovered over her palm.

  PRESENTATION: Microscopic cysts on the brain.

  DIAGNOSIS: Toxoplasmosis.

  MAJOR EFFECTS: Paranoia and timidity in males.

  SOURCE: Magna, pinguis feles.

  “Translate.”

  “A fat cat infected the Firth-Darcy clone,” said Toshiko, the all-knowing, all-seeing voice in the wall. “The malfunction is permanent. Recommend airlocking or incineration.”

  Vi swore under her breath. She shooed the Darcy clone backwards and waited as he mounted his pod plinth. She didn’t have the heart to incinerate a Mr. Darcy, even if he was synthetic.

  “Reseal.”

  The breathable sealant plopped onto his beautiful head, slid down those perfectly sculpted shoulders, and engulfed him, top to toe, in seconds. Like Jason Momoa, Darcy was downcast as he was consigned to suspension.

  But all was not lost. There were ten Firth-Darcys in the room. Each in identical pods awaiting her command. She had to be certain they were free from contaminants before bringing them out of suspension. She didn’t want to see that pathetic, pleading stare or hear her favourite Darcy whine again.

  No one wants petulance at Pemberly. Pouting, yes (if it was the cool-sexy kind), but not whiny-disappointed stares and sulk-pouting.

  “Toshiko. Scan all Firth-Darcys.”

  The walls pulsed and hummed, sending wave after wave through the clones.

  Vi waited, her palm flat and ready for an incoming transmission.

  The results rolled in. All identical. Cysts on the brain. Toxoplasmosis. The Firths were goners.

  Albert was going to skin her alive. Then airlock her. Then have her name struck from all records. She was going to go down in history as an Unperson. So humiliating. And unjust. The disaster was not of her doing. She just happened to be the runner who was in charge of the clone-Darcy who’d been mauled. But she’d be made to pay the price. Someone always paid.

  It wasn’t fair.

  She’d left her clone alone for two minutes, max, while she availed herself of the ladies’. She’d returned to his cubby, next to the Green Room, to find his face in ribbons.

  F☆ was screeching at her assistant in the adjacent room. Something about her chicken not being cooked the way she’d ordered it. “I wanted the sauce on the SIDE,” she wailed. “Are they morons? Don’t they know how to follow instructions? This is my lucky chicken. I have it before every show. My beau and I share a plate. It’s tradition.” Her voice went up an entire octave. Then the plate hit the wall and shattered. “Hamilton doesn’t like the sauce…” On and on she went, complaining without end.

  F☆ was famous for her on-set tantrums. It was half the reason people tuned in to see her. Would she or wouldn’t she throw a wobbly? You never knew. She was a law unto herself. And the sad truth remained: Everyone secretly loves a train wreck. You might live in an underground bunker in a poisoned world with little-to-no-chance of a reprieve and nothing but the entertainment tubes to keep you company, but someone else had it worse than you. Someone rich and famous. Someone who should have been able to hold it together.

  Vi hated the cult of personality and all that went with it, but her livelihood was directly linked to all that longing and loneliness so, in a tangential way, her job for the day was to keep F☆ on track for the show.

  If she saw Darcy with a mauled face she’d lose it.

  Vi had grabbed a jar of Pretty Putty and slapped it on Mr. Darcy’s wounds. They waited. The ten seconds it took for the putty to dry stretched out like decades. She crossed her fingers and prayed. “Please let it hold. Let it hold. Let it hold. Please let the Pretty Putty make Colin Firth whole again.”

  The putty peeled away from the jagged edge of the wound and slid down Darcy’s face.

  Which was when she decided to lock him in the toilet and go for help.

  But Albert’s solution had turned out to be a non-solution. There were no fully-operational Darcy clones available.

  Vi slumped against the smartwall in the Firth clone bay, unable to move. They were going to have to cancel the show. The other Darcys—Lawrence Olivier, Matthew MacFayden, Sam Riley, and Matthew Rhys—were wrong on so many levels. Wrong body types, wrong voices, wrong lines.

  To say nothing of the fact that F☆’s fans were expecting Colin Firth.

  If Lawrence Olivier made an appearance, with all those plummy vowels and his “provincial young lady with a lively wit” lines, they’d riot.

  Matthew MacFadyen’s lines were barely any better. All that “I love, love, love you” nonsense in a regency drama. Not that he wasn’t easy on the eyes, but Vi—along with millions of her fellow Janeites—had selected Colin as her favorite Mr. Darcy and she wasn’t about to be cheated out of seeing him strut his stuff because of a damned cat.

  “Think, Vi. Think. How are you going to conjure a Firth-Darcy out of thin air?” She whacked herself upside the head. “THINK!”

  The light, but unmistakable pad of pussycat toe beans on metal told her the blasted creature who had her life in its hands—no, in its paws and claws and teeth and jaws—was inside the pipes overhead. She couldn’t let that furry bleeping bleep-bleep wander free a minute longer.

  She relinked a single neuron to the firm’s mainframe. “Schematics, Clone Deck,” she said. The floor’s schematics appeared in front of her. “Show heating and cooling.”

  The walls of her holograph fell away, leaving the duct work. Vi held the projected plans up to the ceiling to see if the model matched the hardware in the room. It didn’t.

  Basic Orientation had covered “Space Station Health and Safety” (what you could and couldn’t touch if you wanted to stay alive and in relative good health), but it hadn’t covered which pipes did what. She didn’t know what she was looking at or what to ask for.

  She snapped a retinal shot of the pipes. “Reverse image search,” she said.

  Her stomach dropped.

  The pipes led to the holy of holies; the grow room.

  The cat padded nonchalantly towards the doors.

  Vi swore a blue streak using all the forbidden words in her rather splendid vocabulary as she raced ahead of the cat. She screamed her instructions at the wall. It had ears. It was listening. “Toshiko, open all doors between here and the grow pods.” She was trackable. The computer knew who she was, where she was, and which doors to open.

  Vi flew past the Chemistry Lab, past Hardening, Molding, Makeup. Past Hair, Teeth, Nails, Costumes. People had their heads down. No one wanted to get involved with a woman who was running. Running wasn’t allowed. Only guilty
people ran.

  But run she did.

  As hard and fast as she could.

  The door to the pod room was closed. A huge sign hung over the door: RESTRICTED ENTRY. AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. Made sense. They couldn’t allow contaminants into the clone feed. But these were special circumstances. They had to let her in. There was a cat coming. A disease-ridden cat. It would infect all the clones if she didn’t stop it.

  No clones, no show.

  No show, no sponsors.

  No sponsors, no Space Station Watch This Space.

  Then it would be back to Earth where her parental units waited, certain she’d fail and gleeful when she did. That couldn’t be allowed to happen. She’d escaped Dismalville. She wasn’t going back.

  She waved her hand at the sensor in the ceiling. Nothing. “Manual override,” she barked. “Keypad, please.”

  No keypad appeared.

  Vi swung around, looking for an office or an administrator. There was a man in a grey jumpsuit at the end of the corridor. He was pushing a slop bucket ahead of him with his mop. Even in space, floors have to be washed.

  “Hey there,” she shouted. “Excuse me…do you have a key?”

  The cleaner looked up at her.

  A shiver ran down Vi’s spine, setting her arms on fire. The tingles didn’t stop when he spoke.

  “You havin’ a laugh?” He’d have hated it. The line came from a mock TV show (Where the Wind Blows) inside a TV show (Extras) about the second- and third-tier actors hoping to break into the big leagues. The point of the line was to ridicule easy, rote punch lines. That Ricky Gervais’ clone had ended his time as a janitor in space, spouting it without irony, stirred up a whole mess of grief inside Vi.

  But, sad as it was, she didn’t have time to grieve for Ricky Gervais’ legacy. The cat had infected her Darcy and was seemingly hellbent on infecting the rest. It had to be stopped.

  “I need to get into the pod room.” She pointed at the door. “The grow room. I have to gain access. There’s a cat coming...”

  “No cats allowed.” Ricky dropped his head and sniffed. If Vi hadn’t known better she would have thought the clone was weeping. “I want to see Ollie. Just one more time. He used to let me blow on his feet, like I was playing the bagpipes…”