Looking for the Mahdi

by N Lee Wood

  Gently, I pushed him back, rolling over to press him down against the tarp. “What else do you like?” I asked softly. “Do you like this?” I kissed him the way he had me, then along his chest.

  He reached for my shoulders, and I caught him by the wrists, holding his arms down by his head. “What are you doing?” he asked, bewildered.

  “I want to make love to you, Halton, the way you made love to me. Do you like this?” I slid further down, my mouth slowly exploring his perfect body. “Or this… ?”

  I kept his nano-amplified hands pinned by his side, nuzzling him with my lips and tongue until he was as randy as I was. “Now?” he said, voice hoarse, pleading. “Now, yes?”

  “Yesss…”

  I straddled him, my legs between his, and within moments I came, my body turning as rigid as a surfboard riding the orgasmic wave. Halton was looking up into my face. My coming turned him on, and he followed, his face going round and smooth. Eyes half shut in the rush of euphoria, he murmured, “Oh. Oh. Oh.” No contrived macho grunting and straining, and the look of utter bliss on his face quickened a second tingle curling up around the base of my spine ready to course through me…

  Yeah, a scientific example of feedback mechanism, only this was pure human, totally natural, the real thing.

  We lay exhausted and shaking, a trickle of sweat running down my nose to drip onto his neck. I kissed it, tasting salt. His dark hair curled plastered to his forehead, no longer perfect. I think I preferred it mussed up.

  “No one’s ever done that to me before,” he said softly once he’d caught his breath. “No one has ever made love to me.”

  I hadn’t thought so. I suspected the women Halton had known before, who had approached him for sex, were both pretty enough to be carelessly self-confident, and selfish enough to use a fabricant as a substitute for what they couldn’t get from a real man. At least that was my pet theory, which also fit in nicely with my other pet theory, which was ugly women were better fucks, because we have to try harder to be any competition at all.

  I didn’t bother expounding on my theories right at that moment.

  Cuddling together in the warmth of the madja’, we murmured unintelligibly for a while. He dozed off after a few minutes, curled up around me as if I were his favorite teddy bear.

  I couldn’t sleep, my mind going in circles, vague worries chasing their own tails in the growing dusk.

  FIFTEEN

  * * *

  Iwas surprised by how deeply Halton slept, as if the sex had shorted out his hyperawareness circuits. I watched him as he dreamed, his eyes moving behind the lids, his fingers curled around my forearm twitching now and then. It was close to evening when he sighed contentedly, and woke up. The temperature would cool off rapidly once the sun began dropping behind the edge of the mountains, but the waning heat was still comfortable.

  He smiled at me sleepily, a satiated, very human-looking smile. I stroked him gently, combing his tangled hair with my fingers until he yawned and stretched, then hitched himself on one elbow to look down at me. He kissed my bruised eye.

  “Well,” I teased him, “I guess you lied to me, then. You were a virgin after all.”

  His forehead wrinkled as he thought about that seriously. “I don’t think so, at least not by the common definition of virginity,” he said finally. “I think a better word would be ‘inexperienced.’”

  I laughed. “Jeez, Halton, sometimes I think you’re putting me on.”

  “I’m not,” he insisted. “I’m just new at this.”

  “Are you really only twelve years old?” I asked. “I could go to jail. There are laws against that, you know.”

  He leaned back, his eyes widened. “Are there really?” He still had trouble recognizing a joke.

  “No, I’m kidding,” I assured him. I had to stop teasing him.

  Wrapped in a comfortable post-coital glow, we talked. That, I also didn’t bother telling him, was a first for me. My average sex partner usually couldn’t wait to get his clothes and his rocks off, and afterwards couldn’t wait to get his clothes on and split.

  After a while, he said, “It is true, about my age. Fabricants are designed to have very short, intensive childhoods, and a much longer adult life span.” His face had that barren look again. “Although there aren’t many fabricants much older than I am.” I assumed there weren’t ever likely to be too many either, because none would be allowed to live long enough to grow old. I shivered as he gently held me in his arms.

  He needed to talk. His naked body entwined with mine, he was as physically close as we could possibly be, but his eyes were off somewhere else, a million miles away.

  Fabricants, he told me in the bland kind of voice a college professor lectures with, are neither robots nor clones. Each fabricant zygote is individually grown around a predetermined DNA “template,” human-phenotypic, but not genetically the same. Even his mitochondria were considerably different from anything human. He couldn’t get me pregnant; we’re not the same species. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that one.

  The nanomachine systems are added sequentially to the growing embryo at various stages of its development before the fetuses are implanted into surrogate “mother fabricants.” Originally, they had used chimpanzees before developing a more dependable pinheaded female fabricant with only the most basic of brain stems to keep it functioning. Its specially adapted limbless body is not much more than a large womb cradled by wide, deformed hip bones, allowing the fabricants a full fourteen months development before birth. With every stage of fetal development rigorously monitored and controlled, every hormone and biochemical measured and balanced, the ten resulting fabricant babies were more invariable than human identical twins.

  This was certainly strange pillow talk. Almost as weird as our dinner conversation, but I listened carefully, curled up in the crook of his arm.

  After their forced delivery, baby fabricants grow at an enormous pace, their education strenuous and rigidly narrow. At about five, they hit puberty, and the massive growth spurt begins to slow. By eight, fabricants are considered to be at their completed adult stage, and from the next few years on, their aging slows to a similar rate as their human counterparts.

  Halton had grown up in a small enclave inhabited only by his nine twin “brothers” and his teachers, CDI trainers. His knowledge of the outside world was limited to what the CDI trainers wanted him to know, directing his developing body and mind down the corridors of reinforced preset patterns they determined most useful. A fabricant’s first loyalty is to his CDI trainers. In spite of their communal upbringing, the ten little John Halton fabricants had no particular devotion toward each other, no “brotherly” bonds. They didn’t even have separate names.

  “Don’t you care at all about the others?” I asked. “What happens to them, at least?”

  He didn’t answer for a very long moment, and I twisted to look up at his face. That inhuman, bleak nothingness drifted through his eyes, before he blinked, as if coming back from the edge of a barren abyss, and smiled wanly at me. “Yes,” he said. “I care.”

  I didn’t press it, just let him talk about what he wanted.

  “I didn’t see my first stranger until I was four years old,” he said. Computed in doggie-years, that would have made it the equivalent of about eleven. “And I still think that it was an accident.” He smiled, and kissed my forehead, running his fingers through the stubble of my hair distractedly. “She was nice.”

  He was looking out the open doorway, watching the shadow of The Mothers as it crept across the desert flatlands toward us. “I mean that she was nice because she wanted to be, not because it was a calculated part of the conditioning methodology. She brought in books from the outside, the first different books I’d ever seen. She would read stories to us for fun instead of having us study them for tests.” He was quiet for a moment. “I believe she got into trouble for it. They transferred her after that, and I never saw her again.” His voice was sad.

&
nbsp; “What kind of books?” I asked quietly. I was beginning to get a hint of what made John Halton tick, understand him a little better. It scared me, and it made me want to cry.

  “Children’s adventure books, fairy tales, mostly. Nothing really subversive.” He shrugged. “Classics like Ivanhoe and Treasure Island. Peter Pan, that sort of thing. I’d never seen any fiction before, so it confused me at first, thinking these were real stories.” He was still staring out, looking back in his memory at the first true mother figure the John Haltons had ever known even briefly.

  Of course they hadn’t wanted her to treat the fabricants as real children, turn their affections away from Big Brother CDI to an actual human being. I could imagine him sitting on this faceless woman’s lap, wide-eyed at vast enchanting worlds opening up on the surface of a bookreader, combined with the potency of his first experience with kindness simply for kindness’s sake. It affected him deeply, an indelible impression left in his young, growing psyche.

  “After she left, my entire subgroup had to have tests done to see if the series should be terminated early for psychological contamination,” he said, the flat serenity in his voice not matching the horror of his words. “We were isolated individually, reassigned to new trainers, and subjected to extra tutoring in understanding the difference between fiction and fact. Then we were retested. Fabricants are expensive.” I almost heard irony in his voice. “The decision came down that we were still within the acceptable parameters.”

  I heard it, unspoken. “But?”

  He shrugged again, helpless. “But,” he said. And stopped. He took a deep, ragged breath, and I put my hand against his chest, feeling his heart beating more rapidly. “But… sometimes, I think… they might have been wrong.” He had to drag the words up, twisting out like little vicious snakes annoyed at being disturbed. He averted his eyes. “I’m scared,” he added softly.

  “Just because someone was nice to you when you were a kid, read you a couple of books?” I was incredulous. “That’s ridiculous! You don’t really believe that?”

  “I know,” he said quietly, “if I fail on this assignment, I’ll be terminated. I think, even if I don’t fail, after I return to Langley I won’t pass the post-examinations. I’m the third John Halton; the first two somehow failed. They had to be destroyed. I don’t know why or how, and I’m afraid if I don’t figure it out, I’m going to fail the same way.”

  He finally looked up at me. “But I suspect CDI has already made that decision. That’s why they’ve placed me with a non-company person. It’s not important to the assignment if I’m contaminated by you. I’m expected to perform a certain function, and after I’ve served my purpose, I’m expendable. I won’t be needed or useful again for anything else.”

  I sat straight up and stared back at him, horrified. “Jesus Christ, Halton, then don’t go back! Screw the CDI, run away or something. Why don’t you go to the ACLU, file a lawsuit and sue the goddamned Government for human rights abuse? GBN would get you a major-league lawyer, we could help you organize fabricants into fighting for their civil rights…”

  He was staring at me like I was the crazy one. “Kay Bee, I’m a fabricant. Fabricants aren’t human, they’re not people. Their whole purpose for existence is predetermined, they can’t function independently. That’s outside the designs the CDI molded them for.”

  “Us, Halton, us!” I was yelling at him, furious. I jumped up to pull my shirt up over my shoulders, the desert cooling rapidly in the twilight. “Why can’t you say it? Them, they— you’re always talking about other fabricants like they’re fucking Martians from outer space!” I was pacing in the confines of the tiny madja, like a caged neurotic tiger. “Didn’t the goddamned CDI plug any sense of family kinship into you at all?”

  Halton had sat up, bare legs curled under him, his hands in his lap. “No,” he said quietly. The expression on his face was so vulnerable, as open and exposed as a trusting child, I froze, unable to move. A stone-cold killer, a creature who had been intentionally conceived to be faster and stronger than any human being, Halton would obediently walk back and place his neck meekly on his creators’ chopping block.

  He’d been right, there would never be a fabricant rebellion. His makers had ensured themselves against that, and Halton knew it very well.

  I burst into tears, unable to stop myself.

  Instantly, he had his arms around me, holding me tightly. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he kept repeating in a small, frightened voice. I hugged him, trying to squeeze the trembling out.

  “Shut up, Halton,” I whispered. He did. “You didn’t do anything wrong. I should be saying ‘I’m sorry’, except it’s not my fault, either. Damned creeps should fry in hell.”

  We held on to each other, drowning souls clutching at straws to keep our heads above the sewage.

  “This sucks, Halton,” I said finally, my face against his chest. “I may be old and slow, but I’m not some stooge CDI can jerk around. I don’t like being used, and I don’t like using other people.” I sighed. “Too bad we can’t just pack it in and run off to someplace like the Moon, be pioneers in the asteroid mines or something.”

  He stiffened. I looked up inquiringly. His face had gotten that impassive dead look again. “If you want,” he said simply. “However, I believe if the motive is to find a secure refuge away from CDI, off-Earth would not be a viable choice.” He was reciting with about as much animation as a textbook. “CDI exerts far more control over off-Earth Stations and lunar colonies than on the planet itself. I would suggest searching for a sanctuary on Earth first.”

  “I wasn’t being serious, Halton,” I said. I pulled away from him, shivering in the sudden chill, and started dressing. “Even if I were, you couldn’t go with me anyway. You’re still a CDI fabricant, your first allegiance is to the Hill, hardwired in, right?”

  “Not exactly.” He started dressing as well. “I’d be useless as His Excellency’s bodyguard if my commitment to him could not be guaranteed, but intelligence implies a certain amount of autonomy of thought, what you could call ‘free will.’ Without it, fabricants would have no more flexibility than AI machines.” He buttoned his shirt, watching his hands. “What is hardwired in me is a strong need to belong to someone or something. I’m absolutely loyal to whatever or whomever I recognize as being my legal owner.”

  Finished with his shirt, he looked up at me. That strange, cold look flickered in the back of his eyes. Totally inhuman. “At the moment,” he said calmly, “you are still the legal owner of record.”

  The implications began sinking in. I suddenly felt sick. “If I say ‘Go,’ you’d go, just because I wanted it, is that right?”

  “Yes.”

  Bile stung the back of my throat, turning the inside of my mouth sour. “So, all this”—I waved a hand at the tarp on the sand-covered madja’ floor, two indentations still marking the depressions our bodies had made—“this was just because CDI programmed you with some weird sense of loyalty?” I could feel the outrage churning up into fury. “You wanted to fuck me only because I wanted it, and whatever I want, like a good little dog, you’ve got to give it to me? My obedient slave, is that it?” I was crying now in anger. “Is that all it was, you bastard?”

  He looked startled at the idea, and hesitated, deliberately analyzing the idea. “I don’t know,” he said finally, his voice low, troubled. “I don’t know.” He couldn’t even lie, the son of a bitch. Not even that.

  It was worse than all the perverts and the drunks who had used me as an easy lay, then tossed me aside. At least then I’d had no illusions about the desperate humiliation I’d allowed myself to wallow in time after time. The pride I’d had to swallow so many times along with bitter semen was nothing compared to the betrayal I felt now. It was worse than rejection.

  I’d let my guard down, again, and once again it was being rubbed in my face that it simply wasn’t possible for a man to feel for me anything like I felt for him. Even a goddamned fabricant could only get i
t up for me if something else were in control, some other need, some other degenerate perversion calling the shots.

  I was crying, hurt and furious, years of alienation turning me into a pillar of salt tears. I walked out into the violet gloom of desert twilight and lit a cigarette, drawing the smoke in to try and sear the pain out of my chest. All it did was ache.

  Halton came out, folded the tarp and placed it in the back of the sandjeep behind me. I didn’t turn around. I heard the sandjeep’s tires creak as he leaned against it, waiting silently. Stars were beginning to pop across the cobalt-dark sky. I lit another cigarette with the butt of the last and sent the stub arcing out with a flick of my fingers, red ashes glowing like a miniature missile. It splattered a tiny fire when it hit in the darkness, and faded away.

  Sand crunched under Halton’s feet as he finally walked up behind me. “Kay Bee…” he started.

  “Hey.” I turned and cut him off. I had my shoulders back and chin up, tears dried and a sneer plastered firmly on my face. “Let’s just forget about it, okay?” The tough little street kid was back. “I don’t need to hear it.”

  “I’d like you to listen to what I have to say.” He sounded angry.

  That surprised me. It got my attention, anyway. I looked at him narrowly, his face hidden in shadows. As I drew in another lungful of smoke, the red glow briefly illuminated the hard line of his jaw. “Okay,” I said, spiteful. “You have a captive audience.”

  “You said you kept forgetting I’m not real. That’s not true.” The meek, obedient Halton had vanished. This Halton was mad as hell. “What you keep forgetting is that I’m a fabricant. It’s no sin, and it’s no crime. I’m not ashamed of what I am. I have no more desire to be human than an elephant wants to be a hedgehog. I’m not a little wooden Pinocchio hoping my good fairy will turn me into a real human boy if I keep my heart pure and do kind deeds.”

  Ouch. He was getting good with the sarcasm.

  “I don’t have human rights, because I’m not human. I never will be.”