Multitude

by Swanson, Peter Joseph

  Thorn asked Mack, “What is a union, really, and why do you have it?”

  Venus said, “It’s a lot of meetings, with treats.”

  “Law!” Madam Wintermirror gave Venus a scolding expression. “The union was supposed to keep a big fat firewall between us and the robber scientists so that we would not be made into criminals, ourselves.” She took a deep breath. “We don’t want future people to judge us as horrible as history is going to judge them. We’ve all been a part of killing millions of clones for the study. This one clone threatens all our laws of innocence. If we say he’s real then what kind of murderers have we all been all this time?” She looked dizzy.

  “Please breathe,” her care attendant urged her.

  “There is no damn law.” Venus laughed.

  Lady Hatchet nodded. “We have a hostage and nothing more. Treat him as a live clone hostage and we’ll be fine in messing with the robber scientists just the way we decide to. We hate them. Let’s just keep our plan simple—whatever plan we come up with.”

  “Yeah,” Mack frowned. “What plan.”

  Lady Hatchet said, “We should be thinking about our demands. That’s the damn hard part. We don’t usually have anything to bargain with in life and so we usually always give up. So what are the SOPs?” She grinned smugly.

  Madam Wintermirror asked, “What’s SOPs?”

  Lady Hatchet looked brash. “Standard operating procedures.”

  Madam Wintermirror blinked at her. “Oh. Those. What does that have to do with anything? Remember when they said they’d replace all our jobs with damn robots? As if we’d all just go away like that and go back to Earth without new bodies. As if we came all this way into damn space and worked for them for so long for nothing. As if we’d all just go away and say thank you.”

  “Do you think this clone can force our position on getting the older members some new bodies?” Mack asked, looking at them all dubiously. “There’s so much talk of the clones being imperfect and yet all you really want is to become clones, yourselves, eh?”

  Madam Wintermirror said, “But we won’t be super bodies like that. That would ruin everything. I’ll just be a new me from the same mold, without improvements, so it’s just me. I want to be me at sixteen again! And I’ll be a real clone, a legal one. Not a dime a dozen lab clone like that.”

  Thorn said, “I really am just a man.”

  Venus gave him a sympathetic smile.

  “Don’t smile at him like that,” Madam Wintermirror ordered Venus.

  “I’ve an idea.” Lady Hatchet suggested, “Just use the hostage to threaten them. Threaten to return him to Subco Gibeah to contaminate the whole study. Let him run around where he can talk to everybody in there and he can do some real mental damage on them all. Give them all some wild thoughts they never had before until they are ruined clowns. We have to think big, here. If everybody is always going to think we’re crazy then we might as well think big while we’re at it and make the most of it! Make everybody crazy!”

  Venus asked Madam Wintermirror, “Are you okay? You look as pale as a clone cracker.”

  “I’m fine, and that plan won’t work that easy,” Madam Wintermirror said. “They just flush the whole thing when it gets out of bounds. They’ve flushed the clone city before. They only lose four years doing it.”

  Thorn asked, “Flush it?”

  Madam Wintermirror nodded. “They just send everybody up the elevator all at the same time and start over. So they lose four years, they can take that kind of loss from time to time.”

  Thorn gasped. “That’s horrible!”

  Madam Wintermirror put her trembling finger in the air and spoke very quietly. “I know how we’ll start our little total clone war. It’ll get them, good. It’s classic. Leave it to somebody as old as me to know how war is to be started. Of course once you start a war, it’s all on its own. A war can never be controlled. But what do we have to lose?” She burped and it looked painful. She stood up and burped again. Her face went blue. “I can see the future is going to be very interesting. But then, I… am… very...”

  Venus nodded. “Yes, tell us.”

  Mack asked, “Are you okay?”

  “…very… I remember…”

  Her attendant said, “Maybe you should take a nap.”

  Her voice became childlike. “I remember when I was a little girl. I was at the tree fort.”

  Venus asked, “But what were you saying about this war?”

  Madam Wintermirror stood and looked off at nothing, smiling. “The tree fort. Those were my happiest days. Bret was there and boys were so nice back then. Well… Bret ended up gay, anyway. Those days… in the woods… I bet Bret looks very different today… I wonder if Bret is even still alive…”

  Venus repeated, “Tell us about the new clone war!”

  Her attendant glanced at everyone in worry and then repeated to her, “Maybe you should take a nap. Maybe you should take a deep breath!”

  Lady Hatchet scolded, “Sit down before you fall down. You look terrible!”

  She turned bluer and started to say something else, smiling bigger, but then fell on her face as indelicately as a bag of rocks.

  “Madam Wintermirror!” They all screamed, horrified, reaching for her. As they pulled her up, her nose was crushed flat but no blood was dripping out.

  “She’s dead!” Mack gasped. “Hurry to the hospital to pull her back.”

  “No.” Her attendant inspected her veins. “She’s dead dead.”

  “What?”

  “She’s really dead.”

  “Damn!”

  “What’ll we do?” Venus cried. “How can we save her mind, now? We can’t clone her mind, not the her that’s her, we don’t have her damn mind anywhere now!”

  Lady Hatchet tried to say something pious for the occasion but after her mouth merely flapped a few times she sat back down, put her head to the side, and wept.

  Thorn asked, “What? Didn’t you record her mind?”

  “We don’t have access,” Mack said, gently picking her up and laying her out on the couch. “We don’t have the computer space for everybody, ourselves, and the lab won’t share theirs, of course. It’s all used up for you test clones and the robber scientists’ minds. No room for ours.”

  Thorn asked, “What about all the empty cars around here?”

  Mack shrugged. “What about them?”

  “Can’t you cannibalize them? Use their minds? Dub your minds over onto them and then have recordings of you all, that way? Then you can do it yourself. Why wait for favors from the robber scientists. Do it all yourself!”

  “Is that possible?” Venus asked, through tears, gently taking off Madam Wintermirror’s shoes, as if to make her comfortable. “Their brains are too small but could they be linked together?”

  Mack shrugged. “I wonder how many cars it would take to make a copy of one human mind?”

  “It’s far too late for this firstborn, here,” Thorn said of the corpse of Madam Wintermirror. “But why not try to rig something up like that for yourselves. Take the minds from all those cars and figure out how to erase them and use that space for yourselves. Combine them until you have enough for one human mind and dub away. Make your own lab. Who needs the robber scientists for anything? Do it yourself!”

  “I’m not sure we know how,” Venus admitted. “Our union jobs have kept us pretty here and there. What’s the word for that? Compartmentalized.”

  Mack sadly nodded. “I think our bosses did that to us on purpose to keep us from having too much power, individually.”

  “Damn them.” Lady Hatchet shook her head angrily.

  “We can work together, then, and put together what we know,” Mack said. “We’ll have to start to see if we can add our smarts together like a jigsaw puzzle and rebuild this place from the bottom up.”

  “What about Madam Wintermirror?” Lady Hatchet moaned.

  Venus dabbed at her own tears. “She’s damn dead! Dead dead. No more electrici
ty. No backup.” She rubbed Madam Wintermirror’s hand. “It’s already stone cold.”

  Lady Hatchet took the cold hand. “Then the union people will want to statueize her, if she’s really so dead.”

  “She wouldn’t have wanted that at all,” her attendant insisted. “She told me she wanted to go to the cemetery.”

  “What?” Lady Hatchet gasped, putting the dead hand down. She back away. “Phhh! Not a cemetery! How awful! What a dishonorable grave.” She whispered, “What will people say?”

  Venus argued, “I thought she thought she’d become immortal. That’s so damn hypocritical of her for her to say something like that.”

  “The cemetery is defeat.” Lady Hatchet frowned. “Dishonorable defeat. A very sad grave!”

  Mack nodded in agreement. “The union won’t allow it. We have to have standards. She becomes a statue.”

  Her personal care attendant explained, “She had a sneaking suspicion her time might run out. She spent a lot of time with her family at the hippisticks. She was them more than you realize.”

  Venus wiped her cheeks. “I did see her there a damn lot. I thought she was just trying to convert them or something. But then one day I saw her swimming with them and then I knew they had become one in the ocean of space. Or one in that crappy little lake of new life forms… whatever.” She chuckled and wiped fresh tears at her eyes.

  “No. She was a hypocrite and proud of it,” her attendant insisted. “She wanted both.”

  Venus sobbed. “Yes. A hypocrite, the poor thing. But she didn’t get both. She only got one. Death. The eternal dreamless sleep in all eternal darkest blackness of nothing! Dammit!”

  Thorn suggested, “Maybe she went to heaven—the old fashioned way.”

  Venus glared at him.

  Thorn insisted, “She was smiling like she saw heaven! I just know that’s what she saw. Did you all see her smile before she died? She saw heaven!”

  Venus rolled her eyes. “If that happened then how are we going to know anything about it?”

  Thorn insisted, “Because the story of old says so. And I just saw it in her smile! I just saw heaven in her eyes!” He folded his hands in prayer.

  Lady Hatchet sniffed back her tears. “And we’re gonna live forever like this, here. Yeah, right. Me and my unicorns.”

  Venus took out her pen and spoke into it. “Mortibots. We need a Mortibot. Madam Wintermirror is dead and she needs morticare. It seems she died of old age. Old age.” She sobbed. “Old age. Old age.”

  Thorn looked at the door. He wondered if all these people were just a crazy waste of his time and if he shouldn’t run out and try to find the heaven at the end of the elevator all on his own. This certainly wasn’t heaven, and if he was ever going to find it he would have to leave them all behind, to their own crazy secular mundane problems. “I have to leave the world behind.”

  Mack grabbed his arm. “Come with me.”

  Thorn asked, “To heaven?”

  Mack nodded. “I think of it that way! So… yes!”

  Away from the city, broached up against the side of a steep black cliff, with discreet clear gas masks on their faces, Thorn and Mack climbed up a long cavity inside the asteroid.

  “See over there?” Mack pointed into the impenetrably dark distance. “It’s all ice. It’s fun. It’s good to get far away into the wild for a little while when really bad things happen and you want to get away from the women.”

  “This is your heaven?”

  Mack nodded. “Heaven is getting away from it all, where you want to go. God is everything wild, right?”

  “Really?”

  “The city is human made. What is wild is before that—what humans haven’t changed. Right? Look at the beauty of nature!”

  Thorn looked around. “Can’t really see a thing.”

  “The ice is over there. And this cave is very schizophrenic. Over that way, around the corner so you can’t see it from here, is the back of a furnace. So it’s only wild for so far. Under the furnace is a chain of ponds that goes for a few acres. The ugliest fish are there that I’ve ever seen. They are some failed class project I bet from the grad schoolers. I’ve noticed that the fish have been disappearing, though.” Mack rested at a narrow ledge to catch his breath.

  “Maybe the grad schoolers are eating them.”

  “They’re all skank, they taste like clone notzles after missing a bath for a week. You’d probably eat them if you had salt, since your tongue is about as good for taste as my foot is for flying.”

  “Sure.” Thorn gave a nod, feeling dumb. After Mack caught his breath, they climbed up higher. “Why is there a furnace? I thought there were solar panels?”

  Mack explained, “Most the heat comes from solar panels outside. But they could break off. There’s back up systems all over the place. There’s a few small furnaces scattered along the place. We’re about as big as Britain.”

  “That’s what Venus told me.”

  Mack scoffed. “She don’t know a thing she can’t see in pictures. Her friend, Lady Hatchet is far worse. She’s all fake.”

  “She’s what? A robot?”

  Mack said, “No, no, but still a fake. She acts like she was a princes or something. She really came from the dregs. Don’t let her fool you and put you down. That name of hers is fake. Lady Hatchet, I bet.”

  “What was it?”

  “Tractor Oil or something pathetic like that, I can’t remember.”

  “Why a name so bad?” Thorn asked.

  “Earth got in the habit of rude names. Inhuman names. It all got too inhuman in too many things. The only nice names were the corporate labels on everything there was to buy and it was the people that became like objects. Most the religions just said you didn’t count, weren’t even real, until you died. Starving yourself was the best way to do it. Earth God likes suffering. There was a reason some wanted to get away from Earth.” He got to the top of where they were climbing. “We’re here. This is the very top, the top ledge I was telling you about.” They pulled themselves up over a broad shelf and sat side-by-side. They faced a dark distant wall on the other side of the lofty cave. Mack breathed loudly. Thorn’s blood pressure hadn’t even risen.

  “You all right?” Thorn asked.

  “Fine,” Mack assured him. “It’s good for me.”

  “Let’s have you rest here awhile.”

  “Ah, wilderness. Ah, paradise. This is where I do all my real thinking.” Mack exhaled happily. “It gets me away and I can really hear myself. Hear myself!” he shouted, making a chain of echoes.

  “Think about what? The union?”

  Mack said, “I try not to think about work. I’m worn up to my original eyeballs in that with everybody disagreeing on everything. And then they blame me that they can’t agree.”

  “And now Madam Wintermirror gone,” Thorn added. “Now you’re the labor boss. You get to lead the war. You’re the king!”

  Mack frowned. “I’d like to climb somewhere out of here and forget all that. I’d like to climb and think about Earth out in nature away from religion and war. I’d like to pretend I’m on a mountain there. I should put a big screen up over there on that wall over there so I can have a view of an Earth valley or something kitschy like that. I’ve never been there. But I studied all about it in school here. I know you have, in a past life. You saw it all firsthand in the old days.”

  “They say an earthquake spread a lot of pollution. I wonder when that’ll settle.”

  Mack said, “Radiation takes even longer than a clone can keep tract of. I still want to go back to Earth. They have potassium iodine pills for the radiation where it isn’t too bad. South America is where all the action is now. They say there’s always the most ferocious storms there now and it’s all very dangerous and exciting—there’s always tornados. The shorelines are all different. Florida is mostly gone. Of course the city of Venice is all gone. Things change.”

  “Are you ever going to go to Earth?”

  Mack th
ought a spell. “Maybe after I’m not the boss anymore. I don’t know.”

  Thorn asked, “Don’t you want to be cloned?”

  “Do I want to live forever? Sure. I don’t know what I would do forever. I get bored a lot these days as it is and I ain’t that old.”

  “Old people get bored?”

  Mack nodded. “The old people around here got ripped off. They came to this rock to be clones and the robber scientists haven’t delivered, yet. They claim the brain dubbing isn’t perfect and it’s gotta be perfect if you’re going to clone as you. I’ve a better chance. I’m younger so I have so much more time until they get it right.”

  “I’m imperfect?” Billy Boy Thorn asked.

  “All the way. Your memories are dubbed imperfectly and your body has been changed to enhance everything about it. Body changes change the mind. We live in our body.”

  Thorn asked, “What if the robber scientists have no intention of ever cloning any of the workers? What if a perfect clone is impossible?”

  “Then we’ll have to decide what is perfect enough and fight for access to it. Do 100% of our memories make up who we are or can we still be ourselves at 60%? How can we figure out how much you have in your head that’s correct? And why did they improve your body so much if that contaminates the chance of you really being you? Is the experiments really what they say they’re all about? What does it feel like to be a clone? You don’t mind my asking? What does your new body feel like?”

  Thorn shrugged. “Powerful. My human appetites are accelerated. My mind is confused. Memories now shoot at me like from a gun and sometimes I feel like they’re going to kill me.”

  “That bad?”

  “It feels like memory could give me a jolt so bad I’d have a heart attack or something fatal.”

  “Everybody has bad memories of bad things. I remember when I was little and I puked a whole pile of cake and ice cream on Madam Wintermirror’s lap during my birthday party. I was eight. It was so horrible she never once brought it up to torment me, which was so unlike her. She’s dead but I’m still mortified about that. I’ve never even talked about it before. She’s so dead she can’t shame me anymore and it still feels creepy to mention it. I can’t believe I puked on her! You’re the first person I’ve told. This is the first time I ever said something so horrible out loud.”