Venus replied, “I’m sure there’s a lot more where that came from.”
A woman asked, “How many types of clones do they have in there?”
Mack said, “I don’t know but everybody makes up near to a million.”
“A million clones?” Thorn gasped. “A million?”
“Give or take, “Mack said. “That’s what they wanted. Lots to study. Lots and lots. A super abundance. Otherwise what’s the point? You might as well just stay with the computer models and skip the trials, or else you’re stuck testing for the next millennium.”
Lady Hatchet said, “But isn’t there usually only one alpha at a time? Only one is out walking at any one time, of any one person, and the rest are all kept in water until it’s time for everybody to be iced, and then a whole new batch is started.”
“How do we get a live one even if there are more out walking around somewhere?” Venus asked. “How? The damn robber scientists have the labs, not us.”
Thorn said, “Then I’ll just go find one. Or take one out of a fishtank and dry him off and make him my new friend. A clone needs at least one clone friend.”
“No,” Mack warned him. “If you just go traipsing off behind the sets you can get yourself killed in a flash by a claw or an ice plug or security or whatever. I’ve been studying that problem for quite awhile now.”
“Nobody goes between the cities and lives to talk about it,” an old man warned them. “It’s all so booby trapped.”
Mack nodded. “I’ve tried and tried. It will kill you if you try too hard. A few decades ago I only got some equipment out of the zoo. But then that’s probably only because it’s a dumb zoo nobody goes to anymore. That’s been the only lab equipment of theirs I’ve been able to get my hands on.”
“Make it your first demand,” Thorn insisted. “Make them hand one of him over. I miss Chrysalis Joy and want him back!”
“A hostage for a hostage?” the old man questioned. “What’s the point?”
Thorn said, “The point is I want it. So tell them to give it to me.”
“No,” Mack said. “Then we’d be admitting that we can’t just grab one for ourselves. We would be admitting we haven’t overcome that security and then they’d know we were just bluffing about you going in and out at will.”
Venus asked Thorn, “You miss him that much?”
“All while I was in Subco Gibeah I think he was my only true friend.”
Lady Hatchet looked sour. “Oh phhh. This is a union issue. A damn hostage issue. I don’t think anybody here gives a damn about clone friends.”
Another added, “We’re a union, not a charity.”
An old man said, “Find a new friend.”
“Yeah. Live within your means like the rest of us have to.”
A woman said, “If he’s dead, he’s dead. We don’t get replacement friends so why should you? He’s gone. Deal with it. If you’re really sad, we have pills.”
Thorn wondered if he’d have to wait until he’d gone to heaven before he saw his friend. He remembered that there was a time back on Earth when one had to die first before one went to heaven—there was no other way. He shook his head in frustration. Thorn was now sure that he didn’t know how heaven worked anymore.
“Thorn. We are aware that you are missing from Subco Gibeah,” a tinny voice loudly boomed. Thorn looked around the room. Nobody else was disturbed, not seeming to hear anything.
“Did you hear that?” Thorn asked.
“Hear what?” Mack asked.
“This is your superior. If you are able to respond to this voice, if you are not injured, report to the elevator at the central ring and press 6-1-12. You will be helped in pillplace.”
“You all right?” Mack asked. “You’re spacing on us.”
“Didn’t you hear that?” Billy Boy asked, jumping up, looking at anyone for a clear explanation. “It was loud! My superior wants me to go to 6-1-12.”
“Oh my!” Venus gasped. “He hears the damn radio in his head again. They know he’s gone and they used his damn radio to try and call him back.”
“It’s horrible! It’s horrible!”
Lady Hatchet said, “Just ignore it. If I can ignore her, you can ignore that.”
“I can’t take this!” Thorn panicked. “Take it out! Out! I can’t just live with voices popping into my head like this! How can it happen?”
Venus tapped at her own noggin. “It’s grown in there, like I told you when we first met, like your damn gills were, to help while you spent all that time in water. People would naturally have certainly evolved gills and telepathy for real if staying underwater was their only natural environment.”
“I know that but I’m not used to hearing it just talk to me, not since then. And I don’t think I ever will get used to it! It’s just too weird and horrible! I once heard Chrysalis Joy say something to me inside my head during the funeral and it scared the piss out of me!”
Venus looked concerned. “Are you sure? Sometimes when we’re sad we imagine things. And maybe it was another clone of him. It’s very handy being able to get radio waves. We could talk to each other through walls if we all had that. It’s a shame nature didn’t evolve it on all of us. Damn.”
Lady Hatchet said, “Nature doesn’t bother with senses we don’t absolutely need.”
Mack explained, “There’s about three or four ways to try to do memory transfer from brain to brain, and radio waves are but one. You’re from that type of batch.”
Thorn let out a deep frustrated sigh. “It will drive me nuts! You all don’t understand. You all don’t have the damn thing screaming at you from right inside your skull!”
“But its no big damn deal.” Venus kindly patted his arm. “Really. It’s natural… for you. It’s all there latent, anyway.”
“Did a radio crystal just grow in my ears?”
Venus nodded. “It grew right in there, yes.”
Lady Hatchet said to Mack, “But they know he’s damn missing. What can they do?” She looked around the vast area, growing paranoid. “They will want to kill him.”
Mack hushed her with his hand. “They’re just sending out general frequencies. And they just told him how to get back to them. They’ve decided that he has to be destroyed, we all know it.”
Thorn said, “They seem like they don’t know where I am.”
Venus added, “They want you to walk into their death trap.”
“I think I’m going to be sick.” Thorn put his head in his hands.
Lady Hatchet slapped at his arm. “Phhh! Stop that. You can take it.”
“No, Lady Hatchet. I can’t! This is all too horrible!”
“Oh phhh! If you weren’t a clone you wouldn’t be here to be damn sick about anything. You’d be an old dead criminal. So be happy you can get sick. I wish I could say that in a hundred years from now. I hope I have your damn problem. I hope I’m a firm spunky twenty year old in a hundred years. I hope I’m just sick about it because I’m so spoiled like you are. Dammit.”
“I think these radio messages are going to drive me nuts. The message is stuck. It repeats. It won’t shut up!”
“Put this around your neck.” Mack handed him a thin silver necklace with a capsule on it. “Squeeze the ends twice when you want to jam the signal with lots of noisy noise. White noise.”
Thorn asked, “But why would I want to listen to that?”
“After a few hours your brain will get sick of the white noise, realizing it isn’t information. So it’ll tune it all out. Like your ears tuning out the endless sloshing sound of the pounding of your heart.”
“Are you sure?” Thorn looked at it oddly.
“Can you hear your own heart?”
“No.”
“I told you so.”
Venus nodded. “Take it. It’s better than listening to voices all day trying to get you to step into a death trap.”
He put it on. There was a low rumble and then the room started to vibrate. He looked at his neckla
ce oddly. “What’s that?”
“What’s what?” Mack asked.
Thorn asked, “Can you all hear that?”
They looked about, then in alarm, and then all nodded a resounding yes.
“Listen. Is it an earthquake?” Venus marveled. “Here?”
“An earthquake!” Mack gasped. “Asteroids don’t do that!”
Lady Hatchet grabbed onto the table for balance while looking about at all the things in the cafeteria gallery that were starting to wobble and then topple over. There were sounds that resembled gunfire.
As if from an explosion, a sharp icy wind that was filled with swirling snow broke through a wall, shattering it. “What’s that?” a man asked. He stood. His head lopped off.
They screamed and fell to the floor as broken glass flew through the air. The light cloth gazebos blew towards the ceiling and collected in the airshaft near the top of the opposite wall. The ceiling started to undulate violently, the layers of decorative clear pyramids crackled loudly, while all the imbedded chandelier lights bobbed and flashed in unison.
“Are you still alive?” Lady Hatchet yelled, sliding forward on her belly.
“Yes, dammit!” Venus screamed. Just when the layers of the entire ceiling threatened to pull as far as it could from the walls, to break entirely loose, the wind abruptly ceased. Pink leaves rained down on them.
Thorn jumped up. “What was that?”
Lady Hatchet crawled backwards away from the headless body. “Oh damn! Oh no!”
Venus sat up and spotted the body. She pulled out her pen and sobbed into it. “Mortibots. We need a Mortibot. Jamison Johns is dead and he needs morticare. He was decapitated by flying debris.” She spotted his face stuck near the top of a pillar. The back of his head was gone. “It’s horrible!” She gasped. “It’s just horrible!”
“Anyone else dead?” Thorn asked.
An old man said, “I don’t know yet.” Thorn went to him and helped him up.
“Oh gross, I smell rotten eggs!” Mack moaned as he crawled out from under the overturned rostrum. “Somewhere the asteroid broke open.”
“Oh damn. I’m gonna puke,” Lady Hatchet gagged, putting her hand over her mouth. She turned to Thorn and said to him, “Be glad you can’t smell!”
“Were they trying to kill us?” Mack asked. He finally saw the dead body and then hugged Venus. “Oh, no, they’re trying to kill us all.”
“No, wait!” Thorn said. His necklace had ripped off and he was hearing the voices again.
“Sabotage,” a tinny voice said. “The miners have been blasted into space. All lost.”
“Could it have been an accident?” Another tinny voice in his head asked.
“No. Sabotage is certain.”
“Who?” the other voice asked. “The union? We have to destroy them before they destroy us.”
“No. They are all accounted for, the old guard and the rebels. It was the grad schoolers, certainly. Now most of the miners are now dead. They were just sucked into space.”
“There are union rebels?” Thorn asked Mack. “Did you know that?”
Mack looked even more panicky. “How do you know? Who are rebels in our crowd?”
“In my head… voices are now assessing the incident, right now in my head, and they dismissed the union rebels for causing this explosion, and they’re blaming the grad schoolers. But miners were killed. Who are all these people?”
“Who?” Mack asked. “Rebels? Who are these damn fools? I never heard of them!”
Venus said, “Those damn idiots protesting Madam Wintermirror’s funeral, I bet. They’re now branded as rebels. Damn them. Those little shits! Makes me so damn mad I could swear!”
“Who’s leading them to dissent?” Mack wondered aloud. “The union has always spoken with one voice. That’s its only strength, as piddly as that is.”
“The grad schoolers are trying to kill us!” Lady Hatchet said. “I knew something like this would happen to us someday!”
“How?” Venus asked. “Why?”
Thorn related to them, “The miners have all been sucked out of the rock into outer space. That’s what the voice in my head was talking about. Who are miners? Why would the grad schoolers want to kill them? How many groups are up here in this place?”
“The miners are clones, kinda just like you,” Mack said. “The grad schoolers have their own scientific agenda and they want to clone differently. They have different ideas on how to transfer consciousness from brain to brain. They may be ridding the rock of all the old work to prepare for their own. Or maybe they just had an accident.”
Venus wiped her tears. “The grad schoolers are insane psychopaths! Look at what they’ve done! They won’t be happy until we’re all dead and the damn stinking rock is all their own.” She looked at Lady Hatchet. “Are you okay, dear?”
“Yes, don’t worry. My ears are still ringing and I just want to go to bed and get away from this damn smell of sulfur and the sight of such a horrible nasty death.”
Venus sniffed. “The smell is clearing from the air. The rock is already resealed.”
Thorn also sniffed, in vain, pretentiously, and jealously. He could tell that the air was warming. “It’s all under control?” He felt a drop of condensation drip on his head from the ceiling. He rubbed it into his new short crop of black hair.
Mack frowned. “Rebels in our own union, splitting the union! Shocking! I’m upset.”
A mortibot entered through a dumbwaiter and zipped up to them. Venus pointed out the headless body and then pointed out the man’s face that had been stuck to the pillar but had fallen to the floor. The mortibot said to them, “I am sorry for your loss.”
“Thank you,” Mack told it. “It just makes us sick.”
Thorn grabbed his own head. “I hear the news! They are reporting this disaster on the news on the public radio! They’re reporting a union worker dead! Decapitated!”
Mack gave the mortibot a dirty look. “We now have a spy in our midst. Let’s get out of here. Anyway, some of the union rebels are probably on their way, to see. If they only find the one dead union member here with the mortibot then they won’t think too much of it. They won’t suspect there was a secret meeting here without them. But if they should see us all standing here already they might get mighty suspicious. That’ll look very bad for me!” He turned to Thorn to say, “Let’s go rock climbing! Now!”
“Now?” Venus gasped. “You want to go play at a time like this? What if another damn hole blasts open in the rock again? It’s easy to get killed around here. Too easy! We’ve just had tragedy enough. So don’t go asking for more!”
“Everybody in the whole union knows that that’s where I always go when I’m upset and I need to get away. And since I always broach myself down when I’m out there I’ll be so much safer rock climbing than sitting in a cafeteria.” He regarded the rubble and shivered from a foreboding thought that far worse damage could happen to Gaol.
“I just want to go to bed,” Thorn said. “My head hurts. Where are the dorms out here?”
Lady Hatchet shook her head. “We don’t have dorms here.”
“But I really do want to rest. My head feels full of mud.”
Lady Hatchet asked, “Are the radio voices ruining your brain?”
“No, I don’t hear a single thing right now. Silence. Marvelous silence.”
Venus said to Mack, “Maybe they changed frequencies to try and stay private.”
Mack took Venus’ arm. “You find him an apartment. I’ll just take a walk down the mall, then, and see if there were any other parts where the city blew apart on this end. I gotta think. I’m really rattled. Poor Jamison Johns. He was a good man.”
Venus nodded. “Yes, we all need some time alone now to think about what just happened.”
They stepped over a fallen tree in front of the door and walked to the concourse outside the food court. It was dotted with waiting cars. Lady Hatchet kept her face away from them all so that they couldn
’t see that she’d started to cry, as she said, “I’m going home. Venus, will you find the clone a bed? You’re so much more patient than I am so it would be better if you did it.”
“Will you be okay?”
Lady Hatchet nodded despairingly.
Venus asked, “Where do I find a clone bed?”
Lady Hatchet finally turned and loudly slapped her hands to her sides in exasperation. “Any damn bed, what is your problem!”
Venus smiled nervously. “But it’s highly illegal for a clone to actually live in the worker’s city.”
“Lady Wintermirror is dead, Jamison Johns is dead, the rebels hate us anyway and I really don’t think Mack gives a damn about something like that anymore!”
Venus nodded. “Sure. I’ll just find him someplace nice out of the way where nobody will be antagonized.”
“Yes.”
“You know how there’s always somebody to take everything wrong.”
“Thank you!” Lady Hatchet nodded tightly as she hurried away to a car.
Thorn tried to act brave although he felt he was about to be delivered to hell. He was going to go off to live alone somewhere with just his wild thoughts of every other uncertain memory of his abysmal life.
* *
The three climbed in two separate cars and zipped off. Venus said to Thorn, “We’ll take you someplace far. Don’t worry. You won’t get lost. The cars always know the way.” The car turned onto an empty thoroughfare.
“Far? Why far?” he asked. “Then why go so far?”
“It’s not a bad thing. Don’t be so nervous. It’s nice to travel a ways to get anywhere. It helps the world not feel so small. It helps kill some time between this and that.” She regarded the cobweb-covered branches bordering the road. “It’s a shame the plants are all dead on this side of town. But it’s still something to look at as you go along. We’ll go to where there’s some life. That’ll cheer you up. I hope you like having an apartment. You aren’t used to privacy.”
“Privacy? What’s that?”
“It’s privacy.”
“What’s that?” he asked. “A political thing?”
Venus rubbed her lips. “No. Well, maybe, perhaps. Yes. Yeah it is.”
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