“What is it? What is privacy? Like… being alone? I haven’t had much of that but I’ve been told it’s good for wild thoughts. I mean, thinking.”
Venus said, “Being private might be disquieting for you at first.”
“Why be private? What’s the point?”
She shrugged. “Some people have just found that they prefer it, especially after childhood is all over with and the body changes and they don’t like their body and they don’t want anybody else to see it anymore.”
Thorn admitted, “I don’t know if I’ll like being private.”
The car turned into a park of ten foot ficus benjamina. Most were still alive. Venus jolted with an idea. “I know! I’ve an image program of lots of people walking around that you can call up. They aren’t really there. They’re just recorded. They’re holograms. But you can pretend.”
He asked, “Why would you have something like that around?”
“They were a backdrop for an act I did back when. I used to be quite a corker, in the day, and the crowd loved me. I was an outrageous chanteuse. But then the years went by and I just got tired and too old to talk to anybody, much, let alone to want to keep doing my cabaret acts.”
“It’s just people walking around?”
Venus nodded. “It isn’t like you really ever really want to talk to anybody in a damn crowd anyway. So if you don’t pay the people much attention you won’t notice any difference or care, anyway.”
“They won’t respond?”
“They weren’t programmed to respond. They just walk around and crowd up the place. And they’ll ignore you since they aren’t real. When you learn how, you can later call up movies on anybody, for real, real people, and watch them. Everything is recorded up here in the city cave and if you know how, you can watch it back. But this will be good enough for now.”
“I can watch anybody? I can watch Eleven Jane? How do I watch her? I want to see her!”
“I’ll tell you another day. I’m dead tired and this’ll be good enough for now.”
Thorn smiled at Venus like a conspirator. “What a wonderful way to try privacy.”
“I don’t do cabaret shows at the gallery, anymore. I ran out of new ideas and everybody lost interest. It’s hard to always be interesting year after year and to not just repeat yourself. When I stopped getting the courtesy of an introduction, I quit, and nobody noticed anyway. The last time I was on that stage I walked out nude, painted like a zebra, and nobody even looked at me. They were all talking. I called it my zebra song for my swan song.” She chuckled sadly.
He nodded to please her but had no idea what she was talking about. The car stopped. “Here?” he asked, nervous. He looked up at the gray Bauhaus building.
“Get out.”
He did. “Here?”
“It’s as good as any. There’s a nice courtyard in the back if you want to throw a party someday, with real people, although it seems the days of fun and games are over. Bye bye. Hope it’s clean. If it’s not you can call up a few wipe spiders if they haven’t just all blown out into outer space.”
“Are you angry with me?” he asked.
“Why would you say that? Of course not.”
“You seem upset with me.”
“No. I’m upset about what happened in the cafeteria.” She rubbed her eyes. “Gotta go and take a nap, too. All of our nerves have just been stretched. I have to have a good cry. A man died. I didn’t know him very well but it could have been me. We all almost all died. The union now has rebels. I think I’m going to be depressed. I think my ears are still ringing. I need to go to bed.”
“But…”
“Buh-bye!” Venus waved him off and the car sped away.
He slowly opened the door, having no idea what to expect. “A room? An empty room!” He warily put his head into the room. It didn’t bite. He stood at the door and looked around, breathing deeply, waiting for the terror of privacy to assault him. When he decided nothing could happen, he took off his clothes and looked around in the rooms, throwing open closet doors to yell into them, and nobody was there to attack. Then he remembered that that was the whole point. “Nobody.” He walked over to a window at the far wall to look at the back courtyard. “Hello!” Nothing out there moved. He shivered.
He went to a bathroom mirror and gazed at his hairy head. He was especially intrigued at how he now had eyebrows framing his eyes making them so much more dramatic. He considered his head from all angles. It disquieted him. He now seemed like a different person. “New person,” he said, touching his lips and nose. “Clone.” After taking a shower he looked at his hair again in the mirror, amazed again at how much it had changed his entire appearance. He shaved just his beard.
Thorn went to the main room that was void of any furnishings except a few chairs, a table and several empty paper boxes. He sat on the floor against the wall and started to feel crushingly alone. He jumped up and noisily squashed the boxes and then called up Venus’s hologram crowd. He watched them walk around for a while, trying to pretend he was safe in the streets of Subco Gibeah. “Wild thought!” he yelled at a man with no shirt. “You were thinking of your mother! You wanted to eat something with olive oil! It isn’t here! And you’re not going to perfect bliss in Elysium Grounds! Pillplace!” he yelled at another. “You haven’t used your body rights in seven hours! Another minute more and your poncho will pop! Wild thought!” he yelled at a woman in a mini-dress patterned in cartoon bugs. It reminded him of Eleven Jane. He tried to look up her skirt. “You’re not invented. You’re not a clone! You can’t go to perfect bliss in Elysium Grounds! It was made for clones, the real men! Men!” He lay on his back for a while, watching everybody walking around. Although he was where he looked like he would be stepped on, they all ignored him and sometimes moved right through him. When that ignorant fantasy lost its appeal, Thorn jumped up and dimmed the lights.
He found the bedroom and nodded off. In his dream his thirty-foot father stomped up to him. “Thorny Boy, I’m furious with you! You’re nothing! You’re nobody! You’re a failure! You’re lost opportunities and wasted chances! God will shun you! You have no soul! You’re like a farm animal raised only for a barn! You’ll be dropped into a chute and made into food like a farm animal! You’ll have no grave! You didn’t exist! You’ll just be packages in the vending machine.”
“You don’t even know me,” Thorn sadly said in return.
Eleven Jane danced up to him as he floated in water. They looked at each other through the glass. She was somehow only wearing a macramé plant hanger. He felt as though his heart was going through a meat grinder. He was so in love with how she moved. She flipped her long ruby hair behind her shoulders as she rocked her hips. She smiled at him. He reached out to touch her chest but his hand went through her as if she was only a hologram.
He woke up feeling confused and sad. The phantom sight of Eleven Jane was still before him. After the memory of his dreams faded, he got up and looked for a robe. While his head was in the bathroom closet, he heard voices. Puzzled, he realized they were coming from outside his bathroom window, from the courtyard in the back. He made out some of what they were saying.
“The union has become irrelevant.”
“Times have changed. The union hasn’t.”
“We need something new to get us through this.”
“The spirit left with Madam Wintermirror.”
“The way they treated her mortal remains was an outrage. She was a hero, not ashes to ashes and damn rust.”
“They gave her such a dishonorable grave; you can’t tell me she would have wanted that for herself!”
Thorn peeked out the window as carefully as he could, hoping to get a sight of Eleven Jane, but she wasn’t there. He was disappointed. The door pounded. Thorn jumped. Mack charged in. “Did you get any sleep?”
“There’s a crowd outside talking about the union. A crowd of real people. I don’t think they’re the hologram.”
“What?” Mack hurried
to the window and was surprised to see that there really were people out there. “Hey, a get-together without me?” Thorn joined him at the window to see the small crowd looking up in surprise.
“What are you doing in there?” a man asked.
“The clone lives here, now.”
A woman glared at Thorn. “A clone lives here?”
Mack shrugged. “He has to live somewhere. Venus thought she was putting him out of the way where he wouldn’t cause any trouble. What are you all doing here so far out of the way?”
“W-we were just planning a… a… on a trip to the cave,” a man obviously lied. “W-we know how you like to rock climb down at the main freezer there where there’s lots of good ice. Damn good ice. Good ice!”
“Rust no, not there!” Mack said. “It’s too much work climbing back up!”
“We’ll bring the nails to carry us back up,” another man assured him. “That’ll make the slide down worth it.”
“When you going?” Mack asked.
A few of the assembly murmured amongst themselves and then one said. “Lunch.”
Mack smiled big and waved. “See you at the back of the bottom drain. That’s the best slide.”
“Sure.”
“See you at lunch.”
Thorn called out them, “See if Eleven Jane wants to come. That would be fun.”
A woman reminded him, “She’s not in the union, why would she be around us?”
“Oh. That’s right.” He darkened.
On the ledge of the cave near the freezer drain, staring vapidly at a long snaking vein of glittery rock across the faraway facing wall, Thorn and Mack slumped, alone, waiting, feeling dissed. “The union hates me.”
Thorn said, “They might come.”
“What’s the point? The union hates me.”
Thorn saw something below in the shadows. “Is that them? Hello? I saw something move down there.”
“Where?”
Thorn pointed. “There.” He yelled, “Hello! We’re up here!”
“How can you see that far away in such darkness?”
Thorn shrugged. “Clone eyes?”
“Hellooo?” Mack called down. “Nope. There’s nobody down there.”
Thorn said, “I thought I saw movement.”
“The union hates me.”
“Why not rock climb and play all the time. Why not let the robots do all the work all the time?”
“Robots?” Mack made a sour face. “What would we do? Great.”
“So you could play like this. Rock climb all day.”
“Yippee, I’m having so much fun.”
Thorn looked at him. “Seriously.”
Mack said, “That would change the damn money system.”
Thorn shrugged. “So?”
“So, Earth spent a long time systematically destroying tribalism, the extended families, the local community. They’re not going to turn around now to a higher social way, a modern communism, not overnight.”
Thorn pulled on his ear. “Huh?”
“Earth took a long time to get the way it is and it isn’t going to change overnight. You just don’t thumb your nose at evolution. Social evolution, too. It is what it is.”
“But, we’re not there. We’re not on Earth.” Thorn patted the space rock he was sitting on. “We’re here.”
Mack nodded. “But Earth wouldn’t allow an alternative society anywhere. As I said, it has spent far too long making it all corporate fascism. The news reminds them of that everyday so they can’t ever forget.”
“They still have radio on Earth telling people how to think?”
“Sure. Why not? For as long as people have ears and want to listen to things… and accept what they’re told. With media you get a dictatorship and you don’t even know it. And the capitalists don’t even know it because they’re fighting each other. So it gets complicated.”
“Everybody accepts it?”
Mack nodded. “They have no choice anymore. There are no other ideas out there except those that the business commercials are willing to pay for.”
Thorn asked, “What could the corporate people of Earth do to everybody here if everybody here wanted to change how things work—just here?”
“They would blow us out of the sky in a heartbeat.”
Thorn gasped. “They would not.”
Mack nodded. “If they thought this was a lab to experiment with alternative societies for export to Earth, and not just clone guts, they’d blow us all up to get rid of us. We’re a prison. We were first built for that, anyway. But we’re all still carefully controlled. We answer to Earth’s politicians and courts. The news could get everybody on Earth to hate us in no time. It would unite all of Earth under one common threat, so I bet they do it from time to time, anyway, just for all their confusing politics. That’s why we’re so deserted out here like we are, and rusting. They always hate us.”
“Nah. We’re too far away for them to attack us. I bet they’ve mostly forgotten about this place.”
“I bet they have but if we reminded them that we’re here, by getting radically political, they’d make a feeble excuse to wage a campaign against us of one sort or another, and that could mean they blow us up. I wouldn’t want to try them. From what I’ve heard of Earth, they scare easily. They scare me.”
Thorn shook his head. “Maybe they’re all itching for their own revolution, for themselves.”
“Revolutions are a lot of damn work. People have to have nothing to lose before they even start thinking of changing anything.” They sat in silence for a while, kicking their legs over the chasm. Then Mack added, “Besides, we really do want to work. The robots can go jump in the lake. Only a few people such as the artists and thinkers and engineers and creative people like that could find meaningful things to do if everything here was always all automated. What would the rest of us do? You can’t be gone fishing forever.”
“Sure you can. Why do the union workers tolerate the daily grind of moving ice and clones around when very simple primitive machines, autobots and robots and a press with eyes could do it all, and so much easier and without mistakes.”
“Machines do help and keep it clean, safe and meticulous. Machines do the all the initial clone processing, as primitive as that system is. People need to move their bodies through time and space somehow to feel like they’ve had a day. I bet one day people will update and rebuild the clone system, just to make it work better, and to have a sense of accomplishment. People need a sense of accomplishment. But then after this place is all automated people better find something else to do.”
Thorn rubbed his ear. “I’d just let the machines do all the work, and relax.”
Mack shook his head. “There was a time in history when most people were stuck behind computers and that proved very unhealthy. It was so unhealthy it couldn’t last long. People’s hearts and backs got too weak. Menial work isn’t entirely meaningful but it’s better than nothing. It makes you move your shit.”
“A weak heart doesn’t sound very good.”
Mack thumped his chest with his thumb. “The biggest problem is that people have blood vessels. The average person needs to toil, to some extent, to the point of worry. It makes the hormones work right. That’s what we evolved for. We need to use our hands and manipulate the world. People used to hack at wolves and get a leg bit off. That was hard. People used to have to watch out for Vikings and there were spiders that didn’t clean anything for anybody. Or, however it went back when. It was hard. The average person needs to do menial work to pass the clock and feel like they’ve accomplished something, even if they didn’t want to. A person needs to work an hour a day to help have some sense of identity. A job helps give identity. The brain becomes so neurotic so easily, anyway.”
They heard a tremendous clanking sound echoing from far down the cave. They jolted.
Thorn asked, “What was that?”
“It sounded like it came from where the furnaces are. I wonder what that was.
”
“You never heard it before?”
“Damn no.” Mack shivered and rubbed his arms. “Ignore it. I’m sure this place has a lot of clanks and bangs. What was I talking about?” They both sat a while longer in silence looking around at the rock, and listening. “How could my own union have played a mean trick on me?” Mack blasted his light up and down the opposite wall of rock. “I don’t think they like me.”
Thorn said, “It looks like they’re not coming.”
“Of course they’re not coming.”
“The union isn’t going to accept your authority as they accepted Madam Wintermirror’s,” Thorn presumed, playfully crisscrossing his light a few times with Mack’s, on the wall. “Maybe in a few years but not yet. Let them mourn Madam Wintermirror, first. Just let them be, for now. They’ll come around.”
“You’re probably sort of correct.” Mack stood up.
“What’s that?” Thorn pointed off down the cave.
“What’s what? Why do you keep doing that! You’re making me nervous, damn you!”
“It’s gone,” Thorn said. “I thought I saw something move again.”
“What did it look like?” Mack asked, straining his eyes off into the dark, trying to shine his point of light everywhere at once. “Is it our lovely union?”
“No… it was almost like… it couldn’t have been.”
Mack asked, “What.”
“It was like a really big hand crawling all by itself, way over there.”
“A what? A big hand? Are you sure?”
“No.” Thorn grinned. “I barely saw a thing so I’m not sure.”
“Then shut up and don’t say that! Don’t spook me! Damn!”
“Sorry. Probably some from the union trying to play a prank.”
“That’s worse,” Mack said. They both aimed their lights all over the various areas of the cave. “Let’s go. Let’s get the damn hell out of here. I’m really freaking out, now. Now I gotta piss real bad but it’s gonna have to wait until I’m where it’s nice and bright.” Mack grabbed onto Thorn’s hand for support and they both proceeded to work their way back over the ledge. Mack said, “I wonder if I’ll like climbing anymore at all when I get so old. Then what will I do for a hobby.” Halfway down, they noticed a shape splattered at the edge of a massive icicle. “Look!”
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