“I left them.” Christopher Goi shook his head, “I didn’t want to live out the rest of my lives in a fishtank. I won’t return.”
“Fishtank?” Thorn questioned.
“Cloned along in fishtanks, of course.”
“They don’t ever finally walk around?” Thorn was mystified.
“No. They live in fishtanks and do all the work through the union and machines. They think via the computers. There’s a whole network of them in this place.”
Venus asked, “The robber scientists don’t use their bodies? They run Subco Gibeah without bodies?”
Lady Hatchet rubbed her nose. “Is that why nobody sees them running amuck. And here I always thought it was just because we had all kept ourselves so ghettoized.”
“That’s one big reason why I left their way of working. It was all too mental. I called an autobot to pull me out of my fishtank when I was sixteen. It was hard—I didn’t have a group like they do in Subco Gibeah to remind you how to use the body again.”
Thorn pointed out, “But you didn’t have to worry about wild thoughts.”
“True. Thinking was encouraged and I like having a body, also. A person should have both, body and mind.”
“I want to see what happened to those damn robbers!” Lady Hatchet said. “If something really happened to the damn robber scientists then nothing can keep me on this rust bucket and I’ll take a bus out of here even if I have to do the driving, myself, the entire way.”
Venus asked, “You’ll leave with me for Earth, then?”
“Damn Earth. “Lady Hatchet frowned. “But where else is there, anymore? I can’t stay here. I’m scared. I’m terrified!”
Venus wiped a tear from her own eye. “It’s totally pathetic. I feel like such a failure. I’m too damn old to start over. I’m too damn old to dream, let alone pay Earth rent. I feel like I’m nowhere, going nowhere. I was a fool to give up greed as a lifestyle. Look what being greedless got me! My sisters stayed on Earth and made real Earth money. They invested. They’re living nice, I bet. I bet they have a little room somewhere where it stays dry and can’t blow over no matter how bad the storm. That’s something, for Earth. But I don’t even have that.”
Lady Hatchet nodded. “Greedy people always win, don’t they. We’ll just have to go back to Earth with nothing but our damn union status and work at some dreadful lab, there. If they still use people. I hope I can find a room on Earth where I can stay dry!” She shuddered. “I doubt they use people like us on Earth anymore at all.”
Thorn said, “I’m going to visit the robber scientists’ lab. I can’t believe you work for people who don’t even walk around. Where is it?”
Venus asked, “Aren’t you afraid they’ll burn you down at the door? It may be a trap.”
“They sounded weak.” Thorn thought about it and then assured her, “I’ll be careful.” He turned to Christopher Goi. “Where are the main clone labs?”
“There are six units all in a row.” He punched up a map.
Thorn leaned close. “I’m going to check it all out.”
“It’ll be like busting out of prison to get to them.”
Thorn smiled. “We have bombs.”
Christopher Goi shook his head. “And they have security robots with guns. And for what. What is there to see? To see vast rooms of many look-alike clones in tanks of water. The scientists aren’t there. They’re not with the other clones. They’ve all been at the zoo for decades now.”
Lady Hatchet looked amazed. “The zoo? I haven’t thought about going to that place in a long time.”
“Nobody from the union has been there in a long time. That’s why the scientists finally moved in.”
Lady Hatchet and Thorn rode through a string of concrete tunnels. A few empty cars joined them but then fell back as they went deeper. Thorn felt an odd sense of emptiness. “My radio waves didn’t come from here.”
Lady Hatchet said, “Your radio waves are only as stereo as your damn ears are apart. You can’t really know where you’re going just from your own senses.”
“I feel a strange emptiness.” He recalled in his past life on Earth where there was a patch of woods. A creek ran through it. There were bugs everywhere. The air was filled with energy. However, in this tunnel he felt so completely alone. “It feels as dead as outside with the stars.”
“Just wait.” She patted his arm to assure him. The tunnel led to a vast park filled with gray dead trees. Most of the lights above them were burnt out so they drove through the thick lace of murky shadows. “This used to all be bright and alive. It was green when I was here, last. It was one of the first places we came to when we first arrived here. After we stepped off the rocket we went to rooms, first. They were small rooms just for bathing. Damn did we need a good bath after such a long trip. I only had a dry clean, of course, after leaving the swamps for space I swore I’d never get wet again, and I meant it. The next day they had a welcoming party here in this park and we felt so special. I was so happy, thinking I’d come to paradise. They had a pig roast, special, for us all.”
“Pig? In space?”
She laughed. “That’s what they told us it was. What did we know? I now know pigs taste just like humans. They did try to break us in gently. We ate humans all the time on Earth, of course, there was never any shortage of that, but coming here we thought we were going someplace new where everything would be different.” She rolled her eyes. “Well, anyway, after the piggy roast we were taken to Metroplex and I haven’t been back here since. So sad to see it all dead, now.” She looked around and smirked. “But then if new scabs are coming in to replace the union then it’s good they don’t get the same fancy welcoming party I did. Let’s hope we never cross paths at all.”
The car swerved around some fallen branches then stopped at a terrace leading to a wide set of doors under a marquee. They couldn’t see what it once read; it was now buried in a tall canopy of dead vines.
“My ears!” He patted at them. “I hear digesting.”
“This is still it, then. The damn mouth of it all. It leads through to the elevator that goes to the robber scientists’ villas, from back when they really did all walk around, if you go all the way to the back. It used to anyway. That’s what they said. And who knows what’s all there now.”
“Will they let us all the way in, to the very top, to the villas?”
“Phhh. Up there? There’s nobody walking around anymore so what would they care. Who knows if we’ll get near anything at all. But they should be very interested in you, no matter what. You escaped. Now pretend you’re a union hostage. Let’s go and see if we can’t at least get in as far as the zoo down here and see if anybody has anything to say about anything.”
“You really have no idea what you’re doing.”
She grinned. “We really have no idea what we’re dealing with anymore, anywhere. So just fake it until we get some info.”
He followed Lady Hatchet in the door and up steps to the empty lobby draped in cobwebs. At the dank sight of it, Lady Hatchet wrinkled up her nose.
He asked her, “What do you smell?”
She breathed in deeply, looking around, then finally shrugged. “Old. I just smell an old weedy rotting barn, here.” She sniffed again. “Just weeds.”
At the end of the lobby, Thorn pulled on many doors that stopped them from proceeding farther in. None of them would budge. He said, “I suppose this is where we want to go because they won’t let us.”
Lady Hatchet turned to leave. “Let’s get out of here. Damn this mess, I should have brought a scarf to cover my hair.” She swatted at cobwebs in the air. “Let’s go. I hate this place! It’s too dirty. It’s changed so much. It makes me sad to see it all like this. Come on.”
“Look down there. There’s a hole in the wall.” He walked to it. “Laser beamed right through. And it looks like it was cut from the inside.”
Lady Hatchet raised her eyebrows in surprise. “Somebody wanted to get out?”
/> “We can fit through here. Here. I’ll help you.”
“No. I don’t want to now. I don’t want to go in if it’s such a mess.”
“But I need you.”
“I’m old and my back will go out if I climb through that hole.”
“You’re old and know so much stuff. You have to be with me to help me understand what is going on in the zoo labs and with the scientists. You’re so much more intelligent than I am about this stuff. You’ve been with the union for so long. You know the job from the inside.”
“Very well. Phhh.” He helped her step through the hole in wall. She put her hand over her nose. “Stinks in here.”
“What’s it smell like now? Dead bodies? Strange animals? What was once all in this zoo? Things looks broken up. Do you smell human sewage? Can anybody live here?”
“Pee-you. Dead vegetation… and rotted fruit. How odd.”
He looked up at the ceiling, wondering if a claw would drop down to drag them off to ice them. “Careful. If a claw shows up don’t move a muscle.”
Lady Hatchet walked into the room without fear. “This isn’t one of the main labs so it isn’t booby trapped like that. It’s a small lab mostly set up for fun, being a zoo. I always meant to come back to see. Never quite bothered, though. They said they made crazy things here just for the fun of it and anybody could come and see, back in the day.”
He walked over to the doors and tried to open one from the inside. “I guess that’s why somebody cut a whole in the wall. These doors won’t open for anything.”
“I guess the zoo is closed to the public now.” She laughed at the decrepit sight.
As they walked through a few more rooms, their feet started to crackle on the oddly porous floor. Tiny hair roots weaved through the irregular holes. Thorn asked, “Why is the floor dissolving?”
She shook her head. “It looks to me like the floor is being absorbed by these odd growths in it. The smell has changed in this room.”
“Like what?”
She shrugged. “Don’t know. Dead wine? What’s this?” She pointed to the floor. “Are those fingers coming out of the floor?”
“Roots?” Thorn shrugged.
“Looks a lot like fingers, doesn’t it? Are they pulling the minerals out of the floor? Looks like it. If it’s that damn good I should try eating it, myself.” She laughed. “I’ve seen enough rust and rot. Let’s go.”
“No. Not yet. Let’s go on in as far as we can. If we don’t fall through the floor first.”
They passed rows of tall doors that were drooping and seemed to be converting to jelly. They stepped over where some of them had fallen completely over and draped limply on the floor. “I think that was once solid.”
She snorted at it. “Phhh.” They walked through a passage set in a large glass wall curtained with green vines.
Inside the lab, Thorn noticed the light was so mottled and green that everything lit by it seemed to be a phantom. Lady Hatchet whispered, nervously, “The place has gone damn crazy with plants or parasites, or something. Parasite plants! Weeds!”
He pointed. “What’s at the very end of the lab?”
“Beyond the zoo? A big back room, a lobby. It has an elevator to their villas, I’m pretty sure.”
“You’ve never been to the villas at all?” Thorn looked doubtful.
“Of course not. You think for a moment that the damn robber scientists are going to invite an old union slog like me over for supper? They don’t mix with us. Never did. We hate them. And who knows how long ago they gave that all up to stay in fishtanks.”
He smiled. “Maybe it’s the elevator to heaven! Maybe that’s the one! Maybe it’s really here! Maybe I finally found it!”
She looked in his eyes. “You really think so?”
“It seems like it is. It’s…an elevator.”
“They have to get up there somehow.”
He blushed. Stepping over more and more odd lumps of things, he couldn’t see the floor and walls for the vines. Some of the plants were long dead and almost naught, like hanging dust. Some had grown their leaves up against the light fixtures, causing the green dappled light. And where they were getting too much of the light’s energy they had holes burned into their leaves, along with odd tumors. “Lady Hatchet!” He pointed. Thorn swore.
Disguised amongst the greenery, they finally saw the bodies inside the glass tanks. Dozens and dozens of humans were now skin-wrapped skeletons. Every drop of liquid was drawn out of them. “They didn’t die just now. They’ve been like this a long time.” Lady Hatchet diagnosed some of them with her pen. “Egad!”
Thorn pulled some of the vines off the glass. “Killed by meat eating hydroponic plant engineering… or something?”
“Gone wild! The plants killed the damn robber scientists as they were screaming and screaming and screaming bloody murder in their fishtanks in utter horror and pain and torture, unable to run away. I hope. I’ve always hated them.”
“But how?”
Lady Hatchet shrugged. “Maybe they were killed, first, by something else. And that would give the plants the chance to slowly mosey over and recycle the nutrition.”
He asked, “Who would kill the damn robber scientists? The grad schoolers?”
“Maybe. Who can know for sure.”
“I wonder what happened here.”
She said, “Maybe they just couldn’t unplug themselves from their own fishtanks. Maybe they didn’t think to ask the robots for help because they were drained away before they could think about it, I don’t know. When you got out of your fishtank was it a lot of effort?”
“I didn’t do a thing. My tank was chosen out of all the others and it rolled forward to a huge tube that sucked me up into a pool in my city. And I floated to shore from there. And then people greeted me and helped me out of the water and showed me how to use my body... how to walk and stuff. Walking is harder than it looks if you didn’t do it before.”
She looked around. “Maybe the plants overtook them while they were in their fishtanks and they didn’t even know it was happening. I wonder why they did that here. It’s supposed to just be a zoo, I wonder why they chose to move here. I wonder if something bad happened first to their other labs. I wonder what brought them here like this to die anyway.” She shuddered. “Odd that the zoo would just be full of dead people, now.”
“What’s that?” He quickly looked around, spooked, feeling as if his own clone of himself was in the shadows, waiting and welding a club.
“Nobody else is here, unless you count killer plants and dead idiots.”
“I thought I saw myself,” Thorn said. “Silly. It was almost psychic like my radio waves make voices in my head seem psychic, but this was just an image. Like a hologram of somebody and they were visiting the room. They weren’t here for real, I don’t think. They came and went too fast. I don’t know. But I could swear I saw my own face!”
“Scary. I hope there aren’t survivors up in the villas, still. It would be nice to think the scientist clones are all gone.”
“How will we know?”
“We’ll never know what happened here,” Lady Hatchet said. “No time for autopsies. Not that it wouldn’t be fun to rip into a mummy. It sounds so dry and tidy compared to all you damn gushing clones spilling wet guts all over my shoes, and the room. Damn you all.”
“But how did all these different plants do this?”
“Just took over, huh,” Lady Hatchet stated. “The ornery thugs. We’ll never know.”
Thorn asked, “How were the clones talking to me if they’re all dead?”
“If their bodies are all dead then they could still be all alive in their intellect in the computers. As long as this rock has electricity they’re zipping around deep in all the main machines where the plants can’t suck that part of them dry.”
“They could have consciousness inside the machines?”
She shrugged. “Maybe. Then they just need to get that consciousness into the new clones, fi
gure out how to exactly do that, and… voilà! They live forever young and happy. Bastards. They’re dead and they’re still bastards!”
Thorn asked, “This room could have been like this for years?”
“Maybe.”
“Can we know?”
“I suppose if you’re patient enough just watch the movies of it. I’m sure there’s plenty before the security cameras overgrew and got all covered up. But I’m not going through all that tedious footage today. I’m not going to sit down to watch plants grow.”
Thorn frowned. “To think Subco Gibeah wasn’t even being jerked around by real people with legs? How rude!”
“Legs don’t make a damn person. Does thinking stupid things all day even make a damn person? What is enough?”
Thorn pointed. “Let’s go up to the villas and see if they’re haunted by dead ghosts or living ones.”
Lady Hatchet said, “You put it that way, I’m scared. Are you sure you don’t hear any radio waves from it?”
“No,” he said. “I just hear screaming primal life around me. I just hear digesting.”
They walked through a maze of hundreds of glass cases of mummified humans until they came to the big back room that had the elevator to the villas. “I want to see what’s up there.”
She adamantly shook her head. “I won’t go up in a rotting elevator, if it’ll even go an inch at all.” She walked around a classical fountain that was full of tall dead grass to another corner of the room and pushed vines to the side to reveal a metal fire door. “Does this lead to the same place?”
He asked, “Is it stairs?”
She opened the door and nodded. “But I don’t take the stairs. So let’s just go back, now. We’ve seen more than enough to give me nightmares.”
He looked down the stairwell. “What’s below us?”
“No idea. We’ll have to find out someday.” She made a disinterested face.
He looked up the stairwell. “The stairs would be safer than that elevator, I bet.” He scooped her up in his arms and carried her.
She yelled, “Not so fast!”
As he walked up the steps, he said, “We don’t have all day so just let me carry you.” He carried her up thirteen flights until he came to their first door. He put Lady Hatchet down and opened it up.
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