“Go then.” Thorn pointed up. “Get yourself mopped out and leave me alone.”
“I’ll be back with a gun if nothing else.”
“Why didn’t you bring one this time?” Thorn asked.
“I was hoping to have fun killing you with my face against yours. I was hoping to use my superior strength to pull your head off, after your arms and legs were gone… gazing into my own beautiful dark eyes!”
“Superior strength, ha!” Thorn waved him off. “You’re a dot a dozen. You’re as special as forgotten ice cubes. Go now and lick your wounds where I can’t see you. You’ll die before you reach any lab, anyway. I’ve just wasted enough of your time.”
“What?”
“You couldn’t even get back in time to have them electrocute the bugs. You’re already flush with fever. I see it in your cheeks.”
“Rust you!” He ripped the electrical cable out of the wall brackets to electrocute the bugs out by himself, forthwith, but the electricity animated the cable so violently it jerked out of his grip and flew away. He jumped down onto the elevator car roof to chase it. The hot cable exploded against the wall. As sparks shot up around them, the entire elevator box cracked loose and plunged down the shaft, screeching as metal grated and burned. They dropped with it as it plunged dozens of stories.
As they wrestled on the elevator box roof, it finally popped out into the giant silver globular cave. It slowed its fall and lost all gravity in the middle as they floated off it. Thorn fell amongst a ballet of hundreds of clones expertly riding their neon green gyro bikes around the vast smooth walls in the humongous bright silver bubble room.
He swam past his clone and as he reached out to grab him, he hooked the elevator with his one and only foot and vigorously swung it up against his clone’s chest sending him and the elevator careening against the wall. They crashed heavily then rebounded back to Thorn as he searched the cave for the elevator shaft they’d just come from, but they’d been spinning too much and he had no bearings. As he pushed himself off the cave wall he finally spotted a small square hole far away on the other side.
A Subco Gibeah guidance counselor shot out of his glass belvedere watch station, riding a small rocket off the diving board, shouting, “Illegal maneuver. Arrest and pillplace!”
As the loose elevator came whirling back to Thorn, he grabbed it and swung it to the guidance counselor. It solidly clobbered him and pushed him backwards. The guidance counselor slammed into a wall where he was run over by a gyro bike. He and the rider tumbled head over heels, leaving long wet smears of red on the silver wall. Other gyro bikes piled up over the debris as dozens of men crashed over each other, flew off their seats, and likewise smeared up the walls with blood. The unmanned rocket zipped over Thorn’s head and he wasn’t fast enough to grab it. As Thorn’s clone tried to seize it, it slipped through his hands also and wedged into his belly wound, shooting him backwards and then crashing into the wall. It pinned him to it, nearly ripping him in half, still firing furiously. The clone clawed at it in a rage, having no idea how to turn it off. Thorn swam to him and firmly yanked down on his legs to finish pulling him in half.
A Subco Gibeah billy boy cop flew out of a diving board door and sped towards Thorn, nervously yelling, “Wild thought!” while holding out a gun, trying to look menacing. As the billy boy looked at the torn apart clone pieces floating at him, Thorn deftly grabbed the cop’s arm and ripped his gun from his hand, stealing it. Then Thorn flung the billy boy away to collide with an empty gyro bike that was now just twirling around in place in mid cave.
Thorn caught another empty gyro bike that came at him. He pushed away off the wall and swam to the diving board door, ducked through it, hopped on the gyro bike and leaned all the way forward to force the bike to ride up the enormous spiral ramp to the garage as fast as torque, centrifugal force, and courage would allow. He drove through the garage and into his old clone city. He turned down a street that was a dead end, so he turned into a narrow sweltering sauna that he knew came out the other end at another street. He parted a crowd of sweaty seventeen year olds while he rode clumsily, zigzagging amongst them, still trying to master his balance. He noticed they all still had tender gills beneath their ears.
“You can’t ride that in here!”
“Out of the way!”
“He’s missing a foot!”
In the corner was an astonished seventeen-year-old clone of himself, already sent into Subco Gibeah to replace him. As Thorn lurched past, his young immature clone looked at him in gaping horror. Riding out onto another street of Subco Gibeah, a small army of billy boy’s gathered to chase him on foot, screaming, “Pillplace!” and “Wild thought!” at him and also at anybody who witnessed.
He soon mastered the full poise of the gyro bike, quickly gaining confidence in his ability to steer around everybody in the streets, and leaving the scrambling billy boy’s behind. One cop finally shot at him with a gun and the lightning hit the ceiling, blowing out the panels that lit it, sending shards of glass into their faces.
Thorn raced past the birthing pool and when he got to the seven steps of Jacob’s ladder he rode into the Eden Room. “Welcome to perfect bliss in Elysium Grounds. All is well, push the button and ride all the way to the final gardens of eternal life.” As he got off the gyro bike he hobbled painfully from stump to foot, then impatiently waited for the elevator. When it opened he hopped in with gun out, finger itchy, and mind ready. The door closed with a happy chime and, “Welcome welcome welcome”. He felt the car rise and he finally couldn’t control the sickening feelings of being back in the research project of Subco Gibeah, and seeing the phony streets and ignorant cloned people again. The sickening feelings became physical. He puked on the wall.
He would have liked to have time to cry, mourn and curse for that entire wasted four years of his life when he thought he was a tough cop full of righteous glory, but the doors opened and he quickly ducked and blasted the big metal claw that was swooping in to take him away to be iced. His shot broke it to bits. Through the smoke of the explosion he spotted another backup claw. He was too late. It caught him by surprise and plopped down, tightly grabbing his head. As he was ripped up off his foot and carried away, he fired into its wrist. The claw’s fingers broke apart and dropped him.
He held onto the elevator doorframe in a reeling daze, blinded by bright white spots dancing in his eyes from the explosions. “What? No guns in Elysium Grounds?” he said with a growl, rubbing his head to find several scratches there.
With a loud crack he pulled his ankle stub up from where it had frozen onto the ground and he hopped over the broken metal fingers. While he hobbled through the many rows of hundreds of ice pillars, he tried not to notice how gruesome they were with startled looking dead men inside. Metal began to noisily clang and bang overhead as several other claws slid on overhead tracks, searching him out. He shot the tracks and the claws piled up onto each other, their grinding metal showering him with icicles and sparks. As other claws vehemently charged towards him across their tracks, he dodged them by hopping through the door of plastic strips to the hallway beyond.
He fidgeted as he waited, not bothering to hold still, and when that ceiling claw of tatty metal and skin popped down through its hatch, blinking its red light in its palm to find and nab him, he aimed, fired, and blew the thing away up into a shattering hole, setting the ceiling on fire. He hopped away to the flooded room, waded through it and angrily sloshed up the metal stairs to the endless halls with an endless orange stripe down the middle of the endless carpet. “Ow, ow, ow!” His ankle stub was beginning to hurt badly, shooting agonizing pain all the way up into his hip and lower back.
He remembered Venus and Lady Hatchet telling him that he had walked for a day in a big circle, before he first found them where they were working. So he tried a door. It was locked. He fired his gun and blew it open. He walked into the room and saw that it didn’t go anywhere. He returned to the hall and blasted open the opposite door. He
went down six steps into icy cold water. He trudged through a flooded hall to a set of rusted metal stairs. He clomped up them to step out into a bright factory complex where he’d first met the two old women. He walked amongst hundreds of cots containing identical clones. He could see some of them were badly rotting. One was on the ground, on its face, with only one leg, and the body looked half eaten away.
“Are they all the same class of men, rich or poor?” A voice in his head asked. He looked around to make sure it wasn’t a real voice. “What makes a man different from another?” He had an odd memory of being a different person in a different time. His mother was telling him that all people were now the same except for the thing called gender. Once in history the planet used to have many different races and cultures of people that made them superficially appear different. That was in ancient times when people grew up isolated from each other. That was when nations of people took on different family traits. But now everybody was the same human family except for those few people stuffed in museums who had kept the ancient family traits to the bitter xenophobic end. They were now called a different species. “Wild thought!” he whispered, pounding his fist on his head. “Wild thought!”
A voice more distant and tinny asked. “Is the only human difference rich or poor?”
“Planet Earth was once a large place,” an odd voice yelled back. “Now it’s too small and inbred.” Humans were nearly the only large animal form left because they crowded out most all other biodiversity. Most other wild animals larger than a rat had gone extinct.
He remembered camping out in the cornfield at night, as a kid, to try to scare all the rats away. He put a radio out there in front of the tent to try to add scary noise. On the radio program they were yelling about how terrible the poor people were who didn’t buy enough from the corporations and it made him very angry to hear what was happening in the world. He wanted people dead for it. The dog caught a rat and killed it but she was badly bitten on the face first. It must have hurt really bad but the dog never acted happier.
He yelled, “But that wasn’t me! That was a man who died many years ago!”
“You will go mad,” another voice said inside his head. “When you were in the fishtank you sometimes picked up different people’s radio waves by accident. They really need to improve on that. If they don’t then every clone’s mind will include a crowd.” Thorn wondered how he could ever find out who he really once was in the first place. He wondered if he would ever be able to figure out a way to separate the first Thorn from everybody else.
He yelled, “I don’t remember!”
He noticed a clone with a gun. “Fix my foot,” he ordered Christopher Goi who stood in an open door, aiming a gun at Thorn’s face. He wore a gas mask. “Put that silly thing away and grow my lousy foot back!”
“How do I know it’s you?” Christopher Goi asked.
“Don’t make me think. I have a headache! Is the air bad here?”
“It smells like death. The clones aren’t being processed anymore.”
Thorn gagged. “Yes, I can see. Fix my foot. This stub is beginning to feel really very tender about now!”
“Don’t take another step. How do I know you didn’t kill him or he didn’t kill you or which one you are?”
“Give it up.”
“Don’t come any closer to me or I’ll have to shoot!”
“It’s me! Because!” Thorn insisted. “Because, that other damn clone, when he still had a head, it was bald. I saw one of me in Subco Gibeah, but he was only seventeen, still in puberty with gills.”
“So?” Christopher Goi shook his gun, trying to look more menacing.
“What do you mean so!”
“I can see you’re not the one with gills. You can fake gills but you can’t shave four years off your looks, especially to seventeen. But hair can be faked cosmetically if given a good hour. How do I know you aren’t that clone, in disguise? I’ll have to test your dots, first.”
Thorn grew angry. “I don’t have any blood left!”
“Regardless of which clone you are,” Christopher Goi said, “You’ll have to calm down.”
“Calm down? Damn you! How do I know this still isn’t the research experiment that I’m in? How do I know the research experiment isn’t just a maze with layers of layers of tricky layers to try to escape from and to, to go beyond, to test the fragility and gullibility of damn human intelligence? How do I know you’re not testing my mental breaking point? First perfect bliss in Elysium Grounds being nothing but a horrible nasty trick, and then the nasty horror that you are Chrysalis Joy who is supposed to be my best friend and not a clone of a thieving scientist. And now my own identity is in doubt yet again! How do I know I’m not the same person as all my clones and that it doesn’t matter who of me I am and that we don’t all have the exact same consciousness and that’s why we’re only supposed to be let out one at a time? How do I know anything? This place could be anything. They say that when nothing makes sense then anything is possible. How do I know this isn’t the same research experiment I was in, in the first place, and Subco Gibeah was a playing level, and then I went to the next level up in Metroplex and now you’re pushing me and goading me into this next level, whatever it is? Well what if I have too much self esteem for that and I don’t want to be your test rat anymore!”
“Any clone could say that. Tirades and rants don’t really prove you’re the version of Thorn that I will allow.”
“Is Lady Hatchet in on this? I’ll wring her scrawny little neck if she’s in on this with you! Is Metroplex just a damn facade to confuse clones to think they’ve escaped from something to someplace else? It looks fake enough! Is she really some sick nurse in this sick mental experiment? Was Venus some fabrication just to see if clones could have feelings when they see an old woman hacked up and murdered? Was it just her clone you arranged to have killed and is the real Venus laughing her butt off at me right now? Damn you! I’m so over you all!”
“No, Lady Hatchet was not in on anything other than her mundane union job. No, Venus was not cloned and the only Venus there ever was, was killed. Now you’re paranoid and you’re doing it just to distract me. It won’t work. Stand down. How do I know it’s you until I get some of your damn dirty blood?”
“You’re the dumb scientist. You find out on your own.”
“I never thought …”
Thorn said, “Who cares what you think? It’s not you, that’s for sure. You were only a real person when you were your last person, my friend in Subco Gibeah! Now you’re just a stupid fat ego on legs trying to control a world that’s all junk. And you’re only a lousy dubbed-down clone of that, anyway. You’re as damned as I am so shut up.” Thorn turned to leave. “Shoot me. I could care less. I’ll just go get a foot somewhere else.”
Christopher Goi started to laugh. “All right so it is you, I can tell. I can see how you look at me and when you do you still think of my clone. You see me and see Chrysalis Joy. No other clone of you would have done that.”
Thorn nodded. He considered the man’s long hair, gas mask, and clothes, and still he mainly saw the other man through it all. “Why do you think I didn’t shoot you. I have a gun, too. But I didn’t want to shoot him.”
“You mean I didn’t intimidate you with my gun?”
“Not in the least. I was a cop. Now fix my foot if you can still find it in the elevator shaft that goes to the villas. You can still use the old bones and save time.”
“I can’t,” Christopher Goi admitted. “I already tried.”
“What happened to it? Where’s my foot? I want my damn foot!”
“That disgusting foul bubble thing ate it and then you managed to kill it with it.”
“My foot killed it?”
“It must have been too much for it. It ate your foot and died.”
Thorn heard rustling behind him. He turned and saw a far away dead clone cart being pulled back. “Who’s there!” The clone on the cart was pulled off by something
on the other side of it, just below it. Christopher Gio came deeper into the room and stood by Thorn’s side. They finally spotted a spider the size of a table clumsily dragging a dead clone away. They both aimed and fired at the same time, blowing the thing to gray gooey pieces.
Thorn was laid up in a clinic bed in white pajamas and a small fishtank over his ankle, to re-grow a foot. A hologram image of Eleven Jane came to his room. She stood at the end of the bed. She shimmied out of her long yellow paisley caftan. She was left in an even brighter shade of yellow pajamas. “Do you find me beautiful?”
“Even if I wasn’t so bored with myself stuck in this bed, I’d find you beautiful. You’re probably the most beautiful women in the whole world… asteroid… universe.”
Eleven Jane held out one of her long elegant legs. “And nothing has been improved with cloning.” She did a slow measured ballerina pivot.
“What are you doing? Are you here to entertain me with a space dance to take my head away from being bored? My foot itches like crazy and there isn’t even anything there yet to look at.”
“Dance?” She flipped her long ruby hair behind her before planting her hands on her hips. “I had more in mind than that. I’ve had designs on you since I first met you.”
“Designs? What’s that? Designs? You?”
Her green eyes twinkled. “I didn’t visit you before because I didn’t know if I’d hate you later, regardless.”
“What?”
“But now that you’re stuck there and I’ve decided you’re worth my regard, if not pity, don’t you want to kill an hour or so and play? Aren’t you curious about my body? I am about yours.”
He squinted at her as if she was dumb. “Hippisticks don’t have body rights with clones. I thought I was banned. Malbri Three warned me all about it.”
“I’m only an image, now, of course. I’m only talking about our images getting to know each other. So don’t get hysterical.”
“So then what’s the point?” Thorn asked. “If I can’t feel anything then it’s not body rights. They used to make holograms with ultrasonic waves, back in my day—my first time around. You could feel a hologram.”
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