“Really? On earth they did that?”
He gently rubbed his own arm. “Their surface wasn’t strong enough to make a sex toy that a man could go all the way with but it was a start. You could feel it if you didn’t get too rough with it.”
She looked at her hand. “I wonder why they didn’t do that to holograms here?”
He rubbed his chest. “I guess that would make it too much of a tease.”
“If they thought of it at all.”
He looked around the room. “Maybe they just didn’t think holograms would be that important to people here. They didn’t think we’d be flirting with each other like this with them. This is silly, isn’t it? It’s a silly game that can’t go anywhere.”
She sadly shook her head. “There can be more to a quick rendezvous than the sense of touch.”
“What then? Body rights is about skin touching and that’s about all.”
She rolled her eyes and smirked. “Men. Clones. Aren’t you a big lug. You are all soooooo gorilla.”
“What? Tell me.”
Eleven Jane smiled. “Well, how can I say this in words without sounding stupid. There is the curiosity of seeing another body. There is the emotion of spending that privileged private time with a secret friend. Curiosity and emotions are powerful compensations, enough. At least with someone who is quarantined from our blood.”
“Well, how do we do this?” Thorn rubbed his face. “I’ve never had body rights before that weren’t just grabbing and direct feeling and ending up very obviously in a bath.”
She climbed up on top of him, hovering just above him, weightless.
He asked, “Like this?” He tried to kiss her.
She backed off and said, “Let’s not start out so obvious.”
Thorn resituated himself in bed and reached up at her arms. “But there’s nothing to touch.” He reached at her chest.
“Careful, you ox!” she hollered. “You just put your hand through me and it nearly gave me a heart attack!”
He said, “It’s just your image.”
“That’s the game. Most the joy we have in life is illusions. Let’s make this no different. I really am here, after all, just not in the flesh.” She looked down at herself and chuckled. “Now take me in your hands, carefully, and pretend.”
He asked, “Aren’t you going to take off your pajamas?”
“Nope. Not the first time. I want to tease you a bit first.”
“Why.”
“Because it’s a game!”
“This is dumb. Everybody already saw everybody else naked when we all went swimming.”
“And I thought your eyes would fall out of your head the way you looked at me as if there was more to what we were doing besides swimming together, to become one. You were rude to do that during our ritual. You acted like there was only me and you.”
“I’m not used to naked women. That was a nice surprise. I liked seeing you naked. I wanted to become one with just you, that way, sure.”
“But that was swimming. Of course I’m not going to wear clothes into the water. How stupid that would be to do something like that, unless I went in by accident. Our rituals are very deliberate.” She put her arms out and chanted, “We are all one in light and water. We are all one in spirit and matter. Let us swim in the ocean of space to show how we are all one.”
“So, take your clothes off now. I want to see you again.”
“This isn’t swimming in water. This is another game. This one involves our imaginations.”
Thorn popped out his lower lip. “I don’t want to pretend. I want it to be real.”
Eleven Jane pretended to touch his lip. “Most the joy we have in life involves pretending. Yes, most of our games are dumb. Now reach out like you would touch me.”
“I can’t feel you.”
“Sometimes people don’t need to end up with their skin getting bruised, to say they did anything.”
“There’s nothing there.”
“I am here! Be curious. Aren’t you curious about my body? Yes you are! So play the game!”
“I have a better idea.” He suggested, “Let’s level the playing field. Why don’t I meet you somewhere halfway, as an image, too. Then I’m not stuck here, a real body, and on my back in a clinic bed so gimpy. I feel so frustrated this way.”
She shrugged. “Sure. Whatever works for you to get you going. I’m game.”
He snatched up a pen from the side table and clicked it on. “If you want me, first you have to find me.”
“Fair enough.” Laughing in a low sinister tone, she flipped a long lock of hair behind her shoulder and vanished. “I can trace you anywhere,” only her voice said. Then she came back.
He asked, “How come it didn’t work? How come I couldn’t get to the climbing cave?”
“Slow down grasshopper.” She smirked. “You can only go, as a hologram, where there are projectors set up to do that. There are none back there at the climbing cave. It’s just mainly at the worker’s city we can do this. I was hoping to just stay in this clinic. You know what a turn off the city is for me. It’s hard to have fun in a place that has no soul.”
“Holograms can’t go everywhere? Crap. It would be a good way to spy, if they could.”
She nodded. “I’m sure they don’t want our holograms just walking around anywhere we want, where they don’t want us.”
“What if I met you floating high over the city?”
Eleven Jane gasped. “Where everybody can see us?”
“Are we keeping our clothes on?”
“Yes.”
“Then who cares.” Thorn said. “I’ve never pretended that I was making out while floating high over a city, before.”
She crossed her arms over herself. “I want privacy for that kind of thing.”
“What if I meet you at the building in the city that is gutted because it had that big fire. The City Hall.”
She smiled. “That would be wicked cool! That is a place in the city that has real history, now. All its straight lines have been broken. Nothing is even. It has been destroyed. So it has a soul.”
He frowned. “But wait. It might smell really bad for you in there.”
She shook her head. “Our holograms can only go so far as see and talk and hear. That’s all there are projectors and receptors for. We can’t touch or smell, this way. I would love to see a burnt out city building. What a romantic first date!” She vanished.
In the burnt out building, walking on a black floor that would be too dangerously feeble for their real weight, they circled each other, playfully, until Thorn began to feel sad that this would probably be as good as it could get. She floated up off the floor to the splintered black ceiling. He floated after her and tried to slam dance in slow flight but stopping just before the two illusions touched. She stayed close and he followed the illusory outlines of her body with his hands, trying to be careful that he didn’t entirely ghost through her. They floated around each other for a while as if they were stuck in each other’s gravity, like two suns that were too close to each other.
He finally said, “I think this is the apogee if this game… unless we do something like this!” He backed off and dropped his pajama bottoms a moment before he pulled them back up. “Your turn. Flash me something.”
She shook her head. “Not the first time. I have to leave you wanting more.”
He cried, “This is a cruel game! Maybe women like this kind of thing but to a man this is torture. Or are you doing this to me to make fun of me?” He vanished and went back to his clinic bed. She was there shortly after. “I couldn’t feel a thing,” he repeated.
“Couldn’t your imagination excite you?” she asked.
He could only look back at her, perplexed “You did this just because you hate me. You hate clones!”
“I was just trying to give you some attention. I felt sorry for you.”
“I need to grow a foot. Leave me alone.”
“Lady Hatchet is so crea
tive,” Eleven Jane said, “that she once came to me refashioned entirely into a young princess in sixteenth century Iraq.”
“Did she tell you it was her?”
“Of course, she’s fanciful but not warped.”
Thorn asked, “And she looked young? It’s a shame she can’t get that for herself, for real, but only out of a pen.”
“It took her hours to program the body,” Eleven Jane explained. “Longer than it took to make the costume. And she looked stunning! Her eyes were wide and bright. Her hair was in a soft black roll just as she wears it up, now.”
He had to chuckle, “Yeah, she is good at making herself better than she is.”
Eleven Jane asked, “What would you pretend to be, if you could?”
He looked back down at himself, and shrugged. “Like you, I’m put together well enough to not bother with that kind of a thing of having to use my imagination or be creative. Beautiful people don’t have to learn that skill. You can’t tell me you’d ever change your image. You’re a very beautiful example of woman.”
Eleven Jane frowned down on him. “Not enough to keep you playing for long.”
He shrugged again, this time apologetically. “I’m not used to any of this. Don’t take it personally. You are a beautiful example of a human, of a woman, and everybody knows it. Maybe we can all go swimming again… for real.”
She vanished once more. “Heal fast. Thanks for letting me play.”
He closed his eyes, utterly baffled. He hadn’t felt at all played with and now felt all the worse for it. “Everything is damn illusion.”
When his foot was finished enough for it to leave the fishtank, Malbri Three slowly pushed Thorn in a wheelchair across the bridge. The bridge was crowded with people, with the ban on Metroplex lifted, since there would soon be little of it left. So a hippisticks looting parade carted vital supplies from the city to their own lockers.
“Dude, I bet you’re glad to be out and about.”
Thorn waved his arms to try and shoo people out of his way. “I didn’t mind being alone, thinking. It gave me a lot of time to think.”
“What did you think about?”
“I thought a lot about thinking. I thought a lot about where thoughts really come from, for a clone like me.”
“You’re real.”
“I am, now that I left the prison. I’m sure of that. I know that the memories I have since then are real and all mine; what freedom probably really is, the death of friends, friends leaving, new people, everything changing.”
Malbri Three nodded, now lost in his own thoughts. “Childhood memories seem so unreal, anyway, for most everybody. It’s the feelings that stick with us the most, whether we realize it or not. We know we’re dumb and stupid at such a small age but we hold on to the feelings from way back then as if they are always so smart.”
They left the bridge and hit the stretch of fake green lawn to see the progress at the cave where the hippistick camp had been taken down and packed away. “It’s all gone,” Thorn said of the empty hippistick space when they entered it. “It looks so weird to see everything all gone. All your tents and things could still be damaged, you know, even in storage. You might want to change your mind about all this. Smashing the whole place up could smash up your stuff too.”
Malbri Three nodded in acceptance. If he was worried he wouldn’t show it. “I think we have it packed up pretty good but then you never know what’ll really happen. We didn’t before. We don’t know. Dude, we never will. You gotta roll with the punches.” He laughed. “Roll with it when it rolls!”
“Everybody could be left with nothing at all. Why go through with this? Stop it and just let things be the way they’ve been. Don’t change everything so fast. I’m worried now that you’ll destroy a lot more than you intend to.”
Malbri Three said, “Eleven Jane already set this up with the union rebels a long time ago. It’s all already in place. It would be more work to undo it.”
“But the union rebels are all gone.”
“We hope. Anyway, the rockets outside that spin this rock were physically turned so it would be a lot of work to go out again and undo the sabotage, and there aren’t enough of us hippisticks who have training with spacewalks. We couldn’t have done this without the rebel union, at all. The firing is already programmed and reprogrammed to prevent undoing.”
Thorn said, “Of course it can be undone.”
Malbri Three nodded. “You’re right but it’ll take more work than we have time for now.”
“When will it happen? You must tell me!”
“That’s a secret, even from us. That way the computers can’t all be jammed at that time. And you can’t jam the computers for all time, they hate that so much they don’t put up with it and they bounce back in no time. If you wanted to reset the gravity rockets and save the asteroid all by yourself then you wouldn’t even know how to find them out there. And then how would you know how to readjust them without making it worse? So give in to it and just consider all this that’s going to happen as destiny. It’s now fate. It’s better to spend our time sacking what supplies we can from that evil union city before they’re all smashed and wasted.”
“So yesterday it wasn’t okay to go into the evil city but today it is?”
Malbri Three nodded, unapologetically. “We’re righteous and we’re sincere and we’re going to destroy the evil world to purify it. But we’re not idiot extremists.”
Thorn looked around. “Have you seen Nuremburg lately?”
“Nope. That little dude comes and goes. He is going to grow up to look a lot like you, isn’t he?”
“I feel like he’s my lost son. I see him and I feel like he’s mine even though he isn’t really at all. Make sure Nuremburg is with you all and is safe when you do your great sabotage.”
Eleven Jane stepped out of the cave wearing the same yellow pajamas she was wearing when she was a flirting hologram. Thorn asked, “Are you here for real?”
“Yes.” She smiled big. “I’m sooooo ready for the apocalypse, now, how about you?”
“You’re not afraid?”
She put her hands on her hips. “Afraid? Afraid of death out in space? I’ll not live here in fear. Cowards die so many times before their actual deaths.”
He gestured to the lake. “One last swim?”
She looked repulsed toward the black ripples beyond the red lit layers of steam. “In that?”
“Don’t you do your ritual to the ocean of space time cosmos anymore?”
She nodded. “Sure, we just don’t do it anywhere near that water.”
Thorn asked, “Will this be the last time I ever see you?”
“Why would you say that?”
He felt tears sting in his eyes. “I dunno.”
“Maybe. Anytime is always maybe the last time. The fates are sometimes sooooo cruel.” She walked up to him, bent over the wheelchair and gave him a tiny dry kiss on the cheek. “For just in case.”
He put his hand on his cheek—it tickled so much. She walked back into the cave and was gone.
Malbri Three pushed him across the bridge toward the tall statue of the union worker, reciting, “Why, man, Caesar doth bestride the narrow world like a colossus, and we petty men walk under his huge legs, and peep about to find ourselves dishonorable graves. Men at some time are masters of their fates. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.”
Thorn asked, “What was that?”
“Dude, sometimes when things get really heavy I just fall back on a bit of Shakespeare. I’m pretty sure that was Shakespeare.”
“Your library might be all smashed up for all time. The union library, too!”
“So I better remember all I can now.”
Sitting high up on a balcony at the union hall, Thorn joyfully kicked both his feet over the edge, amused at how the new foot really did look newer than the old one. He rubbed at a callous on the old foot and then looked down again to watch the
few dozen union members preparing a tall platform. A Madam Wintermirror statue would stand on it in the midst of a plaza fountain. “You’re not going to Earth?” he finally called down to them.
“We’re staying,” one yelled back up. “We’re going to try and live forever on our own.”
“How?”
“We’re cannibalizing the car’s memories for our own permanent memory storage. Didn’t you give us that idea? It might work.”
Thorn smiled, impressed. “So, you’re going to take a stab at cloning yourselves after all, for real, really. Aren’t you afraid of its shortcomings, and more urgently, what the hippisticks are going to do to this place?”
“We’ll broach ourselves down good. We won’t actually put up our statue until it’s all over with. We wouldn’t want anything to happen to all our hard work, and she deserves great honor. But this platform for this statue should be able to tip upside-down with everything and not break.”
Thorn asked, “Do the car computers work well?”
“Rust no!” a woman complained. “They don’t like to be cannibalized. We only have five cars pulled apart so far. It’s taken this long just to chase them and pin that many down.”
He laughed at them. “I didn’t realize cars had a sense of self preservation.”
The man yelled up to him, “Maybe it’s part of their accident avoidance senses. Maybe to them to be cannibalized is to be crashed. And a crash is probably a car’s worse nightmare.”
Another man added, “Who knows what a car really thinks.”
Thorn asked, “How long will it take to grow a statue?”
The woman in charge explained, “We’ll have a great statue of Madam Wintermirror up here in a few weeks after the spin. We’ll make her twice her size. It’ll look like religion!”
Thorn asked, “You can do that with her dots? Make a really big statue?”
“The only thing we can’t do is clone the same person back since we didn’t record her mind for posterity. But we’ll make sure that doesn’t happen to us.”
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