by Mark Leigh
‘I know’, Taylor said. ‘I believe you’.
Leaning forward, now confident that Taylor wasn’t going to hit him, Dick posed the question he’d been absolutely dying to ask.
‘Does anyone else know about the fact that she’s… er, well, you know, a…’
Taylor interrupted Dick to save him the embarrassment of saying something like ‘mechanical’, ‘not human’ or ‘a fucking robot’.
‘No. No one knows the truth. You’ve probably guessed that Alice was part of Project Gladstone but I couldn’t say anything when you told us you were working on it’.
‘Did you work on the project?’, Dick enquired.
‘In a sort of way’, answered Taylor.
‘Did you help to design them?’. Dick was intrigued.
‘Let’s just say that some of my skills were utilised. I’ve got an electronic engineering background, but I can’t tell you any more. Alice was one of the last working prototypes. She never went out in the field and was supposed to have been scrapped after final testing’. Dick was still slightly stunned as Taylor continued his revelation. ‘With the help of another resistance member I managed to ‘rescue’ Alice and de-activate certain parts of her programming. She was given a new identity like you and well, here she is, ostensibly an ordinary member of society but a key member of the Resistance. The Party has no idea she still exists’.
‘Couldn’t you have re-programmed her to be totally faithful to you?’, Dick asked, quite insensitively.
‘I wish I could’, Taylor replied. ‘But I don’t have the necessary skills. Changing her prime directive was one thing, but altering the rest of her behaviour is beyond my abilities’.
‘Does she know that she’s… er, well, you know, a…’
Taylor cut him short again. ‘Yes. It’s part of her programming. She has to know what she really is in order that she understands the importance of concealing the truth from anyone. Plus, of course, if you found a serial number imprinted on your inner thigh, it would only get you wondering wouldn’t it?’
‘Until I saw that’, Dick explained, ‘I had absolutely no idea at all. I didn’t even realise when she was almost naked. She’s a perfect replica. There are some people I’ve known who are, well, less human than her’.
‘I know. The realism is uncanny, isn’t it? But there was one aspect of the design and engineering that even the best technological brains in the Party couldn’t overcome. One thing they had to conceal’.
Dick threw Taylor one of his puzzled expressions.
‘The smell. The hydraulic fluid necessary for their operation has a characteristic and unusual smell. You must have noticed that from the demonstration of Jack’.
Dick thought back and remembered that Jack and the robot harlots built for the demonstration shared a very odd odour. ‘That’s right! I mentioned it to one of the technicians who said that when Jack was sent out into the field, that smell would be masked by a strong cologne’.
‘That’s why Alice wears her distinctive perfume’, Taylor explained. ‘To mask the oil’.
Dick smiled. He’d been aware of her alluring perfume from the first time she appeared in his trailer. If only he knew then the real reason she wore it. He nodded and then asked Taylor with an astonishing amount of insensitivity, ‘What’s it like fucking a machine?’
This time Taylor did punch Dick in the face.
CHAPTER 23
Sitting in the lounge a short time later with his colleagues Dick discretely nursed his bruised jaw. As relationships with your boss went, he wasn’t doing so well. So far in their brief relationship Taylor had kneed Dick in the groin and punched him in the face, but if Taylor harboured a deep-seated feeling of seething resentment towards Dick then this was currently well-concealed. He was as civil and as friendly as usual. Likewise, if Alice had been distressed about what had taken place earlier on the library table then she certainly didn’t show it.
The three of them, Edward and Susan were discussing the extraordinary news of the capture and likely execution of Benjamin Faraday. Taylor vehemently denied that Benjamin had been a member of the Resistance and that his arrest was as much of a surprise to him as it had been to Dick. By the strengths of his protests and those of his colleagues Dick was starting to believe that Taylor might actually be telling the truth. Taylor, meanwhile, was angry with himself that Benjamin’s anti-Party sentiment had not come to his attention earlier – and for not recruiting him. He wondered how many other people like Benjamin had slipped through the net; valuable additional members the Resistance so dearly needed. This was being discussed when, in an extraordinary coincidence, Grace rushed into the room with a copy of the London Evening Telegraph in her hand and an excited look on her face.
‘I think we might have found a potential new member!’, she said eagerly. ‘Look!’
Grace pointed energetically at the open paper. Dick joined Taylor, Alice, Susan and Edward in staring at the page.
‘New Indian tiger for London Zoological Gardens?’ Dick asked, pondering a) why they would recruit a tiger and b) how they would train it to such a degree that it would be useful to the Resistance, let alone cure it of its innate man-eating instincts.
‘No!’, Grace, exclaimed, pointing excitedly to the page again.
Dick tried to follow her finger but this was difficult as she was waving it about so frantically.
‘New Sewerage System for Manchester?’ If Dick had doubts about recruiting a tiger then enlisting the help of a sewage system made absolutely no sense whatsoever. Dick thought the whole notion was fraught with impracticalities, starting with the fact that they would need an unfeasibly large volume of perfume to hide its stench. Dick’s colleagues however, didn’t share his confusion.
‘Well spotted Grace’, Taylor said. ‘This is definitely worth investigating further’.
‘What an odd story!’ added Alice, which made Dick even more determined to find out what all the fuss was about.
‘What is it?’, asked Dick, the frustration evident in his voice.
‘This!’. Susan picked up the paper and thrust it in Dick’s face. She read out the headline of a very small story sandwiched between ‘New bandstand for Kensington Gardens’ and something equally un-newsworthy about a new iron ore smelting process.
‘Man Arrested For Molestation of Statue’.
Dick took the paper and scanned the story. According to the article a man had been arrested for being intoxicated and trying to have sexual relations with a statue of Queen Victoria in Regents Park.
‘So?’. Dick handed the paper back to Susan. Apart from a very slight comedic value in the story and a weak pun about ‘statutory rape’, he couldn’t see what all the fuss was about.
‘So? So!’ said Taylor. ‘This is a great opportunity! Someone displaying anti-Party sentiments’.
‘What, being drunk?’, Dick asked.
‘No, being sexually repressed. Trying to have sex with a statue!’, Susan explained.
Dick still thought they were placing too much importance on the story. ‘The man was drunk and drunk people do lots of odd things’, he said. They’re sick in doorways, they start fights and they marry people they shouldn’t in Las Vegas. Just because he was humping a statue doesn’t mean anything!’
Taylor smiled. ‘But it does, Dick. You see the monthly injections are designed to suppress sexual desires, whether conscious or subconscious. The dosage is such that this sort of behaviour should not take place. How it even got reported is another matter. You can be certain that the story will be pulled from a later edition’.
‘What it means’, Susan explained, ‘Is that the man who did this had latent desires that even the injections can’t quash. All the alcohol did was temporarily allow these dormant feelings to rise to the surface’.
‘Think of it as a catalyst’, added Alice.
It was Edward’s turn to support this assumption. ‘We’ve seen it before Dick, the same sort of behaviour. Trust us. This man is a good candidate to
join the Resistance’.
Dick looked at the four of them, all smug and self-satisfied in their suppositions. To him the man was clearly pissed. Nothing more and nothing less. If he’d been caught molesting a statue of Scarlett Johansson then there might be something in what they were saying, but it could only be intoxication, pure and simple, to make someone fake sex with a statue of the ugliest queen ever (and that includes Queen Dorete of Denmark, the wife of Eric VII, who had warts and a small moustache). It was one thing he thought, to use Victoria’s image for private arousal, but trying to have sex with her statue in public was definitely not the action of a sober man. As far as this newspaper article went, Dick felt his colleagues were reading far too much into it.
‘I’ve done some research and you know the most amazing thing about this story?’ said Grace.
‘This ordinary story about a drunk man?’
Grace ignored Dick’s sarcasm and dropped her bombshell. ‘He is a low-ranking member of the Party!’.
Taylor’s pipe dropped from his mouth. If Edward, Alice and Susan had been smoking pipes, then theirs too would also have fallen out in the exact same way. But they weren’t, so they just looked shocked instead.
Grace continued. ‘Out of interest I crossed referenced his name with our intelligence records and sure enough, found a match. He’s called David Parnell. He’s an assistant to the assistant under-secretary to the deputy joint executive in charge of canal digging!’
Dick was suffering from SUS, Severe Underwhelment Syndrome, a condition and a term he’d just invented but which seemed more than appropriate for this moment.
Taylor displayed an almost orgasmic level of excitement. ‘Don’t you see?’, he asked, ‘This is a man who has displayed anti-Party behaviour and who is actually a member of the Party. Recruiting him will be such a coup!’.
‘Sure, if you want to find out all the dirt on canal digging!’, Dick added with an equal degree of cynicism and unhelpfulness, and a smug feeling about his word-play.
‘It doesn’t matter’, Taylor continued. ‘However minor his role, he’s a member of the Party and would be able to give us names, positions, news, rumours… anything like that is priceless’.
Edward concurred. ‘That sort of information, even if it’s seemingly inconsequential, helps complete our picture of the Party’.
‘Whatever’. Dick shrugged, still not convinced.
Taylor, Edward, Susan and Grace left the room in a high state of excitement to double check the records, leaving Alice and Dick alone.
‘You look jealous’, Alice said.
Dick frowned. ‘Me? Why?’
‘This new man, David Parnell. If we manage to recruit him he could provide invaluable information. Are you worried we might discover he’s actually more useful to the Resistance than you?’
Alice, apart from having full, firm breasts and the most squeezable ass Dick had seen in a long, long time had obviously been programmed with the kind of logic circuits to give her a woman’s intuition. He laughed out loud, the sort of false laugh that usually means you’re covering up for some sort of insecurity.
‘Me? Jealous? Come on!’ said Dick as convincingly as he could.
‘Why not?’ pressed Alice. ‘You told me before that you were jealous of Taylor and I. If envy is a weakness then it’s not so unbelievable that you’d be jealous about someone who might usurp your place and your role in the Resistance, is it?’
Dick laughed out loud again. More of a ‘guffaw’ this time, and just as unconvincing. Deep down Dick knew she could have a point. And even deeper down he knew she was right.
‘That’s crazy’, he said. ‘I think the whole idea of this guy making some anti-Party demonstration is ridiculous however in the unlikely event he is what you all claim, then that’s great. I’d welcome him with open arms — in a brotherly way of course, not as some precursor to any form of man-love that might lead to naked wrestling, touching willies or sodomy’. Alice was now staring at him. Dick shrugged and continued. ‘Sure I’d welcome him here. Any enemy of the Party is a friend of mine’.
‘As you say, Mr. Longg. As you say’. With that, an unconvinced Alice left the room, leaving Dick alone with his thoughts and a teeny weeny bit of jealously.
‘Anyway’, Dick said under his breath in an effort to comfort himself, ‘I bet he’s got a really small penis’.
Sure enough, that news story had disappeared from the later edition of the paper, giving credence to Taylor’s assumptions. Further painstaking research conducted the next day by Humphrey established that David Parnell had been arrested and taken to West End Central police station for questioning. Taylor thought that while there was a very small chance that the Party would make David Parnell ‘disappear’, it was far more likely that he’d be fined, demoted – and given an extra dose of chemical suppressants. Because the Resistance now knew where he worked, it was an easy enough task for one of the members to follow him home one night and note his address.
Everything moved very quickly after that. The same source in the Resistance who supplied Dick’s entire fake back-story manage to access David Parnell’s permanent record. This contained details of a series of minor incidents going back over several years that, when viewed in isolation, were just that; minor incidents: vandalism, drunken behaviour and public disorder. Nothing that demonstrated any real degree of dissent, but which definitely did hint at someone dissatisfied with the status quo. Under Taylor’s direction David Parnell was placed under detailed surveillance. Further investigations failed to throw up any questions or issues about his legitimacy or sincerity, and verified Taylor’s original assumption that he was a good potential resistance member. That being the case, plans were made to contact him.
- - o O o – -
At the next meeting Taylor updated everyone on the process to recruit Parnell.
‘Don’t you think you’re moving a little too fast?’, Dick enquired. ‘I thought you said that the recruiting procedure for new members took months. You said you had to be overwhelmingly confident that the prospect was entirely safe to introduce’.
‘You’re right’, Taylor admitted, ‘But we’re extremely concerned about this secret weapon that the Party are developing. Each day that passes is a day they’re closer to using it’.
‘But we’re not sure about the weapon. It’s still just a rumour isn’t it?’, Dick enquired.
‘It is, but a very strong rumour, and one from several different sources. That makes it a rumour we can’t afford to ignore’.
‘Just because you haven’t uncovered any definite proof about it Mr. Longg, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist’. Humphrey added. There were murmurs of agreement within the room. Dick recoiled from the pointed criticism.
‘Have faith. Taylor has weighed up the situation and he knows what he’s doing. There are sufficient precautions in place to safeguard our identities and location’. This was Alice’s turn to add support to her lover and she did it with a look that said, ‘You were wrong about Mr. Parnell and you’re still jealous of him’. It was also a look that said, ‘And when he gets here I’m going to have really good sex with him’ — but then Dick thought that maybe he was reading a little too much into her look.
When it was Dick’s turn to report on developments he told his resistance colleagues that Jack had so far located and dispatched eleven of the rogue harlots. In his job at the Ministry he continued to seed all variety of rumours about the murders including fake confessional letters from the killer in which he signs his name Jack. All these reports were being lapped up by the public which still demonstrated an unquenchable desire for all things associated with the killings. In addition to these news stories papers were devising their own crowd-pleasing features like ‘The Ripper Diet’, ‘Are YOU a Prostitute?’ personality tests and even ‘Jack the Ripper Bingo’. Dick even planted a few reports that said that Jack had killed prostitutes and their clients in the same bloody brutal attacks (the men, stories claimed, had been found with their seve
red penises in their own mouths). Discouraging women from becoming prostitutes was the key objective, but putting men off visiting them was equally important.
The Party didn’t mind the fact that conflicting stories confused the police and ultimately wasted their time. The intention of these reports was to make sure everyone got the message that prostitution, as the Party had always claimed, was a ‘great social evil’. Of that, after Dick’s sustained media campaign, there was absolutely no doubt.
- - o O o - -
Although Dick was kept busy, his days at the Ministry had become rather routine. The Ripper business would continue until all the robot prostitutes had been killed, and then maybe a little longer. (At his most cynical and manipulative, Dick was toying with the idea of a moral ending to Jack’s reign of terror; having him killed off in a fight to the death by a god-fearing, Party-supporting, non-masturbating, happily-married man — that sort of thing). Each day he monitored transcripts of the television news, studied press cuttings, planned and implemented future activity and briefed Vera on his activity. Just when he felt he’d been forgotten and wouldn’t receive any more recognition for the excellent work he was doing, he got the call. As calls went this one was very, very welcome, and in fact featured in Dick’s Top Three Calls Of All Time.
The first was the time he learned he was being inducted into the Pornography Hall of Fame, having his penis imprinted for perpetuity in cement outside a seedy cinema off Hollywood Boulevard. The second of the top three calls was the time he was told he would be appearing on the cover of Newsweek as ‘The Man With The Golden Cock’ (this was a feature on his immense wealth and not an incident involving a pet rooster and a can of spray paint). This latest Top Call came when Dick was in the middle of charting week-on-week newspaper coverage.