by Logan Hunder
“I am only legally permitted to sell specimens modelled after individuals old enough for their likeness to be in the public domain,” she responded, treating it like any other question.
“Ah. There’s so many though! Have you . . . ?”
“All of them.” Pia responded before he had finished.
“Wow . . .”
None of them seemed inherently unhappy, yet there was an unshakeable dystopian feel that came from seeing them packed like sardines in a Swedish sweatshop. In spite of their tight quarters, they worked together with a synchronicity as perfect as the machines. Such behaviour was the only hint of uncanny valley in their makeup. Well, that and the ridiculous smiles they wore, in spite of engaging in zero social interaction with one another.
From far up ahead, just around the bend, bits of familiar territory began to pop up. At no point in the tour did any of the frosted-glass room partitions or wall-embedded foliage seem copied or pasted from other parts of the facility; therefore, it seemed rational to assume they were nearly back where they had started. Feeling an impending conclusion, Cox couldn’t help but glance around in search of a gift shop.
“Well I gotta say, Pia, this place is real—”
“Quiet,” she said quickly. The proprietor’s gaze was transfixed seemingly on a large, suspicious shrub in a corner, not unlike any of the others that populated the halls of her kingdom. “Something is not right.”
“Do you want me to shoot it?!” The bodyguard offered, drawing the laser rifle from his back. “I can shoot it.”
“Willy!” His captain hissed. “You don’t even know what you’re offering to shoot at.”
“Oh . . . but, like . . . safety first?”
“You wanna be safe by blindly shooting at something?!”
“It’s just the stun gun from the prison, dude.”
“I said ‘Quiet!’” Pia reiterated.
The trio gazed at the workplace garnish as if expecting it to explode. Willy slowly raised his weapon up, stopping when Cox put a hand out and slowly pushed it back down. The bush didn’t so much as rustle. Any subtle sounds that may have been emanating from it were drowned out by the bustling footsteps from adjacent rooms and the occasional distant cry of “IT’S ALIVE! IT’S ALIVE!!” which could not possibly still be original by this point. Willy cleared his throat.
“We’re all looking at that leafy thing, right? Or am I missing something?”
“Yes, we are looking at my croton.”
“It’s nice! Goes really good with that corner.”
“It is not supposed to be in that corner. Somebody has moved it.”
With such a heinous crime having been committed, the group was understandably on edge. Only the vilest of psychopaths could bring themselves to disturb such an obviously well-tended ecosystem of a workplace. With such an act already under their belt, there was no telling what they would escalate to next.
Pia walked over to the shrub and picked it up to set things right. As soon as it was moved, the limp body of a young Joseph Stalin spilled onto the floor. His eyes were every bit as glazed as they were in life, and his time in the corner only seemed to strengthen the messy allure of his hair. However, the sizzling blaster shot in the unit’s chest wasn’t that attractive, except maybe to a niche market that had some issues to work through.
“Oh my GOD!” Cox exclaimed, recoiling in tandem with everyone else. “Is it bad that I kinda feel bad for him? I mean ’cause, y’know, he’s not the real one, but still . . .”
18.
SHOT THROUGH
THE HEART, BUT
WHO’S TO BLAME?
SECURITY AT CASA DE Pia was abysmally low for a location that could be easily confused for the Oscars or Grammys or a Whole Foods. The choice to have only one way in or out may have been a defendable design, but the funny thing about easily secured exits was the fact that they weren’t worth much if left completely unmanned. Perhaps history may have made it seem unnecessary. Like the island homes of yesteryear, a space-based place was only accessible to either the well-funded or admirably tenacious. Such seclusion understandably limited outsider knowledge of a building’s contents and dissuaded any in the know from making attempts upon procuring them. Of course, it also made the collection of one’s mail into a tremendous nuisance. For all the leaps and bounds made by a spacefaring society, a reliable address system still had not been formulated to guarantee the right mail could be delivered to the right station. Most opted for the simple PO box solution; but Pia had become quite frustrated with hers in recent years as it became stuffed more and more often with a frankly alarming amount of alimony checks meant for somebody with a similar name who lived on Earth.
Should the isolation defence be circumvented and foreign parties gain access to the lab, they would quickly find the place to be an easy case. Not much of readily apparent value was kicking around, but unless they bumped into the overseer herself, they could look for as long as they pleased. The only real obstacle was the odd attempted sexual advance from the suspiciously pretty staff members milling around. Despite their otherwise-unflappable professionalism, they valued the personal space of their guests about as much as a cat did.
But this wasn’t Kim’s first ballgame. Donald and Whisper’s stealth skills, by comparison, were fairly lackluster. Fortunately for them, they had no responsibility besides to follow along behind her without banging pots and pans together.
If the co-captain had one drawback as an infiltrator, it would probably be her lack of patience. The two decoys were barely out of eyeshot with their charge before she bolted out of the ship, Glock in hand, and set to work. The gun might as well have been a flashlight with the way it was waved about during the searching. Like with many things, prior knowledge would have eased the process greatly; had they known about the surveillance shortcomings, it would have saved them a lot of crouching under windowsills and skipped heartbeats every time footsteps went by.
“I still don’t know why you guys wanted to come,” Kim informed the floor as she bear-crawled along a wall. “This isn’t exactly a three-man job.”
“Well it was go with you, go with Cox, or stay with the ship,” Donald explained as he walked behind her, perfectly upright. “I didn’t wanna come at all, but since I’m here, I figured I may as well stay with the gun.”
“Chances of needing the gun would be a lot smaller if you would make any attempt whatsoever to hide yourself.”
“There’s no point. If we get caught, it’s going to be by a security guard who’s already in the hallway. No scientist is going to care if they see some random person out in the hall. They’re probably not even looking out the window; they’re working.”
“You know that from your years of being a scientist, do ya?” Donald stopped in the middle of the hallway.
“I went to SIT, dammit!” He spat at her amid his foot stomping. “Just because I didn’t graduate, and am stuck working this shitty job for you people, it doesn’t mean I’m a burnout loser who makes things up to try and hide my failures.”
His voice was so loud it startled Kim into an about-face, which wasn’t easy to do on her hands and knees. Any wit stored for his response was sapped by the outburst. Being the sassiest person in the room may have been important to her, but not enough so to supersede her own well-being.
“Calm down!” She implored with an open hand. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Now is the wrong time to be bugging you. Just, can you try and keep your voice down at least?”
A grunt was all the acknowledgement she got, but it was enough to earn her a slump against the wall and irritated sigh. As the oldest member of the group, and the only one putting forth the requisite effort to contort into discomfort for stealth’s sake, even she was not immune to the occasional “kids these days” moment.
“Do I even wanna know what your excuse is?” She asked Whisper with a raised eyebrow.
The pilot had been rather distracted by whatever she happened to be viewing through the window. With h
ands on the sill and head raised just high enough to peep through, she briefly took up the mantle of “party member who most resembles a burglar.” Kim’s question seemed to snap her out of an enthralment.
“Are you crazy!? There’s no way I was gonna stay on the ship!” She exclaimed. Her eyes returned to the window. “I’ve always wanted one of these!”
The declaration was enough to stupefy not only Kim, but Donald as well. Both peered a second time through the window and scanned around. Nothing but white coats squirting liquids through oversized eye droppers and conducting some sort of biological experimenting in petri dishes. Kim ducked her head back down quickly, but, as was previously established, Donald kept on staring due to having no fear of being discovered.
“ . . . wanted one of what?” He asked, nose still against the glass.
“Them.”
The brief response elicited vacant expressions from her companions. Owning another human being, while not an unheard-of concept, was still a very peculiar desire in these times. Kim had seen it before in some of the well-to-do lowlifes found in her previous line of work. However, to hear it come from a teenaged entry-level worker was certainly a new one . . . especially when their first choice is a gainfully employed and well-educated man at least twenty years their senior.
Whisper, sensing the impending loss of her audience, huffed and pulled her phone—a word that had long stopped meaning “telephonic device”—from her pocket. After some quick fiddling, she handed it to her coworker and resumed salivating.
“Is this an ad?” Donald asked. He took the device and examined it. “Pia Dickinson: the Who—uh, the . . . Whoreticulturist . . . ?”
“What?” Kim grabbed the phone from his hand. “‘Craft the perfect companion. Suited to any need.’ What the hell are they?”
“Real men.” The pilot answered flatly. “That’ll actually do what you tell them and don’t have any stupid interests you have to pretend to care about. Plus, they’re ssssoooooo hoooooooooottt . . . Look at them. They’re literally perfect.”
“So by ‘real men’ you mean not real at all,” Kim said as she shook her head. “That’s pathetic. Who would trade having someone who actually loves you for some . . . thing that only wants you because it’s programmed to?”
Whisper waved her off.
“It’s the same thing. Who cares why somebody loves you; everything we do is just for selfish reasons anyway. So why get somebody lame when you can have somebody perfect?”
“Because we’re people! We’re all lame people living our lame lives trying to meet someone who makes us feel less lame. If you go shack up with some perfect being, then all they’re going to do is remind you how lame you are by just existing.” This new topic wrested Donald’s interest away from whatever fascinating room contents held it until now.
“That’s why you’re with Cox?” He asked, leaning against the wall. “He makes you feel less ‘lame?’ Whisper was saying you used to be a hitman, or woman, or something. How does hanging out with that guy make you feel less lame?”
“Excuse you. I don’t agree with all my husband’s philosophies, but I can guarantee you that murdering people—while not as damaging to your psyche as some would have you believe—is still neither cool or fulfilling.”
“Uhhh . . . you gotta admit, it’s kinda cool.”
“Okay, fine, it’s kind of cool. Sometimes. When you know they’re a big shot or something. But that pretty much never happens. The vast majority of the time you’re just killing lowlifes who are no better or worse than the person paying you to do it.”
The mere act of thinking back on her old mess of a life caused her to grow restless. Being midway through a mission behind enemy lines during such recollections offered no help, either. Hoping to cut things short and get back to business, she hopped to her feet and carried on without an invite to the others. Their instantaneous pursuit showed it wasn’t necessary.
Donald was the first to catch up, already gasping a little from the twelve-foot jog.
“If you hated it so much, then why did you do it back then?”
“Not all of us had the opportunity to go fail in university.”
“I DIDN’T FAIL! I was expelled because my stupid classmate roped me into—”
The raving faded into a dull roar when Kim sidestepped into the first empty room they had come across. While it had tables and chairs, the large box-shaped machines against a far wall lined with glass jars containing pink goo gave off the impression it wasn’t a break room. However, nowhere among the timers, thermometers, and wall projections full of scientific gobbledygook was the giant vat of acid they sought.
Donald and Whisper came bumbling in shortly thereafter. “Yeah, yeah. I know you don’t like your job either,” Donald said to Whisper, continuing a conversation from out in the hall. “But that’s because you don’t like the captain. I’m just saying if she found her actual work to be so soul-crushing, I just wanted to know why she did it.”
“I was a waitress for a long time too, you know!” Kim seethed. “Can’t we talk about that?”
“Uh, okay . . . did anything interesting ever happen?”
“Not really,” she admitted as she rifled the cupboards, checking the labels on each bottle. “That is where I met Tim, though.”
“Boring,” Whisper grumbled.
“He was getting beaten up by three guys behind the nightclub I worked at.”
“ . . . Less boring.”
“Turned out they were trying to shake down the mobster who owned the place and thought it was him because he kept handing out free drinks to people.”
“Oh. Boring again.”
“Anyway, long story short, I broke the closest one’s jaw with a metal serving tray, and the other two hoofed it before I could start on ’em.” She closed the final cupboard and turned around.
“There’s nothing in here; we need to keep moving.”
Donald’s interest no longer seemed to lay in the mission. If it ever did.
“You sound like you were a lot less lame when you weren’t with him.”
With a smirk on her lips and a crinkle in her brow, Kim opened the door back into the hall and gestured accordingly.
“Oh, don’t worry, I can still do everything I could do back then.”
The amount of care taken towards discretion had been on a steady decline since they began. By this point in their excursion, nearly all precautions taken to avoid detection had been completely forgone. A casual glance through a window to make sure the room wasn’t full of people was the only action taken before whipping open the door and starting the process over.
“You know what I mean, though,” Donald revived the conversation.
“I do. But I didn’t say we find people to make us less lame—I’m getting really sick of that word now—I said we try and find someone who makes us feel less . . . broken.”
Whisper scoffed.
“Whatever. It’s not like these guys can’t do that.”
“How could they?!” Kim shook her head. “When you’re at your lowest point and some lab-grown Adonis bends down and says they love you anyway . . . the first thing you’re going to think about is how they’re perfect with or without you and only saying that because they’re programmed to. I’m sure this is starting to sound like just a bunch of hippy bullshit, but there’s no way to imitate the feeling you get when you know someone loves you even when they have no reason to. It’s the only thing I’ve ever found in my life that somehow knocks you on your ass while lifting you higher than you’ve ever been lifted.”
An impassioned motivational speaker she was not. So it would have been arrogant to assume her words were so powerful they humbled her audience into quietude. The ensuing silence that followed could just as easily have been awkwardness from her dumping a heap of heaviness on things. Once the feels worm their way inside a conversation, the only ways to proceed are to double down and commit or to back right off. Sure enough, both outcomes were represented in the r
oom. Donald busied himself with rifling through medicine cabinets like a teenager looking to get high, while Whisper, the actual teenager, had abandoned the pretend searching she had been pantomiming. For the first time, all traces of derision or sarcasm were absent when she addressed Kim on the subject. She actually addressed the floor, but it was presumably for Kim’s ears. “When . . . did you know that he loved you . . . ?”
Now it was Kim’s turn to shy off to a cupboard with mild embarrassment. As she busied herself with the contents, she mulled over the question. With everything they had covered so far, it was a bit late to back out and just start ignoring questions.
“It’s kinda dark; I’m just warning you.” She admitted, tossing aside a bottle of formaldehyde. “We had been dating for about six or seven months. I’ve never been one who had many friends, but the rare time I did tell someone how he proposed, I would always say he took me down to Earth and found a deserted island where we spent the weekend. What actually happened was that I had gotten pregnant.”
She cleared her throat to smooth out any sneaky cracks in her voice that were starting to form.
“I was told I would never be able to have kids, so I didn’t believe it at first. But it was true. He proposed right there outside the women’s clinic before we’d even gotten back to the ship. I mean, I did love him, so I said yes. But I knew he only did it because it’s . . . y’know . . . a guy like him would figure it’s the ‘right thing to do.’ And then, not even twenty-four hours later, I lost it. Guess maybe those doctors and their years of medical training knew what they were talking about when they said kids weren’t in my cards. I was terrified to tell him, obviously, ‘cause why the hell would he stick around now, right? But I did. I . . . I did it. Told him all of it; figured he’d break off everything right there. But he didn’t. The idiot didn’t even flinch. I’ll never forget, he just looked down at me and said ‘I don’t care if we have a baby now, or later, or never. I just know that I don’t want it to be with anyone besides you.’” Slamming the now-empty cupboard shut, she cleared her throat. “After that, he really did take me down to a deserted island. So that was nice.”