My head felt like someone was pounding an inch-thick spike through my skull, as though someone had stabbed a dagger into my brain, and the bastard was using it to pry the lobes apart.
“What was that?” Cutter asked. “What was your message?”
“Not my message, asshole. Tell him Ray Freeman said that.”
I said those words, and the world went dark.
CHAPTER
THIRTEEN
I remembered the conversation I had with Don Cutter, but the memory seemed far away, like a dream; and, like a remembered dream, it felt surreal and unlikely. I could not recall how the conversation began or how it ended. What mostly came back was the emotion I felt, the anger and the frustration. Try as I might, I could not remember what he might have said to make me so furious.
As I tried to work that out, it occurred to me that I did not know where I was. Well, I was in a bed. Not a bed, a cot, a thin mattress stretched over a metal rack.
The moment I woke up, I knew I was alone in a cell. I knew prison cells when I saw them. I’d spent time in a few. I recognized the featureless metal walls and the bright light that shone down from the ceiling.
Wondering if I had been beaten or drugged, I sat up. My body responded, and I felt no pain. Pain. Pain? I remembered pain so sharp it felt like my head would split open as I spoke with Cutter. Was it a dream?
I never experienced pain in my dreams. If I’d felt that much pain in a dream, it would have woken me.
I knew who I was—Wayson Harris. I knew what I was—a Liberator, a Marine.
I stood and walked the eight feet from my rack to the door.
This was a civilian prison, which meant it was a lot more comfortable than a brig. I had a modicum of privacy. The cell had a door and walls instead of bars or an electrical-containment field, but there must have been cameras in the cell. I could not see the people watching me, but they could see me as clearly as if the walls were made of glass.
The cell was designed for isolation and had no windows. Isolation was the universal solvent of torture techniques. A slow process of mental erosion that leaves the physical intact, isolation will wear anybody down given sufficient time to do its work.
The room had a cot, a toilet, a sink, and bright light shining from the ceiling. I stared into that light until spots danced in my vision, then I looked away and rubbed my eyes. Several minutes passed before the spots went away.
Half-expecting an electric charge, I touched the door. There was no current, but the door was locked. I knew it would be, but I had to try it.
I wondered who had captured me, and just as quickly I knew. I was on Mars. I had taken the train from the spaceport to the Air Force base. And then what? My memory ended when the train reached the platform.
How much did these people know about me? Did they know I was a Liberator? Did they care?
Frustration welled in my brain. Trying to distract myself, I searched the walls for cameras, knowing that I might as well search for microscopic germs. The walls were completely smooth and cool to the touch, and dark gray in color. I ran my hands over the walls, feeling for bumps and seams, possibly pin-sized holes for cameras and microphones. I found nothing.
The door had some sort of rubberized airtight seal, but it was not an air lock—at least it wasn’t any kind of air lock I had seen before. I thought I might be able to rip the rubber from the doorway, but that would not buy me freedom.
Kneeling on the ground, I located discreet vents running along the walls. The air in the cell must have flowed through those vents. A fine, sturdy microfiber mesh lined those air ducts. I tried to push it in with my finger, but it did not give, and I would have needed a blade as fine as a scalpel to cut through it.
I looked at the toilet and knew I could break it. If I had shoes, I could mule-kick it until the chrome pipes gave way. Chrome pipes on the fixtures and a ceramic sink…definitely not a brig, I thought. I did not have shoes. My feet were bare and cold.
The sink looked breakable, but I saw no point in destroying it. Even if I shattered it, all I would get for my trouble would be an armed guard and possibly handcuffs. I might even get myself drugged.
Drugged?
This was a civilian holding cell, which meant I was no longer on the Air Force base. When had they returned me to the spaceport, and how? They couldn’t have used the train unless…What if Cutter didn’t destroy the tracks between the spaceport and the base? As his name crossed my mind, I remembered thinking he was “incompetent,” but I did not know why. It seemed like that was part of that dream.
Okay, I had searched for panels and cameras. I had checked the plumbing. There was one more way out of here, the most obvious way of all. I pounded my fist on the door and shouted. Nothing happened. I knew no one would come, but I had to try.
I ran a hand across my chin and found about one day’s worth of stubble. Had I been in the cell for a day? Maybe I had been in there longer and someone had shaved my beard.
I slammed the heel of my fist against the door and shouted again. Nothing.
I asked myself if I was hungry and decided that I was not especially hungry or thirsty. I felt claustrophobic. I wasn’t going stir-crazy, but I did not like the feeling of confinement.
Sometime later—I had no sense of time—the door opened. The airtight seal gave way with a hiss, and an acrid chemical odor filled the air. My body stopped working, and I fell, helpless, to the cold floor.
The paralysis was nearly complete. I still had feeling in my fingers and my toes; but I could not move anything, not even my eyes.
A woman walked through the door. Lying on my side, I could only see her calves and knees and nothing more. She knelt in front of me. Her voice sounded so specking cheerful. I realized that she could hurt me or help me or do whatever she pleased, and there was nothing I could do to stop her. She said, “Will you look at that! Wayson, you managed to stay awake. What a remarkable man you are.”
The woman gently rolled me onto my back.
She had silky brown hair and liquid blue eyes. I did not recognize her; but on some level I must have known her because I felt the stirring of a combat reflex.
I tried to speak, but the muscles in my jaw would not work.
“Can you hear me?” she asked as she touched two fingers to my throat to take my pulse. I wanted to recoil even though the warmth from her fingers felt good against my cold skin. She checked my pulse, then she stroked a finger along my cheek. Her touch was soothing.
Despite my paralysis, blood still flowed freely through my veins. Some of my blood had gathered in my lower regions, inconveniently revealing my attraction to this bitch.
A man entered the room. In a casual voice, he noted, “Look at that, Sunny, he remembers you.”
The girl blushed. She looked at my crotch and gave it a dismissive pat.
Anger, humiliation, and rage surged through me. I wished I could break free of my paralysis, but my arms and legs ignored me, and I remained perfectly still as the man hoisted my useless body onto a gurney.
I studied both of their faces. The girl was pretty and young, with chocolate brown hair that hung past her shoulders and ivory skin. She looked pampered, the kind of girl you expect to find lounging beside the pool of a yacht club. She wore a white lab coat, which she left unbuttoned over a low-cut dress. I got a clear view of the tops of her breasts when she fastened me onto the gurney.
“He’s looking at your tits,” said the man.
“Franklin, he can’t move his head, and he can’t move his eyes,” said the girl. This time her exasperation showed.
“So you moved your tits where he could see them?” the man asked.
“You’re such an ass,” the girl answered.
“At least I’m not giving peep shows,” the man said. He was short and muscular, with a face like a movie star. He had green eyes and blond hair that he kept patting into place. I swear, he was like a specking woman, touching his hair, brushing it with his fingers. I’d only seen the man
for a moment, and already I knew that the bastard obsessed about his appearance.
He might have been thirty years old; and despite his fascination with himself, he gave off a menacing air. There was something unstable about him. He was calm and joking with the girl, but under the surface, I sensed he was ready to explode.
“Leave him alone,” said the girl. She sensed what I had about the guy. He scared her.
The man stuck a finger in one of my nostrils and turned my head so I was facing him. He said, “They don’t want me to hurt you, asshole. If they find a bruise on you, I’ll be in deep shit.”
Then he placed his hand so that his palm covered my mouth as he pinched my nose. I could not breathe or struggle.
“Franklin, stop it,” the girl said. “Stop it!”
He pulled his hand from my mouth, then he leaned so low that our faces almost touched, and he said, “See that, asshole. I can kill you with one hand behind my back.”
He stood, laughed, and fixed his hair. He said, “Look, Sunny, he’s drooling. Think he’s drooling for you?”
I could not see her reaction; she had stepped out of my field of vision. I heard her say, “Go away.”
“Tell you what, Sunny, you and me…why don’t we do a little dance on that gurney once he’s through with it.”
“Get specked,” she said.
He laughed, and said, “Exactly.”
Of all the people I had met up to this point in my life, this “Franklin” was the one I wanted to kill the most. I lay on that cold gurney, on my back, my face pulled to one side. I could not control so much as a muscle in my body. I could not swallow. Drool leaked from my mouth.
Trying to sound professional and in control, the girl, Sunny, said, “He’s on the table. I can take it from here.”
“Oh, but he’s so much fun. I want to stay.”
“Do I need to report you? What do you think Silas will say if I tell him you’re endangering the program? What do you think he’ll say when I tell him that it’s your fault that Wayson is starting to remember?”
“Maybe he’ll let me kill him,” Franklin said. He tried to sound confident, but I heard worry in his voice.
So did the girl. She said, “Do you think he’ll have you transferred or shot? Maybe he’ll flush you through the moon pool with the rest of the garbage.”
“Just when do you think you are going to talk to Silas?” the bastard asked.
“Tonight,” Sunny said, sounding confident.
“What makes you think you’ll live that long? Who’s going to protect you? All you have is the dummy, and he can’t even protect himself. I could kill you in front of him, and he wouldn’t remember. I could kill you and say he did it.”
“Are you threatening me?”
“Take it any way you like,” he said. “You want rough, I can give you rough. You want sweet, baby, I can be sweet. I’ll give it to you any way you like.”
Having shown he was not afraid, the bastard turned and strutted out of the cell. I was able to see him leave only because he had turned my head in the right direction.
The girl said, “Don’t worry about Franklin. He won’t hurt you. He can’t touch you. You are the most important man down here, Wayson.”
The girl…Sunny, wheeled the gurney down a brightly lit hall and into a long, large room. The tables and furniture reminded me of an operating room, but the place was huge.
There was a row of occupied incapacitation cages along the wall. Incapacitation cages weren’t really cages, they were gurneys with electric diodes. The men on those gurneys, all of them clones, lay motionless, rendered helpless by electricity channeled from the gurney into the napes of their necks. The electricity made their muscles contract.
I looked at the men as she wheeled me past. They were dressed in surgical gowns, their legs stretched out, their feet a shoulder’s width apart. If they’d been standing instead of lying down, I would have described them as being at “parade rest.”
Someone had implanted metal filaments into the necks of the men on the incapacitation cages. The filaments channeled the electricity into their spines so that even a small electrical charge left them helpless. They were aware of everything around them and paralyzed from the neck down. As the girl rolled me past them, a couple of the clones even muttered something.
“It would be so much easier on everyone if you were more like them, Wayson,” Sunny said. “But don’t worry, we won’t treat you like that. We want to keep you perfect. No holes. No burns. No wires. You see, Wayson, you get VIP treatment. You’re very important to us.”
We passed rows and rows of men on gurneys. There might have been a thousand of them. There might have been fifteen hundred. Fifteen hundred less two, I thought. We lost two men in the grand arcade.
She rolled me into a private room, and whispered, “We don’t want anyone to interrupt us, dear.” She stroked my arm, then she reached her hand into my pants.
Under other circumstances I might have enjoyed her attentions. Her hands were smooth and warm and soft, and she knew all the right spots. But I did not like her taking advantage of my paralysis. The term “rape” came to mind. So did the term “violated,” but those were not terms Marines used to describe their situation.
If I had not been paralyzed, I might have willingly joined in…and yet…and yet…there was something in the back of my mind, something subconscious, maybe even deeper seated than the subconscious. I hated this woman. She repulsed me. And I feared her, too.
She was beautiful and her touch was warm and she had protected me from Franklin, but I hated her; and it wasn’t just that she had captured me.
“Don’t worry about Franklin. He won’t hurt you. I won’t ever let him hurt you.”
I felt her warm hands around my genitals. If it weren’t for the feeling of nausea and helplessness, it might have been erotic. She squeezed a couple of times until my body began to react, and then I felt a sharp, stabbing pain that did not go away. She had clamped something cold and sharp to my scrotum.
She leaned over me so that her face was an inch from mine, and she smiled. “There now, that wasn’t so bad.” She moved her mouth to my ear, and whispered, “You know, I don’t have to massage you like that.”
She kissed me, not on the lips but on the forehead.
I was raised in an orphanage for clones. Before I learned that I was a clone, I believed that I had once had a mother and a father, and I used to dream about my mother kissing me on the forehead, right between my eyes, in the very spot that this woman had just kissed me.
Next she strung a long, thin breathing tube beside the gurney. She clipped the tube to the bottom of my nose.
She said, “This isn’t going to be pleasant, Wayson. But lucky you, you won’t remember a thing.”
The pain was so searing, that I thought my eyes might roll out of their sockets. The world seemed to turn to the color of lightning, but I managed to hold on to one thought…one thought…Anything that can be programmed can be reprogrammed.
During my last instant of awareness, I realized that I was what had been programmed. I was a clone.
CHAPTER
FOURTEEN
I woke up in a cell. Even before I opened my eyes, I knew it would be a civilian facility instead of a brig. I kept my eyes shut and eked out the details from the fused clay of my brain. The room would be small with no windows and a rubberized airtight seal around the door. The air would come through a ridge of discreet vents at the base of the wall. There would be a toilet with chrome pipes and a ceramic sink. There would be a beautiful blue-eyed woman with a soft smile who would be kind to me, but her kindness came with pain. Her touch was warm and filled with venom. There would be a man who wanted to torture me.
I opened my eyes and sat on my rack.
The room was precisely as I had imagined…not remembered, imagined. To the best of my knowledge, I had never entered this cell; but here I was. I must have been in here before, or I would not have known the details. Maybe I wo
ke up as the pretty woman and the sociopath dragged me in.
What other details could I think of? The man’s name was Franklin. He looked like a movie star and fussed with his hair. If I could, I would hurt him; but I knew I could not hurt him. I could not understand why, but I knew I was no threat to him.
I imagined a room filled with clones, too. At first I dismissed it as a stray memory from my childhood—an orphanage dormitory with hundreds of clones sleeping on rows of racks. As I tried to grab hold of the image in my mind, I saw that the clones were grown men.
“Anything that can be programmed can be reprogrammed,” I whispered. Then I added something else. I said, “Even me.”
Something had happened to me. Somebody had done something to me, and they had tried to erase it from my memory; but I had held on to these images.
In my head, people and emotions ran together. The girl with the liquid blue eyes represented torment, and I wanted to kill her. I wanted to kill her every bit as much as I wanted to kill Franklin. I had a strange pseudosexual fantasy about strangling her and kissing her on the forehead as she gasped for breath. The thought was repulsive and seductive at the same time.
What was happening to my mind? Was this reprogramming?
I felt weak. When I stood, the world seemed to spin. My throat did not feel dry, and I was not especially hungry. I tried to remember the last time I had eaten. I’d had a meal on the Churchill. Was that a day ago? Was it a month ago? Was Cutter searching for me, or had he written me off as dead?
Don Cutter had been at the meal. The bastard questioned me. He undermined my authority. I wanted to kill him. Did I hate him as much as I hated Franklin and the girl? Sunny. Her name was Sunny. I wanted to kill Sunny. I wanted to choke her. I wanted to kiss her as she gasped her last breath.
Warmth ran through my body. I was having a combat reflex. With the warmth came clarity of thought. I realized that I was supposed to hate Don Cutter. Somebody wanted me to hate him.
I was not supposed to hate Sunny. I think I was supposed to love her and fear Franklin, but I was not supposed to remember them. I was not supposed to remember this cell.
The Clone Sedition Page 10
