Multitude

by Swanson, Peter Joseph

  She replied, “I really don’t think he’s going to rip our heads off.”

  He looked oddly at her sleeve lined in glossy blue decorative buttons. Her bony grip repulsed him so he pulled away.

  “Well, fine,” she said. “It isn’t like I’d know where you go, anyway. I’ve never even seen the clown colony with my own eyes. They might still show it live on TV somewhere but I never cared for nature shows.”

  “W-work?” he asked. “Clone colony? Real? Do you mean Garden City?” He became impatient and angry. “Just point the way to Garden City! I wanna go to the Garden! The one with a blue sky forever and ever and evermore!”

  Lady Hatchet slowly reached up to push at her hair twist. “I don’t know where you think you are, clown, but you can’t get to no damn garden like that. Not unless you can hold your breath for a very damn long time.”

  “What? Where am I? Tell me! Just tell me! Tell me!” Billy Boy Thorn begged.

  Venus answered, “We’re far from any so-called Garden City. We’re far from Earth. This lab is inside a big fat rock in the asteroid belt.”

  Lady Hatchet sighed. “You’re such a dumb damn clown. And I guess we’ve got to get you back to the control study. Heaven knows why I should help. It’s not my job but you do look a bit lost.”

  He looked around. “We’re in a what?”

  Lady Hatchet gestured at all the dead clones. “Think about it. They say you know everything since your brain has been dubbed over, time after time. Think about it.”

  Billy Boy Thorn rubbed at his pounding temples. “My memories. They might be real?”

  “Yes, you dumb clown, er, I mean, clone.” Lady Hatchet stomped her foot. “Haven’t you heard anything I’ve said?”

  His eyes didn’t focus on anything. “R-real?”

  Venus nodded. “Where do you think thoughts come from, anyway? You’re a dumb clown on purpose. I knew they kept you dumb but I never before got to talk to its face and see the vapid look for myself.”

  “Now-now,” Lady Hatchet quietly confided to Venus, “He’s just confused. They make them that way, you know, on purpose, until they’re done with all the tests and whatever they all do with them and then they’re food. Waste not want not.”

  He asked, “Food?”

  Lady Hatchet nodded. “We recycle what we can. And people have always liked their food to not be too knowledgeable, on any account.”

  “I don’t care if he’s confused,” Venus said. “It’s not my job to care and I don’t want to know about what I don’t want to know about. I’ve always told the union I already know too much to sleep at night without being tortured with weird dreams of how all those stupid clowns must think they live.”

  “Yeah! I am confused,” Billy Boy Thorn said. “How we all live? Who are we? Where do you live?”

  “I should hate you,” Venus admitted to him, her eyes narrowing in contempt. “I’m damn jealous I don’t have my own clones of myself parading out my poppy.”

  “Keeping us young,” Lady Hatchet added, self consciously touching her cheek.

  “We were promised,” Venus sadly whispered, “and it could still happen.”

  “We were promised new bodies. I wouldn’t have bothered to take such a long trip into space for such gruesome ghoulish work if it hadn’t been for all the promises.”

  “What did you say about food?” he asked. “Food? Tests?”

  “Sure!” Venus said. “There’s so many of you for the tests and when they throw you all away when they’re done they just can’t waste.”

  “Y-you e-eat what?”

  Lady Hatchet put her nose in the air. “What do you think we are up to, here? A bunch of vegetarians way out in damn nowhere outer space? Did you think we were all eating greens from the oceans? They’re all so damn polluted anyway you can still almost smell them from here.”

  “Smell. Oh. The nose? It breathes something.” Billy Boy Thorn looked side to side down at his strong arms. He remembered he once had a dream where he swam out of a bowl of fish soup. Legs were everywhere. And he ate them. “We eat… men?”

  “Only men,” Lady Hatchet assured him. “We’re not disgusting.”

  Venus added, “We only eat men legally, whatever that means these days. We don’t eat men illegally. Not the real men.”

  He gave a serious nod. “I’m a real man. Really!”

  “But you’re not legal. Nobody is where you’ve been living,” Lady Hatchet reminded him.

  “The real women on this rock, like me,” Venus added with a girlish smile, “are just the damn help!”

  Billy Boy Thorn sat on the floor, with a moan, all the while his mind reeled. “Smell. Earth. Earth is far away? That’s not possible… it’s right here!”

  “I guess you couldn’t know that,” Venus said. “Most of your clones don’t even get out of the water. They only let the prize of you go alpha and walk around for four years. Anymore time than that and you start thinking about it too much. Like now. But you got out anyway. So damn those robber scientists. We hate them. And I guess if you go back now you’ll ruin this latest round of the damn study.”

  “The study?” he asked, feeling his proud cop identity evaporating so quickly he feared he might literally implode with one sob.

  Lady Hatchet asked Venus, “You want to slap him?”

  “Dear, he’s confused. Slow down.”

  “Phhh, you knackered old tart. If we go any slower he’ll die of old age.”

  Venus said, “He’s still people remember, when you get down to the dots of it, and you know how good all people are at digging their heads deep in sand.”

  Billy Boy Thorn pleaded, “No no. Don’t slow down. I’m getting it. It’s all there in my head, somewhere. Go on. I’m fine. Really. If I fall over just keep talking.” He put his head on the floor.

  “Okay dear.” Venus gestured toward the walls. “This dump started as a big ugly prison but was taken over by a team of genetic scientists, the robber scientists, damn them, we hate them, and you’re the guinea pigs. That’s what you get. Crime doesn’t pay. Or maybe it does, just look at that body! I’m a good girl so I get old and fall apart until I’m left standing here looking like the dinosaur bones on display. You look at me like I’m disgusting while you live forever looking like that. People talk about ethics all the time… well… you tell me what’s fair?”

  He sat back up and rubbed his face. “I remember it, I think. I’m just not supposed to. That would be illegal. But I…”

  “Irony.” Lady Hatchet sadly laughed.

  “No! How can I explain?” His cheeks flushed red. “A wild thought and I’m a billy boy and I help keep everybody on track. Everything on track. That’s my job. I’m a cop and everybody respects me. Maybe this is a mass hallucination. I was warned of those. You can’t be real.”

  Venus walked up to where he sat and slapped the top of his bald head. “Did you feel that?”

  He got back on his feet but didn’t feel steady. “Yes. That was real.”

  Lady Hatchet asked, “Like waking up from a nightmare and trying to explain a dumb situation in the dream and it seemed such a big deal at the time but now that you’re awake, nobody cares?”

  “Just listen to yourself talk,” Venus said to him. “Why am I even explaining anything to you. You know everything. If you didn’t I wouldn’t be here. I’d be out of a job. The experiments would be stupid and would have failed and eternal life would only exist for solitary atoms out there bumping into each other and not even knowing it. We all want to live forever… and know it!”

  He mumbled, “Eternal life?”

  Venus shrugged. “It’s what people really want, right?”

  A moment of calm and clarity came over Billy Boy Thorn. He did know it all and he felt like it was almost all within touch as if it was all sitting patiently on orderly shelves in a walk-in closet in the back of his mind. “This clone thing that I am is all about experimenting with immortality. And it’s working. How can clones share thoughts, th
ough? How can I know what I originally was, and what my last body knew that made me me. How many bodies have I been through?”

  Lady Hatchet said, “That’s the most important part of the immorality experiment…”

  “Immortality experiment,” Venus corrected her.

  Lady Hatchet smiled. “I said what I said on purpose. Anyway. Who wants to be a clone of themselves if they aren’t still themselves?”

  Billy Boy Thorn asked, “So how can I still be the criminal? I still remember it all but I wasn’t in as ideal a body back then. It’s not really the same body. I’m idealized. Look at me. Look at these legs. Back then I was just a regular ole person. I had a body with scrawny legs. Scrawny everything. How many generations away am I now, to look so improved?”

  “I don’t know.” Venus shrugged. “They pass it all along, the content of your brain, while you’re developing in tanks. They do it to each one of you with radio waves. You can’t transmit out because you weren’t engineered with that equipment, but you were made to grow receptors in your brain that radio waves can come inside to. Your brain reads radio waves like it reads light waves and sound waves. You have a simple one-sided mental telepathy.”

  Billy Boy Thorn didn’t expect that amazing an answer. He had to slowly lick his lips before he continued. “Yeah. A radio in my head. I somehow knew that but I knew it wasn’t right, somehow. It’s organic? It’s not metal?”

  “Both,” Venus answered. “There’s lots of metal in your body naturally.”

  He asked, “Who sends the first me to the me that I am now?”

  “The who what?” Venus raised her eyebrows. “What who?”

  “Who sends… which version of me…” he tried to ask.

  “The computer, I guess,” Lady Hatchet cut him off. “Who else? It has more than enough memory to store the contents of a puny human brain, no problem. And a computer lasts longer. The brain rots, like Venus’ over here. But then she’s a knackered old tart.”

  “Damn you, you old slog. I can remember to hit you upside the head with a wet noodle and that’s more than enough memory for one hour.”

  They both laughed bawdily and then Lady Hatchet continued, “All computer info can be dubbed and dubbed until there’s more dots than you care to count. Combine a computer that can transmit its info on simple radio waves into a fresh new clone that can pick it up with his one sided telepathic brain and you have somebody who can live forever and still remember who they are.”

  Venus put her finger up in the air to make a point. “Or… at the very least… at least they can remember who somebody else once was… somebody else who looked exactly the same.”

  “And I’m that experiment?” Billy Boy Thorn asked, feeling hollow, but now remembering hearing voices inside him and now there was finally a reason for it.

  Venus sighed impatiently. “What did you think you were after all I just said? A real cop in a real damn city?”

  “You know it all, you silly clown,” Lady Hatchet impatiently pushed a cot away so it banged into another. “Why you all just can’t think for yourselves in the first place and know what they’re doing to you is beyond me. I guess we’d get a rebellion, a clone war, but I don’t care. If I don’t get a clone of myself soon I’ll lead that damn war.”

  Venus replied to her, “That would be a cloneless war, dear. A war of those of us who didn’t get one and got damn old.”

  “Why don’t you?” he asked.

  “Don’t I what?” Venus raised her eyebrows. “Care or get a clone, or start a war?”

  He shrugged. “All that, I guess?”

  “The study drags on and on with excuses from the damn robber scientists. We don’t even see them in person anymore. Only criminals get to be guinea pigs. It’s the law, as it was once decided. Damn ethics. Damn it all! I don’t want to get any damn older and then just drop dead having only had one go at life. How pitiful. How small. How demeaning.”

  Venus nodded to agree. “Living a life is all too complicated to get right the first time.”

  “Especially for you, dear.”

  “Who cares if cloning isn’t quite right yet,” Venus argued. “They can just fix that one… they can just perfect the process a later clone down the line. That should be good enough for now. I say clone me now and let me be young and stupid and fix me later.”

  He looked down at himself. “What happens to us after the tests are all over… for good?”

  “You aren’t cloned anymore. Obviously. You think it’s fair that criminals should live forever and ever until the stars burn out? Where’s the justice in that?”

  “I’m not a criminal. Well, I guess I’m wild, now, but …”

  Lady Hatchet pointed at him accusingly. “You were bad and you remember it. The computer kept all the bad that was in your head with the good, it can’t sort out all the dots, they all look the same when they’re that way. That’s the study. It all gets dubbed over.”

  Billy Boy Thorn looked around the room for doors. “Where are the people doing the study? Where are the scientists?”

  “Phhh!” Lady Hatchet put her nose in the air. “Too busy to chat up the working class, that’s for sure, but we aren’t suppose to talk like that. They accuse us of class warfare when we do and that’s supposed to be rude of us. And they aren’t having a war against us. A war would imply they’re paying us some attention. They’re just conveniently ignoring us. The reason is, supposedly, they’re all clones by now, themselves, and they decided it wasn’t perfect. So we have to wait until they fix all the bugs. Cloning themselves was the only way to keep a study going that lasts such a long time, to keep them alive for it. We’re left out. Of course.”

  Venus said to her, “Damn. I don’t think the clone cares about that.”

  Billy Boy Thorn asked Lady Hatchet, “The robber scientists are clones, too?”

  “They must be, to be still around, and not be older than dirt. But they don’t live where you lived in the original prison, Subco Gibeah. They’ve got their own street of villas in this damn rock that beats all, I bet. I can just imagine. We don’t go there, us workers. It’s a gated community. I bet the kids sneak in from time to time. Kids can find ways to sneak into anywhere.”

  He asked, “How long has all this been doing on?”

  Venus rubbed her nose. “Hmmm. When was that? I took the Sultan Starbus line here to this stupid asteroid when I was twenty-five. The study had already been underway. We read about it on Earth. We wanted instant results so we could all come and live forever but they said there were too many issues raised by the very thought. And so the study would have to go on for a very very long time and very far away from everybody.”

  “Far away?” he asked.

  “Remember dear,” Lady Hatchet spoke. “You’re not on Earth. The tests had to be far away from Earth. Keeps it all in quarantine. We’re supposed to be dangerous to life—original life, anyway.”

  He nodded. He remembered it. In Kabul he took a space tower up above gravity. There were towers on the planet at Atlanta America, Marrakech Morocco, Kubul Afghanistan and Jinan China; connected at the top by a space ring which was far above the atmosphere beyond the pull of gravity. Then he floated away on a spaceship to prison, shunned. He held his head in pain.

  “You going to vomit?” Venus asked him. “Breathe deep.”

  He looked around the room at all the cots containing dead clones. “Where do I go from here? Where can I?”

  Venus meekly reminded her coworker, “We’re supposed to report him for discontinuation. That’s what it says in the damn instruction manual. The library has six versions of it and I know them all because I was in on one of the last negotiations.”

  “Damn them.”

  Venus grinned wickedly. “I wonder if the union shouldn’t get a look at him.”

  “Well, the damn robber scientists aren’t going to get any help from me. We hate them.”

  Venus warned her, “It’s against the contract to keep him.” She didn’t sound se
rious.

  “Damn that, too. You all gave in too easily on everything in the last negotiations. That’s why we now have nothing.”

  Venus nodded. “It’s an old contract stacked in their favor that we’ve fought against for long enough. It’s a contract that says that we do the work until we drop dead and they ignore us as they have their own pissing contests. We hate them.”

  “Hmmm.” Lady Hatchet said to Billy Boy Thorn, “I guess you can’t go back. If we throw you back in your confinement center then you’ll be self-aware and ruin this round of the study. I don’t know if a stupid clown should ruin four years of it just for something like this.”

  “We can’t shelve him away, now,” Venus said. “He’s out of the system. Shouldn’t he get a prize or something just for escaping… or something?”

  “Escaping what?” Billy Boy Thorn asked. “I only went up the elevator but obviously not all the way. This is not perfect bliss in Elysium Grounds!”

  Lady Hatchet nodded and pushed on her hair twist again. “No. This is not a perfect place. This is where you get very old and bored of your coworkers.”

  Venus grinned wickedly again. “Let’s take it home.”

  “Like a pet?”

  “No … a …” She rubbed her nose in thought.

  Lady Hatchet nodded again, this time more determined. “We have spent all this energy getting this guy to remember the obvious. Let’s not make this day a complete waste of our time. Why don’t we just take him with us and let the library choke on the rules. As long as he doesn’t act like a criminal.”

  “I’m not a criminal at all. I’m a cop, now. A billy boy. I did very well in the school and no citations in four years.”

  Venus smiled victoriously. “You can be a damn stupid clone and our hostage, to boot!”

  “Hostage?” he asked.

  Venus grabbed his arm again. He let her and he followed. Venus said, “Tell the damn robber scientists we have a living clone and the damn thing talks. And we’re keeping it and we know how to use it.” She laughed, amused.

  “I remember.” He rubbed his face. “I remember what a woman is. And a ship, the yachts. I used to smell and taste other things beside just salt. Some things are sweet. Some things rot. I remember I could sometimes smell my armpits… and smell women! And Earth. And old age. I could smell flowers and coffee and food… and food was more than just crackers. I ate with a fork. There were wet noodles. There were grapes! I feel like I’m waking from a sleep.”