Lady Hatchet rolled her eyes. “Phhh. Why wouldn’t you. It’s all in there.” She tapped her own noggin. “It’s just waiting to be remembered.”
“I remember! I really remember what woman and Earth and old age are!”
Lady Hatchet groaned. “If you didn’t have it all up there waiting to be remembered then all this clone testing would be one big fat damn flop.”
Venus looked around. “What’s that sound? Oh my. Not again. This place!” She jolted.
Gray water ran down a wall. Metal mice raced up the wall on each side of it and disappeared into a gushing vent in the ceiling.
Venus stepped backwards. “The floor will need mopped again, yet again. I gotta take a break, anyway, I’m so excited. Or did seeing all that water make me have to pee. Follow me to the lobby.”
Lady Hatchet grimaced at the leak pouring down the wall, and glanced directly above her to see if any would drip on her. She put her hand over her hair. “I’m out of here. I’m not getting all wet. That looks like it’s going to be a mess. And I’ve got to powder my poppy by now, too. Our hour is almost up, anyway.” She looked at the glowing green numbers on the wall clock. Underneath it were the statistics for their productivity. It gave them a very low score for this session. She shivered with excitement. “No, stupid clock. We really scored today!”
He followed them past a row of robot autobots laid out on tables, looking lifeless. Billy Boy Thorn saw Nurse Bobbitt the robot from pillplace there. “Wait a minute.” He stopped. “What’s that red nurse doing there? Is he dead?” He quickly put the torn face back into place.
The robot said, “I’m Nurse Bobbit your autobot class A robot. Red nurse 27. Aren’t you in safe hands? I’m more than qualified to help you. Now, who’s been a wild boy today or are you here to bring good cheer and fresh batteries? Don’t be afraid, don’t shit on the floor. We’ll get your brain cleaned up in no time.” Then its lights went back out.
Billy Boy Thorn shivered then walked with the women again. “Poor fellah!”
“Conked out. Broke,” Venus explained indifferently, not slowing. “The poor bot said some rude billy boy cop told him he was broke and it hurt his feelings.”
Lady Hatchet added, “And he was sending radio waves out of the blue to the stupid cop clones. That is rude. Red nurse autobots are programmed to think too much and over time it always gets a bit tangled. Thinking all adds up, I guess.”
Venus frowned. “The machine came to us so sad. The more you think the sadder you get.”
“Will he be fixed?” Billy Boy Thorn asked.
“Don’t know.” Lady Hatchet shrugged. “Whatever. I don’t do that. You can’t fix a fancy style robot mind like a red nurse, anyway. You just have to gut it out and start with a brand new computer. It’s so much easier that way and why do we want to beat ourselves up? Why bother with psychiatry over that? Not over a stupid robot. Not an autonurse, if anybody. A motor is a motor.”
Billy Boy Thorn said, “But Nurse Bobbit just thought he was going to get brushed up. That’s all. He assumed he’d still wake up when it was all done and he’d still be himself. I think he rather liked himself.”
Lady Hatchet waved him off superciliously. “It’s not my problem to make all the motors happy. They’re getting so selfish these days, they shouldn’t make them with such a sense of entitlement. That’s how snobby some of them have gotten. It’s galling.”
“But…” He followed them into a vast blue lobby lined in tall blue curtains.
Lady Hatchet pointed out a long bench for him to sit on, warning him, “Don’t get it dirty,” as she followed Venus through a double swinging door to the toilets.
He didn’t sit. He looked at the art on the wall between the curtains. There were paintings of squat buildings on the surface of the moon. When the old women finally came back out, rubbing their hands with cream, he asked them. “When did they build all this?”
Venus wrinkled up her nose at it. “Space travel is boring. Nowadays it’s mostly just the robots and robber scientists and human miners. And union grunts like me who help make it all happen because I’m such a sucker for slogans. Just a dumb worker.”
Lady Hatchet held out her arms. “No, I am the universal union worker. Look at my life.”
Venus ignored her. “I could go back to Earth now and start over again, sure, nobody’s twisting my arm to stay… but this is my rut, by now, at my age.”
Lady Hatchet put her arms back down. “It does get harder to start over and over past one-hundred. You get tired.”
“A job is a job and the ones on Earth aren’t any less jobby. I feel like I’ve wasted my life in this rock, in a way, and now what do I have to look forward to? Space was supposed to be such an adventure. The cliché rules… space is a bore. A big bore.”
“I remember Earth,” Billy Boy Thorn said. “I remember a bullet train used to go through a tunnel. I would play there as a kid.”
“The train!” Venus brightened. “Oh! Let’s hop on the train. Wait until I show you Metroplex.”
“You can’t do that?” Lady Hatchet warned her. “He’s a clone. We can’t take him there. We can’t, I think. Can we?”
Venus nodded. “We can too take him there. If he’s a union hostage then we can show him anything the union shows him. And we’re the union—we’re the workers. Let’s take him to the kids, first. Let’s show him to all the crazy hippisticks.”
“I suppose.” Lady Hatchet nodded. “We know he’s not going back there to sit in his petri dish ever again.” She carefully eyed Billy Boy Thorn head to toe, her small eyes narrowing but gaining a bright twinkle. “A hostage sounds fun. The hippisticks have gotten so boring and need something new to disrespect all us union members about. They’ll flip when they see this.”
Venus pushed Billy Boy Thorn to the end of the hall. “First, look at these. These are pictures of where you are now.”
He intently stared at the several pictures of the floating rock, one merely looking like a blue boulder amongst stars. He read the caption. “Gaol?”
Venus gave a crooked smiled. “That’s the name of the asteroid we’re in. Everything has a name. Even if it’s a stupid one. The G is said like a J. You say it like Jail. I think that was an old-fashioned old English spelling. Aren’t they just fancy shmancy?” She laughed.
“Jail. Spelled G A O L. Interesting.” He shuddered.
He remembered that when he was blasted into outer space, he heard somebody say “Welcome to Jail” Even though he was just a brain in a plastic bag.
He asked them, “How big is this asteroid? What am I looking at?”
“As big as Britain,” Lady Hatchet answered. “Though you wouldn’t know just by being here. Most the asteroid is just damn rock. Not drilled out for anybody. We’re probably only taking up as much space as a tiny fraction of London would. And by now I’m sure London is far more modern. We’ve been left in the dust. Few things get updated here that I can tell.”
Venus said, “This asteroid was filled with big pockets of sandy lattice, silicon honeycomb, and something they called something techy. So even a child with a 2 M bake oven could have melted it out and made these spaces inside for us.”
“What’s that?” Billy Boy Thorn asked, pointing to a photo of a beautiful and eerie noir city skirting a black reflective lake. “Is that heaven?”
“Not quite. We don’t have one of those. Not here anyway. Unless heaven is where the robber scientists live.” She laughed bitterly.
He leaned close to the picture to inspect the details. “It’s amazing. Where is this place? It looks like heaven to me!”
“It’s right here.” Venus thumped her finger on it. “Metroplex. The workers’ city. It’s the main city in the biggest part of what we have here to live in, from melted out ice leaving a big cave space.”
Billy Boy Thorn marveled. “It’s the most magnificent thing I’ve ever seen! The city of the future! Heaven!”
Venus wrinkled up her nose at that picture, t
oo. “No, it’s rather old fashioned by now, and I’m pretty sure a lot of it’s fake and just for show. And I know the robber scientists have a much nicer place all for themselves in their gated community. You just know it. At least it’s probably more secure from all the germs created by all the clone experiments. Damn, I hate them.”
“Let’s go.” Lady Hatchet shooed them back up the hall. “Phhh already.”
Venus looked at a large clock between two of the curtains. “Is work over already?”
Lady Hatchet winked. “We have new work, now. A clone war… one with a talking walking clone! Finally!”
chapter 5: workers’ paradise
He followed them from the blue lobby, down a series of hallways while standing on moving sidewalks, and then they rode up an escalator to a vast train terminal. He gasped at the ribbed pellucid ceiling. “This is magnificent!”
Venus looked around. “This isn’t it. This just gets us there.”
He put his hand on his heart. “It gets grander than this?”
Lady Hatchet said, “Yes, silly clone. This isn’t the city. It’s just a station. Your city wasn’t very nice, was it.”
“I thought it was, at the time.”
They rode another moving sidewalk down a pink glass tunnel, walked single file through a clanking turnstile gate and entered a yellow platform. There they approached a turquoise colored train. “Make yourself at home.” Lady Hatchet grandly waved her arm around. “Damn.”
“Where is everybody?” he asked Venus, sitting across from them at the center of the car in one of the bright orange seats. “There’s just us.”
Venus carefully twisted at one of her decorative buttons. “The city in the cave was built to hold a million people, plus whatever pets and lovers we could build. But of course builders aren’t crowd control and that doesn’t mean all those people cared to show up or even stay once they got here. Not everybody was as stupid as we were.”
Lady Hatchet frowned. “You and me both. I am the universal stupid union worker.”
He looked out the window at the glittered walls that were pulling by as the train picked up speed. He shuddered.
Lady Hatchet wasn’t paying attention to the view, as she added, “The whole clone thing became something most people didn’t like. People just didn’t come here and stay like they’d planned.”
He asked, “It’s an empty city, here?”
“Almost,” Venus answered. “We stupid workers live there. All damn few of us. Just a few thousand by now, I think.”
The train entered a narrower tunnel guarded by immense stout metal doors. “That’s so secure looking,” Billy Boy Thorn commented, watching the smaller tunnel’s lights strobe at them as they flew by.
Lady Hatchet nodded as if relieved. “The train goes through a special tunnel here. It’s a safe area in case the whole damn rock cracks in half. As if I’d make it to a safe area in time if that should happen. Phhh. But when there’s a huge disaster we’re all supposed to hop the train to stay safe.” She laughed at that.
Venus added, “We’ve had a lot of warnings of all sorts of accidents that could happen here that would send us sucking out into space. One way to survive that is to just be on the train when it happens. Remember that.”
He asked, “This whole place isn’t safe?”
Venus rolled her eyes. “We’re in the asteroid belt in goddam outer space. Think about it. Everybody’s orbit has long been set, so we’re not supposed to crash into anything, but still, who knows all what can happen out here.”
The train exited the safe area leaving behind another massive set of doors. When it stopped and they got off, Billy Boy Thorn gasped at the sight, as warm humid air hit him. Past a red lit lake, against the back wall of a vast cave, sat a jewel-like city glowing in blue light. The cave was so huge that a few low clouds had room to gather from the vapor off the lake. “Wow.” His eyes filled with tears. “It’s so beautiful. It’s not heaven, you sure? That looks like heaven to me! I am beholding the glory of heaven!”
Venus shook her head. “No, no such luck.”
He wondered if they were tricking him. “It looks just like heaven should look!”
“There it is, Metroplex.” Lady Hatchet gestured toward it. “Sorry, that’s all it is. It ain’t heaven.”
He frowned. “Metroplex.”
Venus nodded. “Just a city… for those not as quixotic as you. They built it pretty, to try to impress, but in the end nobody really cared all that much.”
He asked, “Is it safe enough to build something like that in a place like this?”
Venus asked him. “Safe?”
“A lake in space?” Billy Boy Thorn pointed to it. “A lake?”
Venus regarded the dozen tall cylindrical buildings that went from the bottom of the cave to the top, as if there was no certain up or down. Other various structures were tucked in-between. “It all has safety features. Those main shafts are the original buildings and they’re good as money and shouldn’t go anywhere if the gravitational spin is interrupted.”
Lady Hatchet said, “We haven’t deviated our orbit one iota since they fixed it up. It doesn’t take much to spin an asteroid, to fake gravity, once you get it going.”
He asked, “We’re spinning?”
Venus looked up. “To feel like earth gravity. Of course. Otherwise we’d all be bumping our heads right now.”
Lady Hatchet added, “And if something ever happens to the spin, just hop the train and it’ll take you into the safe place. They say even the lake sucks away into holding tanks if we lose gravity, or get bumped and it all wants to fly sideways, so the whole place isn’t all splashed on. You have to have safety features. Whether they work or not, who knows? How would you test them?”
Billy Boy Thorn could see activity far away on one side of the lake. “Is that people?” He pointed.
“Probably some kids. The hippisticks. They’re a group of kids that hang out in these parts.”
“Hope so,” Lady Hatchet added, “Or the monkey mob or one of those monsters that eat people.”
“What?” he asked.
“Ignore her,” Venus said, “She’s always making up crazy grand tales, always says there’s monsters out there in the lake. But that’s crazy, if I haven’t seen any. Now let’s go and visit. I’m sure you’ll love the dip in the water, gills or no gills. The water is warm.”
The three walked to a lower concourse of black shiny flagstones. There, stylish compact passenger vehicles intermittently zipped by. One seemed to sense their presence and stopped. “Get on and hurry,” Venus said, pushing at him, “before the damn little gizmo changes its mind and leaves you in the street on your butt.”
“They do that to some of the kids, sometimes,” Lady Hatchet warned him, also climbing in. “These kiddie carts are feeble minded, or cruel, I can’t figure which. They need to grow up!”
Venus ordered the dashboard, “To the hippisticks. They’re at the lake cave, in case you didn’t already know.” The small open car took off on a road skirting the lake.
Lady Hatchet put her hand on her hair and said to Billy Boy Thorn, “We think the cars have somehow been tooled to a higher consciousness.”
“Oh please,” Venus chided her. “That’s nonsense.”
Lady Hatchet gave her a dirty look. “I can just feel these things.”
“Because you’re crazy. You’re superstitious and self-indulgent all the time. Lake monsters and evil cars out to get you. Oh my.” Venus turned to Billy Boy Thorn to explain, “The cars were all tooled to think that they had some symbiotic relationship with us worth having. It was to make them want to drive us around, but that doesn’t make consciousness.”
“Relationship?” he asked.
“They’re supposed to think that giving us a damn ride does them good,” she explained. “But do they think?”
He asked, “Consciousness is a slipperier thing to create?”
Lady Hatchet patted the side of the car. “You can’t cre
ate it, at least not in a computer as small as the ones they put in these things. They don’t need to all run around pretending to be Hamlet. They’re just supposed to be a part of the transportation system.”
He asked, “Still, they know people?”
Venus winked. “The only contact they really have with people is their seat to ours.”
Billy Boy Thorn asked, “They feel us?”
Lady Hatchet nodded. “I’m sure they can tell by my butt that I’m an old lady but look how they still drive like I want to pretend I’m about to be killed. Slow down damn car! We don’t need to get there in such a hurry. The clone war will wait. Slow down or you’ll give me a damn heart attack!”
Billy Boy Thorn admitted, “I still don’t understand your clone war.”
Venus smiled toward the lake. “We don’t either. Not yet. It has to be planned and we’ll do that later when we meet up with the rest of the union. We’re going swimming now, since we’re visiting some of the kids and it’s so important to them. It’s all on the way.” She patted the dashboard as if it was a pet, and said to it, “Thank you, dear.”
He bristled. “Swim? Me? Here? With who?”
Venus nodded. “It’s their ritual so it would be rude to not swim with them. It means baptism or something. Don’t worry. You grew up in water; you’ll take to it like a platypus.”
Lady Hatchet added, “It means they’re all one in the ocean of space. That’s what it means to them and they take their religion seriously, when it suits them.”
Venus pouted at Lady Hatchet. “Swim with us all, then, this once. I’m pretty sure it’s good politics to play nice.”
Lady Hatchet looked upset. “You know damn well that I know how to swim. But I don’t like getting wet.”
Multitude Page 7
