“A statue isn’t alive at all,” a man explained, “not even like a plant, so it’s really very easy to grow from her dots.”
“You know,” Thorn warned, again, “the cloning thing still has big problems. Like, it makes you… dead after you die.”
A man waved him off. “Details. We know there’s more research to be done but why not let us try? Why always keep the big things in the hands of the big people? If we have consciousness too then let us try and figure out what consciousness is for ourselves. Maybe we’ll figure out an angle they won’t. Maybe we’ve been letting them give us all the wrong preconceived notions just because we’ve assumed they’re the smart bunch.”
“As if their brain is bigger than mine!” a woman added.
“Society here has drastically changed and you had a part in that,” another man thanked Thorn. “You should have pride in that. Now, we’re just waiting for the next great leap forward.”
Thorn asked, “What’s that? The place tipping over is a great leap forward?”
“No, what comes after that. The old bureaucracy has gone back to Earth. We can have a new social order, a new socialism, but in a small microcosm. Easy to control and administer. Like a kibble of lore.”
“Kibbutz,” he was corrected.
“Yeah. Of lore. When our group grows, we hope the commune grows slow enough to evolve with it and not have it fall out of control. We want a society that becomes genuine and natural, not just being bossy, and not by somebody else’s old irrelevant book.”
A few driverless cars silently entered the plaza and circled around the people at the fountain. The people looked at them curiously then nervously as the cars drove around repeatedly in a tighter and tighter circle.
“Go away!” a woman yelled at them, “We’re busy with doing a statue platform today. We’ll gut you out later.”
The circle of cars grew closer. More cars arrived and merely jerked back and forth.
“They’ve gone crazy!” a man said. “When we want their brains they’re impossible to catch and now they swarm and act crazy! Are they trying to act crazy so we won’t want their brains?”
A man said, “Maybe they liked Madam Wintermirror, too, and they want to watch us work on her platform. They drove her around a lot, too.”
“Let’s get out of here,” the woman in charge suggested. “I don’t like this at all. These stupid cars have acted aggressive before but this is ridiculous.”
“Yeah,” another man agreed. “I’m getting the creeps. They’re being nosy and weird.”
“What the damn do they care about Madam Wintermirror’s statue?”
Thorn called down, “Do you think they’re dangerous?”
She shrugged. “How can they? They’re just supposed to drive us around.”
The circle drove away as dozens of other cars quickly raced into the plaza and plowed directly into the people, knocking them high into the air. Then they ran forward and backward over their crushed heads, repeatedly.
Thorn quickly punched his pen, almost dropping it over the union hall balcony, hollering, “Lady Hatchet! Are you alive?”
“Phhh. Of course I’m alive.”
“The cars have gone crazy! Stay away from them…”
“And how do I go anywhere?”
“They’ve just killed a bunch of the workers who’d stayed behind. The ones that were working on the platform for the statue!”
“Who?” she asked. “Calm down!”
“The workers who stayed to clone themselves from car parts! They were at the union hall fountain and just got attacked by dozens of cars! Ran them over again and again. They’re still doing it! Killed them all and they’re still running them over!” He saw two crazed cars sideswipe each other, their wheels slipping in the gore.
“What? No!” Lady Hatchet doubted him. “That isn’t how it works young man.”
Thorn said, “They were preparing the fountain for a statue of Madam Wintermirror and the cars raced into the square and now they’re all getting run over on purpose! They’re just driving right over them, back and forth over their heads, again and again! Head parts are scattered about everywhere!”
“Killed?” Lady Hatchet questioned. “Damn! How do you know?”
“I’m watching them getting run over, right now, now, as we speak! The cars are still running them over! They’re smashing the people’s brains into a total complete pulp! Right now! Right now!”
She ordered him, “Well, get out of there!”
“I’m up on the balcony.”
“They could drive up inside and get you from behind. Get out of there!”
“All right, I’m out of here. But don’t you dare take a car! Stay away from them!”
“Oh, rust! Union people dead for no good reason and now I’ll have to take the damn train! Meet me and Christopher Goi. Meet us… at the tower overlooking the runway, the runway that all blew up. You remember the elevator that gets to there? We’ll hope the cars can’t ever figure out how to take elevators.”
“Yes. And warn Nuremburg, too!”
“Yes. I’ll try to send out a general alarm on my pen. I’m sure he has his own pen and he’ll hear it.”
Thorn hurried inside and ran down a long skyway to the next building, taking a passage he hadn’t ever been down before, desperately hoping it was a shortcut. Around the corner of a dark lobby at an intersection, through a sprawling dusty garden of dead black potted palms, he thought he heard rhythmic pounding. He looked around nervously for any cars. Though he assumed he was spry enough to dodge any small vehicle, he was still spooked. He followed the pounding, finally realizing it was drums. He went into a building and parted black curtains. There were more black curtains ahead and he parted them. The drums got louder.
Thorn pulled aside a final black curtain against a wall and revealed a door. On it was a drawing of a dragon and over it was a bat, done in blue marker. He cautiously pushed the door open and found a group of teenagers inside an apartment with its walls painted with crude bold black spirals over silver crisscrosses. They were lounging about, playing with hand drums and each other. They were dressed like gothic Halloween ghouls with thickly painted black eyes, eyebrows shaved and shiny silver lips. Their clothes were mostly silver mummy wrappings under long black jackets or capes. At the sight of him, they froze in wide-eyed terror.
“A dorfeck!” one warned.
Thorn put his hands up. “I’m not here to hurt you. But you can’t stay here.”
“Are you a… a dirty schizoid dorfeck?”
Thorn shook his head. “What’s that?”
Another one answered, “A devil clone?”
A petite girl in a snake bra hopped up from where she was undulating in a blob chair, crying, “He came to eat us!”
“No! And yes I’m a clone. But it’s all right. I’m with the union and hippisticks. I’m not here to hurt you.”
“The hippisticks?”
“Really,” Thorn assured them.
A teenage boy with his long black hair twisted into large coils, said, “We’re not going back to the hippisticks! We’re corporate now! I’m Bark the Bold With No Number and I say you have to leave!”
“Corporate?” Thorn wondered if these kids were some of their offspring who had rebelled to Metroplex, and hadn’t been mentioned.
“Yeah.” A girl with a hooded cape nodded. “They’re all blind.”
A tall boy with glassy eyes behind a silver fishnet veil, slurred, “Loose ‘em, the mudders!”
Thorn tried to explain, “Things have changed around here. Everything has become dangerous. You have to get out of Metroplex altogether. Avoid the cars, and be ready for the whole place to tip over any day now. Completely over. Upside-down.”
The boy under the veil said, “Just as our leader prophesied the end of the world! Before he was run over by a schizoid car.”
Thorn asked, “One of you have already been run over by one of them?”
A girl with a duo of fuzzy spide
rs over her chest, said, “Yes. It went back and forth over his head until it was like creamed clone. Doom. He had just said it was the end of the world!”
“The end of the world?” Thorn said. “Usually that’s not very original but this time it is accurate, at least. Now let’s go and get to where it’s safer so that when everything tips over you don’t smash about.”
“Where we going?” Bark the Bold With No Number asked. “The whole stars will explode. You can’t run! The ocean of space will explode. All of it. We are not one.”
“Why are you here?” Thorn asked. “You look like you’re just rotting. I bet you smell bad.” He regarded their sullen fashion and the general mess. “Now let’s get out of here to where it’s safer.”
“We have given up,” Bark the Bold With No Number said. “We have given in to the dreams and demons. It’s easier to live that way. That way when it all explodes then we won’t be made sad by it.”
Thorn asked, “Who are your demons?”
“The robber scientists have taken over the world. It didn’t use to be this way. This world used to be free but now it’s under control and the culture is just one big advertisement to get you to accept their product zombie ways.”
“Yeah,” a longhaired boy with a grand chest tattoo under a see-through caftan added, “it’s all to lower your expectations. Seriously.”
Thorn said, “Huh? That’s dumb. You can dream as big as you want. Come on!”
“They tell you that you live in the greatest asteroid in the universe, better than Earth, even. The best place ever, just so that you stop expecting more and better and asking questions as to why things are actually really very lame.”
Another boy scoffed and then despondently tossed an empty food wrapper at the floor. “To make you glad to just get a cracker with their logo stamped on it. Everything has to have a label. We can’t even bork each other without first affixing a corporate label to our backsides to make it feel real.”
A girl added, “And do it to their music, or it’s not real music.” She hit her drum. “That wasn’t real. It didn’t come out of digital slots. The air is not real. It was just sound in the air. Rust it. But I bet the air is corporate, too. It was made by machines. Just give in to it. Pray to it. Pray to the demons. We are not one.” She threw the drum down.
“Your demons are dead,” Thorn stated. “Or at least the scientists that I’ve seen are dead. They have turned into a crazy thing. A sort of… homicidal experimental vegetation, of sorts.”
Bark the Bold With No Number asked, “What are you talking about? Are you on LSD?”
“No, I saw it. It seems they’ve been absorbed by plants. I was in one of their labs and it was a jungle and they were dead in dry fishtanks, sucked clean of any moisture.”
Bark the Bold With No Number shook his head. “Nah-ah. The robber scientists? But they have all the control! You must have been looking at some clones they left behind.”
Thorn explained, “It seems the ones I know about have been dissolved and digested by their own experiments. Eaten by their vegetables.”
Bark the Bold With No Number asked, “Then why did the cars run people over?”
Thorn shrugged. “They’re somehow self aware that the union was going to cannibalize their brain parts for their own computer clone work, I suppose. It made them feel like car crashes. Maybe. I don’t know for sure how they think and feel. But the asteroid is going to lose its gravity, soon, actually spin sideways and upside-down and I don’t know all what, for a while, until whatever it is they all programmed for sabotage runs its course. And you can’t just hang onto something for a few minutes, and traipse across the ceiling while it happens. There’s a big lake out there.”
A boy said, “It’s got safety precautions in case the gravity is disrupted. The water will all suck into tanks underneath it.”
“That’s been sabotaged, too,” Thorn warned them.
“We can ride it out here,” the snake bra girl assured him. “We’ll just close the door.”
Bark the Bold With No Number said, “We’ll just walk around the room. No big deal. Up the walls across the ceiling. As you said, traipse. It’ll be fun.”
Thorn warned again, “The entire city could tear loose by a very big wave!”
“No it was built for that kind of stuff,” the spider girl said. “It was built to take all kinds of stuff. Don’t you know where you are? It’s always dangerous in outer space. So they fixed it.”
“No,” Thorn argued. “The damn hippisticks and rebel union sabotaged the place good! It’s going to all smash up!”
He looked at them like they were fools until they each went to a window and looked out of it to a view that caught the edge of the lake. They slowly looked back at each other, quietly. “We better get out of here,” Bark the Bold With No Number finally said. He ran out and they followed them down the corridor.
“Wait!” Thorn ran after them out into the hall. “This way!”
Lady Hatchet swerved around them on a gyro bike, intently pushing forward on the bar. “Watch those cars!” she hollered at the kids that looked like scattering naughty trick-or-treaters. “They’ll run your brains out!” The kids were gone.
Thorn was shocked at the sight of her. “Why aren’t you hidden away? We have to escape!”
“Phhh.” She pulled back on the handle and stopping in front of him. “Christopher Goi took care of everything. He spent hours in the digital frames and rearranged more dots than he could count to unprogram the mess. The rockets won’t re-fire. We won’t go reeling. The rock isn’t tipping anywhere.”
“Are you sure?”
“No. But that’s what he’s been up to. He may still find some backup programs to undo. Who really knows how redundant the sabotage plans were?”
“Why aren’t you helping him?”
“I don’t really know how computers work once you get behind the pretty part. I just point at the pretty things. He’s pulling out all sorts of math and undoing it. It’s quite remarkable to see a human go toe-to-toe with math like that.”
Thorn regarded her wheels. “You have a gyro bike.”
“At my age! I’d rather not, how undignified for me, but they didn’t give them brains. So they’re safe to get around on now that the damn cars went psycho. This damn contraption will blow up my heart though. I’m too old for this.”
He explained, “You only have to lean forward a little. It shouldn’t tire you.”
“I know how to damn lean over a gyroscope. I can still complain.”
“How’d you find me?” Thorn asked.
“I just followed your damn signal.”
“Signal?”
“Sure.” She pulled out a pen. “Everybody gives off damn signals. It’s stronger than your breath.”
“Then why can’t we find half the people on this rock?”
“It’s an easy thing to hide if you want. You didn’t hide yours and here you are. Now let’s get to the watch tower where we can plot with Christopher Goi how to stop all these killer cars.”
“What’s that?” Thorn felt an odd vibration. He put his hand on the wall to feel. He touched the floor.
“What? Is it a mob of killer cars? Let’s get out of here and you drive.” Lady Hatchet indelicately sat on the front bar, facing front.
“I don’t know,” he questioned, listening hard. “I can’t tell what I’m feeling. Unless they’re crashing into the walls.” They heard odd squeaking noises.
“That’s all we need! Can we please go, dammit?”
He pushed forward, kicking off to make up for their extra weight. Once the gyro bike had its momentum, it rolled along at a mounting speed but then seemed to slightly lean to one side.
“What’s going on?” she asked. “What the damn!”
“I think everything is tipping over, anyway. Are you sure Christopher Goi took care of the spin?”
“Damn! He said he’d be done, unless the sabotage outsmarted him!” The racing gyro bike leaned more
and more to compensate for the tilt in the hall. “Oh my … we’re tipping over!” she exclaimed. “Damn! Hurry! To the train! Go there!”
Thorn said, “The lake better be reconnected to the tanks!”
“Christopher Goi didn’t mention that. And, and, I don’t know how waterproof these buildings are. I hope the hippisticks are locked up and the little ghouls we just crossed take cover.”
The gyro bike finally picked up so much speed that wind whistled at their ears and Lady Hatchet’s wispy hair blew loose to whip at his chin.
He warned, “The floor’s tipping too far to ride for much longer!”
“Hurry to the damn train! That might survive a big wave. Maybe.”
He asked, “Will the train try to kill us on purpose?”
“It’s not like the cars. It doesn’t have a brain. It just goes around and around stuck to its track and that’s just a dumb magnet. I wish we had a kite.”
“I’m glad we have something,” Thorn hollered. “Anything.”
The tilting slowed and then stopped and then slowly reversed, sliding back the other way until the hall leveled back to normal. A window blew out as a tall dead palm tree crashed through it. The window wasn’t glassed in but its decorative lattice shattered and tossed across them.
“Careful! Dammit!”
Thorn steered clear too late and drove over the stiff dry palm leaves, bouncing both of them up off the gyro bike. He quickly wrapped his arms around her and rolled in midair. Hitting the floor, she came down on his chest heavier than he had anticipated. “Oomph!” The bike fell on top of her.
“Damn! My knees!” Lady Hatchet screamed. “I broke my damn knees again!”
Thorn laid her out carefully on the floor. “Good thing everything stopped tilting. Just in time! I can call help for you. Just stay here and don’t move a muscle.”
“It’s just my knees, I’ll live.” Lady Hatchet gasped with joy. “I should eat my words, though; I never thought those damn kids could make the place feel like it had tipped like it did. It took some real screwing with the rockets, outside. I’m glad it didn’t go any farther. That was far enough to make a mess.”
Multitude Page 27
