Lady Hatchet asked, “Why are we talking old Syrian religion in a crumpled train in damn space? What do people usually do while waiting for a rescue that probably won’t come? What did they do in the past?”
“Pray,” Thorn remembered.
“Wish upon a star,” Lady Hatchet said, “and you don’t get very far.”
Malbri Three shrugged. “What else are we supposed to do to pass the time?”
Thorn chuckled. “I suppose if you can only visit us now in this train as voices than why not talk about invisible spiritual things to pass the time.”
“Fine!” Lady Hatchet said. “With my knees all gone to hell I can buy the idea that as I get another day older that the devil is the world become physical! Venus is gone, no longer physical. So I guess she didn’t go to the devil. We go to the devil when we’re born cause that’s when we become physical. She’s become released from cells and dots and blood and released from the devil and now…” She continued on and on in growing sorrow and draining volume
Thorn slipped deeper into his own personal thoughts, still mulling over the maddening fact that he wasn’t going to ever be in bliss in Garden City with all its eternal glory for all endless time. Then he thought to ask, “How are you hippisticks getting to Earth once you come out of your coffins, since you aren’t dead. Is a ship coming special for you? Why would it? What can you pay them?”
Eleven Jane said, “There’s nice plush yachts outside, docked all over to the surface, of course. Plenty of them.”
“What?” Lady Hatchet perked up. “Where? Who’s damn yachts?”
“The robber scientists mostly, of course,” Malbri Three answered, “The privileged come and go at their own leisure. At least back when they had bodies to go and come in. Funny how they gave up everything to just be a bit of electricity in a machine, if that’s all they are. I wonder if that’s self aware. How can it?”
Thorn asked, “There’s lots of personal spaceships docked out there?”
“Sure,” Eleven Jane said. “But who knows how many, really. Most the docks out there are empty since most the elite left back when the union first took hold, way back before I was even born. But there’s still some yachts out there, though, somewhere. Once we’re off to Earth we should first do a fly around the asteroid to destroy the ones we don’t take, to quarantine you clones here.”
“What quarantine.” Lady Hatchet scoffed. “If the damn robber scientists just came and went then what about them bringing contagion to Earth?”
Malbri Three said, “We assume they practiced the procedures to control that. They were scientists after all.”
Lady Hatchet frowned. “It only takes one unforeseen slipup to bring some new germ to Earth they don’t even know about. Free travel was very irresponsible of them. One quarantine slipup could infect the biology of Earth. It could start an accidental experiment nobody would enjoy trying to live through. A simple plague could kill everything with just one incompatible cell or dot. That was stunningly irresponsible of them to go back and forth like that! Damn!”
Eleven Jane chuckled sadly. “Rich people have always had their own rules, and their own private yachts to come and go as they pleased. Don’t act so stunned. You weren’t born yesterday, you should know that.”
“And the damn world is all theirs to ruin?” Lady Hatchet asked. “The union shouldn’t have just gone on strike but should have gone on a big rich person murder spree, if we really valued life.”
“The scientists have always risked our lives,” Eleven Jane said. “We still wallow in their pollution of the most bizarre chemical residuals. It’s in our blood even up here in space. That’s just the way we created the world. That’s why we have to seek a higher plane of life that’s far beyond cells and dots and floors and walls if we’re to survive at all.”
Lady Hatchet moaned. “You’re not very original. Weirdoes have been saying that since the beginning of beads.”
“Prophets,” she corrected.
Lady Hatchet coughed. “You’re not a damn prophet. You’re just a zealous vandal. You just want to smash up things you don’t approve of.”
“Yep. Like a vaccine. Like a hunter. Like somebody who wishes to survive.”
“Oh hell. How long do I have to be a captive audience to this? When you’re my age you don’t have the patience to hear such passion.”
Thorn asked her, “What else is there to do right now?”
“We’re dry enough, now. Let’s get some rest,” Lady Hatchet suggested.
Eleven Jane and Malbri Three said their goodbyes. Thorn and Lady Hatchet sat and listened to the water outside settling and washing by. They finally nodded off but then woke up to Nurse Bobbit shaking them, his old plastic face was completely peeled away and hanging to the side, flapping like a wet oozing cloth. He had brought a lamp with him so they could see again.
“You’re alive!” Thorn 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. No you didn’t. Because you’re a little shit!”
“You’re alive!” Thorn repeated.
“Fixed up a smidgeon by another nurse and no thanks to all you crazy stuck up mammals with thumbs… that spook at the drop of a hat and shit on the floor. Dirty sparks!”
“How did you get here?”
“The door.”
Thorn went to the door and looked out, holding out the lamp. Water was raging by, down the tunnel, still too flooded to step out onto it. “How did you get through that?”
“I didn’t. I stayed above it. I’m a robot. I rolled across the outside of the wall.”
“Well I can’t do that!”
“You don’t have magnets. Just one more thing that makes me better than you.”
“You! Better? You lied to me in pillplace! You’re a liar!” Thorn made a fist. “Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you tell me about Metroplex and the clone research?”
“What,” the robot asked. “You mean that banged up rubble out there? What a disaster.”
Thorn repeated, “Why didn’t you tell me about the bigger world outside?”
“It was my job to tell you to shut up and shut up,” the robot explained. “You’re not my boss so it’s none of your business, anyway. You don’t tell me my job. Besides how was I to know you would go all emancipated and liberal on us and jump the labyrinth? And now that you’re free, do you feel free?”
Lady Hatchet interjected, “Today?”
The robot added, “Look at you, smarty wet pants, all banged up and out to sea, as they say. Free from what? Not free from gravity, that’s for sure. No matter what you do, gravity always wins.”
“No, not free from anything,” Lady Hatchet said. “Damn.”
Thorn glowered. “You still could have told me back in pillplace when we were talking.”
“Why and what’s the point?” Nurse Bobbit asked. “What would have been the point of telling you that you were only going to live the life that you were going to live, as if you are so special. Everybody lives the life they live, no matter how special they may feel that they are.”
“I’m mad at you!” Thorn told the robot.
The nurse robot made a few angry clicking sounds. “I’m furious with you! You let me lay on a trash heap! Dirty sparks and hail from heaven, it was another machine that found the presence of mind and common compassion of a civilized head to fix me up. Where does that leave you, sloppy humans? Why should I ever care to tell you selfish creatures anything?”
“We’ve all been busy, sorry. Really. Sorry,” Thorn said.
“I can see that. You crazy humans! They used to say, ‘Burn the village to save the village.’ I can see the evidence of that ideology all over the place around here. But if you humans want to live like this, who am I to complain? I’m just a red nurse 27. I was made by humans and for their own selfishness. But I still have
to wonder if I shouldn’t curse my creator up one side and down the other for being such a damn oblivious fraud.”
“Live like what?” Lady Hatchet asked.
Nurse Bobbit said, “Just go ahead and shoot yourselves all in the head to prove you hate your foot.”
“What?” Thorn asked. “What are you talking about?”
“Just go kill everything. Kill all yourselves to prove you were once so serious.”
Lady Hatchet said, “We all aren’t dead. Here we are, and the hippisticks are out there working hard on being very rude again. They want to shoot all the yachts they haven’t ridden away in.”
Thorn added, “We’re not dead. We’re just miserable.”
The robot said, “The hippisticks who went into coffins, all of them, are gone. Dead.”
“What? Nobody left? What happened to the hippisticks?” Thorn asked in concern. “Did they already leave for Earth? Already? You mean gone, right? Not dead. You’re using the wrong word! You mean gone!”
“Nope. Dead,” the robot stated.
“What?”
“They sucked away. They’re all gone. Dead gone. Sorry, were they naive.”
“What?” Lady Hatchet gasped. “What?”
“Gone?” Thorn asked. “Dead?”
“But!” Lady Hatchet argued, “We just talked to them.”
“Oh they lived for quite a while, it just happened just now,” the robot explained, dispassionately, “they were all locked away in protective boxes, their silly coffins, but then the floor yanked out from under them and they drowned.”
“How?”
“Their coffins got stuck in the plumbing. They had closed off the water tanks that drain the lake in emergencies because they wanted it to flood Metroplex. Well there’s a reason for it and you shouldn’t mess with it. That’s what did them in. In hippy cultures, synchronicities are recognized as signs that you are on the right path. They went down the wrong path.”
Thorn gasped. “How? Eleven Jane is dead? But how can she? She was just here. She was so alive. She was pretty! How did it happen?”
“Yeah, how did this happen!” Lady Hatchet echoed.
“Pretty or not, they locked it off to prevent the lake from draining,” Nurse Bobbit explained. “And it worked for a while and everything smashed up out in the cave. But when it came back around and the lake filled up again, the vacuum was unbearable. It wasn’t made to not work. The tanks inhaled anyway and blew in their residual caps. The floor under their camp cave blew out and all their coffins just sucked up into the other end of the tanks, with all the water. It just happened about ten minutes ago, while you were sleeping.”
“Residual caps?” Lady Hatchet asked. “What’s that?”
“Just back up widgets,” Nurse Bobbit stated. “The world is full of them.”
“They drowned?” Thorn questioned, unbelieving. “Eleven Jane drowned? Did Nuremburg drown too?” Tears filled his eyes. “Dead? Really dead?”
The robot shook his head, and his face flapped at its side. “Nuremburg wasn’t in any of the coffins. I don’t know where he is, dead or alive. But the hippisticks in their coffins didn’t hide themselves so I can detect them all. Dead.”
Thorn walked to the back of the train car and sobbed, with his back to them. Lady Hatchet sat as still and silent as the robot. After awhile, Thorn returned and asked, “How?”
The robot shook his head. “And they had wanted to think of everything. They did models to plan out every damn angle. The computers didn’t think of that!”
“How?”
“How can you think of everything,” the robot said. “The safety tanks were too primitive in design to take seriously. The computers had merely put them on a list and kept them there. The computers worried about much bigger problems.”
“Bigger problems!” Thorn gasped. “But they’re dead! That’s very big!”
“It was entirely unexpected to die that way,” Nurse Bobbit said. “As it turns out they would have done better just to have run around and dodge the city as it came rolling upside-down at them.”
Thorn wiped tears from his eyes. “Divine justice? They’re dead! They were just here and now they’re dead!”
“Sloppy smugness.”
“The fools felt invincible,” Lady Hatchet said, wiping her own tears. “Damn them. They weren’t old enough to have a proper reverence for the craziness of chaos.”
Thorn asked, “Is this a bad thing to ask, is it my imagination, but did they sort of want to die, anyway?”
“It was a strange cult, as junk cults go,” Lady Hatchet explained. “They celebrated life. They hated civilization. They had profound contradictions. But then what group doesn’t? So I could say yes and I could say no and be very correct on both accounts.”
“Contradictions? All groups?”
“That or hypocrisy, whatever you want to call it. It doesn’t matter. The mind is very willing and able to smooth out all the various and varied bumps as it bumps along, just to have something marvelously grand to believe in, at all costs.”
Thorn turned to the robot and asked. “Does your mind juggle contradictions? Do you think like a human?”
“Dirty sparks no. The human mind is a garden and every garden has its serpents.”
Lady Hatchet let out a dark laugh. “You make it sound so interesting that way. I worry about the weeds.” She put her hands over her face and sobbed. “The sticks!”
“The poor hippisticks,” Thorn moaned.
“As a full class autobot we were programmed to follow a superior mental model to be adaptable and self aware, yet not so screwy. Not as prone to mental illness caused by conflicting information willingly accepted yet mulishly trying to be resolved. Hypocrisy is very wearing on the brain. Many synapses have to be webbed about especially just to throw your nonsense out of the way just to keep electricity handy to think any clear thoughts at all, on occasion. Now enough about how inferior you are. We’re going to my old pillplace to patch up the female’s knees.”
“Subco Gibeah?” Thorn gasped.
“Yeah, sure,” Nurse Bobbit replied with a pert nod.
“What about the clones,” Thorn asked. “Are they all banged up? Did they survive rolling around on the ceiling? They can’t see Lady Hatchet. She’s too old for their eyes, and she’s a woman! They can’t see me illegally again. They’ll be confused more than they are!”
“Oh it’s all empty there now,” Nurse Bobbit assured him. “Don’t worry.”
“Empty? Were they all crushed?”
“Oh, no, not while alive. Though now they may be all crushed ice.”
“You flushed?” Lady Hatchet asked the robot.
“What?” Thorn asked them both.
“Every now and again,” the robot explained, “the experiment gets so confused with contaminations that we just have to give up, flush the pot and start all over.”
“Well, where’d they all go?” Thorn asked.
“Oh, we just had somebody win a complete city wide lottery and shooed everybody up to heaven.”
“What?”
“It was a stampede of joy.”
“The elevator to heaven?” Thorn sat on the floor so he wouldn’t faint on it.
The robot nodded again, his torn face flapping happily. “A righteous stampede to glory. Everybody couldn’t wait. You should have heard them all sing!” Then he frowned. “Eight killer clone claws had been ruined or damaged, a tract was damaged, shot, and had to be replaced in a hurry, first. Do you have any idea how claws could have gotten hurt?” He looked down at Thorn suspiciously. “They were blasted apart by a billy boy gun, by somebody who knew to watch out for them. Even the scrappy claw in the hall that was always a little dingy got blasted. No sane person would enter those freezers for anything. This guy was digital damn maniacal crazy!”
“Why kill all the clone city?” Thorn cried, “But why?”
“Every now and again,” the robot said, “we’ve had to completely clear the damn streets, cl
ear the research project, and start over. This isn’t the first time.”
“Why?”
The robot explained, “You were only out four years so you wouldn’t know anything about all the radical start-overs we’ve had in the past. And radical it always is, since the elevator wasn’t thought up to process an entire population all at once. A lot of clones just stand around in the freezer all confused until they freeze to death before the claw even gets around to plucking at their heads.”
“But.”
The robot nodded. “Sometimes a whole batch of clones come out geniuses, way too many for the cops to kill. So we just flush the whole place and start over if we can’t keep crowd control. In your batch the clones only got genius one at time and you billy boys kept up. Or the pillplace kept up. Chrysalis Joy got genius just at the last minute. You were far from genius though. You were at large and walking around for hours in halls that were actually rather nice and it still didn’t dawn on you that you had just left a fake city doing a fake job.”
Lady Hatchet patted his arm. “Don’t worry dear. You found out it was just an experiment after we explained it to you enough times. So you aren’t a total dunce. Don’t worry. Now that you are self aware, and you have shown us that you’re a good and gentle person, you’ll never be sent to Elysium Grounds. We wouldn’t be so cruel. You’ve simply surpassed the experiment and are now just a dim-witted citizen like the rest of us dupes.” She sobbed. “But at least you and I are still alive. We aren’t so dim-witted that we got ourselves killed. Oh damn! Oh damn!”
“You sent them all up the elevator?” He lay on his back, feeling numb and sick.
“It was quite a happy singing parade,” the robot reported. “I helped herd them all in. Lots of noise and jumping up and down, and the great hopeful songs of religion.”
Lady Hatchet shook her head. “Is anything left out there at all?”
“If one of the kitchens is still in one piece, those clones are all melted into crackers and chips by now but I bet the kitchens are a smidget of a mess right now. I’m an autobot, without dots like you folks, so I don’t care about meat. I have the superior brain and no stomach so don’t expect me to care about whose stomach who ends up in. So stop giving me that astonished look, Thorn. My fuel cells are far more civilized and advanced and efficient than you putrid humans. I don’t rot and burn other people’s meat just so I can ambulate. We need to bandage your knees!” The robot said to her. “Let’s go to pillplace now where I can do it before it swells anymore and you start to complain.”
Multitude Page 29
