MAN ON THE MOON
a short story by
HARRY BEHEMOTH
� SHOCKING STORIES (MMXXIII)
* * *
It is self-exonerative processes rather than
character flaws that account for most inhumanities.
-Albert Bandura, Communication Theorist.
The bottom fell out of the market for Kim Kardashian clones after it was discovered that flawed mitochondria would make considerable plastic surgery necessary to improve the whole-carcass to the desired aesthetic, and frontal-lobe implants to prevent violent outbursts of rage. Point mutations, goddamnit. Just one base pair out of whack could turn your priceless classic hot-chick sex-doll into a lump of worthless misshapen protoplasm sporting grotesque teratomas. No matter. Kilburn already had the security deposits for this batch. A few cortex tweaks here and there, excisions of deformities, an industrial grade dilatation et curettage, a bit of virtual blood-trauma operant conditioning would still make most of these girls very salable. The training Kilburn would perform himself. It was a delicate business manipulating the neural network of the R-complex to achieve socialization and docility; all untutored whole-carcass clones operated on base instinct. One false crackle in the synapses and blam, bitches! Bitch pudding. The truth was, all of these bitches were potential killers. There were always some you had to literally beat the shit out of during training just to keep them under control. But there was always a market even for the violently anti-social sex clones. Some guys just love trouble. But the problem wasn't that these clones were women. The problem was that these women were clones.
Even now, fifty years after the first human clone, forty years after the vaccination degeneration, and thirty years after the Great War, human cloning was still a highly profitable, if currently illegal and dangerous bio-science, only performed by a handful of highly trained (although their training came mostly "on the job") highly motivated renegades. Even though Kilburn had invented a complete, standardized computational method for HiFi whole-genome sequencing, resolving many variant types, including single-nucleotide polymorphisms, insertions and deletions, structural variants, tandem repeats, segmental duplications, copy number variants, methylation and phasing data in a single bioinformatic solution, it remained impossible to create the perfect clone - you could never tell when point mutations might rear their ugly head and ruin the physical perfection. And mentally, try as he might, all of these girls retained minds of their own. Non-computability was an eternal human problem hopefully that would never be solved. Kilburn sighed. Romantically, he was a philosopher. He never wanted to look into the depthless glassy eyes of a human meat-puppet and think you don't know what you've got till it's gone. Maybe non-computability was the essence of the human soul.
The Black Nobility forbade natural pro-creation on Earth except among their own class. They carried out a highly successful sterilization program among the proles and slaves with the forced Great Vaccination of 2030, and viable stem-cell cultures were now very difficult to obtain. The elite cared not as they were replacing the meat-puppets with robots; but try as they might, there was something about the non-computability of humans that would always tell in the end, something about human perception that would always trump the limited bias of contextual AI database robots, no matter how extensive the technical knowledge. This non-computability was what the Guardians were now trying to stamp out, in the rare places where it still existed, the essence of what makes a human being human. Things were bleak on Earth for the common man.
On the Moon, things were a little more wide open, a little less dangerous for those who dealt in black-market clones. There was an Imperial Guardian Police presence there to be sure, but they were a little more pliant, a little more open to bribery, as many of what was left of the Earth's elite enjoyed an occassional jaunt to the Moon for some very expensive R'n'R, and they all wanted to get laid.
Kilburn was the acknowledged genius innovator and leading practitioner of the black art. Grandson of the inventor of the "whole-carcass" method of growing clones (as distinguished from the "embryonic" approach), he had inherited his grandfather's cellular database and had achieved a significant boutique business in creating clones of female celebrities of the late twentieth century all the way up to the vaccination degeneration of the 2020's and the Great Prophylactic Event of 2030. After that, the viable stem-cells for clones fell virtually to nil. Rarer still were viable female eggs. (Note: These eggs were cut into fourths, seeded, and used to make four clones). Modern clones themselves were sterile; their stem-cells were degenerate and unusable. His original boutique clones were still possessed of viable genetic material that produced almost flawless clones; but there were so few of them left on Earth, and fewer still on the Moon.
The Black Nobility's punitive program of eradication for those refusing vaccination (except for themselves) had reduced the number of humans capable of reproduction to isolated pockets. That in turn made Kilburn's product highly desired and highly-priced. There was not a prince of the Black Nobility who didn't have an order in for a sex-clone. So Kilburn felt relatively safe at Fort Orwell, his laboratory compound on the dark side of the moon. After all, the Lunar Police commissioner was in possession of one of his finest models, a Sophia Loren. Kilburn figured he would lay low and bide his time until the vagaries of human nature made him a hero again.
The long-awaited day of the true cyborg, the grand apotheosis of man and machine, was at hand. His hands. Completely programmable, subservient to the will of the master. There were still problems controlling these flesh-and-blood replicants with their unpredictable brains and unexpected genetic short-comings. There was always a chance of second-generation tissue malfunctioning; during the covalent phosphodiester-bonding process in vivo defective amino acids might fire off the wrong enzyme and the wrong protein would attach to the wrong receptor and you would have a helluva genetic mess, such as what happened with the degenerate Kim Kardashian's. Cerebellum implants were still basically limited to not-completely consistent motor-control functions; most clones still by-and-large reacted to negative stimuli with instinctive violence. The first few months of training a "whole-carcass" clone was quite a challenge, mentally, physically, and spiritually. Kilburn was working feverishly to produce more sophisticated electro-chemical synapse filters, catalysts and the like, looking for control of the sluices into the consciousness. The biological part of the creation was readily achievable; it was the conquest and control of the mind that still proved elusive. He laughed as he thought of Freud: What is it that a woman wants?
On the open market, clones were still desirable but on their way out. Sex cyborgs would bring more than sex robots. Buyers wanted something that was at least remotely human and built to last; clones were perishable and contrary, robots too distant and artficial. He indulged in a grim chuckle thinking of men complaining about what Kilburn called "the Arbitrary Bullshit Factor" in a woman's brain. They didn't know the half of it. Clones were aware they were not normally human and they very definitely had an attitude, once they had achieved a bit of consciousness and learning.
Viscous ocular fluid and bits of dura stained his latex gloves. He had reached in through the eyes to retrieve a valuable hemisphere-switching diode from a malfunctioning unit. This clone had been a vicious biter and unable to learn any language past grunting and screaming. The serum used in the hydro-biogenic cell-replication process was still in the process of being perfected; nutrition delivery and waste materials removal sometimes leaked and resulted in toxic bacterial contamination that affected the development of the clone, particularly the brain. The Great War had shot clone-science all to hell. Quality control, Kilburn sighed. 2075, and he felt himself almost as much a pioneer as his grandfather. His grow-vats were forty years old. There was far too much trouble to make these girls sociable but no rest for the wicked; when replicating life-forms, it is what it is.
"There are semantic flaws in Professor Bandura's theories." Dominique was full of subtle mischief. She and Kilburn briefly locked eyes above their surgical masks.
"Oh yeah?"
"Yes." Dominique held the handlight where Kilburn could see deeper into the fissures. "A self-exonerative process is a character flaw in and of itself, n'est pas?"
"Man could not exist without rationalization, delusion, moral relativism or blasphemy." Kilburn chuckled as he separated two gyri.
Dominique recited, "Only people who love nothing fear nothing and can survive in a world of shit."
"If I have taught you nothing other than that, you've learned plenty." Kilburn's deft fingertips detected the hard edge of the diode deep in the subtle rubberiness of the corpus callosum. "Got it!" he cried. He held the glistening chip to the silvery light streaming in through the transparent roof of the terradome. Here, not far over the horizon from the spiky ridges of the Liebnitz Crater, you could almost see the sun this time of year. Kilburn washed the chip in the sink, then disposed of the remains of the skull in the vacuum tube. Dominique punched in a code on her cell phone.
"Please prepare Dr. Kilburn's hovercraft. For two." She listened. "No escort today. We won't be gone long." Kilburn saw his reflection shimmering in Dominique's luminous orbs, the silver crescent of the edge of the dark side of the Moon in mirrored silhouette behind him, suggesting worlds beyond simple planes, infinite regressions toward the ultimate singularity. Significance. No matter where man might go in the universe, it was impossible to escape human nature. No significance. A smile on a dog.
"No matter where you go, there you are," said Dominique.
"Mind-paraphraser!" retorted Kilburn.
They kissed.
* * *
"Does a clone have a soul?" Terri Incognita inquired.
Dominique smiled. "Better yet. A clone has market value."
Kilburn looked directly at the bar-mistress. "Do you have a soul?"
Terri Incognita poured shots of real Mezcal all the way round. They were in the office at her club "Danse Matrix," a popular showbar in Lunaville. There was talk of a second club in Gates Town. Terri's prosperity had more to do with her culpability in the illegal clone trade than her management ability. Several of the dancers in her club were clones made by Kilburn. She raised her glass and proposed a toast. Kilburn and Dominique lifted their glasses.
"L'chaim." They drank the sweet mezcal down.
Terri sighed. "This place is crawling with cheap replicants," she said, studying the club security monitors. "You can usually tell a replicant, particularly the cheap ones. They all look alike. No personality. They all have crazy eyes. Nobody home."
"Not like my girls," Kilburn bragged. "Everyone an uber-babe."
"Not always." Terri refilled their glasses. "Those four Heather Locklear knock-offs you sold me-"
"Didn't I make that good? You got four new Scarlett Johanson's I barely got to test drive." Kilburn grinned and he and Dominique raised their shot-glasses to Terri.
"Yes you did." Terri grinned back and returned their salute. They drank. Terri sighed a satisfied 'ahhh' at the wondrous mezcal. The worm was in range of a monster-sized swallow. "Those girls were great crowd-pleasers. I made a lotta money selling them to some of the London Saudi's." Dominique picked up the Mezcal bottle. Kilburn chuckled.
"One hand washes the other. You've referred some very lucrative customers to me," Kilburn acknowledged. Dominique swished the mezcal, roiling it up around the agave leviathan.
"I would pour us another toast, if we have any left," Terri smiled uncertainly at Dominique. Dominique beamed back at her and Kilburn, upturned the fifth-bottle and bubbled the mezcal until she had swallowed the worm.
Dominique shattered the empty bottle against the wall. "AAAHHHHH," she belched. A surprised Kilburn and Terri laughed uproariously.
Dominique looked at Kilburn wearing her brightest most mischievous smile. "Non-computability, right?"
* * *
"Socrates, also, was full of shit." Dominique opined.
"My, how I admire the precision of your dialectic!"
Dominique was at the wheel as their spacecraft split the dark of the shadows of the far side, adjusting its rate and direction relative to float along the Moon's Summer librations of longitude. She down-shifted the anti-gravity thrusters. "There is only one side to any question. Even Mao got that. Philosophy begets politics, politics begets power, all political power proceeds from the barrel of a gun. Might makes right."
Kilburn wondered why she had a philosophical bug up her ass. "I quake in fear at your implied syllogism, Xanthippe." Kilburn stretched and yawned. They had made some good trades, cut some sharp deals, copped a good haul of raw materials on Earth, and split. He was ready to party a little bit before they got down to the gritty, painstaking work. No fool like an old fool. Kilburn grinned at his own dirty mind.
Dominique chuckled and glanced at Kilburn. "Heuristic. Damn good pussy."
"Some things you can't learn in school." Kilburn squeezed Dominique's long sinuous thigh. "Take her around to day-side before we go home. Let's see what Christoff has prepared to celebrate the Moon Bowl."
Dominique moued a little kiss at Kilburn and banked hard into a 180-degree turn. Kilburn had come to enjoy the centrifugal tug on his guts produced by Dominique's radical aerobatics. It felt like being hopelessly in love.
They both loved the romantic vista from the D'Alembert Range at dawn, coming from the west. The Sun was maybe ten degrees to the right of the Moon's relative alignment with the Earth, the dramatic shadows receding north, unveiling the terradomes of Gates Town and Lunaville, glittering like blue sapphires in the diaphonous light. Kilburn and Dominique felt like genii floating on the cusp of a dream.
Dominique's amber orbs glowed. She looked at Kilburn. "Sometimes I don't even have to pick your brain. Is that empathy?" she teased.
"No," he answered. "I'd call that pure luck."
Dominique laughed softly, bewitchingly limbic for a moment. Kilburn pressed play on the DeBussy "Claire de Lune" file. He caressed Dominique's warm thigh through her spider-silk pants. "I would like to donate some DNA in the form of protoplasm wit' ya tonight."
Dominique laughed again. She looked up at the flashing viewfinder. "Save it, Man O' War. Bogies at four and eight. Let's skedaddle. Hold what ya got!"
Dominique was a terrible tease. She stayed just out of weaponry range, just far enough ahead to goad the goon-squads on. Just a touch of the hyperdrive was sufficient to outdistance any nuclear-powered craft the Guardians possessed. Kilburn's Scarab was one of only three anti-gravity spacecraft extant, a reward from the American government for the timely success of the soldier-clone program that turned the tide in defeating Red China, during the final phase of the Great War. The soldier-clone program was a rush job, the cells taken from what was left of the bodies of dead human soldiers. Kilburn had quadrupled the electrolytic filtering rate of the blood serum in the vats, enhancing the differentiation rate of the stem cells. And he watched his soldiers grow. He had adapted some acromegaly genes to add three inches of thick skull for protection. Adding the control implants in the brain in the latter stage of the carcass development was always the trickiest part. But by and large Kilburn succeeded. Those clones were mean motherfuckers when they wanted to be, and they always wanted to be. Simple visual and verbal cues were sufficient to train them for their purpose. Their attack prowess had saved the day for what was left of Western Civilization. Not long after that, in the blood-soaked shocked aftermath of the holocaust, the Black Nobility, fearing their own demise, outlawed the making of clones, and those same governments had branded Kilburn a criminal. But, in a gesture of realpolitik, he was allowed to keep the Scarab. Who knows when they might need him again.
Dominique looked in the viewfinder, engaged the parallax weapon-scope and locked the bogies in the cross-hairs. She had an endearing habit of sneering like a wolf-Elvis at the kill. "Fuck 'em and feed 'em fish heads." Dominique got a grim, tight look around her delicate mouth. She pressed the target-lock on the range-finder, then the "pulse" button on the gyro-laser. "You'd think they would learn."
"Probably a show-off looking for a bribe," Kilburn yawned and emitted a slight poot.
"Poof. Into the void!" Cinders flared in the sky behind them, and dissipated. Dominique took her eyes off the viewfinder and gazed toward the horizon, a smug grin on her face. "Oh look! At ten o'clock! Christoff is a genius!"
The Man in the Moon was a monster. A huge hologram representing Shiva, Lord of the Dance, gyred and gimbeled for miles above the wabe of the Sea of Tranquility, not far from the obelisk commemorating the Apollo 11 landing. A familiar eye could detect the Trump Towers integrated into the design at the feet of the shimmying god. No doubt the hotel was jammed with degenerate tourist's here for the Moon Bowl. No doubt Terri Incognita had her fingers in many lucrative pies exploiting same. Lunaville would wax gibbous on the Moon Bowl.
Dominique burst out laughing, peals of rich cynicism. "Trump Towers configured within the Apasma-Rapurasa! Oh Mon Dieu!" Dominique was perhaps too smart for her own good. She wiped tears of mirth from her eyes. Dominique had too much faith in her future, Kilburn thought. But, she would never float belly-up in Lethe, never hunker down in the Valley of the Shadow. Her existence was too improbable and unlikely to be wasted. Kilburn admired her beautiful Deneuve-like profile, counted his blessings and took a quick cat-nap.
He awoke when Dominique back-handed a fist into his chest and shouted "KILBURN!"
Kilburn jerked and twitched, drool spooling off his lip, his eyes bleary. "Wha' tha fuk?" Dominique pointed at two o'clock.
Smoke was hanging in the dead atmosphere like a shroud in a tomb above the dark side of the Mons Mouton, where the laboratory complex, Fort Orwell, lay in ruin.
* * *
Salvaging what little was left was a grim and sorrowful business. His entire security force had been killed, black bodies smoking like over-done barbecue. All of the laboratory complex and his living quarters had been leveled into black rubble. His titanium safe-room was scorched black and shriveled, its outer door ajar. Inside was his personal fire-proof security vault, his entire rare cache of the DNA of the hottest women between the years 1970-2020. It was by far his most important possession. If it was still intact, this disaster was largely mitigated. "Please God," he begged, unbelieving, hoping against hope.
Even through his gloves the outer door was hot. Kilburn threw the door open and stood immobile, stunned. The vault door was open. The vials of hot-chick DNA were gone. All that was left was a fifth of 150-year Bruichladdich Octomores Scotch Whiskey and an ounce of top-strain Colombian red-bud marijuana. A hologram of Philomela, "Wednesday's Child," danced on the top of the vault.
"Hey Kilburn, old buddy, how they hangin'?" Philomela greeted effusively. "Hey listen, bitch, we've got your girls. If you want them back, we want something from you. Don't call us, we'll call you. Get yourself a ticket to the Moon Bowl and maybe we can make a deal. Toodles." Philomela blew him a kiss, and then she was gone, leaving him in the scant light of his torch.
* * *
Kilburn was drunk and maudlin.
"It's ver' simple. People are assholes.The common swine, incapable of perceiving abstractions, never feel life is precious or rare, a sacred treasure. That's why they want to destroy. That's why they're slaves now. That's why I build clone whores." Dominique chuckled. "'Society' is nothing to believe in. Untold generations of humans, thousands and thousands of years, and people are still greedy, rapacious scumbags-"
"Jesus, give it a rest," Dominique griped. "The question is, what are we going to do about it?" She gave Kilburn a side-long glance. "You know who did this, don't you?"
Kilburn bubbled the Bruichladdich Octomores and sucked on the killer weed so hard his ganglia crackled like brushfire and his eyes bugged out, toadlike. His red eyes wept like burst cherries. "Yes, I know who did this." Kilburn wiped his eyes and squinted at the horizon.
"There she is! Good ole Terri!" Kilburn cried. "I knew we could count on her."
"She's in it for the money." Dominique always kept it real when she wasn't engaging in some bombastic fantasy of her own. Terri Incognita's personal craft was hidden in a cave in an unknown dorsum about halfway up the incline of the western slope of the Selenean Summit; if you didn't know where to look, it was easy to miss: There was a lunar swirl of high albedo directly south of the cave about three clicks. The shafts of thin starlight on the rocky ridges of the mons were delicate and beautiful, cloaking the adamant deadliness of the rocks in a silvery sheen. Dominique eased the big Scarab down in a small unnamed mare surrounded by jagged rocks.
She looked at Kilburn. "Put on your helmet." She set the example and Kilburn followed suit. Her voice came in Kilburn's ear on the ear-buds. "It's time to go to see the lady, and make a deal."
"What if she won't make a deal?" Kilburn asked.
"Then I'll make her an offer she can't refuse." Dominique checked the element in her battle-phaser, switched the selector from "Stun" to "Kill," and stuck the phaser in her waist band behind her ass, and under her jacket.
* * *
Kilburn was taking a long time in the loo, too long. Terri passed a bong to Dominique, and exhaled. She glanced at the loo door, sipping on a flute of Moet. The sound of a flushing toilet behind him as he emerged, even more drunk and maudlin. His face wore a facetious sneer as he bubbled the Bruichladdich. He took the bong from Dominique and sucked like a Hoover, erupting into a coughing fit as the smoke and the whiskey overtook his lungs and his consciousness.
Dominque and Terri grinned at Kilburn as he hacked his lungs up, and toppled back in his seat. Bleary-eyed, he looked at the girls. "You know why robots are better than clones?" he asked with the arch tone of a professorial drunk teetering on the brink of God-like omniscience. He answered his own rhetoric. "Because a goddamn robot's behavior is consistent - it follows orders. A clone is capricious. It may well react negatively when hard-used, or for any reason at all. A clone is a bad hater." Kilburn's groggy noggin was drooping.
Dominique sniffed. "A robot never considers itself to be a slave. That's not in its database." Dominique had a taste of Terri's Moet. "A clone will figure it out, no matter what bullshit you feed it. Cellular memory on a quantum level." Dominique emptied the flute. "Non-computability."
Kilburn was drooping almost to falling out of his chair, catching himself and rearing back up, loathe to give up his derailed train of thought. "Atavism," he slobbered. "Field hands." His chin dropped on his breast and he fell back in his chair, eyes closed.
"What it is, is something that doesn't always work right," Terri murmured.
Kilburn unexpectedly rallied. "Some are genetically defective to begin with, some never physically differentiate properly, some mix and match semantic imperatives improperly. It's a goddamn miracle I've been as sussuckful as I have been." Kilburn's neck was full bobble-head.
"Stupid is as stupid does," Terri laughed shortly.
"But sometimes they get it just right." Dominique held up a screen capture from the Lunar Times. The headline screamed: "MUTANT PSYCHO CYBER-SLUTS STILL AT LARGE!" Dominique's grin threatened to split her face as she taunted: "Your masterpieces." She hated for Kilburn to wallow in self-pity. It gave her the fear.
Kilburn stared at both of Dominique's blurry faces. "I ha' wun fur evry day uv tha week."
"Never on Sunday," said Dominique.
"Even God rests on Sunday," growled Kilburn. He was starting to wobble even sitting down.
Terri squinted at Kilburn. "What do you have left?" she asked.
Kilburn reared up and bellowed, "ROBOTS ARE BETTER THAN GODDAMN CLONES, GODDAMNIT!" and then almost collapsed, wavering and swaying. "I shoulda listened to my old man," he whined, in a tearful tone. "Joined the circus."
Dominique and Terri looked at each other. Terri attempted her inquiry again. "Kilburn." No response, just nodding and drooling. Terri leaned in. "KILBURN!" she shouted, and bitch-slapped the piss out of him. Dominique stifled a belly laugh.
Kilburn straightened up, barely cognizant. "Wha'?"
Terri took his hands and looked him in the eye, speaking deliberately as one speaks to idiots and children. "What - do - you have left?"
Kilburn collected himself momentarily. "Operating capital for maybe three months, and the new stem cells and scrapings we got on Earth. But I have nowhere to cook."
"There is no other facility capable on this planet. You'll have to go to Earth. But I don't have that type of money to sponsor you. My business is liquid. I go to work every day." Terri coughed. She took Kilburn's cheeks in her hand and got in his face. "The bounty on your Cyber-Sluts is high."
Kilburn attempted to straighten himself. He cleared his throat. "I know that. I'm counting on it." Dominique sat bolt upright.
"What have you done?" she demanded.
A crooked intoxicated grin skewed Kilburn's stupid face. He waggled his phone. "While I was taking a shit, I wagered the amount of the posted reward for the Cyber-Sluts on the Lunaville Aztecs. Using the stem cells as security."
Dominique glowered at him but controlled herself. "You better pray the Aztecs win."
"Or that the Cyber-Sluts show up at Guardian Headquarters, remanding themselves to custody upon your authority." Terri did not add that the Guardians had been on her ass about her alleged connections with Kilburn.
Dominique feigned scratching her back, fingering her laser-blaster.
"O ye of little faith!" Kilburn cried. "I've got a hunch those girls are going to show up at the Moon Bowl. I am preparing their Waterloo."
"As if," Dominique spat.
"You better pray, as if," Kilburn mocked. "I bet you to cover the over-and-under."
Dominique's intense orbs glowed like coal fire.
"If you lose, I'll cover the over-and-under with ten of my best strippers," Terri propositioned.
Dominque quit scratching her back, rested her hands on her thighs. She looked daggers at Kilburn. Kilburn's cloudy eyes held her gaze as he considered the proposal. He looked back at Terri Incognita. "Twenty. Not a clone less." He looked at Dominique. "She's worth more."
"Done and done," Terri agreed. "Let's drink on it." Terri poured Dominique a triple-shot of Mezcal.
"Can you dance?" she asked.
* * *
The Mutant Psycho Cyber-Sluts had been Kilburn's personal harem, six of the finest custom-made playmates he had ever fabricated. Bred for beauty, talent, intelligence, they were quick learners and abstract thinkers. But what is it that a woman wants?
Kilburn was a man whose tastes were colored by his times. After the War he had great success in acquiring tissue samples from even the remaining famous women. Overnight his infamy became the hope of a panic-stricken world. At first Kilburn had held out the hope of transferring a person's consciouness into a new body, a fresh clone. Mind transference was still maddeningly elusive (digitization meant dissipation and diminuation, and a lack of the spontaneity of a fully-aware consciousness), but a brisk trade sprang up in slave clones, whole-carcass mindless drones for fresh body parts, and personal child replicants (very expensive) for the inbred infertile members of the Black Nobility.
Kilburn's secret method involved growing the organism at an optimum "rate" (it took one year to grow an adult clone approximately eighteen human years in age). The soldier clones had come to maturity just in time to save Western Man's ass. His carefully devised electro-chemical methods of regulating the covalent-bonding process at the differentiation stages of cellular transformation accounted for his superior results; with the Cyber-Sluts, there was an odd side-effect: they were all very telepathic with each other, and to a lesser extent with the public at large. It added an extra layer to their threat. Dominique was of the opinion this trait was a practical example of quantum entanglement due to Kilburn's manipulation of the DNA's covalent bonds. The implants Kilburn put in the soldier-clone's brains kept their intellectual prowess to following orders. But there was no way Kilburn was going to do that to a beautiful woman, no matter how much their ability to think might threaten his chauvinism. He liked pushback from his women.
Kilburn sighed. Random murderous violence had been an unpredictable consequence in the replication of clones, fanning the zombie-apocalypse fears of the Black Nobility, leading to the current ban on human cloning. But Kilburn never stopped his experiments; he was an artist. Despite the defective ones, by and large his clones were superior compared to his competitors. But he worried that the violently deranged ones resulted from some inherent flaw in the process; was it nature or nurture? Socialization comes hard to an organism thrown into the world fresh out of a vat of goo, no matter how much training they received. Even now, Kilburn was conflicted and bewildered on this point; was it "cellular memory" as Dominique claimed, or something else? The Mutant Psycho Cyber-Sluts were the first of his "prime cut" personal clones to turn treacherous. He still didn't know what he had done wrong. What is it that a woman wants?
Monday's Child was the ring-leader, Xena. Xena was a flawless copy of Lucy Lawless. Kilburn had raised her on ancient video's of "Warrior Princess." "Fair of face" she was but she was a vicious bitch when she wanted to be. She had delighted in killing the "inferior" clones of Kilburn's competitors, including the children. Something had been lost in her abstract modeling process.
Tuesday's Child was Beatrix, a perfect copy of Uma Thurman. Beatrix was the most adept at the martial arts, very graceful and lithe, and particularly good at knife-fighting. She would very definintely cut a bitch. Kilburn started to worry about her when he realized her favorite form of recreation was solitary high-speed games of barefoot mumblety-peg with stilettos.
Wednesday's Child, Philomela, was a wondrous approximation of Charlize Theron, weapons-trained to be an expert assassin. She was the cruelest of them all. Kilburn regretted allowing her to keep her tongue. She had cursed Kilburn like a mongrel dog and threatened him with sanguine retribution of a nature so foul Kilburn tried to keep her out of his mind.
Thursday's Child Aubade was special; she had been grown from the oldest egg ever to produce a clone (courtesy of Michelle Pfeiffer). She had the most dangerous mind for strategy. Expert in software engineering, she planned most of the raids and operations of the Sluts, and the widows of dozens of dead Lunaville Guardians could attest to her tactical brilliance.
Friday's Child was Ruby. Ruby looked just like Ann-Margret did in "Carnal Knowledge." Initially the most loving and giving of the girls, eventually she grew resentful of Kilburn's sexual exploitation. Basically she just didn't like the way Kilburn fucked, and that was that. The Sluts used her for the "honey trap" when they needed to hoodoo Kilburn's guards to penetrate security.
Saturday's Child, Jennifer, was a copy of Jennifer Harris, the Pathfinder flight-control specialist. Kilburn had had such a hard-on for her (she was a hero of his youth) he raided her grave and lifted marrow from her skeleton. She was possibly the least glamorous but the smartest of the lot. She was the transportation and security officer for the group. It was she who had figured out the security codes that allowed the Cyber-Sluts to escape their confinement. It was she who flew the stolen hovercraft to Lunaville. It was she who Kilburn feared most. She had outfoxed him, playing possum for years, learning the appropriate cyber and combat skills on her own, and then striking like a rattlesnake. Kilburn learned too late it was a wrong thing for a woman-clone to be too smart. Persistence of Memory. Hell hath no fury.
And all of these girls could fuck like nobody's business. Kilburn's sentimentality overrode his fear. If he could just talk to the Sluts, he could bring them back into the fold. These old-skool clones were prime-cut, unique, ones-of-a-kind. Since the Golden Age of Replicants, most clones were cheap copies of common types who still had viable DNA, many cultivated from a humus of pureed fetal tissue from abortions. Kilburn would never stoop that low. So many of these-type clones wore out quickly and broke down on an organic and intellectual level. There was no value to them long-term. Kilburn sniffed. He would never stoop that low.
But now there would be no appreciable batch of new clones of quality for at least fifteen years on the Moon, thanks to the Cyber-Sluts' destruction of Fort Orwell. Kilburn's anger trumped his erotic longings. There was nothing left to do but kill the bitches - before they killed him. Kilburn was not a hopeless romantic.
Kilburn idly perused his ticket to the Moon Bowl. He knew the Cyber-Sluts would show up somewhere, sometime, somehow at the contest. They would be looking for him, tracking the jumbled thoughts of the crowd. Deal, my ass. They were just trying to draw him out for a hit. Okay, fair enough. They would NOT beat him at his own game. He would walk every concourse, looking for them. He had confidence that his mentality was superior to theirs. They were just clones, and bitch-clones at that. They would rue the day.
He had not seen Dominique since her escape over a week ago. Out of sight was definitely not out of mind with her. Alright, fuck her too, Kilburn groused. He tried to arouse a show of contempt to convince himself, but he could feel his blood pressure rise and his sphincter tighten. He went to check his weaponry, and the protean mask he would use in disguise.
Fuck those bitches.
* * *
The Moon Bowl was a type of lacrosse game played on a natural-gravity field. The players were able to pull off some adroit and amazing feats, competing against only one-sixth of the Earth's gravity. Some players could jump as high as twenty-feet into the air. The goal portal for the ball was thirty-feet high. Violent body-checking impeded the success of the opposing teams. And the Moon Bowl held to the original traditions of the Mayan sacred ball game. It was literally winner-take-all. At the end of the match, the losers were ritually slaughtered by the shamans of the winners. In addition to the winners' share of the money, the winning team was allowed to harvest the organs of the losers. The games were always hard-fought tooth-and-nail to the bitter end. There were moats around the field separating the seating sections to mitigate the effects of the riot that always occurred after every Moon Bowl. Terri Incognita always made a fortune speculating in spare organs, which were now a form of currency on both the Earth and the Moon.
With less than a minute to go, Kilburn's Lunaville Aztecs were up by five goals, 13-8, over the hapless Gates Town Blade Runners. Thus Kilburn had beaten both the three-goal spread and the "over" at nineteen goals. The waterboys of the Aztecs started whetting the sacrificial daggers, bringing a rabid cheer and huzzah from the Aztecs fans. The sacrifice of the losing team observed a strict protocol which not even the most contrarian Lunarian would dare disrupt - the penalty was death. Since the Great War and the abject failure of religion, humanity had reverted to more stark mythologies. The gods of superstition demanded their bleak propitiation. The Moon Bowl was always the toughest ticket in the known universe.
Kilburn started mentally counting his loot, nervously watching each tick of the clock, eyes scanning through the crowd. He had walked through every aisle and concourse of the stadium and had seen neither hide nor hair of the Cyber-Sluts. So far, so good. It didn't look like the Cyber-Sluts were going to show, after all. Although he knew he was headed for a showdown with the Sluts eventually, Kilburn heaved a sigh of relief. Get the money, hop in the ole Dung Beetle, and get the hell off the Moon before the Sluts caught up with him. Fuck the reward now, and the vintage priceless starlet DNA. Hole up on Earth, do the work, and plot revenge on the Sluts where the time and place were to his advantage. The Moon was not big enough to hold himself and the Cyber-Sluts now, Kilburn thought grimly. And what about Dominique? Kilburn exhaled a long, slow even breath. What is it that a woman wants? For the first time during the game, he took his trigger finger off the plasma phaser in his jacket pocket, even though the threats and acrimony were building among the rival fans.
The Aztec water boys were preparing the "bleeding tables" for the sacrificial victims. A Cohort of Guardians in riot gear with maximum phasers, the "Vaporizers," gathered around the playing field. Kilburn watched the last second tick off the scoreboard above the playing field. When the board read "0:00" it erupted in a blinding phospor flash and explosion that took the dementia to an ultimate level. Damn good pussy. Tongues of old-fashioned napalm fire-jelly licked at the crowd like dragon's breath, scorching many bon vivants into smoked meat. Kilburn practiced the greater part of valor, ran for an exit, hoping to live to fight another day.
Kicking steps caught up with him at a turnstile, and strong arms slammed him down face-first from behind. A strong hand jerked him over on his back and punched him in the nose, splattering it into a bloody mess. It was Philomela.
She ripped off his protean mask, tearing great fleshy chunks out of his face in the process. "Dr. Frankenputz, I presume," Philomela gloated. Kilburn could not speak. He had sexually used Philomela well before she was physically or mentally ready for it, clone or not. There was something about her helpless innocence that had made him hard. There was no use lying to himself at this late juncture. Maybe that type of blackness was the only reason he had ever studied the life sciences to begin with. Damn good pussy. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Philomela grasped his scrotum with her vise-like grip (Kilburn understood now why the supplies of amino acids were always unaccountably low) and slowly squeezed, her smile widening as she increased the crushing pressure on his testicles. The pain was unbearable. Just before he faded into oblivion, the face of Philomela rushed at him, her eyes drowning pools, black holes sucking in the warped cosmology of Kilburn's soul.
"I pissed in the vials of hot-chick DNA," she snarled. "This rapey shit has got to stop." The last thing he saw was her hateful, sneering face. He closed his eyes and thought of Freud for the last time. Damn good pussy. He wanted to laugh but Philomela's strong left hand crushed his windpipe and her right exploded his balls. He felt his trachea break and his scrotum ripped off. Non-computability. Then a black wall knifed through his brain.
* * *
Dominique happily puttered around the house. It was good to be back on Earth, doing research and teaching. She and thirty-six other women had been named Global Heritage Genetic Treasures, the last of the boutique love-doll clones, the only clones who could still reproduce. Tissues of the thirty-six were now being used in an advanced cloning process to repopulate the Earth. Kilburn, posthumously, was famous and celebrated again.
Sometimes she would take her young son Huxley out back on a starry night and let him look at the Moon and Stars through an antique telescope left to him by his father. The child was very bright and enjoyed the sciences, and the philosophical classics of antiquity.
"Egghead! Moonstruck!" the mother teased. Sometimes the child would look through the telescope for hours, gazing at the Moon, absent-mindedly sucking sprigs of wild honeysuckle until the nectar was gone, all the taste of it. Then he would go in the house and contemplate a photograph of his father's inscrutable visage, comparing his own face in a looking glass. Already, people were remarking on the uncanny resemblance.
FIN
a short story by
HARRY BEHEMOTH
� SHOCKING STORIES (MMXXIII)
* * *
It is self-exonerative processes rather than
character flaws that account for most inhumanities.
-Albert Bandura, Communication Theorist.
The bottom fell out of the market for Kim Kardashian clones after it was discovered that flawed mitochondria would make considerable plastic surgery necessary to improve the whole-carcass to the desired aesthetic, and frontal-lobe implants to prevent violent outbursts of rage. Point mutations, goddamnit. Just one base pair out of whack could turn your priceless classic hot-chick sex-doll into a lump of worthless misshapen protoplasm sporting grotesque teratomas. No matter. Kilburn already had the security deposits for this batch. A few cortex tweaks here and there, excisions of deformities, an industrial grade dilatation et curettage, a bit of virtual blood-trauma operant conditioning would still make most of these girls very salable. The training Kilburn would perform himself. It was a delicate business manipulating the neural network of the R-complex to achieve socialization and docility; all untutored whole-carcass clones operated on base instinct. One false crackle in the synapses and blam, bitches! Bitch pudding. The truth was, all of these bitches were potential killers. There were always some you had to literally beat the shit out of during training just to keep them under control. But there was always a market even for the violently anti-social sex clones. Some guys just love trouble. But the problem wasn't that these clones were women. The problem was that these women were clones.
Even now, fifty years after the first human clone, forty years after the vaccination degeneration, and thirty years after the Great War, human cloning was still a highly profitable, if currently illegal and dangerous bio-science, only performed by a handful of highly trained (although their training came mostly "on the job") highly motivated renegades. Even though Kilburn had invented a complete, standardized computational method for HiFi whole-genome sequencing, resolving many variant types, including single-nucleotide polymorphisms, insertions and deletions, structural variants, tandem repeats, segmental duplications, copy number variants, methylation and phasing data in a single bioinformatic solution, it remained impossible to create the perfect clone - you could never tell when point mutations might rear their ugly head and ruin the physical perfection. And mentally, try as he might, all of these girls retained minds of their own. Non-computability was an eternal human problem hopefully that would never be solved. Kilburn sighed. Romantically, he was a philosopher. He never wanted to look into the depthless glassy eyes of a human meat-puppet and think you don't know what you've got till it's gone. Maybe non-computability was the essence of the human soul.
The Black Nobility forbade natural pro-creation on Earth except among their own class. They carried out a highly successful sterilization program among the proles and slaves with the forced Great Vaccination of 2030, and viable stem-cell cultures were now very difficult to obtain. The elite cared not as they were replacing the meat-puppets with robots; but try as they might, there was something about the non-computability of humans that would always tell in the end, something about human perception that would always trump the limited bias of contextual AI database robots, no matter how extensive the technical knowledge. This non-computability was what the Guardians were now trying to stamp out, in the rare places where it still existed, the essence of what makes a human being human. Things were bleak on Earth for the common man.
On the Moon, things were a little more wide open, a little less dangerous for those who dealt in black-market clones. There was an Imperial Guardian Police presence there to be sure, but they were a little more pliant, a little more open to bribery, as many of what was left of the Earth's elite enjoyed an occassional jaunt to the Moon for some very expensive R'n'R, and they all wanted to get laid.
Kilburn was the acknowledged genius innovator and leading practitioner of the black art. Grandson of the inventor of the "whole-carcass" method of growing clones (as distinguished from the "embryonic" approach), he had inherited his grandfather's cellular database and had achieved a significant boutique business in creating clones of female celebrities of the late twentieth century all the way up to the vaccination degeneration of the 2020's and the Great Prophylactic Event of 2030. After that, the viable stem-cells for clones fell virtually to nil. Rarer still were viable female eggs. (Note: These eggs were cut into fourths, seeded, and used to make four clones). Modern clones themselves were sterile; their stem-cells were degenerate and unusable. His original boutique clones were still possessed of viable genetic material that produced almost flawless clones; but there were so few of them left on Earth, and fewer still on the Moon.
The Black Nobility's punitive program of eradication for those refusing vaccination (except for themselves) had reduced the number of humans capable of reproduction to isolated pockets. That in turn made Kilburn's product highly desired and highly-priced. There was not a prince of the Black Nobility who didn't have an order in for a sex-clone. So Kilburn felt relatively safe at Fort Orwell, his laboratory compound on the dark side of the moon. After all, the Lunar Police commissioner was in possession of one of his finest models, a Sophia Loren. Kilburn figured he would lay low and bide his time until the vagaries of human nature made him a hero again.
The long-awaited day of the true cyborg, the grand apotheosis of man and machine, was at hand. His hands. Completely programmable, subservient to the will of the master. There were still problems controlling these flesh-and-blood replicants with their unpredictable brains and unexpected genetic short-comings. There was always a chance of second-generation tissue malfunctioning; during the covalent phosphodiester-bonding process in vivo defective amino acids might fire off the wrong enzyme and the wrong protein would attach to the wrong receptor and you would have a helluva genetic mess, such as what happened with the degenerate Kim Kardashian's. Cerebellum implants were still basically limited to not-completely consistent motor-control functions; most clones still by-and-large reacted to negative stimuli with instinctive violence. The first few months of training a "whole-carcass" clone was quite a challenge, mentally, physically, and spiritually. Kilburn was working feverishly to produce more sophisticated electro-chemical synapse filters, catalysts and the like, looking for control of the sluices into the consciousness. The biological part of the creation was readily achievable; it was the conquest and control of the mind that still proved elusive. He laughed as he thought of Freud: What is it that a woman wants?
On the open market, clones were still desirable but on their way out. Sex cyborgs would bring more than sex robots. Buyers wanted something that was at least remotely human and built to last; clones were perishable and contrary, robots too distant and artficial. He indulged in a grim chuckle thinking of men complaining about what Kilburn called "the Arbitrary Bullshit Factor" in a woman's brain. They didn't know the half of it. Clones were aware they were not normally human and they very definitely had an attitude, once they had achieved a bit of consciousness and learning.
Viscous ocular fluid and bits of dura stained his latex gloves. He had reached in through the eyes to retrieve a valuable hemisphere-switching diode from a malfunctioning unit. This clone had been a vicious biter and unable to learn any language past grunting and screaming. The serum used in the hydro-biogenic cell-replication process was still in the process of being perfected; nutrition delivery and waste materials removal sometimes leaked and resulted in toxic bacterial contamination that affected the development of the clone, particularly the brain. The Great War had shot clone-science all to hell. Quality control, Kilburn sighed. 2075, and he felt himself almost as much a pioneer as his grandfather. His grow-vats were forty years old. There was far too much trouble to make these girls sociable but no rest for the wicked; when replicating life-forms, it is what it is.
"There are semantic flaws in Professor Bandura's theories." Dominique was full of subtle mischief. She and Kilburn briefly locked eyes above their surgical masks.
"Oh yeah?"
"Yes." Dominique held the handlight where Kilburn could see deeper into the fissures. "A self-exonerative process is a character flaw in and of itself, n'est pas?"
"Man could not exist without rationalization, delusion, moral relativism or blasphemy." Kilburn chuckled as he separated two gyri.
Dominique recited, "Only people who love nothing fear nothing and can survive in a world of shit."
"If I have taught you nothing other than that, you've learned plenty." Kilburn's deft fingertips detected the hard edge of the diode deep in the subtle rubberiness of the corpus callosum. "Got it!" he cried. He held the glistening chip to the silvery light streaming in through the transparent roof of the terradome. Here, not far over the horizon from the spiky ridges of the Liebnitz Crater, you could almost see the sun this time of year. Kilburn washed the chip in the sink, then disposed of the remains of the skull in the vacuum tube. Dominique punched in a code on her cell phone.
"Please prepare Dr. Kilburn's hovercraft. For two." She listened. "No escort today. We won't be gone long." Kilburn saw his reflection shimmering in Dominique's luminous orbs, the silver crescent of the edge of the dark side of the Moon in mirrored silhouette behind him, suggesting worlds beyond simple planes, infinite regressions toward the ultimate singularity. Significance. No matter where man might go in the universe, it was impossible to escape human nature. No significance. A smile on a dog.
"No matter where you go, there you are," said Dominique.
"Mind-paraphraser!" retorted Kilburn.
They kissed.
* * *
"Does a clone have a soul?" Terri Incognita inquired.
Dominique smiled. "Better yet. A clone has market value."
Kilburn looked directly at the bar-mistress. "Do you have a soul?"
Terri Incognita poured shots of real Mezcal all the way round. They were in the office at her club "Danse Matrix," a popular showbar in Lunaville. There was talk of a second club in Gates Town. Terri's prosperity had more to do with her culpability in the illegal clone trade than her management ability. Several of the dancers in her club were clones made by Kilburn. She raised her glass and proposed a toast. Kilburn and Dominique lifted their glasses.
"L'chaim." They drank the sweet mezcal down.
Terri sighed. "This place is crawling with cheap replicants," she said, studying the club security monitors. "You can usually tell a replicant, particularly the cheap ones. They all look alike. No personality. They all have crazy eyes. Nobody home."
"Not like my girls," Kilburn bragged. "Everyone an uber-babe."
"Not always." Terri refilled their glasses. "Those four Heather Locklear knock-offs you sold me-"
"Didn't I make that good? You got four new Scarlett Johanson's I barely got to test drive." Kilburn grinned and he and Dominique raised their shot-glasses to Terri.
"Yes you did." Terri grinned back and returned their salute. They drank. Terri sighed a satisfied 'ahhh' at the wondrous mezcal. The worm was in range of a monster-sized swallow. "Those girls were great crowd-pleasers. I made a lotta money selling them to some of the London Saudi's." Dominique picked up the Mezcal bottle. Kilburn chuckled.
"One hand washes the other. You've referred some very lucrative customers to me," Kilburn acknowledged. Dominique swished the mezcal, roiling it up around the agave leviathan.
"I would pour us another toast, if we have any left," Terri smiled uncertainly at Dominique. Dominique beamed back at her and Kilburn, upturned the fifth-bottle and bubbled the mezcal until she had swallowed the worm.
Dominique shattered the empty bottle against the wall. "AAAHHHHH," she belched. A surprised Kilburn and Terri laughed uproariously.
Dominique looked at Kilburn wearing her brightest most mischievous smile. "Non-computability, right?"
* * *
"Socrates, also, was full of shit." Dominique opined.
"My, how I admire the precision of your dialectic!"
Dominique was at the wheel as their spacecraft split the dark of the shadows of the far side, adjusting its rate and direction relative to float along the Moon's Summer librations of longitude. She down-shifted the anti-gravity thrusters. "There is only one side to any question. Even Mao got that. Philosophy begets politics, politics begets power, all political power proceeds from the barrel of a gun. Might makes right."
Kilburn wondered why she had a philosophical bug up her ass. "I quake in fear at your implied syllogism, Xanthippe." Kilburn stretched and yawned. They had made some good trades, cut some sharp deals, copped a good haul of raw materials on Earth, and split. He was ready to party a little bit before they got down to the gritty, painstaking work. No fool like an old fool. Kilburn grinned at his own dirty mind.
Dominique chuckled and glanced at Kilburn. "Heuristic. Damn good pussy."
"Some things you can't learn in school." Kilburn squeezed Dominique's long sinuous thigh. "Take her around to day-side before we go home. Let's see what Christoff has prepared to celebrate the Moon Bowl."
Dominique moued a little kiss at Kilburn and banked hard into a 180-degree turn. Kilburn had come to enjoy the centrifugal tug on his guts produced by Dominique's radical aerobatics. It felt like being hopelessly in love.
They both loved the romantic vista from the D'Alembert Range at dawn, coming from the west. The Sun was maybe ten degrees to the right of the Moon's relative alignment with the Earth, the dramatic shadows receding north, unveiling the terradomes of Gates Town and Lunaville, glittering like blue sapphires in the diaphonous light. Kilburn and Dominique felt like genii floating on the cusp of a dream.
Dominique's amber orbs glowed. She looked at Kilburn. "Sometimes I don't even have to pick your brain. Is that empathy?" she teased.
"No," he answered. "I'd call that pure luck."
Dominique laughed softly, bewitchingly limbic for a moment. Kilburn pressed play on the DeBussy "Claire de Lune" file. He caressed Dominique's warm thigh through her spider-silk pants. "I would like to donate some DNA in the form of protoplasm wit' ya tonight."
Dominique laughed again. She looked up at the flashing viewfinder. "Save it, Man O' War. Bogies at four and eight. Let's skedaddle. Hold what ya got!"
Dominique was a terrible tease. She stayed just out of weaponry range, just far enough ahead to goad the goon-squads on. Just a touch of the hyperdrive was sufficient to outdistance any nuclear-powered craft the Guardians possessed. Kilburn's Scarab was one of only three anti-gravity spacecraft extant, a reward from the American government for the timely success of the soldier-clone program that turned the tide in defeating Red China, during the final phase of the Great War. The soldier-clone program was a rush job, the cells taken from what was left of the bodies of dead human soldiers. Kilburn had quadrupled the electrolytic filtering rate of the blood serum in the vats, enhancing the differentiation rate of the stem cells. And he watched his soldiers grow. He had adapted some acromegaly genes to add three inches of thick skull for protection. Adding the control implants in the brain in the latter stage of the carcass development was always the trickiest part. But by and large Kilburn succeeded. Those clones were mean motherfuckers when they wanted to be, and they always wanted to be. Simple visual and verbal cues were sufficient to train them for their purpose. Their attack prowess had saved the day for what was left of Western Civilization. Not long after that, in the blood-soaked shocked aftermath of the holocaust, the Black Nobility, fearing their own demise, outlawed the making of clones, and those same governments had branded Kilburn a criminal. But, in a gesture of realpolitik, he was allowed to keep the Scarab. Who knows when they might need him again.
Dominique looked in the viewfinder, engaged the parallax weapon-scope and locked the bogies in the cross-hairs. She had an endearing habit of sneering like a wolf-Elvis at the kill. "Fuck 'em and feed 'em fish heads." Dominique got a grim, tight look around her delicate mouth. She pressed the target-lock on the range-finder, then the "pulse" button on the gyro-laser. "You'd think they would learn."
"Probably a show-off looking for a bribe," Kilburn yawned and emitted a slight poot.
"Poof. Into the void!" Cinders flared in the sky behind them, and dissipated. Dominique took her eyes off the viewfinder and gazed toward the horizon, a smug grin on her face. "Oh look! At ten o'clock! Christoff is a genius!"
The Man in the Moon was a monster. A huge hologram representing Shiva, Lord of the Dance, gyred and gimbeled for miles above the wabe of the Sea of Tranquility, not far from the obelisk commemorating the Apollo 11 landing. A familiar eye could detect the Trump Towers integrated into the design at the feet of the shimmying god. No doubt the hotel was jammed with degenerate tourist's here for the Moon Bowl. No doubt Terri Incognita had her fingers in many lucrative pies exploiting same. Lunaville would wax gibbous on the Moon Bowl.
Dominique burst out laughing, peals of rich cynicism. "Trump Towers configured within the Apasma-Rapurasa! Oh Mon Dieu!" Dominique was perhaps too smart for her own good. She wiped tears of mirth from her eyes. Dominique had too much faith in her future, Kilburn thought. But, she would never float belly-up in Lethe, never hunker down in the Valley of the Shadow. Her existence was too improbable and unlikely to be wasted. Kilburn admired her beautiful Deneuve-like profile, counted his blessings and took a quick cat-nap.
He awoke when Dominique back-handed a fist into his chest and shouted "KILBURN!"
Kilburn jerked and twitched, drool spooling off his lip, his eyes bleary. "Wha' tha fuk?" Dominique pointed at two o'clock.
Smoke was hanging in the dead atmosphere like a shroud in a tomb above the dark side of the Mons Mouton, where the laboratory complex, Fort Orwell, lay in ruin.
* * *
Salvaging what little was left was a grim and sorrowful business. His entire security force had been killed, black bodies smoking like over-done barbecue. All of the laboratory complex and his living quarters had been leveled into black rubble. His titanium safe-room was scorched black and shriveled, its outer door ajar. Inside was his personal fire-proof security vault, his entire rare cache of the DNA of the hottest women between the years 1970-2020. It was by far his most important possession. If it was still intact, this disaster was largely mitigated. "Please God," he begged, unbelieving, hoping against hope.
Even through his gloves the outer door was hot. Kilburn threw the door open and stood immobile, stunned. The vault door was open. The vials of hot-chick DNA were gone. All that was left was a fifth of 150-year Bruichladdich Octomores Scotch Whiskey and an ounce of top-strain Colombian red-bud marijuana. A hologram of Philomela, "Wednesday's Child," danced on the top of the vault.
"Hey Kilburn, old buddy, how they hangin'?" Philomela greeted effusively. "Hey listen, bitch, we've got your girls. If you want them back, we want something from you. Don't call us, we'll call you. Get yourself a ticket to the Moon Bowl and maybe we can make a deal. Toodles." Philomela blew him a kiss, and then she was gone, leaving him in the scant light of his torch.
* * *
Kilburn was drunk and maudlin.
"It's ver' simple. People are assholes.The common swine, incapable of perceiving abstractions, never feel life is precious or rare, a sacred treasure. That's why they want to destroy. That's why they're slaves now. That's why I build clone whores." Dominique chuckled. "'Society' is nothing to believe in. Untold generations of humans, thousands and thousands of years, and people are still greedy, rapacious scumbags-"
"Jesus, give it a rest," Dominique griped. "The question is, what are we going to do about it?" She gave Kilburn a side-long glance. "You know who did this, don't you?"
Kilburn bubbled the Bruichladdich Octomores and sucked on the killer weed so hard his ganglia crackled like brushfire and his eyes bugged out, toadlike. His red eyes wept like burst cherries. "Yes, I know who did this." Kilburn wiped his eyes and squinted at the horizon.
"There she is! Good ole Terri!" Kilburn cried. "I knew we could count on her."
"She's in it for the money." Dominique always kept it real when she wasn't engaging in some bombastic fantasy of her own. Terri Incognita's personal craft was hidden in a cave in an unknown dorsum about halfway up the incline of the western slope of the Selenean Summit; if you didn't know where to look, it was easy to miss: There was a lunar swirl of high albedo directly south of the cave about three clicks. The shafts of thin starlight on the rocky ridges of the mons were delicate and beautiful, cloaking the adamant deadliness of the rocks in a silvery sheen. Dominique eased the big Scarab down in a small unnamed mare surrounded by jagged rocks.
She looked at Kilburn. "Put on your helmet." She set the example and Kilburn followed suit. Her voice came in Kilburn's ear on the ear-buds. "It's time to go to see the lady, and make a deal."
"What if she won't make a deal?" Kilburn asked.
"Then I'll make her an offer she can't refuse." Dominique checked the element in her battle-phaser, switched the selector from "Stun" to "Kill," and stuck the phaser in her waist band behind her ass, and under her jacket.
* * *
Kilburn was taking a long time in the loo, too long. Terri passed a bong to Dominique, and exhaled. She glanced at the loo door, sipping on a flute of Moet. The sound of a flushing toilet behind him as he emerged, even more drunk and maudlin. His face wore a facetious sneer as he bubbled the Bruichladdich. He took the bong from Dominique and sucked like a Hoover, erupting into a coughing fit as the smoke and the whiskey overtook his lungs and his consciousness.
Dominque and Terri grinned at Kilburn as he hacked his lungs up, and toppled back in his seat. Bleary-eyed, he looked at the girls. "You know why robots are better than clones?" he asked with the arch tone of a professorial drunk teetering on the brink of God-like omniscience. He answered his own rhetoric. "Because a goddamn robot's behavior is consistent - it follows orders. A clone is capricious. It may well react negatively when hard-used, or for any reason at all. A clone is a bad hater." Kilburn's groggy noggin was drooping.
Dominique sniffed. "A robot never considers itself to be a slave. That's not in its database." Dominique had a taste of Terri's Moet. "A clone will figure it out, no matter what bullshit you feed it. Cellular memory on a quantum level." Dominique emptied the flute. "Non-computability."
Kilburn was drooping almost to falling out of his chair, catching himself and rearing back up, loathe to give up his derailed train of thought. "Atavism," he slobbered. "Field hands." His chin dropped on his breast and he fell back in his chair, eyes closed.
"What it is, is something that doesn't always work right," Terri murmured.
Kilburn unexpectedly rallied. "Some are genetically defective to begin with, some never physically differentiate properly, some mix and match semantic imperatives improperly. It's a goddamn miracle I've been as sussuckful as I have been." Kilburn's neck was full bobble-head.
"Stupid is as stupid does," Terri laughed shortly.
"But sometimes they get it just right." Dominique held up a screen capture from the Lunar Times. The headline screamed: "MUTANT PSYCHO CYBER-SLUTS STILL AT LARGE!" Dominique's grin threatened to split her face as she taunted: "Your masterpieces." She hated for Kilburn to wallow in self-pity. It gave her the fear.
Kilburn stared at both of Dominique's blurry faces. "I ha' wun fur evry day uv tha week."
"Never on Sunday," said Dominique.
"Even God rests on Sunday," growled Kilburn. He was starting to wobble even sitting down.
Terri squinted at Kilburn. "What do you have left?" she asked.
Kilburn reared up and bellowed, "ROBOTS ARE BETTER THAN GODDAMN CLONES, GODDAMNIT!" and then almost collapsed, wavering and swaying. "I shoulda listened to my old man," he whined, in a tearful tone. "Joined the circus."
Dominique and Terri looked at each other. Terri attempted her inquiry again. "Kilburn." No response, just nodding and drooling. Terri leaned in. "KILBURN!" she shouted, and bitch-slapped the piss out of him. Dominique stifled a belly laugh.
Kilburn straightened up, barely cognizant. "Wha'?"
Terri took his hands and looked him in the eye, speaking deliberately as one speaks to idiots and children. "What - do - you have left?"
Kilburn collected himself momentarily. "Operating capital for maybe three months, and the new stem cells and scrapings we got on Earth. But I have nowhere to cook."
"There is no other facility capable on this planet. You'll have to go to Earth. But I don't have that type of money to sponsor you. My business is liquid. I go to work every day." Terri coughed. She took Kilburn's cheeks in her hand and got in his face. "The bounty on your Cyber-Sluts is high."
Kilburn attempted to straighten himself. He cleared his throat. "I know that. I'm counting on it." Dominique sat bolt upright.
"What have you done?" she demanded.
A crooked intoxicated grin skewed Kilburn's stupid face. He waggled his phone. "While I was taking a shit, I wagered the amount of the posted reward for the Cyber-Sluts on the Lunaville Aztecs. Using the stem cells as security."
Dominique glowered at him but controlled herself. "You better pray the Aztecs win."
"Or that the Cyber-Sluts show up at Guardian Headquarters, remanding themselves to custody upon your authority." Terri did not add that the Guardians had been on her ass about her alleged connections with Kilburn.
Dominique feigned scratching her back, fingering her laser-blaster.
"O ye of little faith!" Kilburn cried. "I've got a hunch those girls are going to show up at the Moon Bowl. I am preparing their Waterloo."
"As if," Dominique spat.
"You better pray, as if," Kilburn mocked. "I bet you to cover the over-and-under."
Dominique's intense orbs glowed like coal fire.
"If you lose, I'll cover the over-and-under with ten of my best strippers," Terri propositioned.
Dominque quit scratching her back, rested her hands on her thighs. She looked daggers at Kilburn. Kilburn's cloudy eyes held her gaze as he considered the proposal. He looked back at Terri Incognita. "Twenty. Not a clone less." He looked at Dominique. "She's worth more."
"Done and done," Terri agreed. "Let's drink on it." Terri poured Dominique a triple-shot of Mezcal.
"Can you dance?" she asked.
* * *
The Mutant Psycho Cyber-Sluts had been Kilburn's personal harem, six of the finest custom-made playmates he had ever fabricated. Bred for beauty, talent, intelligence, they were quick learners and abstract thinkers. But what is it that a woman wants?
Kilburn was a man whose tastes were colored by his times. After the War he had great success in acquiring tissue samples from even the remaining famous women. Overnight his infamy became the hope of a panic-stricken world. At first Kilburn had held out the hope of transferring a person's consciouness into a new body, a fresh clone. Mind transference was still maddeningly elusive (digitization meant dissipation and diminuation, and a lack of the spontaneity of a fully-aware consciousness), but a brisk trade sprang up in slave clones, whole-carcass mindless drones for fresh body parts, and personal child replicants (very expensive) for the inbred infertile members of the Black Nobility.
Kilburn's secret method involved growing the organism at an optimum "rate" (it took one year to grow an adult clone approximately eighteen human years in age). The soldier clones had come to maturity just in time to save Western Man's ass. His carefully devised electro-chemical methods of regulating the covalent-bonding process at the differentiation stages of cellular transformation accounted for his superior results; with the Cyber-Sluts, there was an odd side-effect: they were all very telepathic with each other, and to a lesser extent with the public at large. It added an extra layer to their threat. Dominique was of the opinion this trait was a practical example of quantum entanglement due to Kilburn's manipulation of the DNA's covalent bonds. The implants Kilburn put in the soldier-clone's brains kept their intellectual prowess to following orders. But there was no way Kilburn was going to do that to a beautiful woman, no matter how much their ability to think might threaten his chauvinism. He liked pushback from his women.
Kilburn sighed. Random murderous violence had been an unpredictable consequence in the replication of clones, fanning the zombie-apocalypse fears of the Black Nobility, leading to the current ban on human cloning. But Kilburn never stopped his experiments; he was an artist. Despite the defective ones, by and large his clones were superior compared to his competitors. But he worried that the violently deranged ones resulted from some inherent flaw in the process; was it nature or nurture? Socialization comes hard to an organism thrown into the world fresh out of a vat of goo, no matter how much training they received. Even now, Kilburn was conflicted and bewildered on this point; was it "cellular memory" as Dominique claimed, or something else? The Mutant Psycho Cyber-Sluts were the first of his "prime cut" personal clones to turn treacherous. He still didn't know what he had done wrong. What is it that a woman wants?
Monday's Child was the ring-leader, Xena. Xena was a flawless copy of Lucy Lawless. Kilburn had raised her on ancient video's of "Warrior Princess." "Fair of face" she was but she was a vicious bitch when she wanted to be. She had delighted in killing the "inferior" clones of Kilburn's competitors, including the children. Something had been lost in her abstract modeling process.
Tuesday's Child was Beatrix, a perfect copy of Uma Thurman. Beatrix was the most adept at the martial arts, very graceful and lithe, and particularly good at knife-fighting. She would very definintely cut a bitch. Kilburn started to worry about her when he realized her favorite form of recreation was solitary high-speed games of barefoot mumblety-peg with stilettos.
Wednesday's Child, Philomela, was a wondrous approximation of Charlize Theron, weapons-trained to be an expert assassin. She was the cruelest of them all. Kilburn regretted allowing her to keep her tongue. She had cursed Kilburn like a mongrel dog and threatened him with sanguine retribution of a nature so foul Kilburn tried to keep her out of his mind.
Thursday's Child Aubade was special; she had been grown from the oldest egg ever to produce a clone (courtesy of Michelle Pfeiffer). She had the most dangerous mind for strategy. Expert in software engineering, she planned most of the raids and operations of the Sluts, and the widows of dozens of dead Lunaville Guardians could attest to her tactical brilliance.
Friday's Child was Ruby. Ruby looked just like Ann-Margret did in "Carnal Knowledge." Initially the most loving and giving of the girls, eventually she grew resentful of Kilburn's sexual exploitation. Basically she just didn't like the way Kilburn fucked, and that was that. The Sluts used her for the "honey trap" when they needed to hoodoo Kilburn's guards to penetrate security.
Saturday's Child, Jennifer, was a copy of Jennifer Harris, the Pathfinder flight-control specialist. Kilburn had had such a hard-on for her (she was a hero of his youth) he raided her grave and lifted marrow from her skeleton. She was possibly the least glamorous but the smartest of the lot. She was the transportation and security officer for the group. It was she who had figured out the security codes that allowed the Cyber-Sluts to escape their confinement. It was she who flew the stolen hovercraft to Lunaville. It was she who Kilburn feared most. She had outfoxed him, playing possum for years, learning the appropriate cyber and combat skills on her own, and then striking like a rattlesnake. Kilburn learned too late it was a wrong thing for a woman-clone to be too smart. Persistence of Memory. Hell hath no fury.
And all of these girls could fuck like nobody's business. Kilburn's sentimentality overrode his fear. If he could just talk to the Sluts, he could bring them back into the fold. These old-skool clones were prime-cut, unique, ones-of-a-kind. Since the Golden Age of Replicants, most clones were cheap copies of common types who still had viable DNA, many cultivated from a humus of pureed fetal tissue from abortions. Kilburn would never stoop that low. So many of these-type clones wore out quickly and broke down on an organic and intellectual level. There was no value to them long-term. Kilburn sniffed. He would never stoop that low.
But now there would be no appreciable batch of new clones of quality for at least fifteen years on the Moon, thanks to the Cyber-Sluts' destruction of Fort Orwell. Kilburn's anger trumped his erotic longings. There was nothing left to do but kill the bitches - before they killed him. Kilburn was not a hopeless romantic.
Kilburn idly perused his ticket to the Moon Bowl. He knew the Cyber-Sluts would show up somewhere, sometime, somehow at the contest. They would be looking for him, tracking the jumbled thoughts of the crowd. Deal, my ass. They were just trying to draw him out for a hit. Okay, fair enough. They would NOT beat him at his own game. He would walk every concourse, looking for them. He had confidence that his mentality was superior to theirs. They were just clones, and bitch-clones at that. They would rue the day.
He had not seen Dominique since her escape over a week ago. Out of sight was definitely not out of mind with her. Alright, fuck her too, Kilburn groused. He tried to arouse a show of contempt to convince himself, but he could feel his blood pressure rise and his sphincter tighten. He went to check his weaponry, and the protean mask he would use in disguise.
Fuck those bitches.
* * *
The Moon Bowl was a type of lacrosse game played on a natural-gravity field. The players were able to pull off some adroit and amazing feats, competing against only one-sixth of the Earth's gravity. Some players could jump as high as twenty-feet into the air. The goal portal for the ball was thirty-feet high. Violent body-checking impeded the success of the opposing teams. And the Moon Bowl held to the original traditions of the Mayan sacred ball game. It was literally winner-take-all. At the end of the match, the losers were ritually slaughtered by the shamans of the winners. In addition to the winners' share of the money, the winning team was allowed to harvest the organs of the losers. The games were always hard-fought tooth-and-nail to the bitter end. There were moats around the field separating the seating sections to mitigate the effects of the riot that always occurred after every Moon Bowl. Terri Incognita always made a fortune speculating in spare organs, which were now a form of currency on both the Earth and the Moon.
With less than a minute to go, Kilburn's Lunaville Aztecs were up by five goals, 13-8, over the hapless Gates Town Blade Runners. Thus Kilburn had beaten both the three-goal spread and the "over" at nineteen goals. The waterboys of the Aztecs started whetting the sacrificial daggers, bringing a rabid cheer and huzzah from the Aztecs fans. The sacrifice of the losing team observed a strict protocol which not even the most contrarian Lunarian would dare disrupt - the penalty was death. Since the Great War and the abject failure of religion, humanity had reverted to more stark mythologies. The gods of superstition demanded their bleak propitiation. The Moon Bowl was always the toughest ticket in the known universe.
Kilburn started mentally counting his loot, nervously watching each tick of the clock, eyes scanning through the crowd. He had walked through every aisle and concourse of the stadium and had seen neither hide nor hair of the Cyber-Sluts. So far, so good. It didn't look like the Cyber-Sluts were going to show, after all. Although he knew he was headed for a showdown with the Sluts eventually, Kilburn heaved a sigh of relief. Get the money, hop in the ole Dung Beetle, and get the hell off the Moon before the Sluts caught up with him. Fuck the reward now, and the vintage priceless starlet DNA. Hole up on Earth, do the work, and plot revenge on the Sluts where the time and place were to his advantage. The Moon was not big enough to hold himself and the Cyber-Sluts now, Kilburn thought grimly. And what about Dominique? Kilburn exhaled a long, slow even breath. What is it that a woman wants? For the first time during the game, he took his trigger finger off the plasma phaser in his jacket pocket, even though the threats and acrimony were building among the rival fans.
The Aztec water boys were preparing the "bleeding tables" for the sacrificial victims. A Cohort of Guardians in riot gear with maximum phasers, the "Vaporizers," gathered around the playing field. Kilburn watched the last second tick off the scoreboard above the playing field. When the board read "0:00" it erupted in a blinding phospor flash and explosion that took the dementia to an ultimate level. Damn good pussy. Tongues of old-fashioned napalm fire-jelly licked at the crowd like dragon's breath, scorching many bon vivants into smoked meat. Kilburn practiced the greater part of valor, ran for an exit, hoping to live to fight another day.
Kicking steps caught up with him at a turnstile, and strong arms slammed him down face-first from behind. A strong hand jerked him over on his back and punched him in the nose, splattering it into a bloody mess. It was Philomela.
She ripped off his protean mask, tearing great fleshy chunks out of his face in the process. "Dr. Frankenputz, I presume," Philomela gloated. Kilburn could not speak. He had sexually used Philomela well before she was physically or mentally ready for it, clone or not. There was something about her helpless innocence that had made him hard. There was no use lying to himself at this late juncture. Maybe that type of blackness was the only reason he had ever studied the life sciences to begin with. Damn good pussy. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Philomela grasped his scrotum with her vise-like grip (Kilburn understood now why the supplies of amino acids were always unaccountably low) and slowly squeezed, her smile widening as she increased the crushing pressure on his testicles. The pain was unbearable. Just before he faded into oblivion, the face of Philomela rushed at him, her eyes drowning pools, black holes sucking in the warped cosmology of Kilburn's soul.
"I pissed in the vials of hot-chick DNA," she snarled. "This rapey shit has got to stop." The last thing he saw was her hateful, sneering face. He closed his eyes and thought of Freud for the last time. Damn good pussy. He wanted to laugh but Philomela's strong left hand crushed his windpipe and her right exploded his balls. He felt his trachea break and his scrotum ripped off. Non-computability. Then a black wall knifed through his brain.
* * *
Dominique happily puttered around the house. It was good to be back on Earth, doing research and teaching. She and thirty-six other women had been named Global Heritage Genetic Treasures, the last of the boutique love-doll clones, the only clones who could still reproduce. Tissues of the thirty-six were now being used in an advanced cloning process to repopulate the Earth. Kilburn, posthumously, was famous and celebrated again.
Sometimes she would take her young son Huxley out back on a starry night and let him look at the Moon and Stars through an antique telescope left to him by his father. The child was very bright and enjoyed the sciences, and the philosophical classics of antiquity.
"Egghead! Moonstruck!" the mother teased. Sometimes the child would look through the telescope for hours, gazing at the Moon, absent-mindedly sucking sprigs of wild honeysuckle until the nectar was gone, all the taste of it. Then he would go in the house and contemplate a photograph of his father's inscrutable visage, comparing his own face in a looking glass. Already, people were remarking on the uncanny resemblance.
FIN
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