Gene Drifters: The Clone Soldier Chronicles-Book III (34 page)

And at the moment he was; Michael Segev was barreling across
that open stretch of up-top highway between Ulan Baatar and Bulgan, racing the
global warming sun rise, like a specter out of Sana’a, his amber eyes glowing
like tiny lights in a dark world. (
Obviously, that’s another story
.)  

Someplace in the back zone of bubble-stop #5, Max woke up
sitting in front of a tiny light, in his very own dark world. He had no idea
where he was; he seemed to have lost his memory.

He tried to get up from his chair but could not move. Max’s
body was useless, except for his hands and fingers, which seemed to pass
automatically and non-stop over one of those old fashioned keyboards. At first
he had no idea what it was, and then he realized he was sitting in front of one
of those old thingies, a lapstop, no, a laptop computer.

“
Where the hell am I
?” he thought to himself. But, he
could only think it; he could not speak and his body would not move, even
though his mind was completely lucid. When his eyes adjusted to the
semi-darkness, Max realized he was not alone. There was that familiar smell,
the same as what he’d noticed when he passed through that opaque security wall
with Chad.

“
Where is that fucking clone? For that matter, where is
anybody? Why can’t I move? And, what is that smell?
” Max asked himself,
mentally.

Now he recognized it, it was latte, chai latte; that was the
smell. It was all around him, in old white plastic cups stuck permanently to each
table. Max tasted a little through a straw which reached his mouth. The cup
seemed to refill itself, after each drink.

He was not able to focus on the computer screen yet; his
vision still blurred, making the words fuzzy, unreadable. And besides Max
rarely actually read printed words, anyway; he used the audio versions. He
tried to rise from his chair again, but his legs would not move, or his hands,
except to pass non-stop over the computer keyboard in front of him.

Just to confirm he was awake he glanced down, to be sure he
was still wearing his charcoal grey suit. Satisfied, he then looked again at
the screen in front of him. “
Odd, there is nothing but pages and pages of
endless job ads, mostly for temp jobs, or unpaid internship positions, or for
volunteers, ditto unpaid,”
Max said to himself, speaking in his mind.

He tried to yell, to get someone’s attention, but found he
could not open his mouth; he could only just mumble slightly from the left side
of it, and words like opening, job fair, and temp poured forth. He spent the
next several minutes trying to say something else, anything else. Then he
noticed his companions staring at him, no, at his charcoal grey #42 suit.

In a flash of realization Max looked down at his suit, and
remembered when a #42 suit should be worn.

“
Oh No, I’m wearing an official job interviewer suit
!”
Max looked up quickly, at the reflection coming off his computer screen. There
was a shuffle behind him, a slow movement of people coming towards him.

There were hundreds, thousands of them. They were starting
to surround him, moaning with outstretched arms, and hopeful pleading eyes,
with resumes in their hands. The horror dawned upon him. He was with the…
uns
!
He glanced from side to side, noticing he could still move his eyeballs back
and forth, just across the computer screen. It produced just enough light to
reflect the faces of the thousands of half-dead, but still hopeful individuals
behind him, in front, on either side, slowly moving towards the newest addition
to the mindless mass…Max, in his official #42 interviewer suit.

They were all there mumbling, the living dead, tied to their
computers in an endless, useless, chai latte drinking, hopeless cycle of…..Oh
no! Not that. They were sending out
job applications
, hundreds, thousands
of endless, hopeless, useless, unanswered job applications, all over the world;
applications that were channeled into a giant archival storage vault, buried
inside an abandoned salt mine, near Yekaterinburg. It was not unlike that
quaint seed bank built over one hundred years ago in Greenland, back before the
WME took over, back when people still felt the need for planetary biodiversity.
Deep inside the vault was a mega-computer with a single purpose; answer all the
ads with a rotating message:

Dear Sir/Ms,

Please be advised that your application (insert the word resume
or manuscript, if applicable) will be read by a qualified individual on our staff.
Your applications (insert the words, novel, essay, list of qualifications, or
resume as appropriate) will be given full consideration by our staff. Should we
wish to consider your (insert as above) you will be contacted. While we try to
be expedient, please understand that our volume is large, thus, please expect a
reply within (insert time as backlog in computer memory banks dictates). Thank
you and have a nice day. 

Max was with the
Uns
…
The
Unmanageable, the
Unmutated, the Undesirable, the Undefinable, the Unemployable…the Undead! And,
of course, all those clone soldiers.

He froze, just long enough to notice he’d finished half of
his application to work for a summer, as an unpaid permanent temp volunteer,
cleaning kangaroo poop, in a zoo near Coober Pedy. Using every ounce of
strength, Max opened his mouth, pushed out the words and screamed.
Unfortunately, he said the one thing you never said in the back zone of #5. Max
rose up in his charcoal grey interviewer suit, just before he collapsed
permanently (well, for now anyway) and yelled,

“Stop, I should not be here; I am a job creator!”

As Dorian watched on his sat-com, from his control room at
Donner Pass headquarters, a solid swarming mass of mumbling, chai latte
drinking, palm tablet holding, painfully, hopeful-looking unemployables swarmed
over Max.

“Shall we save him?” Dorian asked Dina, while drinking hot
chocolate in the control room at Donner Pass.

“No don’t worry; he will be re-trained like the others. But
keep a watch over him, Dorian. I have a feeling that someday Max will return,”
Dina replied, and went for some more hot chocolate.

                                                                          
POSTSCRIPT

In the weeks following Max’s demise, things finally returned
to normal in the under-water tunnels. Roxanne and Rose continued their rig
hauls, Irma and Eldridge ran the bar, and Leo Songtain plastered a fresh set of
bounty posters all over Hong Kong, and on the ceiling above his bed. Max’s
assistant, Ms. Vandercline took over the job as chief legal counsel for
Stemworm, Inc. While she never tried to poison a rig-ryder, she did have some
serious sexual encounters with her very own clone soldier. But, again that’s
another story. Chad and Gimlet stayed on at #5 for three full years, to help
his clone clan become established in their new home, and later to deal with the
abovementioned  issues in those bilge tanks.

And finally, I know you are all anxious to learn what
happened between Rose Smoot and Darcy Segev. We canines have a fondness for
literary allusion; I bet you didn’t know that. Thus I must end my tale with the
famous sentence from Jane Eyre, chapter thirty-eight, canine version, concerning
the fate of Mr. Rochester, Darcy Segev, in this case, and I quote,

“Reader…I boinked him.”

          
                                                 About the Author

My love of science began in high school where I attended a
now nonexistent all girls’ Catholic convent school…the same one that the former
Mayor of San Diego went to. I wanted to be an oceanographer, but alas, my
father moved us all back to the Midwest during one of those many recessions,
where I attended, and partied, at Ball State University, receiving my BS in
1971. I got one D, in a sewing class, hence science, which is closer to
cooking, was my future direction. I learned skiing, backpacking, Microbiology,
and Chemistry, in random order, at Colorado State University, obtaining the MS
in 1973. But California called me home…we Californians are not unlike salmon.
Once back home, I attended the University of Southern California, and mostly
that was all I did, leaving with a PhD in Molecular Biology in 1979. After the
birth of our first daughter, it became apparent that a small town would be
easier for a two-career family ( my husband is also a scientist), so we
accepted offers as faculty, back in the Midwest again, and away from my home.
We remained at Kansas State University for 32 years as faculty in Biochemistry
(me), and Biology (him). We added another daughter, were tenured, published,
and even received those pat-on-the-back faculty awards, mostly for bringing in
a chunk of money from grants. But, the salmon instincts took over once more,
and in 2011 we retired and returned home to California. I kissed the ground
upon driving over the state line; the border patrol said it happened all the
time. I always wrote fiction, but publishing anything but hard scientific facts
was frowned upon, and besides, I was supposed to be working 25/7…right? I still
work, but much less, as a freelance science editor for three different firms in
Houston, Beijing, and Ireland, making currency conversions a daily online event
in itself. I do miss the lab, but find that I can do much more cutting edge
research at my computer, in my novels, and in a global warming future. Plus,
I’m not constrained by those nasty experimental results…virtual data are so
much easier to obtain. Too bad there is no Nobel for imaginary science
(although some of my colleagues often said a lot of it was just that).

For the last three years, as a retired Professor Emeritus of
Biochemistry, I still had one graduate student, got a patent (real, not
virtual), and continue my science editing. But mostly, I have been busy
creating that world of clone soldiers and courageous new-worlders that must
live in the mess we have left for them.