The Clone Sedition (14 page)

The girl walked in, and so did the man. I could only see their feet, but I knew who they were. She said, “He’s awake again. That’s so odd. It’s supposed to put him to sleep.”

“Maybe he’s fighting it,” said Franklin. He knelt in front of me and turned my head so that my eyes stared directly into
his. He was a young man, maybe in his late twenties, maybe in his thirties. He asked, “Are you putting up a fight? Are you in there?”

I remembered his face. I remembered his face vividly. He looked exactly as I expected, green eyes, jutting jaw, smooth skin. I would hold on to that face. No matter what happened, I would hold on to the image. Nothing short of death would make me forget this man’s face.

“Leave him alone, Franklin. I told Silas you were bullying him,” said the girl. She had tried to be friendly, and now she turned angry. They did not like each other.

Franklin stood. He reached under my arms and hoisted me onto the gurney. He was short and trim and young and strong. I weighed two hundred pounds, but he lifted me as easily as he might have lifted a child.

I was helpless. If he’d wanted to, he could have snapped my neck. Instead, he played with me. He curled his forefinger under his thumb, and then he flicked it into my open right eye. His fingernail tapped against my eyeball.

He laughed, turned to the girl…Sunny, and asked, “Do you think he knows that I did that?”

“If you scratched his eye…”

“I didn’t.”

“Even a bruise or a chipped tooth…”

“I did not hurt him.”

“I’ll wheel him to the O.R. I can take it from here,” she said in a pouty voice.

“I’ll be specked, you really do have a thing for him. You’re hot for the breathing cadaver.”

She did not say anything.

As he left, Franklin said, “Maybe I should tell Silas about the two of you.”

Silas,
I thought.
Remember the name Silas.
He was another person I needed to kill.

From the moment I smelled the chemicals, my combat reflex had not stopped. Now it increased to battlefield proportions. I could feel the heat in my veins. I needed violence. Violence became more vital than breathing.

The girl walked around the table to examine me. I imagined myself strangling her. I imagined her lips forming a
circle, her face turning purple, her mouth and tongue turning blue. I saw her eyes changing to glass, and I imagined myself kissing her as the death rattle escaped from her lungs. The thought was both sadistic and sexual. Cruelty and sexuality had never gone hand in hand in my thinking. I generally hated and occasionally loved but never had both feelings for anyone.

Sunny’s smile was sweet, and her eyes were as liquid as I had imagined. I could lose myself in those eyes, and I saw her concern for my safety. What could she possibly have done to me? Why did I want to kill her?

She brushed the hair from my forehead, and said, “He can’t hurt you, Wayson.”

Her voice was soft and soothing. I caught a hint of peppermint spice in her breath. My muscles might not have worked, but my blood flowed, and my body betrayed my feelings. She reached down and stroked my crotch, and she whispered, “You’re at attention.”

Sunny wheeled the gurney through the halls and into a large medical facility, the one I had known we would enter, the one with rows of men. This was not like the barracks in the orphanage, it was a torture chamber. The men did not lie on military racks, they were stretched out on incapacitation cages. Fine metal filaments had been drilled into their skulls. The filaments conducted electricity into their spines. These men were alive and alert and as helpless as me.

My combat reflex increased as images lined up in my head. I remembered the operating room and some of what would happen when we entered. She would arouse me, then there would be pain. I tried to struggle, but the only struggle was in my brain. My body ignored me.

We entered a room in which we were alone. She whispered to me, then she caressed me. She rubbed me and reached into my pants. Her touch was soft and she stared into my eyes…and I fought. I could not wiggle a finger or flutter an eye, but I put up a fight in my head.

She closed her hand around me. She tugged. She rubbed.

I thought about battles. I thought about men dying on bloody fields, Marines, clones, synthetic people like me. I once had a sergeant named Tabor Shannon. He was a Liberator. He was my mentor. He died in a cave on a planet called Hubble.

Her hand was warm. She stroked. She grasped. She pulled.

My first friend in the Marines was a clone named Vince Lee. We went on leave together to Hawaii. I saved his life during the battle of Little Man. Vince and I were two of the Little Man Seven—seven survivors from a force of two thousand.

Vince always suspected that he was a clone. He took a drug called Fallzoud that enabled him to live with the knowledge that he was synthetic, but the drug made him crazy. He died on a ship called the
Grant
. I helped kill him.

“Come now, sweetheart. Relax. Relax,” Sunny purred.

I once loved a girl named Ava. She was a clone of an old movie actress. When the natural-borns exiled the clones from Earth, Ava came with me to a planet called Terraneau, and she loved me; but I did not love her the way she wanted to be loved. I was restless, and I wanted revenge.

She died alone in an apartment on an evacuated planet. I left her there to die. She wanted me to leave.

Sunny pressed herself against me. I could feel her body on top of mine. Her hair fell across my neck. Her lips brushed across mine, and I inhaled her breath. It smelled of peppermint and spice.

I had a friend named Ray Freeman. I went to Seattle to find him the night I killed those three men. I did not find him. I did find him. He told me that anything that can be programmed can be reprogrammed. He said there was a back door in my neural programming. He said my conscious mind could be switched off.

CRACK.
Sunny’s hand slapped across my face. Because my neck was relaxed, the force of the blow spun my head to the side.

“Bastard,” she said.

She grabbed my chin and turned my face so I could look at her. A tear leaked from the corner of her eye. “I protected you,” she said. “Do you have any idea what Franklin would have done to you if I hadn’t been there? Do you?” In her anger, she became less pretty. Her chin and forehead wrinkled, and her lips went tight. She stared at me with cold eyes.

She held up a probe. It looked like a metallic model of an infant’s hand curled into a fist. “I wanted to make things good for you,” she said in a silky voice that was sensuous and
hateful. She brandished that probe. I did not know what it was meant to read, but I knew where she planned to clamp it.

“I shared myself.”

Instead of stroking me, she gave my genitals a nasty slap. Bright pain shot into my head, but my muscles did not respond, not even when my brain told my body to curl into a ball. Sharp pain followed as she clamped the probe into place.

She said, “You won’t remember any of this.” Then she smiled, and added, “Next time…maybe next time I’ll let Franklin do what he wants with you.”

She pulled a tube into my view so I could see it before she clipped it under my nose. Chemical fumes entered my head. Pain followed.

The hormone from the combat reflex raged in my brain. Between the hormone and the chemicals, I felt like my brain would shred to pieces. A pulse of electricity tore at my groin. The electricity tied my muscles into knots. When the current stopped, my body went numb and limp. The electricity surged and ebbed, surged and ebbed, like waves on a beach, like the pain in my head, like my thoughts.

Anything that can be programmed…

The electricity seemed to jump between my testicles and my teeth, making my muscles contract in spite of my paralysis. I curled up into the fetal position. I had no control over myself.

When the electricity stopped, my body went limp. I lay on that specking table as limp as a freshly killed corpse.

The gas I had inhaled contained ammonia, that much I recognized. It burned my nose and filled my sinuses with flames. Just as every trace of thought left my brain, the combat reflex took over.

Anything that can be programmed can be reprogrammed.

Another trickle of gas floated inside my nostrils, followed by a new wave of electricity. My thoughts turned to the color of lightning; my body curled into a ball. When the jolt stopped, I went limp. A wave of nausea rolled over me, and I vomited on myself. I could not move, so I lay there, in my bile, my body trembling as a third cloud of gas entered my nostrils, and a new surge of electrical current tightened my muscles.

I passed out after ten minutes. The pain and the drug finally got me, but this time I remembered everything.

“You’re awake already? That’s probably not good for you, darling. You’re fighting me, and that means we’re going to need to speed things up.” Sunny sounded so damn cheerful, as if she had forgotten her failings (or mine) from the night before. “I don’t suppose you remember what we do here, but it’s quick and painless…and I will make it worth your while once we’re done.”

I was weak, too weak to even sit, and my mind was fuzzy. It wasn’t that I had just woken up, it was as if my brain had somehow been removed from my body. Maybe this was what near death, as opposed to death itself, felt like—as if I were a ghost hovering over my body on an operating table.

I had been scrubbed clean and was lying on a clean bed. A crisp white sheet stretched over me from my feet to my chest. There were no straps holding me down, not that restraints were needed.

As I became more aware, I realized that there was a tube running from a computer beside the bed to a clip fastened beneath my nose. Parts of my scalp felt numb. I wanted to reach up and feel them, but my arms would not have responded.

Faint odors entered my nostrils. The scent kept changing. At first I smelled organic scents like fruits and grass and oranges, things I recognized. Sunny stood by the computer and smiled down at me. Her brown hair was soft, her eyes were luminous. I felt revulsion at the sight of her, but I desired her, too.

As I breathed the chemicals, a rapid succession of images appeared in my head. I saw Don Cutter, actually saw him as if he’d appeared in the room. I saw the
Kamehameha
, the first ship on which I served. I saw planets—Earth, Terraneau, New Copenhagen, Providence Kri, Mars, Little Man, and Hubble.
I saw a satellite from the old Broadcast Network, the pangalactic highway that once connected the arms of the Milky Way. The parade of images stopped on a picture of Ray Freeman.

Ray was seven feet tall, bald, and powerfully built. He was a black man. The Unified Authority had tried to do away with races, but a Japanese colony still existed. And Freeman was an outcast from a recently exterminated colony of African-American Baptists.

“What do you see?” asked Sunny.

Her computer must not have been able to read the images the scents evoked in my head, only my reactions to them. I cannot explain what made me do it, but I decided to lie. I said, “My civilian advisor.”

“That’s Watson, right? Isn’t that Travis Watson? You’ve told me about him.”

“No, someone else,” I said.

I could see it in her eyes—she did not believe me. I felt a chill, and I wondered if I had just condemned Travis Watson to death.

The images began to flash again. They came and went in such quick succession that I did not have time to identify most of them. By the time Sunny pulled the clip from my nose, I could not hold on to a single thought.

She gently removed the clip from my nostrils, then she kissed me and pulled a series of telemetry patches from around my scalp. Her breath smelled like peppermint. Her hair felt like silk as it brushed against me.

She took a step from the bed so I could see all of her, and she removed her smock, then her red dress. She was naked beneath the dress. Then she climbed into the bed beside me, and she whispered things I did not understand into my ear, and I discovered that I had more strength and ambition than I previously imagined.

Somewhere in my mind, I imagined myself killing her.

Sunny took me to a cafeteria and told me to sit at a table. I had no trouble walking. I felt weak and lethargic, but when she told me to walk or stand or make love, I found strength and obeyed.

The cafeteria was filled with clones. They sat at tables with trays of food in front of them, but they paid no attention to their meals. Mostly, they stared straight ahead.

I sat at a table. The men around me were mostly young though a few appeared to be in their thirties. I did not check to see if I knew any of them. They were clones, just clones, just nameless, faceless, synthetic, military men, much like me.

The man sitting beside me picked up his knife. He turned it around in his hand, staring at the flat of the blade as if it were a mirror.

“Hey, he’s doing it! We better stop him.”

Two men in white uniforms approached the table, then they paused. One said, “No…no. Let him do it. I wanna see what it looks like. You ever seen it happen?”

The other stood mute.

The clone stared into the blade. He moved it around so that it reflected different parts of his face—an eye, his hair, his mouth.

“Yeah, that’s you…just another clone,” one of the orderlies said. He turned to the other and explained, “This is what happens when they fight it.”

Still holding the knife, the clone rose to his feet. His body convulsed for just a moment, and the knife fell from his hand, then he crashed back to his chair and fell face-first into his food. Blood pooled in his ear.

“That’s it? That’s the death reflex?” The man sounded disappointed.

“That’s it.”

“Should we haul him out?”

“We can get him later.”

They left the clone lying in his food, a thin stream of blood now leaking from his ear down to his chin.

Sunny came and placed a tray on the table in front of me. She looked at the dead clone, then called the orderlies over. In an angry voice, she asked, “When did this happen.”