The Fictional Man (2 page)

The laws of most countries prohibited the cloning and duplication of real people. “Every American has the right to their individual identity” was the line in the US. There were also various bans in place on weaponised and otherwise enhanced humans, but every so often North Korea would crow about men who could see in the dark and lift buses, at which point any country with the technology to achieve that would realise they were far better off just working on a nuclear programme. Which they did.

So really, the only legal or useful place left for human cloning was in entertainment.

They’d already used a cloned shark in
Jaws
– augmenting it to be larger, more vicious-looking, but also more docile and easy to train. Thanks to some wheeling and dealing behind the scenes, it was significantly cheaper than the cost of a model would have been. In the wake of that film’s success, a brief spate of creature features with cloned animals followed –
Dodectapus,
Piranha, Death Bear –
and, eventually, someone took a close look at the laws on the books and decided to take the next logical step.

George Burns had been in the running for the title role in
Oh, God!,
but the studio made the decision, somewhat blasphemously, to cast a cloned human with a personality programmed by a computer – a computer the size of several rooms, back then – to match the God from the original Avery Corman novel. According to the law, real people could not be duplicated, but fictional people – as confirmed by a fairly contentious ruling from the Supreme Court – were fair game.

(In trying to explain the Supreme Court’s working, Warren Burger made a rather confused analogy – that, just as fictions could be translated from English to Spanish, so they could be ‘translated’ into the language of the human genetic code. It was one of the least coherent statements of his career, but the term stuck.)

God, as he emerged from the translation tube, had a warm, beatific personality and a wickedly dry sense of humour, but what made his performance – as himself, or Himself, depending on how heretical you were feeling – was the essential otherworldliness he brought to the role, that strange touch of unreality. If you were to watch the film today, you probably won’t notice it – we’re used to Fictionals now – but imagine how it must have been, in 1977, to see a fictional man walking and talking for the very first time...

God made two sequels – one with George Burns starring opposite him as the Devil – and after that, the studio released him from his contract and he was left to his own devices. Over the next year – 1985 – he starred in ‘special episodes’ of
Magnum, P.I.
and
Cheers
and announced his plans to write a (necessarily short) autobiography. He never finished the book; he was found dead in bed in late December of that year. Physically, he was eight years old.

By that time, eighty-three other Fictionals – most with life expectancies benefitting from the rapid improvements in cloning technology – had been produced by the larger studios. By 1990, there would be more than four hundred, each of them modelled on a fictional character from a novel or a play, or created especially for the big or small screens. By the turn of the millennium, the number of Fictionals in Los Angeles would stabilise somewhere between forty and fifty thousand.

The Fictionals were here to stay.

“...A
LL RIGHT.
” N
ILES
sighed, looking at the floor. “Maybe I was worried about implying... oh, you know what. The other thing.”

Ralph chuckled again.

In a flash, the novelist leaped from the chair. With one expertly-delivered karate chop, the giggling moron’s neck was snapped like a cheese straw,
Niles thought, as he continued to sit and stare at his shoes.

“What other thing?” Ralph grinned. “Come on, say it out loud. It won’t hurt us.”

Niles sighed. “You being a... a Fictional.” He scowled. “There, happy?”

“A Fictional.” Cutner stood up and began walking around the room in a slow circle, staring intently ahead. On the
Cutner’s Chair
message boards, this was known as the ‘walk and talk’ moment.
He stalked his office like a panther prowling a cage,
Niles found himself thinking,
the laser eye of his mind seeking out every last detail of the demons plaguing the inner landscape of the handsome novelist.

It was comforting, in a way – but at the same time, oddly irritating. It almost felt as if Ralph was flaunting his unreality, shoving it down Niles’ throat.

“Say it loud, say it proud. Created, not gestated. My father was a typewriter and my mother was a translation tube.” Ralph gave himself another beat, as though following the orders of an invisible director, then turned. “I’m not
real
in the way that you are, Mr Golan. That’s a part of it, isn’t it?”

“No.” Niles scowled. He could see what Cutner was implying. It was arrant nonsense, of course.

There were people who thought that way –
realists,
they were called. They’d been a serious problem for the movie industry until 1989, when a realist mob had murdered Bernie Lomax, a Fictional created for the
Weekend At Bernie’s
franchise, leading to a controversial and arguably gruesome rewrite of the script. Public opinion had turned solidly against realism after that, but there were still plenty of people who felt that a character who’d emerged from a translation tube with a full personality already in place was, if not an abomination
per se,
at least naturally inferior to someone who’d been born from a human womb, who’d acquired their genetic makeup the old-fashioned way.

Niles wasn’t one of those people. The Fictionals were
different
– of course they were – but certainly not
inferior.

Not
very
inferior.

He scowled. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

Cutner smiled, showing his teeth again.
It was the predatory grin of a shark,
Niles narrated, feeling the old desire to shut himself up like a clam rising in him.

“The way I see it,” Cutner said, “you couldn’t open up to Loewes because she
was
real. She
was
a professional therapist. She was analysing every word and gesture you made – or you thought she was, anyway, and that’s enough. Probably seeing things about you that you hadn’t worked out yourself yet, right? And that’s not a nice position to be in for you. You felt vulnerable.” He smiled, pouring himself an apple juice from the whiskey decanter on the sideboard; like many Fictionals, he had an aversion to alcohol, preferring the prop drinks that came on the set. He knocked the drink he’d poured back in one. “You come to me because you feel superior to me.”

“Really?” Niles tried not to roll his eyes. “Because I’m a writer? Is that it?”

“Sure, why not? A famous writer, at that. How many books is it now?”

Niles had to admit it was nice to be called a
famous
writer. And he certainly didn’t mind talking about his work – in fact, it was one of his favourite topics of conversation. “Eighteen. Nineteen in February. And Doubleday want a new Kurt Power novel by Christmas.”

K
URT
P
OWER WAS
Niles Golan’s signature character; a no-nonsense private eye and ex-lawyer who, on the days he wasn’t solving cases involving genius serial killers, consulted for the police and anti-terrorist forces. He was divorced, with a drink problem and – the clever touch Niles was most proud of – an autistic six-year-old daughter, whose unique insights often provided the key to a difficult case. The first few novels had done relatively well, before sales settled down to something reasonable but unremarkable – enough to keep Niles in the style to which he had become accustomed, but not enough to put him up amongst the greats, which was where he felt he deserved to be.

After all, what did King or Rowling have that Golan didn’t? Why did Gaiman command a Twitter following of over a million, while Niles struggled to reach six thousand? Why had
Bring Up The Bodies
won a Booker while
Pudding And Pie: A Kurt Power Novel
had been so cruelly ignored?

The critics, of course. Critics, Niles Golan believed, came in two varieties – insightful, and jealous. The insightful occasionally compared him to Clancy, or Crichton, which was flattering, although Niles really saw himself as being closer to a young Thomas Pynchon. The other kind of critic, meanwhile – the jealous kind – used words like ‘cosy’ and ‘predictable.’ Which was obviously ridiculous, especially after Niles had ended
Down To The Woods Tonight: A Kurt Power Novel
by having the Teddy Bear Killer murder Power’s new girlfriend in cold blood, just to cruelly mess with Kurt’s head and drive him back to the drink. How could anyone have predicted a finale like that?

No, obviously whichever small-minded hack had called that stroke of brilliance ‘predictable’ – it was Lance Pritchards, writing in the
Topeka Examiner
– was suffering from a touch of the green-eyed monster. How depressing it must be, Niles thought, to sit behind a desk all day, being called on to write wretched little hit-pieces about wordsmiths who could out-write you in their sleep! No wonder Lance Pritchards so envied Niles that he had to use what meagre power he had to poison the well against him. Lance Pritchards and all those bastards on Amazon, giving their meagre three-star reviews to books like
The Saladin Imperative: A Kurt Power Novel,
even though it had surely completely changed their understanding of Middle Eastern politics.

Bastards, all of them.

C
UTNER SMILED.
“R
IGHT,
right. Nineteen books. And, obviously, you know Kurt Power could end up being translated any day now” – he was actively smirking now, in a way Niles didn’t much like – “just as soon as the studios realise what a hit they’d have on their hands. Which, I guess, makes you something like a minor God compared with me...”

“I didn’t create you.”

“No, but you...” He coughed, in a way Niles couldn’t help but notice. “You easily could have done. Ahem.”

The Fictional’s thoughts were as visible to the author as words on a page,
Niles thought. Anyway, he could have easily thought up a character like Ralph Cutner – easiest thing in the world. He’d just had his hands full with Kurt Power, that was all. Who, by the way, was a vastly more complex creation, what with his father having been murdered by the leader of the very terrorist organisation he found himself regularly defending the world from.

Ralph read his expression. “Of course, as a writer – a
wordsmith
– you can probably see all my motivations, my inner workings, my tropes and tics, just the way you felt Loewes could see yours. Am I warm?”

Niles grimaced. “Not even slightly. You’re stone cold,” he said bitterly.

Cutner shrugged. “Well, that’s why you come to me, to hear things you can dismiss easily.”

“That’s not true,” Niles scowled. “I just, ah, find you a little more...” – Niles searched for the word, not wanting to be drawn into any more discussions of his supposed realist tendencies – “more
relatable
than Loewes was. That’s all.”

Cutner chuckled. “Well, of course you can
relate
to me, I’m an acerbic genius who doesn’t suffer fools gladly. Relating to me strokes your ego.”

Niles gritted his teeth.
It took an incredible display of iron will for the author to resist rising from the chair and punching the smirk off the man. How dare he?

He forced himself to relax, and pointed to the decanter. “If it’s not too much to ask, could you pour me a glass of that?”

“Sure.” Ralph poured another apple juice and handed Niles the glass, a look of distaste crossing his face for a moment. “You’re not alone, you know – well, when it comes to the ego-stroking, at least. Most of my clients aren’t like you. They’re real fans of the show – they can quote every line. They don’t want treatment, they just come here to re-enact old scenes, or make out we’re friends. Very occasionally” – a look of disgust crossed his face – “one makes an appointment just to tell me they’re in
love
with me.”

Niles was shocked. “Wait, they say this to your
face?”

“What can I say?” Ralph shrugged. “Some people are freaks.”

T
HERE WAS NOTHING
particularly sick or wrong or unpleasant about a human becoming attached to a fictional character. That had been something for writers to aim for since literature began.

No, it was simply a question of degree.

People could fill blogs and tumblrs with adoring gifs of a particular character, a cartoon or comic-book icon – there was nothing strange about that. Nobody saw much difference between a tumblr devoted to Thor or Loki and one devoted to James Dean or Brad Pitt.

Some, admittedly, took it a little further. They might start sleeping with a body pillow or a ‘real doll’ of their favourite character, touching and stroking it in the night. Or they might photoshop a cartoon horse into their arms or their bed and put the resulting pictures up on Facebook. That might make the general public feel a little queasy.

As it was generally understood, real people could love each other. Real people could have affection for fictional characters. But if a real person
loved
a fictional character – well, then something had gone very, very wrong with them. There was a necessary distance between the real and the imaginary.

And when the imaginary was walking around in the world of the real, it made things even more complicated. Those queasy feelings – pity, revulsion, an overriding sense of creepiness – didn’t go away just because the fictional character in question had been translated into a clone body instead of onto a pillow. Fictionals were still imaginary beings. If anything, those feelings of disgust became even more pronounced. The idea of a human being and a Fictional having sex produced an almost phobic reaction in many people, including Niles.

There were, occasionally, human beings who slept with Fictionals, even fell in love with them. On the rare occasions when human/Fictional couplings had been admitted to – only twice since the first Fictional was translated, once in 1991 and once in 2000 – it had been professional and social suicide for both parties. The gutter press had had a field day, subjecting the couples in question to as much muck as they could hurl without fear of litigation, and the public had been happy to lap up every salacious detail. No studio would take a chance on casting a Fictional who’d been subjected to that kind of public gaze, and their human partners tended to be ‘let go’ for vague and spurious reasons, such as ‘bringing the company into disrepute.’ Eventually, they’d been forced to leave Hollywood altogether. It was a taboo that had a frightening amount of power to ruin lives.