CLONE SON

WARNING: The following story contains explicit language, violence, and sexual content. Consider it to be rated R. Not for the easily offended. Refer to Matthew 9:11-12. Additional material on the projection of moral values through hardcore environments can be found in "Clone Son Notes" (link at bottom).

To the test, writer, tell your story quickly because you do not have much time! The slow river of your elaborate words has almost reached the sea; it has said so much, it has said nothing. Say it in a day, or let the story die with you. Say it simply, because the world is losing the patience to right itself. If there is any point in this story at all, make haste! - United Earth, 2701. Council of Recent History.

__________

_________

He is wandering on the street, a young man, 23-years-old, hair that counts as short but is still a bit wild, a hurt look in his eyes. He is like so many others who have come here, driven by some wound, but he is still new to this; he is not hardened or cynical, and he is therefore especially at risk. A frail, haggard man who seems weakened by some disease, which might only be pleasure carried to extremes, is leaning against a wall, and regards the newcomer with interest. Entertaining things usually happen in the vicinity of the inexperienced. Suddenly a beautiful woman appears, wearing a long white translucent dress, precariously held on her body by a red jewel-clasp by her throat. The young man seems astonished by her beauty, unable to decide if she is a butterfly who might land on the flower of his still intact ability to respect her, or a street cat more likely to scratch his eyes out. Then the men attack. There are three of them, and they seize her. Is it a robbery? At first, it looks like it. The lead hoodlum seizes the jewel from her throat, then watches as her exotic dress unravels, with nothing to keep it together, unwrapping her like a present for their eyes. He looks at the jewel, and casts it aside. "You are the jewel I want," he says, turning back to the woman. The woman is white, like snow, perfectly sculpted and proportioned, but with a tiny triangle of brown curly hair in her most vulnerable spot that somehow makes the goddess body seem human and accessible. "This is what I want!" the thug cries again, seizing her in his arms, while his accomplices grab her from behind, one by the throat, pulling her backwards, one by the arm, twisting it. At the same time, someone’s pants are coming off.

In an instant, the young man is in the middle of them, kicking and punching the men, crying out, "Leave her alone! Get off of her!" The frail spectator, leaning against the wall just a minute ago, has the discarded jewel in his hand, by now, hidden in a pocket of his cloak-like robe-coat. It might be fake, but then, again, if it is real… He looks up, amazed by the speed and force of the young man’s attack. The three perpetrators are lying sprawled out on the ground. "Here, miss," the young man is saying, picking up the woman’s collapsed garment, which is lying on the street. "Are you all right?"

"No!" she cries out. "I want to be raped!" And suddenly, she rears back and slaps the young man across the face. "You ruined it! You god-damned prude! Get out of here! Leave me alone!" She throws her dress back to the ground, in a kind of tantrum, then looks, with tear-stained eyes, at the three men lying on the street. "Now they can’t! They can’t do it!" she cries. Then furiously she turns back to the young man. "You did this! It’s on you. You have to make it up to me! It’s your responsibility! You have to rape me!"

Stunned, the young man begins to back away from her. Angrily, she seizes him by the hair. She hits him again and again, spits in his face, and scratches him. "Rape me! Rape me!" He covers up, not fighting, till she hears one of the wounded thugs stirring, and struggling to his knees. "Oh Vlady!" she cries out, running over to him. "Are you OK? Are you OK? How long till you’ll be able to do it?"

"Maybe never," he says. "That son-of-a-bitch got me where it counts."

The young man is stumbling away, now, confused. The frail man decides to follow him.

__________

FRAIL MAN: Yo, son! Slow down! Slow down! It’s never good to run so fast from a beautiful woman!

YOUNG MAN: Who are you? What do you want? – (He asks again) What do you want?

FRAIL MAN: A protector. Anybody who can fight like that is worth being friends with.

YOUNG MAN: I’m not here to be anybody’s friend.

FRAIL MAN: (Looking back in the direction of the battered thugs) Well, if not having friends is your priority, that’s three less guys you have to worry about.

The young man says nothing but keeps on walking. The Frail Man follows him a ways. Finally, the young man turns around.

YOUNG MAN: Yes, can I help you?

FRAIL MAN: (Insistent) Be my protector. Look, I’ll pay for your services. (He pulls the jewel from his pocket, and offers it to him.)

YOUNG MAN: You slime ball! That jewel belongs to the girl! She needs it to hold her dress up.

FRAIL MAN: In case you didn’t notice, she doesn’t want her dress to be held up. She wants to be naked. She wants to have sex.

YOUNG MAN: It belongs to her.

FRAIL MAN: So what? She’s already thrown away things a lot more valuable than that.

YOUNG MAN: (Agreeing) You’re right. Her dignity. Her self-respect.

FRAIL MAN: (This isn’t the point he’s trying to make.) Why didn’t you give her what she wanted?

The young man turns away with contempt. How could anybody even ask that?

FRAIL MAN: Is it because living up to your self-image of what a moral person is matters to you more than her happiness? Are you sure you’re moral, and not just egotistic?

YOUNG MAN: Look, don’t try to play with my head.

FRAIL MAN: Why are you here? If you’ve got outside values, why didn’t you stay outside? This is our place, here. Our place to be shooting stars, to light up the sky with our incompatibility with the world, to crash and burn. Our place to be degenerates, perverts, killers, cynics, lost souls, whatever it is the outside won’t put up with. What the hell did you expect, kid? Go back home. Ask mama and papa to take you back.

YOUNG MAN: Shut the hell up!

FRAIL MAN: What, did I touch a raw nerve? Push the wrong button?

YOUNG MAN: I said, shut the hell up!

FRAIL MAN: OK, OK, take it easy. I want you to be my protector, not my killer. (He puts the jewel away). Look, I’m always getting myself in trouble. I don’t know why. I need protection. See, there’s a lot of crazy people in here; they don’t like intelligent people like me… Where did you learn to fight like that? You studied karate? They still teach that on the outside?

YOUNG MAN: It helps to develop the mind and spirit. It builds up confidence. It puts you in harmony with your objectives.

FRAIL MAN: Yeah, yeah. I’m all for that philosophy. I think it creates a beautiful harmony in the universe when you kick somebody in the nuts. (The young man starts to go again.) No, please don’t go! I’m a philosopher, too! It’ s just that my philosophy doesn’t pack the punch yours does… Look, we could be a great team. You don’t know your way around here yet, you are in extreme peril. I’m an old rat, I know every twist and turn of the maze. You could beat the crap out of a whole gang by yourself, but you could also get blindsided, because you don’t know the scams, the cons, the tricks, the ins-and-outs of this place… Look, you seem lonely. I got vocal cords. I can talk. Please - protect me!

__________

The young man feels pity for the frail man, and it’s true, he’s lonely and doesn’t know his way around. So he agrees to protect the frail man, who identifies himself as Chister. The young man identifies himself as "Jimmy." At first, the link between the two is tenuous. Chister mouths off to a huge thug walking down the street. "Hey, Jack, you don’t need a beanstalk, do you?" The thug comes over to beat the crap out of Chister, and Jimmy, who has now assumed the role of his protector has to disable the giant, with a lightning fast series of hand blocks, four rapid-fire punches to the body, an arm hold, and a kick to the head. "Amazing!" cries Chister, in glee, "a work of art!"

"Listen," says Jimmy, "it’s not like I like doing this kind of stuff. Cut it out." He starts to break the deal with Chister, but Chister swears he won’t mouth off to strangers any more. "If I do, you can axe me," he assures his protector. But then, he sticks his foot out as another thug is passing, and trips him up. Enraged, the thug comes after him. Jimmy glares, but Chister points to his foot, as if to say, "I kept my part of the bargain, I didn’t say a thing to him." Jimmy flips the thug; then sends him flying to the ground when he comes back for a second run at him. Now, a knife comes out. "Please don’t," Jimmy says, "or I’ll have to hurt you." The thug slashes at empty air, and takes a devastating kick to the stomach. His arm is simultaneously held and struck, the knife falls away, and he crumples onto the street, clearly damaged, and broken in a serious way. "Beautiful! Beautiful!" exclaims Chister. "You are a Michelangelo of violence! What magnificence! I have become so accustomed to brute force that I have forgotten how aesthetic mayhem can be!"

Jimmy is disgusted and starts to leave.

"Chivalry! Chivalry!" protests Chister. "We agreed that I wouldn’t verbally provoke anyone, and I didn’t, I only tripped him. You have to honor our pact! You can’t cut out, now, it would be dishonest!"

Jimmy laughs, and is surprised at himself for finding humor in the midst of events that should only be disturbing. He laughs again. Is he starting to become acclimated, after all?

__________

Not far away, as Chister tries to catch up with him, Jimmy comes upon a row of men and women standing in a line, their eyes vacant and strange, some with tears coming down their cheeks, but several also jubilant, in some kind of ecstasy, it seems. Maybe they’re on drugs? Suddenly, he hears a thump, a strange sound a bit like an electric transformer going out. He’s been hearing a lot of these sounds since he got here, but has yet to learn what they mean. Two more thumps, and suddenly, one of the men standing in the line cries out in pain, and flies backwards as though impacted by a heavy object moving at great speed. He crashes onto the ground where he lies, writhing, and visibly deformed by what has happened to him. There is another thump and another man flies backwards. He rolls, staggers, climbs to his feet, and stumbles back into the line, clutching his chest as blood pours out. "Almost! Almost!" he cries with joy, then suddenly falls to his knees, and pitches face first to the ground. He is dead. Three more thumps follow, and from the distance, Jimmy hears someone curse. "It’s not me, it’s the alignment! The tube is off!"; and someone else is saying, "No, you suck, you can’t even hit someone standing still at 100 yards! You’re of no use to me!" And there’s another thump, and a scream in the distance, and then five more thumps, and four of the people in the line go flying. One gets back up, with what appears to be a dislocated shoulder, and one rolls around groaning on the ground; the other two are silent and unmoving.

Jimmy finally understands that the people here are being shot by some kind of weapon. "Get down!" he yells, rushing forward. He hurls a young woman and a middle-aged man to the ground, as a salvo of thumps erupts, smashing four more members of the line to the ground. "Stay down!" he urges, dragging the woman behind him, like a leopard dragging a carcass back to its lair; only she is the prey of his compassion, and he is trying to save her. "Don’t try to change my mind!" she cries, tears flooding out of her eyes. "They messed with me, they turned me inside out and took away everything I cared about! They might as well have cut my heart out with a knife! Do you know how sharp a sun that doesn’t shine can be? Let go of me, you idiot Samaritan! It’s taken me months to work up the nerve to do this!" Meanwhile, the man he knocked down has leapt up and is shouting in the direction of the tube-shooters, "Don’t forget about me! I’m still alive! Don’t go! Don’t leave me another day in this pitiful world!" Jimmy jumps up from where the girl is lying to try to knock the man down, but before he can reach him, the man is flying past him, with a plume of smoke coming out of his chest and a trace of blood beginning to form like a smile from the wound. Stunned, Jimmy looks up to see the girl rising, her arms stretched upwards as if praying to God. "Please, don’t miss me!" she cries. She is a strange and sensitive girl, who looks like she was blown here from a hurricane, disheveled, interesting, graceful like a swan floating on a dark inner lake, her madness is like a great novel; he wants to embrace her, shelter her, confront the hugeness of the black in front of her eyes with some life-giving inspiration which her vulnerability will elicit from him, but the thump is definitive, like the crash of a guillotine that severs a beautiful, overwhelmed head from a body that does not have the strength to bear it. The girl is hurled backwards, and bounces like a tiny doll thrown across a room by an angry child – she is both the doll and the angry child. Horrified, he crawls over to her, to find her trembling lips mouthing out the words, " Mother. Do I have a mother? Or am I only one of those lab kids? Mother!"

"Suicidals," says Chister, joining Jimmy once again. "Look, don’t take it so hard, you didn’t fail. They wanted to die. They came here to die." Jimmy looks up to see in the distance, a band of men packing the death-tubes away into large black bags, then slinging them over their shoulders, and beginning to disperse, as if a sporting event had just ended. "Advorzhi and his men," says Chister.

Jimmy looks up at Chister. "Who are they? What do they want?"

"Anywhere else, you’d call them bandits. But here, the word makes no sense. They’re simply harder players, and a bit more organized, than most. They’re in search of constant target practice to refine their marksmanship, and the suicidals want to die. It’s the perfect partnership."

Chister laughs at Jimmy’s grim, astonished face. "You haven’t caught on to this place, yet, have you? You upset a woman who wanted to be raped, and now you almost forced people who wanted to die, to live."

Jimmy looks up at him.

"And by the way, you’re very lucky Advorzhi’s men didn’t snuff you out. Their hearts didn’t seem to be here on the target range today. Maybe they’re on their way to a party. Though that word doesn’t make much sense here, either, since ‘party’ is all this ever is."

"Is there a place to bury her?" Jimmy asks, looking down tenderly at the tormented girl who will suffer no more, or perhaps suffer for eternity.

"The vaporizer crews will come by at dawn. That’s as sentimental as it gets."

Gently, Jimmy lifts her, and carries her to the corner of the street.

"Why there?" asks Chister.

"Out of the sun."

"What does it matter? The glare doesn’t matter to her now. Leave her in the middle of the street, otherwise the vaporizers will miss her when they pass by…. You want her body to lie here for another day?"

Jimmy picks her body up and places it back in the middle of the street. Tenderly, he closes her eyelids. "Sleep well – will it be the first time?"

Jimmy doesn’t drive Chister away this time, he realizes the troublemaker is right about his usefulness. In some places, there’s no substitute for a cynical mind.

__________

Jimmy drifts for a while, warding off his companion’s efforts at making small talk. Something too profound has just occurred to be disturbed by words that have no purpose. He feels Chister’s chatter is just a way of trying to solidify a bond that isn’t real. When he needs him again, he’ll force himself to put up with him.

For a while, they just walk. Two giggling girls, with powdery faces, like children who haven’t learned how to eat without making a mess, exchange a little box which they take turns holding up to their noses. Suddenly, one blinks, retracting from a white cloud that engulfs her, and doubles over with laughter. "Ow! It stings! Do you think I can make my eye high? " A limping man goes past, with scratch marks on his face and a woman’s high-heeled shoe in his hand. He looks at the girls, starts to follow them, then changes his mind. Four young men pass in the opposite direction, eager and joyful, one of them is saying, "So, like, they’re texting me now, an orgy is just starting up in the park!" "Wow, man, like I did so much Tranquilex, I don’t know if I can get it up!" From the sides of the streets, there are periodic blasts of music and the buzz of massive accumulations of conversation, as doors open and close, bars and clubs momentarily letting the secret of their existence slip out before barricading themselves once more against the streets.

Finally, the drifting leads them into a square; there are some people milling about by an inert movie screen, but what stands out most is a slender, beautiful woman with completely green skin, and wild waves of green hair, standing off to one side. She is wearing a short white blouse that exposes her bare midriff, with a pair of pants hanging down so low that you can clearly see the provocative pelvic bones that are like the markings for a landing strip in the jungle. Her eyes are closed, she is deep in some kind of trance, her hands are extended outwards, palms exposed to the sun.

Before Jimmy can allow Chister back into his world, to get feedback on the green woman, a crippled man with an artificial power-leg with a dead battery hobbles into the square. "Damn crap-ass battery!" he is yelling. A band of three thugs overtakes him, seizes him, and says, "Cough it up!" "You damned bastards!" he yells, "I need my money for a new battery!" "Tough luck, maybe you can score a hand-out from a newbie, you shit-faced defect!" They begin pummeling him, then kick him and stomp on him where he lies on the ground. One cuts his pockets open with a knife, and finally pulls out the wallet. "Nice day fishing!" he laughs, turning to the others. "Let’s spare the son-of-a-bitch, he’s been kind to us. Why kill the milk cow?" Laughing, after one more kick, they leave.

Chister steps up beside Jimmy, and asks: "Well, why didn’t you do something? Forget your karate?"

Jimmy looks at him. "What, you mean this guy wanted to be helped?" Chagrined, he heads over to take a look at the battered body lying in the street. "Girls who want to be raped. People who want to be murdered. But this guy wanted to be helped…"

"Sure," Chister says. "This was about something more important than a life. Money."

Jimmy looks the wounded guy over, then helps him slowly struggle over to a wall, which he leans him against. "Are you all right, mister?"

"Mister? I haven’t been called that for years."

"What have you been called?"

"Son of a bitch. - Damn!" he says, after thoughts finally begin to return to him, digging their way out from underneath his disaster. "All because of a stinking god-damned battery! It ran out of juice. I was on my way to get another. When it’s working, this god-damned power leg works better than the one I was born with, and can outkick a donkey. Thank god, they didn’t take the leg itself! - Oh yeah, good money," he tells Jimmy’s puzzled look, "especially with the Limb-Cutters around. – What?" he asks, responding to Jimmy’s lack of recognition. "How long have you been here?"

"Just a few weeks."

"In the ‘shallow end’?" That was the place where the undecideds came to sort things out, before plunging all the way in. There, there were still police, who let in just enough roughness to make people think twice about going in all the way, but not enough roughness to exterminate them while they searched their souls.

"Yeah," says Jimmy.

"No, they stabbed him," says Chister, and suddenly the two of them are laughing together, brothers in a jaded world, while Jimmy steps back, amazed at their cynicism.

"Money, money, it moves the world," says the robbery victim, who finally reveals his name as Almost; his real name became meaningless long ago, just a waste of time. "You want to come here, to never work, to get away from the control, the boredom that’s like cancer on a sunny day; the one stupid law after the other, that’s like being tied to your chair by some freaky mother who thinks you’re going to break her favorite teacup; the stupid reports, paperwork, repairs, BOREDOM! Like a god-damned firing squad: ready, aim, fire, your regular, normal, and safe day has killed you! So you come here to make it real, to shake dying things back to life, and what do you get? A refuge, a sanctuary for the human life force. A chance to live again – and to make terrible mistakes."

"Unfortunately, it’s not all people like you who drop in," says Chister, hugging Jimmy affectionately, who pushes him away. "There’s also people like us!" And he and Almost begin to laugh again: a pitiful duet of moral exhaustion that has left them stranded in a place that is not quite so hard to reach.

"So what?, we all get money – Freedom City money – at the Subsistence Office," says Almost. "I guess you haven’t learned yet that it buys next to nothing."

"Store owners and service providers know they can get more. They amp up their prices so we have no choice but to diversify our money-making strategies, you might say!"

"Can you two stop laughing?" asks Jimmy. But the two veterans are in love with the devious twists their tones of voice can impart to innocent words; the way they can carjack outside language, and put another driver behind the wheel.

"Yeah, where you learn that shit tastes good, after all."

"So what, then – you’re all nothing more than a bunch of hoods?" demands Jimmy.

"No," concedes Almost. "Not all of us are up to stealing. It takes more skill than some of us have!" He and Chister break out laughing again, and Jimmy, pointing to the blood still flowing from Almost’s head, asks, "Doesn’t it hurt?", a way of trying to put an end to his bothersome guffaws. "No, not at all," says Almost, who continues laughing.

"Stealing is one way to make ends meet," admits Chister. "But there’s other ways, too, like hiring yourself out for services. Prostitution. Protection. Friendship." Conveniently, two men pass by at that very moment, intensely scrutinizing a card in their hands. "The day’s hint," says Chister, delighted at the coincidence, which will embellish his presentation. "Another option for the cowardly. Government’s behind it, of course, to help keep the place afloat. They tell you the location of a treasure they’ve planted somewhere, on that card there, the daily form. Only the information is mangled beyond all recognition, and turned into some kind of infuriating riddle. Anyway, the Finders, who don’t mind wasting their time with that kind of crap, spend their days running around looking for treasures, pitting their sorry brains against the overeducated weirdoes who devise the clues."

"Miss a lot of good pussy that way," says Almost. The veterans aren’t happy that Jimmy won’t laugh with them, and Almost, with a trace of anger in his voice, like, "cut the holier than thou crap", says, "There’s also gambling, and the big games."

"Jackpots galore," says Chister, trying to pave over Almost’s edge of anger, because he needs Jimmy’s fighting skills, and maybe he likes him a little bit, too; having a moral friend here is almost as cool as having a pet monkey. "Beat a house gladiator – survive a night in a den of lions, if you’re Biblically-inclined – swim across a pool filled with sharks. Disneyland meets the Roman Games. It beats sitting behind a desk, and wasting your life away, once you wake up to the fact that your cushy swivel seat is only a subtle kind of electric chair." Chister adds the Maze to the inventory of economic options, "Theseus updated, labyrinth supreme," before Almost reminds him of "The Minefield" - the greatest game of all. "It’s where I lost my leg," he says, and suddenly Chister is silent and reverent, as though Jesus, himself, had just appeared before them.

"A huge minefield," Almost says, nodding in agreement that it is something grand that he once tried to cross it, accepting Chister’s respect. "Land mines. All kinds of explosive devices. Always shifting beneath the surface, a giant computer is constantly rearranging the charges. You can always feel the explosion coming, the ground below you begins to vibrate, real tight-like, in one spot; it means a mine is activating. You jump away from it – but where to? You just might land on another mine that’s already been turned on, and blow yourself to smithereens. Which way to safety? Which way to death? Will you guess right? At the same time, you’ve got unpredictable laser sweeps going on, forcing you down to the ground, so sometimes you can’t jump off a mine that’s coming to life, you just got to lay low while it’s revving up right below you, and pray to God, or else crawl like an animal and hope you won’t end up in one of the death pits."

Chister touches Almost like he’s touching a god. "Almost - how did you survive?"

"I made it to the ‘Replay’ zone," says Almost. "3/4 of the way. The caretakers pull you out if you make it that far, that is, if you get hung up or hurt or lose your nerve to go on; they give you medical attention, if you need it, and a consolation prize. I lived off that for a good, long time."

"You didn’t lose your nerve?" Chister asks.

"No you bastard, I lost my leg."

"And on the other side?" asks Jimmy. "What were you trying to reach?"

"Five thousand thousand acres. An automatic farm. Shitloads of money. My own private paradise, because some rats would rather not share a cage. Control of the computer, to come and go across the minefield as I please. So I could bring in hookers," he explains. "I almost made it. Now the money’s run out, and I just got robbed, and I can’t even afford a battery for this god-damned leg, which is just like dragging 50 pounds around by the stump of the one that was blown off, god damn it! I got outslicked by a decoy vibration."

"Give him the jewel," says Jimmy.

"What? Shhhh!" says Chister.

"What?" asks Almost. "Did he say jewel?"

"No, juice, he said juice," says Chister. "I drank it all," he tells Jimmy, winking at him to be quiet.

"Give it to him," says Jimmy.

Chister can’t dissimilate anymore; habit, which quickly pushed reverence to the side, is beaten – for now, at least. Chister must give in to Jimmy’s insistence. He pulls out the jewel from his robe-coat pocket, and hands it to Almost. "Well, then, how much do you think this is worth?"

Almost wipes the drool from his mouth, and says, "Oh, it should be good enough for a battery. It’s a pretty piece of colored glass."

"You bastard!" says Chister. "It could buy artificial legs for a whole damned soccer team! Plus legs for the Rockettes! It’s a giant-ass ruby."

"So, then, rob me again. I never yet been robbed two times in a single day. After ten years here, I’m hard-up for a new experience!"

Jimmy quiets them. "We’ll go together. So that’s it?" he asks, smiling, because if you switch the dark side of the human race to another channel, somehow - perhaps as a defense mechanism - its tragedies start to become amusing, like all of mankind was slipping on a gigantic, black banana peel. "That’s the economy of Freedom City, in a nutshell?"

"What more do you want?" says Almost. "Extreme jackpots pump big money into the system. Winners hire bodyguards, and go on spending sprees. Business prospers. Fruits grow like crazy on the robbery tree, all kinds of criminals come out of the woodwork. It’s like a blizzard of money, falling everywhere, everybody’s grabbing anything that moves to try to get some of it. Stealing, scrambling, thinking on their feet, selling something, whoring, gambling…"

"And conning suckers like that," says Chister, pointing to the green girl who is just beginning to wake up out of her trance, some kind of daybreak, it seems, rising inside of her.

"Sucker?" asks Jimmy, who considers her to be striking, and far from vacant.

"Pretty, but brain-dead," says Chister. "But then, I never knew a vagina to be stupid, or a penis to be intellectual. So go on and talk to her if you want. I’m sure it will all turn out good."

Jimmy scowls, and demands, "Sucker - why?"

Chister is amazed that it matters. "She’s one of those idiots who doesn’t want to steal, or sell herself," he explains. "Perfect prey for Dr. Chlorophyll."

"Dr. Chlorophyll?"

"He told them he could transplant chloroplasts into their flesh, or whatever you call those plant structures that convert sunlight into carbohydrates, you know food? He told them with chloroplasts especially adapted for human beings he could provide them all with photosynthetic ability – you know, give them the ability to nourish themselves, just by standing in the sun, so they would never have to work, or steal, or prostitute themselves just to eat. He promised them complete independence. ‘No social system will hold you in its clutches, baby, from now on, you’re free of being a slave or a predator!’ All the suckers had to do was pay him a fortune to have the operation."

"So she used to have money?

"A girl like that might have worked as a high-class pro. Built up some good savings. Then blown it all. Looks like she’s losing weight, now. Poor sucker, starving herself because she can’t afford to eat anymore, she’s just too good to make money here, to play our nasty games; she’s reformed, and thinks the photosynthesis will save her soul. She’ll either waste away, or go back to using what she’s got; using what’s real and what gives men with money a hard-on. Hopefully soon, cause once she gets too skinny, she won’t be good for anything."

__________

While Jimmy watches the green girl slowly returning to the sights and sounds around her, a giant blast of trumpets sounds in the distance. Soon, it sounds again, much nearer. A group of shirtless men comes struggling in, carrying a platform on which is seated an attractive young woman wearing a black blouse and pants, with heavy doses of eye shadow and black lips. "Make way for Lofty Girl! Make way for Lofty Girl!" the men cry out. "Out of the way, it’s a woman with a brain!" But it seems Lofty Girl doesn’t want to be carried out of the square, she wants to say something to the rabble that is slowly seeking her.

"Female Anatomy 101," she says, speaking into a voice enhancer. "Yes, women have vaginas. Yes, women have breasts. Yes, women have asses. And guess what? Women also have heads. And inside those heads are brains. And from those brains come thoughts."

"Who cares?" someone yells back.

"Is your capacity for boredom infinite? Supposedly, you ran from the outside to escape boredom. Yet here you are reduced to a routine of jumping into one vagina after another, hello, good-bye, hello, good-bye. Not tired yet?"

"No! Not by a long shot! Not until it falls off!" someone counters.

"Worms breed with worms," she says. "Ants with ants. Mice with mice. Stay with your kind. They’re all only extensions of the drugs you take, anyhow. I’m not here for you. I’m searching for men of quality, who want a woman who can think, discuss ideas, challenge them, make them grow, stimulate them in ways that a headless body cannot. Anyone out there who is more than a mere appendage of their penis?"

Chister, meaning well, pushes Jimmy from behind, towards Lofty Girl. "Him! This one here! I’m too smart to try to be more than my penis, but this one, here, he’s suffering from sentimentality, or some other form of mental illness, so I think you two just might be a match."

Jimmy doesn’t like to be thrust into the limelight, so he starts to back away, but Lofty Girl won’t let him. She spears him with her words. "Rupert Jardinowe, yet again! What a pitiful crutch to lean on! How much did the surgery cost?"

Chister is upset with himself, he should have seen this coming.

"Look, everybody, here’s a real winner!" cries out Lofty Girl, she is merciless towards people she considers to be absurd. "The young Rupert Jardinowe, all over again! So how many do we have, now, in Freedom City, is it a hundred? Two hundred? A thousand? Poor Rupert Jardinowe. The great genius who overcame the Speed Of Light Dilemma and built the Hyperspace Network, imitated by thousands of mediocre idiots, who go to any unscrupulous plastic surgeon who’s got a mold, to copy his face, and cover up their superficiality and lack of talent by resculpting themselves to be the spitting image of a real genius. Like if you look like him, it will rub off on you? Like, after you step out of the plastic surgeon’s office, we should all bow down to you? Pitiful, pitiful, insecure, imitative nobody! I’d rather be with the ugliest man who ever lived, than be with a copycat loser like you!"

"Well, here I am honey!" says Almost, taking hope.

"Don’t let it get to you," Chister is telling Jimmy, in the meantime, trying to hold him back, even though Jimmy is perfectly still; "she’s snotty, that’s all."

A bunch of armed guards surge in front of Lofty Girl’s litter, with lowered tubes, expecting Jimmy to attack, but he just stands there, robbed of the gift of speech. Her eyes are shining, her body alert, like a prairie dog standing guard by its hole, she is expecting to provoke something.

"Everybody has a right to have their own style, and that applies to their face, too!" says Chister, defending his protector, shaking slightly with all the tubes pointed at them.

"Yeah!" says Almost. "What’s the difference between your black lipstick, and his plastic surgery? It’s all about changing your look. You’re a Goth intellectual, he’s Rupert Jardinowe. You wash your masquerade off at night, he keeps his on."

"Anybody who could outthink a chimpanzee, here?" she asks, signaling her retinue to ready her departure.

"You don’t have to be mean," Jimmy says. "You don’t know who you’re talking to, you don’t know my story, or the story of any one of us. We’re all strangers but you act like you know us. You don’t."

"Oh, so sorry Rupert," she says. "Any new breakthroughs, have you got those black hole inverters up and running yet? Any progress on cosmological management, or is this all a big castle in the sand? Oh, I’m sorry, I forgot! That’s all over your head. You’re not who you appear to be. Up for a game of darts and a glass of beer?"

Before he can answer, a band of men, bounty hunters, suddenly appear, and seize Jimmy from behind. He fights off three of them, but a chi-sapper comes out, a little rod that is thrust into his side, and he is paralyzed, and thrown to the ground, with a tube pointed at his head. Almost is pushed over, and Chister easily dragged off to the side. "Get a DNA sample," says one of the bounty hunters. A sample extractor, a small scraper with a tiny storage chamber, and built-in analyzer, appears in one of the tough men’s hands. But before they can use it, Jimmy has overcome the effects of the chi-sapper, which is using his own energy to bind him, tying him up with his own power. He uses what his karate teacher once called "the mind behind the blows", or the "inner landscape of the martial arts", to disconnect his energy from the machine, withdrawing its availability to the controlling device; then with a slight twist of his body, gets out from under it, and begins to fight back with terrible, yet precise fury. Four competent fighters are down on the ground in less than a minute, while the man with the tube just stands there, not firing. Somehow, Jimmy knew that he wouldn’t. Jimmy takes the tube out of his hands.

Outraged, Chister demands, "What the hell is all this about? You stupid thugs!" He threatens the men who are sprawled out on the ground.

One of the bounty hunters who is still standing says, "Look, we’re under contract from the outside, since they aren’t allowed in themselves. Rupert Jardinowe’s clone has run away. We believe he’s somewhere, here, in Freedom City."

A gasp escapes from the crowd of bystanders.

"The old man’s fading," says another bounty hunter. "The Life Extension Injections are reaching their limit. His mind is going. We can’t do without him, a genius like that comes but once every thousand years. That’s too long to wait. Clone son was being prepared to take his place, to carry on from where his dad left off, but now he’s gone."

"Big shit," Jimmy says. "Make another one. Make a thousand, make a million, turn the whole world into Rupert Jardinowe."

"He didn’t want a whole bunch of clones," the bounty hunter says. "He didn’t want to become a swarm of locusts. He wanted his clone to be like a son. He wanted every resource to be devoted to him. He wanted to build him up with an entire planet’s worth of support."

"Say, kid, you fight pretty damned well," says another one of the bounty hunters, rising slowly to his feet. "You know, clone son was trained in the martial arts, to improve his focus."

"You mean, he was distracted?" asks Jimmy. "A bad student? Not like his father? But, of course, that would be impossible. He was a clone."

"Where did you learn to fight?" the bounty hunter asks, wiping blood from his mouth.

"The street," Jimmy replies. "Look." He takes the DNA analyzer, and appears to scrape himself with it. "Read it."

The man looks at a little meter on the device. "It’s not a match," he says, disappointed and puzzled, his instinct overruled.

"You know, there’s lots of copycat Jardinowes around, courtesy of the wonderful world of plastic-surgery. It’s the latest face fashion, the current rage in pop style. Just ask her," he says, pointing to Lofty Girl, who for a moment was mesmerized by Jimmy, believing she might have stumbled upon a great treasure, but now regards him with increased disgust, as though he had just been transformed from one cockroach into two.

"Would you let us put this stamp on your hand?" asks one of the bounty hunters. "To show us that we’ve already checked you out, and that you’re not him?" They flash money in his face. Chister and Almost embrace each other.

"Certainly," replies Jimmy. "The seal of an impostor. No, wait, I’ll do it myself." He takes the stamp, checks it out, then imprints the mark on his hand, and returns the device to its owners. "Look, Lofty Girl," he says, holding up his hand with the sign on it. "The mark of a copycat. Sure you don’t want to spend some time with me? I’d love to show you a play I just wrote. It’s called Hamlet. Or would you prefer to read my novel, The Brothers Karamazov?"

Lofty Girl snaps her fingers, and her servants carry her away. "No one here," she says, loyal to her standards. Behind her vanishing entourage, a group of scantily-clad prostitutes appears, scavengers of Lofty Girl’s impossible demands, crying out, "Hey boys, who wants to have a good time? You don’t need brains, you just need money!" The men cheer. Things are once again simple. Jimmy keeps the bounty hunters’ tube, their assault has earned him that right, and he may need it down the road. "How about some fun?" Almost asks him, looking at the girls. "No," says Jimmy, "we have business to take care of first. A battery for your leg." "Oh, I forgot," admits Almost.

Meanwhile, Chister asks Jimmy, "Why did you scrape my hand with that frigging device? What was it? You cut me."

__________

They have just got Almost his battery, and juiced up his leg. To show them his renewed powers, he jumps high into the air, as though riding a 500-horsepower pogo stick. Then he kicks a loose stone from the street far into the distance. It almost kills someone. "Look at him run, he thinks it’s mortar fire!" laughs Almost. Braying like a mule, he says, "Almost is back on top of his game. Thank you minefield, for turning me into a superman! - Now, can we go to the whorehouse?"

That’s when they notice they have been followed. The green girl, stealthy like a cat, but without that coiled ferocity, is standing nearby, looking into a store window.

"You like that crap?" asks Chister, coming up beside her. The store is filled with second-hand clothing, lots of it with tube holes burned into it, garments gathered from the dead. "It’s more like a forensic laboratory than a clothing store."

The girl shakes her head. "No. I think it’s hideous."

"But it’s the best window you’ve got to make it look like you’re not following us?"

For a moment, she looks frightened, which Chister enjoys, because intimidating a beautiful woman is a big sexual turn-on. But Jimmy won’t let that game get off the ground. "It’s all right," he says. "We saw you meditating in the square, before all the commotion. Then, with this money, it was good to move on. Staying in one place after getting paid doesn’t seem like a smart thing to do." He reaches into his pocket, and takes out a wad of money, sheltering it with his body so no passers-bye will see. "You’re hungry," he says. "That must be why you’re following us. Here, take this, get something to eat."

Chister, blowing kisses behind Jimmy’s back, motions that she should put out for her benefactor, that’s way too much money not to get something in return for it. "No thanks," she says, pushing the money back towards Jimmy. Jimmy looks over his shoulder, and imagining what is going on, tells Chister to chill. "No, take it," he tells the green girl, "it’s a gift. You don’t owe me anything. You’re hungry."

She regards him. "You know, I can do photosynthesis," she says.

Jimmy’s eyes become tender, through the hardness they are beginning to absorb and recognize the need for. "Of course you can. But it can’t hurt to supplement your diet. Most plants don’t walk. You may need to eat a little more than they do."

"You’re new here," she tells him, taking the money, and hiding it under her clothes.

"I’m learning," he says.

"Don’t learn too fast," she replies.

"Why not?" demands Chister. "You want him dead?"

Turning to Jimmy, she says, "You said you had a story. Lofty Girl was putting you all in the same boat, and sinking it. What’s your story?"

Jimmy doesn’t answer.

"I’d like to hear it," she says.

Jimmy shakes his head. "I haven’t come here to talk about myself. I’ve come here to get as far away from myself as I can. And that’s already saying too much. But if you want to tell me about you, I’ll listen."

__________

They’re in a bar. The girl is smart, but completely out of place. This is reality, and she is a creature of fantasy. There is something beautiful about her ideals, but also deadly. She is like a deer who has never heard of hunters, wandering into the open. Having lived in a place like this for over two years, if she remembers correctly, the walls of her delusions must be as thick as bunkers. Somewhere, in her mind, she’s writing a novel with reality that may end up getting her killed.

"A common story," Chister whispers to Jimmy, as the girl begins to tell her story, suggesting he not allow it to move him. "Here, have another." An ajow brew, the closest thing to lava you can pour down your throat. Chister figures that with one or two of these, Jimmy will be ready to f**k her and save his ears a lot of distress. "Your typical sob story," Chister warns, staring into his pitcher. But there is Jimmy, paying him no heed, listening away. The girl had no parents, of course not!, she is part of the test-tube element. The world still depends mainly on daddies and mommies and families, because too many other psychological deprivations require that bare concession to human emotions; and besides, a premature commitment to universal genetic engineering could freeze the biological progress of humanity, locking it into the optimum evolutionary designs of one age, while shutting out the unimagined improvements possible in another. Maybe 10% of humanity now belongs to the test-tube element, but what a trouble-ridden element it is! Test-tube baby syndrome, hundreds of thousands of them stretching their arms towards a mamma who never comes, no matter how hard they cry. For a moment it looked good, she got approved to be placed into the Adopted Test Tube Baby program, after acting out as a teenager: "I was shy and wanted to obey the rules, but I also knew the squeaky wheel gets the oil, so I got into cutting myself, and vandalism, with some shoplifting thrown in for good measure. One night, after smashing a store window with a homemade explosive , I just stood there while my vandal sisters ran away, mesmerized by the way the glass was falling down like an avalanche of ice and the alarm was shouting out my need to the world. I was crying through that alarm, and I was joyful to hear my cry, because I knew it was finally going to bring a mother running to me in the night. First the mother of the police, and then the mother of the program." But very quickly, the program went bad. The girl’s adoptive father raped her, she stabbed him in the arm, ran away, got caught and put into a prison school, and later sent to a coercive work site, after being declared a genetic misfire. When her restoration request was denied, she headed out to Freedom City with two other coercion workers, one of whom died from a drug overdose, one of whom was killed by some freak sniper a few months later. Green girl survived through prostitution. Her quality was soon recognized by one of the houses, which upgraded her to a courtesan: a worthy companion, a diligent listener, and certified master of the erotic arts. But the house, which became her new home, was finally ruined by Advorzhi, the bandit general who took it over and not only lowered the girls’ take, but also forced them to serve his men for free. The last straw was being forced to make love to a man covered with the blood of someone he had just killed. Escaping with her savings, something in her seemed to snap; the only refuge from the cruelty of the world that remained, after years of seeking, was inside: inside of a mind that was determined to dance on the broken glass; to walk over Hell, across the tightrope of how the world should be.

"You’ve had a hard life," says Jimmy, desire pacing back and forth like a tiger inside a cage in his heart, that he is only one drink away from opening. And why not? She’s accustomed to betrayals, to deceit and force, to sympathy as nothing more than a form of hunting. Hasn’t he listened enough to deserve to use her for his pleasure? He doesn’t want her to reciprocate by listening to him turn his soul inside out, why not just go upstairs and give him a good time? Put those hands, those lips, that center of the universe to work? He doesn’t want her compassion, he wants her body. He wants a sensation without a life attached to it. Another drink appears before him, he pushes it away. "No, I don’t want to be like this."

"Where are you going?" green girl asks.

"To sleep, Hetasia." She’s told him her name. But he can call her Tassy. "This crap is too strong for me." Somebody’s laughing at him, "The kid looks like he’s just seen a ghost. And he’s only had two cups of ajow!"

"Want to lend me some of that money?" someone asks him.

Jimmy’s tube is in his face. "Did I hear you right?" he asks.

"I said, good night, sir. Ajow’s an awful drink, it should be banned. It’s worse than VD."

Jimmy goes upstairs, rents a room, and barricades the door with furniture. He lays the tube down beside him, and says, "Freedom City. I made it through one day!"

__________

It is a week later, now, and Chister and Almost have been prospering from their association with Jimmy, thanks to the cash he got from the bounty hunters and the big red jewel, which has turned out to be a stolen museum piece, from some dead queen’s crown. The girl they got it from, whose name they learn is Karmela, obviously had ins with bandits. "Hope we don’t meet up with her, again," says Chister, "now that her jewel’s turned to liquid in my pitcher." Meanwhile, Hetasia is disappointed by Jimmy’s inaccessibility. He won’t talk about where he came from, or why he came here. He’ll listen to her talk about herself, and he’ll listen to her theories, which he considers to be light and airy, but which he doesn’t dismiss her for, since he understands they are merely the products of her damage. Somewhere underneath her pathetic optimism, is a deep and troubled soul; somewhere, swimming in the pool of her gullibility, is wisdom.

"So why did you have your face done?" she asks. "Why did you want to look like Rupert Jardinowe?"

"Don’t you admire him?" he asks.

"Sure. Everybody does."

He acts like the question is answered.

"So, like he’s your role model? Like, maybe if you have his face, you’ll remember to try to live up to him? Sort of like hanging his picture on your wall? Except your wall is your face?"

Jimmy answers by doing something else.

After she comes back from meditating, he gives her a sandwich. "So – what are your plans?" she asks.

"Why? What plans can one possibly have in a place like this, except to make it through another day?"

"Did you come here because you want to live? Or do you want to die?" she asks.

"I don’t know why I came here," he says.

"Maybe you came here looking for love."

"Maybe your name is Hetasia, and not Dr. Sigmund Freud."

"I only want to understand you."

"It’s not worth the trouble."

She chirps like a songbird for a while, perched on his patience for women whose sensitivity has been vandalized. He is reading a manual about weapons, and listens to her like a man who is half-asleep as the birds celebrate the dawn which he takes for granted, but which they never seem to belittle as being certain. Something about that damned Dr. Chlorophyll, again, and the beauty of surviving without sin; and then something she’s been onto for a long time, some bunch of idiots called the New World Club, a band of philosophers who want to reform Freedom City and use it as a base to transform civilization.

"This place is nothing more than a giant viper’s pit," he says, studying the range and fire options of the laser detonator and the street bombs which it can be used to explode. "You’ll never build anything worthwhile on a foundation of thugs and emotional cripples. This is where the dregs of the world gather, they don’t have aspirations, they just have addictions; they don’t have ideals, they just have vices. The outside uses the unchecked pleasures of Freedom City to siphon off its undesirable elements, to make its own ideals possible to attain by getting rid of those who would sabotage it if they remained within it. The exaggerated boredom of society, and all the restored injustices of Deliberate Historical Retrograde, are carefully constructed to make life unbearable for certain types of people, who are driven by their frustration to flee to Freedom City, if they can’t escape through the space colonization project, that is, which can only accommodate about 2% of any generation. And face it, their evaluations are going to be too low to get selected. It’s a brilliant work of social engineering, actually, a world that lures everyone whose discontent could topple it into a baited refuge where they only end up destroying themselves."

"That’s what the New World Club is saying," Hetasia says. "See, I knew you’d like them."

Now Jimmy is studying the range of the tube. There’s also body armor, which is reliable at about 100 yards. It costs a lot, though. "New World Club must be high," Jimmy says. "Here, everybody is either drunk or high; their blueprints for a new world probably have lines of cocaine on them. Of course, Freedom City can become the springboard for a great global change!" he says sarcastically. "Of course, you can use bandits, whores, dropouts, and nut-jobs to build utopia! Here, in Freedom City, we can do what Athens could not do, what Rome could not do, what Great Britain and the United States in the days before world unity could not do! High people can do anything, until their drug wears off. Paradise was invented, Hetasia, to keep us from sliding down into the deepest, darkest pit in our hearts. Trying to get to paradise, we climb out of the pit, but we never reach it. It’s not a place we’ll ever live in, it’s only a means of escaping the worst we could become."

"You know," she says, "it’s not like there’s only thugs in here. Look at us. Not everybody is a robber or a rapist – are we? How do you know the raw material to change the world doesn’t exist in here? You’re being too hard on the New World Club. You feel angry, and disappointed, like life is empty; and you don’t want anybody to prove you wrong."

"Hetasia, I just don’t want to get my hopes up," Jimmy replies. "You’re sweet, you really are." He looks at her for a moment, then turns away, before it can lead to something. "I’ve got to learn about these weapons. This is the language Freedom City speaks."

She watches him for a moment, fascinated and somewhat frightened by his concentration as he studies the methods men have devised to kill each other. Who is he, really? Why is she hanging out with him, and his two obnoxious friends? He looks up from the book, staring at something far away, he is probably calculating distances and visualizing the range of some weapon he has just studied.

"How about a movie?" she asks.

__________

They are back in the square where he first saw her, now, the square where Lofty Girl ripped him to shreds. There’s a big movie screen here, and they’re going to play some movie about the Near Disaster. That was the atomic war they had, centuries ago, which wrecked parts of several countries, and finally convinced the nations of the earth that they had better form some kind of effective World Council. Lucky the war was just enough to force the world to rise to a higher level, and not quite enough to destroy it. After that came the Exchanges – the insertion of huge strategic enclaves of foreign populations into every major country of the world in order to mix people together so closely that no future nuclear strike could be made without destroying one’s own people. You could say, huge voluntary human shields were emplaced in every nation. Meanwhile, massive intermarriages were also promoted, connecting formerly hostile peoples. Under the cover of these programs, the final steps in national disarmament were finally made, and Council control consolidated. After that, there were occasional revolutions, and outbreaks of crime and plunges into apathy; periodic troubles which did not threaten the survival of the earth, but which discomfited the peace. Sometimes, these problems were solved by political means, sometimes by massive police actions, and sometimes by technical means, as when the great Rupert Jardinowe utilized undiscovered laws of physics to deter a major revolution that had erupted on the earth, by restoring hope to the world.

"Like, is this going to be a documentary, or a movie?" somebody is asking somebody else.

"Like a movie, man. Near Disaster. Bombs away. "

"I hope the special effects aren’t too gooey. Like melting faces and all."

"Yo, nuclear war was a bad-ass thing. Take a tube gun and multiply it big time. Like a ping pong ball compared to the planet Jupiter."

"Or a fly’s shit compared to an elephant’s diarrhea."

"Yo, shut up, this is serious, dudes. Our human race almost didn’t make it. This isn’t something to make light of."

" ‘Make light of’, oh, so the English professor is here. Look out, he’s got a red pen, going to circle every word that comes out of your mouth."

A juggler, silhouetted against the screen, is trying to make a few bucks, while somebody else is going by, saying, "Friendship! Friendship here! Only fifty bucks an hour, friendship here! I listen, and I always say the right things. I’ll care about you. Only fifty bucks an hour!"

"Yo, start the movie already!" someone else is shouting.

Suddenly, the lights around the screen go out, the people cheer. When they see the words, "Pre-movie Short", they boo. But when they see Rupert Jardinowe’s face, they cheer again. He’s probably the only person from the outside they feel that way about. "Hey! This short is about Rupert Jardinowe!"

__________

NARRATOR: Rupert Jardinowe, a man loved and revered by a world. Who is this man, and why do we love him? Why must we never forget what he has done?

NARRATOR: 2490. The world is in crisis. Recently recovered from a century of apathy, when productivity ground to a standstill; when vandalism, and absenteeism flourished; when thousands of workers had to be dragged to work by police. This was all changed by the space program, by the colonization of other worlds. Once again the world had a dream to live for. But now, that dream has been ruthlessly betrayed. Popular representatives discover that the great colonization voyages are a sham. Hundreds of thousands of space colonists have been launched into space aboard multi-generational spacecraft that are actually nothing more than death ships, intended to rid the earth of them. The discontented are being hurled to die into the depths of deep space; reports coming back from the colonies are fake.

NARRATOR: At first, the world’s clamor for justice is met by force.

NARRATOR: But soon the chaos becomes too much to bear. Not only are there riots; workers around the world go on strike; absentee police join the rebels, and distribute weapons. Productivity plummets. Agricultural unions refuse to obey embargos designed to starve the population into submission. The chief conspirators are finally arrested and sentenced to death.

NARRATOR: But even so, the world continues to reel. Without the space program, humanity has been robbed of the vision that sustains it. Without war, there is no drama and flux in life, only survival, and that is not enough for the human spirit to get by on. Sport is merely a fantasy, it cannot carry the full weight of the human need to strive and to struggle. For a time, the council seeks to reinject passion into the world through DHR – Deliberate Historical Retrograde. But people resent artificial challenges and intentional withdrawals of technology. They resent intentionally induced and satisfied revolutions. What the world needs is for the space program to get back on track.

NARRATOR: They say that the great man is the man who best fits his moment in time. If this is true, then human history has known no one greater than Rupert Jardinowe.

JARDINOWE: We have discovered an entirely different means of traveling through the universe, a method which utilizes the vast energy sources inside stars to gain entry to hyperspace and tunnel through space-time, as it were, to distant quadrants of the celestial habitat. We have bypassed the problem of the speed-of-light altogether; in practical effect, we can surpass it many times. Actual construction of the technology is feasible within the matter of a century. After that, inhabitants of our earth will be able to reach alien planets capable of supporting life within their own lifetimes, and to communicate with their loved ones on a regular, if delayed, basis.

NARRATOR: The world’s dream is restored. Rupert Jardinowe tirelessly pursues the development of the technology unleashed by his theories, prolonging his ability to serve mankind with massive doses of Dr. Mensen’s new life extension formula.

NARRATOR: But this is not the only reason that we love Rupert Jardinowe.
We love Rupert Jardinowe for his integrity, and his solidarity with his fellow man. It is Rupert Jardinowe who told the Council, "I will not take one drop of Dr. Mensen’s formula, unless you make it available to the rest of mankind."

NARRATOR: It is also Rupert Jardinowe who insisted on full public transparency of the space program, to insure renewed public trust in the government.

NARRATOR: Now, as Rupert Jardinowe advances in age, and nears the end of a fabulous lifespan filled with humanitarian and world-changing achievements, let us honor him, and cherish his work by making it our own.

__________

As the full-length feature about the Near Disaster begins, Hetasia hurries after Jimmy, who has abruptly left the square where he promised to watch a movie with her. He’s obviously changed his mind.

"Is something wrong?" she asks him, finally catching up with him on a distant street. She corners him by a wall. He turns away from her.

"It must be nice to be so famous, to be so loved," he says. " To have done so much for humanity. To be Rupert Jadinowe."

She sees something moist by one of his eyes, in his reflection in a store window. Her hand tentatively reaches out towards him.

Forcefully, but without touching her, he strides past her back into the night. She chases after him, having to run to keep up with his walk. Sensing her by him, once again, he stops, aware of his rudeness, but equally loyal to a dark mood that is raging inside him, demanding solitude. Compromising, he points upwards. "The moon. Isn’t it like that great big screen where we just watched the movie? Can’t you see Rupert Jardinowe’s face in the moon? So far above us?"

"He’s your hero," Hetasia reminds him, testing him.

"Of course. Why else would I have remolded my face in his image?"

"I wonder why his clone son ran away?" muses Hetasia, watching him like an eagle from behind a pose of innocence.

"Are you a bounty hunter?" Jimmy asks, turning towards her brusquely, threateningly.

"No!" she exclaims, jumping away. She looks at him. He looks at her. "Rupert Jardinowe’s old. He needs his clone. The world needs his clone. To expand the space program so more people can participate. To work on cosmological management. To keep the government honest, and the people believing in it."

"What if his clone wasn’t up to the task?" Jimmy asks. "What if his clone wasn’t able to fill his shoes?"

"But how couldn’t he?" asks Hetasia. "His clone is him. How couldn’t he fill his own shoes?"

Jimmy nods in agreement, a bitter frown taking over his face. "Yes, how couldn’t he? It seems to be impossible. A genetically identical human being, raised in a carefully constructed childhood environment designed to reproduce the major influences on Rupert Jardinowe’s life. So well planned, the continuation. Why couldn’t the clone son just receive the torch from his father’s hand, and keep on running with it?"

Hetasia’s ingenuous side has a powerful eye inside of it, an eye that mostly stays shut, but sometimes opens to see everything around her. There is the hard rock of a strong mind underneath the soft earth of her naiveté, and if you dig long enough into her foolishness, you will find undeniable substance.

Once again, the two of them look at each other. This time, they know the truth. There is no use in pretending anymore. "Jimmy Jardinowe – clone son," Hetasia says gently. "Let’s go somewhere and talk."

__________

Once again they’re in a bar, this time safely stashed away in a private booth. It’s dark. They are only shadows and imagination. They have drinks in front of them, and a collection of pills, courtesy of the house. Jimmy pushes the pills away, but takes a drink. Hetasia watches him.

"So I’m not me anymore, am I?" he asks. "From now on, I’m Rupert Jardinowe. You must be crazy about me. The brilliant scientist who saved the world."

"Don’t underestimate me," says Hetasia.

"It can’t be the same now. I was starting to like you. But now, I’ve ceased to be me. I’m him."

"You are him and you," says Hetasia.

"But the him in me eclipses the me. I’m the desert, and he’s the well. People come to me to drink his water."

"Is that what it’s about?" Hetasia asks. "Coming here, to Freedom City? You want to be loved for yourself, and this is the only place where you could disappear? The only way you could cease to be him?"

"No," Jimmy protests. "Maybe I came here because I love him. I wanted to shelter him from my failure. I was breaking down. It was too hard to do it in front of him. Or maybe it was to protect him from what other people think. To them, he’s perfect, invincible; then, they see me, and taking me as a window into him, they begin to discover his flaws. My defects let them see all the shit that’s inside his intestines, and they begin to look at him differently. He needs his mystique intact, more so the older he gets."

"So you came here to protect him?"

"Why should I protect him?" Jimmy growls, following his drink wherever it leads him. "He’s got the whole world on his side, millions of people who love him. He doesn’t need anything from me."

"You’re jealous?"

"No, that would be pathetic. I’m not close enough to his level to even merit being jealous. He’s accomplished great things. Why hold it against him?"

Hetasia is silent for a moment. Maybe she’s pressing too hard.

"All those puzzled bastards looking at me!" Jimmy curses. "They can’t figure out what’s wrong! I’m supposed to be good at this stuff: astronomy, physics, energetic geometry, time/space manipulation, non-material engine construction – the works! It should all come easily to me, I should be a natural, a prodigy, my professors should be asking me for help. And here I am, floundering. Failing exams. Reading this crap over and over again and not getting it. More than that, bored out of my mind with it! Bored and terrified. Terrified that I’ll slip and fall down the mountain of ice. They say dad loved this shit, thinking was like sex for him, he couldn’t ever get enough. A part of him was like a bulldog who would grab onto a question and never let go of it till he got an answer, while another part of him was like a sibyl, who things just came to. And all these teachers are looking at me like my head is on fire, or I’ve got a bullet hole in my chest. Something terrible is happening! Something’s gone horribly wrong! Yo, can I just have a life? Without this over-the-top pressure? Without the whole world trying to squeeze me to fit into a life that isn’t mine; that I don’t want? Yo, he’s got it covered, it’s his thing, let me do something new. He did this joyfully, I’m being whipped by the highest expectations every step of the way. If he f**ked up, no one would notice, who would ever guess he’d slipped on a mountain they didn’t even know existed? He could fail to become a God by a mile, and they’d call him a great man, but if I’m half a step behind him I’m a loser. He never had himself as a yardstick to be measured by."

Tears are beginning to fill up Hetasia’s eyes, but Jimmy doesn’t notice, he’s staring into his drink like it just cursed him out.

" ‘You’re behind! One class behind! We know you can do it, your father did! Maybe you’re just lazy.’ ‘Maybe you should just f**k off.’ ‘Don’t talk to your teachers that way, son.’ ‘Don’t call me son. I’m you.’ ‘Listen, you better show me some respect! I’m not just some kid in school. Do you know who you’re talking to?’ ‘Yeah, I’m talking to me; and I can say anything I want to me!’ "

"’Oh, Amy, yes, hi, Amy.’ Clone girlfriend for the clone son. Very nice blonde girl, daddy was crazy about his own Amy, so why shouldn’t I have one, too? He sucked her dry. It was all for a great cause, of course it was right of him to take everything she had, every last piece of her heart and soul, for himself, he was building rockets with it; she laid down in his bed and he turned the geometry of her vagina into the doorway that brought mankind into hyperspace. ‘So, Amy Clone, what would you like to do today?’ ‘I thought you had to study today.’ ‘No, let’s go to the park, to our special place.’ ‘I could get in trouble. If you fail your test, they’ll blame me.’ Some people are just born to be somebody else’s blood supply. I wasn’t a good-enough vampire to be able to love her. And that’s another difference between dad and me. He never saw anyone before him break another human being like glass; I did. - Yo, waitress, this crap is half water! Bring me another one, and this time don’t dilute it. You want me to start diluting my money?!"

"Jimmy," Hetasia pleads.

"Failure! Failure! Oh my God! Just make another clone son! ‘No, he’s my son; and he’s me! I won’t fail! Find a way to get him back on track!’ Yeah, get me back on track. Maybe Amy’s not hot enough, how about Yuki –if you pass the next test! What about a trip to Rome, they still have the ruins there. What do I need to see ruins for, all I have to do is look in the mirror? But Yuki? They give me a video of her naked saying ‘Jimmy Jardinowe, I’m begging you to pass your next test, because I want to f**k you.’ But I got snagged on step 24 of Naumann’s application of the Stryzwski Formula. Bastards even took back my video!"

Hetasia suggests, "Maybe you should drink a little less."

Jimmy sneers, and gulps down half a glass, then laughs. "Maybe reverse psychology will work! Tell him we’ve given up on him, we don’t care what he does anymore, he can spend the rest of his life watching movies, and sleeping. Despise him, see if that will jump-start his pride. If it doesn’t, we can always try the guilt trip. ‘The world needs you, Jimmy! You are being selfish. Your failure is an act of egotism. Who will carry on with the space program, if not you? We need to make space available to at least 40% of the population. Right now we can only offer it to 2%. How can you get more energy into the hyperspace web, to hold it open longer and reach more distant targets? What about when we finally contact extraterrestrial civilizations? It’s bound to happen! And what about Cosmological Management? If you can’t find some way to outfox the predicted destruction of the universe, mass depression is bound to set in sometime in the future; civilization will become impossible.’ Oh, come on, cut the crap! Is there only one brain on the planet? Don’t bind me to all this shit, it’s too much! Cosmic collapse is so far away, and there’s so much to learn between now and then, that you can put that one on the back burner for about twenty billion years; leave me the hell out of it! As for ETs, well, just make sure you’ve got a whole lot of glass beads and trinkets – it worked last time, why not now? ‘Don’t be so damned cynical!’ ‘Why not, if you don’t have talent, cynicism’s the next best thing."

Hetasia extends her hand across the table. It’s on Jimmy’s. She’s overcome the fear of what his reaction will be, with the sincerity of her action. "Jimmy," she says, watching his eyes take a few steps away from the past, but still not quite into the now. "You’re not a failure. You just didn’t want to be him, all over again. You wanted to take another path. He was an innovator, a pioneer, an explorer, and you are too. Which means you couldn’t give a repeat performance. You need uncharted territory to be at your best. Remember the poem? ‘The Road Not Taken’?"

"Robert Frost."

" ‘Two roads diverged in a yellow wood.’ You wanted to travel on the road you left behind; to be the self you sacrificed in order to be him. There’s more to Rupert Jardinowe than he knows, and you want to discover it, to develop it, to live it. You don’t want to be a mere copy of him. ‘Clone’ doesn’t mean ‘copy’, Jimmy, there’s so many people in each and every one of us, most of whom we end up killing by having to commit ourselves to being only one of us. But you can come back, Jimmy, and be who you weren’t. You can bring one of those lost people back to life. You can rescue one of those abandoned possibilities."

Jimmy squeezes her hand, her foolish green hand, grateful for her tolerance and her gameness. "So I ended up here?" he asks.

"Why?" she agrees.

"Because back there, the whole world was compelling me to be Rupert Jardinowe. Maybe this is like jumping from the frying pan into the fire," he admits. "But it’s the one place they can’t follow me with their expectations."

That might not be true, Hetasia realizes, but she lets it go at that. "Come on, let’s go out and get some fresh air," she suggests, to get him away from the dangerous weight of the drinks. "I don’t want to stop getting to know you," she says.

__________

They are outside now, breathing in the cool night air, temporarily feeling safe among crowds that are peaceful, and grazing with conversations, like herds of animals on the African plains not threatened by a lion. Even lions need to sleep; between their meals, lovers inherit the world.

Hetasia pulls Jimmy into an all-night accessories store, and buys a shared MHS (mental head set) with perspective zoom-out capability. "Pricey," warns Jimmy. "Don’t be cheap," she laughs, using his money to buy it. "I want to know you as a child. I am feeling tender towards you."

"Oh no, tender?" asks Jimmy. "Does that mean, I’ll never get laid?" Then he is asking for forgiveness profusely, blaming the drinks, while she is laughing and saying, "Yo, I used to be a courtesan, don’t take it so hard."

Jimmy hugs her. Something close to adoration has exposed itself in the way he is holding her; just the way he is touching her is like a love poem. There is an awakening familiarity between them, a harmony of fractures. "Now show me one of your memories," Hetasia insists. Jimmy knows she wants to see him as a child, but the image of her dancing has triggered a memory from his teenage years. He shares it.

"Oh my God, I remember that day!" Hetasia cries. "The day the weather shield broke down over New Administrative City! I was watching it from the inside, from behind a window!"

There is snow falling down to the earth in giant huge flakes, and people running for cover; but Jimmy is outside, he has run out of his school room, and is dancing about in the snow, with his hands raised upwards towards the Heavens, spinning around and around, and yelling with joy, opening up his mouth to catch and eat the snowflakes. "They sent security out to try to bring me back," Jimmy says, "but they couldn’t catch me. I was gone for the whole day, till Meteorological Administration finally completed its repairs."

"Oh, how was it Jimmy? The snow! It looks so beautiful!"

"It was. Maybe one day – maybe one day it will happen again."

"But those images of security guys chasing after you," she says, after a moment, a sudden question occurring to her. "They were big strong guys, Jimmy. How did you manage to outrun them?"

"Hetasia, they were all arms. And I was in good shape. Maybe this memory will help to answer your question."

Hetasia sees Jimmy as a boy, about ten years old, jumping over the rail of the moving sidewalk, which is filled with office personnel going to work, and running alongside it, with his bookbag slung over his shoulders. He is looking at the people as he passes by them, and laughing at them. "What will you do if the sidewalk ever breaks down?" he asks them. "It won’t," they say. Down the block he pulls the emergency brake ("Oh no!" gasps Hetasia), and Jimmy says "Time to lose those extra pounds!" He tells Hetasia, after admitting that he got a good lecture from the police as a result, "I felt superior to the sidewalk riders. I know that sounds arrogant, but it’s because they let themselves go to pot, and I can’t stand people who don’t have willpower. Without willpower, there is no virtue, only convenience. I couldn’t stand the thought that these lazy-ass people were allowing the human race to de-condition, that they were making it increasingly incapable of morally beautiful acts, and by turning us into a flabby, self-indulgent species, letting heroism vanish from the human repertoire…"

"You weren’t lazy, Jimmy," she points out.

"Not physically," he agrees. "Not in anything that had to do with emotions, either. I read voraciously. The history of struggle. Battles. And poetry. Preferably dark and brooding, like a crow flying over my heart. I loved the kind of stuff that would drive other people to commit suicide, I just couldn’t get enough of it. But as for science – well, I loved it, too, but not the lash across my back. My teachers called me lazy, but what I was, was stubborn. That’s what being with you right now is beginning to make me think."

She is overjoyed that she is having this effect. "And then, you did all that karate," she reminds him, building on a good thing.

Nodding, he shows her a memory of himself in the dojo; he is a teenager. "They let me study karate to try to take advantage of my physical inclinations, to get my mind back; they thought it would restore my focus, penetrate through all the distractions that were confusing me, help me to think clearly once again. They also thought karate would allow me to vent, and work off some of that adolescent angst that was getting in the way of my classwork." Hetasia watches him, he is shouting; there is fierce and focused anger in his face, he is striking at the air with hands and feet in bold, precise patterns, swift and graceful like a panther as he savagely dispatches one imaginary opponent after another. "Great! Perfect!" his teacher is telling him. "More hip! More hip! More mind! That’s it!"

"Who were you destroying?" Hetasia asks.

"My father. Myself. My obligations. Like Cyrano de Bergerac said at the end of the play, ‘Falsehood, Prejudice, Compromise, Cowardice, Vanity’… And men I did not know I would ever meet, the bandits and the thieves of Freedom City…"

Hetasia puts her arms around Jimmy, and practically hangs on him, like a wreath. The memories of karate have agitated him, brought his anger back to the surface. "What’s the most peaceful memory of childhood you have?" she asks him.

His eyes drift; for a moment there is no recognition, then, suddenly, a light, a soft light comes into his eyes. She sees a giant pool of water, and in it Jimmy, about nine years old, is clinging to a dolphin, a big, gray, Atlantic bottlenose dolphin. "Fins," Jimmy says, "my pet. I’d get down into the pool, and his big eyes would look at me with love. And he’d let me hold onto him, and he’d drag me around the pool, with infinite patience. No one else looked at me with that kind of love, Hetasia." Hetasia sees one of Jimmy’s teachers come by the pool and tell him, "After you come out, James, I want you to add the following word to your vocabulary list: anthropomorphic."

Hetasia turns Jimmy’s head towards her, and kisses him. "No, I am not kissing Rupert Jardinowe," she assures him. He kisses her back, the night is going to be proud of them.

__________

Great love forgives dingy rooms, small beds, torn curtains, dirty carpets, it turns holes into shrines, it cures the lepers with a kiss. Lives that were vanquished rise in the morning, singing.

Hetasia rolls over, yawns as though she deserves it, stretches her naked body with uncontemplated pride, displaying her beauty to the gods of sleep, as she begins to slowly wake.

Jimmy is in the bathroom, the water is running, he is rinsing his mouth and spitting into the sink; it sounds like a waterfall in paradise.

She looks at a little tattoo she has, which says, "If you can see this, you are going to have a good time." A leftover from her days as a courtesan. Now it has been blessed by Jimmy’s laughter; as his joy has washed clean all of her nights with other men, which were only her way of mastering the art of love, to give to him. "You have muscles there?" he asked. "I can hold you in a thousand ways," she told him.

Hetasia, shielding her eyes from the light, searches for him from underneath her hand. He is coming to her. Last night he told her, "Today is the first day I have no regrets about coming here, to this crazy hellhole. Before, I couldn’t understand it. I could have a world bowing down to me, and instead, I’m dodging bullets, and living with thieves. But now I know why I came here. I came here to love you." He said it last night. Now it’s in the way he walks.

Jimmy sits down beside her, he is also naked. Her hand feels for something. "Your soul is everywhere," she says. "But this is one of my favorite places to find it."

"Until official?" he asks. That’s the way it’s done these days, before the diamond ring. She gives him the three finger shake, yesterday (which made me need you), today (in which we are in love), tomorrow (in which we will be in love). Then their hands rise together (symbolizing "growing together"). "Until official," she says, her voice hoarse and cracked. She clears her throat, and says, "Until official."

__________

Hetasia, Jimmy, Almost, and Chister, who now go by the name of Positive Potent Posse, or PPP, are on their way to see an old friend of Hetasia’s give a speech at the run-down Fenians Theater. The PPP has picked up three new members along the way, Dominatrix, a former pro-colleague of Hetasia who wears leather and carries an electric whip, and is really a good-hearted woman when she is not pounding some poor man to a pulp; Bad Boy, a huge and terrible looking guy who is Dommy’s faithful "slave"; and Slicks, a reformed pickpocket who now only steals from bandits, which he figures is only fitting, "moral and ironical at the same time. I’d give back the money and jewels to their rightful owners, except I can’t find them." "A marked man," says Chister, "no wonder he wants to join us." They are going to listen to the president of the New World Club, who is trying to turn Freedom City into a base for transforming the world. "Some kind of utopian bullshit," Chister mutters, "worthy of Dr. Chlorophyll. But as long as I don’t come out green, I can put up with it, I guess; I can’t afford to be left behind by my posse." Of course, he’s only talking to Almost, he wouldn’t let Hetasia overhear him, because he knows how much she means to Jimmy. Looking at Almost, he winks: "Looks like the two of ‘em clicked last night, wouldn’t you say?" "No, where’d you get that idea?, they just took a bath together in a vat of glue and have been stuck together ever since."

Their spirits are high, until a man who looks like the young Rupert Jardinowe appears running towards them in the night. "Hey, you!" he yells, noticing Jimmy, who he practically collides with. "Face brother! Word of warning! Time to go back to the plastic surgeon. Soon. This time around, tell him to make you look like Hitler, or the Elephant Man! Anyone but Jardinowe!"

"What do you mean?" Hetasia asks, concerned.

"Everybody wants us," he says. "Before it was only chicks who wanted to sleep with Jardinowe. But now, the thugs want us, in their own way. Seems the clone son ran away from home, and they’re all over, trying to track him down. Huge reward. There’s bounty hunters working for the outside, for Rupert Jardinowe himself; there’s Advorzhi’s hoods, hoping to score a super-hostage and break the outside’s vaults; there’s outcome gamblers, who are betting that he’ll be caught or killed, and who are trying to win their bet by doing it themselves! Our face has never been so popular!"

Another guy, catching up with him, says, "Shut the f**k up, you self-absorbed jackass! Those hoods weren’t after you, it’s just a wild night tonight, must be some astrological crap going on, even though planets is just planets. Mayhem, sheer mayhem," the guy says.

"Where?" Jimmy asks, as Hetasia takes the other Jardinowe’s hand to see if he’s been stamped as an impostor. He has, but it hasn’t made a difference. Jardinowe hunting season is on.

"All up and down Travis Avenue," the copycat’s companion warns them.

Chister steps forward. "What about Pike Street?"

"Pike is past-tense," the informant says. "You’ll have to walk past a lot of bodies, but it’s over with. Advorzhi’s boys just wiped out the Yellow Claw Gang."

"I wonder if that will affect Danceosaur?" Almost ponders. Some club he has a crush on.

"Maybe we should turn back," says Hetasia.

"But why on earth?" queries Almost. "It’s just an ordinary evening here, in Freedom City. If you turn back tonight, you might as well never go out at all."

"We’ll go," says Jimmy. "This meeting could be important."

Dommy gives Jimmy a slave hood to hide his features while they’re in the street, just in case they run into any Jardinowe hunters. "Now I’ve got two boys," she says.

"You got one," Hetasia reminds her, only half-joking.

Soon enough, they run into the carnage the informants described. There’s bodies all over the place, but this is the safest way to go, because the danger has moved elsewhere. "Tube hits, stabbings, blunt instruments, rewired laser detonators…" says Almost. "Must have been sheer chaos while it was going on."

"Detonators?" asks Jimmy.

"Yeah, the lasers are meant to detonate bombs long distance, but if they amp them up, and double-link them, they can turn them into a horrible death ray. Advorzhi’s moving up in the world. Got a good operation going, here. And look. Look around you at the buildings."

"Yeah?" Jimmy asks.

"Not as much damage as you’d expect, not with bodies that look like this. Should be a lot of ruins around. Scorched walls, broken windows. This is the mark of highly professional fighters, not many stray hits at all, they got real good aim."

Hetasia is covering her eyes, as Jimmy guides her over and around the dead. "Oh Jimmy, this is horrible!" she’s crying.

"Don’t look. Don’t look," he says.

"I love women who are squeamish," says Chister.

Dommy says, "What’d you say?"

"For Christ’s sakes," he says, "I didn’t say nothing. What, are you going to whip us all to your point of view?"

Passing by a sidestreet, they suddenly see a bright flash. "Down everybody!" A box is flying into the air and there’s an awful explosion, they hear glass breaking, alarms sounding, and people cursing.

"What the hell is that about?" demands Jimmy.

Slicks, meanwhile, is praising Advorzhi’s gang as "true professionals. They cleaned out Yellow Claw gang down to the last pocket."

"Nasty friends you got here, Hetasia," Dommy complains.

"Yeah, we’re nasty," says Chister. "If you don’t like it, take it out on Bad Boy."

Dommy’s giant slave glares at him, but Chister only walks next to Jimmy, and tells him, "I’d give you a thrashing, except your mistress might get jealous."

Hetasia says, "Here we are, at the Fenians Theater. Thank God! When you listen to New World Club present its case, I want you to think about everything we’ve just seen."

__________

The name of Hetasia’s friend is Janus Crick. He was one of her johns, but so what?, great idealists and world-shakers need good sex the same as anybody else. In the large, dilapidated auditorium which must have seated 2,000 or more, there is only a small smattering of people, maybe 50, and that includes PPP’s 7-person crew.

"Hi," Hetasia says, giving Janus a hug. "Hi," he replies, his hand going down low to rest on her ass. Jimmy watches with cold eyes. "This is my fiancée," she says, introducing Jimmy to him. He has removed his mask. "Oh!" Janus says, surprised that Hetasia has a serious relationship, not because there is anything in her character to suggest that she wouldn’t, but because it’s not what you would necessarily expect of a courtesan, and he has locked her in his memory of another night. Right away, Jimmy can tell that Janus discounts him because of his Rupert Jardinowe face; it’s obviously the sign of a shallow follower of trends, a mere imitator, a devotee of appearances. He, on the other hand, Janus Crick, is a man of depth and substance, an original thinker, a humanitarian and fighter who wants to change the world. For his part, Jimmy is proud, and that man’s hand has transgressed, wandered into territory that is not his. Hetasia notices their dynamics, and is concerned; she needs them to get along. The world doesn’t deserve to fall through the cracks between two angry men.

PPP seats itself, and Janus ascends the stage, to look out over the nearly empty theater. "The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step," he says, "or in this case, with a single seat that is not empty." Somebody laughs. He tells them they are all special, and says something about a mustard seed: a little seed that’s going to become a great tree, the home of many birds. He introduces five other members of the New World Club, and says they number two hundred in total, but due to the danger of Freedom City, they never all show up at a single time or place.

And then, not allowing himself to be discouraged by his practically non-existent audience, he begins to try to save the world, a few converts at a time.

JANUS: My friends. Please allow me to call you that. We are gathered here tonight to sweep aside our misperceptions of ourselves; to overthrow the social myths which bind us to failure. We are neither as contemptible nor as lost as the perspective of the outside towards us has led us to believe. Unfortunately, we have internalized that perspective; our minds have been conquered by hostile judgments; we have come to believe that we are nothing more than drunkards, prostitutes, drug addicts, gamblers, thieves, misfits, defects and dropouts.

JANUS: In fact, what we are here is rebels. We are rebels against a heartless, depressing, emotionally sterile, trivial, demeaning, unjust and unheroic world which is an affront to the human spirit: a vast, and intricately-organized means of wasting our precious chance to live.

JANUS: We have come here, seeking to bust the chains that bind our life force to mediocre things, while the clock of beautiful possibilities ticks towards oblivion. We have rebelled against being bureaucrats, administrators, maintenance personnel, busywork employees and solution experts for DCPs (Deliberately-Constructed-Problems), which are merely meant to hold us in bondage, because there is nothing more dangerous in a world that has nothing to offer, than a man with time on his hands.

JANUS: We have rebelled against the collective fantasy that all the boredom, workplace discipline, behavior-rules and self-denial are really necessary, in a world where technological processes requiring minimal human supervision have been perfected to fulfill our basic material needs. We are freedom fighters, each and every one of us.

JANUS: Unfortunately, we don’t realize it; our rebellion lacks consciousness. We have been convinced, by the ideologies meant to tame us, that our rebellion does not come from a deep and worthy place, from the very core of what human beings are and were meant to be; but that it comes from a selfish, self-indulgent, decadent, or antisocial place, which leaves us feeling degraded and inferior. The end result is that we end up despising ourselves, we lose the self-respect needed to change the world. We let our rebellion be channeled into the forms the outside has provided for it: corrupt and debased channels which clip its wings, and make liberation seem to be mere perversion. Without pride, it is impossible to stand up for our alternative beliefs; we plummet into new depths of corruption and self-destruction, which only seem to prove that the world was right about us all along. Because our instinct to be free does not fully understand itself, it is easily waylaid by poison options, and tricked into taking paths which guarantee its futility.

Slicks asks Almost if he has an aspirin. "Sorry, buddy," Almost replies, "but I may need it myself." Meanwhile, Hetasia bends close to Jimmy and asks him what he thinks. "I’m listening," says Jimmy, with no display of warmth towards the speaker who touched his woman’s ass, even if he is trying to save the world.

"Finally," says Slicks, "the guy is on to something. He did say ‘orgasm’, didn’t he?" "It was somewhere, in there," says Almost, snapping out of his lethargy.

JANUS: Simultaneously, Freedom City is modeled on the ancient Roman Games, a place of excitement and manufactured meaning – a vast stage for life and death, erected in the midst of insufferable boredom and pointlessness.

"Now he’s talking about erections," says Slicks. "Time to wake up, class!" Chister is just shaking his head, wondering if there shouldn’t, at the very least, be an IQ test to qualify for being in the PPP.

JANUS: It’s also modeled on the North American theme park, a fantasy world created to replace the fairy tales killed by the industrial societies of the 19^th and 20^th centuries.

JANUS: Finally, our current home is modeled on the German concentration camps of the 1930s and 1940s. Not outwardly, of course. But if you carefully scrutinize the intent, behind its creation there is the same rationale of cleansing society, of purifying the earth of ‘bad genes’, which drove the Nazis to mastermind the holocaust.

JANUS: I know this may sound overly dramatic (if his audience knew history, it would be), but stop and think about it! The right-to-have-children movement succeeded in capping genetic redesign at 10%. Where did that leave the philosophy of Iskarniod?

JANUS: Iskarniod’s Proof showed us that civilization has a tendency to outrun our biological capacity to handle it. At some point, our capacity for genetic adaptation is left so far behind by the velocity of our technical developments, that we end up trapped inside a social system, and endowed with powers, which we are not biologically evolved enough to manage. Ancient genetic attributes which remain inside us, and have not yet caught up with our drastically altered psychological and material environment, come back to haunt us, with amplified powers of destruction, in the form of apocalyptic wars and revolutions which are often nothing more than eruptions of frustration which have fabricated a cause.

JANUS: For a time, after the Near Disaster, Iskarniod’s Proof served as the basis of a massive genetic engineering program. It was considered the only possible way to save civilization, to close the gap between our outward achievements and our genes. But finally, political reality ground the program to a halt. The people refused to let scientists spread-eagle mankind over a map of genomes, and to operate on our essence, in order to preserve the civilization which we have built but have had so much trouble living in. It seemed too much of an affront to liberty. And so the government came up with this, instead: an asphyxiating social environment feeding directly into Freedom City. Accelerate evolutionary change by creating a gigantic killing field for nonconformists, lure them into a hellhole laced with pleasures, to commit a huge self-inflicted genocide upon themselves which will genetically alter the human race. It’s natural selection, but this time they’re in the driver’s seat. The World Council knows what genes it wants to preserve, and which ones it wants to weed out. It knows what types of people it wants to perpetuate, and which types it wants to eliminate. It knows who to keep, and who to drive to Freedom City. And everything looks so moral, because the Council’s only crime is to make society boring, and to board all the horizons shut; it gets its victims to do the rest."

JANUS: Friend, 2% of every generation is approved for the space program. That’s all the earth has the capacity to support. That means that 98% of us are doomed to remain behind, buried alive in a society that has nothing to offer our souls. Some of us – millions of us – chose Freedom City instead.

JANUS: And so you see, there is much to be done here. This is much more than a haven for drugs and cheap sex.

JANUS: This is much more than a refuge for the fragile and the vanquished; much more than a paradise for muggers. If we want it to be, it can be a paradise for all humanity. It can be the place where we finally overcome our demons, by loving the beautiful repressed needs that drove us into the arms of demons. Once we truly learn to cherish our joy, and our hope, they will cease to have horns. Once we bow in reverence to the hearts that drove us here, they will shed the dark forms they have acquired, and restore us to nobility. Once we band together to make paradise here, in Freedom City, we will seduce the world with it. We will recover the earth.

__________

It is after the meeting, and PPP and several others are standing around Janus, engaged in casual conversation. Jimmy is observing Hetasia’s reaction to him, when Janus asks Jimmy, "Well, Rupert Jardinowe (which he means as a dig in Hetasia’s presence), what do you think?"

Jimmy says, "Good analysis. But probably a little utopian."

"Jimmy," Hetasia protests. "We’ve got to aim for it if we’re going to reach it."

"You’re working with thugs here," says Jimmy.

"That’s right," chimes in Chister.

"Yeah," Almost agrees. "Pure blood, and proud; thugs of the world! Only thing that will unite us – I mean, unite them – is a well-conceived criminal project."

"You’re underestimating the people in Freedom City," says Janus.

"Here’s your wallet," says Slicks, returning it to him.

Janus feigns coolness, but you can tell he is flustered. Hetasia is on the verge of becoming upset, because she detects two bucks locking antlers over a doe in this discussion which needs to be constructive: after all, a world is at stake.

"Anyhow," Janus says, "Rome wasn’t built in a day. We’ve got recruiters out on the streets. Once we get a bite, we bring the fish home, we surround him with good energy and clean things to do. We give him the experience of brotherhood. Little by little we’re building a new world, one person at a time. Not everyone will come to us, but enough to tip the scales."

"You need weapons," Jimmy says.

"Jimmy!" Hetasia protests, as though he’d just unzipped his fly and begun to urinate on Janus’ foot.

"Violence breeds violence," Janus counters. "If we arm ourselves, we’ll only attract an armed response. Our only hope is to be as wise as serpents, and as harmless as doves." In a world like this, there’s no need to give footnotes, there’s no one to catch you playing with somebody else’s words; you might as well claim every piece of history’s wreckage as your own. "The last thing we want to do is put ourselves on the radar screen of the bandit gangs," Janus says. "If we stick to words, they won’t notice what’s going on until it’s too late."

"You act like they’re dumb, just because they have weapons," Jimmy says. "Believe me, before a killer pulls a trigger, there’s a whole world he takes in," Jimmy insists. "It may not be the intellectual world, but it is a world where cleverness counts; and the ones who are still standing could hear a pin drop outside of their door. You’re talking about nothing less than ending their way of life, and taking away the medium they need to flourish."

"To put it bluntly," says Chister, "if you succeed in changing the values of Freedom City, all the bitches will run to you instead of to the hairy-chested bandits. They’ll kill you before they let that happen."

"Yo, clean up your mouth," Dommy tells Chister.

"What are you going to do, wash it out with soap and water?"

"Maybe," Dommy warns him.

"No thanks, that’s not my kink. Yo, freedom of speech!"

Seriously, Jimmy says to Janus, "Right now, you and your whole project are just standing here, like someone who is utterly naked in the rain. You should know that. You’ve seen the corpses. You need a sanctuary to grow in, you need protection to shelter you from the violence of those who can’t be redeemed. Maybe you can win converts. Maybe a lot of them," he admits. "But if you don’t have weapons, somebody is going to snuff you out before you can become a real threat. At some point, you’re going to have to fight, or else your dream is going to get blown away."

"You tell him, Jimmy!" cries Chister. "Why, I’d blow it away right now if I had a tube! Just for the joy of proving you wrong, Janus!"

"Yeah," says Almost, eyeing him fiercely. "This is what you’ve got to work with."

"I’ve also got Hetasia to work