Lynn walked the streets of the Rim with purpose and with confidence. Even though everyone who lived out there knew her as a serious woman, not to be bothered late at night, she was always a little wary of accidents this close to her back-up date. In Ultima, the last city on Earth, death meant losing precious time.
The Southwestern Rim was a haven for illegal activities and drug dealers. All of the colors of the rainbow were represented, depending on which direction you wanted to go. Up. Down. Blackout. Hallucinate. Lynn didn’t do drugs herself but every week she visited every dealer, and every dealer paid her personally. They paid her for protection. They paid to keep her happy. They paid her or they became food for the alligator.
In a city ruled by every fear but the fear of death, being ripped apart by an alligator was near the top. Even if the gator’s name was Burt and he was a good boy.
Lynn was heading back home. She lived right at the wall; as far from the capital as she could get. Many of the women, who lived outside of the main complex, had their own gardens and grew everything from herbs to fruit. Along Lynn’s portion of the wall, behind her house which was also a bar and a bottling plant, there were strawberries as far as the eye could see. Her bar was the city’s main source for strawberry wine.
Drugs and other victimless crimes were not illegal in Ultima, and were very profitable. Before Lynn organized the street gangs, more bodies were pulled out of the Southwest Rim than all other exterior neighborhoods combined. Back then, you’d be hard pressed to find a citizen in Lynn’s neighborhood who had lived long enough to back up twice. With lost time, old rivalries were new again. The violence was endless.
“Most girls in my neighborhood hadn’t backed-up in years.” That was how Lynn put it when she was trying to boast about how dangerous an area she used to live. It was still dangerous but it was no longer a war zone.
Primary exports of The Southwest Rim were: Strawberries, Opium, Coca, Cannabis, Kava, Periwinkle and Bodies. The Southwest Rim produced lots of bodies.
The Sanitation Authority picked up the bodies and took them to be recycled. It wasn’t a Soylent Green situation. The remaining population of the planet Earth were vegetarian. Animal protein was not consumed and hadn’t been for years.
No. The bodies of the dead were broken down into proteins at the cellular level and used to make… people. People were made out of people! Charlton Heston wouldn’t have known what to do with himself.
Lynn had amassed a great many credits through her various endeavors. She saved them all. She was the cam tech for the most dangerous neighborhood in Ultima and she wouldn’t let her bosses forget it. She was overworked and overpaid, highly compensated for the hazard and the overtime. With the credits she collected from her shadier operations, the sponsorship deals and The Strawberry Wine, she did very well.
Her only extravagant purchase was Burt. She paid off a geneticist to create for her a dangerous pet and was pleased to discover the template for an alligator in an old catalog. She wanted a jungle cat, but the woman convinced her that an alligator was easier to maintain and easier to hide from the authority because of their long lives and low profile.
The geneticist, a tiny black woman with few morals and many overdue bills, as Lynn remembered her, took specialty orders, and for the right price could make almost anything. She had made herself a cat, an annoying talking cat that Lynn had wanted to feed to her alligator. Lynn had asked if she could make the alligator speak but the woman assured her that all it would do was scream.
Lynn brought the lizard back to her home. She fed him with protein blocks, small rodents and the occasional severed limb of a disrespectful drug dealer, and he grew. He grew to nearly thirteen feet in no time at all.
Lynn’s pack held a container of oatmeal cookies and a protein loaf. She was heading home to feed her pets. She had two; the aforementioned alligator and a Grunt she had liberated from his headset a few summers ago when she discovered how easy it was to detach the soldiers from the authority. She stole one for herself.
The cookies were for him.
She spent as little time as she could in the Capital Complex. She discovered that the Soldier liked oatmeal cookies by trial and error. She tried all sorts of things. He had the body of a killing machine but the personality of a puppy, and oatmeal cookies were his treat of choice. It was worth the trip.
The Capital Complex—four clusters of skyscrapers connected by corridors every ten floors—held most of the population of Ultima. Forty million people lived inside and rarely saw the wall.
Summer lightning crashed across the sky at night. While tornadoes and cyclones whipped through the waste land in the winter. A lightning rod attached to the center of the geodesic dome that protected them from radiation, dust storms, and acid rain was the tallest manmade structure left on earth.
Without the dome, the concrete walls buried deep in the ground, and its massive lightning rod in the center, the city of Ultima would have been a grave and the human race extinct.
All three of the dome cities were monuments to human survival and engineering but only Ultima remained.
None of this impressed Lynn108. She wanted as little to do with the capital and the authority, as humanly possible. She felt that here, at the end of time, there was very little need for playing the establishment game.
She kicked open her unlocked front door half expecting to find her pets devouring and destroying a sneak thief or home invader who had seriously picked the wrong house. Kicking open doors was a habit she picked up from work.
Burt emerged from his wet sunken quarters the moment he heard the door. The clone soldier, sat in a chair, at attention, staring at Lynn’s wall terminal. It was dark. She had left it off. He never moved.
Lynn pulled the oatmeal cookies from her pack and the clone recognized the sound of the paper package, looked up at her and smiled. A clone Soldier smiling was something no one in the city had ever seen but Lynn.
A few months before, she had gotten a call that there was a street cam dark near the edge of her territory. She worked, she played and she stayed close to home, but she still took her transport vehicle, a two-seat, plastic, open cart with good old fashioned wheels and room in back for her tools, a hook, and her extension ladder.
She parked it across from the broken street cam and got out to gather her tools.
But there was a Soldier sitting at the house where she stopped. He was on the steps of a home that was across the street from the outage about twenty meters away from her appointment. It couldn’t be a coincidence but they usually informed her if there was going to be dogs at a job site, particularly in this neighborhood. Particularly because the girls in this part of town were frequently armed and were known to fight back against the authority.
Still the clone Soldier sat crying on the steps of the one story house near the rim. Lynn had never seen a clone cry. It was not weeping. It was not bawling. In fact it made no sound at all, yet tears streamed down its face and it intrigued her.
Lynn approached the clone. His arms were covered in blood and he did not acknowledge her, so she entered the house. Something had happened here and she wanted to see. There had been an incident for sure. There was blood splattered on the walls and pooled next to four bodies. She took a portable from her jacket and called it in.
“This is…” she quickly realized that her name was irrelevant and corrected herself. “There’s been a police action at 200 Wall Street. There are four dead. We need clean-up. Cams are down but the danger has passed.”
Carnage was a constant companion to a cam tech, but never to this degree. It looked like the three citizens had surprised the Captain and ran him through the back with a sharp wooden spear. A pointed stick right through the neck.
Who knew where the Soldier was at that time his officer was killed but Lynn was sure that it was the Soldier who had dismembered the three women.
But why was this biological machine crying? Did he feel guilt for what he had done? Or was this officer like his friend or something? If they even had friends. Lynn had no idea. The only thing she knew for sure was that the authority would destroy it. They were not supposed to have emotion.
Lynn knew she had to move quickly before the sanitation girls arrived if she was going to save this emo killing machine.
She wanted to save him. She needed to save him. If for nothing more than because it was the wrong thing to do. And it had never been done before. She was going to steal a clone. She just needed to get him out of here before…
BUZZZZZ.
Her portable buzzed. It was still in her hand and it startled her a little. She was just excited because she was going to do something new. Something naughty. Something she was not supposed to do. She checked it. It was the authority with another job. This one was to turn on the cams at 200 Wall Street. Where she already was.
She physically hacked her portable. Opened the back and removed the power cell. She did this as she headed for the door.
On the steps she kneeled down behind the crying Soldier and with her thumb and forefinger she removed the two tiny nodes from the back of his ears severing his connection to his helmet.
Then she moved around to his front and said clearly and slowly to him. “Alert… Thirty One. You… are… damaged. Follow… me. Alert… Thirty One.”
The clone looked up at her, his tears subsiding, as he stared into her eyes.
“Why are we like this?” His eyes asked.
There was an intellect and a recognition that she had never seen in the Soldier units.
“Whatever happened to human compassion?” His eyes questioned.
The Officers were intelligent and egotistical and they would study a citizens facial expressions and judge their motives and talk down to them and annoy the shit out of Lynn. But the Soldiers, they were just weapons.
“Am I bad?” His eyes asked.
Yet this one soldier, this broken clone, looked to Lynn for answers to questions she did not have.
“Are we bad people?”
With no warning the look was gone. The expression. The crying. The emotion. All of it was gone. Replaced by the blank stare of the soldier. But she was still going to rescue him. The Soldier stood up and followed Lynn to her transport and got in the passenger side without delay. She took him home.
No one had ever come looking for him. No one even cared. But Lynn cared for him. She cleaned him up and cleaned the blood from his uniform. And taught him to stay away from the windows. And left the terminal on for him so he could watch the people walking around downtown or in the capital. And she gave him cookies. And used him in her act. The Wild Woman and the Alligator. She threatened to feed him to an alligator if enough people tuned in. You know, normal relationship stuff.
But every once in a while he would look at her with eyes that questioned the nature of humanity and the meaning of his existence and she found it endearing. They would have the most interesting conversations with their eyes.
It’s just that somewhere along the way Lynn fell for him. He had never spoken a word to her but she believed it was love. He would have killed her without thinking had he been ordered to do so but she believed it was love. He had no education, no genitals and no idea who she was… but she believed it was love.
She was in love with a clone. In love with a soldier. In love with the very symbol of the authority. In love with the brutal killer of women. In love with the last vestiges of war, a war that destroyed the entire world. In love with a man.
Lynn108; scourge of the underworld, keeper of the giant lizard that feeds on her enemies, the richest woman in the city and for that matter, the world. Lynn108; The citizen who had died more time than any other, who had killed more times and in more savage ways than any other, who had neither friend nor fear nor feeling. Lynn108 who had tamed the toughest neighborhood and the toughest creature on earth; a woman who was afraid of almost nothing.
Lynn108 had two pets both of which were savage killers. She loved them both. She loved them madly. And that scared her to death. ||
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