In the Lab w/ Caroline

*In the Lab w/ Caroline was lived in front of a citywide audience.

Caroline opened the door by waving her hand in front of the sensor. It was locked with a biometric tumbler. There were maybe a handful of locked doors left in the city of Ultima, the last city on Earth, a city of 70 million women, several billion cameras and no men. In fact, there were more locked door than there were men. But there was only one way to open the door to Caroline’s lab, and that was by being uniquely Caroline.

Caroline waited for the door to slide shut before putting her pet carrier down on the counter and swinging the cage door open for her oldest friend. 

Lucy declined to acknowledge that the cage’s door was opened as she instead began cleaning her front paws. It was as if she didn’t want to give Caroline the satisfaction of knowing that the cat wanted out of her cage. But once Caroline walked away, Lucy would come out when she was ready.

“Pawn to E-4.” She said from inside her hard plastic carrier. It was the feline’s way of letting her owner know that she wanted to start a game. Lucy always started a new game when they entered the lab. She was a creature of habit and did everything without asking.

Lucy hadn’t always been her cat. They started out as lovers, both human, but then one of them tried to destroy the world and things got complicated, they got turned into a house cat and the rest is history.

Caroline walked over to the chess board and made the move her cat had stated. She didn’t make her own move because she had not yet gotten settled in and the game could wait until she’d gotten settled.

Caroline had been out in the capital complex giving pelvic exams all day. She was not a medical doctor. She was a scientist. Specifically, the city’s top geneticist but she had been demoted after her lover nearly destroyed what was left of the human race.

“This is not what I signed up for.” She muttered to herself as she settled in. She wasn’t happy with her new assignments, now that her inferiors were her superiors. They teased her incessantly, treated her poorly and gave her assignments they knew made her uncomfortable. This current assignment was far too social and that sort of thing took a lot out of her. 

Caroline was dark skinned and short, which made her stand out. She had dread locks in a ponytail and a womanly figure, which were also uncommon. In a city where the citizens could choose their eye, skin and hair color, she was constantly disappointed by how often women chose the exact same settings. No one wanted to be different. They all seemed to want to blend in.

Caroline was a lover of women. She would have loved the ladies even if there were still a world full of men. There wasn’t. All remaining humans were women but that didn’t make finding love any easier. Her last serious relationship nearly ended the species and that was decades ago.

Human Lucy had tried to destroy the city and end the human race when she fell under the influence of the mad priestess. A viciously charismatic cult leader who had helped destroy the other human cites with her whispers in the night. “Let the human race die,” she said. And Alice Springs drowned. La Paz went up in flames years later and Ultima would have been next.

Her words and ideas were dangerous they said. It would take only pencils and paper to start the apocalypse they said. 

The mad priestess wrote about God and how he had created the light and the world and then made man who made a mess of that world destroying God and himself in the process but it was woman’s work to clean up the mess they both made and to turn out light when she was done.

“She is done.”

It was the last message out of Alice Springs before the explosions that took out the base and sunk her into the ocean.

“She is done.”

It was the only thing the mayor of La Paz said over and over as her city burned.

“She is done.”

Caroline hung her white coat on a hook by the sink. There was a ton of messages for her on the terminal. She promptly deleted them all. If they had something important to tell her then they should have buzzed her portable. She was listed. And anyway, who has time to listen to recorded messages when the present is so … present.

Caroline smiled to herself and walked over to the thick wooden chess table. The brown and tan squares held ceramic black and white pieces. She moved her pawn to meet her little friend’s pawn and called out her move. 

“E5,” she said.

Lucy, the cat, had come out of her transporter box when Caroline wasn’t looking and moved across the counter behind Caroline’s desk chair. She rubbed her mouth on Caroline’s shoulder and offered her unsolicited opinion on her friend and owner’s life.

“You need to stop letting those bitches control you.” she purred. Lucy couldn’t read minds or anything but it wasn’t hard to tell that Caroline needed to assert herself at work. Cats, they say, have a way of sensing their master’s emotions but talking and playing were uncommon in the species.

Caroline often had to remind Lucy not to let her win. That was just how good a player she was. They say that cat’s have an innate desire to let their humans win. Lucy once told her, during an awkward Queen’s Gambit Declined game that it was all she could do not to “accidently” knock over the board and the pieces. It was in her DNA.

Caroline had only beaten Lucy at chess, without Lucy letting her win, less than a couple of dozen times. She didn’t like to lose but she didn’t like to be pitied by her cat either.

Felis silvestris catus. 

Human Lucy would also defeat Caroline at chess, all the time, back when they were friends. Back before the change in her. Before the words of a long dead mad woman penetrated her heart and convinced her to kill her sisters, her neighbors, her lover.

Caroline was on rebirth duty tonight. She still had her responsibilities along with her appendage search. She was supposed to be on the lookout for any anomalous rebirths or mutant births. There never were any. There hadn’t been a problem with a rebirth in decades.

“That machine is the only thing that works around here.” she often said. 

Rebirth was the authority’s number one priority. If the power somehow went down, the last thing to stop working, long after the air purifiers, underground heaters or waste management would be those damn rebirth chambers. 

Immortality was her most important mission. keeping what was left of the human race alive. And even though it did not need her, she was the one on duty and she would check up on it every hour for the rest of the night. 

“A mutant rebirth would erode consumer confidence,” they said.

Caroline’s cat was technically a mutant. She had hybrid vocal cords and some higher brain functions. Caroline thought giving her the ability to speak was the least she could do for her old friend. 

She had once tried the same thing on an alligator but all it was able to do was scream. The lizard brain was unable to process anything other than the primal. If only she could turn off the memory of the screaming.

“Do you believe in God?” Lucy asked her adding “Knight takes pawn.”

Caroline did believe in God once, long before uploading her best friend’s consciousness into the mind and body of a cat. A cat, she assumed, knew nothing of her past crimes against humanity. But if she did remember she wasn’t letting on. 

Caroline wasn’t one to believe that science and religion were opposites. They weren’t two sides of the same coin. They were the same side of the same coin. Science was the religion of the intellectual. Science was faith and humility and tradition. Science was rules that governed action, disciplines to be mastered, and magicks to be discovered.

“No, Lucy, I do not believe in God.”

“Good,” Lucy said. “Then it won’t hurt as much to hear that he thinks you suck at chess.”

“Shut up, cat.”

Caroline believed in the soul. She’d managed, at least, to save her friends soul when they ordered her to be destroyed. Lucy was alive. She had a reduced mental capacity, was only about that big, and had no fingers or hands to manipulate weapons, but still, she thought, that cat can’t be trusted. 

When a scientist wants to bring about the destruction of the world, because she’s part of a cult or believes it’s God’s plan, it’s not wise to turn your back on her, even if she is a small yellow and white talking cat. 

Human Lucy worked in a dress shop downtown. She would’ve been just another woman who fell under the control of a cult if it hadn’t been for the fact that she dated the city’s top geneticist. A woman with access to the only true power left, the power of immortality.

It was Lucy who sabotaged the system using Caroline’s codes. It was Lucy who incited the early violence. The riots could have been dubbed the Lucy riots. It was Caroline’s short blond former teacher turned lover that had brought the city close to destruction. And she had used Caroline’s codes to destroy back-ups erasing decades of women’s lives.

It certainly wasn’t the mad priestess who ended years of trust and friendship.

“Knight takes knight.”

“Bishop takes knight.”

“Queen takes bishop.”

Lucy opened her mouth, showed her fangs and hissed from the back of her throat.

“Don’t hiss at me little kitty. I am 10 times your size.”

“But only half my intellect. Pawn to f4.”

“How did I miss that?”

“You always forget about pawns. You think of them as terrain when you really should see them as little people. Makes them easier to sacrifice.”

Concern crossed Caroline‘s face. “You see when you say things like that you make me wonder if…”

“Wonder what?” Lucy snapped. “If we should trade queens or if you should have put me down when you had the chance.”

“Both.”

The mad priestess was about as dead as her queen was about to be. But Caroline was sure that it was that priestess’s words that had perverted Lucy’s mind and convinced her to sabotage Caroline’s back-up and wipe her lover’s memory.

What her girlfriend didn’t know was that Caroline didn’t have back-ups like the other citizens. She had switched out her uploads so that every one of them was her most recent. There was no going back for her. Maybe because she didn’t trust her president, the authority or any of her colleagues. Maybe because she had seen too many citizens lose decades of their lives and the pain it caused. Caroline backed up her memories nightly and every iteration was the present.

She had no way of knowing that Lucy was so far gone that she would smother her partner in her sleep. 

Caroline woke in a rebirth center fully aware of what had happened and completely naked. She knew she must have died in bed with Lucy by her side. But when she awoke and Lucy, her friend for more than  a hundred years, was there, introducing herself as if they had never met, she wanted to cry… she also wanted to hit something or somebody.

“I was just dead?”  Caroline asked her.

“Yes.” The human Lucy told her. “You’re in Ultima. The last human city. Your name is Caroline 17.”

“Seventeen?”

“Yes. The number counts how many times you’ve died and been reborn.”

“Caroline.” Caroline cut her off. She’d never been as angry as she was then. “I’m Caroline. Not Caroline seventeen or five hundred and something. Not even Caroline one. Just Caroline.” 

She climb off the warm slab and grabbed a spanner out of tray next to the machine. It was long. It was hard. And it would do the job. Caroline strode barefoot toward her former lover in a threatening manner.

Lucy was stunned and backed up slowly. She thought about apologizing but couldn’t find the words. “I’m sorry I tried to erase the last hundred years of your life”  It just didn’t seem like enough. She had expected to be in total control of a Caroline who would think she had just arrived in Ultima. What she got was a severely pissed off ex-lover with weapon.

“I have lived for nearly two hundred years.” Caroline continued. Naked as the day she was reborn. “I fear death like the original humans did. It IS the end for me. But to tell you the truth,” she spit the next words out of clenched teeth with fury. “my friend,” she said pausing letting it sink in like a knife in the back.

“We don’t belong here, sweetheart.” Lucy told her. “We’re clinging on to nothing.” Lucy tried to back up but there was very little space and she found herself with her back against the wall and no where to hide. “The human race is done,” she pleaded. “What is the use of a world without men?”

Lucy regretted turning off the cams. She regretted a lot of things. “We’re not supposed to go on without them. We’re supposed to join them in death. We’re supposed to throw ourselves on the funeral pyre like a good wife, mother, sister.”

“I can’t believe I let you paint my toes.”

“C’mon Caroline you must feel it too. The human experiment is over,” Lucy said. “All that is left is to turn out the light.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“Then what do you believe?”

“I believe in common courtesy. I believe we are more than a collection of our memories and body parts.” Caroline went on. “I believe we are more than women. I believe we are men as well. I believe that when we die. We just die. Every one of us. And that any new copy is just that, a new copy. Same memories, same body, but not the same person, A new soul with our old memories.”

“Are you going to kill me?”

“Yes I am.”

“And will I be coming back?”

“No you won’t.”

“But you love me.”

“I remember loving you but that was another soul in another life, a life that you ended last night.”

“Since when did you start believing in a soul?” Lucy asked in defiance and anger at the end.

Caroline was right on top of her and meaning to beat her former lover to death with a large metal spanner and then she said the last thing that Lucy’s human ears would ever hear. “It was the day you came back from rebirth with that pamphlet and all those ideas. It was the day I realized I no longer knew who you were. I started believing in the existence of a soul of the day you came back without one.” 

The human consciousness loses much of its higher function inside a feline brain. Memory is diminished and instinct controls reason. But with a few tweaks and a little practice, Caroline was able to repurposed her friend’s memories, and turned her into something she could still curl up with but wasn’t trying to erase her and the rest of the population.

The president ordered that the words of the mad priestess would never be spoken but those pamphlets are still out there. You can find them in rebirth stations where they wait to infect the newly reborn with ideas of armageddon and true endings. 

“Queen to E-5” Caroline said and rubbed Lucy on the head. Half from affection, half to throw off her game.

“But how can someone who does what you do; churning out copy after copy of empty human forms, believe in the soul?” Lucy asked her, licking a paw and rubbing it behind her ear.

“Can we talk about something else?”

They sat in silence for several minutes as Lucy contemplated her next move as well as their next conversation.

Lucy suddenly yelled “Rook to G-3!” As if her rook were pouncing from a hidden position. Before rolling slightly on to her back and licking her thigh as if the outcome of the game had already been decided.

Caroline checked the status on the last five rebirths. They were all perfect. As the two old friends talked and played chess.

“Tell me again why the human race should go on if there are no men,” Lucy insisted resisting an urge to physically pounce on the board and declare Caroline the winner by forfeit or random cat attack.

On a living planet, behind the safety of our domed cities built in what was determined to be the safest places left on earth, we waited out the violent storms, the floods, the quakes, with a patience few men have ever possessed. 

A woman who called herself the mad priestess, travelled the world looking for survivors and bringing them to the nearest domed city. She was put in charge of saving the human race. 

And there were men scattered about, and she would return with them, and they would be asked to abandon their manhood to stay in the safety of the cities and would be reprinted in the bodies of women. 

“And those who refused?”

“Would be killed.”

“And let me guess. They still got reprinted as women but with their minds wiped.”

“Yes.”

“Fucking hypocrites,” Lucy said. “So some of these women are actually men?”

“No, Lucy. All of these women are women. I should know. I made them myself.”

“And they lived happily ever after.”

“On our new female planet,” Caroline concluded, ignoring her cat’s sarcasm. “And it would be soft and loving and endlessly sustainable and the men who had destroyed it would be only a distant memory.” 

“Not even a memory,” Lucy corrected her.

“No. Not even.”

Caroline moved her threatened king out of jeopardy. “But after hundreds of years and after the destruction of the other cities, and after the riots here, President Taryn  decided to reawaken the clones and reintroduce men to our sapphic society.”

“Those clones aren’t men. There are women here with more between their legs than those clones,” Lucy countered. “But I don’t have to tell you that. You see it every day. Bishop takes pawn. Check.”

Caroline stared hard at the chess board and the precarious position of her king, absently mumbling, “And that is how we find ourselves here.” before concentrating more on her predicament. “Clones on strike. Population on edge,” she mumbled.

Lucy shifted her position and then asked, “Why don’t we ever go outside?” starting another of Caroline’s least favorite conversations.

Caroline had a social fear. Borderline agoraphobia. It was not crippling but she found it hard to step outside her home or her lab for anything less than a necessity and even then she had to psyche herself up for the trip. 

“I guess I wish going out for a walk to enjoy the city was more of a necessity.” Caroline moved her king and added, “Maybe one day it will be.” 

“No,” Lucy said. “I mean outside the dome. Can’t you see the sun has come out?”

And it had. 

Something outside had changed so slowly that few had noticed. The sun was yellow again and the sky outside the dome was blue. Things were looking up. 

“Queen takes rook. And by the way,” Lucy said. “That’s Checkmate.”

“Alright cat, reset the board and we’ll play again.”

“Fuck you.”

“Oh that’s right you don’t have any hands.”

“You’re such a bitch.”

“Yeah, but I have opposable thumbs. Don’t I.”

“Just reset the board.”

“Stop knocking the pieces onto the floor.”

“I can’t help it. I’m a cat.”

“And whose fault is that?”

“Mine,” Lucy said. “But in my defense, I’m easily swayed by words on paper.”

Aren’t we all. ||