He woke with a bad headache, bad even for him. He was chained like a hog ready for Pap’s barbeque pit. He was in a narrow concrete cell with a squishy rubber water bowl beneath a water dripper, stainless steel bowl-hole-toilet in the floor and a painted steel door.
What place is this?
Dummy, wherever this is you are not getting any milkshakes!
Darn, prison does suck. No pudding even?
The light never blinked out so he just pretended it was his bogus little sun and bathed in its comforting glow for what seemed forever.
He woke up to piss and realized he was naked.
Well, at least I’m not sharing this cell with New-net-the-love.
She was kind of cute.
He drank and pissed and drank and pissed and drank and pissed and then returned to his basking half-sleep. He had many aches and pains but he did not care. He would heal. He always healed. When he pissed next he would start training for his next campaign.
Wow, telling time with your bladder. Who would have thunk…
He drank half the bowl and began his modified floor exercises—then a door beyond this one slammed, and after about ten more chained shrimp-crunches this one opened to admit a single solitary figure wearing a CIA I.D. and dressed in a suit. He just stopped mid-crunch and stared—could not really do anything else, because he was looking at his own self—or his twin before Garrison broke his nose and the cougar peeled his bald head.
He did not know what to say—but did not have to, because this man had that covered—certain evidence that it was not him, not his alter ego risen from his tortured body to haunt him. This version of himself really ran his mouth and spoke highly polished English—too polished.
“Hello Yule, I see you are enjoying your time in the Twenty-first Century. You are awfully messy Brother. It must be a malfunction in your contingency cannibalism protocol. It was still experimental when it was implanted.
“Overall your primitive protocol package seems to have served you better than Mother Corp dared hope. The retardation nexus however, seems to have generated some disturbing anomalies. That is no surprise. It was the most experimental thing about your augmentation.”
The man’s voice—Jay’s voice with perfect diction—then trailed off.
“I’m sorry, Yule I’m Brenner, your brother, your twin. I have missed you, although I realize you have no recollection of our gestation. I would like to shake your hand, so to Deactivation with manners and other cultural artifices.”
Brenner stopped and spoke to himself in some sort of strange language. A chill played up Jay’s spine as he witnessed something he had seen before: a 24th Century Military Gen interacting with its operations suit. A rubbery skin grew over Brenner’s hands like superhero gloves and then the man reached out with his fingertips and pinched off the chains—as if they were strands of dough—at five points.
He felt the chains fall slack from his body.
“Thanks, Brenner.”
Brenner spoke to himself again in the strange language and the suit contracted beneath his clothes.
“Don’t thank me Brother. Just shake my hand. I’m leaving you in this hole for the short run. You look a mess. I can’t believe what you have done to that beautiful body; well, all of that body hair is disgusting if you ask me. You were, by-the-way, birthed with high normal range body hair to prevent any unauthorized use of your operations suit should you have fallen into enemy hands. You look so primitive it is frightening.”
This is so weird but I am not surprised. How did I know this yet not know this?
Can I really be that which I hate?
“You have a governor implant that restricts internal searches and is only bypassed by external cues and key words.”
So this dick reads minds too.
“I have not been stripped down or retrograded, Yule. I am what you were designed to be before your customization. Mother Corp is never needlessly kind. I do find myself hoping now that you are not recalled—you’ll go through half our spare parts. We share the same bio-rack you know.”
This creep is in disguise; one of those Gens just messing with your mind.
Rip his head off.
Brenner gave him a sad look. “Even though I’m suited I wouldn’t stand a chance Yule. But please don’t kill me. I’ve got a nice cushy life. I’m not free like people in this Time wrongly believe themselves to be. I do, however, have it much better than any poor tech, or most of these wretched old orgs.”
This guy really seems attached to you—and I like him.
“Yule, you have been retarded and bio-stressed for a retro-existence and augmented for primitive military ops. I’m just an executive protection escort; a run of the mill EPE. Please don’t terminate me Yule. I don’t have the capacity to believe in your comforting superstitions. When I die it’s all over for me.”
Being called Yule hurts, why?
Brenner held his hand and sat down next to him. “I am sorry Brother. I am here to debrief you not help you. After I log my report you will either be recalled: for deactivation; reconfiguration or upgrading, or placed on a military priority list. Two of Mother Corp’s four options are terminal for you, and you are the only brother I have. If we were military gens we would have been tandem-gestated to form a mated homosexual pair. As it is we are siblings. That makes us luckier than those blasted grunts, but lonelier too.”
Gestated?
“Yule, we are not orgs. We are gens, the Master Race, designed by the Five Corporations. It normally takes us three years to be gestated to achieve a twenty-five year old organic equivalence. You only went through the first—infant—stage of gestation before you were augmented, retarded and enhanced for implantation in a Twentieth Century maternity ward.
What?
“I can’t answer any more questions at this time, Brother. I don’t want to be a party to your termination. Help me out here Yule. You received our template’s first name, with the added e. That indicates that you got more of Mother Corp than I, who gave me the normalizing e in place of the y in Brynner. In the absence of a chronological birth order that makes you my ‘big brother’.”
I always wished Randy and I had been closer.
Brenner then lowered his voice, smiled at his own behavior, and grinned. “I can answer questions, just can’t offer answers. Hopefully your retardation nexus doesn’t prevent you from asking the right questions. It is good to see you, Brother. Sorry about this, but I am forbidden to answer any questions until you answer the following.”
Brenner paused respectfully as Jay stood up and began to pace, hoping this would jump start his brain. He always did think better on the move.
I suppose being really smart means being able to think while you stand still or sit around. I’m about as dumb as dog-shit .
Brenner’s voice was clinical. “Who do you believe yourself to be?”
“Jay Brant Bracken, son of Edward and Marge Bracken.”
That sounded like this guy talking.
“To what person or organization are you loyally sworn as a war-fighter?
“Three-Rivers, One Prophet of the AllPeople Nation. That is the way he likes it for business. I call him Squirrelboy. That’s it. I’m his war-chief.”
You are speaking pretty clearly without trying to.
“Do women of various backgrounds develop fast-forming and obsessive attachments to you?”
“You mean they aren’t like that with everyone?”
“Yule, that pheromone package and genital design are the result of 120 years of research and development! Mother Corp deploys us with state-of-the-art equipment—and packaging I’d like to think. Black Geisha tends to field operatives with more evolved social protocols. Personally I believe we possess better paramilitary options—you being a perfect example. Sorry, I digress. I’ll get spanked for that on the debriefing compact.”
Brenner seemed to admonish himself and continued, “What is your best operational zone?”
“Stone-age.”
You never even thought that through. Are you just a darn robot?
Brenner’s voice was soothing, “You do not have to contemplate your answers. It is better if you do not. Yule, How many engagements with military gens have you survived?”
“Three: September Twenty-third Fifteen-twenty-eight; June Seventh Fifteen-twenty-nine and Thirty-five-thousand-one-year-five-months-eleven-days before present—wish I would have killed that last smartass, Sir.”
Dummy, you do not know that. Where did that come from?
“Yule, when your battle matrix is no longer able to process timely decisions due to combat pace, enemy proximity, etc. does your subconscious encroach on your conscious mind?”
“I begin to see the nature of things rather than the cultural overlay.”
“When in this insightful state do you have a mother and what is she like?”
“She’s a wolf—mostly.”
“Operative Yule Alpha Seven, what is your confirmed count?”
“Five-hundred-and-thirty-six military; eleven paramilitary; thirty-two collateral; five apex mammalian; seven consumed operationally; one murder; one-hundred-eighty-six incidental, cooperative, maimed, walking-wounded and other non-confirmed human-impacts; five un-quantified force-multiplication main-force battlefield impacts suggestive of three to four thousand military and civilian casualties…stand ready to upgrade Mother—wow, dummy slow down, your temples are pounding.
He was feeling ill and began vomiting in the stainless steel basin as the room spun.
When he woke his head was being cradled in Brenner’s lap.
Dummy you have to ask something.
I don’t know what’s important.
What would be important to Dad?
Brenner looked up at the ceiling at a camera disguised as a sprinkler nozzle. Brenner’s eyes blinked in micro-twitches as he stared at the thing. He then seemed satisfied and returned his attention to Jay. He sounded distant. “Yule, we only have Mother. There is no father.”
“Okay baldy, than who were Edward and Marge Bracken?”
“The innocent parents of Jay Brant Bracken.”
“Is he alive?”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“The Smithsonian Institute, Washington D.C.”
God this hurts!
“Just stay calm and don’t concentrate, Yule.”
“When is he?”
“Twenty-three-thirty-four, when last I visited him. I look in on him when on leave.”
“Did Mother Corp kill his parents?”
“No, Black Geisha did.”
He is upset, wishes he could help you but can’t. [/ITASLIC]
“Hey good lookin’ what is your assignment?”
“I’m a paramilitary consort to a ninety-six year-old Lunar Securities executive whose disabled husband links into the wraparound monitor in our—her—bedroom from his medical micro-habitat. Thank Mother I was engineered for sex overdrive or else I wouldn’t be able to function. I do some policing of the H2O mines and have had to whack a couple of those poor tech scrubs.
“I’m jealous, Brother. You really get to live—I’m a fixture in an executive suite not much different than that bowl you just vomited in. Are we rectified, Brother?”
“Yeah, Brother, we’re good. I know you didn’t have to come clean for me.”
“So, Yule, are you going to come forward or does Mother have to send a retrieval team?”
They locked eyes and Brenner knew what was in his mind so he said it just to feel whole.
“Tell Mother and Black Geisha that I just put them on my military priority list. I’m coming, Brother. Try to stay out of the way.”
Hey dummy, you pronounced everything correctly.
I know. This is creeping me out.
