Cloneworld - 04 (5 page)

You'll never, ever leave!

Franco grinned. They were probably right.

"I was simply walking down the street."

It was 3am. Franco sat on the bar stool and glared blearily at the line of shimmering bottles lining the back of the bar.

"Are you okay?" asked the barmaid. She had a dumpy basin haircut which had, at first, made Franco laugh. A lot. Until it was pointed out that this was, in fact, a cool
ganger look
, mimicking the greatest of filmy and TV goddesses, Rebecca Rebecca.

"S'fine. Drink."

"What would you like?"

"S'whiskey."

"Single? Double?"

"S'bottle."

"Are you sure you're fit for a
whole
bottle?"

"S'listen here, Rebecca, can I call you Rebecca, oh yes you said I could call you Rebecca, well I is Franco Haggis and I'm here on this mission and oh dearie me I can't be talking about all that. Still, nice to meet you, and be ashured I can take my spill. My s'drink. You know it. What I mean, I mean."

"Sure, sugar." Rebecca passed him a bottle of whiskey, and Franco poured himself a pint. He squinted at the label. Scrotum's Old Todge Clogger - Finest Single Malt.

"Good stuff," said Franco, without irony, as it left a burning trail from his tongue to his arsehole. "Never had it so good."

"Good, sugar. Glad you like it."

Another barmaid appeared. She looked exactly like the first one, and for a few moments Franco thought it was Scrotum's Old Todge Clogger - Finest Single Malt playing games with his clogged old todge. But it wasn't. She was a ganger. They all were. That's why it was called Cloneworld. It was full of clones.
Hot shit.

"So tell me," he drooled, leaning in his own spit. "Why are you called gangers? Eh?"

"Because we have the ability to
ganger
," said Rebecca, clone of Rebecca Rebecca, and sister to her fellow barmaid, also a clone, a ganger, and also called Rebecca, named after Rebecca Rebecca and all the other Rebeccas. "We can clone ourselves, copy ourselves, or
shift
ourselves. We can only do it so many times during a cycle, but we can
change
to resemble other people, or, using blank body shells, make another version of our person. Our reality. We can shift to look like people we find attractive, or alluring, or just downright fashionable, for example. Or we can make multiple gangers."

Franco could see this might get complicated, and his mind twisted and curled like a twisted neutron core. "Er," he said.

"It comes from
doppelgänger...
we are the
double walkers,
my ever-so-slightly drunk friend; we can change to look like any other living person in existence with only the slightest genetic sample. It's part of our heritage, as finely ingrained in the cultural psyche as sausages, horseradish, leather shorts, large glasses of beer and slapping our thighs when we dance. We are proud of our ability to mimic, to copy, to clone. It's an ability unique to our human pro-species."

Franco's lips twitched. "Did you say sausages and horseradish?"

"Ah, so we have a cultural awakening!"

"I'm hungry."

"I'll bet you are, soldier. Listen. Take this card" - she slipped him a glossy business card on wafer thin alloy - "then head out of here, turn right, and half a klick through the neon bustle, there's a place on the right called
Van Gok's.
You'll find everything you need right there."

"S'everything?"

"Trust me," smiled the ganger, and her teeth were perfectly straight, in a genetically modified kind of way.

Franco nodded, and stumbled out into the night. This was Downtown Nechudnazzar, otherwise known as
Party Town
, or
The Streets That Never Sleep
. It was a bustling maze of neon and flesh and drugs. It was a labyrinth of decadence, of hedonism, of violence, of pleasure. It was Franco's kind of place.

As he wandered through a violently colourful maze and haze, his mind swam.
Mission?
queried his inner guilt
. Aah, fuck it, what mission? What difference would one night make? After all
, insisted Franco's internal lack of logic,
if you keep a Combat K squaddie, one so rampant and horny and downright exuberant as I, locked away like a fish in a bowl, like a tiger in a cage, like a like a like a like a stag in a shed, then you can't expect anything else than a blowout when I go on R&R, reet? Stands to reason. Like night follows day. Like salmon swim in ponds. Like octopi have nine legs and a beak. Or something. Thus, so, when Pippa sent me on this mission, alone, on my billy-o, after such a long, long, long lockdown, then she must have, must have known I'd go a bit loopy the first night, stands to reason, that's what I always do, and even though she said not to, that's what she'd would have to say, standard procedure, but she'd know I'd do the opposite and so that's okay, because she knows, so I can do it, and not get into trouble, as long as I do the mission tomorrow, and nobody'll ever be the wiser. Reet?

Franco stopped, and blinked, and placed his hands on his hips. The thick flesh snake flowed around him, a million party people going about the business of pleasure. Franco blinked. Clarity flooded him. An epiphany took him in its fist and squeezed harder than hard. I can party. Party, baby! After all, I'm the party boy, all right!

Franco swaggered down the street, leering at pretty women (and a few pretty aliens). As a rule, most of the gangers avoided him. It was obvious he was an off-worlder. His clothing, for a start, proclaimed him an alien to Cloneworld. And then there were the subtle pheromones that gangers exuded to attract either sexual mates, or ganger mates. On certain drugs, gangers could get
high
just from cloning one another...

Franco squinted again at the alloy business card.
Van Gok's.
Wasn't he that bloke who cut off his nose? Or something? A poet, or summat? Used to paint poems? Or was it the one who helped fat women disguise the wobbles? And wrote that bestselling celebrity navel:
Hide the Fatty
? Or maybe it was a celebrity shit? I mean,
chef?

Franco stopped. He could see
Van Gok's
up ahead, through the haze of sweat and heat. And gods, it was hot. Like a furnace. Hotter than Hell. But a damn sight more fun...

Purple neon glittered.
Come to Momma,
said the neon letters.

Franco tottered forward like a baby taking its first steps.

Pippa would beat him for being such a Bad Boy!

He brightened. Hell yes!

Outside
Van Gok's
stood three tall gangers. They were identical. They had the same fluorescent purple hair, the same silvered breasts, the same powerful, beautiful features. One moved to Franco, and touched him lightly on the arm.

"We have many pleasures inside," she said. "Pleasures of body, mind and soul, pleasures of which you could never dream, pleasures only allowable to
gangers
but here, you can have anything and everything, anything filtered from the magic of an infinite mind, anything you can
dream,
we can provide..." She licked glistening, moist lips.

"Anything?" breathed Franco, hoarsely.

"Anything," she crooned, her voice music.

"Can I have sausage and horseradish?" he said, almost whimpering like a naughty little schoolboy.

"As much as you can spread across your mighty, hairy body!"

"That'll do. I'm home, chicken, I'm home..."

The three gangers led Franco under a dark archway, and into
Van Gok's
. The last one halted on the threshold, turned, and made eye contact with a woman across the street. She was tall, and thin, and gangly, and looked like a man. She wore simple black clothes and hair like a fused tangle of lightning-struck barbed-wire.

Their eyes remained locked for a few moments, and the watching woman gave a nod, as if dismissing the ganger. The ganger promptly disappeared from sight, leaving an open archway: like a maw leading straight down into Hell.

With a sound, the woman shifted, merged with the crowd, and disappeared into the heaving mass of Downtown Nechudnazzar.

"And so you see, technically, I was simply walking down the street. Yes, I did get dragged drunkenly in Van Gok's weird and wonderful emporium, but then it went black, and that can't be my fault, right? I mean, how can it be my fault that everything went black? I'm just an honest geezer, a lad, a bloke, a dude, and I'm riding through life on the bubble of chance that is my existence. Yes, I'd had a few whiskies, but who doesn't? One certainly doesn't expect to be kidnapped and put into a kidnap situation and then brutally abused to the extent where you think, y'know, that your very existence is threatened and so you get a bit violent, in a purely self-defending kind of violent way, and Opera accidentally cuts off her own head in the kerfuffle and bam! You're in a cell with an enraged but
deactivated
org who thinks she's the shit, but, no offence meant, crone, she's not. Because she's been deactivated.
Made safe.
You see what I'm saying?"

"Do you ever shut up?" said the old org who had, indeed, been deactivated. Yes, her lasers targeted, but there was no laser in the laser. It had been a very tense few moments when Franco Haggis had thought he was about to become a Franco Haggis
kebab.
But no lasers came. No burning red purification emerged, and the clanking old org had sighed and grumbled and muttered and consigned herself to the corner of the cell cube, as far away from Franco as she could get. Unfortunately for her, it wasn't far enough. Franco could talk for the Quad-Gal board. Or bored. He prided himself in it. He'd won medals. Or at least, time in the brig.

"Actually, I have been known for my scintillating conversations," said Franco, primly, puffing out his chest, which was currently naked, as befitted his prisoner status. He had been allowed to wear only his Big White Asda Underpants (BWAUs). And flip flops.

"You got any more gifts, wanker?"

Franco completely ignored, or was simply oblivious to, any form of sarcasm. "Actually, yes. I am considered a sexual athlete." His eyes gleamed. Then they fell on the mechanised
mess
that was the old org. She was indeed an old model. One of the first. What flesh hadn't been replaced by metal and machine had been replaced with bad skin graft. She was like a merged explosion of car factory and female sex doll.

"A sexual athlete?" She sounded interested.

Uh-oh.

"Er, ahem. I'm married, you know."

"You look like the divorced sort, to me."

Franco reddened. How did she know that? How
could
she know that? The bitch! The bugger! Franco was indeed divorced. He had married the girl of his dreams, but through a very strange set of esoteric circumstances, his bride-to-be had transmogrified into a kind of zombie genetic super-soldier - a one-way process, which left her eight feet in height, mucus of skin, disgusting of flesh, an eight foot monster who looked like she was inside-out. Doing the right thing, the best thing, the
honourable thing,
Franco had indeed married his betrothed - and gone through with the evil deed. Several times, if he remembered right. Often in his nightmares. However, after a further series of adventures, Mel - for thus was her name - had filed for divorce. She cited reasons such as Franco being unreasonable to live with. And lusting after other women... which wasn't
that
surprising when you considered his wife was a zombie, and Franco would lust after a one-legged whore in a vat of supermodels. He was
that
kind of dude.

"Actually, I
am
divorced," Franco said primly, "but I have a long line of women lining up to be the next Mrs Haggis."

"So that's your name? Haggis?"

"Yes. Haggis. Franco Haggis. Shaken, not stirred. Except, you know, when I've been shaken."

"Which would be right now?"

"Er, yes. Opera decapitating herself, that was hardcore shit. Left me a bit rattled. After all, I'm here to, er, yes, well. I've said enough."

"And killed enough, by all the sounds of it." The old org started to cackle, rocking backwards and forwards. Her machinery hissed and spat occasionally, and she belched old oil smoke, and Franco stared at her, as he would a particularly mangy dog.

"So then," said Franco, conversationally. "What you in for?"

"Murder."

"Aaah."

"Well, they call it murder, but I call it self-defence. After all, they was only gangers, they was. And we're practically at war. Damn police shouldn't have come poking around my neighbourhood. We have walls and things. And gates. Their disguises didn't stand up to much."

"So you killed the Royal Ganger Police? Wowsers. How many?"

The old org shrugged. "Thirty, forty. It's hard to count when they all get mashed up in a slurry pulp of severed limbs."

Franco shuffled along his bunk, until he was as far away from the aged psycho as was humanly possible without actually merging into the steel of the cube prison's wall. He felt suddenly, deeply vulnerable in his BWAUs and flip flops. It wasn't exactly War Grade Armour. It wasn't exactly nuke-proof
Permatex.