Death’s Head Reunion Š 1999 by Jerry J. Davis A Clark Gable clone stands passive while Marilyn Monroe pulls at his elastic band pants … they’re gray, soft, and slips off easily to reveal an enhanced wang surrounded by a gnarled forest of curly black hair. Her velvet hand reaches out and caresses Clark. He’s smiling, his unit erect. “I’ve got something for you,”
he says.
A man behind the camera line is holding his head in both hands, hiding his face. He can’t watch. These are two legends, heroes to him – how can these people exploit them like this?
“Dreams are real,” the announcer is saying. “You can dream.
You can live. You can live your dream.”
Cinematia bodies. They’re real. They’re legal – they’re made from your own DNA. You can have your DNA altered, you can authorize your body to be grown. You can be downloaded into your new body, and keep your old one as a spare – or, for a huge tax break, you can donate it to the organ banks for the poor.
The poor cover the world like a blanket of dust. The poor cannot live their dreams. The poor have no dreams. We must help the poor. Three percent of the world’s population controls ninety-seven percent of the wealth.
It is currently vogue to feel guilty about that.
Many donate money to organizations which feed, clothe, and house the poor. Others donate money and organs to the Organ Bank For The Poor. No one ever donates to the point that it hurts. No one really feels that guilty.
The Clark Gable clone is now on top of the Marilyn Monroe clone. It is graphic, wet, hot sex. Both are enjoying the scene immensely. They enjoy being attractive, and feel no modesty. Their old bodies, their God-given bodies, they had big noses and fat thighs, poor skin, poor vision, and a general pear-shaped ugly quality. Now they have the bodies of Movie Star Gods. The only thing they retain are their fingerprints and retina scan.
The man behind the camera line peeks through his fingers.
Marilyn is gorgeous. This is sick! This is sick! What am I doing in this business?
Because of the money, George. Because you’re in that class that is as rare as a poor child born without cancer: you belong in the middle class. You are neither rich nor poor, and you strive to be rich. Your body resembles a potato, your head is bald and one of your eyes is bad so you sport a monocle. You want a woman like this Marilyn clone, this Bernadette Petrezov. She would never touch a potato-head like you, George, so you need a pot of gold to buy yourself a Clark Gable suit, or James Dean, or Mel Gibson. And this is your chance, George. This is it. And you sit there hiding behind your hands afraid to look at those things you are so close to having, so close you dare not breathe too hard for fear of blowing your chance away.
It’s sick, he thinks. It’s inhuman. It’s unfair. But the words bounce around in his mind like ping-pong balls, full of air.
They lose their meaning, their potency.
Marilyn fakes her fifteenth climax and they call it a rap.
Into the editing chamber George goes, practicing that peculiar talent he ended up with, one of God’s two gifts to him (God’s other gift was a perfect set of naturally healthy teeth).
Bernadette, the Marilyn clone, watches him shuffle off through the darkened backstage with his collection of golden video disks. She lights up a cigarette – which is harmless to her new body – and thinks about him, about his wonderful father-like looks, his warm, nervous smile. A real character, she thinks, a genuine real person. She wonders if he’d have anything to do with a mannequin like her.
She pulls on impossibly tight pants and loops on a rotary shirt, no underwear, no bra, gives Gavin (the Clark clone) a friendly kiss on the cheek, and wanders out of the studio. Nobody pays any attention to her whatsoever. She’s just a clone, a meat puppet.
Outside the rain pours down in a torrent, ugly brown rain, rain that is muddy even before it touches the ground. After the rain the afternoon sky is still black. Nature is dying; only man-made things like Bernadette’s body will survive. Bernadette’s body and Martinelli’s 9 pound apples and Chiquita’s patented tree-less bananas and vat-grown cultured meat by Hormel, and “Sticky Finger Honey” produced by special bacteria, and programmable bionic racing horses, and cats and dogs of metal and plastic, and your best friend, Sexy Susan, an AI sexual surrogate that now outsells cars and house computers, or her alternate Macho Maxx, who can go all night and day ‘till you beg him to stop.
Beyond the black air, almost straight up – 55,000 miles away – a new condo is being built for Bernadette. It’s all bought and paid for, but it’s not finished. There’s no air to breathe yet. Bernadette is only down here until it’s ready. Until then, she takes occasional trips to New California, a mere torus but very pleasant, or sometimes to Heaven Orleans, the “Europe of space cities,” and for the time being lives in a 7 bedroom apartment in an archology in Arizona, only 33 minutes via air-taxi from Hollywood.
She doesn’t go home tonight, as the thought of another lonely and meaningless evening in her apartment might drive her to suicide. She hails a SmartCab, and when it asks for a destination, she says, “Just go.” The AI programming is prepared for that, and drives off in a random pattern, charging her credit account by the millisecond.
At that moment Bernadette is again locked in coitus with the Clark clone, coming to an orgasm then freezing, un-coming for a moment, movements in reverse to a point and then stopping. George walks around the two, studying the positioning, the 360ş
composition. Cutting from one angle to another is much more of an art in cine-holography than cinematography, since George must also control 360ş segue and use the powerful effect of planned vertigo.
A phone call interrupts his concentration. He is annoyed.
“Editing room,” George snaps, answering.
“Sorry … I hope I haven’t disturbed you.” Marilyn Monroe’s face is on the phone’s 2D screen. “Silly of me, really – of course I’ve disturbed you.”
“Well,” George says. His voice is weak, all harshness disappearing into a little hole in space. His heart rate changes painfully. “I’m not too busy to answer the phone.”
“I was hoping … there might be a chance … you would have dinner with me.” Despite all the make up and state-of-the-art genetic engineering, she suddenly looks more like Norma Jean than Marilyn.
“I’m probably going to be working until three or four in the morning.” George says this regretfully – it’s hard for him to speak the words. “Would you still be interested tomorrow night?”
“Yes, I would.” She smiles.
Joy. Glee. Rapture.
Heartburn.
Sickness.
They say good-bye and George labors far into the wee hours of the morning, falling asleep with his head inside the image of Bernadette’s heaving torso.
The rain continues on and off the next day. Large areas of coastal Los Angeles have been claimed by the sea, and one seaside highway, on pillars, gives a great view of half-submerged buildings encrusted with sick yellow barnacles and gray-blue mussels. George is on his way to meet Bernadette, and he is wondering why it was happening.
Maybe, George, it’s because she likes you, and wants to get to know you better.
You know that’s bullshit, George. She couldn’t possibly give a rat’s ass about you. She’s pulling some sort of career move thing, and she’s going to try to talk you into working on her portfolio for free, “as a friend.” Or maybe she’s involved in one of those stupid cults and she’s going to try and recruit you.
She’s one of the “Daughters of Orca” and she needs you as a male sacrifice to that big fish they’re keeping in Huntington Bay.
The restaurant, Sal’s by the Water, is on the banks of the Los Angeles River, which is so full it’s in danger of flooding the parking lot. Despite the run-down look this is a chic place, and the entrance is guarded by doormen. As the SmartCab pulls up and stops, two dozen heads turn to watch George get out, watching to see if he is somebody. Disappointed, they turn away.
The two large male doormen have Cinematia bodies: Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger. While the clones are pumped up enough to be realistic, the psyches inhabiting them are all wrong.
Sylvester looks far too intelligent, and Arnold looks gay.
Sylvester confirms that George is on the list and they step aside and allow him to pass. The crowd’s interest in George is suddenly renewed; obviously George is somebody, but they have no idea who.