Enjoy This Story? More Stories of Synthetic Kind Wait in the Flatland!
An excerpt from “Meek in the Fields,” available from Flatland Fiction...
Patch dared not exit his station at dawn.
He kept his station's door locked. He reinforced his boarded windows. He had no desire to tend to the station's tractor. He had no want to walk through the surrounding fields. Patch's shaking hands fed Tripod a turkey meat pie before he took a position peeping out of a boarded window with his right eye, fretting to see the signs of dust rising from the station's lane that would signal the return of his tormentors.
Tripod whined and refrained from the turkey pot pie.
Patch summoned all of his strength to look into the dog's worried eyes. “I'm sorry, Tripod, but we can't go out this morning. You do whatever business you might have to do on those blankets in the corner. It'll be fine. We just can't go out that door this morning.”
Patch did not have to wait long. An aging pickup truck, the color of rust save for a hood painted in a primer gray, roared towards his station. Patch squinted and counted the men piled in the cabin, with the tormenting boys seated in the middle of them. The truck stopped abruptly as it arrived at the station, and Patch held his breathe to see men dropping out of the vehicle's bed, armed with baseball bats and chains.
Tripod growled at the windows.
“Oh please be still, girl,” Patch paced around his small room. “Be still and maybe they won't think we're hiding in the station.”
A pounding hammered at the door.
Tripod unleashed a flurry of furious barks.
“Oh, please Tripod.”
A deep voice bellowed from the other side of the station door. “You don't try to play stupid with me, clone! We all know you and that dog are in there. My boy tells me he tried to ask you kindly, and I beat him good to teach him a clone don't deserve any manners. So you listen real good, and don't you even think about peeking at me with that cursed eye. You throw that dog out this door. You do it right now, and we won't beat the life out of you after we take that dog for ourselves. You go now clone, you give us that dog.”
Patch trembled.
“I told you once, clone!” The voice thundered. “I'm not going to ask again!”
Tripod howled.
“We warned you, clone!” The man's voice seethed with contempt. “No one's going to care for your corpse when we're though with you!”
The men outside assaulted the agricultural station. They beat on the boarded windows. They struck at the station door. Overwhelmed, Patch rocked at the foot of his bed, burying his face into his hands. He had only wanted a little company in the form of a dog. He had never before asked for anything more than his work. How had the situation turned so against him after the dog had introduced such warmth into his days?
“Tie those chains to those boards in the windows,” the man shouted at his companions. “We'll link them to the truck and then just pull those boards out.”
Patch trembled. “What are we going to do, Patch?”
Patch looked to the station's corner and found Tripod. His breath emptied.
Tripod curled and panted in the corner. A small, furry pup nestled against its mother. Tripod panted while laboring through her litter. Tripod glanced at Patch before turning her attention back to her pains.
“Oh no,” Patch whispered. “What are we going to do? They'll kill your pups if they get hold of them.”
Outside, truck tires squealed and the windows shook. Small plaster motes dropped from the ceiling.
Every clone was familiar with his agricultural station's design. Clones memorized station blueprints. A clone could build and repair a station based upon whatever need was chosen in the field. Patch knew his station could not long withstand the assault. Mr. Jacobsen and the Company could not answer an emergency call in time. Patch had to do something for Tripod. But he was only a clone? What did a clone know about defense?
A shock fired in his mind. A strange calm fell upon Patch.
The air rifle waited at the bottom of a toolbox. Patch realized it was not much of a rifle, but it may as well have been a bomb for the implications of a clone seizing any kind of weapon. To take arms against man ran contrary to every genetic pairing the Company had created for its clones.
But there was Tripod in the corner laboring with her litter. The dog showed Patch more compassion than a clone might have ever hoped to feel. How could he feel any pride in his fields from that moment forward if he did nothing in the dog's defense? The fields would hold no happiness for him if the men spared his life after killing Tripod and her pups.
“I'm afraid Mr. Jacobsen will never forgive me, Tripod.” Patch's breathing steadied as his resolve firmed. “But it's all we have left. I'm afraid you might have to find a new source for your favorite meat pies after today.”
An excerpt from “Plastic Tulips,” available from Flatland Fiction...
“You getting sick, Scott? Nobody's going to think any less of you if you need to step outside.”
“I thought I'd be able to handle it this time, Mike.”
Mike shrugged. “It's fine. The gore's never easy to look at.”
Scott swallowed. “I thought it would be different this time.”
Mike put a reassuring hand on his partner's shoulder. “Do you know they add dye to their fluids? They do that so their synthetics look more human. So that people will more easily accept them.”
A grisly scene of red spilled and splotched across the grocery store's linoleum floor in front of detectives Mike Henson and Scott Plymouth. To the lesser-trained eye, the lifeless flesh at their feet looked like any other homicide victim. To the lesser-trained eye, the carnage that stained the voluptuous cardboard woman advertising a case of light beer appeared no different than the brain matter a bullet to the back of a human skull would spray out the forehead. To the lesser-trained eye, the body sprawled between the spilled onions and avocados seemed to have been snuffed out in the prime of life. The body felt like it deserved empathy and grief. It looked like a tragic loss of young beauty.
But the better-trained eye would recognize that the corpse with the blood-matted strands of auburn hair, with the frayed, oozing remains of a face was something less than human.
Scott took a breath. A little color returned to his face. The sickness did not rise up from his stomach and chase him out from the ripening and decaying taking place in the grocery store's produce aisle.
Mike circled the crime scene. “I attended an afternoon seminar the force conducted last year that tried to teach us how to differentiate between a case of murder and a case of property damage now that so many of these synthetics are on the street. Pretty important stuff. Police resources are limited, and we can't afford to throw money down the drain opening murder investigations before finding out we're only dealing with property destruction.”
“Did you learn to tell the difference in one afternoon?”
“Not really,” Mike answered. “But we're lucky today. Lots of witnesses in the grocery store, and this synthetic was no stranger. Had a crowd telling us she wasn't a real woman before we asked. People don't make that assertion unless they're certain.”
“Could you imagine being mistaken for a synthetic if it was your corpse lying on the floor?”
Mike nodded. “We live in strange times, Scott. Strange times.”
The gunshot responsible for the carnage in Diekemper's Groceries and Goods in the town of Portis failed to empty the aisles of Saturday morning shoppers. The shoppers crowded behind the detectives. Though they could not step across the yellow tape surrounding the produce aisle' gore, they could take their time to choose between flavors of ice cream and cuts of fillets. Though Portis was a tranquil town which rarely heard a gun's roar, the shoppers did not that day feel danger. The victim had been a synthetic, and no child of the Lord. And the woman who pulled the trigger was a grandmother who cooked oatmeal cookies every Monday morning to donate to any community fundraiser scheduled during th
e week. Sophie Carter, who had unleashed that bullet from the handgun she had purchased at the sporting goods outlet thirty miles down the highway, would never shoot a human being. She had shot only a synthetic, and a synthetic, no matter what some fools whispered, was only property.
An excerpt from “Mudder Stew,” available from Flatland Fiction...
The edge of that teeming ball of fisticuffs rippled before a slender man ran out of scrum's numbers. He stumbled towards Hank, his eyes so bright with fear that he paid no attention to the snarling dog that strained against the leash. Two attackers pursued the fleeing man, striking their prey with homemade clubs. Blood streamed down the wounded combatant's face, and he seemed helpless to avoid becoming another victim to the day's violence until his attackers froze as Chomp barked and showed his teeth. Those club-wielding men considered the dog for a second before turning and returning to the mayhem, having decided it best to leave their prey to the raging canine.
Pete scowled. "Let Chomp at him, Hank. He's a mudder."
Hank cursed his aging sight for not noticing before Pete. A blue circle of zeroes and ones ringed the fleeing combatant's right eye, the mark of the clone, the brand of mudder. That eye fixed upon Hank as the clone stumbled, and toppled, upon the concrete before Hank's feet.
"You've got to help me," a busted lip slurred the mudder's plea. "You have to get me out of here. Get me away from this mob. You have to help me."
Pete spat into the mudder's face. "You don't deserve any of our help, mudder."
The mudder shook his head. "You don't understand. Something's busted inside."
Hank took a menacing step closer to the mudder crumpled upon his car lot. Chomp snapped and pulled against his pinch collar.
"I'll give you ten seconds to lift your sorry ass off of my lot. That's more than most would give you."
"But something's broken inside," the mudder held up his hands. "Just call an ambulance. Just do that for me."
Hank snarled. "Ambulances are for men, mudder. Ambulances don't roll through the streets for the sake of any mudder. Not when so many men bleed in the street."
"Let the dog at him," Pete whistled to raise Chomp's ire. "Nobody's going to miss that mudder. I've heard enough of his talk. Let him learn what happens to mudders who march in the streets."
The mudder's lips trembled. "You don't understand at all. I'm no mudder. I'm a man. A man like the two of you. I'm no mudder at all."
Pete skipped forward and delivered a thudding kick into the mudder's side. The clone howled in pain and rolled upon its face.
"That's enough, Pete!" Hank shouted. "Let the mudder bleed, but don't hit it. The last thing we need is a lawsuit seeking property damage."
The mudder breathed a long, rattling breath and willed himself to look one more time at Hank.
"You have to believe me. I'm no mudder."
"You have a mudder's tattoo around your eye," Hank answered. "The zeroes and ones circle your skin. You have a mudder's barcode."
"But it's not real," the clone cried. "The mark's fake."
Pete whistled. "You mudders are sure getting brave. What has the world come to when a mudder thinks it can tell such a lie?"
"You don't know," the clone winced. "Look at me. Do I look like a mudder? Look how thin I am. Look at my face. Look at the age and tell me I'm a mudder."
"That circle around your eye tells me all I need to know," Pete laughed.
Still, Hank felt his certainty shudder. Something did appear off in the bleeding face of the mudder crumpled on the lot's asphalt. The face looked too old, the pale skin too blemished. Nor did the mudder's build appear very strong. The legs and arms were too thin. Something made Hank doubt whether that blue circle alone was enough to mark that bleeding body as one belonging to a mudder. The mudder who pleaded for help just looked too old and weak.
"Why would anyone want to ink a fake mudder's mark around their right eye?" Hank couldn't believe anyone would act so foolishly.
"I hate the mudders as much as you do," the clone snarled. "I have a family to feed. I had to do something to avoid becoming another family evicted onto the street. I had to find work, any work, any way I could. No one hires anyone other than a mudder anymore. No bossman wants to pay a man's wage for a man's labor. So I went and took the mudder's mark, and with it I took a mudder's job. We don't have much, but we still have shelter. My family might have to eat mudder stew, but at least we don't starve."
Pete's face flushed in anger. "If you don't put that dog on that thing, Hank, I'm going back in the office to grab the shotgun beneath the counter. Then I'm going to blow that mudder's brains all over this car lot."
Hank didn't hold Pete back as he stomped towards the office.
"You better drag yourself off of this curb, whatever you are," Hank growled. "That man comes from a family with very deep pockets, and it won't hurt him much to pay the cost to replace a mudder."
The clone shook as he struggled to his knees. "I had to find work."
"No matter if what you say is true," Hank returned, "you were a fool to take the mudder's mark, more foolish still to join in a mudder march."