John Brosnan - The Sky Lords

“What are you talking about?” he demanded. “You can’t live without me ! I’m your whole life! For God’s sake, I created you!”

She suddenly flung the fake coconut at his head. He ducked and it hurtled across the beach and vanished into one of the holographic projections. Then came the sound of breaking glass. Miranda jumped out of the hammock and pointed an accusing finger at Milo. “Yes!” she screamed. “Say it again! Tell me yet again what I owe you! That’s all I’ve heard during my short life—that the great Milo Haze took a rib from his own perfect body and created the perfect woman. The perfect woman for Milo Haze, that is! A woman made in his image!” Her face had become contorted with rage and her chest was heaving violently.

Milo was startled by the intensity of her anger. “All right, all right …” he said soothingly. “Take it easy. You’ve been under a lot of stress recently and it’s understandable you’re upset. I know you don’t know what you’re saying. You still love me as much as I love you.” He stepped close to her, put his hands under her open dinner jacket and caressed her breasts. Miranda knocked his hands away and moved backwards.

“I don’t love you! And you don’t love me! You only love yourself!” she cried scornfully. “That’s the whole point! The whole point of my existence! When we’re in bed we’re not really making love together—there’s just you masturbating with yourself.”

“Don’t speak this way, Miranda,” he said coldly.

“Isn’t science wonderful?” she continued in the same scornful tone. “Once all a man needed was his hand but now, for a mere billion dollars or so, he can get something like me—a female clone of himself, nurtured in an artificial womb, subjected to accelerated growth and force-fed with hand-me-down memories, all within a span of six years. The ultimate jerk-off apparatus for the man with an over-sized Narcissus complex. Yes, that’s what I call progress!”

Her words stung him. “Miranda, I don’t see you that way. You’re as real as I am. …”

“Oh, thank you very much,” she said sarcastically. “Coming from you that’s a real compliment.”

Milo took a deep breath. He wanted to grab Miranda and shake that smug, condescending expression off her face, but he knew it would be unwise to lose his temper. This strange attitude of hers had to be some temporary emotional aberration which he should be able to talk her out of if he kept calm. He said seriously, “Miranda, we have a special relationship—a unique one. We have a relationship closer than any other couple alive.”

“If we’re as close as it’s possible for two people to be then God help humanity,” she said mockingly.

“You can’t deny it!” he told her. “You love me just as much as I love you. You have no choice, you were. …” He didn’t go on, realizing he’d made a mistake.

She finished the sentence for him. “… conditioned to love you. Yes, I’m well aware of that, Milo. And I did love you once. But the conditioning doesn’t work any more. It doesn’t work because you’re no longer the same man.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about all those ‘enhancements’ you’ve undergone. They’ve had a cumulative effect on you. They’ve changed you in ways you didn’t anticipate. In fact, I’m beginning to feel you’re not even human any more.”

“What crap!” he cried. “You must be drunk!”

“No, I’m not. I’m telling you the truth. You’ve passed over some invisible dividing line between being human and being something else. You’ve re-designed yourself right out of the human race, Milo.”

“Nonsense! I admit I’ve changed, but I’m still human!” he told her fiercely.

“Human?” she asked. “What human being can’t feel pain? What human being is incapable of feeling fear? Panic? Terror?”

“So why does the absence of those human flaws make me less human? Why should humanity be defined by the ability to experience pain, fear and terror?”

“I can give you lots of reasons, but the main one is that if you can’t feel pain or fear yourself you can’t empathize with the rest of us who can. And that makes you no longer one of us . You’ve cut yourself off from the rest of humanity.”

Milo shook his head. “No, no, you don’t understand. I remember only too well what it was like to suffer from those afflictions of so-called humanity. But just because I’m free of them now doesn’t make me inhuman. If anything, I feel even more pity for the rest of you! You don’t know what you’re missing, Miranda. Since my last series of enhancements I feel completely liberated. And you could have been like me too if you hadn’t been so stupid.”

“I thank you again for the gift of immortality, Milo, but all those other gifts you offered were of no interest to me.”

“One day you’ll regret that you rejected them,” he told her coldly.

“That day will never come, Milo, I promise you. I may be just a genetic echo of you but I am still human. And I want to stay that way.”

He felt his control of his temper start to slip. It took all his strength of will to keep his hands off her. “I keep telling you—I am human. Super human, yes, but basically still human.”

“You may think you are, Milo, but you’re not. You can’t see what you’ve become. The human personality is the product of an infinitely complicated and sophisticated biological process and science has a long way to go before it unravels them. You can’t just chop great chunks out of the system—as your genegineers did with you—without destroying something vital. …” Miranda nodded agreement with herself. “Yes … yes … that’s it. In a sense you’ve killed yourself, Milo.” Suddenly she laughed. “It’s ironic, actually. All that money and effort to turn yourself into a superman, but by doing so you’ve committed a form of suicide. You’re walking around thinking you’re immortal but you’re dead inside and the ants are already feeding on your soul.”

“Shut up!” he exploded, raising his hand as if to hit her. “I won’t listen to this superstitious crap! Now, for the last time, are you coming with me or not?”

“No, Milo. Because I just can’t stand being in your presence any more. It’s not just your altered personality, it’s physical as well. Those ‘enhancements’ of yours again, they’ve screwed you up on some subtle level. I’m telling you the truth when I say that you physically revolt me. And I mean that with every one of your cells in my body.”

Milo slowly lowered his hand. He stared at her for a long time in silence, then turned and strode off down the ‘beach’. He passed through one of the holographic projections and then out of the door. He took the elevator straight to the flipper garage on the roof. One of the smaller house cyberoids met him as he entered the garage. “Good evening, Mr Haze. Are you going out?”

“Yes,” he said curtly as he headed for his flipper. He had no fixed plan in mind, only a vague idea about getting out of the state. After that? Well, with the way the newer plagues were spreading maybe he should think about getting off the planet itself.

“It’s a pleasant night for a flight,” said the cyberoid, following him.

“Certainly is,” said Milo and smiled bleakly. He was about to climb into his flipper when a thought occurred to him. He looked at Miranda’s flipper parked on the other side of the garage then pointed to it. “Disable that vehicle,” he ordered. “Open the maintenance access panel and destroy the drive unit.”

“But sir,” said the cyberoid in its flat, polite purr. “It is part of the property I am programmed to protect.”