Fantastic Metropolis

THERE WAS NO question; the dead thing in the gutter was one of his clones.

It was naked and fetal-curled like a withered spider, rain drops bursting all over its white skeletal body. Its face was turned up to the sky, lips folded back from a frozen gnash of black teeth. Its flesh was ossified, like stone, pitted all over and cracked black at the joints and around the neck and jaw. The black eyes were like holes where spikes had been.

Drew thought it was beautiful, lying there, like a cast figure from Pompeii. He looked up around him as he sipped from his lidded coffee. Across the street was the Chrislamic Cathedral, a looming metal structure of jagged black spires and stained glass windows all red in webs of black steel. On this side stood a row of warehouses, half of them empty and sealed up, a few converted into housing for the cheap labor teams who worked in the warehouses that were still operating. It was a nice setting for the corpse; a quiet street, a lonely street. As lonely a street as anything could hope to die in.

He was tempted to move the creature just a few feet to be more directly opposite the cathedral. In that way, it would seem even more like some lost soul denied its salvation. But no, the thing had chosen to die here, not there, and while Drew was the artist he decided to respect its choice.

He walked the rest of the way home quickly. The lift to his loft was not functioning again today; it merely squealed painfully and shivered until he shut it off. The metal steps he took instead clanged under his heavy boots; some of the staircases he mounted were inside the old warehouse, some outside. Dirty rain water trickled between the filthy white ceramic tiles of the building’s skin, to which the external staircases were affixed like the skeletons of immense parasites. He heard a woman crying behind one window he passed. Wasn’t aware someone had moved into the trashed third level. Maybe it was a ghost. He used to think ghosts lived on the roof of the old sealed up factory across the way—at night they would often move about in the rain, a softly glowing blue—until he finally realized that it was someone’s holotank sending out a scattered signal on stormy nights. That would explain the frequent shootings. Movies. Drew had thought it was the ghosts living out their deaths.

His loft comprised the entire upper floor. Its narrow balcony ran the length of the building, and on warm nights he would sit and listen to music as he stared out at the city lights of this Earth-established colony called Paxton—or, more commonly but not necessarily with more affection, Punktown. Sometimes he would sketch out there. Though he worked with more three-dimensional mediums, he was adamant that every artist should be able to draw, as every surgeon should still know how to stitch a suture.

The balcony furniture was piled and tipped over now for the winter, and the rain slanted into his back as he struggled to unlock his door. The illumined code buttons were flickering, and he was about to dig out his key when finally the big metal door grated open three quarters of the way before jamming in its track. He slipped inside, hit an overhead bank of sickly greenish lights, and punched the internal door key. The door slid shut with a mournful metallic groan.

The overhead lights were sputtering now, too. Maybe the storm interfering with his illegal power tap-in. Well, that was the price he had to pay.

He didn’t remove his overcoat. With it still swirling around his legs, weighted with the rain, he went directly to a series of metal shelves lined with large jugs of liquid and powder, labeled with markered tape. He pulled down one without a label, screwed off the cap to sniff the contents, flinched back from the fumes. This was the one.

With the jug slung from one finger, through the handle like a trigger guard, he clomped back across his loft to the door, and returned to the torrents.

The downpour was picking up strength, but he doubted the water would interfere with the sealant. It was, after all, waterproof.

The clone was still there. No being had carted it away, no animal had come to dine. It had no stench. How long had it been dead? Did its fossilized skin seal in its decay? The plastic sealant would do that, much better.

He poured the clear, sap-thick fluid directly onto the corpse, unmindful of a few wildly varied vehicles which floated past or splashed by through the wet street. He was careful not to let his feet get near the stuff as it began to pool around the figure. He wanted to pour the sealant on so heavily that the clone would be impossible to remove, glued to the street, until someone finally went so far as to chisel it free.

Only a little sealant left, so he poured that on just to kill it off and tossed the jug into an alley between warehouses. He nodded, smiling at the figure, which glistened as though varnished. He thought it might be interesting to spray-paint his signature on the sidewalk near it—he had, after all, tattooed and branded his signature onto a few of his clones before setting them loose—but was afraid that someone might think this was some ordinary mutant, and he its murderer.

Of course, there were always the clones in progress at his studio to prove the actual situation.