A groundcar van was parked outside in the building’s loading dock, white and nondescript. After Titama and Jojo loaded the crate there was just enough room in the back for Titama to sit beside it. Jojo drove, as he always did. Although his brain implant caused some difficulty with thinking and speech it worked as a great GPS, projecting the route he needed to take right onto the optic centres of his brain.

Sitting and staring at the crate, Titama went over the possibilities in her head. Muturangi was still working with clones behind the closed doors of the Farm’s secret section, which narrowed the options. As a fight fan, Titama had been hoping for fight pit clones with heavy, rule-breaking levels of modding, but given the address they were delivering to it didn’t seem likely. Porno clones were already a pretty dicey area, especially depending on the kind of wetware they were programmed with. The other top possibility that Titama had alluded to with Muturangi was that they were transporting a celeb clone. Rich weirdos could pay huge sums of money for stolen pieces of genetic material from their favourite celebrities. Hair, or spit, or skin flakes. With that they could create a carbon copy in a cloning tank. That, again, would be far more harshly punished than their regular business at the Farm. The genetic code to grow clones had to be taken from somewhere but usually it was sourced somewhat legally, either bought from someone desperate enough or taken from someone using a DNA-mapping service that hadn’t bothered to read all the fine print. Keeping the crate company, Titama decided celebrity cloning was probably the most likely theory.

Passing back through the neon lights of Little Kiwitown’s main drag, they headed uptown. Giant holograms and glowing billboards dominated the road. Lower buildings gave way to skyscrapers. Some looked like Chinese pagodas but dozens and dozens of stories tall, brightly coloured with sloped roofs jutting off each level. Other spires and art deco towers sprouted and twisted hundreds of stories into the clouds. The sky was dark and some skyscrapers disappeared into the black. Rows of flying cars, headlamps and engines glowing, drifted between the buildings. Most of them moved from garages suspended high in the air to others hundreds of metres above, never coming close to the ground. Meanwhile, their van crawled through traffic.

A police drone billowed by overhead, red and blue lights blinking on and off on either side of the stingray-shaped hovercraft. Cameras and scanners jutted from the drone in all directions. A fifty calibre machine gun and a tear gas cannon were slung under the craft. Jojo kept driving. Even if the drone did a deep scan on the van, the clone tank was shielded.

Parking the white van under the building they’d been directed to, Titama and Jojo unloaded the crate. The parking lot was almost abandoned, only a few groundcars that looked like service vehicles scattered around the spaces. The residents would all have aircars and private garages attached to their apartments on every level. The client had buzzed them in. Rolling the crate onto an elevator, they were whizzed up smoothly and rapidly to the sixty-fifth floor.

When they left the elevator, Titama realised their client’s apartment took up the entire level. Deep runnels were made in the entryway carpet by the wheels of their crate. The client hurried to meet them. He looked like a man on the verge of closing a massive corporate deal. Trying to keep his face neutral in case of last minute negotiations, his eyes nonetheless shone with excitement.

“You’ve got it? Just as I asked for?” The man said. “Come on, come on, bring it inside!”

Probably in his early forties, the client was neither attractive nor unattractive. He was a little too pale and his cheeks too hollow, dark hair eschew. Skinny but not in shape. He was, in a way, forgettable. Wearing a dark suit and white shirt, open at the collar, it appeared like he was not long home from the office.

“Where do you want it?” Titama said.

“Anywhere, there’s fine,” the client said.

“You sure? You got to decant the-, delivery, it’s going to make a mess of your carpet in here, cousin,” Titama said.

The apartment was old fashioned ultra modern, white walls, white floors and ceiling, every piece of furniture either glass or white leather. What art existed was plain and unfeeling, and there were almost no personal touches. The carpet was just as plush as it had been in the entryway. The crate’s wheels and Titama’s boots sunk deep into the fibres.

“I know that, I have cleaning bots for a reason,” the client said. “You can go.”

“Hey, I know you’re paying big bucks but we’ve got to go back with the equipment,” Titama said. “You just get what’s inside.”

The client hesitated. “Okay, okay, I was already set up,” he said. “Bring her in here.”

Wheeling the crate across the living room, Titama and Jojo headed deeper into the apartment with the client. Multiple rooms branched off the wide central hallway. In one room were floor to ceiling windows offering a breathtaking view of Neo Francisco, the lights of the city aglow. The client led them to a bedroom at the far end of the apartment.

Titama couldn’t help noticing there were multiple locks on the bedroom door, including a dome-shaped retinal scanner. The door only locked from the outside. As it opened, Titama was struck by how glaringly different the bedroom looked compared to the rest of the apartment. The walls were hot pink and decked with lace. It had a bed, a dresser and mirror, and a large closet, with a rainbow-coloured rug in the middle of the room and a massive dollhouse. Stuffed animals clamoured for every available surface. It was a little girl’s room but too perfect, too clean, like a little girl’s room from a movie or a furniture store catalogue. Several large plastic sheets, designed to catch fluids such as those from the clone tank, were laid across the rainbow rug and the bed.

“What is this?” Titama said.

“Come on, hurry up,” the client said.

Titama’s boots crinkled on the plastic sheeting. In the hall, Jojo undid the latches on the corners of their crate. The sides and lid fell away, revealing the long glass cylinder of the clone tank and its transportable monitoring system on one end. Outside the shielded crate, the monitor beeped softly.

“Oh, wow,” the client said. “She really is perfect.”

Inside the cylinder was a young girl, one that looked only nine or ten-years-old. She floated in the viscous liquid, breathing shallowly. Tubes and wires ran out of her body. Like all the clones, the little girl was naked. With the adult clones, Titama had become so desensitised to nudity that she hardly even noticed anymore but the clone’s prepubescent frame looked heartbreakingly fragile. It didn’t seem to bother the client. For a few moments, Titama tried fooling herself into thinking the man had wanted to clone himself a surrogate daughter. The look on his face though, as he admired her ‘perfection’, was not fatherly.

Titama felt herself breathing hard. The bed, she realised now, was much too big for a little girl’s bed. Mirrors on the dresser and on the doors of the wardrobe were angled to point toward it as well. One of the closet doors was ajar and Titama could see the clothes inside. Except they weren’t really clothes as much as they were costumes. School girl uniforms and puffy princess dresses.

“You sick motherfucker,” Titama said.

“What-, what did you say to me?” The client said.

Titama circled around the room, ignoring the flush of anger that crossed the client’s face. She went to the clone tank and studied the monitor attached to one end. Titama’s tattooed face darkened.

“This thing-, it-, she, is full-cog, not wetware,” Titama said. “Full frontal lobe job, sensory input and learning ability.”

“I paid your boss a lot of money for this!” The client said. “I don’t know who the hell you think you are, coming into my home-,”

Titama whirled away from the monitor. Jojo looked confused more than anything else. Titama snatched the client by the throat. He was roughly as tall as Titama but she easily hoisted him into the air, lifting him by the neck and slamming him into the nearest wall. The man gagged and started clawing at her hand.

“Why?” Titama said. “You said she was exactly as you ordered, why the full-cog, why?”

“Her-, it’s the-, closest you can get to owning a real-, human being,” the man choked. “At least-, in this country.”

“Titama, what are you doing?” Jojo said. “This isn’t right, we got to make the delivery! Make the delivery to the client, bring the equipment back! All business is customer service!”

“This is bullshit, disgusting, I can’t believe Muturangi made me a fucking part of this,” Titama said.

Titama let go of the client’s throat. Grabbing at his bruised neck, he slithered back down the wall. There was no strength in the man’s legs so he slipped and sat down hard on the hallway carpet, sounding like he was about to weep. Titama rounded on the tank with the young clone again.

“Come on, Jojo, let’s get this fucking thing out of here,” Titama said. “We’ll take it back to-, I don’t know, but we’ll take it back.”

“You can’t treat me like this!” The client said. “I paid a lot of money!”

Leaving the sections of the crate behind, Jojo followed Titama, pushing the clone tank back through the apartment the way they had come. They returned to the elevator. Voice breaking, the client yelled in protest behind them but was left alone with his empty pink bedroom.

“You can’t go back down there with her! You can’t let people see!” He said.

They returned to the parking garage downstairs. The fluid in the tank was still glowing dimly. Titama fumed. She had no idea what she was going to do next but she just knew she couldn’t be a part of what the client had been expecting upstairs. They wheeled the tank back to the van and locked its wheels. Titama sat in the rear again while Jojo returned to the driver’s seat.

“Uh, where are we going now, Titama?” Jojo asked.

“Take us back, Jojo, back to the club,” Titama said. “I don’t know how, but we’re going to straighten this out one way or another.”

===

Titama is a standalone story but operates as a prequel to characters and events seen in Kill Switch: Serial Escalation by Sean E. Britten.

If you’re enjoying Titama so far, please feel free to share, and check out the Kill Switch series on Amazon, available in ebook and paperback:

Kill Switch

Kill Switch: Serial Escalation

Kill Switch: Final Season

Sean E. Britten is an author, radio presenter and podcast host from Sydney, Australia. His favourite book of all time is Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, so that might give you some idea of where he’s coming from. Check out his website here, find him tweeting stuff here or sometimes posting things on the increasingly dead medium that is Facebook here.