Kiln People

The foam still flowed, bubbling, hissing, and spreading across the factory floor. Imprinted survival instincts feel like the real thing, and I joined other onlookers backing away from the stuff. “All right,” I sighed at last. “Let’s get out of here.”

I turned — only to face several burly security types, liveried in pale orange with blue bands. And triple-size ersatz muscles that they flexed menacingly.

“Please come with us,” one of them said with an augmented voice of authority, taking my arm in an adamant lock grip. Which I immediately took to be a good sign.

The “please” part, that is.

We were put inside a sealed van — one with plain metal sides that stayed opaque, no matter how hard we stared, which Palloid thought rather rude.

“They could at least give us a view before they start dicing up our brains,” groused the ferret with Pal’s face, ingratiating himself with the guards in his typical fashion. “Hey, up front! How about letting a fellow consult with his lawyer-program, eh? You want to be held personally liable when I slap a mega-lien on your whole company for ditnapping? Are you aware of the recent ruling in ditAddison vs. Hughes? It’s no longer an excuse for a golem to say he was ‘just following orders.’ Remember the Henchman Law. If you switch sides right now, you can help me sue your boss and go swimming in cash!”

Good old Pal, a charmer in whatever form he takes. Not that it mattered. Whether we were “under arrest” in a strictly legal sense was immaterial. As mere property — and possible participants in industrial sabotage — we weren’t going to inspire any UK employees to turn whistle-blower over our abused rights.

At least the driver left my armrest entertainment-flasher turned on, so I asked for news. The space in front of me ballooned with holonet bubbles, most of them dealing with a “failed fanatical terrorist attack” at UK. They weren’t very informative. Anyway, a short while later another item grabbed top billing as a ba

At first I didn’t recognize the site of the blazing inferno. But news correlators soon added the address targeted by a clandestine murder rocket.

“Cripes,” Pallie muttered near my ear. “That’s tough, Albert.”

It was home. Or the place where this body of mine got imprinted with memories, before getting set loose into a long, regrettable day. Damn, they even burned the garden, I thought, watching flames consume the structure and everything inside.

In one sense, it seemed a mercy. Leading rumor-nets had already begun naming Albert Morris as a chief suspect in the UK attack. He’d be in a real jam if he still lived. Poor guy. It was predictable, I guess, so long as he kept trying to act as a romantic, old-fashioned crusader against evil. Sooner or later he was going to irritate someone much bigger and stronger and get in real trouble. Whoever did all this was being devastatingly thorough.

Trouble didn’t even begin to cover what I was in as the van pulled to a stop. The rear door started opening and Pal’s raggedy little ferretdit prepared to spring. But the guards were vigilant and quick. One snatched Palloid’s neck in a viselike grip. The other took me by an elbow, gently but with enough power to show how futile resistance would be.

We stepped out next to the unlit side portico of a big stone mansion, turning down a dim set of stairs partly hidden behind some truly outstanding chrysanthemums. I might have resisted the guard long enough to try and sniff the flowers, if I had a working nose. Ah well.

At the bottom, an open door led into a sort of lounge where half a dozen figures relaxed at tables and chairs, smoking, talking, and quaffing beverages. At first glance I thought they were real, since all wore varied shades of human-brown under durable cloth garments in rather old-fashioned styles. But an expert glance showed their fleshtones to be dye jobs. Their faces really gave them away — bearing familiar expressions of resigned e

Two of them sat before expensive interface screens, talking to computer-generated AI avatars with faces similar to their own. One was a small, childlike golem, wearing scuffed denim. I couldn’t catch any of his words. But the other one, fashioned after a buxom woman with reddish hair, wearing ill-fitting matronly garb, spoke loudly enough to overhear as the guard pulled me along.

“… with the divorce coming up, there are going to be a lot of changes,” she told the onscreen face. “My part will get more complicated while stress-induced submotivations grow increasingly subtle. If we can’t have better day-to-day continuity, I wish we could at least be given better data on the original misery indices. Especially since I have to start each day almost from scratch. Fortunately, the situation was so chaotic that consistency isn’t much required, or even expected by the subject …”

Her voice was pure professionalism, the words unrelated to any concern of mine. Albert Morris clearly wasn’t the only skilled contract laborer hired for obscure projects by an eccentric trillionaire.

Our burly escorts took us to a door beyond the lounge/waiting room. A visible ray sca

That is, I guessed they were the latest. Albert is — or was — an interested amateur who studiously read articles about the brain psychopathology of evildoers. A fascination that I, as a frankie, do not seem to share.

The guards escorted us to another waiting area, outside a sealed doorway. Through a narrow window I glimpsed an individual pacing nervously, barking sharp questions at somebody out of sight. The interrogator’s skin was burnished-bright and expensive synthetic tendons bunched, almost like a man’s. Few could afford bodies like that one, let alone to use them in bulk quantities. It was the second high-class Kaolin-ditto I had seen in an hour. He kept glancing at a nearby wall where multiple bubble displays floated and jostled, ballooning outward in reaction to his gaze, showing events in many time zones.

I noticed that the UK factory was prominent in several bubbles, revealing that emergency teams still moved about, but with less frantic urgency than before, having apparently succeeded at limiting the prion attack. I’d wager that production might resume before dawn, in remote sections of the factory.

Another bubbleview gazed down on the smoldering ruins of a small house — Albert’s home, and probably his crematorium. Alas.

“Come away from there, please,” said one of my escorts, in a mild tone that implied a second warning would be less courteous. I left the window and joined Palloid, who lay on the slim mattress of a nearby hospital gurney. Pal’s little ferret-golem was licking some wounds it received during our brief battle gaining entrance to Universal Kilns.

As realPal expected, the tu