Preface:

I found this image browsing porn on imagefap, and it inspired me to write this short story. I hate long captions.

The Image:

https://i.ibb.co/CsR4dZN/scarlotte.png

In case it disappears (I don’t own it and did not create it), it’s an AI generated image of a naked woman kneeling in a display case in what might be a sex-shop ( there are boxes behind her bearing what is probably lewd cover art. They can’t be VHS pornos in this day and age, so maybe they’re dildoes. Imagine what you will.

She’s loosely wrapped in clear plastic food-wrap with a tag that says: 98K. The woman might resemble a celebrity you’ve seen, or not, you never can tell with AI images you did not create, but any resemblance to persons living or dead, or to characters in other fiction is not intended and is purely coincidental.

Enjoy!

This is the first thing Jesse saw (the image, click the link above in the preface) after breathing in the ether or whatever it was the ‘doctor’ used in that sketchy Mexican Field Hospital for drug runners, cartel members, and wounded Civil War III soldiers.

His partner in crime was dead. Jesse saw Gunter’s head turn into a red mist of brains, some of which he had to spit out. It was Mister Weiss’s wife Karen who pulled Jesse’s wounded body into her station wagon and out of the heated battle between the cops and two organized crime factions erupting in front of her house.

The large cube of cash accumulated by her deceased husband enabled the soft hearted woman (at least that what Jesse assumed she was) to bring him there and get him looked after; at least she hadn’t brought him to the hospital - his face was all over the TV for sure now.

98K for a Scarlotte Jimhenson clone?, he thought, Man the neodollar had gone to shit!

There were only a few ‘classic’ movie stars whose cells were public domain - grandfathered in before the requirement for cloning rights passed. Scarlotte Jimhenson was one of the first. Hela was older, but nobody cloned her except as cells because she was just an immortal cancer used for research.

Jesse half remembered hearing about a famous legal case from a documentary his mother was watching on TV while he made himself poptarts as a kid: It concerned an actress who tried to get a cell sample (she said ‘stolen’ during a mandatory Chinese Bird Flu test) destroyed.

The actress, a feeble old woman by then, died of a fall (some say suspiciously) before the case concluded, so it was eventually settled by her estate for a sum of money, leaving her cell line intact in the hands of a ruthless and scrappy biotech startup.

The clone’s eyes followed whoever held the camera connected to Jesse’s consciousness, but there was no awareness. The program existed to keep the brainless clone from looking like a corpse on the shelf or expressing a (more) off-putting affect. These things were grown in a vat and not allowed by law to develop a brain but outside the skull it was fully human. The processing core in its skull using Nervalink connectors connected to its spinal and cranial nerves to puppet the body via the peripheral nervous system would receive its program after purchase.

Strangely slow on the uptake, Jesse went from why are we in a clonebot shop? to oh yeah, replacement organs to wait how am I seeing this? to oh... to appreciating that dying was a great way to take the heat off his now infamous face, and scary as that was, he didn’t feel dead, disembodied though he was. All these thoughts flashed by in the instant before Jesse’s consciousness paused.

Jesse was dead again - permanently if nobody hit the resume button, like atoms on their way to an alien planet to save money on props. But Scotty was a master of his craft.

Too bad for Jesse Mister Scott wasn’t on duty, and this wasn’t Star Trek.

The light wasn’t blinding or overly bright, but he struggled to resolve shapes at first. His legs ached as if he’d been kneeling for way too long. Looking up he saw Karen Weiss looking down at him, and what was this shit? Saran wrap? He’d ‘rematerialized’ as a ScarJim!

Jesse struggled at the wrap to no avail. He was weak, very weak, and uncoordinated, doubting he could even stand, or find his balance. This body was not his own.

“I can’t imagine what you must feel like Jesse, but the weakness is not permanent, it’s an overlain software limitation like a governor on a car so bots don’t hurt themselves when calibrating a new program,” said the friendly technician/shopkeeper, “I’ll help you out of that plasti-”

“Stop!” barked Mrs. Weiss, “Not till I’ve spoken with him.”

“I was just going to unwrap him and give him some clothes, you can still speak with him,” said the merchant.

“It was my money that paid for this Very-Illegal-Thing you’ve done, and you would be stupid to let him go out your place of business as a fuck-doll knowing how to trace this back to you. The PCA will have your head for putting a person’s ghost into a sex toy!”

Note: A typical Three Letter Agency, the Population Control Agency (PCA) investigated and regulated clones and consciousness transfer. Basically transferring human consciousness into a clone-bot was banned, though the criminal rich persistently tried it despite the fact that programs had no rights, and could be deleted at any time for any reason by the PCA. The PCA had a devil of a time keeping the old dying rich from scooping the brains out of real living people to possess the body of their kidnap victim bearing a legal ID number. The PCA often caught these ghouls trying to bypass a head-scan or launder their proverbial cubes-of-cash into the hands of the poor unfortunate whose skull they now occupied, or caught them during a raid because they appeared on records as impossibly old never appearing in public. Their often devilishly clever schemes endlessly amazed crime blotter readers.

Thankfully early experiments showed a 50% chance of failure at transferring human consciousness to a machine model, and of the successes, a 10% chance of significant permanent mental degradation (temporary mental degradation early on after transfer was almost guaranteed).

Banning further development before the numbers improved was probably the only thing tamping demand enough to give the PCA a chance at doing their job even with the draconian powers they’ve been granted, though conspiracy theorists posit that the PCA’s successes might be more of a cover story for the benefit of the peasants hiding from the sheeple the horrible fact a vampiric Nobility really runs the world like a ranch raising bodies and the PCA’s policy of summarily terminating found rogue programs kept those ghouls-on-the-outs the PCA was allowed to catch from giving up the whole game.

The food wrap holding Jesse was so effective he thought, wondering if he might be being governed at something like just 10% of his strength.

Looking down at him, Mrs. Weiss said, “You probably figured out your old body is toast - they tried very hard to save it, but in the end getting shot three times takes its toll. My guess is it’s in a hole in the desert somewhere. That was six months ago. It must sem like six minutes ago to you, because you’ve been off, but I’ve had to let the heat die down and do a bunch of things so I didn’t have time for you.”

Jesse tried to respond, but he only grunted spilling drool. It wasn’t his voice.

“Speaking’s gonna take some practice kid,” interjected the tech, “You’re in a whole new body. But you made it this far, getting into the box is the tricky bit, from there it’s just a straight data copy, so you’ll get the hang of it soon enough. But no need to push it kid.”

Karen continued, “Here’s the thing beautiful, you’re gonna have to make a choice, and depending on what you choose, I’m going to either load you in the trunk and drive you out into the desert far enough away that I can be long gone before you find anyone to tell - and I’ll deny everything if it comes back to me, or you’re going to come home and live with me from now on.

“I don’t owe you a thing, but you see I no longer have a husband, and I do have a huge cube-of-cash without much I can really spend it on, as far as legal things go, but Gunter left me with some connections here in the underworld on which I can spend some of said cube without the five-oh catching on.”

She continued, “I was once pissed at you for corrupting my husband, but I see now that it probably went both ways so that’s water under the bridge now. I don’t know if I saved you for him, or because I felt sorry for you, but when they offered to put you in a box for later for three times the price of what I’d paid for them to try and save you, I had no idea what I was going to do with you, but I told them to go ahead thinking I’d probably just bury the box or burn it. I honestly couldn’t deal with another death just at the time, it was an expensive stalling tactic for my own mental health, but then they told me the procedure worked, and I had a box with a dormant human soul in my hands, and soon I had an idea...

“You see, I don’t know you well but I think you’re probably just a decent kid that got mixed up in drugs and became too much for your mother to control. An addiction can make a monster out of most of us. You won’t have any physical addiction now, and I don’t even think you’d be able to feel intoxicated by any substance anymore since you’re really just a program running in a clone’s processing unit.”

“Actually she can Ma’am, she can feel things like lack of air, and thirst and hunger and pain etc, the simulation was developed early on and is said to be 100% accurate. Also she can feel drunkenness, and getting stoned, but other psychoactive substances were never simulated so she could smoke all the meth in the world and never feel a thing mentally,” said the guy now sitting behind the counter.

“That’s perfect,” said Karen, “And I suppose I’d better start using the correct pronouns from now on as well. I chose this body for you because it was cheap, and because I am secretly a huge Dyke. And you’re a well known utility model - nobody will think it’s weird for me to have you living with us as a housemaid clone-bot. It’s a perfect niche for someone in your situation, which I am afraid is somewhat bleak. I’ll explain it for you because I’ve had months to think about it, and you just woke up.