She rushed away from the pool party, chiffon bikini cover-up billowing, high-heels clicking on flag stones in flickety-clicks, her bejeweled fingers gripping the sides of her face in panic. All in attendance watched her scurry away, for she was the center of attraction and all party-goers had at least one envious eye always on her. Medea lived in a strident and dramatic state of mind and physicality so rushing off in a huff was just another one of her fantastic acting methods applied to real life.
Locked in the small changing room, Medea looked at the edges of Prunella’s melded face to see tiny capacitor-pustules erupting, raw bioelastic skin cracks and tiny, mysterious gooey discharges. Over the past week, she’d reacted with dismay to the fact of Prunella’s face simply rejecting the repeated melding into hers. All around the edges of the meld, her real bioelastic skin was discoloring, pimpling up and flaking off.
She pressed at the edges of the bioelastic and painstakingly peeled off Prunella’s face. It had been months since she’d first put on Prunella face in Maui. Each meld now became a tedious process, requiring concentrated mental coercing from all her advanced regenerative nano-biologies to find the perfect placement of Prunella’s face against hers.
Thick and outrageous make-up achieved the same virginal and innocent beauty that had made her a powerful holo-movie star in Prunella’s likeness. Her excessively made-up face had become the epitome of high fashion and many women universe-wide revered it and dreamed of becoming Medea, as did many men. Many insecure women imitated Medea and displayed faces looking as if Halloween was just around the corner or they would soon be auditioning for the fringe porno-holo-movies of Kabuki Dancers Gone Wild.
Medea emerged as a dark and evil manifestation of Lady Sisely and modeled her self on the ancient Adam's family character of Morticia Adams. But, now, looking in the mirror, she saw her original evil beauty had taken on wickeder and crueler manifestation. Her constant evil thinking and manipulation of all those around her, affected her, aged her, gradually ravaging her original face almost beyond recognition... a Botoxian nightmare waiting to happen.
She wanted to put a stop to her evil ways, however she was created with vile and grisly wickedness at the root of her being. Short of falling into a flaming volcanic caldera, she would live forever, growing meaner by the day with the maneuverings and machinations of driving Lady Sisley into the darker Marquee de Sadeian realms.
However, having been programmed with all the hatred of Lady Sisley’s immoralities of a broken romance to Arturo Roark, Medea still retained her basic androidal morals and manners buried deep within layers of Spockly trisistors. Like all androids, her basic programming required being kind to humans, yet her code was hastily revised to accommodate Lady Sisley’s hatred complex of the hated Arturo Roark, a deadline delivery date and a removable black box of nasty code hidden in her anal sphincter.
In human terms, Medea’s mind existed in the realm of paranoid schizophrenia. In computer terms it endured as corrupted program emulation. Medea’s sanity depended on well-functioning memory management unit and the proper functioning of her Translation Lookaside Buffer. This bioware should have placed her self-concepts in the correct physical address, on her quantum drives or in a cache. Whenever Prunella’s facemask melded to Medea’s face, Unicode corruption and digital discombobulation went on a rampage.
The conflict, was as simple as beauty itself. A smile on Medea, using Prunella face, could not be written to any physical address Medea owned, as hers and Prunella’s personality drives and caches remained unique and proprietary.
When Medea produced a smile, with Prunella’s face, it created an infinite loping, divide by zero construct, which in turn created a thousand-million smile instances of Prunella’s happiness, but with no happy mind-place to call home. These smile byte instances roamed Medea’s internal structure, night and day and oftentimes-displaced vital memory addresses, corrupted caches and thus began the bioelastic war on her original face.
In human terms it would be called terminal acne.
People who wanted to know about the important people of holo-movies and mega stars believed the paparazzi dribble as the gospel of the galaxies. These outside-the-dome bottom feeders, began to blog-fart that Medea was indeed the most beautiful woman in the world, but her eyes appeared sad, that her eyes told a different story, that her eyes mirrored an unhappy and somewhat inhuman soul.
Soon after reading these outrageous, but generally spot-on blog-fart lies, Medea took to wearing fashionable, resort X-ray sunglasses, and 3-D headscarves depicting famous or ancient landmarks, and living holo-WhoTube videos of the history of warfare. In her irrational vindictive anger, she beckoned an army of Rich-Buildmore lawyers and bankers to crush all the Newsyness of the World Corporation and all its tabloidal, wimpnet, blog-farting minions.
The impossible began happening to her. She was aging; her once perfect figure began slackening in muscle and tone, she’d odd little pains in her back and real headaches when she wanted sex from Davidson. These human things did not happen to droids, however, because of her masquerading shenanigans with Prunella’s face, she couldn’t request a virtual tech-check from CloneDroid Corporation to service her.
At first, she thought these ageing aberrations occurred in the odd lighting of the moment, a warped mirror or some internal manufacture’s flaw in her glass eyes, but each day she saw more grey hairs appear at the roots, more sagging skin, the beginnings of a wattle under her chin and worst of all, sagging bioelastic breasts.
She’d taken to dying her hair in fantastic wigged-out combinations; wearing retro, Tura Satana inspired turtlenecks (modified to show her fantastic cleavage) and Kabuki make-up or a wide variety of hats with on-going miniature auto-matons in presentations of famous fin de siecle plays to disguise and distract from her abnormal ageing processes.
A movement was afoot in New Milano, in liberated women’s circles, to bring back the under-wired, conical and sharp-tipped, self-navigating sonar brassiere. Men worldwide complained vociferously, fearing their eyes might be poked out or worse. Nevertheless, Medea adopted the conical sharp-tipped bra to support her sagging soccer balls. Optometrist and eye surgeons worldwide made out like bandits.
And to make matters worse, and contrary to the laws of nature and physics, Prunella’s face appeared to get younger and more beautiful by the day. These were small changes, but to Medea’s keen eye, these changes were obvious and seemed to mock her in her wicked deceptions.
To calm herself, Medea brought up the website, alt.polkas-R-us.zucchinis and downloaded scores of ancient polka music played on the accordion. A large family of inbred and severely dentally handicapped Cajun Arcadians performed the music, which for some unknown reason soothed her frazzled and weary circuits.
***
“Please be kind to Brandt, my evil sweetness. Medea, you’re a holo-movie star because of him,” Lady Sisley reminded Medea, after her return poolside. Medea held all the star power to make or break their futures, so Lady Sisley remained cautious in saying anything to Medea she might misinterpret.
Medea’s entourage of robot muscle men, vacuous blonde human hover-bimbos, holo-movie photographers and fashion hyper-bloggers lazed about the pool, leeching Medea’s essence in sycophantic and servile complaisance, waiting in anticipation for the meanings of life from Medea’s proclamations about everything she deemed dastardly-worthy and wonderfully evil.
Her vindictive perception of existence and her one raison d’etre, a hatred and vile disgust towards men, was skillfully and vigilantly cultivated, and then deliberately disseminated to the world through blog-fart fan pages far and wide.
For her next holo-movie she would play the life and times of a very evil Antigone. Not the Sophocles version, but the recently found version by Euripides, wherein Dionysus intercedes, Antigone marries Haman and then murders Creon’s entire family in league with her mother Jocasta.
In Brandt David’s mind, as producer and director, there was no bad publicly and anything outrageous Medea did only perpetuated her beguiling naughty-actress mythology. Hubby Davidson was cast in a minor part as Hercules Bates, a heroic, but terminally depressed taxidermist who must render the murdered bodies of the royal family into life size mannequins for the palace porticos, walkways and the nightly passeggiata.
Lady Sisley remained Medea’s idee fixe of revenge and malice and she yearned to work in symbiotic partnership with her once again for the destruction of powerful men. She considered Lady Sisley’s marriage to Brandt degrading and utterly pathetic to both of them. The destruction of Brandt David played constantly on her mind. She tried in vain to convince Lady Sisley that Director David existed as a man in love with power and fame and not truly in love with her. When and if Lady Sisley finally realized Brandt was only a mirrored-manifestation of her long ago, deceiver, cad and bounder, Arturo Roark. Then they would destroy him together.
Young and still a forever virgin, Sisley-Virginia was simply banished to the shallow end of the pool in perpetuity. In her shallow end, in her youthful zest for life, she splashed and laughed like the fool teenager she was created to exemplify, she was ignorance in bliss personified. She’d taken up an unnatural adoration of everything French and had began to see Medea as a character out of the French Revolution, specifically as Marie Antoinette, with herself and Philomena in the guises of Madame de Pompadour and Madame du Barry, respectively. She experienced forbidden and vague android scenarios, wherein Medea was sent to the guillotine or became a disguised lowly scrubwoman in a French maid costume, to service hyper-lesbian, contra-sopranos divas of the revolution.
Sisley-Virginia yearned for the old ways, the days when Lady Sisley would hold court by the pool and they would play fun games like Quantum Yahtsee, SCRIBBLE, and Kill the Banker or Tetris for the Wealthy. She longed for the halcyon days, when the discourse revolved around always-wholesome, sweet-sixteen dalliances of things to come (except when it came to older men named Arturo). She missed Prunella, as Prunella had been the one moderating ugly creature that allowed all of them to express anger and viciousness not at each other but at her and thereby they could collectively feel at one with their exceptional wealth and beauty, and the universe at large.
Virginia wanted desperately to grow out of her sweet-sixteen archetype, to experience a mature love and a more mature understanding of the world. For to be a sexually hyped-up android in pubescent and anxiety ridden teenageosoity eternally, forever wanting the sons of rich men’s attentions, and frivolous enhancements to her already beautiful youth made even more beautiful, had begun to bore her.
Like all high-level androids, she wanted the one thing she could never have, humanity, even though it meant a finite lifetime. To android psychiatrists, this plateau in reasoning, by some highly nervous androids, was referred to as, homo sapienenses enviousosis. Conversely, a similar yearning existed in many extremely wealthy and neurotic humans who wanted eternal life as an android, called androideus facticioseous.
Sisley-Philomena Rich-Buildmore never fully recovered from the idea that Harley Davidson could never be her man. Philomena spent hours in the gazebo, suffering from the vapors and exhibited a wide array of symptoms including indistinctness, nervousness, insomnia, positron retention, heaviness in the lower registers, trisistor spasm, shortness of sight, cantankerousness, and a loss of appetite for imagined food or drink. She’d a tendency to tease and taunt Davidson’s pet cats, in all-consuming anticipations of gaining his attentions. She coexisted in his manly presence, a dream of sorts, so infatuated with Davidson that she collected his four cat’s fur-balls in English stoneware Mason jars. She hid the fur balls as a keepsake with her other Davidsonea and they became a fetish object that assuaged her loneliness. Fainting spells ravaged her life, so Lady Sisley assigned a defective servant-bot named Trixie 4, to mop her brow and offer her pseudo-smelling salts 24/7.
Philomena had taken to wearing black, imitation-vinyl capes and now fashioned her life on the Jane Austen novel, Mansfield Park. She became the character of Fanny Price, just as Lady Sisley had done in her youth. Philomena took refuge in the shy and retiring character of Fanny to escape the harsh machinations of Medea and her overwhelming sexual desire for Davidson.
She suspected Medea had done Prunella in, but her fear of Medea paralyzed her to never reveal this to anyone. In private, she applied herself to the principles of entertainment accounting, determining everything was not, ‘coming up daises in Denmark’ (as they say these days) and began to pry into Medea’s zemails and zipper-drives.
She spent inordinate amounts of time with the chauffer-droid, Linus “Lucky” Larabee, who had an equally bazaar fantasy life, that being the belief that he existed as the androidinal reincarnation of the fiction human and vampire killer, Professor Abraham Van Helsing.
Together, they wiled away the hours and spent many days deep in supernatural musings about what human life and death were all about. ‘If I were human’, remained one of their favorite amusement themes and divertissements in afternoons of playful repartee and tiddlywinks. They pondered how their final romantic death scenario might play out, what music would play at their funerals, and what wonderful things they would bestow upon a grateful world of fellow humans. They stimulated each other’s esoteric and hypothetical investigations into the fantastic realms of their androidal sturm und drang for hours and hours on end.
The metaphysical conundrum of this particular week’s exploration dealt with the consequences and the ramifications of an eternal world of android vampires. Could an android vampire, by sucking the electron lifeblood out of another android, gain even more infinite lifetimes in parallel universes and multiple dimensions?
As for Lovelace and Hard Drives, it became the greatest holo-film in the history of holo-films, and the social glue that kept the Lady Sisley-Lord David household bonded to each other in perpetuity. Unfortunately, Medea kept the books and became rich far beyond an offshore banker’s wet dream; so rich in fact that she owned the Kandy-Kane Spelling mansion outright and almost all the people and androids in it.
Medea had manipulated her way to great heights, but Lady Sisley and Lord David held the security codes, preventing her from doing physical harm to anyone or tossing them out on their fleshy-fat or bioelastic butts. The two of them also retained her primary activation codes, locked away in a secret safe deposit box in Vladivostok and of course, they knew the secret of her two-faced deception.
Medea walked a tightrope of financial hoodwinkery. She thrived as a devious droid in masquerade, a false public identity, and a scheme made in droid heaven, a situation of the devil’s and Intel’s makings, as she often thought in sinister glee and haughty hilarity. VainBitchyBazaar and Madame Doge de Fashonista, the top-dome’s premier women’s e-zines, identified her as the world’s most beautiful woman.
In exchange for keeping them all rich, famous and on the top level of ‘The Dome’, Medea coexisted in a dual deception never questioned or challenged her androidinal place in it. However, inwardly, Medea waited for the day Lady Sisley perished, leaving the wimp auteur Brandt David in proxy command, so she could then torture him until his timely demise and beyond.
***
Davidson sat poolside, in the striped pink and white speedo the advertising firm of Shy, Locke & Sauron, deemed best to comply with Brandt David’s artistic directions, which of course where overridden by Medea. Her plan was always to cast Davidson as a leading man in dementia, of moronic longings, into movie roles of desolation and the ridiculous. The always money-hungry and famed tri-gay photographers, iSketch artisans, holo-molder sculptors and Magnetic Resonator Imaging auteurs, fawned and artistically rendered Davidson’s bioelastic body into the man-made god figure that all manly men and advanced CloneDroid’s could imitate.
Looking up for a second, to increase current flow to his life-dulled circuitry, Davidson thought he saw a Zeppelin drift by at the very top of the Dome, directly over Casa Buildmore la Eternidad. He watched the mile-long Zeppelin float sluggishly down the curve of the, 'The Dome', landing, he presumed, somewhere in the vicinity of Tujunga Avenue and Sunset Canyon Drive.
To go ‘out there’, to getaway from Casa Buildmore, to escape into the raw and deadly world outside the dome to many a romantic fantasy, a survival test-quest for humans and droids alike, allowing them to escape a past, a present and or a future of hopelessness and futility.
Outside ‘The Dome’, life existed in an animalistic world ravaged by the 17th World War, a dismal life in the Blau Donauluftschiffahrtsstrudelverlorenkaput* Zones a place where only the bravest, worldly-wise and highly vaccinated survived.
He yearned for escape from Medea, from all the Hollywood holo-movie star nonsense and hype. Marriage to Medea was the second biggest mistake of his ersatz human life, his first mistake was falling in love with an evil imposter. He had no idea where or when it had all gone wrong. He deliberated asking Brandt to initiate a lawsuit against the CloneDroid Corporation for droid duplicity and fallaces sunt rerum species. He wanted an investigation into his love-at-first-sight algorithms; certain a voltage surge in a misguided attenuator had corrupted everything that true love should have been for him.
Outwardly, he remained in jovial sprits; his programming provided his witty butler persona, always in compliance to human expectations, faithful butler, husband and leading mandroid actor, but only while in good company. Alone with Medea, now that she’d revealed her true colors and aberrant personality, he could only sit silently, an android of quiet desperation, in analog and digital torment, of melancholic electrons swirling in fluxes of regret and woe. In this low voltage state, he considered just pulling out his six-pronged plug of existence and shorting himself out against the 196-inch graviton-plasma television.
The one remaining happy memory-moment of his life, dancing that last mambo, to the sounds of Duke Droid and his Hit Any Key Orchestra, with Prunella on that one fantastic night so long ago in Maui, so long ago.
She remained the single bright bulb at the end of an expanding, three-dimensional matrix of ‘n’s to an infinity of Prunella’s = [ai,j]i = 1,...,m; j = 1,..., he sighed aloud in exhalation of what should have been and remembered. Shivers shot up and down his tungsten-boron spine, recalling her radiant beauty walking off into that foaming sea on that last, full moon night of first love.
* Blue Danube airship vortex of the lost captain zones
