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THE GIRL OF THE MONTH CLUB
by
Colin Campbell
I was already late for work but when I opened the door a
Transcontinental Courier delivery driver was in the hall
about to knock on my door.
"Are you William Wood?" said the courier.
"Yes," I said. "What's going on?"
"This is for you." He pushed a handcart into my
apartment and expertly flipped an ovoid shell of
thermoplastic off the cart. It slid on a flattened bottom
side and stopped at my feet just inside the door. It was
about the size of a beer barrel
"Please sign here." He held a clipboard toward me.
"What is it?" I said.
"Are you William Wood?"
"Well, yes, but I didn't order--"
"Then it's for you." The courier grabbed my right hand
and pressed my thumb onto a print plate before I could react,
then trotted away down the hall.
"Hey, wait a minute," I said, but he'd rounded the
corner pulling the handcart. "I didn't order anything like
this," I yelled after him.
The building manager came around the corner in his
electric golf cart just as I yelled. He squinted down at the
shell, then pointed at a label. "It's got your name on it,"
he said. He was an Oldie and he could read.
I looked at the label and it looked like my name--I know
the letters of my own name, WILLIAM MNEMONIS WOOD. "What does
it say?"
The manager read the label aloud for me: "William N.
Wood."
"My name is different from that," I said. "Wait a
minute, let me use my reader." I have a great reader, a
Mitsubishi that's only four inches long and a quarter inch in
diameter and reads 76 languages, and I rubbed it over the
label until my ear implant pinged. Then I touched the pointed
end of the reader to the printed words, and heard them
spoken. "Okay, my middle name isn't N., it's MNEMONIC," I
said. "There's some kind of mistake."
"You kids," said the oldie. "Shit, N. is just an
abbreviation, you kids don't even know what an abbreviation
is any more. Your middle name starts with N, you just said it
yourself."
"But what is it? I didn't order anything."
"I hope not. You were ten days late with the rent this
month. If you can afford this kind of stuff, you can afford
the rent."
He rolled away and I said "But I didn't order it, I
don't want it."
"Do whatever you want with it," the manager said. "If
you leave it out in the hall and I have to get rid of it
myself, you'll have it charged on next month's bill."
Then he was gone. I ran the reader over the rest of the
label, then touched the eight biggest words.
"Congratulations!" my ear implant said, "Here's your first
Girl of the Month!"
It was some kind of mistake, but I was already late for
work. I had to move the shell to close the apartment door.
It must have weighed a hundred pounds.
I pulled off the shipping label and there was a brochure
and an instruction manual under the label. I thumbed through
the brochure: it was full of pictures of naked women, and the
pictures were not only 3D, but motile and audible: the girls
writhed erotically on the pages and little moans and squeals
of pleasure escaped.
How the hell had this happened? I'd heard of The Girl of
the Month Club, but I'd never ordered it--first of all, it
cost a megabuck or more, and only an Oldie could afford one.
But mainly, it was such a geriatric idea--nobody but an Oldie
would want to screw one of these synthetic, non-human clones.
I mean, even a ?moner like me has standards.
I paged through the instructions folder but it was
almost all in writing. Well, I was already late for work...if
I was late one more time...I closed my door and went up one
floor to street level and hopped on my bicycle.
In the old days you had to lock your bike or somebody
would steal it. I can't imagine a Los Angeles like that. What
a barbarous world it must have been. The world the Oldies
made...only an Oldie would prefer a fantasy clone cobbled
together from dog and cat and kangaroo DNA.
I pedaled to the freeway and rode down the ramp and into
the slow lane. The freeway's magnetic field grabbed hold of
my bike's transducer and accelerated me up to a steady 55. It
was against the law, but it was faster than pedaling.
The transducer was one I'd pried out of a wrecked truck
after the cops left the scene of a crash. I welded it to the
frame of my bike and I was going to keep using it until they
caught me: the less time I spent out in the open on the way
to work, the less radiation I'd get.
I could have had my pick of any old-time car in the
city, of course, but gasoline is definitely out of my budget
class, and I've never had any practice driving on the freeway
in a car among the trucks.
Today was clear and sunny for a change. I could see the
mountains all around, and I took off my hood and enjoyed the
naked wind in my face. The pace of traffic slowed and I began
slipping between the trucks and I enjoyed the annoyed honks
from the truck drivers as I whipped past them. I hoped they
were Oldies, but not many Oldies had to take jobs as truck
drivers.
Only Oldies were able to afford things like the Girl of
the Month Club. You couldn't afford it if you were working
for the minimum wage at the Megalith Corporation, like I was.
In ten minutes I was at the Wilshire Boulevard exit, and
in another 5 minutes I was parking my bike at the surface
entrance of the Monolith Building. That's when Skizz tapped
me on the shoulder. He can really sneak up on you unnoticed.
"Hey, Billy," he said, "Need any ?mones?"
"What do you have?" I said. Sometimes Skizz has the
neatest stuff--rhino adrenaline, mutant insulin, tailored
testotesterone--but his older brother makes the stuff and
he's an experimenter, you never know if you might be the
first-time tester of some zappy ?mone. Skizz himself took a
big dose of schizoprine a couple years ago and still hasn't
really come out of it yet.
"Got some new pituitary," he said.
"Nah," I said. I'm already 6'8" and I'm not like those
Get HiGH freaks who aren't satisfied until they're seven feet
tall. I only do it once in a while.
"And some new thyroid you just won't believe."
"Yeah? What is it?"
"Kind of like an upper, gets you really going."
"No, I mean is it human, or what?"
"Well, it's panther thyroid, actually."
"Wow." I gave Skizz a gold dime and swallowed the ?mone
and went into the Monolith Employee Entrance. I announced my
name and employee number and pressed my thumb to the print
plate and the elevator opened. I started the long ride down
and wondered if that package was really from the Girl of the
Month Club, or if one of my pals was trying another stupid
joke...was there really a girl inside it? I remembered the
girl's face from the brochure. Felina was her name.
* * *
Twenty miles away and thirty levels underground in a
luxurious apartment with a delivery code only one digit
different from Bill's, William N. Wood, age 104, studied an
invoice and punched out the phone number of the New York
offices of The Girl of the Month Club. When the prosthebot
answered, he said "Hiya doll, we got some kinda fuckup here,
I got the bill but not the merchandise, lemme talk to a
human, okay? Yeah, I'll wait."
He knew it would be a long wait for a real human.
William N. Wood owned Albuquerque, New Mexico, through a
quirk of the Urban Homestead rules, and he made a comfortable
living by sifting through the homes and stores and factories
and warehouses of Albuquerque and removing valuables and
transporting them to Los Angeles for sale.
He had to do the work himself, or at least supervise it,
because unsupervised labor would simply remove the stuff for
their own profit.
There was no local labor to be had in Albuquerque, of
course. Nobody lived there, not since World War III. Vast
expanses of American urban area had been wiped clean of life
by neutron bombs, but the cities themselves were virtually
undamaged. Several parts of the continent were devastated,
true, but there was so much property left over, and so few
people, that everybody was rich. Sort of.
* * *
It was a long ride down the elevator to the offices of
the Megalithic Corporation. At ground level I was the only
person in the elevator. The elevator stopped about 20 levels
down and another passenger stepped in. He looked like another
?moner to me, but he must have had a good job if he lived 20
levels down.
I thought about the Girl of the Month Club package. Back
before the turn of the century they thought Virtual Reality
would be peddling the whores of the future. Virtual reality
had TV eyeglasses and earplugs and handgloves: that was it.
No tactile feedback devices. They assumed a breakthrough in
which a brain/computer interface is developed that allows
people to "jack in" and experience full-sense transcription.
That breakthrough never surfaced, but genetic engineering
blossomed and made possible the sale of living, breathing,
moaning fuck dolls.
Hey, maybe I could sell it to some Oldie. It had to be
worth a megabuck. Sure, it was some screwup and they'd catch
me eventually, but I could jolt the apartment and be 50 miles
away in another unregistered apartment, and what could they
do?
The elevator stopped and two people got on. They looked
at me disdainfully as we started down again. I have a real
stupid job, and I guess they could tell. Megalithic Systems
Optimization, Inc., has the federal contract for the moon
mines. Six hours a day I sit in front of a video plate and
control a boreworm in Mare Serendipt on the Moon. All day
long I sit in front of a flat video screen and control the
flow and interaction of complex colored shapes, according to
the instructions of the day, using the various controls. It
paid the minimum wage, a hundred bucks an hour, and there was
virtually no hope for advancement. But it paid the rent.
And it was an underground job. If you want to be a
player in LA, you have to be underground. Skizz works above
ground, and makes big cash, sure. His brother Rovar also
makes big money salvaging from LA homes and businesses, but
he has a secret gasoline cache and how can you plan to find
that?
Surface work is a dead end, that's what I think. The
real world is Downstairs. So I was enduring the minimum wage
life while trying to get a clue for advancement.
The elevator halted at my floor and I stood up. I felt
the ?mones starting to come on already. There was a
glittering edge to everything, and motion and time seemed to
be slowed down. The door opened and I stepped out into the
giant underground mall. Many stairways led to levels further
below. I got on the slidewalk, and rode it about half a mile
to the Megalithic offices.
At the office they were having some kind of ceremony. I
was embarrassed at being late, but hardly anybody noticed
when I came in. I saw a couple of my pals, but the only
person I really noticed was Mandy Feather, the best-looking
woman in the company. She's a year younger than me but she's
already assistant manager of the process implementation
department. I was embarrassed to be thinking about Felina in
front of Mandy. She has really nice tits and today she wasn't
wearing a top: instead she had a new fur job, short blond
hair that covered only her breasts. "Hi, Mandy," I said,
waving; she smiled bleakly at me and sat down next to Mr.
Gardner, the Oldie in charge of my department at Megalithic.
He whispered in her ear and rubbed her fur job, and she
giggled.
Hair cream is easy to get if you have enough money--just
rub it on and it changes the DNA in your skin cells and hair
starts growing. It's awfully expensive--but Mandy made a lot
more money than I did.
Then the ceremony was over, employee of the month awards
or something, and Mr. Gardner was helping Mandy stand up, and
I pushed forward past them and let the crush of the crowd
make me collide with Mandy, and I gave her a hip thump as we
touched and she caught my eye just before I surged away.
I don't know if it was the ?mones, but it seemed like
she was staring right into my soul. I had this big urge to
bite her on the back of the neck.
Then I was in my cubicle and the Lunar substratum was
rushing toward me at 30 feet per minute and I opened the
inhalers when properly dense rock appeared ahead on the
sonar/radar plate and I steered toward denser rock further
ahead and I kept a lookout for patches of water to gobble.
I made the minimum wage of a hundred dollars an hour and
there wasn't much chance I'd ever make more than that--I
graduated from high school but that didn't count as a
credential any more. I've got my skills but they are
equivalent to pool-hall skills. Playing pool takes
mathematical insight, but not mathematical training.
Intuitive mathematics. I control the moon robots by shuffling
shapes and colors on the screen. When I touch an outline on
the screen I can change its size and color and shape; if I
drag my finger across the screen, the image will follow
along.
A pulsing yellow barrier line appeared on one edge of
the screen. It represented a bunch of hypothetical dimensions
that I didn't know anything about. In the rules it meant I
couldn't go in that direction with a blue cube or a rotating
dodecahedron.
I felt the ?mones roaring up in me. I could sling those
cubes and dodies easy as can be. Then the break signal
chimed, a tone signaling the first break. I put my controls
in neutral and got a cup of coffee and went to Fred Metz's
carrel.
"Hey Fred, did you see Feather's fur job?" I said.
"Yeah, please don't ask me to stand up."
"Maybe you should ask her if you could borrow some hair
cream," I said.
Fred was caught outside during a Stage 1 radiation alert
last summer, and all his hair fell out. He was too cool to
wear a rad suit until then.
I liked Fred because he was like me--He grew up in the
Midwest and came to Los Angeles because that's where the
action is. We found out that every young man in North America
had the same idea.
"Skizz has some great thyroid, panther thyroid. You
should try it. Sharpens your senses."
Then when I was looking at Fred's screen I suddenly saw
that his screen was just like mine except the barrier line
was on the other side. "Hey, Fred, our machines must be right
together, we're both in lOO-meter diversion."
"I wonder what the mining robots look like," Fred said.
"Hey," I said, "Wouldn't it be cool to drill into each
other's tunnel and see what we look like?"
"We might get in trouble," Fred said.
"Oh, I bet I can turn the robot the way I want without
using any blue cubes or rotating dodies. That's all the rule
is about."
"Okay," Fred said. He studied the screen. "I'll bet I
can cross in front of you."
"Oh yeah? Okay, loser buys ?mones."
It wasn't that hard to do. I went back to my carrel and
slapped and tickled my screen and made my miner cross into
Fred's path. I programmed for a visual simulation. At first
it was normally boring, nothing but a dark rock face and a
jumble of broken rock, but then the rock face shattered apart
and I saw Fred's miner, face to face. A fifty-foot diameter
of lasers and a central structure for grinding and conveying
the ore. Big deal. It looked just like the pictures.
I shrugged and returned my miner to the right path--just
in time because Mr. Gardner and Mandy Feather came back in,
and Mr. Gardner was preeny and stalked around finding fault
with us.
Near the end of the shift I saw Mandy standing alone by
the transmutation monitor and I stepped up behind her.
"Mandy, we're going to Hauser's after work for a couple of
drinks,would you like to join us?" I said.
She whirled and gave me a disgusted look and stalked
away without answering.
There was a radiation alert at quitting time, so I was
able to take underground transportation home for free instead
of bicycling. When I got to Hauser's Bar after work, Skizz
and Fred had a table and I got a beer and sat down with them.
Hauser's is near my apartment and is one story underground,
so it's fairly safe, even if it's a cheap and sleazy joint.
Fred and Skizz and I were part of the Boy Imbalance. A
few years before I was born, they invented a way to make sure
your kid was a boy or a girl, and my mom and dad decided they
wanted a boy.
So did everybody else. It was just a couple of years
after the Fuckup War, and as in every previous era of human
history, parents favored the production of male children.
When cheap, reliable methods of determining the sex of your
offspring came on the world market, suddenly only boys were
being born. In some countries 85% of births were boys at the
height of the fad. I was born late in the cycle, when the
oldest of the Boy Bulge were 16, and then the Big War started
when I was 6, and is still going on, although not in the
fearsome style of the early days. Today it's a worldwide
armed truce, but we still average five or six nuclear
incidents a year.
I had a lot of friends. They were all guys. Oh, there
were lots of women my age, too. Somewhere. But it seemed like
they were all taken by Oldies. "The one I want is Mandy
Feather," I said. "That girl in the Throughput Implementation
department."
"Yeah, I'd use my implement and give her some
throughput," said Fred Metz.
Then Skizz's brother Jim showed up. Jim was a surface
worker--a guy who harvests material goods from the ruins of
the old world above. He had a heavy radiation tan. "You
should have seen what we found today," he said. "We cracked
open this office building and every skeleton was wearing a
Rolex."
Then an Oldie came in with two beautiful girls who
couldn't have been older than 18. You can do a lot with
cosmetics, and god knows the Oldies have been trying a long
time, but there's still something about a girl who's really
only 18 that is beyond the grasp of the cosmetic art, despite
genetic engineering and all.
We watched them for a while and talked about Oldies.
"Why can't that old fart join the Girl of the Month Club or
something," said Fred, "and leave the real girls for us?"
"You have to have big cash to join the Girl of the Month
Club," Skizz said. "And you can't just join, you have to be
nominated."
"How do you know?" I asked,
"Hey, I make money, I tried to join once."
The Oldie got up and went to the Men's room and I said
"You can have your Girl of the Month Club, I'm going to try
some live flesh.I went to the Oldie's table. "Hi, girls, I'm
Bill Wood, and I wonder if you'd like to have some company
more your own age."
They looked at me the way you look at radiation
blisters. The big runny putrid ones. "Grav out, goldless
one," said the redhead. The brunette with the full-body
scintillation film said, "Oh, please tell us all about
processing," real sarcastic, and then they acted like I
wasn't even there.
I went back to the table and Fred and Skizz and Jim
razzed me for a while. That's when this Oldie woman sat down
and started hassling us. She had these wrinkles you wouldn't
believe and her ears and her nose were so big and hairy, eck.
She tried to buy us drinks, offered us some psychotabs--Skizz
was interested at first but I think he just wanted to buy
them for resale, not use them.
The Oldie put her arm around me and tried to pull me
toward her and her breath was awful. "Come on, honey, all I
want is your cock for a little while, okay?" and she reached
down and grabbed me.
"Hey!" I said, and that made Skizz and Fred laugh, and I
jumped up and ran out and went home to my Cube.
The shipping shell from the Girl of the Month Club was
still there. "Fuck it," I said. I pulled the release tab and
the shell whooshed and a waft of chill air came out as the
internal suspended animation circuits shut off. I put a meal
in the microwave and looked through the instruction manual.
It took about an hour for the shell to cycle through. I
sat nervously waiting for the girl to start poking through
the shell. I'd been looking at the brochure and using my
reader to listen to the words but it was awfully complicated
and there was a lot of writing. I was starting to worry...the
brochure warned about how expensive the girls were if you
damaged them, because they had to be returned at the end of
the month. You had to feed them a special nutrient syrup or
they would die.
I decided I would just keep the girl one day and then
call in and let the mistake be known. That would be the right
way to do it.
Suddenly a circular piece of the shell popped loose and
a girl's nose poked out and inhaled deeply. I hastily thumbed
through the manual and found the picture of the nose coming
out and when I looked at it the rest of the shell in the
picture peeled back like artichoke leaves. "Be sure to save
the leaves for return shipment of your girl at the end of the
month," said the reader.
I pulled the leaves off. There were twelve of them and
after just three were off the girl's head was exposed and I
could see she was beautiful, half asleep but fearful and
anxious. Her hair was wet and matted and her skin was covered
with fluid--as I pulled back more leaves a quart or two of
liquid gushed onto the floor. When I pulled the last leaf off
she opened her eyes and looked right at me and moaned and
darted her eyes around and struggled to move. I touched her
hand and she flowed onto me, a huddling frightened girl
hugging me for life, wet and bawling.
According to the manual this was the "imprinting" time.
They'd grafted duck DNA into the clones so that they bonded
with their owner as baby ducks bond to the first moving thing
they see after hatching. The bonding was pheromonic: the
girls were imprinted by the owner's smell factors, and no
embarrassing incidents would result if a non-member were to
encounter one of the girls.
The girl was dripping wet and naked and clamped herself
against me, burrowing through clothes to press her flesh
against mine. The manual suggested that I sit and hug and
soothe her for an hour while she adapted to her new
environment and absorbed my pheromones. When the pheromonic
imprinting was completed, she would be ready for whatever
sexual gymnastics I had in mind.
But the way she was sobbing and moaning and clinging to
me... she wasn't even 5 feet tall, and couldn't have weighed
85 pounds, but with tits that wouldn't quit and a tiny waist
and the cutest ass. All just as advertised.
I was really turned on but I followed the instructions
and just held on to her. I was kind of afraid of her,
actually. She was wet and I tried to pry her off so I could
get a towel, but she fretted and clung to me. I stood up to
get a towel and she rode me like a leaf plastered to a
windshield by the rain.
I toweled her back but her front was clamped against me.
I had a hard-on that was starting to be uncomfortable, but
after a half an hour she began a sniffing ritual, nuzzling
against my chest and licking me and crawling up my body to
lick my face--it wasn't really like kissing--and then she
moved down and sucked me in and after long bliss I gave her
the final pheromonic imprint, a long jet of my own personal
DNA files. The rest of the night was an endless exploration
of orgasm, and I didn't have any moral qualms.
But in the morning I did. I woke early and couldn't go
back to sleep. She looked cute snoozing in my bed...but she
wasn't human, she was just an artificial construct cobbled
together from dog and cat and kangaroo DNA.
She was so sleek and trim. Part of the reason was that
she didn't have much in the way of internal organs. In order
to make a clone with the narrowest waist, the bioengineers
had left out intestines, for the most part. I looked through
the brochure again until I found the "FEEDING" section. The
girls needed a couple ounces a day of nutrient solution--a
half liter flask had been included inside the egg.
I poured her a little glass of it and shook her awake.
She drank it with a slobbering gratitude.
We did it again before I went to work.
******************************************
William M. Wood dialed the Girl of the Month Club again.
"Dammit, you said I would have my shipment by today, and
there's no sign of it."
"I'm sorry, sir," said the prosthebot. "Our records show
your shipment has been received."
"Let me talk to a human."
"I'm sorry, sir, all humans are out of the office at the
moment. May I help you?"
"Look, I'm leaving for Albuquerque. I wanted to take
this month's girl with me, but now you've wrecked it. Now you
make sure she's here when I get back, you understand? The
shipment hasn't arrived. I don't care what your records show.
Send it now." He broke the connection, then programmed his
computer to repeat the complaint.
When the realtime clock in William Wood's computer
dialed the Girl of the Month Club and repeated the message,
it was three in the morning in New York. Just at that moment
in Times Square in front of the offices of the Girl of the
Month Club, a mugger slipped up behind a pedestrian and
pressed a gun into his back. "Gimme your dough or you're
dead," he said.
The pedestrian whirled and pulled an ion gun. The mugger
fired two shots from his .44 Magnum into the pedestrian's
chest, to no effect.
The pedestrian pulled the trigger of his ion gun once,
and then again.
One charge from the ion gun went through the office wall
into the computer of the Girl of the Month Club and scrambled
several memory banks during William M. Wood's call.
The mugger slumped to the ground without a mark on him:
the ion gun's charge coagulated the flesh in a three-inch
wide path through his body, like hard-boiling an egg.
The pedestrian plucked two slugs from his bulletproof
vest, put his ion gun away, and walked on.