Graceland
Just after high noon Martian Coördinated Time, Siddhartha O’Reilly was awakened by the distant sun, a pale orange blur shining into the bedroom of his hotel suite. Hungover after a night of heavy drinking, he sat up effortfully in bed. Although the gravity on Mars was forty percent of Earth’s, he struggled to reach for the silk robe on the chair beside him. The bedroom had the look of a Vegas-style penthouse. Gilded French furniture, marble floors, gold wall decorations. Outside the tall Palladian windows, Olympus Mons, three times the height of Earth’s Everest, shimmered relentlessly against the crimson sky.
Stumbling to the living room, Sid spotted the bag of powdered FlashBang he’d misplaced the night before, wedged in the gap between a pair of leopard print sofa cushions. He plopped down beside it, shook a couple of sloppy lines onto the coffee table, and snorted them up through a rolled hundred-Yuan banknote.
The bliss was almost immediate. Sighing, Sid wiped the table clean with the palm of his hand, then headed shakily to the spa-like bathroom. His meeting with the Graceland resort’s directorate was scheduled to start in an hour.
…
“Allow me to speak frankly,” Graceland’s chief negotiator, a mutated albino, began after Sid had taken a seat between a pair of glum execs at the enormous boardroom table. Located on the top floor of the resort’s central biosphere, the conference module overlooked an exact replica of Elvis’s Memphis mansion. As the mutant spoke, a grit-laden Martian breeze agitated the grove of synthetic polymer oaks scattered across the sandy lawn. “We’ve studied your offer,” she continued. “But QuikLaunch has grossly underestimated Graceland’s real value. I can’t believe you expect us to take your bid seriously.”
In a world that made sense, the meeting would have been a layup. Fierce competition from Freaktown, the Japanese-based hotel casino complex operating out of the Mawrth Valis, had all but bankrupted the resort. But after two hours of heated discussion, the parties found themselves stalled in a Mexican standoff. Attempting to retain her composure, the mutant suggested they take a break. Leaning forward, she pressed a button on her console. A moment later the door opened and an Ursula Andress cyborg entered wearing the skimpy black bikini her original had flaunted as Margarita Dauphin in Fun in Acapulco.
“Thank you, #9,” the mutant said as the cyborg placed a bowl of colorful pills on the table.
“Will you require anything else? Emo, 24k, Sedatedonin?” The cyborg spoke with a pronounced Swiss-German accent.
“No, that will be all.” The mutant dismissed her with a wave of her hand, then turned to Sid. “Beautiful, isn’t she?” She steered the bowl of poppy-blue pills in his direction. Her huge smoke-white head resembled a giant cauliflower. “The Ursula series is one of our most popular Girlfriend models.”
…
After the meeting broke up, Siddhartha and his Mars-born assistant, Rollo, a fern-like young man half Sid’s age, retreated to the rundown bar at the King Creole Casino.
“What’ll it be, gents?” their bartender, a male Tuesday Weld asked them.
The two ordered shots of chemo-whiskey and an envelope of Bang.
Sid put his elbows on the bar and looked around. Over Rollo’s shoulder, he spotted a second bartender, another beautiful young man with Tuesday Weld’s face, serving drinks at the opposite end of the room. “How many Girlfriends and Boyfriends are there?” he asked.
“Perhaps a hundred and fifty. But that number pales beside the cyborgs at Freaktown,” Rollo said. All the native Martians were like him — mutants or scarecrows. In the space of a few decades, the Martians seemed well on the way to becoming a new species. “The cyborgs are essentially like us,” Rollo went on, “but their conditioning is too strong for them to possess any meaningful autonomy.”
“That’s all moot now,” Siddhartha said. He reached for the Bang and poured out a line. “QuikLaunch is planning to abandon the Elvis angle. It’s passé. They want to convert Graceland to a more generic adult theme park.”
…
Back at his hotel suite, Siddhartha poured himself a Martian white wine, undressed and powered up the hot tub. After twenty minutes in the scalding water, he felt better. He climbed out and slipped into an “EP” monogrammed bathrobe. In one of the pockets, he found a stray Extasol. He dry-swallowed it and placed a call to the front desk. “I want a Girlfriend Cyborg,” he said. “Send her up now, please.”
…
“What do they call you,” Sid asked the Girlfriend ten minutes later as she crossed the room in stiletto heels.
“I am known mononymously as Ann-Margret #7,” the cyborg answered. Her heavily eyelinered blue eyes boldy met Sid’s gaze. “But sometimes I am called Rusty Martin, the swimming instructress in Viva Las Vegas. Have you happened to see it? Released by MGM in 1964, it’s a favorite with Elvis fans. I can act out a scene for you,” she purred. “An up-beat song and dance number?”
“Maybe later,” Sid said smiling hard at the cyborg. “I thought we’d go to bed first.”
…
Unfortunately for Sid, the sex was disappointing. He was too high to enjoy it. Afterward, he fell asleep immediately. When he awoke an hour or so later, he was surprised to discover that it was still light outside. The longer Martian day constantly disoriented him.
Wrapped in a plush towel, Ann-Margret #7 emerged from the bathroom and sat down on the edge of the bed. Together, she and Sid inhaled a few fat lines of Blast.
“This is what I’m going to miss most about Mars,” Sid said after snorting the last line.
“Will you be returning to Earth soon?”
“Yes, in a couple of days.”
The cyborg looked at him in a funny way.
“What is it?” Sid asked.
Nervously, she passed her fingers through her hair. There were black roots under the fiery red Beehive. “Is it true that the cyborgs are going to be terminated?”
“Who told you that?”
“That’s the rumor. Everybody says so.” Despite her visible unease, Ann-Marget #7’s voice was lacking in affect.
“The truth is, I don’t know,” Sid lied. “Are you afraid of dying?”
The cyborg thought about it. “Yes. I suppose I am,” she said at last. “Something must be at fault with my hypno-conditioning.”
…
Sid redirected the air nozzle above his seat and stared out the window of the hover car deftly piloted by Ann Margret #7. After billing him an additional 10,00 Yuan, she agreed to fly Sid to Olympus Mons before he returned to Earth.
“Mars takes its name from the Roman god of war,” Ann-Margret #7 told him, as she leveled off the flying car to an altitude of 1000 feet. “Owing to its orange-red color, Chinese astronomers called it the fire star.” It was a spiel she’d evidently recited to countless sex tourists.
Up ahead, a flaming meteor plummeted silently onto the desolate lava plain like a cigarette tossed out the window of a speeding car.
“Did you know that on average Mars is approximately 142 million miles from the Sun? It should be no surprise then that the average surface temperature is negative 81 degrees Fahrenheit. Without our space suits our bodies would literally explode.”
The flew over a chain of razorous mountains. A squatter settlement had entrenched itself In the foothills. The place looked grim — a sprawling hovel of ramshackle geodesic igloos. Many of the inhabitants appeared to still be living out of their space ships.
“Can I tell you something strange?” Ann-Margret #7 asked.
“If you’d like.”
The clone’s nipples poked out like bottle tops through her silver lamé space suit. “Sometimes I think I really am Ann-Margret,” she confessed.
“Those are implanted memories. You’re a synthetic machine.”
“Yes, I know. And yet, they feel true.” The hover car’s powerful rockets droned softly in the background. “I was sixteen. It was all new to me. You pose for photos and then they take you to Hollywood to make pictures. That’s how it works.” She seemed confused. A sheen of perspiration twinkled on her high cheekbones.
…
The hover car circled slowly above Olympus Mons, the volcano’s summit bathed pink-orange in the Martian sunset.
“Prepare for touchdown,” Ann-Margret #7 said. Red dust swirled around them as they settled to the surface.
Unused to wearing his stiff space suit, Sid was afraid he might fall. The Martian soil felt like hard beach sand. It cracked when they walked on it.
“Mars is so beautiful,” Ann-Margret #7 said over her suit radio. Her voice was cold and silvery. Above their bubble helmets, the scattered stars burned white-hot in the alien sky.
Sid felt a twinge of sympathy. The Girlfriends and Boyfriends were as good as dead. Ann-Margret #7 must have known that.
“I love Graceland,” she said. Her eyes were wide. “I could never envision leaving.” In the distance, Graceland glowed like a giant fishbowl. “It’s paradise.”
―
This story is part of a series; previously published Siddhartha stories include “Watchtower” (in Crack the Spine) and “Bad Astronauts” (in The Opiate).
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