Mars Needs Books!. Gary Lovisi

would hold for him after he did it. A brain wipe for sure. Perhaps even a deep unmarked grave in a far away place where he would be dumped in and forgotten forever? The thought didn’t comfort him. Nevertheless, there was nothing he could do about any of this, other than obey. He was owned by the DOC and the DOC had given him an order. You did not ask questions. You just did as you were told. And, if you so desired, very quietly so no one noticed...you prayed.

      “I will tell you later precisely how to dispose of the body and you will carry out my orders exactly as I give them to you,” the girl’s voice said with a force of steel he could scarcely believe possible from one so young.

      “Yes,” Ryan said. There was really nothing else he could do or say, and still continue to exist on this side of heaven or hell.

      Then he did as she told him.

      * * * *

      Later, after it was all done, Arabella Rashid sat back in Simon’s chair and allowed herself to appreciate the utter exhilaration of unlimited power as it washed over her. Simon was gone, she was free. It was delicious. Almost infectious. Her eyes locked on the surveillance images playing out on the screens in front of her.

      She smiled, looked down at the man on the table being worked on by the DOC scientists, as per her orders and said softly, “Well, Ryan, when you wake up tomorrow you will not remember anything about Simon, or me, or what you did with his body. Instead, you will have an entire new set of memories and desires...some of them you would never have thought possible in your wildest dreams....”

      She picked up the old book now. From her own forays into forbidden texts she knew that it was what was called by people from the old days as a “paperback.” That was evidently because of the soft cover wrapped around the pulp paper hard-copy pages. It had been on the console beside her and now she thumbed through its pages at random. It was old, from LastCen, last century in the 1990s. A long time ago. Before the DOC, before the Authority, even before Simon—but just barely. It was something that proclaimed itself “a future science fiction classic”—whatever that might be.

      It had the title Mars Needs Books and seemed to be about the future—but not the future as it was now, as it really was here today, but one extrapolated from the past through rational conjecture. It seemed to be some alternate reality story, some primitive wish-fulfillment fantasy about a world that might be. Or, perhaps one that should be? But that was not this world at all.

      Arabella Rashid looked at the garish cover and smiled. There was a stalwart hero with ray gun and some sexy space-suited vixen with large breasts.... How trite? Funny, really. So quaint and how totally irrelevant. She threw the old paperback down on the console and looked back at the still form of James Ryan as the marvelous DOC mind machines pumped him full of desires, memories, and duty that had never been his own. Yet soon, they would be as much a part of Ryan as was his very soul. If he had one.

      “You’re taking a trip, Ryan. You’re going to Mars. And you’re going there to accumulate and collect old mystery and crime paperbacks. Preferably hard-boiled private-eye novels. Yes, that’s correct. And I’m going to send you shiploads of them, and many men—all settlers—will be transported out there and they will read and treasure them too! Troublemakers, malcontents, and fools, all with their brains fixed—just like you. Every one of them will be a fanatic just like you—obsessed with collecting paperbacks, buying, selling, trading, and above all reading the damn things! You won’t be able to help yourselves; it will be ingrained inside each of your minds. Then you will be mine. My modern equivalent of the Irish monks of our Dark Age, keeping the knowledge from books alive—the stories and the humanity they possess. But not scientific and technical data. That information is changeless and available unfettered in the digital record—for how would our society survive without it? No, what I am talking about here is fiction. The stories and novels that sing their songs to the human heart. The art of the storyteller to bridge that indefinable gap between life and truth and dreams—and yes, even nightmare. The haunting dreams and nightmares of men—and women—that is what is at stake here. These shall not be lost. And though the DOC has caused Truth to perish from this Earth—it shall not perish from our history. One day it shall return. Unfettered. These old mystery and crime paperbacks hold truth in their stories with individualistic heroes, and their many shades of good and bad. You shall protect and preserve them.”

      She watched Ryan closely. He did not move. He was in a stasis field. He had no idea what was being done to him.

      “You’ll all be fanatics. It just wouldn’t work any other way. You will be terrified, full of fear and hate. You will be programmed with a fear, an unreasoning paranoia about using any media other than hard copy paperbacks. You’ll be terrified of mind control from vids, any form of implants, all mass media in any form at all. You will never trust it—you can never trust it. Instead, you will be readers. You will read the old and trusted hard copy paperback books of LastCen. These hard copy editions, printed and bound in their own day are the only words you can trust. I will have it engrained and programmed within you all. This is the only mode of information storage device which has not been changed since it was published decades ago. Ryan, you and your fellow ‘Marsmen’, will only trust hard copy text because it can not be altered without discovery. You will hate the Authority. Some day, you and your band of misfits and malcontents will lead the revolution off-planet, on Mars, and then finally, on Earth.”

      CHAPTER THREE

      THE WHEELS ARE SET IN MOTION

      It took twenty years for her plan to come to fruition. She had been careful—she has had to be so very careful. She used Simon’s DOC science. However, instead of bringing back the monsters of the past as Simon had planned—freaks like Hitler, Stalin, Usama Bin Laden, and their insane evil ilk—she had cloned the personalities and minds of truly great people—men like Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Albert Schweitzer, and Albert Einstein—women like Ayn Rand, Margaret Thatcher, Corazon Aquino, and Golda Meir.

      Then just for pragmatism purposes and security concerns she rounded things out by including the psyches of great warriors like George S. Patton, George Washington, Robert E. Lee. Moshe Dayan, and Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington. When all these outstanding minds and personalities were combined, the amalgam was placed into a human replicant and named Moses Sage.

      Then Moses Sage was set to lead the revolution for human freedom and dignity on the Earth.

      Some day.

      Arabella Rashid called it the Janus Project. It was named after the ancient Roman god who had two faces. The two-face. She smiled at the idea. She liked the duel purpose of it all. When she explained the Janus Project to the DOC scientists and DOC Board, she did so as if it were merely the continuation of Simon’s genius plan. That plan had been to milk the DNA of the worst past masters of murder and mayhem in order to create a group of future DOC soldiers and leaders unlike anything the human race had ever seen. All working for Simon, and the DOC, of course.

      “Simon’s grand intent,” Arabella Rashid told the members of the DOC Board through secure link holochannels, “his Janus Project, was to offer through the bodies of a new generation of clones, the DNA and actual minds of some of the most ruthless men in history. These would serve the DOC and become the new shock troops of the empire. The new leaders for a new era of the world and then outer planetary domination. These were Earth’s most ruthlessly talented, and now from every past era of human history, they will be brought together again to work for us.”

      The applause from the Board members was staggering, the smiles and nods from the scientists was all the approval Arabella Rashid needed to secure her position as the new Director of DOC.

      “We see that now the proper choice has been made for Director,” Emilio Chávez said over a secure link from his region of planetary control in the North-South American Security Sector.

      “You will prove a worthy successor to Simon. This Janus Project is sheer genius,” Mildred Millian added, offering the younger woman a fist salute, a term of respect lately popular in the Southern European Security District, her area of planetary dominion.

      “The Janus Project,” Arabella Rashid continued, “will transform