Chapter One: The Purchase
It was a bright June afternoon outside a corner coffee shop, Java Java Java, that saw two giggly late-teen girls converging on the sidewalk around quarter to five. Tanya waited at one of the white, wrought-iron tables outside the café with her Italian soda, her feet tapping impatiently in their black thick-sole sandals. Her expression changed quickly from anxiously pensive to ecstatic jubilation once she spotted her friend trotting up the sidewalk. Julie ran up in amorphic crosstraining sneakers and white shorts, clutching a brown paper bag that bore a bright red logo reading 'Golly Gee Golemics' in playful letters.
"Did you get it?" Tanya asked her friend excitedly. She tossed back her soda and leapt from her chair, bouncing in front of her friend.
"Of course, of course! I skipped out of 7th hour to get it!" Julie clutched the bag to her chest tightly as they fled the café. "Goddamn, you weren't kidding when you said it cost an arm and a leg! I thought they weren't going to accept my credit card!"
Tanya's tanned legs pumped while trying to keep her upright on the chunky sandals, designed more for standing around than running. "But they did accept it, right? Man, what's your dad gonna say when he sees this charge on his account?"
Julie laughed, tossing back her bobbed blonde hair. "He's not gonna see it, it's my card! He gave me this card to get whatever I wanted, and I want this. He doesn't really care what I charge on it as long as I pay it back..."
"Yeah, but how many months working at the bookstore are you gonna have to put in to pay it off?"
"Oh, he'll help me out if I get into trouble. Besides, I think I'll quit the bookstore and get a job at Chunky Grill. They've got a shift manager position opening up and I could make $20K a year, fucking A."
Laughing, the girls made it back to Julie's house. She called inside to see if her parents were home for any reason - they weren't, caught up in their own careers and appointments, which suited Julie just fine. She never got into enough trouble to warrant a constant watch, and was therefore afforded certain privileges in privacy and self-monitoring. While she felt her friends got into greater adventures and could experiment more, she also appreciated that she never met half the repercussions they endured. Life was a series of trade-offs, she figured, so she could play the good little girl, most of the time, if it let her get what she wanted, most of the time.
They scurried to Julie's room (after grabbing a bag of cookies and a carton of milk) and quickly put in some music: the current teen idols were the Pantywaists, rivaling the Milksops, two fiercely competitive boy bands the girls swooned for. To the tunes of "God I Love You Baby" and "We're So In Love" Julie and Tanya quickly tore the bag apart and studied the black and green box recently purchased.
Golly Gee Golemics, Inc., was a chemical company that exploited the recent discovery of feasible cloning for - what else? - economic gain. This meant that what they lacked in finesse, they made up for in quantity and shared their gift with the consumer world. What Julie had purchased was something like a cloning kit, yet a little more audacious than replicating pre-existing life: it claimed to create life of its own. What it did, actually, was create something closer to an organic robot, an automaton built of fibrous tissues and fluids rather than steel, copper, and silicon. It had the intelligence of a retarded insect, enabling it to follow simple commands but not permitting it to think for itself or, say, plan to escape and breed. This product was what Golly Gee Golemics called the 'Homunculus' (complete with a pronunciation guide for the consumer to say correctly, though "hunkulous" was a popular slang term for it).
"What's it say to do!" Tanya was impatient and giddy, too much so to sit still long enough to read the instructions or even breathe properly. She had to go sit down and moon over the Pantywaists' liner notes for their new CD, So In Love With You Girl. She sat down on the bed, kicked off her chunky wads of foam she called sandals, and stretched out to recover her breathing and focus properly. She was of Hispanic ethnicity, with long, luscious black hair she didn't deserve, deep brown eyes that made her parents nervous, and a short, naturally athletic body she didn't earn and never had to maintain - fistfuls of cookies were a staple of her diet and perhaps someday it would come back to kick her in the ass, but for the meantime she was a Latina minor goddess. She stretched her short legs, underdeveloped calves flexing, powerful thighs tensing from beneath her short white skirt. She wore a yellow spaghetti strap halter over her white bra decorated with wildflowers - a bra almost unnecessary on her young body. Crumbs lingered at the corner of her pouty lips, which she brushed off with the back of her hand. Her huge doe eyes flickered over the lyrics, most of which she could read without assistance, but if there was trouble, there was Julie to ask.
Julie had the fortitude to wrangle through the complex instructions, tackling the big long words with greater ease than the concepts they presented - "Tanya, if I'm reading this right, we have to give up a small skin sample for the kit to develop! Eeeww!"
"But it's totally worth it if it does what it says it does!" Tanya said between munches.
"Well, are you gonna give up some of your skin for it?"
"I thought you would..."
Julie looked at her friend with sharp blue eyes. "It's gonna hurt. I'm not gonna do it."
Tanya shrugged and went back to the liner notes. "Fine, I'll do it. But the first one we create is mine."
"Nuh-uh! We share it! I paid for this with my money!"
"And I paid you almost half of it!"
"Fine! You give me some skin, and it'll be equally both of ours!"
"Fine!"
"Fine!" Steamed, but not for long, Julie turned back to the instructions and read through the chemical combinations. She was almost the entire opposite of her friend, in physique if not in character. Already 5'9" at age 17, Julie was statuesque and more athletically inclined than her friend: she'd been with the high school track team for three years and enjoyed it immensely, participating in the distance running events faithfully. Her long legs kicked out and pumped to carry her body whistling through the air, her thin, pink lips pulled back in pleasure at the sensation of hurtling through space. She was more ready for a bra than her counterpart, though not so much that running caused her any injury. Hunched over the table as she pored over the chemical instructions, she had only a couple more years to abuse her posture before it would take an adverse effect and set in, but for the most part she was good to her body, generally eating right and never being ashamed of her height - otherwise, she would slump to hide it, like many other girls in her school and in generations before her, and their bodies inevitably grew into a permanent hunch. This wouldn't happen to Julie, she'd see to that.
Neither girl had considered boyfriends for very long, as Julie was largely disgusted with most guys in her classes, and Tanya trusted Julie's opinions and judgments more than her own - and as long as following Julie continued to pay off, she would continue to do so. She used to get into trouble before she hung out with the tall, confident blonde girl, and while she missed running around in the streets with her past friends, she felt grateful for staying out of trouble and still had a great time with Julie.
"Well, fuck," said Julie. Sweet as they were in most respects, both girls had salty mouths like sailors.
Tanya sat up, brushing crumbs off her halter top. "What's up, Jules?"
"These instructions say they take a week to ...you know, gel. The chemicals have to sit for a whole week before anything formulates."
The young Latina pouted, an expression which melted the hearts and weakened the knees of any young male fortunate enough to experience it. "And then how long after that?"
"Oh, no, that's it. One week, and then the hunkulouses get up and move around, and then we have to start training them."
"How the fuck do we train them?"
Julie rifled through the box' other contents. "Well, there's a training guide here, and... it looks like some kind of circuitry you plug into them. It says it's some kind of stimulus-response device."
"What the hell?"
Julie read on. "Oh, I get it. It'll be okay, it's really easy to use. Okay, come on up here and give me some skin," she said, holding up a plastic tube within a tube. Inside it all was a small razor designed to take out a square patch of two or three layers of skin - it stung, but it rarely bled. The whole process was not unlike the old Sea Monkeys kits kids could order from the backs of comic books. In fact, it was in one of their girl magazines that Julie and Tanya first saw the Golly Gee Golemics advertisement, which promised to produce a real-life humanoid life form that could respond to commands. The text in the ad didn't attempt to push the girls' minds in any particular direction, though the girl in the ad was wearing nothing more than a babydoll tee and panties, and the homunculus was dancing a jig on her thigh. Julie and Tanya's minds ran pretty swiftly in the same direction, and they intended to "educate" themselves and "experiment" with these "tiny little men," who grew no larger than six inches, the ad asserted. Breathless and staggered by the ramifications of having a tiny little "man" to play with, the girls made plans immediately to get part-time jobs and save up enough money to purchase a kit. When Julie's father presented her with a credit card on her 17th birthday, the plans came into fruition much swifter than they'd anticipated.
However, they didn't think they'd have to wait a week for all the action to start, and then however long it would take to train the little beggars. Ah, well, live and learn.