Blonde Joke Chapter Eighteen by Jeffrey M. Mahr   How can you tell if a Blonde has been working on a computer? White-Out ® on the screen.

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“We can absolutely guarantee that Dr. Isseksen’s process works,” an exasperated Dick Baldwin insisted as he looked around the frowning faces filling plush, leather appointed chairs around the oversized, over-polished hardwood table in the conference room at the Cravat. He could not understand why these men were ready to throw in the towel and more money than either Harry or he could imagine. “How could you possibly think otherwise?”

“When the inventor says it’s a crock, you tend to take her at her word,” Chang answered for the group.

“But that doesn’t make any sense,” Dick responded and threw up his hands in frustration.

“Yeah,” Harry chimed in.

“Did you chat with her when you worked together at GenTech? Did you compare notes about your families? Were you even aware of her younger sister?” Archie asked.

“No, not until we went to find Dr. Isseksen and Tom...er, Tommi. They were at her sister Maggie’s apartment,” Harry acknowledged, albeit grudgingly.

“So how can you definitively claim that Tommi was not just a twin sister you never knew about and that this was not an elaborate con?” Jack asked.

“We were there,” Harry exclaimed. “We saw it work. We nursed Tom Brodsky through his change. I’ll bet that if you check birth records they’ll prove that Katrina Isseksen didn’t have a twin sister. She certainly never spoke of one so I can’t understand why she would tell you people that Tommi was her twin sister rather than her physical clone.”

“Hell! We can prove it works,” Dick continued. “We have a small supply of ViTaGeSeM. We can make more. Then we could find a test subject and use it on them. We can prove it works,” he repeated again, as if saying it a second time would make it more believable.

“We’ve already been stung once,” Jack noted, “and in a rather costly manner.”

The other investors angrily murmured their agreement as Jack continued. “Why would we risk even further damages to both our reputations and our finances by considering what could only be unauthorized human testing?”

“Fine,” Harry’s frustration won out over reason. “We’ll take the ViTaGeSeM ourselves. We’ll sign legally binding statements indicating that we are dong this against your advise and consent and that you are merely providing a biologically secure environment to prevent any risk of contamination. That will also allow you to monitor and confirm that we actually change. Will that make you reconsider?”

Out of the corner of his eye, Harry saw Dick staring at him in shock and Harry realized he had once again allowed his anger to speak for him.

The investors looked at each other questioningly. There was little risk to them from such an action. It would still take time to process their legal actions. A month or two delay, if it even came to that, would not make much difference and if the process really did work, then they were back in the game. Still, not one of them was willing to jump without even more careful consideration given the events to date. Finally, Jack, still speaking for the group, said, “Leave us your cards. We’ll get back to you and thank you for your time, but right now we have another appointment.”

With slumped shoulders, Dick and Harry marched slowly out of the room, passing two people on the way in to the meeting room at the Cravat, a familiar looking woman and the man accompanying her. When the door closed, Dick turned to Harry and asked, “Did that woman look familiar to you?”

“Yeah, I think we know her too. Wasn’t she the secretary that let us into Brodsky’s office?”
“Oh, shit!’ Dick groaned. “We are so screwed.”

The folks at the Cravat had surprisingly agreed to let Harry and Dick make some more ViTaGeSeM, but it was downright boring sitting in the lab at GenTech were this had all started and staring at the incubator as it cooked up more lots of ViTaGeSeM. At least Harry had brought some magazines to read once they had caught up on the backlog of professional journals in their mail boxes–that is if you could call the soft porn he was perusing "magazines." Pacing helped for a while. Then Dick moved on to cleaning out the refrigerators, then the counters, and finally the walls. It was while clearing off the excess on the lab bulletin board that he saw it, yet another of the ubiquitous blonde jokes from Tom Brodsky.

Harry became concerned enough to ask when he glanced up from his “article” for the second time and noted that Dick hadn’t moved in quite a while. He was standing there, back to Harry, hands at his sides and staring at something on the bulletin board.

“Hey, Dick. Are you all right?”

No answer.

“Dick? Dick! DICK!”

“Huh? What? Oh, Harry,” he finally answered bemusedly.

Suddenly, wary, Harry said, “Okay, Dick. What’s percolating inside that little mind of yours?”

“Nah, forget it, Harry. It’s too crazy.”

“Okay.” Harry returned to his magazine, wondering what Miss October’s favorite turn on would be.

“Harry?”

Harry grunted. It was chocolate ice cream. What a shock.

“Harry?”

Studiously ignoring the intrusion into his contemplations, Harry read further to find out that her biggest turn off was liverwurst and recognized the bond of similar likes and dislikes. Harry was please to see they had so much in common.

“Harry?”

With a sigh, Harry placed his magazine on the counter top. “What, Dick? You’re not going to leave me be until you tell me are you?”

“I have a really, really weird idea, Harry old pal.”

Harry groaned and bit his lip. This was going to be even worse than usual.

“I was reading the items of the bulletin board…”

“And I was reading this magazine. How about we go back to what we were doing and we’ll both be happy?”

“Oh, I think I can make you happy, Harry. I think I’ve figured out a way out of our little problem.”

“Why am I suddenly feeling intense dread? You’re not going to stop until you’ve got whatever is bottled up inside you out, are you?”

“Nope, but I really do think you’ll like this idea. It’s so out in left field no one would ever expect it, yet I think it would work. Really work.

“So tell me already. Just speed it up. Miss October is waiting,” Harry grumped.

“I’ll do my best, but this is weird enough that I’ve got to build up to it.”

“Fine, fine, just do it already.”

“Okay. As I was saying, I was reading the items on the bulletin board…” Dick stopped to see if Harry was going to interrupt again. When he just growled, Dick continued.

“One of the items was another one of those blonde jokes from Tom Brodsky.”

“Yeah, you’ve got to admit, his getting stuck with that injector full of ViTaGeSeM was a wonderful example of heavenly retribution. Tell blonde jokes–become a blonde joke.”

“True, Harry, except she isn’t really a joke is she?”

“No,” Harry admitted, “she isn’t. That brain in that body should scare the hell out of any male within three counties.”

“Exactly. Now our problem is that we have no futures. Old Man Brodsky has seen to that.”

“True. No jobs in the fields for which we’ve trained unless we do marginally legal things like the preparation of biologicals without authorization we’re doing now.”

“Marginally,” Dick snorted. “This is out and out illegal and we both know it. Anyway, back to my idea. Instead of just cooking up another batch of ViTaGeSeM like we’re doing, we need to do something that more permanently helps us.”

“Agreed. What do you have in mind already?” Harry didn’t know where Dick was going yet, but from the amount of hemming and hawing being done, he was certain he was not going to like it.

“Did you notice that I also cleaned up the refrigerator?”

“Yeah, you’re a regular maid service. Come on, Dick. Get to the point already so I can say no and we can get back to doing something more functional, like reading magazines.”

“Okay, but that means doing it the hard way and wearing you down afterwards.”

Harry just sighed, and reached for his magazine.

“We need to inject ourselves with the sample of ViTaGeSeM in the refrigerator,” Dick rushed to get the words out. “That way, we prove that the stuff works without the extra delay of finding some poor sucker to act as a guinea pig AND we end up with completely new identities, one’s Brodsky would never think to for when he gets around to killing us.”

Harry’s hand stopped mid grasp. Dick could see his eyes glazing over as he processed what had he had been told. Almost thirty seconds later, Harry dropped his hand without picking up his magazine and turned to Dick. His only response was “No,” but it was not the firm, clear, decisive answer Dick had expected. With a sigh of his own, Dick began the arduous, step-by-step process of justifying the logic behind what he readily agreed was the strangest idea he had ever had.

This whore was a good one, she screamed with a shrill sound that almost made him feel for the bitch. Franklin struck her with the crop and savored her pain. Spread-eagled, face down on the bed with her hands and feet cuffed, she writhed in agony, tossing her hips and her blonde hair erotically as she struggled unsuccessfully to avoid the next blow and the next…

The red marks from the earliest blows were turning into welts. Dropping his boxer shorts, Franklin was stiff and ready. It was time to mount her; to show the lowly whore her place, but then she began to laugh. It was a deep hearty laugh, a laugh at his expense, a disrespectful laugh, a distain-filled laugh. Brodsky hated it.

Forgetting his under shorts, he instead began beating the woman harder, flailing about with the whip so that it struck every part of her fully exposed body. Red marks shown everywhere, and more than half his strikes were hard enough to tear gouges in the skin so that the red stains of blood mixed with the marks creating a patchwork theme of color that would be applauded by the greatest of abstractionist artists. Yet the laughter continued.

Striking even harder, the skin parted and segments of blinding white bone began to appear amidst the variegated reds. Still the laughter continued. Exhausted from his efforts, Brodsky finally stopped. He slumped to his chair, eyes closed, tired beyond imagining, fighting for air in huge ragged gasps. Still, the laughter continued–a counterpoint to his struggling breaths.

Finally, just as Brodsky had recovered enough to continue, the laughter stopped. Raising his head, Brodsky was amazed to see that she was whole. There was not a mark on her, her hair, now red, was perfectly coiffed and she was dressed in the same blouse from that dance floor ages ago.

Jacqueline, his beloved Jacqueline, stared up at him with tear filled eyes, eyes that bore into him, further and further until they burned his very soul. Her ruby red lips parted and she asked one word, the same word that she’d been asking him each time he’d had this same dream. “Why?”

With a scream loud enough to again be heard in the servants’ quarters, Franklin Brodsky lurched into a sitting position on his bed, icy cold sweat running from his body as he furiously fought to answer his dead wife’s question. But he still didn’t know what he needed to answer her and end the dreams. Why “what?” Why did he let her die? Why was he beating her…the prostitute…her? Why was he so filled with hate? Why did he have to be so ruthless? Why was he still alive? Why had he never found anyone else? Over the years some of the best psychiatrists his money could buy had helped him answer most of those “whys,” but not one could get rid of the dream; he refused to call it a nightmare as long as his beloved Jacqueline was part of it.

Struggling to regain his composure, Franklin crawled out of bed and staggered shakily into the bathroom. After washing his face with cold water, he stood before the sink and stared blankly at his image in the mirror. An old man stared back at him, a fit old man with a fairly small potbelly, but none-the-less an old man, with white hair rapidly receding into classic male pattern baldness and bags under his eyes.

“Why?” he muttered at the image in the mirror. As usual, there was no answer. With slumped shoulders, Franklin Brodsky turned to the closet that held his wife's clothes and gently rubbed one of her dresses as he sniffed the faint trace of perfume still lingering after all these years before trudging wearily off to his home office. It was too early to start his day and head off to the corporate offices, but there was no way he was going to be able to get to sleep again.

It was just like old times. Franklin Brodsky sat comfortably ensconced in his oversized, black leather executive chair, feet up on his oversized, spotless, dark teakwood desk in his office at White Wood, while his child stood before him, waiting patiently for him to impart a few gems of wisdom. Well, there were a few changes. Admittedly, Franklin was older, about twenty-five years older, and his hair was thinner and greyer. Also, his son, and heir, was now wearing designer dresses and wore her long, blonde hair in an admittedly fetching style. Still, it was a moment of triumph and he was enjoying it. He had even had a bottle of champagne brought in by Renfrew and made his daughter open it before regaling him, yet again with the story.

“So, I gather that the meeting with Isseksen’s investors when well,” he prompted, looking for yet another telling of the tale.

“Yes, father. For the fifth time, I went there and pretended to be Dr. Isseksen as you instructed. As Isseksen, I told them I was a fraud and that ViTaGeSeM was a trick to try to convince the old me, Tom Brodsky, that I had made a break-through and that he should allow me, as Isseksen, to keep my job.”

“Tommi, Tommi, Tommi. Savor the moment. Business is war and clear victories all too infrequent.”

“Victory? Don’t you mean deceit?”

“In World War Two the U.S. government had a whole unit assigned to sending out misleading information. The CIA employs spies. Businesses such as General Motors have intentionally hidden the appearance of new vehicles being road tested to confound their competitors. Microsoft has published news releases indicating new software will have specific features not even being considered for the sole purpose of scaring away competitors. Deceit, as you call it is a normal part of business.”

“I can see that nothing is going to change your mind. Pardon me while I check on Dr. Isseksen,” the woman stood and smoothed her dress before storming out. At the door, she turned for a lasts parting shot, but instead asked, “Can I tell her she is being released yet?”

“Why do I feel I’ve taught you nothing?” Franklin Brodsky sighed. “Of course not. She is not to be released until all the loose ends have played out. This was a decisive battle, hopefully the turning point in the war, but until the war is won, she stays where she is.”

The elder Brodsky stared up at the ceiling for a moment, then turned hic chair to allow him to look at Jacqueline’s portrait. After a moment, he sighed and said, “he was always more your son than mine, eh Jacqueline? And this change has made it even more obvious. Why couldn’t you see how I needed to be strong for the business to survive? Why can’t she?”

Another sigh and he turned back to the desk. Pulling some papers from the middle drawer, he began reading. Between pages, he savored the champagne, a sip at a time.

“How’s the summation of the various precedents coming, Oscar?” Judge Harry Rothstein asked as he walked out of his office into the common area shared by his law clerk and his secretary.

Oscar Blakelee looked up from his computer monitor and stared blankly at the Judge.

“Uh…oh, it’s done. I was just working on the spelling and grammar before I send it to you.”

“Good. Send it to me as is. Oscar, have you noticed that you have been over the limit and losing hours of vacation for the last three months?”

“Come on, Oscar,” the Judge prompted. “You’re losing vacation time. Take some time off and have some fun. Visit relatives. Go to Disney World. Travel across Europe. I know you have the money. You don’t do anything.”

“But…”

“Oscar, you’re my law clerk, and a damned good one at that, but you’ve been pouring over this Brodsky case like your life depended upon it. I see a great future for you if you don’t burn out, but that’s what you’re going to do if you don’t take a break and I’ve done you no good whatsoever if I don’t teach you to relax as well as work.”

“He’s right,” the matronly woman chimed in from her desk after putting down the phone she had just answered. “You’ve been here when I arrived and when I left for months now.”

“See, even Janice knows you’ve been burning the midnight oil. How many weekends have you spent here?” Judge Rothstein waved his hand, not even letting him answer before continuing. “Too many, I’ll bet. Now I’m going to lunch and I want you to send me the Brodsky file and get out of here. Don’t come back for at least a week, longer if you want. I want you rested, okay?”

Rothstein gave Oscar a fatherly pat on the shoulder and headed out the door.

“He really is right, Oscar,” Janice said after the judge had left.

“I know, but I…”

“You don’t have to justify yourself to me, Oscar. I may just be the secretary here, but I know you’re a good man. The problem is you haven’t changed your shirt in three days, you’ve got bags under your eyes large enough to hold groceries and you’ve drunk six cups of coffee, just this morning. You really are wearing yourself out.”

The office was well lit, but austere, with nothing more than a beat up old desk and three chairs. Of course, there was the required picture of the current president on one wall and the other had a white board covered with boxes and scribbles.

“I hope you’re right about this, Agent Serdland.” Judge Rothstein was clearly not a happy man.
“We are, Your Honor. Our sources are highly reliable and our people have already confirmed the worm in your office computers. You understand that you and your staff are not targets in this investigation. We just wanted you to allow us to place one of our people in your office to misdirect the people who placed the worm until we’ve had the chance to send them information that will provide the evidence to entrap them.”

“Yes, yes, Agent Serdland. I understand. I’ve already prepared a document for your man to type into my Clerk’s computer. You will need to contact the Office of Court services to arrange for your man. That way, all the paperwork will match and even my secretary, Janice, will be out of the loop.”

Uh, actually, your Honor, we’ll provide the paperwork without going through that office. It means there is one less possible source from which there can be a leak.”

“Fine, fine. I dislike violating protocol, but do whatever you need. Just get this over with.”
“Yes, your Honor,” the agent stood to shake the Judge’s hand, but then stopped mid reach. “Uh, there is one more issue. It’s really one for you to consider, more than us.”

“I know. Do I recuse myself? I’ll discuss it with the Chief Justice of the Court once you tell me you’re done and let him decide. For now, just continue to honor my request and don’t tell me who it is you suspect so I don’t risk having it color my judgment.”

“Then, again, thank you, your Honor. We’ll move as quickly as we can to wrap this up and contact you as soon as it is.”

This time, they did shake hands.

The two identical blondes faced each other, one sitting on the edge of the bed, the other tied in a supine position on the bed.

“You were right. It is sadly clear that only force will change your father’s behavior. I guess there is no choice but to use that force against him.”

“And you were right too,” the tied down one responded. “He really is evil.”

“I’m so sorry, Tommi. I know it must be hard to find something like this out,” Katrina responded as she began to untie the bonds around Tommi’s arms. “Even now, he is refusing to let me be released.”

“Much as I hate to admit it, I’ve known for years. That’s one of the reasons why I devised this plan and took your place so you’d have the freedom to develop it. Is it done?”

“Yes, it’s done. I’ve got Dick and Harry watching over it as we produce it in quantity. My problem is not with the ViTaGeSeM. It’s with the plan. It just the plan seems so extreme. Are you sure about doing this, Tommi?”

“You just spent time with him this last week. Has he given in on anything? Has he shown an ounce of compassion, for anyone except himself? Do you believe there is anything that would convince him to change the path he’s taken? Do you want a world like he is planning, a world where he controls everyone’s ability to adjust their age, gender, health and appearance?”

“I have to admit I haven’t seen anything suggestive of a beating, bleeding, caring heart in his chest, but still I have concerns about you. All my projections are that a second major transformation, like what you’re proposing, only has a four percent chance of partial success and less than a one percent chance of complete success.”

“True,” Tommi agreed, albeit unwillingly. “But someone needs to do it, and who can we trust who knows enough to make the plan work?”

“I’m hoping you’ll be able to tell me. After all, you know the company and the people much better than I do. Regardless,” Katrina changed the subject with a shrug of the shoulder. “The hell with what Franklin Brodsky wants or thinks. How about we get you out of here?”

“There’s no way I’m ever going to allow anyone to tie me down again,” Tommi growled as she grabbed the cords dangling from Katrina’s hands and threw them against the far wall before picking up the table lamp beside the bed. “Stretch out on the bed for a moment. Then, let me get behind the door with this lamp and you can call Talker in.”