A Captive Audience, part 1

Disclaimer: If you're under age to read stuff about guys having sex or if you find it offensive, your society finds it offensive or illegal then stop reading now! This story is completelly fictional, as are all the characters.

By the same author: Previously I've written the multipart story "A Different World" which can be found under gay/sciencefiction at nifty. I've recently also started a spin off/sequel to that story, which is published in the same subdirectory, i.e. the directory for "A Different World". The spin off/sequel is called "What Dreams May Come". This is a spin off to "Going Home".

A Captive Audience, part 1

Written by Adam

I awoke in the middle of the night by a noice outside or more specifically above my cell. Well, it was actually a lot of noices consisting of people shouting, maybe fighting and it probably went on for hours but since time inside the cell is much slower all I heard was all noices compressed into one very brief noice which also consisted of the hatch in the ceiling opening. Then they seemed to appear in mid air, well actually at first they fell much too fast for my eye to see them but then they slowed down as their bodies adapted themselves to the time difference inside the cell and fell normal speed the last few feet and hit the floor with a thud and a groan each. Then they, my first cell mates in almost a year, got up and the blonde one yelled upwards.

"Get me out of here, you bastards!" he yelled.

"Don't bother, they're long gone!" I said.

"They can't be they just pushed us down that hole in the floor a few seconds ago" the other darker one said.

"Yeah, but they do something with the artificial gravity on this prison station so that inside the cells time moves much, much slower than outside... so in effect they went and had several cups of coffee before you even hit the floor... supposing those sluglike bastards drink coffee ofcourse" I said.

"Okay, so how much slower is time in here?" the blonde one said.

"12 hours in here is 365 days and six hours outside the cell. While one hour passes in here about 30 days passes on the outside. By the way I'm Scott" I said and offered him my hand.

"I'm Jack" the blonde one said and shook my hand.

"And I'm Kenny" the other one said.

"So, what are you in here for?" I said.

"For being human. I had no idea that was a crime until today" Jack said.

"Neither did I until they threw me in here for the same thing, almost a year ago" I said.

"A year in here or on the outside? ... and since you don't wear one of these, I assume you mean an Earth year" Jack said and indicated the metal ring about his neck.

"A year in here or 365 Earth years on the outside. I was about to ask you about those rings of yours, what is it?" I said.

"The collars? It's what the Masters use to controll us. I'm a bit fascinated, you're the first Terran I've ever seen without a collar" Kenny said.

"Masters?" I said.

"Yes, we're slaves to another species who've cloned humans from Earth and use the clones as slaves that they can kill off as many times as they like, because they always have a new clone ready that have all the memories of the previous one, though about two Earth years ago... we were sent off to war, and we fought in that war and died many times before we managed to desert last month.. and now we're trying to make our way to the planet which only I have any memories of, the planet from which our... donators, for lack of a better word, were abducted and cloned... we're trying to make it to Earth... and if that's were you were actually born normally, instead of grown in a tube like us, then I guess we should take you with us" Jack said.

"I can't leave this cell. If I do then 'normal' time will catch up with me and my body would age as much as years have passed on the outside. I would die instantly of extreme old age" I said.

"Really? How do you know?" Kenny said.

"Fourteen days after I entered this cell my cell mate and I made our first and so far only attempt to escape. It ended in disaster as he'd been in here six months and so when we left the cell he emediatly reached the physical age of almost 200 years old, give or take a few years and I went from 16 to 30 in the same time and only that was very painful. He died and I survived and now I've long since reached the point where I never can leave this cell" I said.

"Oh. Sorry to hear that... and I suppose that he wasn't a clone either?" Jack said.

"No, he wasn't" I said.

"Hey, maybe it won't be impossible for Scott here to leave the cell after all?" Kenny said suddenly.

"Why, what do you have in mind?" Jack said.

"I've gotta check something first, hold on" Kenny said and then started tapping things in on the buttons on his wrist watch and then for a millisecond a face appeared on the display and it's mouth moved very quickly and the voice was extremly high pitched as when people walk by on the walk way outside the force field that forms the fourth wall of this cell.

"That's odd, Brian hung up almost emediatly... I never had a chance to say anything" Kenny said.

"Is that some kind of communications device?" I said.

"Yes?" Kenny said.

"And you called somebody outside the prison?" I said.

"Yes? But I don't understand..." Kenny said.

"You forgot that time moves much slower in here, darling. The communication may have seemed very short to you but to him it probably was a very long time of seeing you frozen in time" Jack said.

"Did you call him 'darling'?" I said.

"Yes, he did. We're gay, and he's my boyfriend. Do you have a problem with that?" Jack said.

"No, I'm gay too... that's partly what got me to where I am today" I said.

"Okay, you can tell Jack the story when I'm gone... since it's possible to communicate, I'm certain that the memory transfer to the cloning machine on the ship will work properly when I trigger. Then you can use my back up memory box to store Scott's life time of memories and put a sample of his blood in the vial and then we can get both of you out of here... well, Jack can get out and bring the box with him and then we can..." Kenny said as he brought the box he'd been speaking of out of his trouser pocket and handed it to Jack.

"Good thinking, and in the meantime you bring the ship here for me to escape to... Er, Scott?..." Jack said.

"Yes?" I said.

"I hope you don't object too much to this... though I don't think you will, because I think what we have to offer you is far better than remaining here for eternity, even though... what we have to suggest have it's downsides too" Jack said.

"What are you trying to say?" I said.

"Before he escapes from here... possibly in a few hours, after you've told him your life's story... Jack will..." Kenny said.

"This won't be as bad as it sounds, mind you" Jack said.

"Jack will kill you" Kenny said.

"What?! Why?" I said.

"So that we can clone you and then you'll have a new body that can live outside the cell" Kenny said.

"Hold on, the ship we're using is of the same type that was used to abduct and clone humans and the room were they did the cloning is intact and we could set up a forcefield where time is as in this cell and teleport both me and Scott into that room... but for Scott to be able to leave that room we'd still have to clone him" Jack said.

"Yes, ofcourse. Why didn't I think of that?" Kenny said.

"So then you won't have to kill me... except, there'll be a copy of me?" I said.

"No, because the cloning machines need a large stock of your genes to make clones from and to get what it need it sucks every drop of blood out of you. I'm sorry, but you'll die in either case... but you won't really die because the clone will be you and if the memory recording is done properly you will remember your whole life... it will be as if you never died and since the cloning machines are set to the physical age of 16 you will get back the years you lost when you tried to escape" Jack said.

"Every drop of blood, huh? Is it painful?" I said.

"Nope... well, I think a bit painful when the tube is stuck into your chest but then you don't feel much" Jack said.

"Well, that doesn't sound so bad... certainly must be better than being shot full of holes" I said.

"How would you know?... No disrespect ofcourse, but..." Kenny said.

"I was shot about twenty times during my last moments on Earth and died from those wounds... I think I died at least, but then I woke up on my lover's space ship and was totally unhurt... though there are still scars on my torso where the bullets had hit me..." I said.

"I'm curious to learn more about that incident" Jack said.

"Well, as requested I will tell you my life's story while we wait for your boyfriend to get help... though I still don't quite understand how he's going to do that" I said.

"Deal. Well, Kenny here will commit suicide and then his next clone will bring our friends here in our ship" Jack said.

"Suicide? How? You haven't been here long enough to die from exposure to 'normal' time and that is as far as I know the only way to kill yourself in here. There isn't anything that you can hang yourself from and no sharp objects that you can cut your throat with... ofcourse, you can crawl into that hole in the floor, beneath that hatch where we're supposed to put anybody who dies in the cell and get shot into space and die from asphyxiation, but I wouldn't recommend that" I said.

"It's easy actually. First I'll kiss Jack goodbye, like this!" Kenny said and they engaged in a long french kiss after which Kenny took off his sleeveless shirt and handed it to Jack.

"And then?" I said.

"I'll just say 78561502td47..." Kenny said and as he said the last number the left side of his chest erupted with a bang, spewing a large amount of blood along with some flesh and bonefragments.

"Christ!" I exclaimed.

"And then I die" Kenny said and started falling over.

Jack caught him and laid him down on the floor and held Kenny's hand while looking into his eyes. Both seemed to look lovingly at each other and neither seemed sad though one of them was dying. Then Kenny let out his last breath and Jack reached over and closed the eyes of the corpse.

"Is there some garbage chute or any other way we can get rid of the body?" Jack said.

"You want to throw the corpse of your boyfriend into a garbage chute?" I said shocked.

"Sorry, where I'm from we're used to our dead bodies being treated as garbage" Jack said.

"Oh... well, I guess that comes from being slave clones... actually, corpses don't get treated much better in this prison, come to think of it. There's a rectangular hatch in the floor there where you put the corpse... I believe I mentioned this a moment ago to your boyfriend" I said and opened the hatch to reveal the space into which a human being would just fit.

"Oh. Will you help me with the body, please?" Jack said and then we maneuvered the body of Kenny into the hole and closed the hatch after which we heard a woosh sound as the body was removed at a speed that was very fast even outside the cell.

"Thanks. Now, let's see if we can't hook up this box to your head and record the memories of your life into it along with all the emotional connections to those memories... wait, the box is full, with Kenny's memories... though they're being uploaded to the cloning machine on the ship it seems... there, now it's empty... I guess, it needed to spool onto this, due to the difference in time between the cell and the rest of the universe. Okay, sit on the bunk there" Jack said.

"Oh. I'm scared" I said and sat down on the bunk bed as he said and then he sat down behind me with one leg on either side of me.

"There's no need to be... well, I think this is going to hurt a bit..." Jack said.

"What is?... Ow!" I said as I felt something being pushed through my skin at the back of my neck and then a second such sting.

"Nothing, I just pushed these two wires into your neck and... yes, it's downloading... hold on a second... yes, it appears to be the world seen through the eyes of... well, I guess it's you as an infant looking up at a ceiling in, what I guess is something similar to the baby pens I've seen Masters put their infants in and there's something hanging over you... some toys or something, simplified images of different animals, it seems and... well everything moves at a much fast pace... there's a woman who comes and picks you up and holds you and then... okay, I don't think I need to see any more" Jack said.

"Can I see?" I said and the box was suddenly in front of me, held by Jack's hand reaching around from behind me and I also felt Jack rest his chin on my shoulder and an awareness of his face being close to mine.

On the box was a small display that showed a shaky ride across what I suddenly realised was the the drive way in front of the garage of the house where I grew up and I told Jack this.

"So I gathered. But what is it that you're moving about on?" Jack said.

"What do you mean? I'm not even in this picture" I said.

"No, but we're seeing through your eyes" Jack said.

"Oh, yes ofcourse... I remember! This must be in 1988 on my third birthday. I got this tricycle for birthday present and that's what I'm riding about on. And that's my mom and that's my dad coming towards me from different directions and any moment I'll be heading to pass next to the front bumper of the car but I misjudge and hit my head... ah, there it is... my first traumatic child hood memory" I said as the image tilted suddenly.

"Strange picture" Jack said turning his head.

"I fell over and got a pretty good bump on the side of my head" I said.

"Oh! And how is this traumatic? It can't have been that bad " Jack said.

"No, not the accident... I only got a mild concusion... more the fact that my father video tapet the incident... you saw the device he held in front of his eye, and sent the tape to 'America's Funniest Home Videos'... no, that wasn't the real trauma either since we won $10 000 on that and my parents put those in a savings account to send me to college... no the really traumatic thing was the stupid voice over that Bob Saget made to the tape" I said.

"Bob who?" Jack said.

"Never mind" I said.

"So are you going to take this opportunity to tell me your life story? You don't need to tell me every detail though. Just jump to where it get's interesting and relevant to how you ended up in this prison cell thousands of lightyears from that home where you grew up" Jack said.

"Don't we need to wait until the memory recording get to that point?" I said.

"No. Now that the earliest part of your childhood has been covered, the bit that's usually buried and seldomed remembered except very fragmentarily, the display will show the memories that are at the front of your conscious memory while the device really records everything chronologically... this means that you can jump back and forth in your telling of the story without messing up the order of things for your future clones... Okay, I'm not sure I understood that explanation myself so please tell me if you need to clarify anything" Jack said.

"No, it's okay. Well, I always knew I was different and as soon as I hit puberty I noticed that I was discovering guys while all the other guys discovered girls... except one boy... who happened to be my best friend, Alex. We grew up together and were always best mates because we had so much in common... more than we realised when we were little" I said and all the while the images on the screen jumped from images of checking guys out in the locker room after gym class, to first an image of Alex at age 14 to images of him as a 4 year old playing together with me in a sand box and then a brief flash of our first time having sex.

"Hold on, what was that last image?" Jack said.

"I thought that might catch your interest. I will get back to that in a moment, but first I will tell you of something that led to my taking the initiative and seducing him" I said with a smile.

"Sure, but make it quick. And I'm curious to see more of this Alex, he looked familiar to me" Jack said with mock impatience.

"Ofcourse. Well, in 1999 my family went on holliday to England" I began.

"But you lived in the USA, right?" Jack said.

"Yes, that is right... I was born and grew up in the state of Minnesota, but six months before my demise my family moved to New York" I said.

"That's a city, right?" Jack said.

"Yes, and a state... but if you keep interrupting me like this I will never get to that point that you were so interrested in" I said.

"Sorry, do go on. You went on holliday to England... London I think that is on the screen" Jack said.

"Yes. And at our hotelroom one night I caught the first episode of a new TV-series called 'Queer as Folk'... well I didn't understand much of the dialog, I'm affraid, because they spoke a Brittish dialect with lots of slang which was very hard to follow for me as an American... anyway, one of the main characters was Nathan, a 15 year old boy... though the actor who played him seemed more like twenty years old, and I should tell you that you look very much alike him, especially when you smile like that, see" I said and indicated the screen on the box which showed a memory from watching that show where 'Nathan' was seen talking about 'his first time' with a single colour bakground and then 'Nathan' smiled in a way that made him simply irresistable.

"Yes, the memories of the original person include watching that show on some storage medium which consisted of discs about this size... it had a name starting with the letter 'd'" Jack said and showed the approximate size of the disc he was talking about.

"DVD?" I said.

"Yeah, I think so" Jack said.

"Well, since we were there for a week only, I only got to see the first episode... More than a year later they made an americanised version of that show which I hoped to be able to see, though unfortunatly my parents wouldn't get the expensive cable channel, Showtime just so I could see one tv-series... but I understand that they named the characters differently in the American version so that 'Nathan' was called 'Justin' there... though since I never saw the American version I don't know if the things I saw Nathan do were copied exactly by Justin... well, anyway what caught my interest was that Nathan was this 15 year old who for the first time in his life dared to go down to the area of town where all the gay clubs are and there he met this rich man, who's much older than him, and who brings Nathan back to his own appartment which is this huge place in a ware house building that has been converted to appartment building and 'Stuart', I think the character's name is, lives on the top floor with slanted cieling and it's just a huge open space with blinds separating the 'bed room' from the rest. And 'Nathan' is very nervous which makes him talk non stop about nothing really interesting to 'Stuart' untill Stuart just starts kissing Nathan and taking off Nathan's jacket... and then they're naked in bed havind sex and Nathan's lying on his belly and Stuart's licking him and no... they're doing something else first, and get interrupted by the phone and they go away to this hospital where a lesbian woman has given birth to Stuart's son and there's a long section at that hospital where Stuart and his best friend Vince go up on the roof and Stuart stands behind Vince and says something like 'Come on, Titanic' and they stretch out there arms and Stuart shouts 'King of the world!' over and over again... a bit silly in my oppinion, even though I quite liked 'Titanic'... and then after they come back from the hospital Nathan and Stuart have sex properly, with Stuart licking Nathan, giving him a rim job and then fuck Nathan while saying really strange things due to being stoned by som pills he took without knowing what they were" I said.

"Yes, I remember my original me seeing that and ... that Vince, was it?... says something about being Kate Winslet, whatever that means... ah yes, there's some other connections to that 'Titanic' that the original seems to know about... " Jack said.

"Yeah, he did saying something, that seemed like some kind of a joke complaint about having to be Kate Winslet... but that other connection... I don't know what that could be" I said.

"'Titanic' is a movie right?" Jack said.

"Based on a real event, though the main characters are fictional, I think" I said.

"Well, there's a remnant of some knowledge that the actor who played that Vince... was also in that movie, 'Titanic'... but a very small part, apparently" Jack said.

"I wouldn't know... you say that the person who you were cloned from has this knowledge?" I said.

"Yes... from checking up on what else the actor has been in on something called a 'web site'?" Jack said.

"Oh... on the internet" I said.

"You know what it is then? Apparently the web page is called something ... imdb..." Jack said.

"Ah, yes... International, Movie DataBase... it's a very useful site" I said.

"Okay... but this doesn't seem to have any relevance to your story, sorry for interrupting you again" Jack said.

"It's okay. Well, when we got back home after that vacation I suddenly noticed that Alex was checking me out just as I was checking him out in the locker room after gym class, and so I decided to act on that by suggesting he come home with me after school to help each other out with our biology home work" I said.

"I don't know why, but I just got a feeling that you didn't have any biology home work that day" Jack said.

"We didn't. I just said that to see if he would point this out to me or if he would play along" I said.

"Sure" said Alex on the small screen on the box.

"Yes, I have seen him before... but how can that be, if he's your boyfriend? Did he become an actor, and I have faint memories of having seen him on tv like with that 'Nathan' character?" Jack said.

"No he never became an actor... he became a clone... or lots of clones if I understand you correctly, so my guess is that you've seen him on that planet where they breed you clones or in the war you mentioned... or both" I said.

"What makes you say that?" Jack said.

"Well, I sort of put two and two together. You told me that to make me a clone you would make a hole in my chest and take every drop of blood from me, right?" I said.

"Yes... that's the only way I know of, and I believe it's the way it was done to the original me, and everybody else that was abducted" Jack said.

"And when they were done with the... donors, the corpses were dumped somewhere near the place they were abducted from? I'm guessing here, ofcourse" I said.

"Yes, that's what I've understood too... I have memories of the bodies of my friends and my boyfriend turning up like that... one of them was actually a famous actor" Jack said.

"Tom Bryant, yes... he appeared to have died in a car crash at first, but there were some really strange circumstances, like there not being any of his blood on the scene, but a whole lot of fake blood they use for the movies... You know him?" I said.

"I know him as a series of clones, though the original me was .... they.... had a very casual acquaintance in the woods just before he disappeared" Jack said.

"Oh... yeah, Alex and me were in the woods too... a camping trip when Alex suddenly disappeared in thin air while I had my tongue in his mouth... and twenty four hours later I found him a mile a way by the lake where we'd pitched the tents he was .... " I broke of the sentence in order to sob.

"... very inaminate?" Jack said in an attempt not to be too blunt, I guess.

"Yes, that's one way of putting it... I guess he was having trouble living with that golf ball sized hole in his chest I discovered when I pulled up his shirt and the total lack of blood in him" I said seeing the events one more time on the display even though it was the last thing I wanted to see.

"Hey, hey, hey! Okay... let's take a break, and then we'll talk about something happier... like what happened at your house that night you invited him home to do homework... okay?" Jack said turning me around and holding me from in front.

"Okay" I sobbed.

I'm interested in your feedback and suggestions. Is there some story thread that you would like me to explore further or turn into a spin off? ... Write me at my_evil_twin47@yahoo.com and tell me what you think of this story!