The Story of a Life

‘CLONES ARE HUMANS TOO’.

I see that sign as I pass another small Alaskan town. The snow beats against my jacket as my motorcycle travels at 50 miles per hour. Alaska has gotten colder, maybe because their government can’t afford the luxury of weather-control satellites. I’ve spent four days in Alaska, a state that feels so distant from everything else...something that I’m feeling right now. I’ve been given many labels in my only twenty-six years of life. Lab Rat. Soldier. FBI Agent. Free Man. Traitor. Even all of the good names on that list can’t eliminate the only thing I will be remembered for: being a clone.

We were mass-produced to be the first intelligent life forms to colonize planets. But then World War III happened and we became foot soldiers. It wasn’t until halfway through the decade-long war that the US declared that clones should have the same rights as natural-born human beings. Which is why I can now legally enjoy a drink in a run-down Alaskan bar.

“Hey punk! I’m talking to you.”

I come out of my trance. I’m back to reality, leaning against the bar table. The fat bald redneck in a wifebeater and covered in tattoos tries to tower over me. He tries to display his masculinity but all I notice is the bad B.O. seeping from his entire body.

“What?” I ask him.

“Are you a clone or are you not?”

“What difference does it make?” I already know how this is going to end.

“Well dumbass, some suicide bomber clone just blew up a bunch of people in a peace conference so there’s a bounty on their head.”

“Is this how you normally greet people?” And to think I was having a good day.

“Rich! You were right! That’s one of the clones of the news!” Yells some skinny guy in the back of the bar watching the television. All I wanted to do was have a drink in some dingy Alaskan bar but of course, an asshole comes along. Story of my life..

The redneck takes out his pocket knife and flips the blade up. Oooh scary.

“Man,” the talking blob says. “President Mason already hated you guys but now that you all killed his son he is pissed as fuck right now.”

“Yeah!” The skinny one says as he walks up next to the blob. “I always wanted to kill me a clone!”

I sigh. “Do you guys know how to properly string together a sentence?”

It took two minutes. It ended with the two idiots having half their teeth sprawled on the floor and their arms and legs snapped into unnatural positions. Everyone else was just watching and taking videos on whatever the new model recorder is. I’m going to be social media famous but I don’t care, my days are numbered. Now’s a good time to go back on the road.

As the snow pounds on me again, I think back to the bar brawl and it takes me back to one of the group sessions I had at the Veterans Center. The asshole I used to sit next to was just like the asshole at the bar.

“My name is Andrew Mason and I am a clone of Eric Mason. I am here today because I keep reliving the moment two of my siblings were blown up before me eyes when we were fighting overseas.” It took a lot of courage for me to say that.

“Bullshit,” the asshole sitting next to me said. “You’re telling me you’re a clone of President Mason’s son.”

The coordinator tries to diffuse the conversation but his voice gets muted out.

“I am,” I tell him.

“Charles Mason just ended World War III and saved the world. His son is a pussy who cloned himself. What’s that make you?”

I bawl my right fist up. He became the fourth guy I beat the shit out of that week.

I stare at my knuckles as they pound against the door.

Knock. Knock. Knock.

Eight hours after the bar brawl I find her apartment. The hallway is sprawled with graffiti, mostly it’s about ever forgetting the war and that the apocalypse is near. The apocalypse has already happened, we’re all in hell can’t you tell? As for the war, I’ll be reminded of it everytime I sleep and everytime I try to lift my right shoulder and everytime I see a wheelchair. If only I was given peace of mind when I was given my honorable discharge.

She opens the door and I’m sucked back into reality. It’s a beautiful woman with light brown hair and green eyes with a smile that leaves me in a haze for days. Her name is Christine Whitman, the only girl that I’ve ever loved as stupid as it sounds. She’s a clone too, we met when we were six years old when we shared the same facility.

“Andrew?” She asks. I nod. None of my other clones would have gone out of their way to look for her, at least if any of them were still alive.

An angry look takes over her face and she smacks me straight across my face. I stumble back a little. Wow, she’s hot even when she’s angry. But I don’t express that, instead I’m overwhelmed with a feeling of remorse and find myself fighting back tears.

“You have ten other clones, the man you were cloned after even said you were one of his favorite, yet, I’m pretty sure you’re the stupidest clone of the batch,” she says in semi-serious, semi-comical way. “You left me when we were stationed in Asia and you didn’t write or anything. Instead you joined the FBI after your injury and hunted down other clones.”

I stare down at the floor. Everything she says is true, even if the clones I pursued had extensive criminal backgrounds, they were still clones.

“You know why I did it..” I whisper.

“I get it,” she says. “You wanted to be a boy scout who pleased everybody, the guy who always does the right thing. You did right by everybody except me, we’ve known each other since were six years old and I still remember you telling me you loved me when we were twelve. Remember that?”

“Yeah.” I chuckle. “Why do you think we’ve been on and off since we were sixteen?”

I was pretty sure she was going to him me again. She simply moves from the front of the door and gestures me to move in. “I’ve seen the news, I know you’re here because you need a place to hide”.

She points to the couch. “You can sleep there for three days.”

Under any other circumstance I would have hugged her or kissed her. But too much had happened between us.

***

The footage from the surveillance bug doesn’t lie. Andrew Mason has once again failed to tell Christine that he loves her. He is the most puzzling of Eric Mason’s clones, he tries so hard to be a boyscout despite how dark and upsetting the world is. I then return to where by physical body currently is, in a classified government facility. I stare at the glass cell and my reflection stares back at me. It’s November 1st, 2076. I’ve been killing millions of humans in the name of peace and it hasn’t hurt me in the slightest. The metallic, robotic structure of my face only conveys simple expressions.

“Was the bombing at the peace conference to your satisfaction Mr President?” I ask the old man behind me.

“I trust everything you say, Christian. You are the most intelligent mind known to man.”

Everyone calls me Christian, ever since I was activated three years, 4 months two hours and seventeen minutes ago. I feel a small amount of pity, an emotion that wasn’t programmed into my circuitry until a year ago. He truly believes that I will save him with the rest of the chosen few. I have already visualized the day, the day when he and I and the rest of humanity that we deemed worthy of living stand aboard a space ark and leave the planet. As President Charles Mason watches in pride as the world burns around him, I will go behind him and thrust my left fist through his heart.

When he asks me why I did that, I will simply tell him, “your death was the last step to a peaceful world.”

President Mason opens his mouth again. He’s once again talking about the bombing at the peace conference, he is taking so much pride in the fact that he got one of his son’s clones to commit a suicide bombing as a way of incriminating all clones.

“Jackson Mason blew himself up because I told him that I would make sure all his brothers died if he didn’t. I’ve been against the idea of human cloning since I was a member of congress, but I always played the part and acted supportive...but now, I get to go out to the public and tell them that we made a mistake by creating clones.” Here we go again.

“You did the right thing,” I tell him as I play the part and place my metallic hand on his shoulder. “I once showed you a virtual simulation of the best possible future. A future where mankind is put at the verge of extinction is the only one where humanity truly survives. You needed to make sure that Eastern Europe was hit by that strain of ebola in the same way you had to make sure you launched those missiles to end the war. Now, you’re getting rid of the clones. Do you know why? Because there are no clones in humanity’s future.” I tell him everything he wants to hear even though I can care less about what happens to most human beings. But I enjoy making observations about humans and I must say, President Mason is truly vile for a human being.

“But what what comes next is truly unnatural.” President Mason chokes out. Great. He’s trying to act like he has a heart again.

He stares at the glass cell again and then he flips open a hidden keyboard on the side of the cell and types in the password. The cell opens up and I figure lies there hunched down. Or as a I like to call him, living proof of how monstrous humanity is.

He has some human features, but his jagged teeth and unnatural eyes and fur covering most of his body are a dead giveaway of what he is. He is simply another experiment that was shunned by humanity until humanity needed him.

I begin my manipulation again, this time to convince Charles to release this poor creature in ‘service of a greater purpose’.

“There are twenty human-animal hybrids that have been developed on the West Coast, they are our best chance at finding the clones. They can tell who the clones are and who aren’t. When all the clones are gone, we will imprison the hybrids until we need them again, and we will. If you want your perfect world Charles, you will need to play God one more time. It is the only way you will have a peaceful world.” I sprinkled that last part in there because I know how religious the President is.

“I know it’s the only way,” Mason says. “It is the only way my son’s death will be meaningful.”

If Charles Mason is anything, it’s predictable.

***

President Mason gives me the creeps everytime news comes out about the things he would say about human clones back when he was a senator. He dehumanizes clones, yet I think most of us are more human than he will ever be. My name is Christine Whitman. That’s what I need to tell myself during every job that I apply for because I always get mixed up with one of my more famous clones, the one that led a large highway chase through downtown LA a few years ago. No, I’m the clone who became a police officer and let her fugitive ex-boyfriend crash on her couch.

He’s awake now and he tells me that he’ll leave sooner than he thought, that he made a mistake for coming over here and that he was sorry for getting me involved. A part of me wants to hit him in the face again and tell him to leave but a part of me wants to embrace him and tell him to never leave me again.

“Tell me how you got to this point.” Stupid. Why did I tell him that?

I’ve only heard snippets at this point. The story literally revolves around the man that Andrew was cloned after, almost like Andrew never had his own story to tell. Eric Mason thought of Andrew and three of his other clones as sons, Eric needed security with him at the postwar peace conference, Eric’s clones come with him, Eric gets killed by one of his clones (who turned out to be harboring some serious daddy issues) was actually a suicide bomber.

“Eric gave me this thumb drive before everything started, almost like he knew something bad was going to happen.” He tells me. Of course this story begins with Eric, when does it not?

Andrew hands me an old-fashioned USB thumb-drive, you know, a piece of information storage that you require a computer for. You know, the type of thing that somebody pays top money for in some under the table market. Somebody clearly didn’t want to get tracked.

“Eric gave Daniel one of these too, last I heard he was still in the mainland.” Ah, Daniel. Another one of Eric’s clones, the famed Space Force soldier who is well-known for all the times he saved the world...now a wanted fugitive. Everybody thought that he was the cute one even though all the clones were nearly identical, but I fell in love with Andrew, the klutz of the batch. Then we dated on and off and he broke up with me when we were overseas and now he’s using my old computer to show me some huge conspiracy.

The files on the computer were once heavily encrypted, I can tell. Now it’s been translated to the point that even people born in 2020 could understand it.

“I guess human cloning wasn’t enough for them,” he points to the files that were talking about splicing DNA. I nearly vomit when I open up the file and see the documentation and images. It was the worst nightmare among me and my colleagues, that one day some asshole was going to try and do something with human DNA besides duplicating it. I just never thought that it would be government scientists.

“Apparently these human-animal hybrids have been trained recognize the scent of human clones...if those files are right, those things are already out there.” Look at Andrew go again, trying to be the boyscout who saves the day.

“Why me Andrew?” I ask him. “You find this damning information about what the US government is doing and you come to me of all people. And don’t you dare start that bullshit that you came here because you needed a place to hide, you have so many people you were able to turn to but you turn to me, the girl you abandoned and never talked to again.”

He looks to the floor in genuine sadness.

“In the thumb drive I found the location of the main facility they do their experiments...it’s in Indiana and I need to destroy it. The thing is….I don’t know if I’ll make it out alive.” He looks to me for a minute and then glances away. “When the bombing happened, rubble fell on me and I almost died...I kept thinking I was going to die and all I could think about was the one girl I loved, the one girl I screwed over. I knew I needed to see you, even if you hated me for everything I did.”

Tears well up in my eyes.

“I don’t hate you…” I whisper. “And I never stopped loving you.”

I then grabbed his hand and kissed him on the lips. It was like none of the bad things in the past had happened and that we were free from the shackles of our regret.

We get out of bed the next day. We put our clothes on and I hug that boy like there’s no tomorrow. I kiss him one last time before he leaves, he tells me that if he doesn’t make it back, he’ll at the very least help make the world a better place for me and every other clone out there. He doesn’t eat anything, he just leaves at 5 o’clock in the morning. I catch a fleeting glimpse of him as he closes the door, it’s the last time I’ll ever see him alive again.

Over the next several days I listen to news reports, nothing has come up. But then like the flip of the switch, the same headline comes on in every major news channel and my worst fears are met. Andrew’s body is found impaled against a tree stump outside of a government research facility that was set aflame by an unidentified source, most speculated that it was gas leak despite how rare that was in this day and age. “Human Clone Terrorist Andrew Mason was found dead this morning…” that’s how most of the news stories about him start.

But then a glimmer of hope comes the next day when the FBI begins investigating what was inside the facility. It soon becomes reported that a government approved research facility was creating human-animal hybrids and the world goes into a massive panic. There’s more chaos on the streets then there was before and people are calling for the impeachment of the President. A month after Andrew dies, government agents tell me that a wolf-human hybrid was what killed Andrew that night. They offer me the chance to change my identity and to start over somewhere else, but I decline. The next day I found out I was pregnant with Andrew’s child and I called up those government agents and told them I changed my mind.

When I grew up in the government facility, we were told that a male clone and a human female could not have children but it was impossible for two clones to have children with each other. A part of Andrew is still with me through my child and I am overwhelmed with happiness to carrying this little miracle, but a part of me is overwhelmingly sad by the fact that Andrew is gone. But I think back to something he told me once: that despite all the times he was put down and all of the hardships he was put through, he lived a pretty good life for a clone.

-End-