Lyle was 68 years old, and as he handed Adam-1 a glass of wine, he admitted that he was beginning to sense the specter of death before him, and there was only one solution.
“What is it?” Adam asked, more for himself than out of concern for Lyle’s frailty.
Lyle pointed at Adam with his pipe, and smiled, as if about to impart a piece of secret wisdom. “Cloning.”
Adam waited for Lyle to go on, then shrugged when it was apparent he wouldn’t. “Sure, we can create healthy new cells and organs, but it’s not going to help us against most cancers or brain deterioration or pneumonia or a million other things that can kill us.”
“I’m not talking about therapeutic cloning.”
Adam shook his head, unsure of where Lyle was headed.
“We’re both going to die,” Lyle continued, and frowned. “I’ve given up the possibility that we can find any miracle cure before our natural deaths. That miracle is eighty years down the road at best. Immortality won’t be reached until we can put these things,” he grabbed his own forearm, “into artificial bodies that can be copied and recreated at will. We won’t see any of that, and we won’t be able to extend our lives long enough to reach the next plateau. In the meantime, there’s only one form of immortality available, and that’s cloning.”
“Well…that’s not really a good option,” Adam said, feeling anger beginning to swell in his chest. “We’d still have to die, and the clone wouldn’t be me. He wouldn’t have my memories or personality. Or all my same phenotypes. And there’d be mitochondrial DNA from the mother’s egg, so it wouldn’t even be my identical twin.” He shrugged, barely in control. “What good is that to me?”
This man who was supposed to give him immortality, whose daughter he had married for that sole purpose, was instead sentencing him to death.
“No, your clone wouldn’t be you. But he’d be as close as we can come,” Lyle responded with surprising calm. Adam was already recalling a divorce lawyer he knew. “And as far as memories are concerned, you leave him those through letters and videos. He feels a connection to you and continues your life and dreams because he’s going to want his future clone to do the same for him.”
Adam nodded, indifferent. Would he be able to get custody of Sarah?
“I’m disappointed too,” Lyle continued, “but I think it’s human destiny – what mankind’s religions predicted long ago. But now we’re creating our own reincarnation. An improved version, because now our next life will have our own DNA and can know exactly what happened in our previous lives. Do you see? We’re resurrecting the bodies of the dead just like God claims he’ll do in the Book of Revelation.”
Adam began to refocus on Lyle’s words. Books he’d read years ago stirred in long-dormant folds of his mind. “But we’ll do it ourselves.”
“Exactly. We’ll be fulfilling the religious prophecies that mankind has always yearned for, hoping some non-existent spiritual beings would give us if we worshipped them properly. Only fools who continue to depend on God will die, while those of us who take our afterlives in our own hands will actually have an afterlife.”
Adam stared into the flames that danced in the hearth, dimly aware that the wine was affecting him. According to his journal, he sensed “a ring of taunting and twisted truth” to Lyle’s vision. Had our ancestors really foretold cloning? Were we destined to die only to rise again under our own scientific powers? He mused to himself that the flames were those in Plato’s Cave, and that for a moment he had turned away from the shadows of reality to view their true source.
“But I don’t want to die.”
Lyle paused. He stared at his pipe. “Nor do I.”
“Why?” he asked, cautiously studying his father-in-law, aware that Lyle seemed to be forcing his curiosity.
Lyle pursed his lips, which Adam had come to recognize as an indication that Lyle was about to try to manipulate someone. The aging man took a large swallow of wine and put his glass down. He held out his pipe, regarding it as if under a hypnotic spell.
“My father was a strict Southern Baptist minister,” he said. “And whenever I committed a sin, or when he wanted to believe I’d committed a sin, he’d grab a leather strap and give me thirty-nine lashes while mother prayed for God to forgive me.”
Adam was silent as Lyle described the night of retribution just before his eighteenth birthday. He slid on a pair of gloves, loaded his father’s shotgun, and stood over his sleeping parents for a long time in the darkness, delighting in the god-like power over his long-time tormentors. Finally he leveled the gun at his mother’s head and fired.
She never woke, but his father jolted upright to find his son aiming the rifle at him.
“God won’t be able to punish me anymore.” It was a line Lyle had rehearsed all night.
His father turned and looked at what remained of his wife’s face before slowly turning back to his son. Lyle had expected his father to recoil in fear at his impending death, but he sensed only rage.
“Demon. God will punish you.”
“But I’m your God,” Lyle claimed, wagging the shotgun playfully.
“You’re no god!” he said before lunging at his son.
Lyle fired, the force of the blast pushing his father’s body back into the bed, the headboard dripping with his father’s enraged brain.
*
Adam-1 kept his eyes fixed on his wine. He wasn’t a good actor, and he didn’t want Lyle to see the doubt on his face. Lyle often told him melodramatic stories to exaggerate his power. It was one of his methods of manipulation for those closest to him. Share a dark secret that would make people nervous to cross him. Adam had long ago researched the murder of Lyle’s parents. The evidence was straightforward. A neighbor was arrested and convicted. What Adam didn’t know was whether Lyle’s story was a lie, or if he truly believed it, fabricating a memory that would have him avenging himself on his abusive parents. He felt it wise not to disturb such delusions.
“Your sister doesn’t know?”
A quiet smile crept over Lyle’s face. “Well, Louise never was quite right. Though I’m sure walking into the master bedroom at the age of four and seeing me standing over our parents’ bloody corpses didn’t help.” He laughed under his breath. It was the first time Adam could remember seeing him laugh. “I considered shooting her too, but then she asked if I could give her a glass of water and left the room. I figured she wouldn’t testify against me. I still don’t know if she ever really understood what happened.”
“And now you’re afraid your father and God will take revenge on you if you die?”
Lyle shook his head. “There is no God. Let’s just say that I’ll only feel truly victorious if I defy them by never dying.” He paused, staring into the fire. “But if I’m wrong, I want to be in control of any soul I might have – not father or God or anyone else.”
“So to this end you want us to have ourselves cloned after we die?” Adam confirmed.
He nodded. “If I can’t save this current body, I want to make a copy of it. I want my genes to live on even if the current ones can’t.”
Adam leaned back in his chair, staring at the ceiling as his mind began racing through what all would have to be done. “Well, we’re still several years from being able to conduct human cloning without the likelihood of serious defects.”
“I know. We’ll store samples of our DNA now in case anything happens to us before we’ve perfected the technology.”
“You know, Ingeneuity will be severely penalized, maybe even shut down, if we’re found to have cloned humans. We’ll have to do it secretly, or the first one of us who dies will be the only one we’re able to clone.”
“I don’t think so,” Lyle said, sitting forward to tap Adam’s shoulder with his pipe, his forced smile on his lips. He rose to refill his wine glass. “I think when we announce the first clone and people see him as a healthy, happy baby boy, the laws will be relaxed. I have friends who will encourage it in Congress.”
Adam realized then that Lyle was primarily concerned with having himself cloned. And Adam wasn’t going to take the chance of being second and possibly being denied this new afterlife. At last, an achievable afterlife. If Lyle started going downhill, Adam would make sure he died before his father-in-law. He wrote that he felt eagerness, not dread, at the prospect. He could have a second chance at immortality, escape his marriage with Lily and his shackles to Lyle, and still have Sarah in his life, again as a mom rather than as a daughter. And, after all, he had the perfect name to be the first cloned human being. Just as the religions had predicted reincarnation and resurrection, perhaps they had also predicted the name of the first human to be reborn. But instead of bringing Death upon mankind, he would eliminate it.
“What’s your plan?”
Lyle half-grinned as he clenched his pipe in his mouth and refilled Adam’s glass as well. He described how he wanted to spin Ingeneuity’s therapeutic cloning division into a separate corporation, U.S. Cloning Systems, under the umbrella of Ingeneuity, putting Adam in charge of it. Only Adam and a handful of USCS employees would initially know about the human clone project. “After we’re satisfied with our ability to clone a healthy human, the first one to die will be cloned. If it’s me, we use a frozen egg from Lily and have my clone gestated in an artificial womb. If it’s you, we use Sarah’s frozen egg. Assuming everything looks good seven months later, we announce the impending birth to the world. My contacts in the media and government will do the rest.
“Then, over the next few years, cloning will become commonplace. Laws regarding who can be cloned, financial and familial responsibilities, inheritance issues, etcetera will be needed. A small group of wise men will determine how the human afterlife will be administered, and we’ll be among them. Or, in one of our cases, our clone will be among them.
“We’re needed, people like us. People who know what it’s like to be left alone in the world as children, and to have daughters we love and want to protect. We know how precious they are, how precious life is, and that the universe will only keep the good alive if we make it happen.”
Adam let that sink in. “You mean, we’ll be like gods, writing the rules of immortality.”
Lyle handed him another full glass of wine. “There are some people, like my parents, who don’t deserve to live once, let alone twice. Would you want someone who hurt you or one of your family members to be rewarded with an immortal life here on earth? Say if someone hurt Lily, or if someone raped your daughter?”
Adam’s glass shook, spilling some wine. “Of course not.”
“See,” Lyle said. “Neither would I.”
*
In the year 2045, both those gods were dead. And for the next seven years I grew up in the home of Lyle’s younger sister, my Great-Aunt Louise.
Table of Contents
24
I’d met Aunt Louise once. I was three years old when Mom brought me over. I didn’t remember her so much as I did her forest of brightly colored glass flowers that took up every spare inch of the house.
When I returned to her house in 2045, I found a seventy-seven-year-old lady who closely resembled a female version of Lyle. But she couldn't have been more different. She was a bright-eyed and kind woman who wasn’t the least bit interested in molding me into Adam-1, a man she’d scarcely known. In fact, she didn’t care what I did with my life. She simply wanted to polish her glass flowers, talk to her pets, and play old-fashioned games like Chinese Checkers, Parcheesi, and a card game called Old Maid. Lily and I were eager to oblige. Lyle was far too young to play.
That’s Lyle-2, of course. He was born from an artificial womb early in 2046, not long before I turned twelve. I tried not to loathe the baby. Besides not wanting to blame Lyle-2 for the sins of his clone-father, I also hoped he might grow into a completely different person if I could guide him.
But who was I to guide? Even as I hoped for a similar separation from my c-parent, I was doing the opposite. With Aunt Louise I could become anything I wanted, but I was becoming my grandfather. I no longer believed I had the courage to make it as a new person in the world. Being the old person was the easy way out, the way to success, and the absence of culpability for past and future failures.
Lily-2 was happy. I started giving her a fresh lily on Adam-1 and Lily-1’s anniversary because it gave her a thrill. All I needed to do was marry her, work at U.S. Cloning Systems, and live semi-happily ever after. The nightmares of struggling in the grave with my c-father almost completely disappeared. Adam-1 had won the battle for our soul. I was embarrassed by the loss, especially when I thought of my mother, but I didn’t have the self-confidence to fight any longer.
Life was easier and mostly uneventful during my years with Aunt Louise. There was schoolwork and games, plus the first two pets I’d ever been around, a German Shepherd named Pierre and an orange cat named Blue. Both were clones, so in fact their names were Pierre-2 and Blue-3. Pierre-1 had died of natural causes. The first two Blues liked to run in front of moving cars and see how close they could cut it. Both, at one time or another, had cut it too close.
So with the third Blue, Louise tried something new. Many animals had been employed to refine the art of genetically engineered superhuman intelligence. The ability to enhance feline intelligence had been perfected years before the procedure was used in humans. Such procedures were outlawed in California where the legislature considered it cruelty to animals, but you could have the procedure done in Nevada. Louise had purchased some intelligence enhancement for Blue-3, so we had the smartest cat in town.
Smartened obedient animals become more obedient because they’re quicker to pick up on what the owners want them to do. But disobedient animals become more adept at getting away with mischief. Louise hoped that Blue-3 would be smart enough to know that dashing in front of onrushing automobiles was unwise. Barring that, she hoped Blue would give her mad dash a slightly earlier start. What she got was a cat who found it entertaining to make as if she was going to run in front of a car and then stop, just to see the car swerve out of the way.
When Louise crashed into her own mailbox to avoid hitting her adorable little faker, Blue became an inside cat.
I liked them both. Pierre had a good-natured attitude no matter what was going on unless he sensed danger, at which point he would turn protective. Blue played amusing tricks on Louise such as picking little things up with her mouth and hiding them, and she always listened intently whenever I talked to her. Louise said that Blue didn’t really know what I was saying, but Blue had fooled Louise so often that I wasn’t quite convinced.
***
As the years rolled by in Aunt Louise’s house, my birthday letters from my c-father became more specific and businesslike. Like this one:
Happy 14th!
Hope you and Mom are doing well. What a world you must be seeing. Maybe cloning has finally become legal and routine. Or at least routine in the lab. But don’t worry about studying cloning; it was just a necessary steppingstone to immortality.
The real future of the company (and of us) depends on our ability to prolong life indefinitely. It’s a goal I believe can be achieved during your lifetime. Copying the brain will be the ultimate escape from death, but first focus on artificial immune systems using nanotech and on the creation of artificial organs. The former will help keep our current bodies free of diseases, cancers, heart attacks, strokes, etc. The latter will eventually allow us to transfer our brains into completely artificial bodies that will be impervious to nearly all perils our currently frail bodies fall prey to.
Spend this next year reading up on the latest works of Donna Price, Cathy Cullar, and Shane Elliott. Hopefully when you’re fifteen you can meet some of them directly when you begin your internship at USCS.
Keep up the great work! Talk to you next year!
– A
There it was. So direct and to the point that it felt like a quick reminder note to himself. Which, of course, was exactly how
he may have perceived it. Or at least how he hoped it would be, that I’d simply be following the tracks he’d laid.
It didn’t matter that they lacked paternal affection. I’d given up on such a relationship. Yet, I read, “Hope you and Mom are doing well” and “Keep up the great work” over and over.
Although human cloning had become even more mundane than Adam-1 hoped, scientists were still struggling with an unacceptable mortality and defect rate from previously overlooked causes. Such problems will forever be linked with Jason Rendell, the teenager suffering from gigantism and compacted lungs. Weary of breathing artificially and feeling like a freak, he walked into the lobby of USCS, doused himself with a can of lighter fluid, held a trembling lighter under his chin, and immolated himself. Witnesses said his entire body was instantly covered with flame as he dropped to his knees, then writhed screaming on the floor before a security guard could smother the fire. Too late to save Jason.
Another disturbing trend with clones began to manifest itself during my teen years: mental problems even among those who were physically healthy. Apparently I wasn’t the only one struggling with identity issues and the stress of living in the ghostly shadow of a c-parent. While polls showed that at least ninety percent of clones were grateful they’d been born, suicide quickly became their greatest childhood killer, which occurred at several times the rate of non-clones.