The Book of Adam: Autobiography of the First Human Clone

  “It’s Valentine’s Day,” she said softly.

  “You’re right,” I said. “I’m sorry.” I picked up one of her hands and held it. She didn’t pull it away, but she didn’t look up until we pulled up to the hotel entrance.

  It was the first trip we had ever shared a hotel room together, and even though she was just shy of fourteen, I guess she’d been expecting that night to be the night. An idea that must have been reinforced when we got back to the room and she found a white lily lying on her bed next to a Valentine’s Day card. As she read the card her eyes filled with more tears. I don’t remember what I wrote, but it didn’t take much to tug her heartstrings.

  I always felt that was one of her best traits. One I’ll always miss.

  While holding the flower to her nose, she fixed me with a look that turned my knees to mush and walked over to me. In her youth, Lily-1 had been magazine cover material. And at thirteen, Lily-2 was already beginning to look far too much like the woman she would become. She encircled me in her arms and ground her lips against mine. Where did she learn to do that? The next thing I knew I was lying on my back on the bed with her straddling me, and she was reaching back to unzip her dress.

  “Wait,” I gasped, pulling her hand away from her zipper.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “We can’t yet,” I answered, gently easing her off my aroused eighteen-year-old body. “Another four years,” I assured her.

  “No one will ever know,” she said, pressing herself against me.

  “We can’t take that risk,” I said, holding her hand to comfort her. And keep her away. “I’d go to jail if anyone found out.”

  “But we’re married!”

  My arousal withered. “No one else would see it that way. It’s just too risky. I’m sorry.” I held her hands. “We have to think about the public relations implications. It’s important for clones and for our company.”

  She turned away and picked her flower back up, again drinking in its aroma. I zipped her back up.

  “Four more years?” she asked. She sounded like she wanted the assurance that it would actually happen.

  “Four more years.” I wondered whether I was setting a date for sex, making a marriage proposal, or giving an unimaginative campaign speech.

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  29

  Those four years passed all too quickly. By 2057, I’d graduated from UCSD and was halfway through the MBA program at the University of San Diego. The MBA was meant to help me move up quickly through the management of U.S. Cloning Systems where I then worked as a project manager. Meanwhile, my semi-celebrity status, Sociology degree, and unmatched experience at being a clone helped me get on the Genetics and Cloning Board (GC Board) where we debated the various legal, social, and biological ramifications of cloning.

  More than one million people worldwide were being cloned each year, in spite of only marginal decreases of infant mortality and mutation rates. The solution wouldn’t be easy. Few of the problems were interdependent, where finding a single solution would solve a large percentage of the defects. Nevertheless, the GC Board pressured the acting CEO of U.S. Cloning Systems to begin shifting more company resources toward fixing those problems. Most of all it was a moral issue, but it also made good sense from a long-range business perspective. The fewer risks, the more the public would embrace the concept and the additional confidence they would have in having themselves or loved ones cloned.

  We also began developing educational materials for social workers and child psychologists. As I’d experienced firsthand, many families pressured clones to continue the lives of their c-parents. While I had resisted the pressure for a while, I had failed and was often severely depressed over my failure.

  The more I talked to younger clones and worked with psychologists and other experts on the subject, the more I began to understand some of what I’d gone through. Pressure and anxiety came from bigotry by anti-cloners. Then there were the parents who didn’t want the clones. An “ugly stepchild” syndrome emerged wherein the clones were not loved as much as the parents’ biological children, and often were raised purely out of duty to a deceased relative whom the couple might not have liked much to begin with. And often c-parents, through letters and holovideos, created even more strain on the clone than did the surviving family members. Making things even more challenging, many suicidal young people felt that their life was not their own, and that the person they were really killing was the c-parent whom they hated.

  What it should have done was re-planted the seed of doubt about my own life path. Although I liked Lily and was flattered by her complete infatuation, I wasn’t in love with her. I didn’t even crave her company. Our home life would be satisfactory at best. But then, considering my past failures, a satisfactory life was the best I deserved. Not a bad consolation prize for someone who couldn’t avenge his mother when handed the chance by the murderer himself.

  Speaking of the devil, Lyle-2 answered Aunt Louise’s door. I was picking up Lily-2 to celebrate the weekend of her eighteenth birthday at the cabin in the redwoods. Lyle-2 was eleven. He grew more aloof and made me uneasier every time I saw him. He had begun studying me as I remembered Lyle-1 studying me during my childhood. He didn’t invite me in.

  “Well, hello sir,” I said cheerily.

  His eyes searched me up and down, his lips as warm and friendly as a microscope slide.

  “I’m here to pick up Lily.”

  “I know,” he said. “You have to.”

  I forced a laugh. “What do you mean? I want to.”

  “No, you don’t. But you have to.”

  He still hadn’t moved out of the doorway.

  “Excuse me,” I replied, and pushed my way past the little asshole. It was becoming ever clearer that Lyle-2 would never like or trust me. There was no need to waste my time trying to be polite.

  Lily walked down the stairs wearing a head-turning tank top. Her face glowed with anticipation. The wait would be over in a few hours. We kissed while the little asshole studied us from the other side of the room.

  “Lyle,” Louise called as she wandered into the room, “can you go get my purse out of my room?”

  He gave an annoyed shrug and headed upstairs.

  “We’ve got money,” I told her.

  “Well I hope so, because I wasn’t going to give you any.”

  “What do you need from your purse?” I asked, grinning at her. She was almost ninety, but seemed young for her age – especially for someone who had refused an artificial immune system.

  Louise paused, placing a finger on her chin. “Well, I don’t know yet. I just sent him away on a pretext, dear. But don’t worry, I’ll think of something before he gets back.”

  I laughed and gave her a hug. Pierre-2 lumbered up for a hug as well. He was growing extremely geriatric and would pass away the following year, but he could still jump on you like a puppy when you first arrived. A little pawing at my ankle told me that Blue-3 had come to see us off as well. I scratched her under the chin, and she purred. Somehow, getting purrs out of a mentally enhanced cat seemed an even richer reward than usual.

  “Okay, you’ve met everyone. Now go have a great time, you two!”

  Growing up I had always thought Aunt Louise was clueless and lost in her own little world of glass flowers. But as I grew older I was beginning to believe she knew exactly what was going on. She just didn’t want anyone else to know she knew.

  I grabbed Lily’s bags and we got on our way. A few hours later we arrived at the cabin. A white lily lay on the bed. Around the stem of the lily was a ring. Her eyes zeroed in on it, and she slipped the ring off the stem and onto her finger, admiring it and fixing me with an enormous, satisfied grin. She held the flower to her nose as she walked up to me. Her other hand took my wrist and slid it under her tank top, pressing it against her bra-less left breast. I caught my breath, feeling both excited and uneasy.

  “Do you need a glass of wine first?” I asked.
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  She didn’t.

  As she pulled me toward the bed, my free hand fumbled for the condoms in the overnight bag. The rest would be unpacked later.

  ***

  Later that evening, I dreamt I was in a lush garden late at night. I could hear crickets, and I think there were stars overhead. But I was also vaguely aware that the tropical plants and flowers were all made of glass. A lamb was nuzzling my arm. Its company somehow comforted me.

  “Adam, where are you?” came a voice. I recognized it as a line from the Book of Genesis just before God punished Adam and Eve for eating the forbidden fruit. Was it God speaking to me? Was he about to level his curse of Death upon me? I was afraid, but couldn’t seem to resist answering.

  “We are over here,” I replied.

  “Why are there so many of you?” demanded the voice.

  “I gave myself a second chance because I didn’t think you would,” I answered.

  “You gave yourself a second chance?”

  I wasn’t sure how to respond. Suddenly an unseen but powerful force plucked me from my hiding place in the garden.

  “Don’t screw it up this time!” the invisible force shouted, and dropped me back into the garden, shattering some of the glass plants.

  “I don’t know what to do,” I said.

  “Save the lamb,” it replied, now from far off.

  I glanced down to see that the lamb was safe, but there was blood all over its wool.

  “I killed it!” a voice proclaimed behind me.

  Lily-2 stood there, her hands awash in blood, one of them gripping a shard from a broken glass flower.

  “It’ll be better this way,” she said. “It would have ruined our wedding.”

  My eyes went back to the dying lamb. It was now wearing a wedding dress. I held it in my arms and began to cry, and that’s when I awoke feeling sick to my stomach.

  When Lily reached for me in the morning, in my mind I saw her bloody hands. I recoiled. She gave me a look of shock, and I apologized, explaining that I was half asleep. She was still put off by it for a while, and we didn’t make love again until that night. Which was all right with me.

  We drove back to San Diego four days later, and in the car Lily inquired as nonchalantly as possible whether we would be getting married that summer. I said that I wanted to finish my MBA first. Going to school part time while working full time would put my graduation date in May of 2059, so we could tentatively plan on getting married the following summer. Which would buy me two more years.

  “Why do we have to wait until you finish school?” she asked.

  “Because I’m so busy right now. I don’t want to get married until I can be a proper husband.”

  It was the only thing I could come up with at the time.

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  30

  Although we didn’t get married that summer of 2057, we did go on a sort of pre-wedding honeymoon. Thomas Wilson’s book Farewell Dolly had begun distribution in May, and I was invited to join him on part of his whirlwind book-signing tour to the world’s largest metropolitan areas. The media was fascinated, and both clones and non-clones flocked to the signings to get Wilson’s book and to meet me.

  Well, not so much to meet me. More so to meet the first human clone and to get a look at the new couple. Our engagement had been leaked (Lily told everyone she knew), so by June it was out that the first human clone was going to marry the clone of his c-father’s wife. The wedding wasn’t for another two years, but it was practically certain to be the first of its kind – a couple reunited by their c-children.

  The press asked a million questions about our relationship, marriage plans, etcetera, and I let Lily field most of them. She was eager to talk about it. I tried to mostly avoid the commotion, but wasn’t always able to. Like in London when Jennifer Barefield of The Times caught us as we strolled through Hyde Park on the anniversary of Adam-1 and Lily-1’s anniversary.

  “You two were separated the night of your 34th anniversary, June 5, 2033.”

  We both nodded.

  “In what way has that most affected your relationship?”

  It was a question made to order for Lily who saw us as a continuation of our c-parents, and a question that I saw as embarrassing. My clone-father had described the events leading up to that night in his last journal entry – events that began more than two months before his death, on March 21, 2033, when Lyle suffered a mild stroke. He was kept in the hospital a couple days for observation, and Adam spent those days unable to concentrate on anything except the possibility that Lyle might die. The technology had only recently become ready. Everything was in place to attempt the first human cloning. Adam couldn’t wait for the government to close down the company following the birth of Lyle’s clone. This was his one chance. Everything he had lived for after his father’s suicide depended on it.

  By the end of April, Adam’s preparations were complete. He wrote several letters and made numerous holovideos of himself which were to be shared with me, indicating most of them were to be presented on specific birthdays so that I’d gradually get to know more and more about my clone-father as I grew older. He also made final preparations on his journal for when I became an adult, both to tell me about his life and to give me vital information I would need to eventually take over Ingeneuity. Then he planned his death.

  He wanted to die under relatively painless, controlled circumstances. And he wanted it to look like murder. For one thing, Adam was afraid that if Lyle found that he committed suicide so he could be first, Lyle might prevent the cloning. Adam also thought it might be a nice touch for public relations purposes. If he was murdered, the public might feel more compassion toward his clone.

  So, on May 1, Adam began receiving anonymous death threats in the mail. The police opened an investigation. Lily begged for them to leave the house for a couple months and go up to the redwoods, but Adam refused to be driven from his home by whatever coward was sending the messages.

  When the threats stopped arriving a couple weeks later, their lives and Lily’s anxiety level began returning to normal. Then, on June 5, their 34th wedding anniversary, a package arrived from Adam’s cousin Marilyn, Charles and Mary’s daughter. Adam hardly knew her, with her having moved to Idaho before Adam had been orphaned. The last time he’d seen any of his cousins was five years earlier at Charles’s funeral, and they hadn’t talked much then. It was quite something to get an anniversary present from her. Lily was surprised.

  The package contained a bottle of wine, and Lily suggested they use it to toast their anniversary before going to bed. After a romantic dinner at Anthony’s Fish Grotto along the bay, they drove home to continue their celebration. As always, when they came in from their anniversary meal, a single lily stood in a vase on the table with a card attached. This time the bottle of wine stood with it. While Lily put her nose to the flower and read the card, he popped the cork and poured two glasses to toast their marriage.

  He took a quick sip as Lily hesitated at the smell. When she parted her lips, he knocked the glass from her hand. She let out a surprised yelp as the glass shattered on the hardwood floor. Adam was shaking his head in mock confusion, inspecting the bottle.

  “It’s not wine!” he said.

  The reality began to dawn on Lily as quickly as Adam had hoped it would. Either the liquid in the wine bottle was poison, or it was all part of an elaborate hoax to strike more fear in the Elwell household.

  They weren’t going to take any chances. At Lily’s frantic suggestion, they decided to go to the hospital and have Adam and the liquid analyzed. I suspect that when Lily went into the bedroom to get her purse, Adam finished off the glass. Enough to make sure they wouldn’t be able to save him.

  As a nurse led him to an empty room, he began feeling the effects of the poison hemlock solution. It was a particularly poetic way for him to end his life if he didn’t say so himself (and he did say so in his private journal). The potion was based partially on what Socrates wa
s thought to have drunk with an added synthetic toxin to ensure that modern medicine could not resuscitate him.

  His legs and arms began to slip into paralysis. His eyelids became heavy. The doctors pumped his stomach, but it was too late. He would die minutes before Sarah arrived at the hospital, with only Lily comforting him as he sank into oblivion.

  *

  “I know we loved each other so much even then,” Lily-2 said to Jennifer Barefield as she leaned against my arm. “But that terrible night gave the whole world a chance to see just how strong our love really was. A love that could transcend the death of both of us and continue on in our current lives. The first time in the history of man.”

  “What about you?” Jennifer asked me. “Do you think the night of your tragic death made your love even greater than it ever was?”

  I was relieved at the leading question. “Yes.”

  *

  We were living with each other during the two months we spent on the tour – the first time we had lived together in five years. And this time we were living in the same room. Some people click, getting along no matter how much time they spend together, but Lily began to chafe me. She talked almost exclusively about our relationship and our past relationship, which she knew far more about than I did. My c-father hadn’t elaborated much except to note Lily’s importance to his schemes for immortality.

  I was more interested in the amazing cities we were visiting and about culture and history. She would play along for a while, but then she’d start in about how much fun we were having and whether we should consider this place for our honeymoon and which mementos should we get to reminisce in our old age. It was nice to be so well loved by someone, and taken in moderation her two topics of conversation would have been romantic. Taken in immoderation, it was torture.

  Meanwhile, the book publisher was rushing to meet the unexpected demand for printed copies of Thomas Wilson’s novel. I felt bad that we seemed to be stealing the publicity that rightfully should have been his. While at a bar after a book signing in Rome, I asked if our upstaging him at the signings bothered him much.