“How is this going to help Lily?” Cain asked as I got ready for work the first morning.
“It won’t,” I admitted. “But it’ll help others. The fewer people depending on Lyle to save their lives, the better.”
He agreed. “But you’re still going to find a way to help Lily?”
I lied to my son. For five years.
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During those five years, Evelyn-2 grew more and more like the young girl I’d fallen in love with. And she seemed to fall in love with her c-mother as well.
For Evelyn-2’s sixth birthday, I gave her a framed picture that I took of Evelyn-1 at the Wild Animal Park with the sun setting on the savannah behind her. I saw Evelyn looking at it often, even moving it around the house – from her bedroom to the bathroom and the living room’s fireplace mantle.
A few nights later, after dinner, Hannah, Martin, and Cain started a hologame in the dining room, and Evelyn came into the living room where I was reading. She was carrying the picture.
“What are you reading?”
I smiled and put my tablet down. “Just something for work.”
“You used to work where your c-father worked?”
“That’s right.”
“Have you ever dreamt about him?”
I nodded silently. Except for Evelyn-1, I’d never told anyone about my recurring nightmares.
“How did they make you feel?”
“My dreams are bad ones.”
She frowned. “I’m sorry.”
“Me too,” I said. Fleeting memories of Adam-1 protecting me from a witch. Sitting in his hologram’s lap. Being a father. I pushed them out. “But now what about your dreams?”
She smiled, put the picture down, and hugged one of the couch cushions to her chest. “Oh, I’ve had lots of dreams. One time a couple tigers were chasing Cain and me, and finally we ran into Evelyn. She protected us and tamed the tigers so we could pet them. In another one, I was attacked in a park late at night, but when they shot at me, my c-mom jumped down from out of nowhere and was shot instead.”
“I’m sure she would do that,” I said. I tasted metal in the back of my mouth. “Do you know, she told me way back in second grade that she wanted to have a clone someday. She loved the thought of you even then.”
Evelyn-2 beamed at the idea. “You know, my favorite dream is one I’ve had several times. I’m standing on a theatre stage with millions of people watching me, and I don’t know what to do, and I’m crying, and she comes out of the audience and gives me a hug. Like she does in her birthday holograms, but in the dream it feels so real. I can even smell her. And I always wake up feeling so comforted.”
I set my book on the coffee table. Any excuse to catch my breath. “Maybe she’s hugging you from wherever she is,” I said.
Evelyn-2 looked suspicious. “I didn’t think you really believed in heaven.”
“I don’t not believe in it,” I explained. I didn’t tell her about how I believed that, if God did exist, he likely hated my mother and me, and that I’d have no interest in whatever that sort of God would create as an afterlife. “I certainly hope there is a good heaven where we all eventually go. That’s the only way I’d ever be able to talk to your c-mom again. And my mom.”
Evelyn smiled. “I hope you get to, but not for a very long time. Unless it’s in your dreams.”
“Me too,” I agreed.
Shortly after that, Evelyn-2 joined her c-mother in becoming infatuated with the arts. Hannah gave her a set of oil paints for Hanukkah, and the next day she painted her first original print. I thought it was an abstract painting, but Evelyn assured me it was a portrait of the cheetahs. We framed the painting and hung it up in her bedroom.
In the coming months she became a prolific and much improved painter. We got her a tutor, and her paintings began to take on some very strong themes, revealing herself ever more vividly through her art as she depicted scenes from her life and the life of her c-mother. She used dark colors and rough strokes in depicting the shooting in Central Park and bright hues and smooth edges for paintings set at the Wild Animal Park or in Farewell Dolly (with full permission of Sondheim-2 and Thomas Wilson, who each bought a couple of those paintings themselves). Evelyn-2 always depicted herself as a young child, but Evelyn-1’s age varied from a young girl to an old woman. Some included Cain, Hannah, and/or myself in the background. My favorite, which she gave me for my birthday, featured our wedding. Adam-1 sat above me and to the side, and Evelyn-2 sat below and to the side of Evelyn-1.
She never painted facial features, which was probably wise at her age and skill level. But identity and emotion were hinted at subtly through hair, position, hue, and background. Those backgrounds were painted like sketches, providing critical settings and colors, but leaving the emphasis on the faceless people. The themes ran the gamut from tender to tragic.
It impressed Edmund Lewis. His father’s Me, Myself, and My Clone had become by far Jack’s biggest success over the ten years since its posthumous publication. When the publisher began making plans to roll out an anniversary edition with a forward by Jack’s recently ordained son, Edmund suggested they include more examples from the past that would touch on many of the most famous clones, and he wanted it to include original artwork by Evelyn-2 that depicted some of the major figures and events in cloning history.
Evelyn-2 went wild. She was commissioned to do the paintings – forty-eight original prints in all. The images began with the birth of Dolly and included the night of my birth, the birth of Shannon Smith-1, my Winter Wonderland marriage to Evelyn-1 in second grade, the assassination of my mother by Gabrielle Burns, the self-immolation of Jason Rendell, the premiere of Farewell Dolly, the suicide of Lily-2 in Central Park, the birth of Cain, Lily-3 and Evelyn-2, the suicide of Cooper Jones-2, and the bombings of my childhood church and the Genetics and Cloning Board. It presented a mixture of triumph and tragedy, along with the portraits of some famous clones with their c-parents.
The demand for the book exceeded even the publisher’s rosy expectations. As of last year, eleven years after Jack’s first edition and a year after the anniversary book, surveys showed that more than forty percent of all clones over the age of twelve owned either a hard or virtual copy, and sales were brisk among non-clones thinking of becoming c-parents and those already raising clones. Preliminary studies seemed to show the book was having a positive and lasting effect on clones in general. Since its publication, the clone suicide rate has dropped steadily, the drop being even more pronounced among those who own or have read the book. In 2084, the clone suicide rate of Me, Myself, and My Clone readers had thankfully declined to scarcely more than the rate among non-clones, and was continuing its downward trend. Where I’d failed to improve that figure much from my seat on the GC Board, Jack and Edmund had succeeded – a fact Edmund was extremely grateful for, feeling that he was helping to continue his father’s legacy.
Edmund came over to present me with one of the books from the first printing.
“I can’t tell you what you and Jack and your grandpa have meant to me,” I told him. “God takes the good and leaves people like me.”
He shook his head. “No, Mr. Elwell. God’s left a person that my father and grandfather loved very much. They wouldn’t want it any other way,” he said. “No sir.”
I was affected by the book as well. Over the years I’d gotten into the habit of imagining my clone-father to be little more than a ghoul, and a burden whose failures as a human being had locked me in a lifelong battle with Lyle. Were there more valuable ways for me to look at him? As the loving father of my mother? As the man whose efforts made my life possible? Could I forgive his sins on account of his orphanhood, his desperate fear of death, as I would hope to be forgiven for my own fears and inactions and deceits? He couldn’t have foreseen how his actions would lead to the murder of his daughter and my wife. Would he really hate me and want to exchange my life with his, or would he be su
pportive of my changes?
Maybe there would be a day when instead of dreaming about him killing me and taking over my life, I would envision him being the father I’d once imagined. At times I came close to recapturing these more ideal visions, but then I’d think of Evelyn or my mom, their dead eyes, and I lost any interest in my clone-father. Whether it meant I was soulless or not, I was glad he was dead.
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On January 31, 2084, we held a big gala at Barebots to finally announce our goal of performing the first transplant into a Barebot body. A goal in which we had tremendous confidence.
Bobby the Barebot was running 6,000 operation simulations a day. More than eighty percent of those were successes, and he was learning from the failures. Meanwhile, real-world tests included the transplanting of four chimpanzee brains into modified, artificial chimpanzee bodies. The first two chimps died of shock shortly after their brains were placed in the new environment. But Bobby reprogrammed the artificial body to react immediately to the shock by sending new proteins to the brain, mollifying the trauma, and the next two chimps survived. Afterwards, Bobby said that brain death would soon be a near impossibility. Once we knew better how to fool the brain into thinking the old body was there and functioning normally, the artificial body would keep the brain alive better than a natural body. And as for the brain controlling the body, he expressed even more confidence. After all, our brains had been controlling artificial eyes for decades, paraplegics had been controlling their bodies with artificial suits for almost as long, and I could personally attest to the legs.
Our optimism was further enhanced by watching the last two chimpanzees that not only survived the transfer, but also seemed unchanged. Even the other chimps accepted them as they had before, although sometimes the patients would look at one of their hands for a couple minutes at a time, or the others would stare long and hard into the artificial eyes in a way they hadn’t before, as if they sensed something was different, but couldn’t put their finger on it. Or at least, that was our impression. For all I knew, they knew exactly what we had done to them and were either marveling at our handiwork or critiquing it.
In any event, the lessons we learned from the chimps were in the process of being applied to the human prototypes, and Bobby and his staff were busy processing the new information into their simulations. We felt confident enough to publicly set a goal date. On January 31, 2085, we were scheduled to make the first transfer.
Most still preferred to be frozen until a cure could be found for their condition, but some patients had already expressed a preference to be our beta testers. Many of our willing guinea pigs were driven by a fear of dying, despite good prospects for eventually being brought back at Rejuve. Perhaps some of them feared worse tortures than being hen-pecked in purgatory – of being sent straight to hell. Assuming all went well, we’d soon start working our way down the waiting list of terminally ill children, as well as the dying adults who feared the hellfire on the other side of cryonic freeze.
The debate, of course, is still raging as to whether rejuvenated people experience any sort of afterlife while their bodies are dead. Out of more than 20,000 bodies resurrected by the start of 2084, eighty percent of those having died from the Hendemic, approximately two in three had what they described as visions of an afterlife. The majority of those were self-described religious people, but several non-religious people had experiences as well. On the other hand, one-fourth of those who considered themselves religious could remember nothing. The evidence was circumstantial, and everyone concluded whatever he or she wished to believe. So far, Daryl Scott was the only one who had been told by Christ to promote egg eating.
During our Barebots party, a group of protestors assembled around the perimeter of the park. I was familiar with such people. In this case, the protestors were against “turning men into machines” and the movement among Barebots pressing for their individual rights. They held up signs against the Barebots, which they referred to as “Calcs” – a reference to them being less like humans and more like calculators. They referred to their human friends as “Bot-Lovers,” pronounced “Butt-Lovers” to make us sound more like one of their other favorite targets, the “Sodomites.” Chants against Calcs and Butt-Lovers were heard throughout the evening.
The hatred had the positive effect of igniting a passion in Edmund Lewis who was attending the party with us. He found a cause that he could make his own, arguing to the media that whether or not machines deserved rights should be dependent on their level of sentience, individuality, and independence of judgment – not on how they came into the world. “If you think robots are capable of human emotions, then love them,” he said. “If you think they’re calculators, then there’s no need to hate a calculator.”
But the protests cast a pall over the party, especially among the Barebots.
Cathode Hepburn and Jeff Goldblum-2 walked over to greet us. I hadn’t seen her since the funeral.
“How are you?” she said as she hugged me close.
“I’m okay,” I said softly.
She greeted Cain, and then caught sight of Evelyn-2, giving the girl such a huge and welcoming grin that Evelyn grinned back in spite of her shyness around strangers.
Cathy knelt down to be on the same level of Evelyn’s clone. “You know, I see Evelyn’s beauty in you.”
“Thank you,” Evelyn-2 whispered.
“This is Cathode Hepburn,” I said. “She’s a friend of your c-mom.”
“Evelyn once played a c-mom and a c-daughter in Farewell Dolly,” said Cathy.
Evelyn-2 nodded.
“I asked her how she did that, and she said it was easy. She said she’d already met her clone-daughter in her dreams.”
I saw Evelyn-2’s mouth fall open and eyes light up in wonder. I felt a tingling myself, a feeling that Evelyn’s soul was still with us. But I also thought of my c-father, and my own nightmares.
I picked Evelyn-2 up and she wrapped her small arms around my neck and gave me a kiss.
“What’s that for?” I asked, pinching her cheek that, like Evelyn’s, smelled of jasmine.
“That’s from my c-mom.”
She rested her head against my shoulder and fell asleep. After we got home and I put Evelyn to bed, I went downstairs to the living room and put in the holotape of our marriage. As Barbra Streisand-2 sang Evergreen for our first dance as a married couple, I stood within my hologram’s image to dance with Evelyn. She looked so real, right to the tiny scar over her right eye and the lightly applied pink gloss on her smiling lips. But my fingers kept slipping through hers. I was just dancing with laser plasma. It was all I had.
Half way through the song I crumpled to the floor. The image of Evelyn’s feet kept dancing about me, oblivious to my despair.
For the first time I felt genuine sympathy for Grandma Lily and regret that I didn’t treat her with more kindness when I was four years old. Now that I’d walked in her skin, I knew what it could be like seeing the clone of the spouse you loved grow up as a different person.
I’m sorry, Grandma. I didn’t know.
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March 11, 2084 marked fifty years since the birth of the first human clone. We started the morning with a small, private party at my place. Evelyn presented me with a painting of my mom cradling me in her arms on my original birthday along with a little poem marveling at how my controversial birth “so very, very, very, very long ago” helped pave the way for so many millions of new lives “who are all a lot younger than you.” Cain provided me with a famous image of the universe about 300,000 years after the Big Bang accompanied by a mathematical proof purporting to prove that the universe couldn’t possibly be older than me.
Aren’t kids clever.
As night descended, it was time to get dressed for the big opening at the La Jolla Playhouse. Stephen Sondheim-2 was giving Farewell Dolly a revival, and he’d chosen that day for the opening, twenty-f
ive years after its first party. A friend of my wife’s, Nicole Kidman-2, was reprising her role of Dolly. Evelyn had met her when Nicole-2 first starred as Dolly with the Riverdale Rising Stars in New York. She told Evelyn that she felt fate was involved in the casting, as her c-mother’s first-ever stage role had been in a Christmas pageant where she played a bleating lamb.
The only hitch with casting Nicole-2 was that they had to re-stage some of the Alice in Wonderland scene, the one in which the Caterpillar undergoes his transformation. Nicole-2 had inherited Nicole-1’s phobia – she was afraid of butterflies.
As Evelyn wrote back, “Seriously Nicole, who isn’t?”
The twenty-fifth anniversary gala was a star-studded event filled with famous fellow clones from parties past and a slew of younger generation c-celebrities including a six-year-old Winona Ryder-2 who was the spitting image of Evelyn-2, and the two of them were inseparable the rest of the night.
About an hour before show time, Thomas Wilson brought out my birthday cake. Cast leads Nicole Kidman-2, Mary-Louise Parker-2, and Denzel Washington-2 came out briefly for the birthday festivities. Those festivities started with Stephen Colbert-2 coming out of a black monolith to portray the Star-Child baby at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey and ended with Bernadette Peters-2 doing a Marilyn Monroe imitation for the singing of Happy Birthday. The cake had “Fifty” spelled out with little sheep candles that reminded me too much of my mother’s welcome mat.
I made a wish and blew, but a couple of them didn’t go out. I frantically blew out the last stubborn candles, hoping to fool the gods or fates or whoever it was that kept track of such things.
At this Farewell Dolly, Evelyn sat next to me. I saw her eyes tear up as the aged Dolly began her final duet with her motherly hologram and they ascended to heaven. I bit my lip as Cain held her hand. I hoped my wife was still able to see her son and her clone-daughter.