Upon finding his initial alibi trashed, Lyle-1 explained that he knew of their conspiracy but had not taken part in it. Lyle-2’s complete plan was to have my clone-father kill me, along with Cain, Evelyn-2, and Evelyn-1 who’d been rejuvenated three days before. Adam-1 would die “accidentally” a few months later, after Lyle-2 had forged Adam’s name on documents declining the option to be cloned.
On Christmas Eve, Lyle-1’s conscience got the best of him, and he drove out there to prevent the crime. Finding no one in our cabin, he supposedly left the scene and drove back home. According to him, the person who shot at us after Lyle-2 and Lily-3 were dead was someone he had seen but not known, and he believed the mysterious stranger was still at large. The weapon that person fired was never found, leaving an opening for the jury to find that explanation possible.
But they didn’t. Lyle-1 was found guilty of murder, attempted murder, conspiracy to commit murder, and kidnapping. He is now serving six consecutive 99-year sentences.
“Adam, I swear I tried to stop them,” he called across the courtroom railing as they began leading him toward the door. “Just like I tried to stop Gabrielle.”
I paused, not looking at him, trying to control my trembling bottom lip.
“If only your mother were still alive,” he continued.
My mom had once said she wanted to live on through me, and that sudden memory warmed me somehow. I turned to face my great-grandfather just as they led him by me, his grin taunting me. I thought of my mom staring Lyle down that Thanksgiving Day, and tried my best to replicate her strength. I grabbed his collar and pulled him to a stop. The bailiff began to remove my grip but changed his mind, standing ready in case it got out of hand.
“But Lyle,” I said, feeling my mom’s strength coursing through me. The warmth of her comfort. The sting of her loss. “She is.”
Lyle studied my eyes. His grin, that had always terrified me so much, faded to a frown.
We remained locked in that silent battle until the bailiff pulled my hand away and pushed Lyle forward. He dropped his gaze to his shackled feet as he carefully made his way to a side exit. I almost pitied him as my once invincible terror shuffled away as an old, defeated man. I watched him till the door shut him from view. I haven’t seen him since that moment. I hope I never do. But if I do, I hope my mother is still here inside me.
***
As for me, the aftermath of the so-called Christmas Clone Killings has been a time of both anguish and healing. We mourned for Cain, Lily, and my clone-father. And for Lyle-2. We were able to hold funeral services for Cain, Lily, Adam, and Pierre at the new Elwell family plot located on a section of our property in the redwoods. Eventually we’d also get permission to have my mom’s remains and those of Aunt Louise, Lily-1, and Lily-2 moved from the San Diego cemetery to our family cemetery.
After the funerals we opened the Christmas presents that we never had the opportunity to unwrap during the holidays, including those for Cain. Evelyn-2 had painted a portrait of Cain sitting on a star and gazing down at the earth. We ended up inscribing it with the epitaph Mark Twain had written for his daughter:
Warm summer sun, shine kindly here;
Warm southern wind, blow softly here;
Green sod above, lie light, lie light –
Good-night, dear heart, good-night, good-night.
Love,
Adam and Evelyns
We had it chiseled on his headstone.
On my grandfather’s headstone we used a poem written by a distant relative more than one hundred years ago.
These Redwoods from the hand of the Creator made,
Growing through aeons of time content to stand,
Performing their stolid, steadfast, sentinel duty –
They keep their timely vigil for a seeming eternity.
– Rev. Elwell Mason Drew, The Redwoods
The next few weeks were busy as Barebots prepared for the momentous operation. An operation that was now set to happen on Evelyn-1. Lyle had brought her back, but had only cured her immediate cause of death, believed to be an artificially created clot that traveled to her brain. The cause of her disease, the mutating genetic sequence we’d never been able to solve, was still destroying and aging her body, which was well over 120 years genetically speaking. Not knowing what the genetic poisoning would do next, we all agreed her operation should happen as quickly as possible, and Evelyn offered to be the first guinea pig rather than risking a terminally ill child.
There was some concern that Evelyn’s testimony would be questioned at the trial following her brain transplant, or that she might die during the operation and be unable to give any testimony whatsoever. They therefore holotaped Evelyn’s depositions, which could be used in case of death and compared with her actual testimony in case of life.
As scheduled, we were set to perform the operation on January 31, 2085. Hannah had to get a prescription for sedatives. We had just lost Cain. We had just been given Evelyn back. She couldn’t lose her again.
Evelyn was surprisingly calm. She’d spent the past month, when not giving sworn depositions, visiting friends including Cathy Hepburn, Bernadette-2, and Nicole Kidman-2 in New York. Evelyn even took a minute to talk to Hugh Hefner-2, listening to his offer for her to pose in before-and-after spreads, which Evelyn demurely declined.
She also spent time at our special place at the Wild Animal Park, taking long walks along the La Jolla beach, and talking to our family at our graveyard in Sequoia.
Too quickly, the day for the operation arrived.
“I don’t want you to feel bad if this doesn’t work out,” she told me after Hannah and Martin had left the operating room.
Being in those sterile rooms of white and chrome and monitors had always made me uneasy. Flashes of stumps where my legs once were. And waking up to find Hannah crying over me, certain my wife was dead. I gave Evelyn a look that might have captured the impossibility of the task she asked.
“I mean it,” she said, reaching out to run her fingers through Evelyn-2’s hair. “Because I don’t want you to be moody around my c-daughter.”
I helped Evelyn-2 up to the bed, and she kissed her c-mother on the cheek. Evelyn held her close and whispered something into her ear, and Evelyn-2 nodded. I eased her back down and took my wife’s hands.
“I need you,” was all I could think to say.
She smiled. “You’re sappy.”
“I know. I’m sor—”
She kissed me, then held my head close to her. “You know I always come back to you.”
We hugged each other for about a minute or so. Not long enough. I breathed in the fragrance of Evelyn’s skin for the last time. Her artificial body would never replicate that.
The surgeons from Barebots entered led by Bobby the Barebot. He had simulated this exact operation on Evelyn more than twenty thousand times and hadn’t lost his simulated Evelyn even once during the past two weeks.
He put his hand on my shoulder. “She’ll be better than new in 6.3 hours.”
I nodded.
“You ready, Evelyn?” Bobby asked.
She nodded, and then used her real hand to squeeze mine one last time. I squeezed back. We smiled. I let go, and stepped back.
“I love you!” she called out, now looking nervous.
“I love you, too,” I said, fear sinking in deeper.
A doctor attached the anesthesia, and we smiled bravely until she lost consciousness.
*
The physical brain transfer took exactly 6.3 hours. When I looked at in on paper, it didn’t seem nearly as overwhelming as some of the other things humans and AI were doing by then. Slowly letting the artificial blood supply from the new body replace the brain’s natural blood supply. Physically removing it from the natural body and placing it in the artificial body’s skull. Connecting its base to the artificial spine so that it could communicate with the new nervous system. Checking to see if the nanocomputers were sending the correct balance of protein
s to the brain to make it believe it was in its natural environment. Child’s play, Bobby assured me.
Finally, Bobby “turned it on,” so to speak.
We didn’t invite the media as Rejuve had for its first rejuvenation. The waking of Evelyn was a private affair attended only by Bobby, Hannah, Martin, Evelyn-2, and myself. We all stood next to her bed, terrified and hopeful. Every feature of the body looked exactly as Evelyn had looked – virtually a replica of the Evelyn I’d married. She had to come back to me one more time.
And, as you know, she did. Her eyelids flickered a bit, and then she opened them. We all gasped and cried and held her hands to see if she was not only awake, but still the same Evelyn we had known and loved.
A hint of a grin wiggled on her lips, then a look of worry covered her face. Through closed lips she slowly said, “Oilcan.”
We were all so strung out, the meaningless word and the way she said it left us horrified.
Evelyn’s brain was the only brain properly functioning at the time. She laughed and smiled – a glowing smile – and looked at me.
“The Wizard of Oz!” I cried out stupidly.
Evelyn’s brain was clearly able to work her new facial muscles as she had her real ones. She rolled her eyes and nodded, and then laughed again as we all began hugging her.
“It’s alive! Alive!” Bobby the Barebot exclaimed. That an artificial person declared this only added to the surreal moment.
In the giddiness that followed, we had Evelyn demonstrate the rest of her physical abilities through a little Young Frankenstein action – having her and Bobby perform Puttin’ on the Ritz. It’s a good thing we didn’t televise it. Everyone would have believed we’d cracked.
The levity ended about an hour later when Evelyn asked to see her old body. I led her into an adjacent room where her former self was still laid out on a refrigerated operating table underneath a sheet.
Evelyn was trembling.
“Are you sure?” I asked.
She nodded, and I reluctantly folded the linen down. Evelyn caught her breath, throwing her hands to her face, then steadied herself against the table. She carefully, lightly ran her fingers along the cold, dead face, pausing at the real scar above her eye.
I don’t think I can quite imagine what feelings wracked her mind as she examined her own corpse – the body that had always been such an integral part of her. Eventually she knelt beside her dead body, alternately touching and hugging it, examining it with sadness and awe. I gently petted her hair a couple times before leaving the room so she could be alone. She remained there for several hours.
*
A battery of physiological and psychological tests followed throughout the month of February and on into March. Small adjustments were made here and there, but no life threatening emergencies occurred, and her mind appeared to be unchanged except for a heightened sense of optimism and happiness. But how much of that is due to being in an artificial body, and how much can be attributed to a new life? There’s no denying that we are all both mind and body, and any change in our body has to change who we are to some degree. We all felt the changes in Evelyn were good.
A large segment of the population was not so joyful at her first public appearances. Some suggest that I had it rough growing up as the first clone, but my mother was the one who really faced that. By the time I was old enough to realize what was going on, most of the uproar had subsided. This was not the case with Evelyn, and the reaction would be strong. People had met humans with artificial legs, arms, eyes, hearts, and even faces. But they had never met a human fully encased in an artificial body. It was the dawn of a new era.
I feel it will be a golden era when people can finally live their lives unencumbered by the pain and suffering caused by our natural bodies – when disease and hunger will become an aspect of our distant past only experienced at our whim. It is a dream so often yearned for as a key feature of heaven, yet so many of the most fundamentalist believers have ridiculed the idea of humanity giving themselves these things while we’re still here on earth.
As I took the nearly 200-year-old family Bible out of the storage box and placed it back on a stool in the living room, I reflected on Reverend Al Lewis telling me that what sort of God we believe in likely reveals more about us than it does about God. I hope God is merciful enough to allow us to give these things to ourselves. Evelyn has now given me some hope that he is indeed that merciful. Perhaps I needed to thank God for making a universe where cloning and artificial bodies were possible, giving me these new chances. And I need to admit that I was wrong blaming God for the hatred and murders committed by humans, just as surely as I’d been foolish for linking the random meteorological phenomena on the night of my birth and the day of my mother’s funeral with the mood of God.
Maybe Evelyn’s new life has made me feel a little Pollyannaish, but right now I’m grateful for the change. I like to think Jack would be pleased by my new outlook, whether or not he agreed that God wanted us to use all our technological victories.
By no means do I intend to trivialize the concerns of others. Human beings tend to be inherently afraid of change, and certainly Evelyn represents the most shocking metamorphosis so far.
How will we be affected by it as a species? What will happen as humanity begins placing our minds into new bodies, ones of our own creation, altering ourselves beyond the dreams of the plastic surgeons of old, into designs that, like avatars, are limited only by our imaginations, edging ourselves ever further from the carbon-based life forms we arose from, and ever nearer to immortality?
The challenges will be tremendous, making laughable the now seemingly mundane issues surrounding cloning. The aftermath is impossible to predict. I’m sometimes frightened myself by the alarming and unknowable future that awaits us down the road as we change ourselves from caterpillars into butterflies. Perhaps the transition will draw us closer to finally answering the question, “Who are ewe?”
Or perhaps it’s pushing us further away.
But that will be another tale, and I will let Evelyn, humanity’s first butterfly, tell that story.
***
Now, as I write these final words, more than a year has passed since that historic operation, and more than a thousand people whose bodies were destroyed or giving out, who would have died, have joined Evelyn as the first humans to experience life in artificial bodies. Evelyn has been there for the reawakening of almost every one, as has Evelyn-2 with a painting in hand and a welcoming smile for each child. Miracles of which I’m grateful to be a part.
Just a few days ago, on September 25, 2086, Evelyn and I went together to the redwoods to celebrate our 27th wedding anniversary. We had something we wanted to reveal to the graves of our loved ones. We wanted to show them the new clone embryo that had been artificially inseminated into Evelyn’s artificial body, and she was beginning to show.
As we stood there in the afternoon shade, our puppy Pierre-4 scampered about the humongous trees chasing after Evelyn-2, I cradled our nine-month-old Cain-3 in my left arm while he gripped my right index finger, and Evelyn happily explained to Sarah that her artificial body’s birth canal easily and painlessly dilated to whatever size the head of the baby needed.
Evelyn suddenly caught her breath. I was worried at first, but then she grabbed my hand and placed my palm on her belly where Lily-4 was letting her presence be known.
I wished my clone-father was there to experience it with us, but I felt in some sense he was. The nightmares have stopped since that Christmas Eve, but sometimes I have good dreams about him – dreams of him as a loving father and grandfather, Mom often joining us for suppers, days at the beach, and holidays. Dreams of him hugging me. For the first time, I feel honored to be his grandson. If I’m not exactly my own grandpa, I feel fortunate that he will forever be a part of me and whatever family we create. Alternatively, if upon death I discover that I am indeed my own grandpa, I will consider myself to be one of the lucky ones – someone wh
o has many regrets, but can still be grateful for his second chances. Someone blessed to have been a part of his soul’s journey.
I love you, Grandpa. This book’s for us.
Visit www.robhopper.com for the free complete multimedia edition, update on The Book of Evelyn, and/or questions for the author.
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