There is a clone of you when you are born. It grows alongside you, breath by breath. Embryonic stem cells conceived in vitro, ready for the harvesting: bone marrow, organ transplant, and skin graft whenever, however, you are hurt.
You all learn this as children. It’s why no twin births are allowed anymore. It would be weird, wouldn’t it? To look at someone and not know if they are twin or clone.
There is a designated room built in each house where the clones are kept. A nook, really. One night when you’re younger than a new moon, you steal into your clone’s compartment and try to play with it like you would with a school classmate: clapping games, singing games, the sharing of juvenile secrets. But your clone is unspeaking, unresponsive, docile as a calf even as its eyes—your eyes—move gently back and forth in its skull.
Doesn’t your mother always say you must take good care of your family clones? You must provide them with nutrition-dense diets and supplements, let them out at night in the walled garden to exercise, hose them down from the day’s filth—but your clone is not a pet or toy. Certainly not a friend.
Well. Who cares about this stupid clone not wanting to play with you? Just like your school classmates ignore you during breaktime; pretend you are a rogue clone and they, the bounty hunters.
Childhood bleeds into adolescence. When the urge to self-harm cleaves you in two, you go to the nook and slap/cut/burn the clone that looks like you, that grows as you do cell by hideous cell, and the clone lets you. (When you got roofied at that school party, he said you let him do anything he wanted, didn’t you? Like a clone? Like a stupid, nerveless clone?)
You itch to cut your own flesh, but your mother often inspects you for flaws. Proxies and placebos are not enough, but you make do. Your clone can bleed and bleed, but nobody notices if you mop up the redness with a rag, place some peroxide and plasters on the wounds. The act disgusts you. You signed up for the pain, not the aftercare. Cleaning your own body is a chore sometimes, never mind this extra baggage; this in-case-of-emergency-break-glass.
You grow up. Get that job in finance your mother wished for you. Then, a promotion, even if that means your boss now harasses you daily. Afterward, you grab your clone by its crotch, and you scream into its ears, it’s your fault, you asked for it. Look at you with your legs open and your eyes hooded with ambition.
People your age choose to birth their children through their clones’ bodies. When the surrogate clone goes into labor in special facilities, your friends pretend it’s them giving birth. They paint their foreheads with the sweat of the clone. Their genitals with its afterbirth. The clone’s cells are yours, aren’t they? The DNA identical, the child looking like it could have come from the guts of the original, rather than the copy? Though your people never speak this aloud; it might raise uncomfortable questions about the keeping and caring of clones.
The clone looks at the child being taken away and can do nothing. It is advised to triple-lock the nook after one such birth, for the clone, by instinct, tries to break the door down, fingernails splintered bloody. A new pill regimen follows. Post-partum depression can stunt the clone’s cell growth, make the transfusion less effective in case a plasma or marrow donation is needed.
You tie your tubes, then your clone’s, to avoid temptation. Do not look at your friends’ new baby pictures online. Ignore the promoted ads of natal vitamins. Do not call your mother to ask about the circumstances around your own birth.
But listen. There is rumor of a second clone, one kept in a hidden facility, undocumented, inaccessible unless something goes seriously wrong with the first clone. Unlocking that facility takes money and influence. If a family’s precious offspring dies, then the second clone replaces it in secret. If the parents were just a bit too rough…if the child asked the wrong questions. Or, if the first clone got damaged—some family member using it as a punching bag, a proxy, because they would never hurt their own flesh and blood, but the clone was fair game—then the second carbon-copy was equipped, exchanged. Nobody would ever know.
Back to you, now.
You get into a car accident after work, lose a leg, an arm. Grisly business. You’ve been drinking, careless, because this was the job your parents and college counselors wanted for you, the job you could live with, until you couldn’t. Until your cubicle was a dark clone nook pressing down around your unresponsive body.
When you wake in the hospital, your clone has gifted you with new limbs. They are paler than yours, never having felt the sun outside of special lamps and supplements. When you try to sleep, the limbs dance arabesques and bash your body. Do they want to hurt you? Or are they only responding to the chemical signals of your broken brain? Doctors murmur about alien hand syndrome. Depersonalization. The dangers of graft rejection. Clone brains cannot he transplanted on account of being under stimulated, underdeveloped. Clone vocal cords severed. Clone brain activity atrophied into lethargy. Little more than children.
You’re tired. While you’re getting used to your new life, new limbs, new unemployment, I thought I might entertain you with a story.
There is another rumor still, about a third clone who thinks they are not a copy, but an original. A clone who keeps other clones. Who says: I am made of stardust and god-clay and free will. Who never thinks: my factory numbers have been filed off, but one body-scan and they’re there in indelible scars of ones and zeros.
We watch that third clone carefully. Monitor its vitals and self-awareness. Although subliminally speaking to our assigned clone is frowned upon, this prohibition isn’t strictly enforced.
Who’s going to believe you anyway?
