CLONES: The Anthology Read online

  I watch intently as the woman whispers into one of the policemen’s ears. He disappears from the step and the woman—a young short-haired ginger in a green pantsuit and blazer—responds to my sister. “We know your father isn’t home, honey. We know where he is.”

  The two of us look at each other again.

  “Please go away,” says Yoshiko.

  “Just open the door. We’ve come to take you someplace safe.”

  “I think you just better leave.”

  “Come now,” the woman says. “You can’t stay in there.”

  And we know she’s right, but we’re unsure what we should do. Then the policeman she whispered to enters the living room from the kitchen. He came through the back door.

  The woman and officers are not unkind, but they are not overly friendly either.

  We’re allowed to pack a small back bag and are taken to the university and put in the dorms. They tell us that the students are all gone now and only other children are here, but as we’re taken to our own room we can’t see if any of the others are our friends; the doors are all closed.

  That night, we are fed in our room. A man comes to the door with a tall cart full of trays. He doesn’t say anything to us, just hands my sister our food. He gives her a leer that makes me slide back behind the door. I can tell he is one of those people she was talking about that doesn’t like us. “Did you see how many trays there were?” she asks when the door is closed. “We’re not alone.”

  I’m missing my father so the thought that others like us are around me makes me feel a bit better. But there are others around us that are mean like the man that dropped off the food. The men guarding us are mean like him. They patrol the halls and we can hear them say scary things. One calls us animals and his friend corrects him, calling us, “Abominations.” We watch the newsfeed in the room. My sister says that we wouldn’t if it wasn’t for the fact that we need to know what’s going on. She doesn’t want us to watch because the things people are saying on the feeds are worse than what the men say in the hall. The endless supply of talking heads on the newsfeed say that those like us are soulless creatures and worse, in void of souls—demons. They say we’re corrupt and that even our food is corrupt. Large quantities are being destroyed because they are unnatural. They say that those responsible for corrupting the natural order are being dealt with and we know they are talking about people like my father. There is a manhunt, a list of names, one of them Dr. Vangelis. He worked with father. “He got away,” my sister says, and we listen closely to the list each time it is read to hear our father’s name. We don’t.

  ~*~

  The routine continues for three more days and then the ginger woman returns to our door and orders us out into the hall. For the first time, we see some of our neighbors, the other children. I don’t recognize any on our floor. Two nurses are working their way to each child. One pushes a cart with trays of vials while the other walks ahead. When they are close, I see that the vials are for blood samples. They are a team these two, one shining a bright penlight into the eyes of each child, one poking their arms. The speak softly and sweet and when the light nurse shines her bright pen into my eyes, she comments that one is blue and one is hazel. Then she says, in the same sweet voice, “I guess you’re not all perfect,” and I realize that she is not kind. I know she is wrong because my eyes are just as they’re supposed to be, and part of me wants to tell her so but another part of me wants to cry. As my skin begins to heat, I feel the tears well and Yoshiko takes my hand.

  The next day, we’re ordered out into the hall again but this time we’re marched outside and through campus. The blue September sky is not aware there has been an upheaval, but the university is. The buildings are empty shells and the benches along the colonnades and arcades that should be peppered with students are barren. And there are the dark red spatters on the cement that I know aren’t paint at all.

  As we file behind our clipboard ginger, I see another column of children marching in another line that’s to merge with our own. I see a few others I know. “There’s Lincoln,” I softly say to my sister. “He’s a boy from my class, and Sophia, she’s from my class too.”

  “Yes,” says Yoshiko. “I recognize him. I saw some children from my school too.”

  We don’t say anything louder. So far we’ve seen at least a hundred children. Fifty came over with us and two other long queues of twenty-some each. They have rumpled clothes, are all different ages, and all like us. The other columns have their own clipboard women, they wear pantsuits too, but ours is the only ginger. When we reach our destination, a small auditorium, the three women stand outside the double-doors checking faces against their list as we are ushered in.

  We sit in the theater and I ask Yoshiko why they brought us here.

  “I don’t know,” she says.

  “Are they going to show us a video?”

  “I don’t think so.” She gestures to the three people seated at a table on the side of the stage—two men and a woman. The men are in suits and the woman in a dress and all three wear glasses and a frown. “Bankers,” my sister says and giggles. But it’s not funny because whatever is happening is all too serious. I know that it is and don’t have to wait long to find out.

  The children in the front row are called up first. They go onto the stage and the first of them is put in front of the table. The man on the right side of the table asks their name while his two comrades align their paperwork. They could be using electronic tablets, but they’re not. When all three have their papers in order, they peer at the child, and the woman in the middle says “Commencing hearing for,” and she lists the child’s name and designation number. The other two echo, “Noted,” and then she asks the first question. “Do you know why you’re here?”

  “No,” the child says. He’s younger than me and I can tell he’s been crying.

  “You’re here because you’ve been deemed unnaturally born. Do you have anything to say for yourself?”

  Before the child answers, the third man slams a rubber stamp down onto his copy of paperwork, repeats the designation number and says, “Citizenship denied. Deportation.”

  The other two echo, “Noted,” and the child is scurried from the stage by two athletic men, while another is put into his place before the table. The first question is always the same and, after the first child, we know that the verdict is too. All of the children are like us. The process is the same and moves quickly and before long the clipboard ginger is escorting my row up to the stage.

  My mind is swimming and from here I can see the children before me are being ushered off stage through a door that leads outside. When they get to us, I squeeze Yoshiko’s hand, but I’m pulled away to face the table. They say my name when asked and they quickly assign me a number. But when they ask me if I have anything to say for myself, I don’t wait for them to finish before I blurt out, “My sister and mother were killed in an accident. My father grieved so badly and missed my mother so badly that he took the stem cells saved from my sister and—well—created me.”

  The three at the table appear stunned that I’ve spoken up. Not one of the forty children before me said a single word more than their name. They look at each other, shuffle through their papers, and I think maybe I’ve made them realize they’ve made a mistake. Yoshiko widens her eyes and silently mouths, “I love you like no other.” When they are through conferring, the first man peers over the frames of his glasses at me. “2325, you’ve never had a sister. This girl Yoshiko is not your sister.”

  I speak before the third man can sentence me.

  “I understand your confusion. My gene identity is not unique, I’m identical to my sister, the one who died in the accident with my mother. I’m basically her twin. Don’t you understand? That’s all it is. There is no more difference between me and my sister than any other identical twins.”

  Again they confer and I straighten my arms and ball my hands into fists. But they are brief this time. “I’m afra
id you’re confused, 2325. Your parents never had a daughter. Your gene identity is that of your mother’s.”

  With that, the third man slams his stamp down. Up close, in front of the table, the stamp makes a loud thwack, but the third man’s voice is distorted and distant, “2325, citizenship denied. Deportation.”

  ~*~

  A Word from Daniel Arthur Smith

  Daniel Arthur Smith is the author of the international bestsellers Hugh Howey Lives, The Cathari Treasure, The Somali Deception, and a few other novels and short stories.

  He was raised in Michigan and graduated from Western Michigan University where he studied philosophy, with focus on cognitive science, meta-physics, and comparative religion. He began his career as a bartender, barista, poetry house proprietor, teacher, and then became a technologist and futurist for the Fortune 100 across the Americas and Europe.

  Daniel has traveled to over 300 cities in 22 countries, residing in Los Angeles, Kalamazoo, Prague, Crete, and now writes in Manhattan, where he lives with his wife and young sons.

  Visit Daniel’s main website for virtual tours and updates

  ~*~

  Awakening

  Susan Kaye Quinn

  ~*~

  I

  I dream of a day when I’m the only sister left.

  Then I pray it never comes.

  My prayers are silent, whispered wordlessly into my hands as I lie in my cloister cell. The box is barely long enough for my sleeping mat, barely tall enough to sit up. My sisters’ cells surround me, their prayers haunting the blue frosted-glass walls. Our doors stay shut so long now, so many hours of the day and all of the night. Time for prayer. Time for contemplation. Mother Superior says our awakening is coming, but I find myself mostly sleeping between interrogations. Exhausted. Worried. Fearful.

  You were created to touch the face of God, I remind myself.

  But I fear I’ll be last among the twelve to bridge that gap.

  Sister Chloe’s hand presses on the glass between our cells. “Sister Amara?” Her lips touch the wall, a pale outline of blue. “She gave me more this time.” Her speaking tone is calm, but the click-cluck of her tongue signals urgency. We use sister-language to evade the constant ears that listen, but I suspect we fool ourselves with that. There’s little the Masters do not know.

  “Hitchy?” I ask. It’s our secret word for the med patch Mother Superior uses to force the truth from our lips. I roll to my side to watch the dark silhouette of Chloe’s hand. She folds down two fingers, leaving up two like thin twigs in winter: no. So our secret is still sorkept—sister-kept, close to our hearts. At least for now.

  We’ve always had our secrets from the Masters—childish secrets kept in childish ways, with sister-language and signs—but now, as our bodies grow into the fullness of womanhood, Mother Superior’s patience is growing thin. And she doesn’t always trust our words.

  “Your heart is mine,” I reassure Chloe. Her cell is to my left, Sister Maya’s to my right, Sister Hadley above and Sister Robert below. Our chromosomes are identical in every way, but we pick our names, and Sister Robert refuses a female one. Perhaps she truly feels more male than female. Or maybe it’s her act of defiance against the forced prescription of our DNA. Either way, I’m glad to see her exercise the one right we have—to be called what we wish.

  I press my hand over the shadow of Chloe’s on the glass—the surface is cool, the temperature set for the comfort of our Masters’ cybernetic bodies rather than the twelve of us who live here, breathing and growing and loving each other. Our Masters do not do these things, except perhaps the last… and even that, I doubt. They certainly do not love us—my sisters and me. Love is not cold boxes and interrogations and genetic manipulation for a divine purpose, no matter how much Mother Superior claims otherwise.

  But this is blasphemy, and I dare not speak it.

  “You are next,” Chloe warns me, her lips whispering against the blue glass.

  But of course I am.

  The interrogation times are always in the same order, just like the rotations out to the garden or time in the virtuals or gym, although the frequency of those has been reduced lately. Our extended time in prayer, secluded in our cloister cells, is beginning to feel like punishment, the toll taken in stiff backs and sore legs and bruises from too much rest.

  Our world is made of schedules and glass and more glass—an endless profusion of transparent walls and frosted ceilings and translucent floors. Our Masters, the ascenders, left their humanity behind long ago—their cybernetic eyes can easily navigate the intricacies of this glass cathedral, but the gradations of color and colorlessness only confuse human eyes and befuddle human minds.

  Sister Hadley lost her mind trying to discern an exit.

  I no longer look.

  Besides, there are no exits for us, only windows—into my sisters’ cells, into the laboratory beyond my tiny door, past that to the other rooms that comprise our hidden cloister. The hallways beyond are forbidden, demarked by a double black line and a mechanical sentry. We dare not travel past them, not because we are prisoners, but because we must not be discovered. We are the secrets—our very bodies, our holy mission, all of it protected from a world that would not approve of Mother Superior’s righteous plans, even as the future of all things depends upon us.

  Depends.

  Such a heavy word for children to carry. While I may doubt Mother Superior’s professed love for me and my sisters, I do not doubt the holiness of our mission. Or the Masters’ ability to create creatures—us—who can achieve it, even as I wonder if I will be the last among their children to do so.

  Only we’re no longer children.

  Mother Superior is right—we’re getting closer to the awakening. I can see it in Sister Judith’s fearful glances, the tremor in Sister Naomi’s hand, the hitch in Sister Jade’s voice, even as we cannot speak of it openly. Only Sister Sophia shows no signs of worry, but she’s always been the wisest and calmest among us. But we can feel it—the one thing the Masters want from us is on the cusp of blossoming in our minds just as our bodies are showing the curves of womanhood.

  The two processes must be linked.

  And the Masters, with their near-Godly intelligence, must know this… because the interrogations are becoming more strident, the drug dosages higher, and the God-state more extreme. But for now, what we experience there must be sorkept—spoken only in code between us—because what if one of us bridges the gap before the others? What if one of us fails to fulfill her purpose at all? These thoughts are a slow drip of dread during the hours in between interrogations. The relentless minutes in the box. Even now, my mind dulls under the steady drumbeat. Sleep is so much easier, however uneasy…

  Behind my head, the door of my cloister cell opens.

  My hand is still pressed to the glass, but my sister’s is gone.

  “Sister Amara?” The soft voice of my caretaker confirms it’s my turn.

  Mother Grace, along with the other Mothers, is humanoid like the Masters, her cybernetic body similar in size and shape to mine, but her skin is the static pink-and-silver shimmer that shows her low sentience—unlike the ascenders’ multicolored and ever-changing palette. Mine is a warm brown that’s lighter on my palms and pinkish on my lips, but that’s about as much variation as I get.

  “Coming.” I flip heels-over-head in the practiced roll I use to exit my cell once it’s unlocked. We each have our own way to manage this. Funny how we cling to each tiny difference like it matters. Like it makes us distinct. We’re already manufactured to be completely unlike any other humans, if there are any left in the world outside the glass.

  I ease down from my box, the floor cool on my feet. The laboratory outside our cloister cells is a medical suite tailored to our human anatomy—this is not where the interrogations occur, although it would be no less unpleasant here.

  Even though we each have our own mother, any of the mothers will do when a knee is scraped or a stomach growls. Their love
may be programmed in, but unlike the Masters, they at least appear to care. It’s a bonding mechanism intended to bring out our humanity, to keep the neuron fires in our brains forming properly as we grow from babies to children and now to nearly adults.

  Mother Grace isn’t a true mother.

  I know this.

  Just as I know the laboratory is not a home, the filtered glow-light is not sunshine, and the box I sleep in is not a bed. Yet I straighten my sheath to cover my legs and smooth my hair for inspection just as I’m supposed to.

  And I glow under Mother Grace’s approving nod.

  “Did you sleep well?” Her voice is soft, always soft. Never harsh. Never scolding.

  I tell myself it’s easy to love something that loves you unconditionally—it’s loving Sister Hadley that’s hard. And yet she has my sister-love more than any bot ever could.

  “Well enough,” I answer her rote inquiry.

  “Sensors indicated your sleep cycle was disturbed.”

  A reminder that they’re always watching.

  “I had a dream, that’s all.” It’s not entirely a lie.

  Her mechanical eyes dilate, and the backs of her fingers brush my cheek. Is she peering inside my head to see my lie? Or does she simply read my body for all the information she needs? The common knowledge database answers many questions, but never these.

  Mother Grace steps back, satisfied with whatever she’s discerned. “Mother Superior is awaiting you.”

  I know the routine for interrogations, and there’s no reason to delay. Mother Grace’s body has ten times my strength and speed, making resistance simply an invitation for less-than-gentle handling by the soft-spoken bot—something every sister learns while we’re still small. And yet, I find myself dragging my feet even as I lead the way out of the lab.