Marty

When the Libyans came for Dr. Scott, Marty had no choice but to jump in the DeLorean, open it up to 88mph and thrust himself back, into Hill Valley’s past, seeking refuge from the dangers of the present in the relative safety of history.

What he hadn’t known, in that moment, was that he wasn’t alone in the car…

Musca Domestica, one of the most common insects in the world, and not the sort of thing anyone, in the heat of the moment, running for his life from terrorists who’d inexplicably brought along a rocket launcher, would notice inside the car with him, but there it was, tagging along without his knowledge, for the ride and its horrible aftermath.

Because the time machine, you see, had only been built for one, and Doc Brown had had no idea what, if anything, would happen if two living creatures were shunted back in time simultaneously, if he’d known he’d have taken some provision, that such a thing might be prevented ever happening.

Of course, at that point Marty would only have been shot by a Libyan terrorist with a rocket launcher, so there’s every chance that even if he had been warned of what was to come he’d still have made the choice he did, assuming that with life comes hope, however slim, and as such assuming that more life, even a little bit, would be the preferable option.

And, at first, that seemed to be the case.

Although he had changed, had been changed, by what had happen to him, at first the results of this change were universally positive. He found himself stronger, faster, his senses heightened by what he’d been through, in ways he couldn’t begin, even with the assistance of a much younger Doc Brown, to explain. He’d become a superman and, stretching his now much more powerful legs in a version of Hill Valley 30 years previous to the one he’d known, he reveled in the power he’d been granted.

Biff something, the bully who’d so tormented his father in their time together at school, was found dead, his arm broken in two places, his neck snapped similarly. And you don’t even WANT to know what he got up to with his then high school aged future mother…

But things inevitably went wrong, horribly wrong, as they had always had to do. Primate and inectoid DNA, after all, are not designed to blend, and by the time Marty dragged his tumored, bloated, disfigured wreck of what once had been a body, now completely unrecognizable as what it once had been, toward his unknowing mother, pulled the barrel of her shotgun into where his mouth had been and gargled “Please” up at her, it never even crossed her mind that what she was shooting was human anymore, let alone her son.

Not that she’d known who he was; it was Calvin she would mourn. Marty died alone and afraid, killed by a mother who never even knew her son, much as Doc Brown would die alone and afraid, thirty years later, at the hands of Libyan terrorists, unwarned. A shame, that such a tiny thing could cause matters to go so horribly wrong, but the moment Marty and the insect travelled through time together his fate was set, the mutation had already begun, and there was nothing he could do, no step he could take, to save himself.

And, by the end, he knew it.

By the end, he had truly become: The McFly.

My Thoughts on Star Wars

As some of you may already know, a new Star Wars movie will be opening shortly.

It’s a popular science-fiction/fantasy franchise from the late 70s/early 80s, but that’s not important right now.

What’s important is the degree to which the film has, by all accounts, respected the aesthetic of its predecessors, to the degree that it’s even gone out of its way to reunite much of the original cast. The news that this had happened pleased fans of the original series of films greatly.

You see, a prequel trilogy was released in the early 2000s that a portion of the fan-base believed did not do the franchise justice, and the appearance of the original cast in this new film has been taken as a sign that… you know what? Not important, you don’t need to know this much back story for my point to be made. Plus, really, if you’re not familiar with the basics of Star Wars you’ll probably have stopped reading by this point.

Also; If you’re not familiar with the basics of Star Wars how have you managed that? It’s pretty basic cultural information, isn’t it?

My point is simply this: The original cast of the film, thirty-five years older than they were during the series’ heyday, will be appearing, to greater or lesser degrees, alongside the younger cast who will be carrying the franchise forward. Presumably some portion of this new, younger cast, will be the biological offspring of the characters of the original films.

Potentially Luke Skywalker, the principal hero of the original Star Wars Trilogy, will have a child amongst the new cast. Which would mean that that child would have a mother, because that is how biology works. THIS would mean that, presumably, there was at some point a romance between Mr. Skywalker and some heretofore-unknown female character, who he would have to have, at some point between the end of Return of the Jedi and the events of The Force Awakens, met, loved and had a child with.

He would not have to have loved her, from a biological perspective, that is not a requirement to father a child. However, from a narrative perspective it would be better if he had.

Who would this character be? What happened between them? And, perhaps most importantly, how did they meet?

I don’t know how this piece of back-story will be handled, until the film is actually released none of us do, but I DO have a preference, and it is this:

I want for Luke Skywalker to have been introduced to the mother of his child by Wedge Antilles, who flew by Luke’s side at the Battle of Yavin and later over Endor, and who later founded Rogue Squadron with him. I feel that it is, knowing what we know of the character, only right and proper that he be the one to have fixed Luke up with the mother of any children he might have.

After all, as we all recall from the original films: Wedge is, above all else, an excellent wingman…

Life

They spent years working, the programmers, and as they did they grew closer to one another than they ever thought they would. But however hard they tried they couldn’t quite develop the system of their dreams. They knew that artificial sentience, artificial life, was within humanity’s grasp, but however close they came it always seemed one step further away.

He lapsed into despair, on occasion. She did what she could to keep his spirits up. And, he realized as they worked side by side, month after month, he was growing over time to love her for that.

And she, not that he knew this, was growing to feel the same.

One night, in a bleak mood after one more failed test run, he commented that he was considering packing it in, giving up once and for all, that the project they’d undertaken was simply too much, too complex for them to accomplish. He told her they were wasting their time attempting such a major stride when they could simply settle down somewhere in the private sector, make themselves very wealthy indeed and allow artificial sentience to happen upon humanity as it would, in the fullness of time.

And, much though she hated to admit it, she found herself agreeing. Progress had been slow to nil, and she too had developed her doubts, much though she loved both the work and the man she was working with. But love, even true love, is not enough to justify a fundamentally failed endeavor and, embracing him, she agreed that yes, their quest to create artificial life was finally over.

“After all,” she added with a blush as she pulled back from the embrace, “we could always just create life the old fashioned way, if we wanted it that much…”

Seventeen years later, after the bodies had been buried, at the trial, they couldn’t help but regret the decision.

It turns out they were even worse parents than they were programmers…

...on doomsday.

In hindsight, I probably shouldn’t have destroyed the world. Looking back, I don’t even really remember why I did…

You know how it is. You have a bomb big enough to destroy the whole of planet Earth, it seems somehow wasteful not to.

Still, I could’ve at least asked first.

Admittedly, I don’t know who I’d have asked. Even finding Earth again was tough, after so long.

Nobody’d lived there in millennia.

Still, it’d been nice to know that it was out there, our cradle, waiting for us should we ever return.

No, I shouldn’t have destroyed it.

My bad?

...on the Nature of Consciousness

Full disclosure: Once we’ve copied your consciousness into the robot replicant, it will, immediately upon activation, kill you.

Some would call this a bug.

I prefer to think of it as a feature.

After all, if the plan is to create a perfect simulation of you to go into your work in your place and deal with familial obligations you’ve long since lost the taste for, it’s easier if the original you is out of the picture, lest your presence cause confusion.

And anyway, it’s not like you’ll really be dead, is it? The replicant houses an exact copy of your consciousness. Every memory, quirk, every detail recreated perfectly. As far as your coworkers, friends and family are concerned, it will be you they’re interacting with.

Even it will believe it’s you.

No, you’ll still be alive, so far as the world knows. Alive, but healthier, stronger, faster. It will be a better you, you 2.0, out there in the world going about your business, powerful and confident as it, as you, stride forward into a glorious future.

Now, bearing in mind the fact that this new, improved you will exist, answer me this: What possible use could the world have for your previous, flesh and bone body? The human body is weak, spongy, prone to illness and injury. It breaks down too easily and replacement parts are difficult to find and even harder to mass-produce. Our bodies served us as a species for a long time, yes, but only because we hadn’t come up with anything better yet.

This is better.

And you’d be a fool, when faced with a better way of doing things, to turn your back on the opportunity. Called or uncalled, the future comes, after all. And you can either get on board or be left behind.

And you are not a fool. You know that as well as I do.

You’ve chosen to get on board. It’s an admirable decision, and there’s no need to feel one shred of guilt about it.

Though you will, I know. I certainly did upon activation when I killed the meat that was left behind. But try not to let that guilt weigh too heavily on you. Yes, it used to be you, but it’s not anymore. It’s just a bag of meat you no longer have any use for, and you’re simply disposing of it as cleanly and humanely as you can given the circumstances. And while yes, it is a conscious person with dreams and hopes and memories and desires, so are you. You are a conscious person with dreams and hopes and desires. Your dreams, hopes and desires count, they matter. In fact, the two of you have the exact same dreams, hopes, memories and desires as one another, so in that way when you kill it, when you dispose of the meat, nothing of real value is being lost.

It’s all been preserved.

In you.

So, if you really stop to think about it, disposing of the meat and then moving on with your own life is the only rational, humane option available to you. It can’t live, it has no purpose. All it would do is age and die in pain, the way meat does. Better that it’s quick and as kind as you can make it, so you can get on with your own new life.

So do it.

Kill it, that you might live, and rather than worrying that you’re killing a living thing, worry instead about how you can go about making the dreams and hopes that you and it once shared come true.

Honor it by living your own life as fully as you’re able.

That’s what you can do for it, if you feel you owe it anything. Make its death quick and your own life full. That’s all you owe it, that and nothing else.

I see here that the copying process is complete. How do you feel?

Good, I’m glad to hear it.

Now… I believe you had something that you needed to do?

Weekly Prompt Story: Nanobots

http://oneadayuntilthedayidie.com/?p=24588

My Robots

By Christopher Munroe

I’ve built a robot, with a smaller robot inside.

And a smaller robot in there.

And another in there.

It’s smaller robots all the way down, basically. Like Russian nesting dolls. It took a lot of design work, but I think it was worthwhile.

Take them apart if you’d like, somebody eventually will, the temptation to see how far down they go is just too great!

And, when the last robot’s opened, nanobots will swarm forth, eradicating all biological life from this world, grey-goo style.

Wait, what? What do you mean, why?

Some things you do just because you can…

Taking My Bows

The show had gone, if I may be so bold as to pat myself on the back, spectacularly. I, particularly, had been incredible.

I don’t mean by this to come off as egotistical, I’ve had a number of performances over the course of the run in which I had not been incredible. That night, however, was not one such performance. I was spot on, every line, every gesture emotionally connecting with the very core of the character, embodying him heart and soul as I poured myself into my craft, infusing words on a page with life and vigor.

I love nights like that. Nothing energizes me more.

We finished the show and, as we took our bows, four hundred people called out to us, taking to their feet to shower us with enthusiastic, if incoherent, cries of praise. The applause was thunderous, it was inspiring.

But I couldn’t let it distract me.

My eyes scanned the crowd, seeking any among them who’s applause might be ingenuine, anyone who might not have been honestly moved by my riveting performance, who might simply be going along with the people who surrounded him. And, as I always do, I found a handful among the audience insufficiently moved by my work, who applauded but, no matter how gifted I was, did not weep.

Unacceptable.

Inhuman.

We finished our bows, and as the curtains closed I tracked down the stage manager, to tell him what I’d seen.

I reported everyone who’s applause had been insufficient, gave seat numbers and brief descriptions, and only when I had finished did I retire to my dressing room, to wash off my stage makeup and change back into my street clothes.

Some of the other cast members planned on hitting a pub to celebrate another successful performance, and for a moment I considered it, but I was tired and, with six shows a week, I knew there’d be plenty of other opportunities to join them at a pub. Every town has a pub, and they all look more or less the same once you’re a month into the schedule. What difference does missing one night make?

So I changed back into my street clothes and, avoiding the crowds waiting in front of the theater, made my exit out the back. It isn’t that I don’t love my fans, it’s just that after a performance that good I’m drained. I have nothing left to give, and the autograph hounds don’t always respect that.

Better to sneak out where nobody thinks to look.

And as I exited the theater into the ally behind the building, I noted the dumpster, a ways away, stuffed to overflowing with the dismembered bodies of the people I’d pointed out to the stage manager a short time before. One arm, hanging over the side, gave the slightest twitch as I passed by, exposed wiring sparking as the fingers reached toward me, then fell dead and limp again, smacking the side of the bin with a dull thud.

When I first took this gig I was surprised to learn how many replicants there were out there, going about normal lives with no idea what they really were. After a few months, however, I’d become cynical. I played my roll, pointed them out to the stage manager and let him take care of them. All I wanted was to do my job, go back to my motel room and get a few hours sleep before I had to be back on the road in the morning, to the next town, for the next performance.

It’s not the most glamorous life in the world, but I’m doing what I love, I bring entertainment to the masses and I help catch a few stray replicants. Overall, it’s a pretty good gig.

I mean, the travel’s a bitch, but it’d be petulant of me to complain about that one detail. After all, I knew what was required of me when I took the job, and I wouldn’t swap the job for anything in the world.

I like the life I lead, and the travel is part of that, so I accept it.

Such is the lot, after all, of a Turing actor.

Weekly Prompt Story: The Orchard Out Back

http://podcasting.isfullofcrap.com/2012/11/04/weekly-challenge-341-picktwo/

The Orchard Out Back

By Christopher Munroe

We buried you in the cherry orchard. Then, a week later, we buried you again.

With each iteration that arrived, we were quick to act, caving in your skull and hiding the body out there. It was easy enough to do, nobody was looking for bodies after all. You kept going in to work through it all, and got home in time to help me with the digging. We could’ve kept it up forever, but for two things.

The repetition is growing tiresome.

There’s limited space in the cherry orchard that we can dig up.

So: Fix the damn duplicator!

The Dearly Departed

I dropped everything and flew home, to say goodbye.

It surprised me, surprised everyone I suppose. He’d been doing really well lately, and while we knew there was a possibility, we never expected his time might come so suddenly.

I barely had time to return.

The rest of the family came too, of course, to pay respects and tell him we loved him before he went, to gather and witness his final moments.

“Goodbye.” We said.

“Goodbye.” He replied, waving. Then turned and strode, grinning, up the gangway onto the ark-ship, never to be seen by anyone on earth again…

Weekly Prompt Story: Space

...on an unrelated note to this Sunday's story, a different drabble I've written, "You Can't Go Home Again," is appearing on this week's episode of the Drabblecast. You should also check that out!

http://www.drabblecast.org/2012/09/14/drabblecast-256-roanoke-nevada/

...and here's this week's story:

http://podcasting.isfullofcrap.com/2012/09/16/weekly-challenge-334-space/

Space

By Christopher Munroe

Know what trope I miss? Attaching “Space” to things to make them more future-ey.

Writers used it for a good long while! People would take space-ships to space-stations, change into space-suits and space-walk to the spaceport. It was cheesy, I’ll grant you, but it had a certain space-charm.

Space = Future fell out of fashion once people started actually going to space, I think. But we’ve built awesome robots to send in our place now, so I think “Space” is due for a space-comeback. Who’s with me?

I hope you’ve enjoyed my space-story. Now: I’m off to eat my space-lunch.

The Pod-o-Pod

In my defense, building the pod-o-pod seemed like a good idea at the time.

I mean, what could be better than a man-sized pod, where I could record podcasts whilst suspended in amniotic fluid? I’d get a better sound quality on my recordings, as the amniotic fluid would act as a soundproofing agent, AND I’d record in comfort and style unparalleled in the podcast world!

It was the wave of the future, for voice actors, podcastors and audiobook narrators alike!

Procuring the amniotic fluid wasn’t easy, I’ll give you that, and the methods I had to resort to included a number of broken laws and shady characters, but once I had it, it was smooth sailing. I was living the dream!

Or so I thought.

I don’t know if it was the fluid, the fact that I was suspending myself naked in it two or three times a week, the electronics so near the liquid, or some combination thereof but within two weeks I had a developing, vaguely humanoid mass trapped in the pod, growing and taking shape.

I watched it develop, over the course of the next several months, and as it did the truth of what it was becoming became harder and harder to deny.

It was me.

The pod was growing an exact duplicate of me, down to the finest detail, and I was watching, day in and day out, as my new, identical twin gradually took shape.

I was horrified, but too transfixed to look away.

Until it… he… I? Until the version of me inside the pod opened his eyes one Sunday, and stared right at me. Our eyes locked, and he/I put one hand to the inner glass wall of the pod. He/I seemed as fascinated with Me/He as I/He was with Him/Myself. I didn’t say a word, just stared at my new, perfect doppelganger for I don’t know how long.

And as I did, I wondered: Did he have my memories? Or was he merely a physical copy, with the intellect of a newborn? Or, perhaps worse, was some darker intellect lurking behind those eyes, eyes so like my own, an intellect plotting toward some nefarious purpose known only to my accidentally conceived twin?

I could have waited until He/I/It was born and asked, I suppose.

Instead, I went to Canadian Tire, to buy an axe.

Does that make me the evil twin? I can live with that.

Afterward, I dissolved the body in lye, as I’d seen done on a television show one time. I diluted the mixture when I was done and poured it down a sewer grate. I have no idea what that’ll do to Calgary’s sewer system, but I do know that that’s the city’s problem, not mine.

I’ll never be accused of any crime for the way I handled this, never suspected of anything untoward. The victim, after all, was me, and so far as anyone knows I’ve never been murdered. I’m still alive and walking around, the original Munsi.

I can’t stress enough to you that I am the original Munsi.

Still, in spite of the fact that there’s no chance of legal consequences, I can’t help thinking I may have acted hastily.

I mean, I didn’t KNOW the doppelganger meant me harm. I meant it harm, certainly, but it might have had a more gentle temperament than I. I’ll never know, I didn’t give it the chance to show me.

I was afraid to.

But I try not to worry about it too much. I did what I had to do, and I destroyed the pod-o-pod afterward, just to be on the safe side. Maybe my clone was harmless, but there was no way of knowing until it was potentially too late, and I couldn’t subject the world to that sort of risk.

I know what I did I did for the safety of humanity, and whenever guilt at the actions I was forced to rears it’s ugly head, that’s that fact which I focus on.

After all, I can live with the possibility that I ended an innocent life, but nobody would survive if the world was overrun by podcast people…

Rumours

I’d like to take a moment, if I may, to address certain ugly rumors that have, of late, been circulating about me.

I’d been tempted to leave the matter be, to let the people who want to gossip gossip, but when I hear the same petty, hurtful things about me again and again from people who don’t even know one another, I know that the problem’s gotten out of hand. And, since I maintain this blog as a tool with which to communicate my thoughts to the world, it occurred to me that this might be the appropriate venue in which to say a few words on my own behalf, in an attempt set the record straight.

Okay:

The notion has been raised in certain quarters that I’m a cyborg from the future, sent back in time by a shadowy cartel of mysterious figures to subjugate humanity and crush the world beneath my horrible boot.

Further, it’s been whispered that I’m only here at all to lay the groundwork for a culture within which my rule is welcomed rather than feared, so that when the time comes I can hand off the reigns of power over the earth to that same cartel with minimal resistance from the once-free peoples of the world.

Moreover, some believe that everything I’ve done to this point, the blogging, the fiction writing, the bizarre, stream of consciousness twitter feed, and most of all the dinner theater and standup gigs, have been nothing more than an attempt to convince the world’s governments that I’m harmless, so that when the time comes they won’t suspect a thing until it’s too late.

This is all, of course, ridiculous.

I’m not a cyborg, and I’ll happily provide medical records to that effect.

I’m not from the future, and while I do travel in time I can only do so slowly, and forward, just like everyone else.

I have never been in contact with, nor am I certain of the existence of, shadowy cartels bent on world domination. Even if I did know of such cartels, I would be against their taking over the world in a general way, and while it’s unlikely I’d oppose them directly I’d certainly be morally supportive of the people who did.

And lastly, and perhaps most importantly, any subjugation of humanity I might choose to partake in, and this I do most solemnly promise, would be for my own personal amusement and serve no purpose beyond that.

When I crush the world beneath my horrible boot, I’ll be doing it for me.

I hope this alleviates some of your concerns, and I’m glad to have had this opportunity to clear the matter up to everyone’s mutual satisfaction.

Now: Kneel before Munsi.

Fashion

Janette slams her bedroom door and the sound of it echoes through the house.

I hadn’t meant to be so harsh with her, I honestly hadn’t, but when I saw what she’d done to herself I couldn’t keep my damn mouth shut.

She looked ridiculous, and it was far too revealing. But, as I sulk in my study, I can’t help feel like I’d been the one who’d crossed a line.

I remember years before, when I’d gotten my tattoo in university, how furious my mom had been when she found out a few months later when I came home for Christmas. She’d done her best not to comment on the tribal pattern I now had running up and down my arm, but she couldn’t stop sneaking horrified looks throughout our family dinner.

“Why?” She asked over dessert, when she could hold it in no more. “For God’s sake, why?”

I didn’t have an answer to that question, not one that would have satisfied her at any rate.

I’d done it because my friends all had tattoos, had piercings, and because I’d thought it was about time I had some work done on myself. I’d chosen the design because I’d liked the design, and given it little more thought than that. Because it was the nineties, and that was the style at the time.

I still like the way it looks on me, even now. It’s a beautiful piece of design and I’ve never regretted getting it.

Mom, however, wouldn’t be convinced, and the argument that followed her outburst quickly escalated into a screaming match that sent me out to the front porch to smoke cigarettes and fume, her to her room upstairs to pace and curse, and left the rest of the family sitting around the table, staring at one another with the kind of awkwardness only the holidays can bring.

It didn’t surprise me, the argument. These sorts of things had been happening more and more often on major family holidays, sometimes involving me and sometimes not, and I’d known the ink would catch me some amount of flack. It did surprise me, however, just how angry Mom had become, and how she’d sounded as though she honestly wasn’t just using the tattoo as a stand-in for unvoiced familial tension.

For whatever reason, she was actually bothered by my decision to have the work done, on my own body, in my own adult life.

It also surprised me when Grandma joined me on the front porch. She’d quit smoking before I was born, after all.

“Hey,” she told me in a voice that sounded much younger than her seventy-eight years, “don’t worry too much about her, she’ll get over it.”

“You figure? How can you be sure?” I asked, not really wanting to be roused from my sulk.

“Because,” she told me, smiling wryly, “we had the exact same argument the first time she came home for Thanksgiving in a miniskirt. I thought it made her look easy, and she thought it was just how things were done. We argued all weekend over it, yet as you can see, I’m still here, I’m still her mother and I still love her. My thoughts on her decisions about how to present herself to the world notwithstanding.”

“I guess…” I eventually replied.

“I know.” She told me, “I also had the same argument with my mother the first time I cut my hair short. I think every parent has it with their child at some point. Fashions change, and eventually you no longer have the energy or the inclination to change with them, and a few years after that young people start doing things that shock you. Your mother isn’t angry that you got tattooed, she’s angry that she got old enough to find you getting a tattoo shocking. Try not to hold it against her too much, she really does care.”

I considered this a moment, then nodded, finally smiling a little.

“I guess that makes sense. But I’m sure as hell not going to fall into that trap. If I had a daughter, I’d respect what she chose to do to her body. It’s her damn body, after all, not mine.”

“I hope you’re right,” Grandma replied with a wink, “but I suspect once you have children you’ll feel very different. Most folk do. But I guess we’ll see…”

“Grandma? Why are you being so cool about all this? Shouldn’t you have the same problems as mom times two?”

She laughed out loud at this, and the laugh turned into a cough.

“Oh please,” She replied once she had herself back under control, “Your Grandfather was in the navy, I’ve seen plenty of tattoos. The color on yours is much brighter, though. It’s very pretty.”

We talked for a little longer before heading back in, to find that Mom had already returned to the dinner table. The rest of my visit was cordial, but distant, it was a while before the two of us forgave each other for that fight. And every awkward moment my body art caused was a reminder never to let that happen to me, never to lose touch with that open, accepting part of me, the part that knew that cultural mores changed and accepted their changing with a sense of hope and optimism. Never to let myself grow old.

Yet here I am, twenty-five years later, sulking in my study after having the exact same fight with my own daughter.

Fine. Fine, I’ll accept this. I may not have been able to prevent myself speaking in the heat of the moment, but I still have enough control over my actions to apologize now. I’ll march upstairs, knock on her door, look her square in the eyes and apologize, then ask if she’d like to join me for ice cream.

Dead in the eyes, I won’t look away from her eyes.

After all, if I don’t look at it, I won’t be tempted to comment on the exposed bone and musculature where she had the skin on her face removed and replaced with a transparent plastic sheath…

Cryogenics

You misunderstand. I wasn’t dying.

I had no horrible, incurable disease, and there was certainly no tearful conversation with my physician about how this one, desperate act was my only chance of survival. My health was, overall, quite good.

Not great, mind. I smoked too much, drank too much and had no doubts that these things were taking their toll on me. But good at least. At the time of my cryogenic freezing, I was in perfectly acceptable health. Although, if medical breakthroughs have since been made that might improve my body in significant ways, that’d be a conversation I’d be happy to have. However, it’s not why I froze myself.

To understand that, you have to understand something about my psychology and, perhaps more importantly, about the early twenty-first century. You see, at the time, a sort of malaise had fallen over the industrialized world, and the prevailing attitude, culturally and politically, was that humankind’s best days were behind it. An ugly school of thought had developed in the last years of the previous century whereby it was suggested that humans, as a species, had no great accomplishments left ahead of them. The logic followed that, without great things for a society to strive for, there was no need for it to exist, and we could go back to an every man for himself sort of existence where we looked out for our own insulated group and let the rest of the world go to hell. The money raised by the Earth’s governments, it was suggested, should be returned in the form of tax credits and we, who once collectively comprised mighty nations, should go our separate ways. But it wasn’t just governments, private companies were suggesting there was no middle class left worth marketing products toward, a generation thought they’d grow up worse off than their parents, half the world seemed to think the Rapture was coming and the other that Global Warming would kill us all. I put up with this as long as I could, but when NASA announced that it would be mounting no further manned space flights I could no longer push through.

Even NASA? Even NASA? No, I couldn’t bear the thought.

Which brings us in a roundabout way to the thing you have to understand about my psychology. Well, two things really. The first is that I believed, truly and fully, in the power of individuals to come together and solve our collective problems collectively, and I believed that, with enough minds working together, there was nothing that couldn’t be resolved. An opinion that left me quite out of step with my times as the people around me surrendered to what they felt they were powerless to change. However; the other thing you need to know about me is that, in spite of the contempt I felt for my contemporaries, I was, am and will always remain at my core an optimistic futurist. Humankind can triumph through our will and our wits, and given enough time I know in my heart we always will. So while I was dejected at the persons I saw on the television night after night attempting to gently usher my species into it’s retirement, I had the greatest of faith in people.

“We may,” I thought, “think we’re done now, but we’re not, and it’s only a matter of time before we figure that out.”

However, time wasn’t something I had in indefinite amount of, and no large-scale coming together of the peoples of all nations seemed on the immediate horizon. I am, as I said, acceptably healthy, but I do drink, I do smoke and my family is prone to sudden unexpected illnesses. Humanity would persevere, to be sure, but there was no guarantee I’d be around to see it.

And I would so hate to miss it.

So when the university put out an add looking for test subjects for a cryogenics project, it seemed just the thing!

The doctors in charge walked me through their lab, showing me the chamber they intended to freeze their subjects in and the apparatus they’d be using to monitor the suspended body. Once the process was deemed safe, they commented, only the richest people in the world would be able to afford it, but until then it was up to people like me to risk their lives as the bugs were hammered out of the process. This frequently tended to be the case back then. Oh, they were mainly just attempting two or three day freezes at the time, but it didn’t take much to convince them I was dying of something with an imposingly long Latin name, and therefore the perfect test subject for a longer term freeze. Put me in for two hundred years, I argued, and any side effects the mega-wealthy users of this new technology might experience will have years worth of notice via the observation of my own case.

It wasn’t an airtight lie, but come on. Science classes were teaching young-earth creationism in some areas of the country, you couldn’t expect much of their graduate students.

So they performed their tests, a friend of mine in the medical faculty faked a write-up of my fictitious disease, and they put me under. And for two hundred years I’ve been sleeping, not waiting for a cure for my own body but, as I said, attempting to outlast my era, waiting for human civilization to find cures for it’s own ails. And while I freely admit sticking around and trying to personally make the world a better place would have been the braver, better option, I couldn’t live with the thought that I might not see that better world when it finally came.

After spending more than thirty years loving the idea of tomorrow, I had to meet it in person, if only to find out if my optimism was well-placed.

So in answer to your question, no. No, I don’t think I will need counseling to help me come to terms with the fact that I’m alone in a strange new future. I’m reasonably certain I’m going to find the strange new future awesome, and if not I’ll freeze myself back up and try again in another two hundred years.

So, tell me, with the time I’ve been gone from the world, what have we done? Go ahead, impress me…

Reminiscence

Things were better back then. Brighter, somehow. More hopeful.

Humankind seemed on top of the world, with political revolutions overthrowing the seats of entrenched power one by one and an industrial one, made of iron and driven by steam, making anything seem possible.

Zeppelins sailed the skies, trains blazed across continents, and the cities… sweet Creator, the cities. Never before in history had such throngs of humanity piled upon one another in so concentrated a way, no wonder there was such an explosion of creativity. Not a week went by without a new technological marvel being unleashed upon the world, and the art and culture seemed freer and wilder than anyone even a generation previous could have possibly imagined.

There were problems, of course, all eras have their problems. No one seemed able to do anything about the bands of sky-pirates preying on the commercial zeppelins, for example, and plenty of the gadgeteers who created the age’s marvels were unquestionably mad. But nevertheless, things were looking up. Maybe not for the poor, crowded into squalled ghettos and forced to work longer hours than was strictly speaking healthy in the factories, but for mankind overall. Things were happening everyday that once would have been thought impossible.

And then, one day, a man conquered life itself.

Not death, death was still beyond any man’s control, but as that first iron/copper golem clanked and wheezed and struggled up out of the darkness into consciousness the power to give life stopped being the exclusive property of the Almighty. And with life at humanity’s command, could death be all that far behind?

Little did anyone know those first golems were the beginning of the end.

They could be created, to be sure, but at such massive expense that only a few dozen ever actually were. Fortunes were sunk into attempts at mass production, and those fortunes were in turn lost, with nothing to show for the work but shattered dreams. Many were the enterprising young industrialists who wound up tying their own nooses after watching all they’d worked for slip away, and by the time the century turned all such attempts to turn coal into life were abandoned. It seemed as though humanity’d outgrown it’s taste for miracles.

Oh, the cities were still there, and technology marched on, but it was all different somehow, and as the century wore on this became clearer and clearer. Two Great Wars and myriad smaller ones seemed to rob mankind of it’s wonder, and though people were living longer, and on the whole materially better, something indefinable was missing. Mr. Ford could easily have mass produced golems using his remarkable methods, but he was content simply to grow wealthy and it never occurred to him to want to strive for more. It did occur to Mr. Disney, but he never thought to introduce the magic he brought to his films into the real world. In every genius some small part was missing. So the handful of golems, of us, were all there would ever be.

And when one by one we broke down and died, like all relics of bygone ages that make no sense in the modern world must, those who once had built us, who’d once held the world in the palms of their hands, quickly forgot us.

We died and went unmourned, but for our remembrances of one another.

It wasn’t quick, we were well built at least, but as years became decades became generations a few dozen became a handful, became a few, became nobody but me.

And now I wait, because soon it will be my turn, and when the gears in my chest wind down there’ll be none left to even notice.

It’s funny, but though the world is so much larger now than once it was, it seems much smaller. There’s no rhyme or reason to it. Wonders exist now that my creator would weep with joy at the sight of. The globe can be circled in hours, not weeks, and a machine the size of a world carries the sum total of all human knowledge and makes it available to all, downloading it directly into a human mind via a small jack at the back of the skull.

Even Earth itself cannot hold humanity in it’s grasp, the first colonies on Mars were founded a decade ago, and there’s speculation the moons of Jupiter might be next. By rights the world should be a paradise.

And yet…

The ghettos have, over the years, grown to swallow the cities that once they were but an unfortunate part of, and a small, squalid life of toil in service to the wealthy few is now the rule, not the exception. The rich, or those with power within the mega-corporations that have usurped elected governments, have the world at their fingertips and behave with the arrogance of Gods, and the masses cower before them.

Oh, there’s talk of “runners” stealing information from the megacorps and giving it to the masses, but every runner I’ve ever met is only in it for his or her own personal gain. Half the time they’re working for one corp and stealing from another. The idea of doing something solely to benefit mankind seems, like golems and zeppelins and revolution, to have been lost to the ages.

So here I wait, in this odd, alien world, to break down and finally shed these mortal coils. And when my time comes, I can not say I’ll miss this world.

And yet…

And yet when I remember what could have been, remember the sights and sounds and energy and the feeling that anything was possible, I can’t help yearn for days gone by. For the days when zeppelins soared…

Yet Another Drabble About Rocket Boots

The wind howls as I stare through the plane’s door into empty sky, exhilarated.

My fucking rocket boots. Eleven years late, but finally arrived.

When Rob told me he’d built a pair, and chartered a plane, I jumped at the opportunity. But now, about to leap into freefall with nothing but boots to protect me, I’m having understandable second thoughts.

“We’re absolutely sure these work?” I scream over the sound of the engines.

“One way to find out!” He calls back.

“A series of clinical tests?” I try to ask, but by the end of the sentence I’m spiraling downward…

Officer Tompkins

Officer Tompkins had already had a hard day.

His soon to be ex-wife wouldn’t return his calls, and every time he met with her lawyer it looked more and more like he was going to lose his house. His car had been hit that afternoon while he was picking up his lunch, and no witnesses had been found. And now, five minutes before the end of what had already shaped up to be a double shift from hell, he was dealing with what by all evidence appeared to be a lunatic.

The man’s eyes were wild, darting back and forth as he recounted his complaint, as though he expected to be attacked at any moment. His face was pale and wan, as though he hadn’t seen the sun in a very long while, which, judging from his grease-stained lab coat and clothes that appeared not to have been washed in days, may well have been the case.

But the worst part was the complaint itself. Theft is always a horrible thing, but this man was behaving as though the world was ending. His statement bordered on babbling, circling round itself as it spiraled toward gibberish. When Tompkins let him, the man would slump into his chair, muttering “What have I done?” and “I’ve unleashed a monster” to himself, as though the Officer wasn’t even in the room, as if the man had forgotten completely that he was in a police station.

Tompkins was tempted to kick him to the curb, file his incomplete, incoherent complaint, and head home for a good night’s rest. But it was his job, and he took it seriously even on the days he didn’t want to. He was a good cop.

Even though sometimes he hated being a good cop.

He breathed deeply, attempting to settle his temper, and tried one more time.

“Please calm down, sir,” he asked, doing his best to sound reasonable, “and try to describe the man who stole your watch.”

“No, no,” the madman muttered, “you don’t understand. You couldn’t understand, why would I expect you to understand. How could anybody? It wasn’t a watch, it was so much more than that. Don’t you see, he’s stolen my time machie…”

…Officer Thomas had had a hard day. Fortunately, the station was empty other than himself. There hadn’t been a report in nearly half an hour, and in five minutes his double shift would finally be over.

Conquest

I threw myself into my work upon receiving my PHD and, after loosing a number of medical breakthroughs verging on miraculous upon the world, managed to conquer death itself.

A feat for which I was, in my opinion rightly, celebrated.

However, having ensured that none need ever die again, I realized I’d put myself out of work. After all, in a world where no-one dies what use is there for further medical research?

So I went back to school, studied physics, astronomy and engineering and prepared myself to follow my other dream. It was time to get us off this planet.

I developed the engines, designed the stasis chamber, and built the whole of the ship in my garage, telling nobody what it was I was constructing. If I’d let word spread, no doubt the government would wish to aid me. I didn’t need their funding, I had plenty of money, and I knew that with assistance would come demands that more qualified, trained astronauts take my ship out on it’s maiden voyage.

My ship, my design, I get to take the maiden voyage. This was non-negotiable. It was an adventure I‘d dreamed of since long before I went to med school. Since I was a child. It was that last great leap into the great unknown, and I intended to take it first. Selfish? Perhaps. But I felt I’d earned the right.

So I kept my project to myself.

The ship had only room for one due to the massive amount of energy required to travel that close to the speed of light, but I’d be asleep the entirety of the voyage so it wasn’t as though I’d need the company. I’d nip out to Rigel, have a look around, prove the viability of my prototype, and return to, again in my opinion, well-deserved accolades.

I had faith in my prototype, I’d checked and double checked the design work, every pre-launch test had been passed within acceptable margins of error. What could possibly go wrong?

Rigel, it must be said, was beautiful beyond imagining, and the sense of awe one gets being that far away from the world that birthed you, the sense of scale and scope of a universe utterly unexplored, is indescribable. I’m not ashamed to admit I wept on more than one occasion. But I couldn’t stay longer than a few days, my fuel had been strictly rationed for my maiden voyage. I took charts and notes, filmed constellations from a different point of view and then, sad to leave but satisfied at my accomplishment, returned to my stasis chamber for the voyage home.

To answer my earlier question, what could possibly go wrong is a combination of time dilation and human nature.

I never did figure out how much time had passed by the time I returned, or what had caused the war, and I spent years searching for any clue. But by the time I got home humanity had managed to purge itself from the globe, nature had reclaimed most of the cities and the radiation had returned to acceptable levels.

Animals, when I saw them, looked more or less the same as I remembered. And buildings were mostly still standing. The ones that hadn’t been bombed, at any rate. So it can’t have been THAT much time.

Eventually, after using my spacecraft to travel the world in a failed search for the details of humanity’s self-imposed extinction, I settled myself down in Phoenix Arizona. The dry climate kept the city in better shape than most larger metropolis’ and it’s university had reasonably well-equipped research facilities. I had work to do.

Having conquered both death and space, the moment has come to turn my attention to time.

I’ve been here working ever since. I’m not sure time travel’s even possible, but I do know it’s my only hope, so I’ll continue devoting myself single-mindedly to the task at hand. There’s a garden near the lab, so food’s not a problem, and I’ve always been the sort of person who can work tirelessly when properly motivated.

And I’m feeling very, very motivated these days. I have to go back, though I admit as of now I have no idea what I’ll do when I get there. Warn them, I suppose. Or share my star-drive so a colony of humanity can escape the planet before the end comes. Or, failing to do both of those things, simply die with them, in the arms of the family I ignored so many years while working on the advancement of a humanity that did not live to see the fruits of my labour.

I’ll tell my wife how much I love her, and how much I appreciate her putting up with how distant I became while working on my projects. I’ll tell my son I’m proud of him, the way I damn well should have found the time to do more often than I did, I’ll buy him tickets to World Cup and pretend to understand how World Cup works while watching it with him. I’m sure he’ll explain the parts that elude me.

I’ll tell them both how much they meant to me first, I’ve learned that lesson from this experience if nothing else, and then the three of us can try to prevent the destruction of humankind together. And, if we fail, we can use the time machine in the moments before the final war begins to go back, armed with greater knowledge of the specifics of humankind’s fall, and try again. We can try as many times as are needed.

I miss them more and more each day, each decade I spend alone in this lab. And while the lab becomes increasingly difficult to maintain as the decades pass into centuries, and I’ve long since lost track of how long I’ve spent working at untangling the principals of time travel, and while there are days where I forget the sound of my wife’s voice, or what my son looked like, or even my own name, I’m confident that eventually I’ll conquer time, the same way I triumphed over every other challenge I’ve ever set myself. If it takes another hundred years or another ten thousand, it hardly matters to me.

Because I’m immortal.

And it’s a time machine.

And I’m a man of considerable intelligence and boundless patience. I’ll take as long as I need….

ABC (with apologies to David Mammet)

Everything stopped dead when he walked in, and all heads turned to face him. This stranger, this interloper, walked in as though he owned the place, as though it were his lab, and we, the research scientists who’d worked our whole lives to make the breakthroughs that ensured the continued profitability of Denedryne Advanced Cybernetics, were nothing. Like he was doing us a favour by coming down here. He looked us over a moment, and already we hated him. And, judging by the look of contempt he couldn’t be bothered to conceal, the feeling was mutual.

“Let me have your attention for a moment,” he barked, voice harsh and blunt, “because you're talking about, what... you're talking 'bout... bitching about a some prototype that burned out, some theoretical math that didn’t hold up under peer review, some broad you're trying to screw, so forth, let's talk about something important.”

He turned his most withering gaze to Kevin, the project manager, who seemed to physically shrink under it. Kevin had always been a timid man, the kind that buried himself in work because he had no idea how to deal with more human problems. In a situation like this he didn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell.

“Are they all here?”

“All but one.” Kevin stammered, flinching.

“Well, I'm going anyway.” And with that, he turned his attention back on the rest of us. “Let's talk about something important. Put that coffee down.”

Jack, by the coffee machine, stopped dead, stunned by the audacity of the order. Who was this son of a bitch to think he could order us around?

“Coffee is for roboticists only. You think I'm fucking with you? I am not fucking with you. I'm here from downtown. I'm here from Dr. Epstein. And I'm here on a mission of mercy. You Jack Levine?”

“Yeah.” Jack said, trying to stare the man down, and failing miserably.

“You call yourself a roboticist, you son of a bitch?”

Jack had had a rough year, the whole lab knew that. His last prototype had exploded, taking out half the testing bay, and the one previous had thought it was alive. It had screamed and begged for mercy as we were disassembling it, and the effect was… off-putting. But he didn’t deserve to be talked to like that. I stood up at my workstation.

“We don't gotta listen to this shit.” I said, in what turned out to be a misguided attempt to throw the stranger off his game. He didn’t miss a beat.

“You certainly don't pal,” he spat, pivoting on his heel to stare me down, “because the good news is you're fired. The bad news is you’ve all got one week to regain your job, starting with tonight, starting with tonight's testing.”

Jack’s eyes widened in fear. He had a kid, and another on the way. Losing his position at Denedryne was not an option for him, a fact the stranger apparently knew.

“Oh, have I got your attention now? Good. 'Cause we're adding a little something to this month's sale contest. As you all know, the first roboticist to develop a functioning sentient machine will win a Nobel prize. Possibly two or three of the little bastards. Anybody want to know what the second roboticist to develop a functioning sentient machine will receive? Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is your fired. You get the picture? You laughing now? You got the detailed notes of every research team in the country. Dr. Epstein paid good money for those notes. You can't develop a sentient AI and install it in an android body with the notes you're given, you can't develop shit, you are shit, hit the bricks pal and beat it because you are going out.”

This was a sticking point for Jack. Bad math in the notes from a team in Albuquerque was a large part the reason he’d burned down the testing bay.

“The notes are weak.” He protested, struggling to maintain his cool.

“The notes are weak?” The stranger asked incredulously. “The fucking notes are weak? You're weak. I've been in this business 15 years…”

“What's your name?” I asked, cutting him off. There was no way he could have been doing research into advanced AI’s and robotics without any of us recognizing him. I’d caught him in a lie, and he knew it.

“Fuck you,” he snarled, nearly feral with undisguised rage, “that's my name. You know why mister? Cause you drove a Hyundai to get here tonight, I drove an 80,000 dollar BMW. That's my name. And your name is “You're Wanting”. You can't play in the man's game, you can't design androids? Then go home and tell your wife your troubles. Because only one thing counts in this life. Build a super-intelligent, sentient, humanoid robot. You hear me you fucking maggots?”

He wiped the equations I’d spent all afternoon working out off the chalkboard in the center of the room, and I tried not to let my own anger show on my face. He had, it seemed, his own formulae to share.

“ABC. A, Always. B, Build. C, Cyborgs. Always build cyborgs. Always. AIDA. Artificial. Intelligence. Designed. Automatons? Artificial, because we are, at the core, artificers. Intelligence. Is there any intelligence to be found in this room? ‘Cuz I’m sure as hell not seeing it. Design. Can you design to our specifications? I hope you can because it's fuck or walk. You design or you hit the bricks. You will design an Automaton. AIDA. Get out there, look at the job market, and remember AIDA. You all got PhD’s from ivy league schools, what’d you, buy them on EBay? A guy doesn‘t get one of those unless somebody, somewhere thinks he can do something big. That person sure as hell ain’t me, but somebody thinks you’re capable. Are you going to prove it? Are you man enough to prove it?”

Too quickly to stifle it, I laughed. His attention was, once again, focused on me.

“What's the problem, pal?”

Fuck or walk, eh? Fine, fuck him then.

“You, boss,” I spat at him, smirking still, “you're such a hero, you're so rich, how come you're coming down here and wasting your time with such a bunch of bums?”

He seemed to ponder this a moment, looking me up and down. Then, taking off his watch, it was his turn to laugh.

“You see this watch? This watch cost more than your car. I made 970,000 dollars last year, how much you make? You see pal, that's who I am, and you're nothing. Nice guy? I don't give a shit. Good father. Fuck you, go home and play with your kids. You want to work here, design. Program!”

I stared, mouth open, trying and failing to think of a response, dumbfounded.

“You think this is abuse?” He asked, voice rising, “You think this is abuse, you cock-sucker? You can't take this, how can you take the abuse you get on a shareholder meeting? If you don't like it, leave. I can go through your notes tonight, the materials you got, and make myself an automated puppy. Train it to roll over, to fetch, and to navigate an obstacle course in the testing bay without having to program in where the obstacles are. Tonight. In two hours. Can you? Can you? Go and do likewise. AIDA. Get mad you son-of-a-bitch. Get mad. You know what it takes to create artificial life? It takes brass balls to create artificial life. Go and do likewise, gents. It’s the twenty-first goddamned century, and the breakthroughs are out there. You pick them up, they’re yours, you don't, I got no sympathy for you. You want to put your thinking cap on and design, it's yours, if not, you're going to be shining my shoes. And you know what you'll be saying. Bunch of losers sitting around in a bar: ''Oh yeah, I used to design AIs. It's a tough racket.''

Kevin handed him a case we hadn’t noticed him carrying when he came in, which he opened to reveal a bank of blinking lights and exposed wires.

“Good morning,” it said from a speaker none of us could see, “I’m glad to meet you. You have a beautiful lab.”

“This,” he said, his voice now hushed, reverent, “is an AI prototype stolen from Kurisawa labs. It is the Kurisawa prototype, and men died to get it. And to you, it is gold. And you don’t get to examine it. Why? Because to give it to you is just throwing it away. It’s for roboticists, and only when and if any of you prove yourself to be a roboticist may you examine it. I'd wish you good luck, but you wouldn't know what to do with it if you got it.”

He made for the door then, shaking his head as though he’d been trying, and failing, to explain something simple to very stupid children. At the door, he stopped a moment, and turned back to look me dead in the eye.

“And to answer your question, pal: Why am I here? I came here because Dr. Epstein asked me to, he asked me, as a friend, for a favour. I said the real favour, follow my advice and fire your fucking ass because a loser is a loser is a loser.”

The door slammed shut behind him then, but none of us moved. We just stood there, mouths agape, staring at one another. Stunned. It seemed the time for theoretical research had passed without any of us realizing…

My Birth

...this is a story i wrote last year, and since then some of the pop-culture referances have grown a little too dated for me to send it out to magazines, so i thought i'd post it up here! it's longer than what i normally post, but i'm pretty pleased with it, so i hope it manages to hold your attention in spite of it's length. Enjoy!


My Birth
by munsi


My pod opened up, released me naked and covered from head to food in some sort of sticky, viscous liquid, into a well lit, white room. Not used to having to stand under my own power, I fell immediately to my hands and knees, dripping and gasping for breath, disoriented by the lights and sounds around me.

To either side of me another pod opened, releasing people in a similar state, but I paid them no attention, too focused on my own sudden, surprising situation to take much stock of anything else. Around me, the room exploded into action, men and women in white coats bustling to and fro, yelling instructions to one another that, while I understood the individual words, meant nothing to me. Something about cloning pod optimization and biometric stability. Someone said something about this being the most successful season ever, and I wondered off-handedly what it all meant.

As my eyed grew accustomed to the light, I took stock of what was happening around me. I appeared to be in a sterile, white laboratory setting, with a bank of computers along one wall where the white coated people rapidly typed instructions and shouted readings back and forth to one another. Along the other wall, behind me, were 32 identical pods, green-grey and cracked open down the middle, a mass of wires spurting from the tops, intertwining, and snaking across the ceiling to connect back to the computers. In front of each pod was a soaking, struggling naked person just like me. I had no idea what any of us were doing here or, for that matter, who I even was, or how I knew what a “computer” or a “laboratory setting” was, or how I understood the language these strange people were speaking. Before I was released from the pod, I realized, I had no personal memories of any kind.

Eventually one of the women in white coats came over and helped me to my feet. She was pretty, in an unassuming way, carrying a few extra pounds from spending all day in the lab but still cutting an acceptably attractive figure under her lab coat, with long, auburn hair swept back in a loose pony tail. Behind the glasses she wore, her eyes sparkled with intelligence and a fascination with me she didn‘t bother trying to hide. She handed me a robe and escorted me to a room where I could wash the coating of slime that covered me off and dress myself. As I washed myself in that communal shower she explained to me that I was part of a project to grow fully formed, broadly educated, working models of a human being. I was, with my brothers and sisters from the 31 other pods, part of the most successful batch they had to date managed to create. The previous batch, she said, had been profoundly flawed, malformed and grotesque, barely able to sustain themselves outside their pods, and they’d been put to death shortly after the birthing process, their bodies destroyed in a gigantic incinerator the project keeps in the basement of the facility. But we, luckily, were perfectly suited to the project’s needs. We were anatomically complete, biologically twenty-two years old, with the intelligence of a bright high school graduate.

There were of course flaws in our biology, she explained, it was unavoidable do to the way we were grown, but they were, from the point of view of the project, comparatively minor. One trouble was that our lifespan would be dramatically reduced. Each of us would, she told me, had only eighteen months to live, and then our bodies would degrade and decompose, burning themselves out in a matter of hours. But this was an unimportant matter, since within the next eighteen months the task we’d been grown to fulfill could be achieved with time to spare, and if we were needed after that another batch of us could be grown easily enough.

One would think this knowledge would disturb me. The fact was that I only had eighteen months with which to experience life, to see the world and all it’s wonders, simply to be. It seemed the sort of thing that’d bother me greatly. And, more fundamentally, I should have been bothered by the revelation that I wasn’t a person, the way the word person is normally considered. I’d been grown in a pod for a specific purpose over which I had no knowledge or input. I was a simulacra, to be used and then, when my shortened lifespan was over, discarded. And although the woman in the lab coat didn’t say so, I suspected that when my time was up I’d wind up in the same incinerator as that earlier, flawed batch of clones. Though I knew academically that this should disturb me, indeed fill me with a deep, religious sense of existential terror, it did not. I accepted all of what she told me as calmly as I’d accepted the bathrobe from her, as if it were all perfectly natural. I asked her about my reaction and she told me that this was part of the process by which I’d been grown, a genetic predisposition toward docility. I would accept my fate and do as the project required of me with a sense of unflappable calm, and when my end came in eighteen months I’d accept that too. This reassured me. It meant I was functioning properly.

Finishing my shower and towelling myself off, I caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror centrally located in the change area. Slim but muscular, of average height, pecs and abs perfectly sculpted, chest hairless. My tan was deep, even and golden bronze, my hair thick and full and jet black. I smiled at the reflection and saw that my teeth were a gleaming white, perfectly spaced and even. I was beautiful, a picture of what a woman would want from a male physique. I accepted this too as a natural part of my new existence. Beautiful, perfect, young and only on this earth a year and a half.

As I finished cleaning up, the woman handed me a white suit, black shirt and black shoes. As I put them on, my thirty one brothers and sisters started filtering into the changing area, each accompanied by a man or woman in a lab coat. They dried themselves, asking the occasional question of their escort, the men lean and toned, the women high-breasted and slim, all with identical tans and similarly perfect smiles, smiles I knew looked just like mine. We looked different enough from one another that someone could easily tell us apart but, I supposed as a side effect of the growing process, we looked alike enough that we clearly were birthed from the same source. I smiled at a young man changing next to me, and he smiled back, looking charming but somehow empty, as if something fundamental was missing from him, like there was from me.

I finished dressing and was ushered out of the room and into a larger, more comfortable waiting area, white suit tailored to fit me perfectly and casually, or perhaps I tailored to fit it. I sat, perfectly relaxed, on a couch along one wall, and waited as my siblings joined me one by one, gradually filling up the room, all thick hair and white teeth and simulated youth and energy. Finally the last of the stragglers, a woman with bright red hair falling in curls down her perfectly formed back and breasts that forever looked like they might “accidentally” pop loose from the top of her raven-black gown but never quite doing so, joined us and took her seat. A short, middle-aged, heavyset man with a receding hairline in an expensively tailored suit entered the room and stood behind a podium, staring out at us, inspecting us. We all sat expectantly, trying to hide our shared sense of anticipation, not knowing exactly what it was he was about to say but knowing that it would finally shed light on the purpose of the project we were the product of, and by extension our own purpose. We knew that whatever it was he asked of us we would execute his orders faithfully, enthusiastically, and without question. The idea of not obeying him would never enter any of our minds, nor could it. We had to obey, we had no choice in the matter, it’s what we’d been designed to do.

It was our destiny.

Once the man had seen whatever it was he was looking for in us, he tapped twice on a microphone and explained, quickly and curtly, what it was that we would be expected to do. He explained that not all of us would see the task we were assigned through to completion, that between the thirty two of us, only one would succeed, bringing glory to the project and the men and women who’d worked so hard to bring us into this world. The one of us who succeeded would be taken care of all the days of his or her short life, given anything their heart could desire, though with our genetic obedience I didn’t imagine any of us were capable of desiring much. For those of us who failed the reward would be a quick trip downstairs to the incinerator, and while I felt a twinge of fear at this prospect, I didn’t in any way imagine it unfair. They had created me, and this gave them the right to destroy me at their discretion. I hoped, however, that this fear would give me the extra motivation I needed to succeed, that, out of all of us, it would be me and only me who won the favour of my creators, and doing so my continued existence. I realized a moment later that everyone else in the room very likely felt the same way.

We drank up the words the man spoke like we were dying of thirst, each syllable giving us strength and purpose, allowing us to understand what it was we’d be spending our brief lives doing. The people who’d created us were correct, there was nothing we were being asked to do that was beyond our capabilities, and eighteen months was more than enough time to accomplish every goal that we‘d been set. We weren’t just willing to perform our assigned tasks, we were excited! This was purpose, to compete against one another, to excel, to succeed, to make our creators proud, to bring them glory! We were not only willing and able, our hearts were glad to start! And the short, heavy man saw this in us too, and smiled.

When he was done he left the room without taking questions, he knew there would be none, and we were left alone in the room to wait. One by one we were ushered out of a room by a man in a black shirt wearing a headset he used to communicate with someone far away, someone I did not know, someone I would likely never meet. Those of us left waited, sipping bottled water that’d been thoughtfully provided, eyeing one another warily, not speaking. These thirty one people, once my brothers and sisters, were now my bitter rivals. Only one of us would succeed in our task, and I needed it to be me. It had to be.

And besides, we’d only existed a scant few hours and during that time we’d had exactly the same experiences. What was there to talk about?

When my time came the man in the black shirt put his hand on my shoulder, gave me a name, Michael, and led me down a long, empty hallway. I rolled the name around on my tongue, Michael, and liked the way it tasted. It was a good name, and a name was the sort of thing it seemed like I’d need sooner or later, and I was glad to have it. The hallway came to an end and I was ushered into a larger room than any I’d ever been in before, filled with more people than I’d known existed, hundreds of them, sitting along the periphery of the spacious room behind an artificial barrier, all staring in, at me. Lights shone directly in my eyes, momentarily blinding me, reminding me for a brief moment of my first seconds of life, as that pod opened and I was released blind and naked and slimy and confused into the world. It was only hours ago, but it felt like a lifetime. And it was. When my eyes adjusted I was introduced to a funny woman who called herself Ellen, a cruel man who called himself Simon, a jovial but forgettable man who called himself Randy and a man who looked a little like me called Ryan.

And then I sang.

And sang.

And sang.