19

My clone-father first met Lyle Gardener in 1988. Adam-1 was given a tour of Ingeneuity by his Uncle Charles not long after my clone-father developed his obsession with genetics – the key to life, and therefore Adam-1’s key to immortality. His only hope of not meeting the same fate as his parents. 

Charles led me into the spacious room. Around the perimeter of Lyle’s office stood an array of antiques – mostly scientific or military, ancient guns and microscopes. Behind the desk loomed an eight-foot-tall grandfather clock, a family heirloom. Its loud tick-tock seemed to count down the seconds of our lives, as if the clock knew it would long outlive everyone present, and it wouldn’t let a second pass without reminding us.

The only thing in the room more threatening than the clock was the man sitting in front of it.

“Um…Mr. Gardener,” Charles began, “this is my nephew Adam. Adam, this is the founder and owner of Ingeneuity, Mr. Lyle Gardener.”

Lyle was in his mid-thirties. He was unusually thin and his hair was already silvering, and he had an arrogance about him that made me feel inferior. He scrutinized me for an uncomfortably long time, an elaborately carved pipe protruding from the left side of his mouth. Then he rose, taking his pipe out with his left hand and extending his right hand to me, forming a stiff, alarming smile.

“It’s an honor to meet you, Adam,” Lyle said.

“Thank you, sir,” was all I could muster. My hand was encased in Mr. Gardener’s surprisingly solid, enveloping grip. I felt right away the man was dangerous, but I also knew Mr. Gardener may be the one man who could give me what I needed. If I wanted to live forever, I’d have to fly as close to that alarming smile as possible. 

*** 

I would come to know that same smile on a face fifty years older, and the memory of it still makes me feel like a child.

I went to live in Lyle’s house on December 25, 2041. It was sterile, not a speck of dust, and elegant in a clinical sort of way. The bedroom in which I now resided was a shrine to Adam-1 filled with his pictures and diplomas on the walls – constant reminders that I was him and that I should live my life as if it was a continuation of his. That might have comforted me, seeing my grandpa as a father figure who loved my mom and would protect me from Lyle. But with my mother’s murderer forcing my c-father on me, I began to wonder if Adam-1 had always been in league with Lyle, and if he had only used my mom for his own selfish needs. Needs that had led to her death.

For the first time, I began to resent my clone-father.

I never worked up the courage to ask Lyle to take the stuff down. Once I took a framed picture of Adam-1 and Grandma Lily off the dresser and put it in the drawer, replacing it with the Disneyland photo of my mom and me. The next day the other picture was back out and mine was nowhere to be found.

“Why did you put your picture in the drawer?” he asked at dinner that night.

“I just liked my other picture more,” I said. I kept my eyes on my food.

“It’s disrespectful, Adam. Remember who you are.”

“I don’t remember him at all,” I whispered.

“Don’t ever answer back to me again.”

I didn’t answer back or move any of Adam-1’s relics again. But it made me begin to loathe my c-father every time I walked into my bedroom, and every time I woke in the morning. If Lyle thought he could force me into becoming my c-father, the strategy was backfiring.

So I thought. What Lyle knew, and I didn’t, was the power of a ticking clock. 

*** 

In the world beyond my bedroom, change was happening quickly by 2042. Cloning moved further into the mainstream. More than 100,000 clones were born during that year alone. The first private schools exclusively for clones opened their doors, though most people encouraged the integration of clones and non-clones in schools and society, and nearly all early divisions proved to be short-lived. The majority of the new wills were written with a “cloning clause” that indicated whether or not the person wanted to be cloned upon death, and if so, who should be the guardian and what the financial arrangements would be. Most churches strongly discouraged cloning – especially upon death – but nearly all of them allowed and encouraged clones to join their parishes.

More sensationally, a few “clone cults” sprang up on the fringe that believed humans should become their own gods as a form of ancestor-descendant worship. They believed that eventually only the people who cloned themselves would live forever, and that those who put their faith in an external God were doomed to die and pass into oblivion. This, not coincidentally, was exactly what Lyle wanted the people to believe. If people were convinced that cloning was the only possible afterlife and Lyle controlled the cloning establishment, he could theoretically hold the keys to heaven. Lyle was not directly responsible for these religious movements, but some of his associates encouraged it by writing books and quietly bankrolling the new churches.

On the extreme opposite side of the religious fence stood the growing cult spawned by Gabrielle Burns. Her journal, now a holy relic, described how she believed the archangel Gabriel had charged her to save the human race by killing the first human clone. If she failed as savior, all humanity would perish. The “Gabrielites” believed that her two failed assassination attempts demonstrated that God had decided to spare Adam-2 and instead destroy everyone for their acceptance of cloning. They therefore no longer called for my destruction, but prepared themselves for the end times that my presence would visit upon the earth.

There were other monumental social developments underway. While much of conservative America adamantly opposed cloning, many liberals decried what they considered a far more damaging development. What had begun as medicinal gene therapy to cure serious defects in embryos was gradually transforming into wholesale manipulation of the genes. Several years ago, some wealthier parents began picking out their child’s gender, eye color, hair color, and height. Now they could start choosing better looks, nice teeth, a genial disposition, strong immune systems and, naturally, greater intelligence for their babies-to-be. Initially only the rich could afford such perks, increasing their advantages over the lower and middle classes. And even now the greatest enhancements can only be had by the wealthy.

Although most conservatives had initially opposed such procedures on moral and religious grounds, much of that opposition was eventually whittled away as powerful and affluent pundits spoke out in favor of genetic manipulation. They argued it was a moral imperative to provide the best possible start for your children, God wanted humanity to constantly improve ourselves and therefore gave us these tools with which to do it, other countries would do it and we needed to follow suit to maintain a competitive edge, it would be un-American to stifle the freedom of parents to develop their children as they saw fit, and the crazy liberals shouldn’t be allowed to determine whether or not our children were smart.

By 2040 the first intelligence-enhanced babies were being born. Within a few months new private schools were already being prepared for them. Although safe, effective, and relatively inexpensive memory-boosting “smart pills” were already on the market, the genetically enhanced brain would always be steps above a non-enhanced one and would get a bigger boost from the smart pills. It began to look as if babies like Lily and I had been born a few years too early.

The entertainment industry hopped on the cloning and gene-enhancement bandwagon. The story of the years between my birth and my mom’s murder was quickly made into a movie, and another even more popular one came out about the life and death of Gabrielle Burns, infusing the Gabrielites with thousands more converts. Then there were the several cloning-related series bombarding homes including such classics as C-Father Knows Best, sitcoms like The Addams-2 Family and Welcome Back, Adam, the cheesy new soap operas As the Brave New World Turns and Two Lives to Live, a serio-comedic take-off of the old police drama Adam-12, and the action series The Clone Ranger for which I had coloring books, action figures, and a lunchbox.

Pet cloning had been going on for decades, but it was seeing a similar resurgence as the ability to clone mammals became more routine and less expensive. Lyle, as you might have guessed, was not exactly a big “pets” person, although I’d have loved one during that time of my life. Anything to get away from my great-grandfather and Lily-2. By the time she turned four, I was beginning to feel increasingly uncomfortable playing with her. She always wanted to re-create scenes that Lily-1 had told her about in letters, like when they went on their first real date to see Sleepless in Seattle. It was awkward to treat Lily like a kid sister when she was always trying to kiss me on the mouth.

“Like before,” she said to me, showing me Grandma Lily’s letter about their first romantic kiss when Lily-1 was sixteen and Adam-1 was twenty-two. She knew every detail of Adam and Lily’s courtship. It would be many more years before I would read my clone-father’s brief summary of his “romance” of Lily. Beginning with Lily’s ninth birthday party, he gave the daughter of Ingeneuity’s CEO a white lily whenever he visited. Lily was immediately won over, and Lyle encouraged him to keep wooing her. 

“She seems only really happy when she knows you’re coming over,” Lyle told me. “But I hope you’re serious.” He tapped me on the shoulder a couple times with his pipe. “I’d be extremely upset if you ever hurt her.”

I guess it was the kind of thing any lovingly protective father might say, but stated with his usual calm severity that always made me uncomfortable.

“Oh, yes sir,” I answered, “I’m very serious.” And I was. I was then. When I was eighteen, working for Ingeneuity was all I cared about. I would’ve dated a garbage disposal.

On Lily’s eighteenth birthday they made love for the first time. Six weeks later Adam became the oldest date at her prom, with Lily graduating from high school and Adam completing his doctorate in bioengineering soon after. About that same time it grew clear that the night of their first union had also seen the zygotic union of their two gametes. As Adam had hoped. They were hurriedly married on June 5, 1999, and their daughter was born seven months and one day later. They named her Sarah. 

* 

Lily-2 started playing Helen Reddy’s rendition of Delta Dawn as it indicated in Lily-1’s letter, and then she puckered up for her first romantic kiss from me.

“But it says here we have to wait till you’re sixteen,” I noted scientifically.

“No we don’t!” she insisted.

I turned off the music and shrugged. “That’s what it says, Lily. I’m sorry.” I smiled sympathetically, said the years would go quickly, and made a small excuse to go back to my room.

Which was really Adam-1’s. But I slowly learned how to function in that bedroom. I pretended to ignore most of Adam-1’s photos and personal items. Unable to block them without assistance, I hid my c-father’s things behind holograms. I immersed myself in holo-books, played the new homnivision games, and inserted myself into homnivision movies, interacting inside new and old films. Within those I could perform the heroic acts of Indiana Jones, Luke Skywalker, and Harry Potter, at times changing events through my actions. I saved Old Yeller, the father in The Lion King, and Bambi’s mother. Once I played the homnivision version of the film Gabrielle intending to modify the outcome by coming to my mom’s rescue. But like my character in the movie, I ran away.

I hid my cowardice inside my e-journal to my future clone, telling him not to worry about being the same as Adam-1 and me, and not to follow orders from Lyle. I guess I was asking him to have the courage we lacked. I didn’t include the fact that I believed Lyle killed my mother, figuring I’d add that after Lyle was dead. Although the e-journal was encrypted, there seemed too much risk in including such information. If Lyle ever found out for certain that I knew he’d murdered my mom, I would surely be next.

Sometimes I’d v-chat with other clones, but I always hid behind an avatar. I didn’t want them to see that they were talking to the first of their kind. Other times I’d create a hologram from a picture of our old dining room or my old bedroom that would make me feel like I was back in my mom’s home. There I daydreamed about Mom and Evelyn and Jack. And about killing Lyle. 

I plotted my revenge thousands of times in countless different ways. Could I pull it off as perfectly as Lyle had pulled off my mother’s murder? Would I be able to kill him at all? I felt small, intimidated, and inferior every time he was around. Where would I ever find the courage to murder him?