TheStorytellersBazaar:Science Fiction
The Selfish Clone"If you had your life all over again, would you live it differently? Would you choose to have a better education or better life experiences? Would you be able to do a better job of raising yourself than your parents? If you have answered yes to any of the above questions, this product is for you," said the advert in the newspaper. "Super Clones Inc. offers a unique opportunity for you to clone yourself." It was Sunday morning and I was having a late breakfast and looking through the classifieds in the Sunday paper when this ad grabbed my attention. I found it somewhat unsettling. Two days earlier I had searched the AllK for references to myself and had found ... absolutely nothing. Why would someone so utterly unworthy of attention, so devastatingly mundane that even the AllK didn't know about them, why would someone so boring as me ever clone themselves? I was so distracted and depressed by my lack of impression on the world, that as I went through the checkout line at the grocery, I forgot an entire bag of oranges that I had already paid for. Walking home I plowed into the side of a shiny black panel van parked in the driveway three down from mine. It was hanging out across the sidewalk and into the street. But that really isn't enough of an excuse. As I picked myself up off the ground, I interrupted my self-absorbed reverie long enough to notice the discretely placed sensors deployed at even intervals around the outside of the van. It gave me a creepy feeling like I was being watched. By the time I got home, all thoughts of my meaningless life had succumbed to paranoid fantasies about aliens in vans watching me and waiting for an opportunity to grab me for embarrassing experiments. During the evening and into the night my paranoia ballooned into an all-consuming mind-cancer. I must have looked out the window more than thirty times to see if the dark outline of the van choking my neighbor's driveway was still there. I tried to convince myself that it was just a long lost nephew come to visit Liesel for a few days ... who just happened to drive a midnight black van covered with sensors. Liesel had been my neighbor for the 3 months that I had lived in my little fabricated house. And during that time the only visits she had received were from community sustenance and collective disposal. |
