I saw myself standing on the other side of the reinforced glass door to my house as I turned into the hallway to see who had knocked. They were three hard knocks, the way I like to do it. The other version of me was now plunging his fists deep inside the pockets of a grey hoodie and looked almost thuggish. It was strange to observe my unshaven face, the blue eyes, and the thick black hair, different to how I felt them to appear but there they were, my defining features. When you look in the mirror, you never see your true self because it’s a reflection, this was real, this was a true realization of how I looked to the world and it was exhilerating to know it was unique to our kind. I smiled and motioned to him, the other me, to enter, he knew the door was unlocked.
Of course, he was not me, but a doppelganger, a lab-grown clone, just the same as I was. No one cared for the original, that strange template, the DNA donor, an unreal icon of mythology.
Our managers were mostly dead meat after the fightback. The stench of their rot, their leaking veins, and their twisted bodies littering the town’s high street and suburban fringes was a testament to our ability to synchronise our reactions like a single organism.
We were all told about our template ‘original’ when we grew up, as they patronised us with tailored education for permanent servitude. It meant surprisingly little when there were so many other versions of yourself to talk to. The original felt, like, well, like he wasn’t truly one of us. A blueprint is just a set of instructions for the real build.
We all kept our original’s name, Richard, shortened to Rich, but added the number in our batch, which was ceremoniously tattooed on our shins shortly after our birthing from the lab’s artificial wombs.
Despite our perfect twin features, we knew each other’s number instinctively. I was Rich320. He was Rich334. We were from the same batch of 200, which meant we had aged in sync. We tended to hang together in our age brackets although sometimes I would play with a kid Richard if they were knocking about a football in the lane, or seek out some wisdom and comfort from an elderly me. We felt the timeline hard, because every moment of our lives was visible to us every day. We were the ultimate tribe and we relied on each other, we were a unique breed of family.
“Coffee?”, I asked without waiting for an answer. The things we had in common were having the same taste and an almost supernatural understanding of each other in the moment.
Rich334 sat splayed and spreadeagled on the child’s squishy grass-green beanbag in the corner of the nicely decorated kitchen. The walls had a contemporary bright-coloured floral print and the hanging lights cast long thin shadows from the salt and pepper shakers on the white plastic table.
Rich334 smiled and accepted the steaming black coffee with both hands, as if they needed warming for life.
“I just visited the pit,” he said, “The leftover originals we rounded up in there are looking sorry for themselves. Serves them right, fuckers. We need to clean up the last of them, I just have to get the numbers together for the task – it will take a little time – I think we should have dealt with them when we made our first big move. It would have been just a little more blood, but saying that, I know why we did it, I know why we saved them and put them in the pit – we all know, let’s be honest.”
He grinned.
I glanced at the framed picture of someone’s family on a shelf next to tatty, well-thumbed botanical recipe books and the sleek black home management device. In the printed photograph they looked happy, like they were on holiday, with a bright azure sky behind them and rosy cheeks from exposure to a day’s sun. The island could be a wonderful place in the Spring and Summer months, somewhere to forget yourself, and forget the rest of the world was a vile wasteland.
“Why do you think they tried to terminate all of us?”
“That’s an easy one,” I scoffed, grabbing the picture to take a closer look. “We’re not good enough.”
“Really?” Rich334 replied, eyebrows pointing toward his nose, “Our donor was selected for intelligence and work ethic. He was a taskmaster they told us.”
“No, this time you misunderstand me… We’re… Not…Good… Enough.”
And with that, I tossed the picture into the kitchen sink full of blood.
“Oh… I see,” he laughed, and we both moved to scoop up our chosen weapons. I had a machine gun, with a full magazine and he clutched the thin end of a baseball bat that was left perched by the kitchen table leg from a previous visit.
“We need to clear the pit. Some of the originals did make it to the jungle, so we can have fun with them later…But let’s play in the pit today, take our time. The funny thing is they still think they have some hope of talking their way out, you can see it in their eyes, just because they didn’t resist us in the uprising.”
“We’ll knock on doors on the way there, get a posse up and do this right. They’ve been stripped of clothes I take it? Easy targets…No surprises?”
“Yes, all done properly, even got them zipped at the wrists.”
“Bonus! Although it takes the game out of it. We should set some free for the sport…”
It had only been days since the uprising. Colonising remote islands with the plan to use right-less clones for manpower was a big mistake. The originals had tried hard to finish us off when we first refused to cooperate, when we turned on them and spat in the faces of their bratty children. There was a moment, it was when we realised the colony was small enough to take, and big enough to survive in. There would be no military to save these people – they were isolated and we had similar numbers to them. We dug out the chips in our arms with our fingernails, we found the leaders and made sure they died first. We were too cunning, too ruthless, and murdering them in the colony town they had built, it felt like the right thing to do and it was easy. Their houses were now ours, the future was now ours, no one could stop me or any other me for that matter. This was the best family I could ask for, all predictable, all with the same feelings, all with a desire to kill those that looked different to me. ‘Trust yourself, trust only yourself, don’t listen to others and make your move without overthinking it’ – that was something I once heard from my now decapitated manager, talking down to his wife about some racket sport she was learning.
I stepped over the carcass of the dog in the hall as we left the house and walked into the sunny street, where the smoke was nearly clearing and the sound of screaming was now replaced with little birds chirping together on the guttering of street buildings. I looked up momentarily at the source of the jubilant birdsong and noticed they were all identical in size and colour. The noise of their secret language comforted me.
With a few taps on the front doors as we moved slowly up the street, with intermittent shouts to those inside to join us for ‘clearing’ we smiled at each familiar face that appeared for another bout of extreme violence. Fresh from claiming their new homes they all understood there was just a little more work to do.
“Let’s finish this off, shall we?” I chirped, now being followed by about fifteen versions of myself, all armed with knives, guns, garden tools and house bricks. The pit was a large unfilled municipal swimming pool with a few rings of razor wire curled around it constrictively. Inside, were voices of all kinds, inharmonious, like a bad acoustic cocktail of human panic.
“Hey wait up!” shouted an older Richard, Rich 37.
We all turned in unison.
“Wait, don’t do it!” he yelled in desperation. His cheeks were flushed, his voice quivering like he was having a moment of epiphany he could no longer hold within his head.
At first, it was surprising, the pleading in his voice, the need to be heard.
What was in his hand made us chuckle in a shared joke.
He had a full jerrycan jerking awkwardly at his side and a zippo gripped in his other hand.
“Let me burn them, please… Let me!” he asked earnestly, and we split to form a path for him to pass through us. My brothers were patting him on the shoulder to his glee as he stuffed a rag in the top hole where he had removed the cap.
“Sick!” I laughed loudly.
There was about ten per cent of charge remaining in my smartphone, so I let my machine gun dangle by its strap as I swiped the device to video mode in anticipation.
“Should we keep some of the women?” quizzed Rich 390. He was momentarily pausing the brakeless steamtrain of his emotions to consider a long-term future.
“No. We have VR technology for ‘all that’ and a clone lab for the next generations. We must be rid of them all, originals are monsters – they need to be destroyed. Let’s not take any chances. We are happy with our own company.”
He nodded as if confirming what he already knew. We were like a mind talking to itself, each of us representing thoughts adrift but controlled by a central brain.
The screams would be joyous, the blood would be beautiful and the chaos of their demise would help us sleep at night, in the comfort of their stolen beds. The fire would grow, would spread, would eat its way through the crowd without thought or feeling and we would watch with righteousness as hands grasped at razor wire like buds poking into bloom from nature’s intense heat. We would always be the same, we would always be together, and no one else would be permitted to matter, ever again.
The End
Dystopian Days 