Krishna kumar Mani - SFS2 - Science Fiction Short Stories

“That’s what’s in place now. You will have full access when you reach the lab.”

As our car drove near my old office, I thought about my past. I thought what my old company would do when they couldn’t find me. I certainly wasn’t about to pay them a million dollars. Suddenly the car turned into the company’s parking garage.

“Hey! What’s going on? Is this some kind of a joke?” I yelled at the driver. “Let’s go to the lab.”

“No joke, sir. This is the lab,” replied the driver through the partition.

Oh my god. It was them the entire time.

As I exited the Lincoln the chairman was waiting with a smile plastered on his face. I was silent.

“Don’t worry, Bob. We’re not going to go forward with the legal case. Well, provided that you continue your research here with us. I saw the details on your laptop and understand exactly what you’re trying to do. Come back and there won’t be any further interruption in your work. At least, not from our side. Our computer guy said you had a nice setup on your laptop. But it doesn’t help to overwrite the hard drive for bad logins when you leave the computer logged in.”

I wasn’t completely surprised that they knew the value of my research. These guys had a mind for money. But now that they knew, they’d want to dictate my every move.

“What do you really want?” I asked.

“Listen, we will provide everything that you need. There’s no need to stay at your small apartment any more. We’ll give you a nice place. All you have to do is create some people for us. If you do that, you will get enough money to live out the rest of your life comfortably. No more worrying about food, and you’ll be doing your research too.”

I knew then that they indeed did have access to the notes on my laptop. I am an idiot. The next project I needed to work on was a language that only I could understand because I couldn’t even protect my digital work at all. A great password or authentication is only as good as the person using it.

“Who do you want to clone?” I asked, getting right to the point.

“They’re not alive currently. One full strand of hair is enough for you to create them though, right?”

I thought for a while.

“What’s up? What are you thinking about?”

“Sorry. I was just trying to guess who you wanted to clone.”

“I may tell you later, but you’ll definitely know once you create them!”

He took out a hard cover book and also a plastic bag. Inside the bag was a longish gray hair. A spark fired in my brain that I had seen the book somewhere before but I couldn’t place it. He handed the hair to me.

“Is this a female’s hair?” I asked, looking at the length of the hair.

“No, it’s from a male. You can start the process now, correct? How long will it take.”

“I can start immediately, but it will take at least 3 months.”

“Three months is too long of a wait.”

“Even a baby takes ten months to be born,” I said with a smile. “I’m creating an adult in three months and you’re telling me that it’s too long!”

The Chairman laughed. This was the first time I’d seen him do so. He had a good hearty laugh.

“Well, is there any way to reduce your time? Do you need more people?”

At that point I had an idea.

“In my initial attempt to test my research, I tried to clone myself. That was when the machine was damaged. If I clone myself, the work will go twice as fast. Also, it won’t be a security risk like bringing in an outsider would be.”

He thought for a while. “Great. Do it.” Then he left.

I was so excited to see my clone that I gave up guessing who the hair was from. I’d clone them and then I’d find out. No big deal.

When I walked into the lab, I was alone. It’s almost like a jail now, but they can’t complete the research without me so they’re not going to kill me. I was at least thankful for that. I worked happily, but was still slightly worried that something bad could happen.

Would my clone respect me?

Who did they want me to create?

What will they do with them? Is it even safe for me to be here?

Growing up my mother always said that I was a lover, not a fighter. She was right. I had some fitness equipment but I wasn’t super strong and I didn’t know how to fight either. I had to be careful here. I knew that much, at least.

Two months later, the work on my clone was completed.

I smiled at my clone. Since he was my clone he knew the research but only up until the crash happened. So I filled him in on the rest. Being me, or a form of myself, he understood the predicament that I was in.

The Chairman was excited and asked about my clone, “You told me it would take three months to create a person, but you created your own clone in two. How did you accomplish this?”

“Please don’t mistake the speed for advancement. You didn’t look over the lab fully when I was fired the first time. I was already a month into the process so I picked up from where I left off.”

After seeing my clone he insisted that I continued to make clones of myself so that he could farm them out and have many researchers working for him. “We need to create a lot of people. The world has been missing out for years on some of the best talents that once existed.”

I smiled, thinking that he was a man who thought ten women could give birth to a child in one month’s time. The project manager didn’t have common sense, but he at least understood that the time it took was non-negotiable.

“This was only the first test,” I said. “So I only created one copy. Later on we can do more as we need to.”

“When will person X be completed?” “Person X is scheduled to be finished within the next 45 days. I have to wonder, why won’t you tell me the name of the person?”

“You will find out soon enough,” he said with a smile.

He thanked me for my work and left. My clone was hard at work so I decided to take a short break before heading back to the lab.

“Oh sorry. I forgot my bag,” said the Chairman as he came back into the room. He grabbed it and left again.

I thought maybe that he was person X, but the hair was too long. I talked for a while with my clone before I went to sleep.

I dreamed that it was the hair from a dinosaur. A raptor. It escaped and killed me. When I woke I reminded myself that dinosaurs didn’t have hair. And my technology wouldn’t work on them anyways. Or would it? Maybe if this were an action movie from the 1990s. I would stick to just humans. In 30 days the gray haired man would be standing in front of us. And then, if it were someone famous, I would know exactly who they were.

After a few weeks my clone and I became great friends. We were essentially twins, but even closer than that. He let me tattoo his hand to stop the confusion that was occurring around the building, but people were quieter too. They didn’t know which one of us was which so they were hesitant to initiate a conversation.

That day I could see most of the face of the cloned person. Person X. Who was it? I tried to guess, but still after seeing the semi-formed face, I had no idea. The seven foot box that contained it wasn’t much help to determine who it might be.

I decided that I couldn’t control my curiosity any longer. I opened the box. I could have never guessed who was inside.

“Oh my god it’s Einstein,” my clone and I shrieked together. They planned to make Einstein work for them. Who are these guys? What do they want with his knowledge of physics?

“No, I can’t do this. I have to destroy it,” I said.

“No, wait!” My clone stopped me and said, “We have to see Einstein. He is back on Earth. He knows so much. We can’t just destroy him.”