I walked up onto that broad, well-swept porch, my speech pressing against the backs of my teeth. I raised my fist to knock on the richly grained wood of the front door. But before I could land a blow on the house, the door swung open. Martine’s face stared out at me, just like the last time I had visited this place.
This time, it was not a blank, welcoming smile she wore.
Martine was gray-faced and trembling and she stared right at me, looking into my eyes with an animal intensity. Her hair hung around her face, one wild tendril swinging a loose bobby pin. A livid bloom of reddish purple mottled her throat. Her right hand gripped the door as though it were the only timber left of her storm-sunk ship.
Her left hand gripped the rosewood handle of a chef’s knife.
I had to look down, if only for an instant. That was all it took for me to verify what I knew I’d see: the skirt of Martine’s dress, which clung wet and red to her legs. An arc of blood swung high across her waist and breasts; it had already begun to dry on her calves and ankles. But the skirt—that was saturated.
When I met Martine’s gaze again, I saw blank horror there, and I knew that I had been right to come to the house after all.
“Thank you for coming,” Martine said in a throaty whisper, her words coming slow. She cleared her throat, wincing as though it were painful to do so. “Something terrible has happened.”
CHAPTER
EIGHT
The conditioning of a clone is a process that requires some fortitude.
The duplicative cloning process is, of course, based on genetics. One hundred days from sample to sentience, and every building block is based on the DNA of the original. Each specimen emerges from amniocentesis at the state of telomeric decay established by the source material: The clone is the exact same age as the original, give or take a handful of weeks. Telomere financing means the clones don’t age at the same rate as the original—clone tissues simply decay quite a bit slower than standard tissues—but no clone is in use for more than a few months at a time, so it isn’t an issue.
At the end of one hundred days, a perfect double of any human can exist in my lab. It’s all genetics. It’s all growth.
The problem with the process is that, without intervention, the clone develops according to ideal conditions.
Humans rarely develop according to ideal conditions. My work, for the most part, has been focused on truly duplicative clones—ones that will look exactly like their originals. A body double for a politician, for example, must be convincing enough to attract a bullet, otherwise the expense involved in creating that double is unjustifiable. The expense in developing the process at all becomes unjustifiable.
Thus, conditioning is necessary. Nutrient levels during development must be carefully controlled. Light exposure, allergen introduction, heavy metal exposure: all are crucial during the nascent stages of growth and maturation.
But there are other factors at play. The original subject might have a crooked nose from a poorly healed fracture, or a distinctive burn scar, or a missing limb. A limp from a broken leg that never set quite right. A cracked tooth from a bar fight or a mugging.
This is the conditioning that necessitates a sense of remove, a steady hand, and a strong stomach.
Clones aren’t people, legally speaking. They don’t have rights. They’re specimens. They’re body doubles, or organ farms, or research subjects. They’re temporary, and when they stop being useful, they become biomedical waste. They are disposable. With the right mindset, conditioning a clone feels like any other research project. It feels like implanting stem cells under the skin of a mouse’s back, or clipping the wings of a crow so it can’t fly inside a controlled space. There’s blood, yes, and there’s some discomfort, but it’s necessary for the work.
By the time I knocked on Martine’s front door, I had been conditioning adult duplicative clones for several years. I had been disposing of specimens, both failed and successful, for even longer than that.
I couldn’t afford to be squeamish. “What happened?” I asked, because I had to say something. I couldn’t just stand there forever. Time would only begin to advance again once I imposed motion. Action was imperative.
“We had a fight,” Martine rasped.
There was so much blood.
“He was angry,” Martine said. “I told him about getting tea with you, and I asked him about the thing you said. About what I was made for.”
I started to say something—not an apology, never that, only an admission that I’d perhaps spoken too harshly—but she didn’t let me get a word in.
“No,” she interrupted. “You were right. I was made for something, and I’ve never even wondered about it. I was never asked if I wanted this.” She gestured to her belly. “So I asked Nathan about it. I said…” She swallowed hard, lifted a hand to her throat as she did so. “What if I wanted something different? What if I didn’t want to be a mother? That’s what I asked him.” She darted a quick glance at me, her eyes fierce. “I do want to be a mother. I want this. More than anything. I just wanted to know whether I had a say or not.”
I believed her. Nathan would have programmed her, after all, to want this more than anything. But then, he also should have programmed her to not ask questions like “what if.” At least, that’s what I would have done, if I was going to build a perfect, docile version of myself. I couldn’t help but feel a twitch of satisfaction: Of course Nathan would cut that corner. He always was sloppy. “And what did he say?”
“He got so angry. He kept talking about his failure, saying that he’d overlooked my flaws. I was cooking dinner, and I turned to get a knife from the block, and it wasn’t there, and then I looked over and he was holding it, and.” She stopped talking midsentence and looked down at the knife in her hand. “Oh,” she said, and dropped it as though it had suddenly sprouted thorns. “Oh no, oh no, oh no,” she repeated in an increasingly frantic pitch. “Oh no, he—he came at me with the knife, and I screamed and I knocked it out of his hand, and he put his hands on my throat, and—”
I clapped my hands once, hard and loud, and Martine startled into silence. “Take a deep breath, Martine,” I said in a low voice. “I can put the rest together, you don’t have to tell me. Just take a deep breath, that’s good. Eyes on me. Don’t look at the floor, look at me.” I was not being gentle with Martine. This wasn’t a moment for gentleness. The trick of the thing was to crush her rising panic. I had done it with a dozen rejected lab assistants, the ones who couldn’t handle the process of conditioning live specimens. “Now, take three steps toward me.” Martine followed my instructions without question, her unblinking eyes locked on mine.
I took her by the arm. Her skin was tacky with half-dried blood. I led her farther into the house. “Where’s your bathroom?”
“Down the hall,” Martine whispered.
“Good. We’re going there.” I kept my voice authoritative. Let Martine think someone was in control of the situation. Let that someone be me. Forward.
We walked into the bathroom, decorated in muted tones of lavender and sage, all the soaps in decorative glass bottles with brushed aluminum pumps. I spun the knobs in the tub, turned the shower on, and undressed Martine while the water got warm.