Game of Clones

by M. E. Castle

  Whoever was inside the duck suit, he was fast. Fisher’s heart was pounding like the music still echoing from the gym. Two finally caught up to the mascot and leapt onto his back. With amazing strength, the disguised villain kept running. But Two slowed him down, and Fisher managed to catch them. Working together, they tackled the mascot and pinned him to the ground.

  Two pried the mask off. There was nothing underneath it.

  Still, it kept fighting.

  “Someone’s rigged it!” Fisher said. “You can see the wires inside!”

  “Hold it still!” Two said. “I’ll pull the power coupling.”

  Fisher gripped the suit as tightly as he could as Two reached down into its neck, grabbing wires where he could. The mascot gave three more weak thrashes before falling still.

  Fisher collapsed in a heap as Two stood up.

  “Was this your plan for me?” Two said. “Put me in this suit and try to control it with wires and controls?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Fisher said. “I didn’t know anything about this.”

  “Sure,” Two said. “And I bet you—”

  “Fisher Bas!” thundered a deep voice, cutting Two off.

  Principal Teed strode across Wompalog’s front lawn, where Fisher still lay in a heap with the mascot suit. His face was as bright red as the punch in Two’s hair. “I thought I’d seen your worst when you stormed the cafeteria with King of Hollywood French fries last month,” he said in a growl, “but you’ve well and truly made a wreck of things this time. Your capacity for destruction and mayhem amazes me! The formal is one of the most anticipated events of the year, and you’ve ruined it for everyone! Do you realize the damage you’ve caused? Do you think all of this is funny? Well?!”

  He looked back and forth between Fisher, who had sprung to his feet, and Two.

  “Are you a relative of his, young man?” he finally asked Two, frowning.

  “Cousin, sir,” Two said with feigned meekness and without skipping a beat. “I chased him out here to try and talk some sense into him.” Fisher shot a poison dart look at Two, but the clone kept his eyes on Mr. Teed.

  “Huh. Good luck with that,” the principal scoffed, before turning back to Fisher. “What you did was absolutely inexcusable. A prank is one thing, but that kind of disruption …” He paused to suck in a deep breath. The red in his face started to fade.

  “Listen, Fisher,” he said, in a slightly calmer voice. “We all remember the TechX explosion. I realize that you went through a horrible experience that you’re still recovering from. Ordinarily, I’d expel a student instantly for pulling a prank like this. But I have to take your recent trauma into account. For now, go home. I’ll think about what to do with you later.”

  Fisher stood up. He found he had nothing to say. Behind Mr. Teed, the students poured out on the lawn, and they whispered and pointed at him. He saw the Vikings, looking gleeful. He saw Veronica, looking disgusted.

  He realized he was on the verge of tears.

  So he simply turned around and started for home.

  His automated dance shoes slapped the sidewalk dully as he passed under the glow of the street lamps. It seemed like he kept climbing to higher and higher peaks, only to find a sheer cliff on the other side and plummet down again. The relationship he’d been building with Veronica was shattered, his friendship with Two had ended in a fight, and his hero status at the school had officially been revoked.

  But it was more than that. The way the mascot suit had come alive, had sliced a destructive path through the dance …

  Only two people Fisher knew had both the ability and the evil nature to rig such a feat. And one of them was far away, filming an awful reality TV show.

  Fisher was still turning the night’s events over and over in his mind an hour later as he lay on his bed, avoiding his parents, staring at the ceiling, petting FP, and hating his life.

  He heard the remote-activated ladder attached to his window turn on. A minute later, Two climbed in through the window.

  “I didn’t think you’d have the guts to come back here,” Fisher said coldly as Two pressed a button to retract the ladder. He started to roll over to face the wall and caught a glimpse of Two’s face. He was white as a sheet. “What is it?” Fisher asked.

  “I … searched the mascot after you left,” Two said. He no longer sounded angry. He sounded afraid. He held out a piece of paper. “I found this.”

  Fisher took it. It was a postcard with a picture of the Hollywood sign. On the back, in small, exceptionally neat print much like their own, was written a simple message: That was only the beginning. There will be more. Much more.

  Fisher felt like his blood had been replaced with arctic wind.

  “Three’s here.”

  Talking about what you’ve done is different when what you’ve done can talk about you.

  —Fisher Bas, Extended Clone Log

  Fisher stood in the living room, hands clasped behind his back. His parents were seated in front of him, concern on their faces. Fisher breathed as slowly and as deeply as he could. A hasty breath might send his diaphragm and larynx into uncontrollable spasms.

  His parents had been informed about the “incident” at the dance the night before. Baffled by the change in Fisher’s behavior, they, like Principal Teed, had hypothesized that Fisher’s experience at TechX might be having a lasting posttraumatic effect on him.

  But Fisher knew he’d been dragging the illusion on for far too long. His lie about Two was sucking dry so much of his energy, which could be of use elsewhere. If they were going to stop Three, they would have to give 100 percent effort. Nothing less would ever succeed, not against an enemy so clever and so cold.

  The time had come to stop the charade, and he finally had his parents’ attention from their current top-secret project.

  “I hope you asked us down here because you have a good explanation for what happened at the dance,” his mother said. She was in her usual lab attire, which included a pair of sophisticated goggles hanging around her neck and large, acid-proof gloves. “I have compounds synthesizing upstairs. I can’t leave them unattended for long.”

  “I’ve got a colony of ants in the early stage of collective consciousness,” said his father. “Also, my cyborg antelope used its electro-antlers to short out one of my best microscopes, and I need to fix it.” A tiny pair of dark scorch spots on his left pant leg suggested that the antelope hadn’t stopped at the microscope.

  “I know you’re both busy,” Fisher said, “and that I’ve been acting a little … strange lately. But this is important. Very, very important. Probably the most important thing I’ve ever told you.”

  Mr. and Mrs. Bas looked at each other, then back at Fisher, clearly worried about what might come next. Mr. Bas’s spring-supported spectroscopic eyepiece hung from its headband perch, and he reached up and brushed it out of the way.

  “I … have someone I’d like you to meet,” Fisher said, suppressing the very strong urge to back away until he was within leaping distance of the nearest window. “Come on out,” he said in a louder voice, stepping slightly to the side.

  Two walked into the room, the remnants of the punch stain on his face not quite scrubbed out, and stood next to Fisher.

  There was a long period of complete, suffocating silence. Fisher’s mind went to a recent Vic Daring storyline in which the space scoundrel was placed on trial for theft of an imperial Martian ruby, and stood before the planet’s rulers in an immense court chamber carved from stone, and was flanked by various Martian gladiatorial beasts. He really hoped his dad hadn’t engineered any of those lately.

  “Hi,” said Two at last.

  Fisher’s parents looked back and forth between the two boys.

  “The missing Accelerated Growth Hormone,” his mother said. “The compound that got stolen from my lab … did … is this Dr. X’s work?” Fisher could tell from her expression that even as she said it, she knew it wasn’t.

  “No,” he s
aid, lowering his head. “It’s mine. My work, my responsibility.”

  Silence fell over the room like a five-ton boulder. Fisher’s parents stared at the fidgeting Two for a long time, then looked at each other, astounded.

  “That’s … that’s …,” his mother said, grasping for words. She was obviously torn between anger at Fisher for taking the AGH and making Two, and marvel that he had accomplished such a staggering feat of biological engineering.

  “Why did you do it, Fisher?” his dad said, since his mom was still speechless.

  “I … couldn’t take things at Wompalog,” Fisher said. “Ignored, beat up, trampled, harassed. I thought I saw a way out and I took it. I didn’t think about the consequences. I’m sorry.”

  “The Fisher you knew the week before the TechX explosion was really me,” Two said. “I was the one making trouble at school, and I was the one who got kidnapped. Fisher risked his life springing me out of Dr. X’s compound, and together we destroyed the place.”

  They had agreed to keep the Los Angeles adventure and the threat of Three to themselves for now. They knew that their parents would try to prevent them from fighting Three, to keep them out of harm’s way. But Fisher and Two were the best suited to take on the new clone. Like it or not, he was made of mostly the same stuff that they were.

  Mostly.

  Because when Dr. X had made Three, he had used Fisher’s DNA as a basis, but bent it. Warped it, shaped it, and twisted it until it resembled something very different. Three looked like them, but he was stronger and tougher. More importantly, he was nearly emotionless. Cruel. Cold as a dagger blade and just as dangerous.

  Fisher’s mother stood up, stepped forward, and regarded Two more closely. Then she turned back to Fisher.

  “I can understand what you did, however foolish it was. But it’s not the fact that you stole from me that bothers me most. It’s the fact that you lied to us. All this time, you lied to us.”

  “I know,” Fisher said, feeling his whole body tensing up in a giant cringe. “I’ve felt more awful about that than I ever imagined I could feel.”

  “I can see that,” she replied. “I realize now I saw the signs of it all along. Oh, Fisher,” she said, shaking her head with a little smile. “Nothing I could do to punish you could make you feel worse than you must have already felt.”

  Fisher peeked at her to make sure she wasn’t kidding. He realized, suddenly, that his parents weren’t angry. Their faces weren’t swirling vortexes of electricity preparing to blast him into oblivion. And he knew a swirling vortex of electricity when he saw one; he’d seen his dad create one by accident once. It had almost blown the back of the house off.

  “You have the intellect for incredible things,” his dad said, standing up to join his mother. “I mean, we’ve got one of the most amazing accomplishments in scientific history standing in front of us. But you need to learn some discipline.”

  “When kids hear the word discipline, they think of punishment,” his mom said. “But that’s not what discipline means. It means being able to control your mind and use your skills wisely. It means taking responsibility for the result of your work. We’ve given you so many tools, but I don’t think we ever really taught you scientific discipline.”

  “I think I see where you’re going with this,” his dad said to his mom. “Fisher, you’re going to be our home lab assistant for a while. Science, just like any other profession, isn’t only about genius equations, new inventions, and brilliant ideas. It’s about work. Long, hard, boring work. The end result wouldn’t be nearly as special if it wasn’t.”

  “You’ll help us keep our labs clean, calibrate our instruments, double-check measurements, compare data,” his mother said.

  “Care for the genetically engineered bugs that’ve developed a taste for mushroom and eggplant pizza …,” his dad added in with a low sigh.

  “You get the idea,” his mom finished. “Is that a little less catastrophic than what you’d imagined?”

  Fisher waited a few seconds, in case that electrical vortex was just a bit late in charging up. But they really meant it. He nodded, and cold relief flooded him so fast, he almost lost his footing. Telling Two the truth had felt sort of like this, and it was nice to welcome that feeling back.

  “And as for you,” his mom said, turning to look at Two, who’d been standing quietly, for once in his short life, “we’d always thought about what it would be like to have another child. We didn’t imagine it would happen on such short notice, but welcome to the Bas family, er … What is your name, anyway?”

  “Two,” said Two.

  “I think we can do better than an integer,” his dad said. “We named Fisher after your mom’s father. I think it’s only fair that my dad gets a chance.” He smiled.

  “Welcome home, Alexander,” said his mom, hugging the clone formerly known as Two, who, after a moment of shock, hugged her right back.

  “As in, the Great?” he said. “I like it! Alex for short?”

  “Of course,” said his dad.

  “Though for that little stunt in the cafeteria, young man, you’ll be playing lab assistant for a while, too,” Mrs. Bas said, looking at him with only a half-stern expression.

  And there they were. Fisher and Alex Bas, no longer boy and clone, but real brothers. Not that that would necessarily be a widely known fact, as their parents were quick to point out.

  They’d keep up the cousin story and get Alex properly enrolled at Wompalog. Their mom promised to get Alex some hair dye that wasn’t corn syrup and food coloring. There was a spare room that was being used to store lab equipment, and they got to work clearing it out to make a new bedroom.

  Later that afternoon, Fisher sat in his room, scratching FP, who lay in his lap asleep after finding a jar of peanut butter and spending several hours sucking the entire thing out through a thin crack in its plastic side.

  It would be weird having his whole room to himself again. As frustrating as Two … Alex, he had to keep correcting himself, could get, the company had been welcome.

  But he was happy. Happier than he’d been, probably, since inventing Two (Alex!) in the first place. He felt as if badgers had been gnawing his stomach for the past few weeks. Now they were gone. The truth was finally out.

  But there was no time to rest now. Now the work would really begin. Three was here, and he was capable of anything.

  And only the Bas boys could stop him.

  At first, I thought the people here acted the way they do because it was an evil villain’s academy. But no villain could ever be evil and brilliant enough to create something as fiendish as the seventh grade.

  —Alex Bas, Journal

  Whoosh.

  Alex’s hand sailed through empty air as Sebastian Wong withdrew his hand at the last moment and instead smoothed his hair back.

  “I don’t think so,” Sebastian said. He and his friends started laughing. It was the third high five Alex had been denied in two minutes.

  Alex looked down at his hand like it was a flashlight that had run out of batteries.

  “Fisher … nobody’s talking to me,” he said as they walked down the halls of Wompalog between third and fourth periods on Monday morning.

  “Get back to me about that after you’ve experienced it for twelve more years,” Fisher said.

  Fisher’s parents had managed to put together a speedy offense to get their surprise new son enrolled at the school, who was still posing as Fisher’s cousin from Massachusetts. Ever since Fisher had revealed the truth about Alex to their parents, the brothers had been getting along again. Which was good, because it seemed nobody else would give them the time of day—not even the shortest, flimsiest second.

  Alex wasn’t the new, cool incarnation of Fisher anymore. And Fisher wasn’t the bold spy hero who’d destroyed TechX and saved the town. Now they were the two horsemen of the fall formal apocalypse. Everyone believed that they were responsible for everything the destructive mascot had done, and the other ki
ds avoided them like they had a flesh-eating disease transmitted by eye contact.

  Fisher hadn’t even seen Veronica. He’d gotten an e-mail from her over the weekend accusing him of secretly being after Amanda.

  I knew she was your friend, she’d written. And I’d have been happy to let you have a dance with her if you’d just asked me. But you snuck away, disguised yourself, and ignored me when I came to find you. The fact that you tried to hide it from me tells me all I need to know. When I asked you to the formal, you could’ve just said no. And now I wish you had.

  The message—the last sentence especially—floated in front of Fisher’s eyes in big, ugly neon pink letters. Not literally, although he had been working on a holographic text display device—but far worse: in his mind, where he had no power to resize, delete, replace, or minimize it.

  Now that Two was Alex and known to the world, Fisher hoped that he could explain and fix everything with her. But first she’d have to actually give him the chance to do it.

  He’d also have to come up with some kind of story explaining the mascot incident. Maybe he could say it’d been Alex in the suit the whole time; he’d just been joking around and it’d gotten out of hand. Maybe he could say that he’d detected a dangerous power surge in the DJ’s equipment and had thrown the DJ off the stage for his own protection, and taken over the console to try and stop it.

  It was disturbing to Fisher how quickly the lies began forming in his head. That was the problem with lying: it was a difficult habit to break.

  “This is really how it was?” said Alex, after waving at a passing classmate who pretended to notice something extremely important on the toe of his own shoe.

  “All day, every day,” said Fisher. “I haven’t seen the Vikings yet, but now that nobody’s looking, they’ll swoop in the first chance they get. Is everything in place? You didn’t forget the key ingredient?”

  “In place,” Alex said. “If they attack, we’ll be ready for them.”

  “I hope so,” Fisher said. “Well, this is me,” he said, stopping outside a classroom. “See you later, cousin.”