CLONES: The Anthology

by Rysa Walker

  She looks up at me, and even though the light is dim, I can see that she’s barely holding it together. Her green eyes are unfocused, confused.

  “Kiernan? But how—”

  I hold my CHRONOS key against hers to transfer the stable point for the cabin, and then help her pull up the interface.

  “Kate, please. You have to focus. I’ve pulled up a stable point, love. Just slide your fingers over it and go. I’ll be right behind you. I promise.”

  That promise is a lie in one sense, but hopefully, she’ll never know it. Six will be there.

  It takes a second longer than usual, but Kate manages to lock in the location. And then she’s gone.

  I slide down to the floor. The gauze and medical tape are a few feet away, but I don’t have the energy. And it’s pointless. Holmes is already trying the door. Whether he shoots me, or I bleed out, or I simply vanish, the end result is the same. My time’s up.

  Still, I bring up the cabin on my key. Not to follow her. The fact that pulling up the stable point is a struggle tells me that’s not possible. I just need to see that Six made it back, that someone is there to help her. I’m not sure what I’ll do if he’s not, but I need to know.

  Holmes twists the handle again and then the door shakes. Once, twice, and then it flies open.

  My eyes remain on the holographic display. Kate is in the cabin, crumpled on the floor. A moment later, I blink in—or rather, Six blinks in. He lifts Kate into his arms and I pan the view around to follow them.

  From the corner of my eye, I see Holmes. He scans the room for Kate, then raises the pistol in my direction.

  Closing my eyes, I hold fast to that final image of Kate, safe in the cabin, and wait for the end.

  ~*~

  A Word from Rysa Walker

  Yes, I know. Time travel isn’t the most common method of producing clones, and it’s certainly not the most technologically feasible. But clones of this sort exist in my series, The CHRONOS Files, created when a time traveler doubles back on his or her timeline and changes something. That action results in a splinter—a temporary duplicate of the time traveler. One copy or the other vanishes in ten minutes or so and the timeline continues on its slightly altered way.

  But… which copy vanishes? You or the new you? Does it even matter if they’re both you? What sort of challenges would you face working with multiple yous toward a common goal? These existential questions are touched on briefly in Time’s Divide, the final book in my series, but I wanted to explore them in a bit more detail. The events that happen to Kiernan after the end of Time’s Echo, when he’s forced to create multiple splinters in order to save Kate, seemed like a perfect opportunity to dig a bit deeper, so I was delighted to have the chance to explore this somewhat unusual method of cloning for the Clones anthology.

  Thanks for reading “Splinter.” If you enjoyed this short story, you can find the entire CHRONOS series online at http://www.amazon.com/author/walker.

  ~*~

  The Vandal

  Joshua Ingle

  ~*~

  A grating noise from the window downstairs wedged itself between Chase and his sleep. He’d heard it before, perhaps ten seconds ago, but he’d dismissed it as part of a dream. Now he began to suspect it was real. Does Alice realize her cleaning is waking me up?

  He willed himself back toward slumber, rolled over… and his arm bumped Alice, sound asleep next to him. How can she be cleaning downstairs if she’s up here with me? With some effort, Chase opened his eyes and glimpsed the time.

  2:08 a.m.

  The window in the living room’s far corner had creaked when Chase and Alice had bought the place all those years ago, but the defect had seemed part of the charm of the rustic old Victorian-style house. It was so minor that Chase had never bothered to fix it; he only ever noticed it when Alice’s nephews occasionally opened the windows during their play-shootouts. The kids weren’t here tonight, though, and they only played during daylight hours, anyway. Who the hell’s opening the living room window at 2:08 a.m.?

  Chase’s whole body tensed, suddenly fully awake. He shook Alice’s shoulder. She mumbled something and tried to swat him away, but Chase persisted.

  “Alice,” he whispered. “Alice, someone’s breaking in.”

  “Hmm?”

  “Alice, wake up. Be quiet. Someone’s breaking in downstairs.”

  She finally sat up in bed and stared at him, her drowsy eyes struggling toward alertness. He held up a finger, urging her to listen.

  After a moment of silence, they heard echoes of faint footsteps tapping on the living room’s wooden floor.

  Alice grabbed her phone, no doubt to call the police. Pushing the bed sheets aside, Chase accidentally bumped the tablet on his nightstand, activating it and sending it tumbling. He grabbed it in midair just before it hit the carpet.

  Gingerly, he exhaled, and exchanged a relieved glance with Alice. Then he turned off the crime novel he’d been reading, swung his feet over to rest on the carpeted floor, and scanned the room for something he could use as a weapon. Chase had never been one for paranoia. He hadn’t thought to prepare a baseball bat or a crowbar—much less a gun—to be on hand in case of an event like this. Alice kept pepper spray in her purse, but that was downstairs.

  Ah! There was something he could use. He tiptoed to his weightlifting equipment and grabbed a fifteen-pound dumbbell: light enough to swing, heavy enough to do some damage. As he approached the bedroom door, he heard Alice snapping her fingers at him.

  “What are you doing?” she mouthed, her eyes furious.

  “Lock the door,” he mouthed in response, and closed it shut behind him.

  He’d read online that the Chicago PD’s response times had been snaillike lately, what with the uptick in crime surrounding the Sect’s attacks. If the cops didn’t arrive for another twenty minutes, Chase wasn’t about to let some gang banger make off with his valuables.

  He made a mental list of what the burglar could be after as he crept down the stairs. Alice’s clothing and jewelry were safe up in the bedroom with her, as was Chase’s wallet and the cards inside. But a cornucopia of smartphones, laptops, tablets, and other gadgets speckled the downstairs area. An intruder might also find the rare liquor bottles kept in the rear of the pantry. The AI hub was especially vulnerable: the door to its closet was always left open for better wireless reception. And if the thief ventured into the garage, he’d find Chase’s UAV equipment and his power tools, which would fetch a killing at any pawn shop.

  Alice might protest Chase confronting the trespasser—he certainly wasn’t young anymore, and the thief might very well be armed. But Chase was quite fit for his age, and he had the element of surprise on his side. Plus, it really pissed him off that some thug would do this to him and his wife. Of course I’m gonna clock this son of a bitch.

  He reached the bottom of the stairs and listened. Silence, in all directions. From where he stood, he could see parts of the kitchen, the dining room, and the living room, all lit by the single dim light above the kitchen table. In the long shadows, nothing moved. Chase’s own breathing seemed to grate as loudly as the living room window had.

  He dared a quick glimpse out a front window to see his Beverly neighborhood sleeping in darkness. No vehicles lurked on the curb in front of his house, but the robber could have parked down the road to minimize suspicion. This neighborhood had been so nice, so upscale when they’d moved in over a decade ago. Even now it wasn’t exactly a slum, but home values had plummeted, and the place could obviously no longer fulfill its function of shielding its residents from the city’s undesirables.

  A hissing sound escaped from the living room. Then, after five seconds, a vigorous clicking noise, followed by more hissing. Spray paint. The intruder was spray-painting something in their living room! Unbelievable.

  Chase snuck to the nearest AI terminal and whispered to it. “Turn off your audio responses. Wait sixty seconds, then play Beethoven’s 5th at full volume. Don’t
respond to this with any audio confirmation. Stay quiet until you play the music.” A green light blinked, indicating that the computer had heard and understood his request.

  Chase crouched low and peeked into the living room. He cringed when he saw it.

  Lime green spray paint defiled every piece of furniture in the room. Slick wet trails of the stuff crisscrossed over couches, lamps, tables—even the TV. Chase’s laptop, still atop the coffee table where he’d left it, sat open and drenched in the neon hue, seeping through the keyboard to the computer’s innards.

  At the far end of the room, his back to Chase, stood a man wearing black. His arms moved frantically to and fro as he finished defacing the large decorative mirror ornamenting the far wall. Droplets of neon green blood oozed down from each letter. The intruder’s full message, spray-painted on an area nearly as wide as a car, read:

  YOU ARE IN SECT TERRITORY.

  Chase shook his head and gripped his dumbbell tighter. So he’s not a burglar after all. He’s a cult member. Chase hadn’t heard of the Sect taking any actions as far south as Beverly, and certainly not in a neighborhood like this. They operated out of East Garfield Park and launched most of their attacks near Downtown. But maybe this guy was just a low-level wannabe, sent to take pictures of his trashing of a rich couple’s house to prove to the group he had what it took. What an unfathomable idiot.

  At the trauma of seeing his living room desecrated, Chase had lost count of how much time remained until the music started. So he walked, crouched, around the back of his sofa, his knees threatening him with weeks of future joint pain. But the future didn’t matter as much as his eagerness to slug this bastard.

  He stayed low and quiet and stopped behind the corner recliner, near the mirror covered in spray paint. He’d heard nothing from the intruder but the continued spraying of walls, so he assumed he hadn’t been spotted. Just as he was about to peer around the recliner to make sure, BOOM. An onslaught of deafening noise exploded from the speakers embedded in the ceiling, so loud and distorted that Chase couldn’t even recognize it as Beethoven’s 5th.

  He hadn’t yet positioned his body to attack the man. But the music left him with no choice. He sprang from behind the recliner and rushed toward the intruder.

  Both hands clutching the dumbbell, he swung it from behind his head. For a split second, surprised blue eyes gaped at him from behind a balaclava. Then Chase drove his improvised weapon toward the intruder’s face. It impacted on the side of the man’s head. He went down, hard.

  Chase kicked him. When he didn’t recoil, or even move in response to the hit, Chase knew he was out cold.

  Chase stared at him for a few moments before realizing something was wrong. Something with the music. Had the AI lowered the volume automatically when Chase had started his attack? No, it still blared overbearingly into his ears. His right ear, at least. Hmm…

  He raised his hand to his right ear and covered it. All sound grew suddenly muffled. He couldn’t hear much out of his left ear at all.

  Then he felt something warm and wet drip down his neck. Oh, shit.

  Chase raced to the mirror and peered through the dripping spray paint. “All lights on, music off,” he said, and the AI responded immediately. The light level rose on a soft gradient until he could see his wound clearly.

  His gory, gaping wound. It looked like someone had drilled a hole straight through his ear! He could see right through the opening! A trail of dark red seeped from the injury, pooling in the lower ear before trickling past the lobe and down his neck. Aw, damn it. Alice is gonna kill me.

  Chase resisted the urge to immediately fetch the medical supplies in his bathroom, and instead approached the unconscious vandal. Sure enough, a handgun rested on the floor near his body.

  He’d shot Chase. He’d almost killed him. A few inches’ difference and Chase’s brains might now be splattered across his sofa. He wasn’t sure if he should consider himself lucky or unlucky. The pain, unnoticed until moments ago, began to blossom.

  Thumping footsteps on the stairs signaled Alice’s arrival. “Chase?” she called, worry in her voice.

  “I’m okay,” he called back, not bothering to look at her as he pinned the gun beneath his foot and slid it away from the intruder. He didn’t want any of his own fingerprints on the damn thing. “I knocked the guy out.”

  “Jesus, honey, you scared the daylights out of me. What was that music?”

  “Just had to startle him.”

  “Chase!”

  She’d seen the blood.

  “Oh my god, Chase. Lie down. Lie down right now.” She ran to him.

  “Nah, I don’t want to get any of this on the furniture.”

  Alice briefly took in the living room, already ruined by green spray paint. “You don’t want to get any blood on the furniture? Really? Lie the hell down.”

  “Okay, okay, relax. It’s just my ear. It’s not my head, okay? I’m fine.”

  Although he’d rather have just ignored the wound for now, he grabbed some tissues from a coffee table and held them to his ear. Then, to placate Alice, he sat on their cabriole sofa, right on a line of wet paint. He raised his eyebrows as if to ask if she was happy now.

  With a quick glance toward the unconscious vandal, she shook her head and raced back up the stairs. To the medical supplies in the bathroom, Chase was certain. As soon as she’d left his sight, he rose, his pajama pants peeling away from the sticky paint. He paced toward the intruder.

  The man was still unconscious, maybe dead. If so, good riddance. But when Chase flipped him over onto his back, his chest rose and fell with each breath.

  Chase examined the rest of his body. The back of each hand possessed a tattoo of the Sect’s triangular emblem. One of his pinky fingers had been cut off, no doubt as part of some barbaric gang ritual, as if sacrificing one’s own body part would prove loyalty to a cause. The man’s shoes, jeans, long-sleeve shirt, and balaclava were all as black as his motives.

  Chase grabbed the ski mask and tried to wrest it off his face. He wanted to get a good look at the guy, in case the authorities asked him to pick the intruder out of a lineup later. He wanted to be able to point right at his face from a witness stand in a courtroom and tell the jury, “That’s the guy. That’s the degenerate who vandalized thousands of dollars of my property. He’s part of the extremists that have been terrorizing the city, so you need to lock him up for a long, long time.” The ski mask caught on the man’s hair, but a few back-and-forth tugs worked it loose enough for Chase to pull it off the brute’s face and look down…

  … into his own eyes.

  Chase yelped and jumped back. He grasped for the arm of the couch and braced himself against it.

  “Chase?” Alice called from upstairs.

  He tried to think through the shock. Maybe he’d been mistaken; maybe the intruder was just a lookalike. He took a few cautious steps back toward the man, and dared to glimpse his face again. A mole protruded from his upper lip where Chase didn’t have one, and his sun-beaten skin bore a leathery texture that Chase’s had never possessed. Through his open mouth, Chase spied a few missing teeth. Yet all other features appeared identical: the blue eyes, the robust facial structure, the thick build, even the high and tight haircut. This man was unmistakably a version of Chase… only twenty years younger.

  “What’s wrong?” Alice said from behind him. He hadn’t heard her come back down the stairs. She stepped up next to him, and gasped when she saw the young man lying unconscious before them.

  They stared for a long minute. The ceiling fan whirred, wafting cool air against Chase’s sweaty skin.

  “Who is it?” Alice finally asked. “Is it a cousin, or… ?”

  “Uh, here. Patch my ear up and I’ll… I’ll explain.” Chase sat on the couch again, right on top of the same line of spray paint.

  Alice prepared some medical wipes and gauze. “An ambulance is on its way, too.”

  “Good, good.” As she saw to his wound, Chase co
uldn’t pull his eyes away from the intruder, even as pain throbbed through his ear. How long had the man been wandering around Chicago, perhaps just miles from Chase, without him knowing? The odds that the two would eventually bump into each other must have been quite high. But how unfortunate that it has to be like this.

  “When I was in college,” he explained to Alice, “there was this company, uh, CellTech. My friend told me about it. They paid people to give them tissue samples, like from your liver or your muscles or your skin. I was strapped for cash, and I figured it was no different than selling your plasma, or your sperm, so I went and got paid for them to take a sample of my cells. I, uh, I had to sign a waiver. And this was right when human cloning first became legal. A lot of people donated, for money and for science. I didn’t think they’d actually use my cells.”

  Alice leaned back from his injured ear and looked him in the eyes. “Are you telling me that this man is your clone?”

  Chase bobbed his head back and forth as if considering her question, hesitant to give a definitive answer. “Well, I certainly don’t have a son or a brother. And he looks like he stepped out of an old picture of me.”

  Alice raised a hand and smacked him on the arm. “You had a clone made of you and you never told me?”

  “I didn’t have him made. I volunteered for a corporation’s science project and didn’t think twice about it afterward.”

  He wasn’t about to admit to Alice that the decision had haunted him for years after the procedure. He’d tried to console himself with the thought that he wasn’t responsible for what CellTech did with his DNA. If it hadn’t been him, after all, it would have been someone else.

  But still, the possibility that a manufactured twin of himself existed somewhere out there had kept him awake many nights when he was young. And oh, look at him. He’s the same age I was when I married Alice. What hopes and fears, regrets and aspirations lay inside that man’s mind, and how similar were they to Chase’s own?