CLONES: The Anthology

by Daniel Quinn

  “We have two dead crew!” Charlie nearly came out of his chair.

  “We’re looking for answers about the origins of mankind,” Alpha stressed. “Our common ancestor, the so-called missing link. This isn’t it.”

  “The Creator,” Echo began, but Alpha cut her off immediately.

  “Victor is not the Creator. Victor is an aberration writ large.”

  “Wait. Just wait.” Charlie shoved away from the table and stood. “All of the experiments have used human genetics as a baseline. We’ve been steadily regressing backwards in each subsequent experiment, filling the gaps with a variety of Homo genetics predating modern man. We should be getting closer to a less complex, less evolved ancestor.”

  “Victor certainly looks less evolved,” Echo said.

  Charlie paced the length of the table, his hands gesticulating rapidly with his words. “Yet if we’re saying he’s the cause of Delta’s erratic behavior, that implies a certain degree of complexity that would not exist in a lower-level ancestor.”

  “Even that’s not entirely accurate.” Echo’s eyes rolled. “And you know it! The evolution of communication is remarkably complex. There have been plenty of studies regarding telepathic communication in animals, communication through pheromones and non-vocal signals, the way they somehow innately know when disaster is about to strike, like an earthquake, and prepare to flee. They possess a certain something that we don’t, or perhaps no longer possess. We merely evolved to possess vocal communication, rather than telepathy. We cannot rule out its absence in these so-called ‘lower-level’ beings.”

  Alpha cleared his throat, interrupting them. “We’ve been working our way back through generations of genetic drift. Yes, we are looking for a common ancestor. And I think we have found it, actually. We’ve just not found the right one.”

  “Explain,” Charlie said.

  Alpha shrugged. “We’re looking for a direct ancestor to man. I think what we’ve found is much, much larger than that.”

  Charlie stopped his pacing. “You think Victor is an ancestor to—”

  “—to all life,” Alpha finished. “Yes. And I think this aberration goes back much further than just life on Earth.”

  Echo stared at him, open-mouthed.

  “Jesus, you’re even crazier than she is.”

  Alpha had pondered the question of Victor on his own for quite some time. Each of them had, and it had allowed them to think freely and arrive at their own individual assessments. Although they oftentimes reached the same conclusions, occasionally one of them managed to surprise the others with an out of the box scenario. Alpha realized now that his was the most out of the box bit of speculation at the table.

  He sipped at his coffee, taking the time to savor it while he thought of the best way to approach his explanation.

  “Our universe is but a single strand in the multiverse. We know of eleven dimensions in the multiverse, and it’s extremely likely that there are many more in any one of those possible universes within the multiverse. Within all of those various dimensions, within all of those various strings and strands of the multiverse, imagine the enormous—the seismic, really—potential for life. We’re so keen on how life began on our planet, whether or not there’s other life in our universe, but just stop and consider. Consider life beyond either of those things and think about life outside of our own realities, just for a moment.”

  Echo paled. Charlie looked flabbergasted and sank slowly back into his chair. He crossed his arms over the tabletop and stared hard at Alpha, but said nothing. What Alpha was describing was Papa’s supreme hope—a discovery of not just Elohim, humanity’s cosmic father, but perhaps even of Elohim’s creator.

  “More than thirteen billion years ago there was an explosion, which led to a singularity. The question has always been, what caused this explosion. Of course, we have no answer, no way of knowing, really, but we do have plenty of what ifs. What if this singularity originated elsewhere in the multiverse and caused a breach, or a quantum explosion, an entanglement of some sort, and whatever life existed at that point of origin was turned into the same stardust each of us are made of?

  “Victor is not a human ancestor. Victor is the ancestor, his genetic construct blown apart and seeded across our dimension and reborn in the primordial ooze that gave rise to life itself. And we’ve corrupted it, perhaps not knowingly but certainly willingly, giving it shape and form. We’ve taken something far more alien than us and twisted it to our own designs. Whatever Victor was originally, it wasn’t like us. We’ve stripped away generations of the human genome, seeking an ancestral baseline based off our own junk DNA, junk DNA that Victor, in whatever small way, was a part of, DNA that helped guide the way we evolved.

  “And now we’ve tried to recreate it, and we have made a considerably sizable mistake. Victor is not a pure ancestor. He’s not a pure anything. Not anymore. Right now, he’s a mistake, and we have to destroy him.”

  Quiet descended following his words. His throat surprisingly dry, he took another long pull of coffee.

  “The amount of progress this signifies, though,” Echo said. “The years of research we could build off of this. You say he’s not pure, but what if this is only a start. We could make him pure over time with enough synthesis and enough finesse.”

  “There’s a factor you’re not considering, Echo,” Charlie said. Alpha could see in the man’s eyes where he was going before the words were spoken.

  “If Alpha is correct and Victor is an extra-dimensional being, things can only get worse from here if we persist. We can only visualize three dimensions. We have no idea how many dimensions Victor inhabited, then or now, and what limitations we would be placing on him if we forced him to exist in our three-dimensional world. Imagine all of the things he could see or do that we couldn’t. Delta and Bravo already got a taste of that in the lab. Whatever it is that might be created from this failed gambit is not worth pursuing. Not if we value our own sanity, and, more importantly, our own fucking lives.”

  “This meeting is over,” Alpha said. He turned toward Charlie and nodded. “Purge Victor.”

  III

  Echo’s forehead was pressed against the glass, as was her hand, which laid atop Victor’s, his webbed fingers splayed in perfect alignment to her own. Both had their eyes closed, and Alpha felt a perverse pang of jealousy at the sight, as if he’d caught them in post-coital basking.

  “Does it hurt you?” he asked, indicating his head. This close to Victor, his head was dully throbbing and he wondered what Echo must be feeling.

  “It’s a strange sensation,” she said after a long moment. “But not painful. It’s more… cottony.”

  She opened her eyes and slowly pulled away from the synthesis chamber. Each movement was subtly marred with the hesitancy of regret.

  “What was he to you?” Alpha asked. He was troubled by Echo’s display, and the way she was acting was entirely inappropriate. He was glad that Charlie had stepped out to get fresh coffee after initiating the purge and could not see this display. Victor was a test subject, nothing more. So why was she acting like this was a personal loss?

  More to the point, what had she been hiding?

  What don’t I know here? Alpha wondered.

  “He was a part of me,” Echo said. “All of us are each a part of the other. Do you not feel a kinship to him?”

  “No,” Alpha lied. Echo merely rolled her eyes, reading him clearly.

  The truth of the matter was, even after all that had happened over the intervening hours, he still felt a sincere, and strange, sense of familiarity with Victor.

  There was no other option, though. The incident with Delta and Bravo illustrated that quite clearly.

  Victor’s eyes sprang open, his mouth flaring painfully wide. The nanites circulating through the amniotic protein bath, responsible for genetic assembly and growth acceleration, were now operating in reverse. Rather than constructing their cloned subject, the nanites were now in an aggressive pat
tern of destruction.

  Victor’s thick hand slammed against the glass, abnormally large. Far larger than it should be for the fifth month growth plan. Bubbles erupted from his contorted mouth, and the hand came down hard against the glass.

  THUD.

  THUD.

  THUD!

  Victor’s legs rapidly twisted in the fluid, creating tiny vortexes as his body turned, his heel smacking against the glass. Small patches of flesh came away in thin, splotchy layers, the cells circulating through the disruption his writhing motions made in the bath. Alpha was again reminded of fish food flakes, an impossible image to shake.

  The aberration’s face smashed into the chamber, his nose pressed flat against the glass as another scream erupted, fingers curling long talons against the glass.

  Did he—?

  Alpha looked closer, and… yes. Victor’s nails, his claws, had dug a shallow trench into the glass.

  THUD!

  THUD!

  THUD!

  Closer this time. On this side of the glass!

  Echo was slamming open palms against the chamber glass, her actions exciting Victor further, stirring his commotion into a frenzy. Limbs flailing violently, smacking into the glass at four different points, legs and hands working forcefully to free himself from the attacking nanites.

  “Echo! Get away from there!”

  Alpha spun, wrapping his arms around her waist from behind and tearing her away from the synthesis chamber.

  “What the hell are you doing?” he screamed.

  She twisted in his grip, the sudden force surprising him, and she tore free from his arms. She turned, cat-quick, her nails raking across his face, pain lancing through his face as curls of skin peeled away from his cheeks.

  He stepped back, reflexively, raising a hand to ward off another assault. A painful burn radiated across the side of his face, and a pulsing tremor tore through his skull.

  Echo kicked, her foot landing squarely in Alpha’s crotch. He grunted and went down on his knees, hard, a projectile of gut-warm coffee bursting from his mouth to splatter against the floor.

  Cold steel pierced the center of his brain, superseding all other pains afflicting his body. He cupped his head in both hands, elbows digging into the floor, and screamed.

  From a nearby terminal, Echo grabbed the seatback of a chair and turned on one foot, slamming the chair into the glass chamber.

  A crack appeared, a small fractured circle radiating through the thick shell.

  She swung again, harder. Then again. And again.

  Again.

  Glass exploded, pointed shards stabbing into Echo’s frame as a thick, warm bath of liquid splashed across her. Sirens erupted, warning lights flashing… too late.

  “No,” Alpha groaned. His vision was reduced to two small slits, the brightness of the lab facility far too bright. The light pierced his brain, stitching a web of pain across the entire surface of his skull with the staccato of a tattoo gun. Through the thin slits of his eyelids, he saw Echo stumble back, watched a thick, piebald foot stomp heavily onto the floor.

  Echo was crying, but he couldn’t discern if it was in pain or fear or joy.

  Alpha rolled onto his back, grunting his way into a sitting position. He cradled his head in both hands, eyes pinched shut, a tacky fluid leaking from the corner of both eyes. He felt a sticky wetness leaking from his ears to pool against his palms. His heels scrambled for purchase, finally able to kick himself back, scooting on his ass away from the monstrosity before them.

  He couldn’t be seeing right. He knew that. What he was seeing was impossible.

  Victor’s flesh was bubbling outward, expanding, shimmering with an upset watery appearance before hardening into solid, wine-stain colored flesh.

  He’s growing.

  Alpha forced one eye to part, at least as much as the aching light allowed, and demanded of himself that he bear witness.

  Victor was no longer a baby. No longer even a child. Victor was immense, and growing larger.

  The nanites should have disrupted this, but—

  Oh, Echo. What did you do?

  He realized then that she must have reversed the purge. Rather than disrupt the synthesis and promote a breakdown of the genetic material, she had found a way to hack the purge protocols Charlie had enacted. Alpha hadn’t seen her leave her own station, which meant she’d carried out a deliberate assault against the program from her own terminal. Rather than eliminate Victor, she had accelerated the growth program.

  Whatever human similarities Victor may have possessed during the fetal stages of growth were absent in his adulthood. The alien DNA was supremely abundant now, those characteristics fully apparent in their total domination over the genetic code.

  Even through the patchwork hide of its body, Victor’s muscles stood tautly, cording his arms and legs, chest, and neck like steel rebar. Tall and hairless, easily more than six feet, his wrists and ankles thick, his limbs as dense as tree trunks. His face was expressionless, a smooth plane of thick gray tissue over an immense skull ringed with pointed protuberances and large bony shelves over its eyes.

  Victor lumbered toward Echo, though she stood her ground, her mouth open in surprise. A piercing scream erupted from deep in her throat. Alpha wiped tears away from his eyes in time to see blood drip from her ears. She cupped her head, mirroring Alpha, and fell to her knees.

  Victor reached toward her, his face still impassive even as his fingers wrapped around her skull and gripped tightly. The thick skin of his hand muted the rustling tissue paper noise, but Alpha could still hear it and then he realized with gross fascination that the sound was the tectonic shift of the bone plates of her skull cracking loose and crumpling in Victor’s grip. Then the monster raised the deflated skull and jerked his hand. The noise of her neck snapping was sharp even over the emergency sirens.

  “No,” Alpha moaned, honestly unsure if he was protesting her death or the looming eventuality of his own.

  A dark cloud enshrouded his mind, the ache in his brain growing impossibly tight. He felt as if his brain were swelling, boiling and bulging against its bony case and threatening to break through. If his skull were to crack open, though, relief would surely follow.

  He reached toward the shards of glass, his palm slicing open in the debris as he sought out the perfect sliver.

  “No,” he said again, this time in protest. He was not in control of his own arm, his movements not his own but Victor’s. The beast was in his head, manipulating him.

  As he reached for the glass, he felt his brain peel open and the horrors that only Victor was privy to flooded in. What Alpha saw was beyond comprehension, and he felt the fundamental foundations of his reality crack and erupt, breaking beneath new knowledge that had no words and could only be expressed through his loud, agonizing screams, screams that turned his throat raw and left a coppery taste in his mouth. His eyes widened, the light brutalizing him, his face contorting into widespread agony.

  The glass nearly slipped loose of his grip, his hand slickened with blood. He forced his fingers tighter around the shard, the blade slicing through tendons as he embedded the glass into his hand, demanding his grip to tighten further even as nerves fired and died, leaving his fingers frozen and useless. He raised his hand, the glass an arm length’s away, and focused on the glittering point that he would soon impale himself upon.

  Not like this. Please, not like this.

  Not like—and in the span of eternity between thought and words, Alpha witnessed stars collapse, eaten alive by black unending mouths, supernovas climaxing and devouring solar systems whole, suns cradled in the cups of enormous hands, the bodies of beings so large he could not process them, could not meet their eyes lest his skull implode upon the sight of them, civilizations rising and falling in milliseconds, all of it broadcast into his brain in a complex system of visions, fractured and divided and spread across a complex web of information shaped like a spider’s eye and shoved through a prism, more than his
meager mind could handle, and his sanity burst like shattering glass into a hundred thousand pointed shards, and he screamed, coughing loose flecks of blood that danced across his forearm like rain—Delta and Bravo.

  A booming noise rang out behind him, deafening him. His eardrums burst, and the second explosion was a muffled whompf! Victor staggered back, a hole blossoming in the center of his torso, and then a second, higher up and to the right.

  The fog in Alpha’s mind cleared, the darkness parting. He tried to release the glass, but it was buried too deep in his skin, his fingers refusing to budge. He had to pinch the point of the shard tightly between the fingers of his opposite hand and pull it free, screaming all the while in agony as he found fresh nerves to ruin.

  And then the darkness returned, and his body collapsed to the floor.

  ~*~

  A shrill droning in his ears returned Alpha to consciousness. The emergency alerts, he realized, but they were quiet, too quiet, as if he were listening to them from deep below the water.

  Charlie’s lips were moving, but he couldn’t make out the sound of the words. Those lips were a strange pale blue color, and Charlie’s flesh was a stark, unnatural gray.

  Alpha was wrapping his hand in medical gauze to halt the bleeding, and the skin itched from the surgical glue that had been used to seal the lacerations.

  His ears were plugged, he realized, in addition to the deafness from ruptured eardrums. He could feel the thick bullets of blood lodged in both ear canals. In between those was a horrible, rending pulsation as his brain beat against its skull cage, pounding fiercely. His nose ran, leaking a curdled, gray substance over his lips, down his chin.

  His brain was fighting to be free of the awful visions trapped in its folds. He wanted to shut his eyes against them, but that only gave those sights a fresh reality. Unbidden, the impossibilities returned to him and he stared again upon a drowned city and the massive figure sleeping over the flooded remains. That enormous, hulking piebald beast, its skull overlarge and barren, bony ripples distorting the slick flesh coating its skeleton. Red, massive supernovas for eyes, their brightness burning through the seams of closed lids, unable to contain the burning heat trapped beneath. And its mouth, a wicked bony cage set atop writhing tentacles that grew from its jaw and chin. This beast, this monster—a devourer of entire cities, a world killer whose belly was filled with the remains of entire planets it had gorged upon.