by Daniel Quinn
“Well, here.” Chase raised his voice—an affectation left over from an earlier era when AIs needed such clarity to understand commands. “House, can you grab a sample of this guy’s DNA? Maybe from some of his dead skin cells in the dust around here?”
“Certainly,” the house responded immediately.
“And? Does it match my DNA?”
“Yes.”
“Completely?”
“The match is one hundred percent.”
Chase glanced at his wife with a look that said I told you so.
Alice eyed the unconscious clone skeptically. “I just can’t believe that someone with your DNA would do something like this.”
“I’m sorry? Say again?”
“Well, you’re a good person. He’s obviously not. I just thought someone’s clone would be more like them.”
That struck Chase as a strange thing for Alice to say. She worked in medicine, as a nurse—didn’t she know that a clone was no different than an identical twin, save the age difference? Two individuals with identical genomes could live very different lives depending on circumstances.
And that was the part of this ordeal that got under Chase’s skin the most. Alice was right: Someone with Chase’s DNA could join a cult, break into a home at night, vandalize it, and shoot its owner. That his clone was capable of such acts signified to Chase that Chase would be capable of those same acts—he supposed that if someone could go back in time and switch him and his clone at birth (twenty years removed), he would have lived the same life this clone had lived. And the clone would have lived his. And then it would be the clone here now, sitting on the spray-painted couch, looking down at a criminal Chase.
Chase had hated the intruder when he’d been anonymous. He’d been ready to kill him. But the man’s identity changed everything.
“Don’t worry,” Alice said when Chase didn’t respond. “For all we know, this ‘clone’ is one of the people who post those snuff videos the Sect makes. He’s disgusting and perverted. You could never be like him.”
“I don’t know. It seems a little like luck to me that I’m here and he’s there.”
“Nonsense. Don’t get weird on me now. You’re gonna be just fine.”
“What, you think it’s the pain talking?”
Alice shrugged.
“Hey, I’m lucid,” Chase said. “The pain really isn’t that bad.”
“Hmm.” Alice tilted her head to see the back of his ear. “Well, I think the bleeding’s mostly stopped, but it’s swelling pretty badly. The paramedics will be here soon. Hold this to your ear, one on each side.”
She handed him two wads of gauze and gathered the bloody remnants of her medical supplies. As she journeyed to the trashcan in the kitchen, Chase, still seated, continued to study the man in black on the living room floor. He was still breathing, but remained otherwise motionless. He’d been lying like that for a few minutes now. Was he in a coma? Chase found himself wishing he hadn’t hit him quite so hard, and hoping the EMTs would fix the clone up in addition to himself. But then even if they healed the clone, afterward he’d surely be convicted and spend years in prison…
“Hey,” Chase said on a whim, not sure exactly how he’d make his case to Alice. “You think we could… uh… drive him somewhere? If we can wake him up? Just restrain him, drive him a few blocks away? We wouldn’t have to tell the cops.”
“Drive him a few blocks away… and do what?” Alice asked from the kitchen, out of Chase’s eyesight.
“Uh… I guess… let him go,” Chase responded.
Silence. Then harsh, pounding footsteps. Alice appeared beneath the arch at the kitchen entrance.
“Are you goddamned serious right now?” she said.
“Look, the guy’s probably had a rough life. The company probably dumped him into foster care when they were done with him. I know you’re angry at him, and believe me, so am I. But he’s hurt, and I’ll definitely give him a piece of my mind before we let him go… but would it really be so bad for us to go easy on him?”
Alice placed her hands on her hips. “You actually want to let an attempted murderer—your attempted murderer—go free just because he’s your clone?”
“I just don’t think this is entirely his fault, is all.” Alice’s jaw dropped at that, putting Chase even more on the defensive. “Look, we send police into the Sect’s part of town, we raid it day after day, we shoot them for little more than jaywalking, we rip their families apart with lengthy prison sentences. Maybe it’d be the decent thing to do to just go easy on him this one time.”
“Have you ever been to East Garfield Park?” Alice replied, lifting her arms from her side to fold them in front of her chest, closing herself off from Chase. “Because I work just down the street from it and every day I see firsthand the filth those people live in. We try to help them but they jump right back in to their lifestyles. So any help we give him will be wasted because he doesn’t want to have anything to do with our way of life. You let this guy go free and he’ll just spit in your face and shoot you again. That’s what these people are like.”
“Look, honey, I’m not defending the Sect. I’m just defending my clone. Do you really think he’d still hate people like us if we didn’t go into his neighborhood and kill his friends and family?”
“Yes! They have an extreme ideology that hates our values. They hate everything we stand for and they think it’s their right to dominate the world.”
“I know,” Chase said. “I know they do. I know my clone probably does, too. But just think. What if we built up that area of town, gave it a functioning economy and solid infrastructure? Then my clone never would have done this. He’d have been too busy working at his job or playing his Xbox to care about any ‘extreme ideologies’. That’s what I mean when I say this isn’t entirely his fault. We could have stopped it.”
Alice actually laughed—the caustic, scornful laugh she only used on these rare occasions when anger overtook her. Chase didn’t blame her, though. The break-in had him flustered, too. “Have you ever even read the tenets of their crazy religion?” Alice asked. “You have to be tough on people like this or they’ll just do it again. They’ll never change.”
“What if being tough on him was what made him this way in the first place?” He gestured to his clone, still passed out, the can of spray paint lying in a pool of its own contents beside him.
“He pulled the trigger, Chase. He made that choice. No one was forcing him. When someone chooses to break into your house and attack you, you defend yourself, and you punish the guy who did it.”
Chase set down his gauze, rose from the couch, and paced toward his wife. “But that shouldn’t be the end of the discussion! We shouldn’t just assume his poor character is his own fault when we know nothing about his life. We need to talk about what caused him to do this instead of just complaining he’s an asshole then washing our hands.”
“He is an asshole! That’s what caused it!”
“Okay, so then what caused him to be an asshole?”
The question froze Alice’s face in place for a moment. He could practically see her mind dissecting it while she stared at him, her expression on pause.
Seeing the opportunity, he decided to press his point. “What caused him to be a bad person? It obviously wasn’t his genes.”
“Yeah, well, I’m beginning to wonder about that.” She breezed past him, treading back into the living room. Toward Chase’s clone. She’d better not touch him… Chase made a beeline after her.
“Okay, sure, maybe some of it comes from his genes,” he conceded, since he was in no rush to argue in favor of his own genetic superiority, “but we can’t fault him for bad genes.”
“We can fault him for bad choices.”
“Well, he makes his choices using the neurons in his brain. And those neurons were patterned in response to life events he had no control over. So we can’t fault him for that, either, can we?”
Alice stooped to grab the clone�
��s gun by the barrel. She turned it over, examining it.
“Aw, honey, come on. Now your fingerprints are all over that.”
Alice tilted the gun’s safety catch toward Chase, clicked it on, then off again, nodding to him as if to make sure he saw the action. As soon as he locked eyes with her, she broke the gaze. She raised the gun and aimed it at the clone.
Chase sighed. There was no chance she’d actually shoot the clone. And thus no need for this melodrama. “Alice, please.”
“You say your clone had no control over the events in his life? No control over the choices he made?”
“I… Well… No, he must not have. Otherwise he’d have turned out like me.”
“What about this choice that I’m about to make? I could shoot him, or I could not shoot him. It’s the same choice he made with you not ten minutes ago. Wouldn’t you say I have complete control over this choice? Just like he did?”
Chase mulled over his response for a few moments. He didn’t want to further aggravate an angry woman with a gun in her hand. But then, the mere fact that he was aggravating her revealed itself as the answer to her question. He might be pushing his luck, but Alice was just as smart as him, if not smarter. She could handle uncomfortable truths.
“I don’t think it’s that simple,” Chase said. “You’re only holding that gun because I’ve been arguing with you about this. We’re only arguing because the clone broke in. You’re only threatening to shoot him because of a lifetime of events that made you into the exact person who would do this exact thing under these exact circumstances. And whatever you choose to do next, you’ll be reacting to me, saying this now. You really don’t have much control over your choice at all. A whole bunch of random stuff is influencing you and you’re probably not even aware of most of it. Hell, maybe you drank coffee before bed and that’s what’s causing your reaction. I don’t know. And neither do you.”
“And you think it’s the same with him?” She waved the gun in the clone’s direction. “You don’t think he chose to shoot you of his own free will?”
“No! For him to make that choice, and to make it freely, he’d need to know about every single little thing influencing him, from what he was able to afford for breakfast to the exact makeup of his genome to me walking into CellTech all those years ago. He’d need to know about all that stuff, and he’d need to have control over all that stuff. And then—only then—he could choose freely.” At this response, as with the rest, relief struck Chase—relief that he’d been able to devise a response so quickly. In truth, he was making most of his argument up on the fly. In spite of the worry he’d always felt over his potential clone, he’d never considered the many implications of what it meant to choose differently from someone apparently identical to him.
Neither, obviously, had Alice. Chase was sure he’d stump her with his response, but she just shook her head. “I disagree,” she said matter-of-factly. “He chose to shoot you. He could have chosen otherwise, but he didn’t.”
“Could he have chosen otherwise? Really? At the moment when he pulled the trigger? With every neuron in his brain exactly the same? How would he have done that?”
“Chase! You’re being absurd. This isn’t a game. You were shot. You and I have spent decades building this life together through love, commitment, discipline, and very hard work. We chose that. And then this punk comes in and almost takes you away from me. And you have the audacity to say that we’re really no better than him? That the difference between us amounts to nothing more than a series of coincidences the universe threw at us?”
Her eyes were watering up. No tears had fallen yet, but guilt hitchhiked with Alice’s words as they pried their way past Chase’s defenses. You’re being absurd, she’d said. Now that she was almost crying, Chase did feel absurd. Would I be reacting this way if it had been my identical twin instead of a clone? Chase had always wanted siblings. Was he overreacting to that desire now? Even if so, I’ve been selfish to put Alice through this. I should never have brought it up. But at the same time, a part of him found Alice quite selfish, too. Would she really force him to choose between sating her need for retribution on one hand, and on the other, saving his genetic equal from a life behind bars?
Chase approached her, his feet padding more softly than when he’d tiptoed down the stairs with the dumbbell in his hand. As lightly as if he were touching a butterfly, he took her free hand in his own.
“Honey, you know I love you,” Chase said. “You know how proud I am of the life we’ve built. Of course it took hard work and dedication. We have such a strong work ethic because we had great parents who raised us with a strong work ethic. We had opportunities like college that my clone probably never had. We’ve never been hindered by our health because we could always see a doctor when we got sick. Your parents let us live with them while we started our careers. We never had to worry about finding food or water, or violence in our homes, or being attacked by the police. Of course you and I both put a lot of effort into earning what we have… But ultimately, when you account for all the factors outside of our control, do I deserve my life any more than my clone deserves his?”
Alice set the gun on a coffee table and wiped her eyes, seeming to shift her gaze in every direction but the direction of Chase’s eyes. “I’m sure his life was very hard,” she said. “But he could still have made different choices. He could have gone to college if he’d really wanted to. He was free to make that choice at any time.”
“It might not even have occurred to him that someone like him could go to college. Can we blame him for not doing something that never even crossed his mind? For not making a decision he didn’t even know he could make?”
Alice held her hands up to him, palms out in a gesture of enough is enough. She plodded past him toward the kitchen. “If it’s all out of my control, then why work for anything?” she said as Chase followed her. “Why shouldn’t I just lie on my couch all day and do nothing with my life?”
“Hey, honey, I’m not saying that our choices don’t matter, and don’t have consequences. They do. I’m just saying that our choices aren’t completely ours, so we can’t be held completely responsible for them. We can choose to do whatever we want in life, but we can’t choose what we’ll want. Does that make sense?”
“Not really.” Alice snagged a roll of paper towels and some cleaning fluid in passing and circled around the kitchen’s far side, back toward the living room. “And what about my brother Seth, huh? He was a drug addict, practically homeless, then he turned his life around with no support from my parents, went to trade school, and now he makes more money than I do. He was able to change in spite of his circumstances, and there are a lot of people who do the same exact thing. How do you explain them?” She knelt over the floor’s wooden panels, sprayed a shot of cleaner, and vigorously wiped up a line of green paint.
“I don’t know about Seth,” Chase answered honestly. “I mean, you can say he had a strong drive inside him that motivated him to change. But where did that drive come from, you know? Whose fault is that drive? Maybe my clone wants to change just as much as Seth did but just hasn’t taken that route yet.”
“I doubt it.”
“Okay, then why’d my clone fail where Seth succeeded?”
Alice spoke rapidly, with exasperation, speeding up their argument. “Because Seth wanted to change more. Your clone just didn’t want it badly enough.”
“Why not?”
“Because that’s the type of person he is.”
“Why’s that the type of person he is?”
“Because he chose to be that way.”
“Why’d he choose to be that way?”
“Because he’s evil!” She threw the wet paper towel at him. It flew past, plopping harmlessly onto the floor. Alice sat straight, hyperventilating, her legs tucked beneath her.
I’ve already pushed her this far… I might as well push through to the end, or this is all for nothing.
“Why is he evil?” Ch
ase asked.
Alice yelled in annoyance, clenching her fists. “He’s evil because he has a soul that’s different from yours. Yours is good, and his is evil. Okay?”
“And is it his fault he was given an evil soul?”
“He was given a good soul, and then he turned it evil.”
“Uh, well, if his soul is him by definition, then can you tell me what separate, non-soul part of him acted on his soul in order to turn it evil?”
“I don’t know. His spirit.”
“Then is it his fault that he was given a spirit that’s evil?”
“You’re just gonna keep this going forever, aren’t you?”
Chase ignored her jab. “Let me tell you what might have made him this way. One possible version of events. I think CellTech dumped him into foster care, and he didn’t have solid parental figures growing up. Maybe an adult abused him when he was young. He probably fell in with a tough group of kids. They didn’t prioritize school, and no one ever told him he should prioritize school, so he didn’t learn anything, and didn’t have the grades to get into college. Plus, he didn’t earn enough at his dead-end job to make ends meet… so he started selling drugs. He got caught, did some time, but no one would hire him when he got out.
“And then! Then someone told him about this new religion called the Sect. It offered him hope, it offered him a community, it told him he had a purpose and that his life mattered. It told him that if he sacrificed everything for it, protected its flock and attacked its enemies, he’d go to heaven one day. So when he comes in here, and he spray paints our living room and shoots me in the ear, he has a whole sad history that’s very easy for you and me to ignore.
“Now I could be wrong. But I could also be pretty close to correct. And if we don’t know either way, can we really just call my clone ‘evil’ and conclusively blame his actions on a series of bad choices?”
“Can we really just blame his actions on a series of random events?” Alice said, wiping some green paint off of her hand.
