By: Nathan Doshier
[2003-07-24]
First Time for Everything
(part 2)
Ok, before you start thinking that I'm some psycho who lures strangers to his blood-soaked house so he can kill them and bury them in his backyard, I should explain. I'm not a bad guy. Before killing Robby for the first time, I had never even been in a fight. I'm not even sure now why I did it. And I'm not saying that you should go out and kill people willy-nilly. Murder is wrong, you know.
But see, it's not like Robby was a real person. He was a clone. A doctor had put him together from blood taken out of my arm. Four weeks later, there was a knock on the door. I opened it, and it was like looking into a mirror.
He was perfect. We even had the same name. We became good friends, and we did stuff for each other. He drove me places, and he cooked my food. He went to work for me when I didn't feel like going. He had all of my memories, so I could talk to him about things that had happened to me at work, or about relationships that had gone bad. Again: we were friends.
Six months after he came, I killed him for the first time by sticking a steak knife through his neck. No big deal.
I owned him. He was my property. Are the police going to come and take me away for destroying my toaster? Give me a break.
So what if I liked it? So what if it made me feel alive? I wasn't hurting anybody.
I wasn't the first person to own a clone of themselves. Lots of people were doing it. It only cost five thousand dollars. Most of the people were busy businessmen who were thrilled to have another them to spend time with the kids while they earned the big bucks at the office. One of the commercials had that very situation. The male 30-65 demographic ate it up.
Among the people buying clones of themselves were harried housewives with too many chores, adulterers, and lonely old people who needed another friend to keep them company. In the six years since cloning humans had been approved for consumer use, over one million had been sold.
Of course, the government had cloned over twice that for the military, but since they had perfected the technology, we let them get away with it.
So no, I wasn't the first person to own a clone. I was, however, the first consumer to discover that clones disappeared when they died. Their bodies, which were made out of a trademarked material called Fake Flesh, started to degrade after death, and were all gone within ten minutes. Again, we had the government to thank. I guess they got sick of picking up corpses on battlefields.
I would guess that there will be more stories like this as nanobiology and cloning progress. Having a clone for spare parts or using clones for organ farms isn't too far fetched. Some of the people who want to live forever are figuring out how to transfer the bioelectical field from one brain to a clone brain. In local news, the World's Biggest Flower is blooming; it stinks because it attracts food by smelling like decaying flesh, it is a carnivore. Yesterday I found out that I have gall stones, it was sort of fun watching all of my internal parts on TeeVee, it made me feel like a biomechanoid.
Why would you want to live forever? I'd get terribly bored.
I'm not bored, I have a feeling that their isn't enough time. It's like if you went to a smorgasbord and only got to try a couple of things. I want to see what the new toys will be next Christmas. I want to know what the 2573 Chateau Lafite will taste like. So, far I've only sailed three of the seven seas. I have never skated on frozen ammonia. I haven't read all of the books nor listened to all of the music yet. I don't feel bored, more overwhelmed with too much to do and too little time.
There's always new stuff, so it would become a quest finding the rest of the items on the list and finding the new items. I'm not only immortal, I'm immoral.
i suppose if they wanted to know which clones had died/decintigrated, they could wait have them wear little metal dogtags with their serial number on them. then they could just drag a magnet around the battlefield to pick them up
Also, they gots grain of rice sized medical data implants that now have Global Positioning System. One future speculative fiction story that I read had a long, long war and the soldiers had a union. The soldier's union had a rule that they could only get killed and rebuilt and brought back to life three times, but the war wasn't going too well, so they kept on just getting killed and rebuilt and sent back to the war. If you're going to live forever, there's better things to do.
Trick or Treat was discovered in Piscataway, New Jersey in 1911 by Clyde J. Rumbaugh.
I suppose that if a person could live forever without having to be a vampire, things wouldn't be so bad.
My real question is: Once human cloning from DNA has started, I would hate to know who's got a piece of my hair or a fingernail clipping of mine. Wouldn't it just blow your mind to be walking down the street one day and pass yourself walking alongside a psycho ex lover - or for that matter, your creepy old high school science teacher??
Ok, that might have been 2 steps too far, but hey - give a girl a break on a Friday.
Some of the virii cause protein folding, which is generally not a good thing. Creuzfeld-Jacob or Mad Cow is big for protein folding. I think that if proteins get folded, due to site blockage of some of the RNA sequence, they no longer replicate properly. There is some problem with this in cloning. Also, there was some note of the 90% or so who survive the respiratory virus, SARS, aren't off scot free but also have some protein folding due to the virus' effect on certain RNA strand sites. Yes, what is to stop blood clinics, for instance, from gathering DNA and RNA? I don't know what happened to the talk of patenting DNA and RNA, but it seems that it would be impossible. If a DNA sequence is known, it can be duplicated, even without cloning.
Well, you do have to realize that cloning is very hit and miss. When a human is cloned it is the result of chance on top of some very expensive equipment.
I think that ordinarily our DNA is diploidal, and it can be coaxed into being haploid. Our DNA doesn't like being haploidal, with only half the stuff, so it wants to pick up the full compliment. There is a weird process called parthenogenesis whereby a woman can become spontaneously pregnant, sort of cloning one of her own eggs. These occurances are almost invariably female, unless by some rare chance it is an XXY female, in which case there could be a "virgin birth" of a male offsprout.
no cries of "blasphemy?"
I am reading a book called Joshua Son of None (the title dosen't have any punctuation, and it bothers me). A docter was in ER 1 when JFK was brought in, so you can use your deductive reasoning to figure out what happens.
I'm writing a speculative fiction story about immortality! Well, I was in ninth grade. I never finished, so I guess I'm still writing it.
Everyone should learn Esperanto with me! www.esperanto.net www.esperanto.ca/kurso
Would you put a comma or a colan after Joshua? There was talk at one time of having everyone learn Esperanto so there would be a universal language. Esperanto seems sort of like Portuges.
minorities, wimpy men, swiss cheese, monterey jack cheese in omeletes, front wheel drive cars, asian cars, roast beef, my car, cats, most of my pubic hair, men's nipples, chicken broth, hangovers, not having enough money for anti-hangover pills, vodka, sweet lemonade, my computer, shopping for clothes, flying coach, english teachers who teach in america, cheap wine, cigarette smoke, uppity women, small children, my mom's cooking, Draegar's potstickers that cost $1.50 each, chocolate-garlic ice cream, being clumsy with sloppy food, allergies, stinging insects, fat people who dress skimpily, my awful sense of direction, hippies, my mathematical inadequacies, and lots more stuff.
We all haven't heard a good rant for a while. Feels good to let go. I hate people who say they're your friends until you need them for some emotional support. I hate girls that want to be my friend instead of my girlfriend. I hate handicapped people who feel you owe them something because you have two working legs. I hate this crazy beachwalker woman who walks by my apartment sometimes with a vacant stare and a skillet in her hand.
So, which part of your pubic hair is OK?
If it weren't for cheap wine, cigarette smoke, and uppity women, I wouldn't have much to do.
If you wanted to really let go, you'd nip out and buy a bottle of Tequila, an inflatable woman, and a selection of astoundingly powerful medical laxatives.
Clones don't last very long at the moment so your creepy ex-boyfriend will be a necrophilliac before long.
I hate you, Chris, and I don't even know you!
I'm going to buy stock in Mitsubishi,then hang out with all my friends of darker skin tone while we talk about free love.
My creepy ex boyfriend probably IS a necrophiliac already. If he's not - he should be. People like him shouldn't procreate. Clean out the gene pool - that sort of thing. He had pubic hair that I hated too. Gods, I hope that doesn't put me into a class with the jackhole a few posts up.
