Clone Crisis: Book 1 in the Clone Crisis Trilogy Read online

  Clone Crisis

  Melissa Faye

  © 2018 Melissa Faye

  All rights reserved. No parts of this book may be reproduced or used in any manner without written permission of the copyright owner except for the use of quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter One

  There were two pictures on my desk at work: one of myself and my best friend Etta, and one of myself at my middle class graduation with my mentor Alexis. That was the last day I ever saw Alexis.

  All through middle school, I met with Alexis weekly to get help with my homework and talk about my personal life. All my classmates had a mentor, but I suspected none of them were quite like Alexis. She talked to me about my relationships, my classes, my teachers, and my career interests. We sometimes met extra times to watch a movie or play a game in her dorm room, then her apartment in the Gold commune. She was tall and beautiful, with a slim figure and long auburn hair, and I wanted to be just like her.

  But what made Alexis most unique was how she talked about our community, Young Woods. Everyone else I knew loved living there. We all grew up together in the dorms, and the community took care of the kids until they graduated high class and began their internships. There was always someone around to talk to. Alexis thought the whole set up was suspicious. She often talked to me about how strange it was to live like this. And how no one ever questioned it.

  “It’s all set up to maximize comfort and keep us from thinking too much,” she said to me one afternoon a few weeks before my graduation. “It’s as comfortable as it can be. The trees, the beautiful buildings, everything about being part of a small community where every face is familiar. But our choices are minimized.”

  We were working at a table in the common room of my dorm. I had a math test coming up, but I would much rather talk with Alexis about this than study. She had a perspective that I never heard anywhere else.

  “What do you mean? What choices?” I was playing with my hair self-consciously. I had big, dark curly hair that flew in all directions. I tried to straighten it some mornings, but it only lasted a few hours. My classmates teased me about it.

  “All of our choices,” said Alexis. She lowered her voice. A dark shadow passed over her face as her tone became more serious. Her eyes darted around the room to see who else could be listening. “Everything you do, Yami. Almost everything. Where you live. Who you know. Your entire career track!”

  “I get to try for a certain job,” I said. I was looking forward to getting my career assignment, and had talked with my best friend Etta about it just that week. We wanted to work in the cloning lab, or maybe fertility. Those were two of the most sought after positions. Of course, we would take a career test in our first week of high school that would identify what we would be best at. Everyone was always saying: you do what’s best for the community.

  “Hardly,” said Alexis. She was tapping her pen on the desk as she spoke. “Do you think Bronzes tried for the jobs they end up in?”

  “That doesn’t make any sense!” I was irritated now; Alexis always got me riled up. At least it was more fun than talking about boys or doing math homework. “You love working in fertility.”

  Alexis leaned back in her chair and raked her fingers through her hair. She squinted her eyes and looked past me to the common room windows. “I do, I suppose. That’s what my career test said I would like. And then I spent four years in high school taking all the classes to support this exact job. Did I have a choice, or was it made for me?”

  I needed to think on this. I wanted to work in cloning, but if my test said I would do better work elsewhere, I knew I would become more interested in that career path.

  “You were assigned to this community,” Alexis continued, picking up steam. “You are here. Your clones are elsewhere. Maybe there’s one who’s forty, living in Sweden. Maybe you have one who’s seventy-five, living her last few years in Bali. None of them decided where to live. None of them chose to be separate from you.”

  “That’s because we have to be separate to encourage us to make new discoveries as a society! New people means different combinations of peoples doing different work in different places. It means a better chance at finally solving the fertility crisis! What’s best for the community is best for me, right?” I blushed as soon as I said it. It was the town motto, repeated over and over again in school, in our TekCasts, and on our buildings. The way Alexis made it seem, this wasn’t free thinking; it was brainwashing. I squirmed in my seat.

  Alexis looked me over. She was tough around the edges, and snapped at my friends or other younger students. She was much more kind with me, though. We had dozens of inside jokes from three years of working together. She took me to the fertility lab where she worked and showed me around. I knew as much about her and her work as she did about me and my life.

  “See? It feels great being here. We hear the same things over and over. Solve the fertility crisis. Cloning is the solution. Everyone works towards the solution. Everything is built to support us reaching that solution. The community does what’s best.” Alexis was tapping more quickly now. “I’m at that F-Lab every day, Yami, and I don’t see us getting closer to solving the crisis. I see a lot of people who are mindlessly enjoying the pleasures of Young Woods.”

  “Why is that a bad thing?”

  Alexis looked down at the table where our TekCasts lay. Mine was open on a page of practice problems. It was plain white. Hers was open to a paper published by one of her colleagues. It featured a Gold band that wrapped around the outside, indicated her Gold career assignment.

  “Not everyone likes things the way they are,” Alexis said. “I know you probably don’t know anything about it, but there are people who think this comfort isn’t worth it. They want to know more about how we’re doing as a nation to solve the crisis. They want an end to the unjust color system that prevents certain people from contributing to the important work we do. They want to open people’s eyes.”

  Alexis must have noticed my concern, because she gently redirected us back to my work. Still, I couldn’t stop thinking about what she said. Who were these people? Did I know anyone who felt this way besides Alexis? I wondered how she had found them and what they were
going to do, if anything. I couldn’t sleep that night; I was worried Alexis would get in trouble.

  “Heads up!” My coworker Charlie was standing over my desk while I stared at the picture of Alexis and me at my graduation. I placed it back down next to the picture of Etta and me, and tried to push back the memory. I looked at Charlie, who had his signature grin on his face, a half-eaten protein bar in one hand and his TekCast in the other. Like mine, his had a Gold band now. We didn’t usually get a lot of time for lunch breaks as medical interns, so we ate when we could. Sometimes that meant eating on the run. Charlie held up his TekCast so I could read his holoscreen.

  “Soo Yen is waiting for us upstairs,” he said. I rolled my eyes. Soo Yen was always waiting for someone to do something or get somewhere faster. “She’s letting us sit in on a patient admission.”

  I stuffed a pear into my lab coat pocket, grabbed my TekCast, and followed Charlie down the hall. The medical building was, like most buildings at Young Woods, pristine. We called it the Med. Here, I was surrounded by white walls, glass and white leather furniture and accessories, and all the latest technology we would need to do our jobs well. Most diseases had been eradicated after years of improving quality of life. Usually we just saw elderly people with those symptoms of old age that we couldn’t fix. Cells had a point where they aged out and died. That was another problem we couldn’t solve. That, and little kids breaking their arms tripping down a flight of stairs.

  I looked over my TekCast while we walked up the stairs. It contained information about all the patients in the building that day, and I swiped through to find Soo Yen’s. Her patient was an elderly man, 89, presenting with fatigue, loss of balance, and memory loss. We could only put off dementia for so long before it struck most people. He was Bronze, and had worked in agriculture until only a few years earlier. Because their work was so labor intensive, Bronzes had a lower life expectancy; 89 was higher than average. It was one of those facts everyone knew but didn’t talk about.

  The pink glow of the holoscreen reflected onto my face, and Charlie read it over my shoulder. “89? How was he working in Ag so recently? Let’s see what Soo Yen wants us to do.”

  If Soo Yen had a plan for us, she didn’t feel the need to tell us. She stood outside the patient’s room and scrolled through her TekCast. As we approached, she didn’t acknowledge our presence, but rather led us inside the room without turning our way.

  As interns, Charlie and I didn’t get to see patients often. All the interns vied for these types of opportunities. Working with Soo Yen was informative, since she was so competent. But seeing her with patients was less helpful, since she could be blunt to the point of rudeness. I could learn all I could from her about diagnosing and treating patients, but nothing about bedside manner. It didn’t matter much for Charlie, who was genial with everyone, patient or otherwise. I needed to work on my attitude. I didn’t like too many people and was bad at hiding it.

  “I heard she was like that all through high school and her internship,” Charlie said after we finished seeing the patient and walked down to the lab. We would review the patient’s test samples by hand. While the Med machines could analyze samples, this task helped us better understand how analysis worked and ensured we had practice with the diagnoses a machine couldn’t handle. After this, we would each write a report and send it to Soo Yen by the end of the day.

  I didn’t respond to Charlie. I gathered the petri dishes that had arrived in the lab before us and pulled gloves out of a dispenser on the wall.

  “Yup, she’s quiet alright,” Charlie said. He winked at me. “But you know what that’s like, right?”

  “I’m not always quiet,” I said. “But I don’t need to be talking all the time.” I used a syringe to transfer a sample to a glass slot in one of the microscope machines. After the slot slid back in, we could zoom in and out on the microscreen as needed. It listed different percentages of chemicals found in the man’s blood. There were classic signs of cell death approaching, and clear evidence of the way the man’s body was affected by sixty years out in the fields. I typed my notes onto my TekCast, then scrolled through the programs to pull up a text I wanted to reference in my report.

  Charlie bounced around next to me. “Oh, of course,” he said. “You don’t need to talk all the time. Or anytime, right?” I didn’t need to look at him to know that he was gleeful to the point of laughter. “No talking. None at all for Yami.”

  I smirked. I wasn’t interested in being friends with Charlie, or most other people we worked with, but I sometimes liked his sense of humor. Still, I quickly rearranged my face. No need to let Charlie know I enjoyed his teasing.

  Charlie stared at me off and on while taking his own notes, sometimes pausing to ask me questions or compare thoughts. We could be competitive, but it was more like a game. Both of us would be doctors in another year. It was predetermined by our assignments. I was actually glad to have Charlie there to ask me questions. I didn’t like starting conversations, and the points he brought up were helpful for my own report.

  “Ok, so how about this,” Charlie said after we sent in our diagnosis reports. “You don’t like anyone, right?” I didn’t answer. “Ok, you like me and you have a few friends. Of course you like me, I’m great.” I pursed my lips, holding back my smile. “A bunch of us are going out to get dinner later. It’s Friday. No work tomorrow. No need to go home right away. And you broke up with your boyfriend a while ago, right? Ben?”

  “Yes I did.” Charlie knew more about me than any of the other interns. I never complained about Ben, but Charlie used to tease me that the way I talked about him, it was clear I despised him from the start. He practically applauded when he found out I had ended it.

  “Ok, so you’re free,” Charlie said with his own smirk. “Excellent! We’re meeting at The Door tonight. You know, the spot next to the Gold commune? You have been outside the commune for something besides work, right?”

  “I’m busy,” I said. Busy not meeting a bunch of other medical interns who were hopelessly optimistic about their lives. I reminded myself to play nice. I hadn’t always been an introvert, but lately I was avoiding people so often that I was turning into a hermit.

  “Ok, ok, fair enough,” Charlie said, raising his hands in the air in defeat. “One of these days, though...”

  I had to go back to my desk to plug in my TekCast. There was a port on each of our desks to locate the private medical data we had collected that day and remove it from our TekCasts. It ensured patient data didn’t leave the building. When I returned on Monday, I would plug in the TekCast and get all the information back. Charlie was a technological whiz. He said he was working on a way to get around the data scrubbing process. “Not that I need anyone’s personal information,” he assured me. “Just, you know, as a little puzzle for me to solve.”

  While the port ran its program to remove data from my TekCast, I looked at the picture of Alexis again. The day it was taken, we met for brunch before my middle class graduation. She was dressed nicely, like everyone was expected to be at these community events, but her hair was a mess and she wore sneakers instead of more appropriate shoes. Her face was pale, and there were deep bags under her eyes.

  When I went to grab our favorite, French toast, from the vending cylinders on the back wall, I heard buzzing around the room. A message was coming through all the TekCasts – no, not all of them, I thought. Only ones that had a colored band around the edge. High classers, interns, and adults. It wasn’t a common sight, but if no one was telling me anything, I figured I didn’t have to worry. I was more concerned with my hair. Was it going to stay straight long enough to last through the ceremony?

  “What’s going on?” I asked Alexis as I slid her tray across the table. She picked up her fork but barely picked at the toast. She was blinking a lot and looking around nervously.

  “Yami, I need you to know something,” she said. Her tone made my heart race.

  “What?”

  “I
found out something, and I’m telling some of my...friends...but I need someone else to know.” She picked up a fork and ate a few bites while I waited for her to continue. “I told you I have friends. They agree with me about all of this. About the community, and how something is wrong here.” I felt a prickling in my stomach, like something very bad was about to happen.

  “There’s a group. They get together and talk about what they know. We’re trying to find...I don’t know. A solution.”

  “A solution? Like a solution to the fertility crisis?”

  “No. A solution to...the stuff you and I have talked about. How everything is decided for us. How unfair the career assignments are. But last night, I found something out that I’m not supposed to know.” The prickling in my stomach grew worse. “Yami, the F-Lab. It’s not doing anything.”

  “Not doing anything? What? You stopped working?”

  “No, it’s not doing anything. I mean, it hasn’t been doing anything. For years.” Alexis was talking faster, like she had to get the words to me before something terrible happened. I looked around; no one was watching. “All the work I’ve been doing there? It’s a waste of time. It’s all fake. No one is really researching fertility anymore. The data and samples we look at? The solutions we test? It’s all for show. I don’t know if it’s a few communities, or our region, or if it’s everywhere but...”

  My mind whirled. Why wouldn’t the fertility experts be working on anything real anymore? Why would someone keep us from finding a solution to the very crisis that drove everything our community did? That’s why we were clones of clones of clones of an earlier generation. We were a stopgap measure. And the only way the cycle would end was by solving this crisis. So why weren’t the fertility experts working on it anymore?

  “Alexis, I’m not sure I –“

  “Yami, quickly. Before anyone comes over here. The government has stopped trying to find a solution for the fertility crisis. The F-Lab data is fake. I heard some things, and found some documents, and...it doesn’t matter how I know. But I need you to know in case anyone gets to me or gets to my group. This is dangerous, Yami. If I’m right – and I’m certain I’m right – then the community will be furious. The council and Chancellor will do anything to keep this information from getting out.”