Clone Sharks
“Quantum physics is eerie,” mused Dr. Gooden. He watched his fingertips subconsciously drum a nervous rhythm on the table’s cheap varnish. “There comes a point where the more you learn, the more you wish you could unlearn.”
His questioners stared at him blankly. His fingers stopped and he snapped back to the matter at hand. Time could not be wasted. After all, his fate rested in the hands of these people.
As Gooden brushed a bead of sweat from his brow, Mr. Khan interjected, “You may continue. We find this relevant. Tell us of your employment at UTM.”
“Yes. My time as a ‘clone shark’. Basically, I never left UTM. As soon as I earned my diploma, one of the professors in the physics department offered me a job. The school was still called MIT then. That was before…you know.” Mr. Khan and Mr. Abadi in their sharply pressed suits continued to study his face in their stolid manner from the other side of the table. Gooden was careful not to over-explain but the men seemed to be awaiting more details. “During my graduate years at MIT — I mean, UTM, there had been a surge of research into wormhole creation. By the time they hired me, the first real-world experiments were ready to be performed. I was lucky to be in the right place at the right time. That’s when I became involved with the tech — with cross-d bridges — to answer your question from before.”
The tiny, featureless room was sweltering. There was no air conditioning or windows, only an oversized standing fan made of steel, the kind found on the floors of factories and warehouses with its slowly oscillating head blowing warm air and noise to scant relief. Gooden shifted in his rigid metal folding chair while, in the corner, the silent and grim Mrs. Suliman sat comfortably in hers as she observed with a cryptic interest.
Gooden continued, “I was a quantum engineer on the very first bridge, working on a team led by Dr. Kathleen Kung. Funny thing is, it was all about teleportation then. That’s what the bridge was originally designed to do. We weren’t even thinking about replication. That was before Eggpocalypse happened and all that–”
“Was it not Dr. Becker who led the cross-dimensional studies at that time?” Khan asked. “You said you worked for a Dr. Kung.”
“That’s correct. I see you all did your homework. Dr. Becker was in charge of the department, at least until Eggpocalypse. Dr. Kung was his assistant–”
“What is this ‘egg oculus’?” asked Abadi. “You say it twice. What is it?”
Khan leaned closer to his associate. “That is the experiment the Americans performed. When replication was discovered.”
“The one with the eggs?”
“The one with the eggs. Were you involved with that, Dr. Gooden?”
“Um, yes,” Gooden stammered, “I was actually present for that, uh… Yeah, the eggs. Every time someone hears I was there, they ask, why didn’t we expect that to happen? The thing is, our previous experiments did indeed raise warnings that our leadership should have heeded. Instead, it was all downplayed or ignored, of course.” Khan motioned for him to continue. “You see, the first subjects we used were microscopic and they transmitted through the wormhole perfectly, as far as teleportations go, from one side of the lab to the other. It wasn’t until we tested a macroscopic object — sand — that we noticed a problem. After almost every teleportation, our analysis program detected that the shapes of the sand grains had changed and their masses slightly increased. Dr. Becker blamed the instruments used for measuring. He argued that the differences fell within the margins of error. We studied the problem for a month but never could figure it out. Soon, Dr. Becker got restless and wanted to resume the tests. He wanted to try something bigger.
“A new teleportation experiment was scheduled to which he invited a dozen others from the university’s staff and faculty, even a few journalists. The man knew history was being made. I stood in the back with the rest of Dr. Kung’s team and the other bridge teams. We all wore goggles, fortunately.
“The room was arranged so that the bridge’s in-chamber and out-chamber were in front, on opposite ends. Keep in mind, these chambers were tiny, no bigger than a fist. Because of that, we had to keep our test subjects small: the first was to be a grain of white rice, followed by a chicken egg, and lastly a mosquito. Mosquitoes were selected as the first live subjects through a wormhole because, if anything went wrong, not even an animal rights organization would shed a tear. Thank heavens we didn’t make it that far.
“The first test was the rice. A single grain was placed in the in-chamber, but when it arrived in the out-chamber, lo and behold, there were three of them, lying side by side. Three copies of the same thing. We were all in shock. Not Dr. Becker though. He looked thrilled. A boyish smile stretched across his face and he shouted his favorite quote, ‘Remember, unforeseen surprises are the rule in science!’
“With much gusto, he instructed one of the techs to load the next subject and, despite her doubts, the young woman complied. She put the egg — the plain white kind we used to be able to get at the grocery store — into the in-chamber, shut the trap, then another tech pressed the execution button, and in the time it took the chamber to slip into the outer dimension and travel to the end of the wormhole — which is slightly less than what it takes for light — the out-chamber suddenly exploded. Ka-boom.
“Egg was everywhere. Wet yellow yolk and gooey white albumen of a thousand eggs splattered all over everybody and the walls and floor and ceiling. Also, broken eggshell and glass and metal went flying in every direction which is how some people got hurt. And that poor woman who got pierced through the head… Yeah, it was awful. You see, there weren’t any exhibitors in the bridge. We didn’t yet know about higher spatial wave grounding. So when that single egg was transmitted, something like a thousand copies of it came along for the ride. You know how the copies push each other aside as they materialize? Imagine all of those eggs materializing within that tiny out-chamber, all jockeying for space at the same moment, creating such an intense pressure instantaneously. Hence the ka-boom. The whole mess could have been avoided with just a little more caution. Dr. Becker was left with egg on his face, and quite literally.” His questioners stared impassively. “Maybe you don’t have that expression in this country.
“Anyway, our focus obviously shifted after that. No one cared about teleportation anymore. Dr. Becker was fired and Dr. Kung took his place as our team began the first research into using wormholes for replication. We had to revisit our understanding of the outer dimension’s behaviors and how the pockets interact, then we traced out the quantum uncertainty chain to figure out what causes the subjects to clone. That’s when we discovered the link between a subject’s increased info-mass and its quantum states and realized why we didn’t notice the replication effect with the smaller, non-organic subjects. In fact, I was the one who figured out that the sand grains actually had been replicating but, due to their small size, they transposed into one, thus the perceived larger mass.
“Mostly during this time I worked with the team on further mods to the cross-d bridge’s components. That’s when it became a real bridge with support for larger chambers and also wave grounding so we could limit cloning down to two instead of thousands. We were finally able to clone mosquitoes although at first there were some very ugly problems with transposition until demodulators were perfected. After that, we had success cloning ants and wasps and some other small insects — whatever we could capture outside the lab. Even though this was early on, the tech was probably just as good as what you can find on the black market now.
“That was when the term ‘clone shark’ was coined. You see, one day someone on the team wore a shirt with an embroidered shark logo and Dr. Kung, being funny, called him that. A clone shark. It caught on, I suppose, and only later did it assume its negative connotations. It’s, uh, a play on the term ‘loan shark’, if you know…” Gooden thought he saw Khan’s eyes squint ever so slightly. “But anyway, when it came to the bridge, I definitely worked on, uh, every aspect–”
“When did you start to clone people?” Khan asked bluntly, never breaking eye contact. Abadi also watched Gooden closely.
The doctor sighed, again peering down at his wrinkling hands. “I’m certainly not proud of what I was involved in, but I won’t lie about it. I will tell you the truth. I know that you need to know about it. Just, please, remember that I had no choice and I got myself out of that business as soon as I could.”
He looked up at the three people waiting wordlessly for his story. Khan nodded. Gooden began, “Our whole team knew that replication tech could be exploited for evil intentions, to say the least, and it wasn’t difficult for us to dream up those kinds of terrifying scenarios. So right away we drafted a list of ethical rules for our brand new field to adhere to. There was a lot of debate because some of us wanted to completely ban human cloning while others were open to tightly controlled experiments. However, we were all dedicated to some level of robust restrictions on the practice and keeping it out of reach from nefarious hands. We also counted on the school’s autonomy to shield our ethical decisions from outside interference.
“That autonomy didn’t last long. Suddenly, and not coincidentally, politicians began to level baseless accusations of fraud at our school’s leadership and then increasingly absurd claims like conducting secret torture experiments on children — whatever could grab headlines and rile up the public. The vitriol got so bad, violent protests erupted on campus. Finally, the governor took the school to court and won state control over it and it was renamed to UTM. Things happened so fast that most people didn’t question why military brass from the Pentagon had installed their subordinates in leadership positions, in the physics department of all places. Next thing we knew, we were being ordered — not asked or tasked — ordered to conduct replication experiments with larger animals: mice, rabbits, then dogs. We weren’t comfortable with this new direction in our work and we pushed back. Our superiors responded by classifying our positions as critical for national security. We couldn’t disobey their orders nor could we quit our jobs. Then the wars started.
“It’s easy to accuse the US of being paranoid but the truth was that replication tech had already leaked to some dangerous countries. Through spying or hacking, I don’t know. Once the genie was out of the bottle, it was only a matter of time before someone figured out how to clone people, or rather, soldiers. If you remember, it wouldn’t take long for our adversaries to form a coalition and begin amassing their own clone army along the Bering Strait. A real life invasion was scary for us to imagine. So, when we started the human cloning experiments at UTM, they were with the intent to outpace our rivals and with the expectation that we could enforce some code of ethics.”
Khan remarked, “But that did not transpire as you hoped.”
“No, sir. Once again, we were rushed into the situation with little preparation, with little care. Progress has no patience for principles, I’ve learned. We thought we were taking precautions by being transparent with our test subjects and explaining to them the gravity of the experiments, but the thing is, we didn’t know what to expect. It was uncharted territory. One thing we didn’t anticipate was that our subjects would be young, simple-minded recruits from the military’s lowest ranks. Kids not even old enough to gamble. Kids with low test scores, no hope of ever reaching an officer rank, mopping the deck for the rest of their unremarkable careers until they retire with meager benefits. Someone in their chains of command talked them into volunteering, but let’s face it — you’re something other than a volunteer if you can’t even vaguely grasp what you signed up for. I mean, this kind of physics could make Albert Einstein go mad.”
Gooden’s fingertips rapped against the worn tabletop and he watched them fall in line one after another like a military march or the muzzled sound of distant machine gun fire. Sulliman’s chair creaked as she leaned forward. Breaking her silence, she inquired softly, “What did you see?”
He gazed downward. “The first one we did was this boy. Jacob. Only nineteen years old. Just joined the army. Really excited about his future. Really wanted to be part of something important. He had no idea what he was getting into. No one did. When we used animals, it was different — they saw their clones as strangers or sometimes family and acted appropriately depending on their species. But humans…we have identities; ones that we ourselves construct and we’re invested in. Our true worth is our individuality. I guess you take that for granted until a copy of that identity is standing right before you. Suddenly, you’re not so unique. Not so irreplaceable. The mind throws up a defense — the other clone must be an imposter. The clone rejection cycle begins: dissonance, derealization, feelings of worthlessness and jealousy, then fear, panic, and fury.
“Jacob went into the in-chamber and from the other end emerged two of him, both alive and unaffected by the wormhole travel. A successful outcome. But then they saw one another and immediately froze in place, each studying their counterpart, trying to process the moment. We all watched, curious about what would happen. When they finally began to move, it was odd because they made the same decisions so their movements were synchronous, like reverse-mirror images of each other, making the same stunned expression, speaking the same words, reaching out their right hands to touch the other’s face. I even wondered if there was indeed a single mind controlling the two bodies, that is, until their movements began to diverge and then increased in aggression. It took only twenty-two seconds for the two Jacobs to course through the rejection cycle before they simultaneously attacked one another.
“Someone should have intervened right away. I mean, that’s why the guards were present. It’s just that nobody expected something so bad to happen and so fast. Within moments there was blood on the glass. Ribbons of skin hung from their faces. They were literally tearing each other apart… Finally, the guards went in there and subdued both Jacobs. Then it became a really sorry sight because the two of them started crying like infants. They cried so pathetically, with such utter devastation in their voices, such woe. The guards dragged them to separate rooms and I never got to find out what happened to them after that.”
Gooden lifted his head. “Of course, that didn’t stop further experiments but greater precautions were taken from then on. Also, Dr. Kung was pretty sure Jacob would be an outlier and that most clones would accept their counterparts. Unfortunately, she was wrong. Although we prevented more fights from happening, many subjects still completely broke down emotionally and had to be promptly separated. These events would have an almost irreversible effect on their senses of self and their religious or moral beliefs. But not everyone. A smaller percentage of subjects showed no aggression at all. They would act curious about their twin, even affectionate. If we kept them together, they would bond as if they were old friends. That’s when the acceptance grid was created, and from then on, we screened out candidates with levels in the violent or psychopath quadrants.”
“And the soldier spawners?” Khan asked. “What was your involvement?”
“I was lucky to have left my position at UTM before the megawar began. I knew something like that would happen. I had surmised that that was their intention behind the acceptance grid — to identify the best mentally fit soldiers for large-scale cloning. Also, the military brass wanted to increase the bridge’s output — from two clones to three, then five, then a dozen. I joined Dr. Kung and many others in standing up to our superiors, but by then, they were ready to rid themselves of us anyway. They fired anyone who dissented and they filled our positions with their own lackeys. It didn’t even bother me. I was glad to finally divest myself from that place, from those horrific experiments.
“When the war accelerated, however, the doubts began to creep in. I wished I did more to try and stop it. Admittedly, I don’t know what I could have done but, I mean…thousands of soldiers were being spawned every day on both sides and dropped into those forests along the gulf and they would mow each other down with cloned guns and cloned drones with those gruesome wave cannons only to be replaced the next day by more thousands and again and again every day. How could we let something like that happen? How could we — me, my team, the military, the government, the world — allow that carnage to happen? And because it’s never enough, new spawners were built to be even larger — the size of airplane hangars — and before long there were hundreds of thousands of soldiers being cloned and dying every day, cloning and dying over and over. Billions of lives, copies of copies of copies but none of them any less human, being wrung through the meat grinder of all-out war in order to advance just another meter on the battleground. For so many years. Billions of young people shot up or blown up or micro-fried and, to their superiors, not one of them was worth more than the cheap fatigues on their backs. Did you know their uniforms were designed to be flammable? After a skirmish, the militaries would torch the battlefield to render it impossible to distinguish which side the dead belonged to. They gave themselves an excuse not to have to retrieve the remains and lay them to rest honorably. Much cheaper that way. And who was going to grieve for them anyway? If you had a child and suddenly there were ten thousand copies of them and half of them had their brains melted through their noses in the mountains of British Columbia, how would you mourn?” His gaze met with some far off point in an imaginary distance where the staggering toll of death and the knowledge of his indirect influence had to be walled off from his sanity.
Suliman leaned closer to the table. “But they were mourned, is that not so?” She looked into Gooden’s eyes. “You wrote about the possibility. Your theory is very convincing.”
He carefully considered his words. “It is a theory. Nothing more.”
“You wrote as if you believed it.”
A cold dread had crept into the doctor’s face at the reference to his universe forking theory and it settled like a tension in the crinkles around his eyes and corners of his mouth. “I don’t wish to believe in it at all.”
“I wish not to believe it too, Dr. Gooden, but all of those clones came from somewhere. Mass cannot appear from nothing.”
“I have a question.” Khan leaned back in his folding chair. “I understand the premise of the forking theory, but the scale of it, I do not. It appears impossible. The, uh, universe…a new copy is made for each clone? Every single one?”
Abadi spoke something in Arabic, showing confusion, and Suliman proceeded to explain. “When that poor soldier named Jacob was sent through the bridge, quantum uncertainty was exploited to create a second Jacob. However, according to forking theory, this second one was bound to a parallel universe — a copy of ours that forked when the wormhole was created. Because of the crossover in the outer dimension, we received both Jacobs but the other universe received none. Imagine the surprise within that other universe when the out-chamber of their bridge was opened and revealed to be empty. Someone had to notify that other Jacob’s parents of the boy’s apparent demise and how there were somehow no remains for his funeral. And in that universe, there would be a copy of Dr. Gooden and copies of the rest of Dr. Kung’s team and most likely they scratched their heads over the mystery of the disappearing Jacob and where he might have gone. The next time they tried the experiment, maybe it worked and they received both of their cloned soldiers but that would have created another fork, yet another universe in which no clones arrived in the out-chamber. This forking occurs every time something is cloned. Clone an egg a thousand times and you make a thousand new universes, each one missing their subject.”
Khan threw up his hands. “But that would be…billions of universes by now. Trillions. That is absurd, no?”
Suliman and Khan turned to Gooden. “Like I told you,” the doctor said, “it’s enough to make Einstein go mad.”
Abadi asked, “So it is true that people disappeared? In this universe?”
“Yes. Sometimes our universe would land on the losing side of a forking event. Those cases were always swept under the rug, so to speak. Yet another reason for my rift with UTM.”
“Why did you continue in the field of replication?” asked Khan. “Even after you left the university and what you just called their ‘horrific experiments’?”
“Well, I tried to branch into new fields. I found work doing odd jobs — lab technician, data entry… I drove a truck–”
“I am referring to your time with the Family Forward Health Clinic.”
Gooden had not expected his questioners to uncover that well guarded secret from his past. Again he shifted in his chair. “I know it probably doesn’t look very good on the surface but, in my defense, the work we did there was not immoral. We weren’t like other black market clinics. We never cloned children, or adults for that matter. We only ever cloned embryos for parents with fertility issues which I always found sensible. Anyway, that was a hard time for me and I had to find some way to make a living, but no matter what, I would have never worked for anyone who cloned children. I found that to be abhorrent — for parents to keep some kind of a backup child or to harvest them for spare parts. I was also against the practice of cloning people’s lovers and against the clonophiles who would clone themselves and move to that commune in Nevada. I never participated in any of that. I only helped families.”
Khan asked, “Did you work there when the Great Wave Collapse occurred?” Abadi turned to him with a furrowed brow and Khan added, “The mummies.”
“Funny enough, I had that day off. I was in the middle of making preparations to emigrate. By then, the war had truly decimated my country and I knew it could not sustain itself much longer. Then, someone from the clinic contacted me in a panic and said the embryos were showing up dead in the out-chamber. The containers had exploded and the liquid nitrogen evaporated. Right away I knew it was a wave collapse. So when I heard about the soldiers, um, mummifying in the spawners, I wasn’t surprised.”
“Nor should you have been,” added Suliman. “After all, that was another of your theories.”
Gooden analyzed this unpredictable woman, even further in years than him, someone who hadn’t bothered to introduce herself when she entered the room late and had silently planted herself in the dim corner so apparently she could converse with him about quantum physics. “Did you read my research paper?” he asked her.
“Of course. I too have experience with wormholes for a long time now. Your theories are intriguing.”
“People used to call my theories ‘insane’.”
“Even after the collapse happened exactly as you predicted?”
Gooden straightened in his seat. “I admit, I did get that one right. Well, almost. I knew the subjects would stop cloning due to the collapsed uncertainty but I didn’t expect the time-sink to be so slow. No more speed-of-light travel through the wormhole — suddenly, the outer dimensional travel from the in- to the out-chamber took a dozen years or more. Not that those poor soldiers lasted that long. They would have suffocated after just a few hours once the chamber’s oxygen ran out. That must have been quite a shock for the engineers to watch a subject enter and a moment later reappear on the other side as a single dried out husk aged over a decade.”
“It would take a large amount of mass to create the collapse, no?” asked Suliman.
“It wouldn’t be impossible to cause a wave collapse in a small-mass dimension like that one used to be. It was bound to happen.”
Suliman countered, “Only miniscule amounts were leaking into the outer dimension: air, bacteria, microscopic bits from the chamber’s exterior. A tiny fraction of what is required for a collapse. Surely not enough to stretch the outer dimension by dozens of light years, but that is what happened.”
Gooden’s mouth cracked into a subtle, wry smile but spoke nothing.
“I see the thought has crossed your mind before,” continued Suliman. “Sabotage. Could that be it? After all, the amount of mass required indicates the event was purposeful in nature.”
“But impossible because an operation of that scale would require tremendous effort and would not go unnoticed on this Earth.”
“No, not this Earth, but perhaps another, alternate Earth? Perhaps one in which some of their spawns disappeared because they were abducted by universes alternate to them? Perhaps that universe figured out how to sabotage these abductors’ machines with a wave collapse and stopped the horrors of which you spoke and thus forced an end to your country’s megawar.”
Gooden still held his nearly perceptible grin. “I’ve heard that hypothesis too.”
“The thing I like most about that hypothesis is, surely an alternate Dr. Gooden discovered forking theory too, as well as the outer dimension’s critical mass level. Maybe even the same Dr. Gooden from the parallel universe who witnessed your alternate Jacob disappear. His expertise in the matter would undoubtedly lead him to be involved in the sabotage — to warp the outer dimension with gigatons worth of mass, collapse its quantum uncertainty and prevent our machines from ever replicating again.” Her expression remained unchanged but her eyes twinkled. “And perhaps that alternate Dr. Gooden still has his country, instead of being…here.”
Suliman stood up and lifted her tote bag from the floor. “I apologize for I must now be present elsewhere,” she announced. “It was a pleasure to chat with you, Dr. Gooden. Perhaps we will see each other again.” She glanced at Khan and Abadi and strode out of the room without another word. From the hall wafted in a warm draft of rotted smells before the door swung shut again.
A small sigh escaped the doctor’s lips but he caught himself and returned his focus to the two remaining questioners. Khan and Abadi exchanged some silent agreement between them, then Abadi turned to Gooden. “After the war, what do you do? You still work?”
“After the megawar ended, I was lucky enough to flee the country before the escalation to nukes happened. My family too. Well, most of them. We went to Qatar but they couldn’t extend my visa so I came here. I’ve been seeking employment ever since.”
Khan asked, “Are you in the Jeddah camps?”
“Uh, yes. That’s where I’m currently staying. You’ve probably heard how it is at those places. You can sponsor my visa, correct?”
Khan and Abadi looked at one another and nodded concurrently. Their stoic faces returned to the subject of their interview and Abadi answered, “Yes, we can do that. Now that I hear your story, I understand why you do not get refugee status. Heh.” He forced a chuckle.
“Oh, that would be great. Really,” Gooden said in relief. “Is the work all here, or–”
“Two sites. Bridges are downstairs in the factory. The pairs are in a warehouse close to the airport. You are responsible for transportation.”
“Nothing perishable goes through the bridges, right?”
“Correct. The goods that we teleport are made from plastic and metals. Most are toys. Sometimes costumes. Everything we make, they handle the time sink. Sometimes it goes very high. Twenty years or more. But, in this dimension they take only one second to send to the warehouse and still much cheaper than using trucks and gas. The only problem is old bridges and electrical shortages in exhibitors.”
“Well, I think that my extensive experience can help to keep your machines in good working order.”
Khan interjected, “The shift begins at eight o’clock, nine hours every weekday, four on Saturday. No unions, you purchase your own safety gear and, as a non-Muslim, you will not receive reduced hours during Ramadan. Are these terms agreeable?”
Gooden pretended to think it over for a second but he couldn’t stifle his smile. “Yes, sir.”
Mr. Abadi extended his hand across the table to shake the doctor’s. “Congratulations! You are hired!”
--
Thanks for reading! Read more of my stories at keithvile.medium.com