Clones To Us!

A Star Spawn Short Story
by Thomas Nevin Huber ©1994

    It was Quorsflic and raining. I was on vacation from EN. Doc and I were old friends from way back. I had gone into the news field and Doc had gone into the medisci field. Because we were old friends, Doc was always trying to get me to give him some air time. I figured this was one of those times. It turned out to be the most important story of my life.
    You see, Doc had an idea in his head about unlocking the genetic history of the cell. I thought he was crazy. In reality, he was one bit reprobate and four bits genius. That mixed into one of the greatest medisci minds of our time.
    It was raining. I hated the rain, but Doc didn’t mind. He never did. He was pounding on my door, shouting something about “finding it,” whatever “it” was.
    I got tired of the pounding and yanked the door open. He looked surprised and said, “Oh. You are home.”
    “Of course,” I muttered back. “Now what is this `it’ thing you’re shouting about?”
    “I’ve unlocked the History!”
    “What history? What happened to the world when Kurskie didn’t come into power?”
    “No, dammit! The History Of The Cell!”
    “Oh.” Of course. It was That, again. He always talked in initial caps when he spoke about That.
    He was grinning from ear to ear. Well, almost. The smile seemed to split his face. “Who do you want to clone?” he asked.
    “Me? You’re asking me?”
    “Yeah, you. The ones I want are all unobtainable.”
    By then, I’d walked over to the big couch and sat. It had been overstuffed back a few years ago, and now all you did was sink in. I sank. Doc closed the door and locked it.
    “What’s that for?” I asked.
    He looked at the door and remarked, “I don’t want Them to Know.”
    “...” That’s what I did when I didn’t know what to say.
    Doc was always off on some tangent. Ever since they passed the sex- regulating laws, he had been upset. I think that he was probably one of those, but I never said anything. The laws had done their thing in controlling rampant sex crimes and diseases and Doc was pissed. He didn’t like the idea of not being able to just go out and get some once in a while.
    “Well?” he demanded.
    “...” Then it struck me. “Who would you like?” I asked him.
    “Me? Tiny Finorra. But she’s not available.”
    I sat back with jaundiced eye and looked at him. (Actually, my eyes are not jaundiced, but it sounds good.) “What do you mean, ‘not available?’”
    “She’s mated.”
    “But your clone?”
    He thought for a moment. Then he went over and sat in my big overstuffed chair. It was like the couch. He sank and thought.
    I watched carefully and after a moment or two, his face started brightening. He got a wonderfully wicked look in his eyes. “All I need is a cell!”
    Before I knew it, he was out of the chair and trying to get out the door.
    “It’s locked,” I observed.
    “Why?” he asked, groping for the lock.
    “...”
    He fumbled with the locks and got it open. “Come on!” he demanded, holding the open door. “Let’s go get a piece of her and get started.”

    “Getting a piece” didn’t have the connotation most of you might think. He meant a literal piece. Like, “A strand of hair?” I looked at him through the rain. I hated rain.
    “Yeah. That’s all I need. An real strand of her hair.”
    I stopped in the middle of the street that we were crossing and immediately an idiot driver leaned on his horn. “Take a tube,” he yelled and I did my thing at him. This is a nice rag, so I won’t tell you what that was. He knew, however, and almost ran me down with his old floater.
    “Where?” I asked as I watched the idiot driver coast on down the street.
    “Where what?” Doc asked, also looking at the departing idiot.
    “Where are you going to get a strand of her hair?”
    “At the hair shoppe, of course.”
    Of course. Any idiot knew that, including the driver. So what did that make me?
    No. Don’t answer that.
    By the end of the day, Doc had drug me all over town and me on my vacation, too. To the hair shoppe, to the pharm, to the bank, back to the pharm. You get the picture. If any of you have teen kids and take them shopping for school clothes, then you know the routine.
    My head was buzzing and my feet hurt as we took the transitube back to Doc’s place. I was sniffling, wishing that Doc was working on a cure for the cold, instead of his damned clones. I was wet. I hated the rain.
    Doc’s place is on the edge. Not of town, just reality. He had it built back in the early years of the space era. Something about being ecologically correct. Windows and funny stuff. Not many of those houses left anymore. ‘Course Doc is a bit strange, anyway. So he and the house got along.
    He was unlocking the door with his keys. Too many locks, I thought. Why not use the thumb print thing? “It can’t be fooled,” I told him. “Goes right down to the molecular level.” It was still raining and I was wet.
    “That’s what gave me the idea,” he said as he continued to work at his locks.
    “What?”
    “The thumb print id. They discovered how to record the cell information.”
    “Huh?”
    “The cell information in the thumb id – they discovered how to record it.”
    He just told me that.
    At last the door was open and I went inside to drip in his porch. He started working on the next door. Why he locked the first one didn’t make sense. We could have climbed into the porch easily enough. But we didn’t and I dripped.
    I sneezed and Doc said something like bless me. I pulled out my dirty laundry and blew my nose. Ugh. I was getting sick.
    Twenty minutes later we were in his lab. I had my cam out, taking vids. He carefully unwrapped the tiny package containing Her one strand of hair. Uh, Tiny     Finorra’s one strand of hair. I know you know who she is. She has got to be one of the greatest looking models of non-clothing anyone could care to look at. And she helped sell a lot of non-clothes. A lot.
    I sneezed again and said, “I thought the cells in the hair wouldn’t work.”
    “It doesn’t matter,” he said, motioning for me to take some more vids. “I can take any cell, living or dead and make this work. All you need are the right ingredients.”
    “Expensive ingredients,” I bemoaned. “I co-signed the note at the bank, remember.”
    “Yeah, but for Tiny, it’ll be worth it.”
    “In about twenty years or so.”
    “Nah, hand me the other package.”
    “Doc, growth hormones don’t make it. We all take twenty years or so to mature. Unless you like ‘em young.”
    “It won’t take that long.”
    “Why not? You can’t grow an adult any faster.”
    He looked at me, smiling broadly. “I can.”
    “!” I shook my head.
    “Just take the shots,” he said.
    So I stood around for two hours taking vids of Doc doing his thing with the hair and the ingredients – I told you they were expensive – right? I made sure I recorded that part of it.
    “Why don’t you lie down?” he asked.
    That sounded great. “Where?”
    “Over here.” He moved a bunch of stuff, mostly books and sweaters and a blanket. A blanket? A cot! I headed for it and lay down. Me and the blanket.

    He shook me awake. It was dark outside. I could tell because the lights were on and the windows were dark.
    “What? Is it time to go home?”
    “No,” he whispered in a hushed voice. “She’s ready to Wake Up.”
    “She?” I grabbed my cam.
    “Yeah, Tiny. I stopped her growth at eighteen. That’s when I fell in love with her!”
    “Uh, Doc...” I didn’t quite believe him.
    “Yeah?”
    “What day is it? How long have I been out?”
    “Two, three hours. Why?”
    I did my jaundiced eye thing again. “Two to three hours? Eighteen years? Time doesn’t work like that.” I felt my face. It was smooth. No weeks or months had passed. Or else Doc had used the anti-hair stuff on me just to fool me. I felt my hair. Still the same old length. Too long and too short for the girls. Sigh.
    Doc helped me get up, cam and all. The cold was settling in my bones and I ached. But, when you’re at Doc’s, you do what Doc wants you to do.
    “I gotta do something about this cold, Doc. Do you have anything?”
    “I can give you a ‘scription. But you’ll have to come by the office in the morn for it.”
    “Tanks,” I mumbled, my node clogging at that moment. I sneezed again, clearing it.
    “I’ll make an exception,” he told me. “I’ll write it up tonight, if you want.”
    “I want.”
    “So do I. Now, come on.”
    He drug me across the room where...
    “Tiny?” I took a vid. She was covered, except for her head, with a blanket.
    “Yup. That’s her at sweet eighteen. Maybe a bit younger, but that’s her.”
    “She’s beautiful.” I took another vid. All I could see was her head and the outline of that marvelous body of hers.
    “Can I look?” I asked as I plucked at the edge of the blanket, cam at ready.
    He slapped my hand away. “Of course not! That wouldn’t be proper.”
    “But...”
    He shook his head. “If she wants to reveal her body, she will,” he said. I took a vid of him for the record. He smiled.
    “Tiny won’t reveal anything,” I told him. “She never did any of the skin stuff. Hows about I get a shot now?”
    “Nope, you can’t. As to the skin stuff, I’ve got her codes for the compudram.”
    That’s another story. Doc and his compudram machine. With it and the codes, he could make the image of her act out anything he wanted. Talk about perversions. Thank Johaicom for his laws. Otherwise, I just know Doc would have... Well, never mind.
    “What do we do to wake her up?” I asked, shooting another vid of her.
    “We don’t. It’s almost time,” he reverently whispered.
    “Time for what?” I didn’t whisper.
    “For her to wake up. The cells mature and she’ll open her eyes...”
    We were staring at her eyes. They were open. I quickly took another vid of her face.
    “Tiny?” Doc asked, leaning over her. I let the cam run, catching vids fast enough for continuous motion.
    Her blonde hair glistened in the light. She turned toward Doc, a strange stare in her eyes. I continued to let the cam run. The shots were great! She was beautiful – so young, so fair, so innocent.
    Doc stared back at her. He raised his eyebrows. He smiled. He said, “Hi,” and a dozen or so other mundane things. She just stared that strange stare. After a while, I shut down the cam. I had all the vids I needed and she wasn’t doing anything interesting.
    I pulled Doc to one side. Her eyes didn’t follow us. I think I’d figured out why she looked the way she did. “She’s a newborn, Doc. She’s not playing her dumb blonde routine. She’s just like a new born kid! The stare’s the same stare a newborn has for the people around it – if it isn’t crying.”
    I paused and looked at her. Tiny wasn’t crying. Doc shook his head and wandered back into her line of sight. He bent over her and peered into her eyes, making soft cooing sounds. I took another vid of him doing that. If what I thought was correct...
    He straightened and turned back. “You’re right. Her eyes have that look – wonderment and suspicion, all wrapped up in one package.”
    We both looked back at her. She opened her mouth and let out a breath. Then she said, “...”
    “Damn,” Doc swore. “I’ll bet she doesn’t even know how to have sex.”
    I’m glad I didn’t have the cam running. That kind of talk could get him into deep trouble.
    “Whatcha goin’ to do?”
    He stood back and thought. “Well,” he said as he moved toward her, “let’s get her off the table and into a chair. Then we can think.”
    I got my cam up and vidding him as he started to help her sit up. He head lolled around, just like a new baby. “Damn.” He gently put her back down.
    She didn’t have the muscles of an eighteen-year-old. She had the muscles and mentality of a new born. She lay there for a long time, eyes just staring into nothing. I’m not even sure she could focus her eyes.
    “What now?”
    “Damn,” he swore again. He was obviously perplexed. I looked at the cam’s readout and decided I had enough vids to do a decent story. I really didn’t want to be around when she decided she was hungry. Or if she decided she needed to, uh, go potty.
    Besides, I was still on vacation and wanted to get rid of my cold. “See ya later, Doc,” I said as I headed out.
    All he did was look at me.

    I checked back with Doc off and on over the next couple of weeks. He was making progress, but not much. She was able to hold her head straight, though it wobbled a bit. If you didn’t feed her, she started crying. If she didn’t get changed, she started crying. If she was tired... well, you get the picture. It wasn’t pretty.
    I don’t know if Doc did anything sexually or not. I kinda doubted it. In fact, it was fast becoming apparent that Doc really wasn’t as bad as I thought. He was becoming almost – fatherly.
    I continued to record the events as they unfolded and wondered what my boss would say if I broke the story. Hell, someone would have to do it, sooner or later.
    Finally, I decided it would be sooner and I’d do it.
    Charlie, my boss, couldn’t keep from laughing at my first draft. It really nagged me, because I thought the story was pretty good. Maybe he wasn’t laughing at my story. But then, what could he be laughing at?
    After he finished, he looked at me and asked, “This is a joke, right?”
    “No, boss, it isn’t.”
    “Rag stuff, then.”
    “Nope.”
    He peered at me and then gave me a dirty look. “You gotta a release?”
    “Release? Of course I got a release from Doc.”
    “No, from Tiny?”
    “...”
    “Well?”
    “How do you get a release from a newborn?”
    He got up and came around the desk at me. I stood my ground and he went right past and got his coat. “Come on,” he demanded.
    “Huh? Where?”
    “To Doc’s. I gotta see this for myself.”
    I don’t know what my boss was laughing at before, but now, he wasn’t laughing. I couldn’t always figure out what my boss was thinking.

    At Doc’s it didn’t take long for Charlie to decide that I was serious. His perplexed look told me a lot. He didn’t like what he saw and didn’t like trying to convince the world about my story’s veracity.
    Charlie leveled Doc with his first question. “Does she know?”
    “Who?”
    “Tiny Finorra – the real Tiny Finorra.”
    “Of course not. I could lose my manhood for that.”
    My boss leveled an acid gaze at Doc. “You bastard,” he said, then he looked at me. “How much were you involved in this?”
    I took a deep breath. “I helped Doc raise some money. But I’m clear, now.”
    Tiny’s clone spoke up. “Daddy?” She was wearing a loose top and shorts. The shorts were wet – in the wrong place. She looked like she wanted to cry.
    Doc got a pained look on his face and went to take care of Tiny.
    Charlie shook his head. “We’ve got to break the story. But who in Hell is going to believe us?”

    It took us two weeks to figure that one out. I figured the boss spent a number of sleepless nights, too, because he visited Doc at least once a day. Each time, he’d come back looking very unhappy. And the next morning, he’d be horrible to work with.
    Finally, we hit upon it. Break the story, just as if nothing had happened... Don’t make anything up. Just let it fly.
    Sure, no one would believe us, but who’d care? It certainly would get coverage. And probably boost our ratings, too.
    So, I went back to work, doin’ a job of it and puttin’ it together, just like it happened in bits and pieces. As hackneyed as it sounded, the boss wanted the truth and nothin’ but the truth.
    So we broke the story. “Tiny Finorra Has Competition... Herself!” was the way the header read. Our first break was short and to the point. A brief flash about Finorra being cloned and more to follow. We had it all ready.

    The only problem was that a lot of the ENT group used that kind of news break to lead into a fictional story. This wasn’t fiction, but that didn’t help our investors. They barraged us with calls telling us exactly what they thought.
    I couldn’t blame them. For some, EN represented a lifetime’s work. For others, it had been prestige. Now they all felt betrayed.
    Fortunately, my boss was prepared and he told them and the world that EN would reveal the clone to the public. A lot of doomsayers said it would never work. They said we were using the real Tiny Finorra to perpetrate the hoax. The boss went ahead anyway, having me write the whole story, from beginning to end. Or at least, up to the present time.
    Doc was elated. As part of his deal with the boss, he got me to publish the full technical explanation, since no self-respecting journal would touch it. Then, Doc personally invited the scientific community to the event.
    The day of the event came and everything went as well as we could expect. A lot of the rags were there with their crews, all ready to jump into the fray. Everyone was civil, but I knew there were a lot of profs and such just waiting to prove Doc wrong. Boy, were they in for a shock.
    The other matter. Yeah, the Real Tiny Finorra. We really didn’t know what she would do, but we half-expected her and her lawreps to show up.
    Well, they did, and Tiny interrupted the whole thing by getting up in front of the crowd and announcing a massive suit against EN, Doc, and myself for fraud and misusing her name.
    Everything went dead. I mean really dead. You could have heard a pin drop it was so dead. Tiny didn’t like that. She wanted something... attention, maybe. But she wasn’t getting it. All the eyes in the room were looking at Doc, me, or my boss.
    Tiny stomped her foot and immediately started modeling her line of non-clothes. For some of us, it was okay. But some of those vidgroups that were there – you know the kind – would not be showing that part on the nightly ‘cast. Not if they wanted to keep their reputation.
    I continued to watch the crowd while Tiny did her thing. I’d seen her in a lot of shows and she wasn’t anything that special. I’m not weird, I’d just seen too much of her. Besides, this wasn’t about her. It was about Doc and his clone of her.
    Suddenly every cam in the room came up and start snapping vids. Tiny’s clone had made her appearance. The real Tiny took one look and lost her cool. She fainted on the spot. Fortunately, I hadn’t, uh, lost my cool, and was vidding everything as fast as I could. What a sight.
    After the real Tiny recovered her composure (I think it was an act), she demanded that the clone reveal who she really was. Well, if you know anything about models as famous as Tiny, you know they can be pretty demanding. To the point of intimidating you. And she did a good job of it on her clone. The results? Predictable: Tiny’s clone promptly peed her pants.
    Then dropped them, because she didn’t like wet panties.
    “Well,” the real Tiny said, “Why don’t you take off the rest of your clothes.”
    “Okay,” the clone replied in her innocent voice and promptly stripped bare. “Isn’t this fun?” she giggled. “I like going butt-butt.”
    I glanced at Doc, but he was studying the wall.
    So there they were, both bare to the world (except for Tiny’s non-clothes that didn’t hide much of anything). It was obvious that Doc had been working with the clone, because she had started developing some pretty good, uh, muscles. I swallowed and wondered if Doc had...
    Later, he told me that he hadn’t. I think that’s what really saved his ass. Because once Tiny realized she’d been outclassed by herself, she dressed, then helped dress her clone. Doc had hastily grabbed some clean panties from her travel bag. Doc was prepared. He never had any kids of his own, but I could tell he would make a pretty good dad.

    Doc went on the receive accolades and awards and lots and lots of money. The real Tiny Finorra was jealous until some shrink got to her and convinced her that being selected as the model for the first clone... Well, that shrink impressed her so much that Tiny up and ended her mating agreement. Why? Because the shrink was a lot smarter than her mate, who was also her agent. Why hadn’t he thought of that? Don’t look at me that way, I don’t know, either.
    You see, Doc was making money with the clone. He charged fees to every specialist that wanted to probe, interview, or run tests on her. One afternoon (it wasn’t raining and the sun was shining) Tiny showed up. Doc was having the clone do some modeling for the press. Only she wasn’t modeling clothes. She was modeling the non-clothes that the real Tiny Finorra modeled.
    Tiny took one look at the clone and stormed off, saying something about having to lose weight or she’d be out of a job. The next day, she showed up again, but this time with a ambulance chaser and claimed custody for her other self.
    Doc couldn’t do a thing about it. The laws were being drafted even as Tiny made her claim. There would never be another clone created. Not the way Doc had done it.
    It turned out that Doc didn’t need the Tiny clone. He still got lots and lots of calls for speeches and appearances and all that. The money still came in and he smiled all the way to the local credibank.
    And that bothered the you-know-what out of the real Tiny. When Doc had created her clone, and started using her to model Tiny’s line of non-clothes, it was the beginning of the end. Tiny’s career was winding down. The press had seen the clone and an eighteen-year-old was a lot nicer to look at than a thirty-two-year-old.
I think that’s why Tiny claimed the clone, because she soon retired from active modeling and had her clone do it for her. Doc was out in the cold, when it came to the clone.
    But he must have done something right, because Tiny started visiting him, with the clone. Maybe Tiny figured that the clone needed a dad, or something like that. Hell, I don’t know; I’ve never been married. And I’m glad I wasn’t. Doc? Well, maybe sorta glad.
    You see, Tiny had something in mind when she started in visiting Doc. It didn’t take long for her to wrap him around her finger. So tightly, that he couldn’t say “No,” when she asked. (I’m not sure he wanted to say “No,” now that I think about it.)
    Tiny and Doc were mated after the customary waiting period. With the money she and Doc received, they lived happily for a while.
    Maybe Doc figured that he’d eventually get what he wanted out of the deal, but he never did. It turned out that Tiny was a follower of that preacher Johaicom and believed firmly in those silly concepts about sex and all that. You know, the ones that say that sex is okay only when both parties want off-spring. Tiny didn’t want any kids, not with her hands full with a full-grown, but childlike clone.
    Well, that’s about it, except for one last weird detail. Doc tried one more experiment with Tiny. He unlocked the genetic history and created everything but the head. Without a head, no brains. Like I said, weird.
    Tiny didn’t need any spare parts, which is what Doc had in mind. You know what I mean. I think he wanted to transfer Tiny’s head to the new body, but laws were passed that prevented Doc from going any further. I’m not sure if Tiny wanted it, either. Maybe it was something about Tiny’s age and Doc wanting to fire up the old hormones in her or something like that. At least that’s what I thought it might be. He never did tell me if that was it or not.
    Anyway, the medisci field started using Doc’s ideas and created the Clones To Us movement. It was kind of neat and helped a lot of folks that had failing organs, or were in accidents. The unlocking of the history of the cell meant that they could tease a body’s cells into thinking that the body was young again, and get it to regrow lost or old organs or limbs and stuff like that.
    You probably know the rest. Doc’s name was disassociated with the movement. What he had done was too “offensive” for the public to endure. Or at least, that’s what they were told. I didn’t buy it because I knew the truth.
    Doc really was the one that created the whole Clones To Us movement... and gave new lives to billions of people, regardless of what anyone else thought about it. Doc, and his two and a half Tinys.


    My earlier stories were building my confidence, but I wanted to flesh out more of the history for my Star Spawn universe. I hesitatingly sketched out the story, knowing the problems and possible cost to good storytelling technique.
    It seems that history does not make for a good story – one that contains a beginning, middle, and end. History keeps on going and about the only true ending is death. If you look at most historical stories, they end in death – the Shakespearean Plays, for instance, and many operas set against the background of history.
    This just wouldn’t do for what I wanted to accomplish – provide the history behind one of the technologies unique to the Star Spawn universe, and the Dracs in particular. Unlocking medical secrets is more about living than dying, and, as far as I am concerned, it always has been. So, this is a story about life, and one without a decent “story” ending.
    The original story was incomplete, but was published as it was, mistakes and all. This version still has the weak ending, but helps complete part of the history of the Drac civilization, one that helps explain some of the technology I use in the second Star Spawn novel.
    This was the first time that I combined tongue-in-cheek humor with first-person narrative. I really like this form of writing, but do not think that it would work for anything more than an old-fashioned private eye story, or some story set in the roaring twenties. This style reminds me a lot of old-fashioned radio dramas where one of the characters tells the story.
    The medical idea came from my personal physician at the time, Doctor Allen. He suggested that if we were ever going to get the human body to regrow lost limbs or organs, we would have to learn how to unlock the history of the cell. I strongly suspect that the same will be true before we really are able to clone living entities – truly clone them, right down the last detail and flaw...
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