Clone Read online

  Clone

  Todd Young

  Published by Mercurial Avenue

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

  Copyright © 2017 Todd Young

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the written permission of the copyright holder.

  Published in the United States of America

  1st Kindle Edition

  Photo-manipulation and cover design by Justin Baxter

  Warning: This book is not suitable for readers aged under 18. It contains sexually explicit descriptions. All characters depicted in sexually explicit descriptions are aged 18 or over.

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  Books by Todd Young

  Corrupted

  Dressing Up

  Jumbo

  Subject 19

  Naked

  Angel

  Owned

  Fracture

  Jism

  1

  Riley crossed the street and glanced backwards. The man in the dark coat was standing in the doorway of a pharmacy on Second Avenue. He’d been at the office, and at the cafe, and now, here he was again.

  Riley frowned. The man was after him. He had no doubt of that, but what had he said or done to get a government agent, if the man was a government agent, on his tail? He’d mentioned the election to Marion a couple of days back, said he preferred Taylor to Flint, but that couldn’t be it, surely. The company would be in power no matter who won.

  He turned away, hunkered down in his jacket, and hastened toward the corner, his stomach a tight fist. The afternoon was dark and it was bitterly cold. The streets were crowded with people hurrying home, everyone muffled against the weather. A heavy snow was falling and his breaths were coming raggedly.

  He reached the corner, but the lights were against him and he had to wait. Above him, on the side of a skyscraper, a billboard the size of a football field read: Anthwars-Berstheim is creating a world free of deviants, a world for all to share. That was right. A world free for everyone but him.

  He took a breath and glanced surreptitiously around. The man in the dark coat was crossing against the traffic. He had his body angled forward and his head lowered, his eyes shaded by the low-brimmed hat he was wearing, a fedora.

  Riley didn’t dress like that. He wore jeans and sneakers and a windbreaker, clothes that had been perfectly reasonable when he was at college. But over the past couple of years, something had changed. The company bought the clothing stores, and accordingly the fashions had changed. It wasn’t the 1940s but it looked like it, the men dressed in suits and ties and hats, the women in shapely dresses and high heels, their hair coiffured. With a bitter wind blowing and everyone in coats this afternoon, Riley was a lone colorful figure in a sea of brown and black. Definitely not what he wanted when he had someone on his tail.

  It couldn’t have been what he said to Marion. It made no difference if the CEO or the chairman of the board sat in the White House, Anthwars-Berstheim would still be running the country, which meant ongoing media manipulation, the suppression of dissent, and the unthinking loyalty of the bulk of the population.

  It had been that way for the better part of thirty years.

  A break in the hovercars appeared and the man dashed forward. Something about the way he moved struck a familiar chord in Riley. He began to wonder where he might have seen him before, but at that moment the lights changed.

  “Move it, bud,” a guy behind him said, shoving Riley in the back.

  Riley stepped forward and broke into a trot, sidestepping a woman in front of him and balancing a hand on the hood of a waiting hovercar. The floating car inched backward and Riley stumbled. He hopped and skipped a couple of awkward steps, leapt onto the sidewalk and collided with a large man with a rotund belly.

  “Watch where you’re going, citizen!” the man exclaimed.

  “Slow your pace. Slow down,” a woman said, her face bitter in the deepening gloom.

  Riley kicked his step into a rapid walk and turned his head. He couldn’t see the man. He continued on for a half a block or so, weaving his way through the crowded sidewalk. Up ahead, a neon sign was flashing. Bakers, it read. A bar, he supposed. He hurried toward the doorway and crashed down the stairs.

  The place was dark and crowded. Big band music was playing and there was a rowdy hum of voices. The patrons, by the look of it, were almost exclusively men. He threaded his way through the press of bodies and made for the bar. He hooked his elbows onto the countertop and then lifted his hand. He didn’t feel comfortable in places like this, in any place where there was a crowd of gruff-voiced men. He was thinking he might have been better off staying on the street when the bartender approached.

  “What’ll it be?” he said.

  “A beer. A bud.” He would’ve preferred vodka, but in a place like this everyone would be drinking beer.

  The bartender nodded, turned to the fridge, and Riley peered into the mirror above his head. A dark figure was treading cautiously down the stairs. It was the man.

  Hell, Riley thought. What does he want with me?

  He paid the bartender, and then, without glancing around, stepped sideways. He narrowed his shoulders and threaded his way through the crowd. Behind the bar, a row of booths lined the back wall. The corner booth was empty, and Riley made his way toward it, figuring if the man was going to approach him, then at least they were inside.

  He took a seat, slid toward the wall, and took a sip on his beer, thinking he perhaps should have made for the bathroom, hid in a stall, and then tried to get out of the place. The beer was cold and bitter. He slapped his tongue against the roof of his mouth a few times before setting it down. Then he looked up. The man in the dark coat was heading for him. As he reached the booth, he lifted his hat off his head.

  Riley stared into a pair of tired, brown eyes, frowned, and then drew his head back.

  “Akam?”

  “Yes, it’s me, Riley,” the dark figure muttered, sliding into the booth.

  Riley hadn’t seen Akam Smith for the better part of two years. They’d been at college together, studying journalism. They’d run track. And they’d been … well, they’d been more than friends. Then a student had accused Akam of deviance, had said Akam touched him in the showers. Riley didn’t know if it was true. All he knew was that Akam had been arrested. That was the last he’d heard of him.

  “What’s happened to you?”

  “Do I look that different?”

  Riley remembered a cheerful, dark-haired boy, a boy who’d grinned at his jokes, a boy whose eyes had glinted with life. The man in front of him was tired and emaciated, his forehead lined, the expression on his face resigned. He looked more like thirty than a man in his early twenties.

  “You look … a little tired, maybe.”

  Akam smiled a weary smile. “They castrated me, Riley. They took that away from me.”

  Riley winced.

  “They locked me up for eighteen months. Eighteen months of their stupid fucking programs.”

  “Hell,” Riley said, lowering his voice and glancing around, “you scared the life out of me. I thought you were a skulker.”

  “You think I’d work for the company after what they did to me?”

  “No, but I didn’t know it was you. Why didn’t you come up and talk to me? Hell, you’ve been on my tail all afternoon.”

  Akam leaned forward. “I had to make sure you weren’t being followed, Riley. I know you … well, I know what you’re like.”

  Riley lowered his eyes. “Like you, you mean.”

  “No. I’m not a fag,
Riley. I was never that. I like women too.” He paused. “But I could never tell you that.”

  Riley watched cautiously as a man passed the table. “You want to keep your voice down?” he said, once the man was clear. They could be arrested for simply talking like this.

  Akam lowered his chin, cut his eyes sideways, and then continued. “I’m a bisexual,” he said, his words fearless and precise, words no one in their right mind would have spoken.

  Riley stared at Akam impassively for a moment, and then lowered his eyes to the table. He put a finger in the pool of condensation at the base of his glass, and drew a series of small, precise circles. Akam had always been a little too open. One day at college he’d taken Riley’s hand. Riley had snatched it away and glanced around quickly, terrified someone might have seen. He knew Akam had loved him, and though Riley hadn’t felt the same, he’d felt tenderness for his friend. It had never gone further than that. Everything that existed between them had been carried in a series of looks and smiles. It had been impossible to speak of anything that mattered, and as Riley remembered the ache he’d felt in the face of this, his chest heaved.

  He lifted his eyes to Akam’s. “You make it sound so simple. You just come right out and say it.”

  “I’m not ashamed, Riley. Why should I be?”

  Riley nodded quietly.

  “All that silence. It kills people like you and me. And now, well, what have I got to lose?”

  In his mind, Riley glimpsed an empty, crumpled scrotum. He closed his eyes. Hell, he thought, if that happened to him, then he’d kill someone. He wouldn’t be sitting here impassively. He’d get back at them somehow.

  “I’ve joined the resistance.”

  “You — what?”

  “The resistance, Riley.”

  “Lower your voice.” He straightened up, suddenly conscious of the men in the booth behind Akam. It was one thing to talk of deviance, but the resistance? Akam had to be out of his mind.

  “We need your help.”

  “You need my …?” Riley trailed off, shaking his head from side to side. A group of colorful lights was trailing over the wall, and the big band music broke suddenly into a trumpet solo, high and raucous. Everywhere he looked, men were talking and smiling, raising their glasses to one another and nodding. They seemed oblivious to what was going on here, to the madness Akam was speaking. He almost expected, at any moment, to see a squad of CPF officers crash into the bar with their guns drawn.

  He turned back to Akam, and felt himself blanch. In fifteen minutes he was supposed to be meeting Susen, another problem, though it paled in comparison to this. Akam was nodding slowly, his eyes fixed on Riley’s. Riley felt for his glass and raised it to his lips. He swallowed a mouthful, placed it on the table, and wondered if he couldn’t simply get up and leave. He hated the government as much as Akam did, but the resistance?

  “What do you …?” Why did Akam need his help?

  “You’ve been …” Akam lowered his voice. “… cloned.”

  “What?”

  “You’ve been cloned.”

  “Cloned?”

  Akam nodded.

  Riley pictured himself fighting in Asia, or, rather, pictured a mysterious doppelganger, every inch his copy, treading cautiously through some tangled jungle with a machine gun slung over his shoulder. Wasn’t that what the clone program was all about? Soldiers?

  He eyed Akam warily and then leaned backwards. It sounded absurd. “Akam, I’m five foot nine.”

  “I know that, Riley. I know exactly what you look like. I’ve been living with Theo for the past four days.”

  “Theo?”

  “Your brother.”

  “You mean he’s here? In New York?”

  Akam nodded. “At my apartment.”

  Riley shook his head spasmodically. A shiver travelled up his spine. Then someone laughed, a man standing a few feet from the table. He had his head thrown back and his companion, a dark-haired man in a burgundy suit, was gripping his shoulder. The music switched up-tempo, and in response, the crowd of men lifted their voices, fighting to be heard.

  Akam was leaning backwards now. He had a coaster in his hand, and was shredding it nervously.

  Thanks to his father, Riley had secured a position at The Company News last year, the government’s text media outlet here in New York. He was a junior researcher, little more than an office boy. Over the past few months he’d come across the occasional story related to the clone program, but they weren’t ordinarily reported. The public vaguely understood that their DNA was on record, and that people with certain physical attributes were occasionally cloned. It wasn’t something personal, not the sort of information the company would filter back to anyone concerned. It was more or less a military secret, the clones being used in the war in Asia. For many years past, since Riley was a child, this had obviated the necessity of ordinary citizens joining the forces, other than as officers, and the general public seemed satisfied with this.

  Using the clones this way disturbed Riley. But he hadn’t thought on it deeply. The few times he’d turned his mind to the problem, he’d found himself shying away. He didn’t like to think of humans being bred for the sole purpose of killing, but he’d resolved it by more or less supposing that these clones weren’t really human. The few times they were mentioned in newsfeeds, that was the impression you got, that they didn’t think or feel or reason in a human way. Then again, it had never occurred to him that he himself might have been cloned. Why would he be? He was athletic enough, but he wasn’t six foot four and built like a tank. It didn’t make sense. But if it had happened, why the hell would his clone be in New York?

  He leaned forward and lifted his chin, attracting Akam’s attention. “Shouldn’t he be in an installation?”

  Akam sighed. “We got him out.”

  “You …?”

  “We got him out. He was scheduled for termination, but we got him out.”

  “Out of where?”

  “There’s a facility. Upstate. Near Schenectady.”

  Riley nodded, and then continued slowly. “Why would you do that?”

  “He’s a human being, Riley. He’s as human as you or I. He deserves life.” Akam paused. “That’s part of what we do. There’s more than a hundred now, living among us, hidden from the company’s prying eyes.”

  “How are they hidden?”

  “We give them an identity. Fit them into the system. Get their fingerprints on record. Even a clone’s print is unique.”

  “Why do you need me?”

  “He’s your twin brother. That’s the identity we’ve given him.”

  “He’s my … twin … brother.” Riley flopped backwards and shook his head.

  “He’s Theo Matthews.”

  “You know my father works for the company?”

  “I know, Riley. I remember.”

  “Fuck,” Riley said, his voice low.

  “He’s at my apartment, but I can’t keep him there. It’s too small, and I’m on probation. An officer is coming for a routine visit in the morning, but they might come at any time. We thought you could take him.”

  “Take him?”

  “He needs help. He doesn’t understand things. Not the way we live. In a couple months—”

  “A couple months?”

  “Riley, please, this is someone’s life we’re talking about.”

  Riley bit his bottom lip and lowered his eyes. He took a deep breath, his chest lifting, and then he began to shake his head again. From the way Akam was speaking, it sounded as if this … Theo was …?

  “You say he’s just like you or me?”

  “He’s human, Riley. They’ve tried to beat it out of him, but he isn’t stupid. He’s curious. And he’s brave.”

  “Brave?”

  “Aren’t you interested in him?”

  “Sure I’m interested.”

  “But you’re worried about your own safety.”

  “Isn’t everyone?”

  “
I guess, Riley, but that’s no way to live. We’ll never have freedom if people don’t stand up for what is right.”

  “I guess so,” Riley said, but he closed his eyes and sat in darkness for a moment, wishing none of this were real. It was bad enough feeling hunted day in and day out for deviance. But getting involved in this was something else. He thought about his father, and wondered how Akam thought that would work. Was he supposed to tell his father? Tell him he had another son? Hell. An hour ago he’d been at work, thinking all he had to face this evening was Susen, before going home to Creig, and as he thought of Creig, he opened his eyes again. It simply wasn’t possible. “I share with a guy.”

  “Creig?”

  Riley nodded.

  “What does he know about you?”

  “Not much.”

  “Have you told him you’re an only child?”

  “No — at least, I don’t suppose so.” He tried to think, but came up blank. Creig had only moved in a month or so ago. They got on fairly well, but as far as he could remember, they hadn’t spoken of family.

  “So — give him a call. Tell him your brother’s in town.” Akam tapped his teeth, looking markedly more upbeat than when he’d first slid into the booth. “Tell him he’s arrived unexpectedly, from interstate, and that he needs a place to stay. A couple weeks.”

  “A couple weeks?”

  “Well, you can stretch it out later. We’ll move him interstate when he’s ready.”

  “Hell.” He brushed his fingers through his hair. “I can’t call him now.”

  “Go on.”

  “This has to happen tonight, does it?”

  “The probation officer’s coming in the morning.”

  “Christ, Akam, some reintroduction to an old friend.”

  “You know you love me.”

  Riley smiled. Akam smiled in reply and Riley felt some of the old tenderness, their eyes tussling shyly with one another. He thought again of what had happened to Akam, of how he’d been castrated, and felt as though he couldn’t refuse. He could all but picture Akam’s genitals, hidden beneath the table, beneath his trousers, and at the thought of it he swallowed, his stomach tight and empty. He continued staring into Akam’s eyes, but pictured a scalpel, bright lights, then blood, and looked away. It was sickening to think the company would go to those lengths, and the irony was that Akam wasn’t even gay, as Riley was, as he knew he was, even if he was a virgin.