This started as a vague idea for a long-term story. Thoughts would
be welcome, although I fear I didn't do it proper justice.
***
All I wanted was to get married, ok? That’s how it all started.
“You want to get married?” Caroline said, her voice astonished. I
had been the world’s most eligible bachelor for so long that my
staff had grown accustomed to the constant stream of one-night
stands and relationships that anyone with my money and handsome
features can have. “Mr Rich, who do you want to marry?”
Mr Rich wasn’t my name, of course, although I have considered
changing it by deed poll. I wasn’t born a billionaire, after all,
and if I ever had children, I wouldn’t want to lumber them with a
name like Richie Rich. It would have been funny, but…hey, I can be
ruthless at times, but hardly cruel. My real name is Alex
“I want to marry myself,” I said. Caroline stared at me. “I think I
need to talk to Doctor Hamilton.”
Caroline tried to talk me out of it. Caroline is a tall blonde woman
who looks a lot like Reese Witherspoon, but there is no way that she
could be mistaken for a dumb blonde. She had been my personal
assistant – get your minds out of the gutter – for the last ten
years and I trusted her as far as I trusted anyone. I would have had
to share the plan with her, just because I needed her help; I had to
trust that she wouldn’t take it at once to the police. There were
laws against what I was planning.
(Of course, the vast amount of money I paid her every year and the
fact that no CEO would ever hire her again if she betrayed me might
have had something to do with her decision.)
“Sir – Alex – there must be someone out there for you,” she
protested, once I had outlined my plan. There was no reason, I was
sure, why it couldn’t be done – at least, there was no scientific
reason. “What about Jane, or Darla, or even Sabrina?”
“All boring gold-digging tarts,” I said, cheerfully. I had managed
to get both Jane and Sabrina into bed at the same time once,
something that proved that rather than loving me for myself alone,
they wanted my money. “I insist on a true equal.”
Caroline bowed. Many employers would insist that she wore a low-cut
blouse, allowing them to see her fine breasts when she bowed, but I
had merely asked her to wear a conservative business suit. I needed
her to be loyal; pawing at her wouldn’t have helped that, would it?
“I will call Doctor Hamilton to the office,” she said finally. “Are
you sure I can’t talk you out of this?”
I nodded; Caroline bowed again and left, leaving me to think. It had
been years since I managed to get in on the ground floor of the
genetic engineering boom…and that had made me a billionaire. The
people who had been against genetic engineering had been fools –
worse, they’d underestimated the power of human desire. One of my
scientists had come up with a pill that caused a female body to burn
fat much faster than normal…and it was the perfect slimming pill. It
actually worked, for one; every woman wanted one and politicians
found themselves forced into permitting the expansion of the
industry. Years later, with better medicines, improved immune
systems, and even the conquest of AIDS…who had been worried about
genetic engineering again?
But I was alone. I had always been smarter than my contemporaries,
from the children at school to my fellows at university; I had
always been able to see through them like glass. Oh, I wasn’t one of
those geeky bespectacled nerds; my insight into human behaviour
allowed me to lure plenty of girls and even a handful of boys into
my bed, but I was always alone in my head. My mental abilities set
me apart.
Doctor Hamilton, by contrast, was older than me, a grey-haired woman
with glasses and a permanently nervous disposition. I paid her
enough to have a proper makeover, enough for her to end up looking
like Caroline, but instead she was comfortable enough with her looks
to remain the way she was. I found that reassuring in a way.
“Let me get this straight,” she said, after I had finished
explaining. “You want me to grow a female clone of you, right?”
“Yes,” I said. The advances in human cloning and memory transference
– all because of my funding and private interests – made such an
action possible. “You can do it, can’t you, Doctor?”
She stared at me. “Mr Rich” – everyone called me that, except a
handful of people – “there are laws against human cloning, laws that
we cannot break.”
She stood up and paced, revealing her tension. “We can clone
individual body parts, and God knows we do, everything from a new
arm to a new penis,” she said. I smiled; the penis enlargement
program brought in almost as much money as the slimming products.
“Cloning a human body is technically forbidden.”
“Those laws were meant to prevent the creation of an entire human
body for organ mining,” I reminded her. “They don’t apply to what I
want, do they?”
“The letter of the law says that they do,” Doctor Hamilton said. I
scowled. “The second problem is that of transferring all of your
memories to her; you do know that you are very definitely a man,
don’t you?” I looked down automatically, and then looked up. “She is
going to be very confused when she puts her hand between her legs
and instead of a penis finds…”
“She’s going to be me,” I said, dismissing her thoughts. I had coped
with worse in my life. “she can cope…”
“There’s also the danger that your memories might get damaged in the
transfer,” Doctor Hamilton concluded. She went into a long stream of
technobabble while I listened with half an ear. “She will never have
the chance to develop into her own person.”
“But Doctor, I don’t want her to be her own person,” I said. “I want
her to be me, with breasts.”
Caroline looked intrigued and disgusted at the same time. “I don’t
think I can do that,” Doctor Hamilton said. “The moral issues…”
I stood up. I wasn’t that intimidating, not compared to…say, Arnold
Schwarzenegger in his prime, but I possessed more power than even
the former President could dream of possessing. I could break
her…and we both knew it. One day, head of the largest research team
in the world, the next, a penniless pauper down and out on the
streets of New York.
“Doctor, I am not interested in your moral issues,” I said. “I
insist that you begin work at once…”
She wilted. “It will take around six months to force-grow her,” she
said. “Can you wait that long?”
I nodded.
I’m something of a hands-off manager, not least because my company
is so large that any attempt to micro-manage would make it
impossible to keep up with progress on other parts of the company.
These days, I have thousands upon thousands of people, on nine
different worlds, working for me. Some of them don’t know that
they’re working for me – I keep some of my assets hidden, just in
case – while others are proud to work for me. I own enough of the
space program to give me a considerable amount of political power;
normally, I only use it to make life easier for my people.
And so I didn’t supervise Doctor Hamilton all that closely. My
security staff reported, from time to time, that she was working on
her new project, but little else. I don’t hire the staff to watch
all of my staff, just the secure areas to prevent industrial
espionage. One of the more irritating things about the local legal
environment is that proving that something has happened is tricky;
what one man sees, the competition has a good chance of duplicating,
without actually stealing any details from me and mine.
“We finally have some progress,” Doctor Hamilton said, at the end of
nine months. I had been irritated when she had informed me that six
months wasn’t long enough, but I wasn’t willing to take risks with
her. “Do you want to come see her?”
“Of course,” I said. “We’re on our way now.”
Caroline and I took the aircar to the laboratory, placed on
Accession Island, somewhere far from any supervision or civilian
populations. I had bought the island years ago from the British
Government; by law, all genetic research had to be conducted in
isolated locations. It was the final throw of those who hated
engineering; it was paranoid enough to make us all laugh. Sure, some
terrorist could bioengineer a virus, but hey, we had done enough to
boost the human immune system that not even the worst possible virus
could kill more than a handful of people. Half of the ‘lab’ was
nothing more than stores and personal quarters; the quarantine zone
consisted of a handful of bunkers deep underground, safe and secure.
“Welcome to the lab,” Doctor Hamilton said, as she led us into one
of the bunkers. It had been sealed off from even the rest of the
compound, I had heard; Doctor Hamilton had done most of the work
herself, without even a single assistant. “Progress on the project
has been surprisingly good, at least in the first stages of growth,
something remarkable for the future. As you know” – I didn’t –
“force-grown clones can exhibit…flaws in their genetic structure;
half of the task was not to clone someone, but to find a way of
growing her without inflicting serious incurable damage on her.”
I glanced around the lab. “And have you succeeded?”
“Oh yes,” Doctor Hamilton said. She touched a switch. “Behold;
Alexandra.”
A door opened; I stabbed forward, drawn by an impulse I couldn’t
explain. The centre of the room was dominated by a clear plastic
tube, filled with a clear liquid. In the centre of the liquid, a
naked girl floated, her eyes closed against the pressures of the
liquid. Two thin lines were connected into her head; smaller tubes
were connected into her arms, providing substance and medical
support. She was…
I stared. Her face was like mine, only softer, more feminine. I
knew, somehow, that we would share the same eyes. Her body was most
definitely not mannish, with breasts and hips and thighs, but there
was a definite hint of…robustness in her figure. I stared, again and
again, and hardly heard the Doctor’s question.
“Does she please?”
“Yes,” I said. I hadn’t known what love was until I saw her,
floating there; it was like looking at a mirror of myself. “When can
I have her?”
“Physically, she’s around sixteen at the moment,” Doctor Hamilton
said. “We intended to take her out and wake her within the next
week, once we had run through the final tests. You and her are
genetic twins, apart from the sex, so children are out of the
question. It would be more like masturbation than incest, but
frankly…”
“I never intend to share this with the world, Doctor,” I said. I
couldn’t take my eyes off my twin. “Have her brought to me when
she’s ready.”
Caroline and I flew home in silence.
My home was built, years ago, by a millionaire who hadn’t kept
abreast of the very rapid changes in the field of human
accomplishment. It was one of humanity’s major weaknesses, I had
always felt, that humans never prepared for change, the one constant
in the universe. He had lost his money and I had bought his house;
in its vast walls, only myself and a handful of staff lived and
worked. The night that Alexandra came, I had sent away almost all of
the staff; they wouldn’t get to see her until later.
She stepped into my room. In her tube, she had been beautiful;
walking, she was astonishing. It was like looking at a warped mirror
of myself, something very alike and at the same time very different.
She walked like me, talked like me; deep inside, I knew that she was
me. I had been standing; it was a surprise when she flashed me a
challenging smile and took the chair that I always loved.
“Alexandra,” I said. The situation seemed to call for strict
formality. “Welcome to my home.”
She smiled at me. “My home,” she said. There was just the slightest
hint of confusion in her voice. My memories were conflicting with
her obviously subordinate position in the house. “This is my home.”
The first months flew past like a dream. Alexandra…was me; I was
starting to realise that Doctor Hamilton had tried to warn me and I
hadn’t understood. Like me, she loved Lemon Chicken and had it
ordered as often as she could. Like me, she liked to walk and ride
and play chess – do you know, I never managed to beat her, nor did
she beat me. There were times when we felt so close, and times when
she annoyed the hell out of me, such as when she accessed my
computer and spent a night trading stocks and shares on the datanet.
“They’re my stocks and shares,” I snapped, that night. “You had no
right at all to trade them!”
“I’m you, you’re me,” she snapped back. Like me, she never backed
down from an argument. “Look, Alex; I earned thousands of dollars
and thousands more in Euros!”
I had given her an allowance. She found that as irritating as I
would have done, under other circumstances. I had always earned my
own money and God knows, I had done very well. Alexandra thought she
was me; in a very real sense, she was me. Worst of all, she had the
same talents as I had when it came to making money; the tiny amount
she had traded rapidly became a million dollars of her own. I didn’t
understand at the time, but…
Our relationship was changing. Living with Alexandra gave me a sense
of what living with me was like. We were both demanding in the
bedroom and we both liked the same things, but only from the same
point of view. Submission didn’t come easy to either of us; deep
inside, we were the same person. I wondered, after becoming the
loser in a contest to see who were underneath, just where our
relationship was going.
That night, Alexandra didn’t come home.
I spent a few hours enjoying the peace before it dawned on me that
she wasn’t here. I had taken the liberty of implanting a tracking
implant in her body before she was decanted, something that would
let me know where she was, all the time. It had been one of the
handful of devices that I sold to the government; I believe that
they used it for keeping track of wreckers and terrorists. When I
checked, the signal said that she was in the bedroom, but when I
went there, I found nothing. She was gone. I hunted, quickly, for
the tracker and found it on top of our desk.
The phone rang. “Alex, this is Kara,” a female voice said. Kara was
Caroline’s assistant, the Secretary’s Secretary, the woman who
handled tasks when Caroline wasn’t around. “Sir, there’s a major
trade war being mounted on us, and…”
I swore. I hadn’t realised how much I was worried about Alexandra
until Kara butted in. “Kara, is it really that important?” I asked.
I had most of the company’s assets carefully secured to prevent just
such a disaster. “They can’t do more than irritate us, can they?”
“Sir, they have all the knowledge of the company and they have
already taking half of the shares,” Kara protested. “They’re right
on course for a hostile takeover!”
I leapt for the computer and brought up the information – or tried
to. The password had been changed. I felt my blood run cold as I
closed my eyes and picked a second password, gaining access to the
system at last. It didn’t take a genius to know what had happened;
Alexandra had altered the password, but being me, she had picked the
same password I would have done. I was starting to realise, grimly,
that it was Alexandra who had launched the hostile takeover and…
It was disaster. Alexandra could pose as me – hell, she was me – and
had used it to weaken confidence over a period of weeks, before
making major offers to some shareholders that had gained control
over their shares. I didn’t understand, at first, how she had
obtained that much money, before checking some of the secret
accounts; they had been emptied, my fingerprints had been used to
clear the transfers. Alexandra had struck again.
I launched myself into the trade war and tried to save what I could.
Alexandra’s attack had been perfectly planned, as well as I could
have done, unsurprisingly. Entire blocks of shares were being traded
within the Internet, moving onwards within seconds, and thousands of
dirty tricks were being pulled into the datanet. Companies no one
was supposed to know about were being used as weapons, targeting my
companies; the entire system was having a civil war.
It was like fighting myself…
I blocked her thrusts through the datanet, wherever she was, and she
blocked mine. I tried to trace her and failed; she probably knew
where I was already. It didn’t matter; she was tearing me apart…and
then I realised that something else was wrong; Caroline had vanished
as well. I had known, at some level, that she was a lesbian;
Alexandra had somehow seduced her and brought her to work for her,
rather than for me. I could guess Alexandra’s passwords, but
Caroline’s? Not a chance. Undoing the damage was impossible.
So I did the only thing I could. I sued for peace.
Naturally, she had anticipated that as well.
It all came out afterwards; I should have known better than to
expect everyone else to ignore my company tearing itself apart.
Alexandra and I actually cooperated to hide the extent of the
damage, but she was very firmly in control. She was me, after all,
and she hadn’t liked the role I had privately envisaged for her. I
wouldn’t have liked it either.
There’s little more to say. Alexandra runs the company now, with
Caroline as her partner. I’m just…alone.
Back where I started.
But I have a plan…
The End