(a drabble)
There are no mirrors anymore. I can walk outside, and look out, and I understand why. Every one knows why. It was meant to be a good idea. Backups for people. Well, influential people, people of promise, because of growing costs. No longer would society have to suffer the loss of a great mind or artist. Wait a couple of days and they'd come back. Memories were gone, but the way that they were, was kept intact. Imagine the brain connections and plasticity as a soul if you like, being washed clean of the bias arbitrary experiences set upon them. Imagine Shakespeare being able to write different plays through the ages, having not known any of his previous, or a team of scientists revolutionizing our understanding of the cosmos?
All good on paper, except that I happened. A criminal with ambition. I had infiltrated the plant through social engineering, tracking a sap's movements, before killing him. He was in a low level janitorial position with an access card. You would be surprised how effective a uniform is at deflecting questions. Kill a few more up the chain and hide the bodies to collect cards, trading up. All done very quickly. They weren't military, and I was. If they had better guards, and if the lab wasn't secretive, the law could've done me in, but it didn't.
Get to the machine that made the backups. Again, that's what it was meant for, backups. I started to make backups for myself over that long night in November. The first backup had taken the longest, but I prided myself in being a fast learner. My mind was plastic. Despite being born minutes earlier, he had enough of a base understanding of who he was that I could clue him in on what to do next. The increasing number of me created more of me. These weren't backups, but copies. Before the remaining scientists came in the next morning, sheer numbers killed them.
Those who didn't remain to secure the lab and continue to make more, fanned out from the lab, with a communication network of stolen cell phones and wearing the clothes of the recently dead. Before people could clue in to what was going on, thousands of me had traveled the world as packs, doing whatever we wished. I was on the news on a 24 hour basis. I loved the attention. I loved the fear I inspired by my ruthlessness. I was my own military might.
Then everyone else started to have convulsions. I don't understand why. Though I could pick up on the obvious stuff, biological chemistry continues to be an egghead discipline I know nothing about. All I know is that if you weren't me, you became dead. The formulas might have been unbalanced. Some of me thought hard and said it could be that a transmittable virus was made as a byproduct of the cloning. I don't know. I never will.
My ambition had been so wide, I think it only possible that unique people exist in very remote places, far from my reach. There are still me creating me as I age, though I know it doesn't change that I'm lonely. I somehow survive, taking on the roles I had vacated - farmer, grocer, tailor, so on. Some philosophers, though not good ones. They say I am not any job, nor am I the clothes I slap onto myself. I am not my music, or my art, or the thoughts I think. There is only the history.
There is only me.
