One of my readers on Facebook asked if I could post a short story. This is one that was never published (and likely won’t be; I don’t imagine I’ll be sending it out after this). It’s one of the few short stories I’ve ever worked on that was intended for teens. Most of my short stories, including the published ones, were all for adults. This isn’t the best story I’ve ever written and not the worst either…(ha, great intro, right?), but I hope you like it. So, without further ado…

 

All of Me

Hey, I’m Annie.

You see that healthy, athletic type over there by the rest of the cheerleaders? Laughing it up and juggling a softball and a field hockey stick on top of her pom poms? That’s me.

About two tables down from her, you’ll see me too. Yeah, the one all in black with the cello, talking with a bunch of other kids in black turtlenecks all pretending to be better at French than they really are. That’s me too.

And, over there, that nerdy looking girl with her hair pulled back in a ponytail, reading Sartre? With that backbreaking stack of books next to her? All alone in a room full of people? That’s also me. Honestly, I don’t know how I manage to read in lunch, with all the noise. I could never do it.

Yeah, that’s all of me. Cici, the buff one. Daria, the wannabe beatnik and Beth…well, let’s just say Beth is Beth. Just call us the archetypes.

Everyone at school, teachers and everybody, think we’re identical quadruplets. Big news. The Wilson High Four. Up until a few days ago, that’s what I thought too. But we’re not. My parents are scientists and they think they’re on to the next big thing. And who better to experiment on than your own family?

See, we’re all clones, just slightly tweaked. One of us is the real kid. The rest of us are really good copies with beefed up left or right brains. It seems their plan is to do a bio-merge at the end of high school and have just one super-kid with all these various talents-smart, artsy, athletic, you name it. Then they want to patent and sell the process.

The problem is, I don’t know which of us is the real kid, the one that’s going to end up the big prizewinner in all of this. I think it’s me.

I hope it’s me.

I had my suspicions that something was weird even before I found their research. Everyone has always said that if we didn’t look alike, no one would even think we’re related. I mean, we don’t even like each other. At all. I’m not talking about normal sibling rivalry; the kind where you hide each other’s favorite shoes or sneak peeks into each other’s diaries. We truly have nothing in common except how we look.

And, as it turns out, our genes.

Maybe it’s that whole opposites attract thing. Maybe we’re actually so alike we can’t see it and that’s why we can’t stand each other. I never thought about it that way before, but we’ve all got a stubborn streak a mile wide, just like mom’s.

But that’s beside the point. I don’t think Mom and Dad have ever even noticed how we just tolerate each other. Even if their research is right, and I have my doubts, and we all wind up in one body, one mind, I think I’d go crazy. I can’t stand being stuck in a car with them, much less one head.

I can’t imagine it. Every night would be a battle. Daria would want to practice her cello or watch artsy foreign films. She’s way too cool for the rest of us. Cici, short for Cecile, would want to go out with her friends or go jogging or something healthy. She eats granola like it was a religion. And Beth? She’d probably want to contemplate her navel or read Nietzsche.

That’s if it even works. I don’t trust this whole bio-merge thing. I mean, it hasn’t been done before, except on some rats and monkeys. And I am no monkey, not even my jock girl self, who can climb like something out of Planet of the Apes.

According to the stuff I found, you take a host body and then merge the cell memories from the other bodies into it. And voila! You’re supposed to wind up with one person who all of a sudden knows how to do all these cool new things that they had no clue how to do before. They’re supposed to have all the donor body’s memories and muscle memories and everything. The whole enchilada.

The thing is, it only works with clones or twins because the host tissue has to be genetically similar to the donor tissue or the whole thing blows up.

I don’t even want to think about that.

So, the donor bodies are basically useless after this whole thing. No more. Non-existent. Just a body-shape lump with no mind and not even any muscle memories. Even if you could somehow reanimate them, you’d have to retrain all the muscles. Mom’s notes say it doesn’t matter, because all the important stuff got merged. It’s all there, inside the host body. The soul remains, more or less, though she wouldn’t use that word. I’m sure there’s some ten-syllable thing for it.

So, they think this is some great thing. They’ve already written out press releases and everything, dated years ago. You can see they’ve been working on this for quite some time.

They’re going to save people all this time, it says. ‘Cause people today, you know, we’re so busy. Especially kids. You can’t fit in all the stuff you’re supposed to do. School, sports, band practice, all that junk. There’s a never-ending stream of it. All the stuff you think you should know, all the stuff you probably really should know and then all the stuff you just want to know.

So this is going to be the magic pill. You don’t have to skip out on anything anymore. Instead, have a clone do it and then just soak it all in with a bio-merge. Don’t want to be an accountant? Try lumberjacking or something stupid like that.

But, since clones age just like normal people do, I think you’d want to start out young. Like they did with us. I must have been cloned when I was just a few days old. That’s the only thing that makes sense. At least, I think it was me. I just don’t know for sure.

I looked up bio-merges on the Internet after I found their research. There wasn’t a lot out there, but I found the studies where they worked on the monkeys. Even found one old magazine article in a scientific journal that mentioned my parent’s names. Very freaky.

They had this one monkey, Gisele, who knew sign language and her twin monkey, Francine, that didn’t. They merged Gisele into Francine and poof! Francine knew sign language. Of course, you can’t ask Francine, “How is Gisele? She in there with you?” or “Feeling okay?”

But, to the scientists, this was a successful experiment. I wonder where Francine-Gisele is today? I’d like to ask that monkey some questions myself. Like, how did it feel?

So, you’re thinking, why would someone do this to their kid? That’s the million-dollar question. Or, if my parents are right and this does work and they do sell it, the billion-dollar question.

You have to know some things about my parents before you understand why they’d do it. When Dad gets a bit tipsy, he’ll start in on how he and Mom were these big time scientists, working under some huge grant in a top-secret lab. How they were the best there is, so far ahead of their time, blah, blah, blah, but nobody appreciated them and now they’re stuck working in some crappy corporate lab making better turkeys with larger breasts so people can have more meat on Thanksgiving.

Mom’s generally trying to shut him up around that time, especially if we happen to have dinner guests. But, before she does, he’ll let slip something about how they could get it all back…if only.

And we’re that ‘if only’ come to life.

It explains a lot, actually. They’ve never been like normal parents, but I’d always figured they were just kooky. Now I know better. Like, when they go to one of Cici’s games, they video it with a running commentary on her performance. They don’t stand up and cheer when she makes a goal; they just record it with clinical detachment. And what other parent would measure their kid’s heart rate and vital signs before and after a game?

It used to tick Cici off, but nothing gets her down for long. When somebody asks her now, she just says “Scientists,” and rolls her eyes back in her head.

It’s not just Cici either. We’ve always felt like we’re being constantly measured and monitored. Now I know we have been. I even found some of the charts, all hidden away in the basement with the rest of their research.

I can tell you what Beth read ten years ago, which is really scary. At eight, she was big on Chaucer and Sylvia Plath. For heaven’s sake, who lets their eight-year-old read Plath anyway? My parents, that’s who. They even quizzed her on it.

And poor Daria had no chance. They were blasting her with everything from Mozart to Metallica from day one. Her first word was “Amadeus.”

They were always giving us stuff before we’d even ask for it, which seemed really cool when you were five but got scarier the older you got. But this all explains how they knew what we wanted-they’d programmed us from the very beginning.

All of which also explains why the basement has always been off limits and locked up. But, they underestimated me.

That’s another reason I think I’m the real kid, the genuine article. I’ve got a mind of my own. I don’t think it even occurred to the rest of them to even wonder what went on down there. They single-mindedly focus on their studies. That’s what their report cards always say, “Very determined!” and “I’ve never seen such focus in a teenager.”

I’m not so focused. I always thought they were better than me somehow, with all their talents. Don’t get me wrong. I’m decent. I get good grades and everything. I’m no slouch. But I don’t have any all-consuming interests like they do, not really. I couldn’t play the violin at three, like Daria. I’m interested in a lot of things and pretty good at some of them, but I’m not an expert like they are. Christ, the English teachers ask Beth to help them out in class.

I’m also more science-oriented, which you’d think, if my parent’s passed on anything, that would be it. That’s where my curiosity comes from. I’ve got that ‘if only’ gene.

But the question is…do I want to be an expert in all those other things? Do I let Mom and Dad go through with it? Do I let Beth and Daria and Cici become part of me?

Okay, so the thought of suddenly being able to run a mile in 5 minutes and being able to see the symbolism in Moby Dick without trying does sound kind of cool. Separate, we’re all relatively normal, but combined we’d be unstoppable. We could be the first woman president. Win the Nobel Prize. Solve world hunger. Cure Cancer. Who knows what we could do?

Ha. If we could work together, that is.

Yeah, that’s what I really want to ask Francine. Or Giselle. Are they really both in there? If so, who’s in charge? Do they take turns? Do they have little mental monkey fights over who holds the banana? Is it a democracy? Or a dictatorship?

Graduation is coming up. Just a week to go. I’ve got to make up my mind soon. I thought about going to the rest of me, and seeing what they think, but I already know what they’d say.

Even though they’re so different, they’re still me. I know what I think and I bet they’d all think the same thing, that they were the one, the real kid. It’s a lot less horrifying if you think about being the one left at the end of the merge. I think they’d all go along with it, anyway. Beth would probably think it was all pretty cool and that she’d gain insight into existentialism or something.

Who else am I going to go to? Who would believe me? I should have made copies of the stuff I found, but I didn’t really have time. There was tons more that I didn’t even get to read, but I definitely got the gist of it. And besides, I was pretty freaked out. I figured I’d find out they were making a bomb maybe, or selling secrets to China or something. No, I’m on my own on this one.

I just wish I knew how much time I have.

I wake up to the sound of my mother’s laughter. I’d know it anywhere. She’s got this very non-scientist hee-haw kind of laugh that you can hear a block away. It’s weird, though. As loud as she is, she sounds like she’s a million miles away. And she doesn’t sound quite right either, like she’s more high-pitched than usual.

I want to look around and see what’s so funny, but I can’t quite see. I feel like my eyes are open, but I’m not really seeing anything solid. I’ve never been a morning person, but it’s like I can’t focus at all. I can see my dad, but it’s like looking through a tunnel. I’m thinking ‘Oh My God, they’ve gone and done it’ when Mom stops laughing long enough to say something.

“You’re not going to believe this,” she says.

“What?” Dad looks halfway scared and halfway pleased, like a cat that ate the pet canary and is waiting for someone to notice.

“Annie found some of our old research in the basement. Remember when we came back and found the door unlocked? She’d been down here.”

Okay, so how in hell did she find out? And why does she think it’s so funny?

“Really?” Dad’s kind of laughing now too. “And what did she think?”

Right now, I think I feel like giving him a good whack, but I can’t quite locate my hands. They probably strapped me down. Shoot, they probably drugged me. You’d have to drug somebody for surgery like this. I just can’t believe they went through with the bio-merge before graduation.

It ticks me off. Not only do they just do the thing without asking, now they’re pretending I’m not even here. But maybe they don’t know I’m awake yet.

I figure I’m lying on one of the operating tables I found in the basement, because of the weird angle. I’m looking up at dad and there’s a light behind his head. That’s probably why I can’t focus on him.

“She only found part of it, mostly the press we’d put together years ago when we first left the lab.”

“Oh, the whole save yourself some time stuff? Learn to play the violin in your clone’s spare time?”

“Yes, all that. And some of the charts we’ve made on them over the years.”

For a woman who yells if you leave a towel on the floor, she seems remarkably unconcerned that I’ve uncovered their deep dark secrets. They probably think they can control me now that we’re all merged, like some kind of pet monkey. Well, they’ve got another think coming.

Which reminds me about Beth, Cici and Daria. I start searching about in my mind for them or for something that would prove they did the bio-merge. It doesn’t take long. I can kind of feel them there, like a burning in my head, if that makes any sense. They feel far away though, and don’t respond when I try for a mental ‘Hey You.’

“So she didn’t find our latest research, then?”

All right, now I’m listening.

“No, and that’s the funny part.”

Yeah, okay, mom. I’m waiting for the punch line. I’m just itching to bust them, but I still can’t move. They must have used some strong drugs on us.

“She thinks…” Mom starts laughing again, so hard she sounds like she’s going to pee her pants. “She thought…she thought that we’d made clones because we were going to make a super-kid like in the press. That we were going to sell that stupid idea to people, so they could be lumberjacks and accountants at the same time.”

What the hell? How does she know about the lumberjack thing? And if that’s not what they were doing, what the heck did they do a bio-merge for?

Dad’s face is convulsed with laughter. “Lumberjacks? That sounds just like Annie.”

“I wish I’d known before we started the bio-merge. I’d love to have talked to her first. She always was my favorite. Our first.”

“Too late now. It looks like our hypothesis with Giselle was correct. The last one in takes over.”

Too late for what? What last one? I’m right here.

I figure I’ve had enough and I try and sit up or move to let them know I’ve heard everything and they are so busted.

“Yes, it’s too bad. I really would have loved to see the look on her face when I told her she was a clone too.”

I stop trying to move.

“That they were all clones, clones of me. You know, we probably could have saved her for later too, as a backup, instead of just using them all at once. But you’re right, it’s too late now.”

I don’t move a muscle. I can’t believe what she’s saying. What is she talking about? Why would she clone herself? What’s too late?

Dad is nodding. “Well, if she’d thought about it, she’d have figured out how hard the logistics of that idea were. It’s going to be much easier to sell the bio-merge process for everlasting youth than the self-improvement angle. People don’t care about being better people, they just want to live forever.”

“We’ve proven both, though.”

Dad is holding up a mirror to me and I see Cici reflected back. I know it’s her because of the little scar on her right cheekbone that she got from playing field hockey in the tenth grade. They must have used her body. It figures, she was the most in shape.

“Like what you see?” he asks.

“Love it,” says Mom and I look in horror as Cici’s mouth forms the words.