Damned Lies!

by Dennis Liggio

  “Yeah, well, in this case, the failure of that theory is fucking up my life. I wouldn't need a death ray if the clone had simply dissolved into nothingness.”

  “That depends where it would have dissolved,” he said. “Depending who was watching, it could have created more problems.”

  “I still partially blame you for this,” I said.

  “Let’s talk about solutions then,” he said. “I’m thinking that you could use my dis-integration gun.”

  “A disintegration gun? Now we’re talking!”

  “No, no, don’t think of it as a disintegration gun. That’s the wrong idea. I blame television and movies. They set all the wrong expectations about scientific weaponry. It's not at all like that. You see movies, you see someone instantly disintegrated into a pile of dust. I know you have seen those movies, so you have a natural excitement to use a gun like that. But that’s not what this is. If you expect the movie, you're going to be disappointed.”

  “But you said it was a disintegration gun.”

  “No,” he said. “I said it was a dis-integration gun. It removes the integration of the various bonds in objects.”

  I raised my eyebrow. "But that sounds exactly like what I was thinking of when you said disintegration gun."

  “Not quite. If you used this gun, you'd see the difference. The key is that the effect does not occur instantaneously or homogenously. If you used it on your clone, for example, it would start the dis-integration process. He would start to dissolve in a way not dissimilar to what I theorized would happen to him. It wouldn't happen instantly, it would simply start the dis-integration process."

  “How long would it take?”

  “Oh, that’s a good question,” said Victor. He scratched his neck. “This would be the first time it would be tested on human flesh, so I don’t have any empirical data.”

  I’m not sure why I was comforted by the fact that it had never been used on human flesh. He rummaged through drawers until he found the gun, handing it to me. I looked it over, my eyebrow still raised. Did you ever have one of those Buck Rogers ray guns as a kid that you got from the flea market? The type where you could pull the trigger and harmless sparks would shoot out? This was a pristine replica of that, down to the retrofuturist ribbed circular dishes on the barrel, the bright red plastic, the yellow lightning bolt decals.

  “What the hell is this?” I said, hefting it in my hand. It had barely any weight, almost exactly the same as a regular plastic gun.

  “The dis-integration gun,” he said simply.

  I looked at him for a moment. Did he think I was insane, or was he the one that was insane?

  “This is clearly a toy,” I said.

  “It only looks like a toy,” he said. “You think I’m just swimming in gun frames here? The average gun frame is a heavy piece of metal and not cheap. I’m in the 10th grade. I can’t easily get gun parts. Sure, I know a guy, and he could probably get me them, but they're still pricey and the margin I might have on them with repeat business is pretty bad. I had all the functional parts for the guts of this dis-integration gun. So I used my ingenuity and repurposed what I had, in this case this old toy. I pulled out the sparking elements and retrofitted it with my own parts, and voila! Dis-integration gun.”

  “You’re not just fucking with me?” I said.

  “Here,” he said, grabbing the gun from me. “What to use it on?” He began looking around his basement lab for something to shoot. “That? No, no, no, I need that. And I do need that. This could go, but the parts would be very useful if I built the… But what if?” He turned to me. “One moment.” He walked upstairs and returned a minute later with a red vase.

  “Isn’t that your mother’s vase?” I said.

  “It’s fine. I’ll say the dog knocked it over.”

  “You don’t have a dog,” I said awkwardly.

  “We don’t have a dog anymore,” he said.

  I dropped that thread of conversation. Some subjects are better left unexplored with Victor.

  He placed the vase on a table covered with clear plastic and then he fiddled with some knobs on the side of the gun.

  “What do those knobs do?” I asked.

  “You should never touch them,” he said.

  “But what do they do? What if I accidentally move one?”

  “Never touch them,” he said icily.

  As he worked the knobs, I decided to ask an idle question.

  “So, Victor, uh, just out of intellectual curiosity. Like, if for someone reason I wanted to, would it be possible to say, umm, well, combine my clone and I, so that we’d be one entity and share the memories and experience of both?”

  He looked up from what he was doing strangely. “Theoretically, it would be possible. I actually have some blueprints for some prototype machines that would do similar things. Not exactly what you need, but precursors. Once tested, I probably would have the data to design a machine that would do what you asked; assuming my current inventions worked within expected parameters, of course. But it wouldn't be a complete merge; that adds an additional operational problem that could be unsolvable. One clone would have both experiences, and the other would be left over. Mass is conserved, so you could have one spare clone. Or, I guess, you could put the merged memories in both clones. Theoretically possible.”

  “So they would not require the sacrifices of human souls or cause the subject to become an abomination against man and nature?” I joked.

  “Those are within acceptable parameters if the memories were transferred, so maybe,” he said without even a hint of humor.

  “Okay, ready,” he said. He aimed the gun at the vase and pulled the trigger. A thick green beam of light streamed out and touched the vase. The beam stayed active, continually streaming from the gun to the vase.

  “See what I mean?” he said. “I can have this beam out as long as I hold the trigger. If it were just there for a single second, that would be completely unimpressive. But a ray can be out for a while. A good death ray would fire for as long as you desired. Beams are so much more limited.”

  “How long does it need to touch the target for?” I asked.

  “Oh, just a single second.”

  He let go of the trigger and the beam died. We both watched the vase intently, but it was another five seconds before anything noticeable occurred. He said it would dissolve, and that was true, but also false. Parts of it started to dissolve, like it was melting. But other parts of it fell like the vase had been shattered. Those pieces fell to the table where they then started to dissolve. All in all, the process took two minutes before there was just a red steaming puddle on the table.

  “A person is obviously going to be more complex than a vase and take longer,” he said.

  I stared at the red puddle, imagining my clone as that pile of goop instead. “That’ll work,” I said, lost in thought. “That’ll work.” I nodded. This would be how I took my revenge. And there'd be nothing leftover to cause a problem. Nothing recognizable, at least.

  I snapped out of my revelry and took the gun from Victor. “Now to call my clone and setup the trap.”

  “Are you going to cover his large bill once he’s dead?” asked Victor. "I have research to cover."

  I ignored him and dialed my home number. One of my brothers answered. I thought it would be nostalgic hearing a familiar voice, but at the moment my murderous intentions focused my mind. I disguised my voice and I asked for myself. In a few moments my clone was on the phone.

  “It’s me,” I said, reverting to my real voice. “I know our last conversation ended in an unpleasant fight, but I’ve had time to think about it and I have reconsidered.” I looked at the dis-integration gun in my hand, turning it over and staring at where the curved red plastic picked up the light. “Yes I’d like you to meet me somewhere, some neutral ground. We can discuss your idea of combining our memories. I think it could be a win-win situation. Oh, great! Here’s where I had in mind…”

  The trap was s
et.

  It's a Trap!

  August, 1994 - The Circle Line, New York

  The Circle Line is a ferry that operates out of South Street Seaport in Manhattan. Long time New Yorkers will tell you how it is the main way to get to Liberty Island and the Statue of Liberty. Long time New Yorkers will also likely tell you that they’ve never actually been on it or to see the Statue of Liberty unless it was a school trip. You’d be amazed at how many of the touristy things that locals have never done. Empire State building? Nope. Statue of Liberty? Nope. Carnegie Hall? Nope, not even with practice.

  I had arranged for my clone to meet me at the front of the ship - the bow of the ship if we wanted to get all nautical. The deck of a Circle Line ship has two tiers and is fully enclosed, except for the front of the ship, which is open to the air and the elements. At the beginning of the voyage, there are always kids up front wanting to see the water and feel the spray, but after a few minutes of full speed, they realize the spray is really wet and it’s very cold up there due to the wind. So once the voyage gets going, this is the most empty part of the ship as people leave the front for more comfortable parts of the ferry. That was the very reason I picked the location: privacy.

  Midday on a week day assured less people on the ship, and as luck would have it, there was no school field trip. There were still some people on the Circle Line, but not enough to compromise the privacy of the meeting. I was preoccupied with the trap I would need to spring, so I paid little attention to the other passengers. I hoped they were returning the favor and paying little attention to me. I was still dripping wet from setting up Plan B. I covered that up by wearing a jacket. I hoped that didn't make me suspicious. Hopefully it made me look prepared for the spray in the front of the ship.

  The boat set out slowly. I leaned against the side, looking out at the water. It hadn’t started getting choppy yet, but it would soon. My clone had agreed to meet after the trip had started. I wanted it to be neutral ground. Neutral ground meant no trickery… other than the trickery I had planned, of course. But it limited his own trickery, since the ferry was a relatively closed system between destinations. No getting on or off while it was moving, except by diving into the very cold water.

  “Hey,” said my clone behind me.

  I turned around. “Hello,” I said.

  “You wanted to talk,” he said, “so here I am. Talk.”

  I took a deep breath. “Look, I know we didn’t get off on the right foot last time. I was angry. I'm sure you can understand that. But after I calmed down, I did some thinking about your proposition. You said Victor might be able to merge us together. I do think there are some merits to merging ourselves together, but also some possible drawbacks.” I paused. “Assuming it works.”

  "True," he said, "but think about it. One body with multiple memories. We'd be like some super being."

  I noticed he was still going with the idea or lie that there'd be one body left. What about the other person? But I let it go for the moment.

  "There's only a few months of differing memories between the two of us," I said. "That'd be interesting, but I think that alone would not make us superhuman."

  "Ah yes," he said strangely, "you're right. Only two sets of memories for a few months wouldn't be extraordinary."

  “But my concern is how it works. Is it a memory transfer, or would our bodies be merging?”

  He pursed his lips. “I’m not sure exactly, we’d have to ask Victor, but –“

  “I was thinking that if it’s a memory transfer, that leaves someone as the odd man out in the cold. Someone gets all the memories, and the other one has only their own. Or has none, if that's how things work. That doesn't sound fair."

  "But that's not how I expect it to work," he said. "I think merging-"

  "Sure, I thought about merging the bodies into one too," I said, knowing that Victor said that was unlikely, which my clone must have also heard from him. "Neither of us knows science really well, but that still sounds farfetched. I mean, doesn't physics say that's impossible? There's that whole conservation of matter thing, so taking twice the amount of matter and merging it into one body seems like something would be left over."

  “But it’s Victor!" said my clone. "Of course you’ve seen things he’s made that don’t quite abide by the laws of physics! One could argue that we don't even abide by the laws of physics. He breaks scientific law with his crazy inventions weekly.”

  "True, he does," I said, pulling out the dis-integration gun. "With things like this."

  I never expected to talk things out. Meeting was a ruse. It was always my intention to kill him.

  He put his hands up. "Whoa, slow down. Be calm. I thought we were just talking, right? We're not fighting. I mean, there could be a solution to this that you don't need to..."

  "No, I've been thinking about this," I said, "and I'm not seeing a lot of solutions. And I mean good solid solutions. Ones that don't require immense trust on my end and not getting screwed by you. I can't take risks on this. I can't. I can't be left out in the cold on this. This was my life for... well, my whole life. I can't lose that. Not to you, not to a merged body, not to anyone. This life is everything that I am. I can't risk being the cast off body, donating memory so that someone else can live. I believe we are more than our memories."

  “I understand that you’re scared of that,” he said. “I am too, but I trust that Victor can find a solution…”

  I laughed. “You know Victor as well as I do. Can you honestly tell me that he wouldn’t find it a completely acceptable solution to make a third clone that has both our memories and ditch both of us? I gotta wonder if that actually would be easier, just creating a third mind with all memories than trying to insert memories into our minds. And if that happens, well, then we're both screwed."

  He was silent, but I knew by his face that this idea bothered him.

  “You know that I'm right,” I said. “If that was the best solution, he’d do that. The only questionable part would be if he told us about it. Maybe he wouldn’t and once we were under anesthetic, he'd wipe our memories. Then he'd have two mindless research subjects. Or maybe he'd just pay someone to dump the bodies. He says he knows a guy.”

  “Look, I know you’re paranoid about all this. I am too. I’m you. I’m just a few months different from you. But I am you. I understand because I've thought it too.”

  “True,” I said, steadying my aim with the gun. “But it feels like there’s only room in this world for just one of me. And if I have that thought, I know you have that thought too. You might decide that you want to wipe me away so you’re the only one. I just want to be the one to do it first, before you come after me with some other invention of Victor’s.”

  “I would never do that,” he said. “I’m committed to a pro-clone stance.”

  “Of course, because you are one,” I said.

  “Have you ever… have you ever thought of the positive aspects of having access to a cloning machine?” he said nervously.

  I did not answer immediately. I noticed that a small group of passengers had formed at the doors. I wish I had just shot him quickly. Holding the gun was attracting attention, even if it was a toy gun. I'm not sure if they thought it was dangerous by my clone's reaction, or if they maybe thought we were filming a movie. I didn’t hear them saying anything, but the ship's engines were loud and I couldn't turn to examine their faces in the poor light. That would allow my clone an opportunity I did not want him to have.

  My clone noticed my moment of uncertainty and tried to edge away. I immediately snapped my attention back to him and kept the gun on him.

  "Nice try," I said. "Nobody's going to help you."

  He swallowed noticeably then took a deep breath. "So how much charge do you have in that gun? Victor's prototypes are notoriously bad about draining batteries. But of course you know that already."

  "I have no idea," I said. "But I know I have enough to use on you. Just one shot. How could I miss right now? I h
ave enough."

  "True," he said, then smiled weakly. "But that won't solve your problem. Do you have enough... for them?" He waved at the people around us.

  "I have no quarrel with them," I said.

  "Do you?" he said. "Take a look," he said, waving his arms.

  The other passengers stepped forward into the light. At first the crowd worried me, thinking my clone had assembled a gang. But then I looked closely at them. I registered shock and didn't believe it was true. Next I was torn between confusion and rage.

  I turned back to my clone who had lowered his arms and now smiled at my confusion. He tried to step forward, but I pointed the gun at him and waved him back. I was confused, but not enough for him to grab the gun out of my hand. I looked back at the passengers.

  "Are you kidding me?" I asked him.

  Every passenger on the ship was a clone of me.

  They wore disguises to throw me off. Some dyed their hair, some had fake mustaches. A few were in drag. But once I examined them all, they were unmistakably me. Some smiled and removed their wigs or hats.

  "What the hell is this?" I said. The clones were walking forward to join our conversation.

  "Well," started the clone in front of me that I had been talking to, I guess now the First Clone. "You know how they say 'Great minds think alike'? Well, that's even more true with clones. We are you, you are us. Whether you're the clone or I am, we're the same. We created a clone to do our less desirable work for the summer so you could go on an adventure, right? Well, unsurprisingly, I had the exact same idea. When I realized there was more than just my job that I didn't want to, I made a second clone. To outsource my life. I had to pay Victor from our savings, but he made a clone of me. He already had all the equipment for it."

  “But I wasn’t happy about working the job either,” said the clone next to him. “So I also went to Victor.”

  “As did I,” said another clone.

  “And me.”