Genesis Alpha

by Rune Michaels

  No. Absolutely not. Not here. Not with Rachel listening.

  “I’m fine.” I gesture toward the door. “I’ll finish up here. You can go take care of Mom.”

  “She’s all right. Diane’s with her,” he says, and doesn’t budge.

  “Let’s go into the house and talk, then,” I say.

  Dad stares down at the kitten and doesn’t move. “I’ve been thinking. It’s probably best if we move away. And until we sell the house, maybe you could stay with your grandparents. A new school, a fresh start.”

  “I’ll be fine. I don’t want to go away.” I walk toward the door. If I leave, Dad will shut up. He won’t say anything about what I am.

  I hope.

  “This is a big story for the media, Josh,” Dad says, just as I push at the door. “Not just the local press. Not just national press. This is international news. Historic news. And if you think the ethical debate over designer babies can be harsh . . .” He puts the kitten down, and I hold my breath, knowing what’s coming. “. . . it’s nothing compared to how people feel about clones.”

  There is no movement in the corner. I must have flinched, because my dad stands up and moves toward me. He puts his hands on my shoulders and makes me look at him. “Some people—ignorant people—are going to think this means you’re another Max. Or that you aren’t a real person. Or even something worse. It’s a brutal world, Josh. I’m so sorry.” Dad looks away. He draws his hand across his eyes.

  When he looks back at me, there are tears in his eyes. “I’m sorry, son. At the time, I didn’t think about you. What this would mean for you. What this would do to you. I thought of you as Max’s cure, not as a real person. But I held you just after you were born, and I stared at you and you looked back at me, and I didn’t remember you were Max’s cure. I didn’t even remember that they needed the cells from your umbilical cord until the doctor reminded me. I forgot about Max.”

  He slides back down on the box and rests his face in his hands. “And there’s my guilt too. After you were born, when I held you, for a moment I forgot about Max.”

  Eventually Dad leaves. I wait until I hear the back door close. The blanket doesn’t move at all. I wait for several minutes, but when nothing happens I grab the edge and yank the blanket off her.

  Rachel stares at me, and she reminds me of two things at once: a cornered animal, frightened out of its skull, and a furious predator, ready to pounce. Nothing moves except her eyes, following my every movement.

  I turn away from her. Finish up the litter boxes in absolute silence and wonder if she’ll ever speak again. Between us, the kittens whine for their mother.

  “A clone,” she says at last, slowly and contemplatively. “You’re Rook’s clone.”

  “I didn’t know. I found out today.”

  “How could you not know? Don’t you feel it?”

  “What should I feel?”

  Rachel shudders. “You’re him. You’re identical. How can you not feel it?”

  “I’m not him.”

  “You look the same. You’re just younger. When you’re his age, you’ll be exactly the same. Your brains must be identical too.”

  “No. That’s not how it works.”

  “Really? Then how does it work?” Rachel asks sardonically.

  “The person you become . . . the brain . . . the mind. It’s a mixture of so many different things . . . it’s not just the genes.”

  “You have the same genes, the same parents, the same home. You must be the same. How didn’t you know? They didn’t want to tell you, did they? They didn’t want you to know you were him. They wanted you to think you were your own person, but you’re not. You can’t be. Can you?” Her voice is smug, excited, but trembling with uncertainty, too, almost like she doesn’t quite believe what she’s saying.

  I think I know how she feels. Like she has found the missing piece of a puzzle, like she’s cramming it into place whether it fits there or not. And I don’t know. I don’t know if it fits. I feel like I’m wrapped up in lies, like a cocoon, and the silver threads are tightening so I can barely breathe.

  “It’s obvious, isn’t it?” Rachel whispers. “Now. Now it’s obvious. Because you look the same. You’re a bit younger, that’s all. And you dress differently. Your hair is different. Why?”

  I don’t say anything. I can’t move.

  “Why? Don’t you want to look like him?”

  She wants me to confirm it, wants me to confirm that I don’t want to be like Max, and then when I’ve made that confession, she’ll tell me it’s no use, I’m just like him and there’s nothing I can do about it.

  Max wasn’t a killer when he was my age. So just because I haven’t done anything yet, that doesn’t mean I’m innocent.

  I’m just elsewhere in time.

  Rachel starts humming. She does that a lot. I never recognize the melody. I think it’s something she makes up. It doesn’t seem to mean anything either. She hums when she’s playing with the cats, and when she’s about to say something nasty, and when she gets that faraway look in her eyes and talks about her sister, and when she rocks backs and forth and carves bloody patterns into her skin.

  “We learned about cloning in school,” Rachel says. “They made you from him, didn’t they? They took one of his cells, and they actually used it to create a copy of Rook. You’re the copy. Correct?”

  I try to ignore her.

  “So you’re like an extension of him. A body part, almost. His cell, instead of becoming a part of his liver or his ear or something, became you.”

  “Shut up.”

  “Why? It’s the truth, isn’t it?”

  Rachel wants to hurt me. And I can’t help feeling I deserve it. Max deserves to be hurt, but I don’t think Rachel’s words would hurt him. They do hurt me, though. That’s probably a good thing.

  “Only you accidentally got your own brain, too,” Rachel continues mercilessly. “You didn’t only provide him with those healing cells, you accidentally became your own person, with your own soul and everything. Or is it your own?”

  Is it? Or am I Max?

  Rachel has the knife in her hand. I fumble in my pockets, sure I’d left it there, but come up empty. She has stolen her knife back and is making tiny cuts to the back of her hand. Barely drawing blood. I lean over and snatch the knife from her. Close it. Put it in my pocket.

  She tosses her hair. “Fine. More fingerprints. More of my blood on your hands. You’re digging your own grave.” She grins wider. “Or should I say, building your own electric chair? Mixing your own lethal injection?”

  “Shut up.”

  She does. She lies there on the mattress, staring up, and doesn’t say a thing. Neither do I.

  Rachel’s shoulders move, tremble as she draws in a breath. “If you could change the past, what’s the one thing you would change?”

  Would I cancel my birth? I like life. I want to be alive. Would it be possible for me to be alive, but for Karen not to have died?

  “I’d want my brother not to be a killer,” I say at last.

  “No. It has to be something you could have changed. Something you could have done. Something that’s in your power.”

  I search through all the things I’d like to change, but none of it was in my power. There’s nothing I could have done to change what Max did.

  “If I’d known Rook would kill Karen, I would have done something,” Rachel says. “But I didn’t know. I suspected he was bad news. But I didn’t know. So I didn’t do anything. But I still feel guilty. Because I suspected. It should have been enough.”

  She’s pulling at her skin with her nails now. The backs of her hands are a mess. I stand up. I fling myself on the mattress next to her, cornering her off. She sucks in a breath, recoils.

  I dig into my pocket for the knife, pull at the different tools until the right one emerges. Rachel sees the flash of metal in my hand. Her breath speeds up. I grab her wrist. Feel the fragile bones through her sweater, hold tight, even though
she whimpers and scrambles backward until her back pushes into the corner. She’s panting now, she’s terrified, but I don’t care, for a moment I even like it that she’s scared. She gasps as I bring the knife to her hand, exhales sharply when I start cutting.

  Her fingernails. They were once covered with pale pink polish, but most of it is gone. I cut them short, even shorter than mine.

  “What are you doing?” Rachel asks when the third nail has been clipped, when it’s obvious what I’m doing, but she doesn’t yank her hand away, and I keep going. I cut all the nails, fling her hand away, and grab her other wrist.

  Rachel stares at her hands when I’m done. Holds them out like girls do when they’re admiring their nails. “This won’t change anything, you know,” she says conversationally. She flexes her hands, traces a finger over the nails on her right hand. “I can still use a knife. Or a rusty nail from the walls here. A shard of glass. I can use anything.”

  “Why do you do it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Karen didn’t cut herself.”

  “No. She didn’t have to. Rook did it for her.”

  Before I can say anything, the door slams open. A figure shuffles in, brushing the snow off his hair. “Your dad told me you’d be here. . . . Man, do you know there was a helicopter circling your—”

  Frankie stops short. He stares at us, his hand still in his hair. Melted snow leaks down into his sleeve as he stands there, and time slows down.

  He sees Rachel. That’s the first thing I think. In a way I’m relieved. She can’t hide here anymore after Frankie knows she’s here. Frankie’s not exactly good at keeping secrets.

  But then I see the look on his face. I see him recognize Rachel. I see him turn his head to me, look at the knife I’m still holding in my hand. I see his eyes widen. Then he twirls back. Droplets of melted snow shoot off him and hit me in the face. The door slams shut behind him.

  I hear him scream for help.

  And Rachel starts laughing.

  Rachel’s still laughing when she grabs my arm, pulls me out of the shed. “Come on!” she says, running, her hand tight around mine. She’s heading toward the forest that hugs our backyard, and we run together, like a three-legged race. She’s holding on to my hand, nothing else, yet I feel like we’re bound together, like I can’t help but run with her.

  It’s stupid. It’s so stupid. The last thing I should be doing now is running away. But I allow her to drag me into the forest, we’re running in random twists and turns between the silent trees. I’m only wearing shoes, not boots, and my feet quickly get soaked from running in the snow. It’s quiet in here, all I hear is our harsh breathing and our feet hitting the ground. Quiet and white. The branches are heavy with snow, and there’s still some coming down, but the weather has been getting warmer, so everywhere water drips from above, almost like rain. It will be easy to track us, I think, looking back at the trail we leave.

  A phone rings. The cheery tune doesn’t belong here, but I recognize it. Mine. I dig my phone out of my pocket, look at the display. Dad. I answer.

  Rachel stops. She leans back against a tree and looks at me, her thumbnail in her mouth.

  “Josh?” Dad’s voice is anxious. “What’s going on?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Frankie told us there was a girl with you out in the shed.”

  “So?”

  “Nothing. It’s okay. You can have friends over, you know that. But . . . he thinks . . . Frankie thinks it’s the missing Crosse girl. Karen Crosse’s sister.”

  I look at Rachel, and she stares back at me. “Yes. He’s right.”

  Dad hesitates. Frankie says you had a knife. I know that’s what he thinking. But he doesn’t say it.

  “Where are you? Why did you run off? Is the girl still with you?”

  “Yes, she’s here. Her name is Rachel.”

  “Put her on the phone, please. I’d like to talk to her.”

  I clench my hand around the phone until the plastic creaks. “Why? To ask if I’m holding her captive? To check if I’ve cut her face yet? To see if she’s still alive?”

  “Josh. Don’t do this. Frankie has already called the police. I can hear the sirens.”

  “Rachel is here. She’s fine. I’m taking her home.”

  I hang up and turn the phone off. Rachel gnaws on her nail, looks at me skeptically. “You’re taking me home? You and what army?”

  “Why did you drag me out here?”

  She shrugs. Clenches her fists, pulls her arms up, so her sleeves hang empty. “I don’t know. I just wanted . . . I didn’t want to wait there. For people to barge in. Police and stuff. My parents. I’m not . . . ready. I needed to think.”

  “You want to get me in trouble,” I growl at her. “You want to show them I’m like Max.”

  “Are you?”

  There’s a burning sensation in my throat, tickling my nose. I won’t cry in front of Rachel. I scoop some snow off the ground and spend several seconds sculpting a perfect snowball. I stretch my arm back and throw it with all my force. It splatters against the tree trunk three feet above Rachel’s head and disintegrates. Snow rains down on her, but she doesn’t seem to notice. She doesn’t notice the hard snowball hurled in her direction, the tree shaking from the impact, the fragments plunging down on her head. She just stands there, looking small, and waits for my answer.

  “Yes,” I say. “I’m a lot like him. And it scares me. I’m scared . . .” I bite my lip and can’t believe I said that. Rachel has enough ammunition without me handing her another crate of grenades.

  Rachel’s hair is windblown and her cheeks red from our run. She looks different outside. More like a normal person. “He’s not,” she says slowly, like she’s still thinking her words through while she speaks.

  “He’s not what?”

  “He’s not scared to be what he is. He wants to be that way. Doesn’t he?”

  I see Max’s face. No guilt, no regret. Only annoyance and anger. Frustration—and fear for his own life. “Yeah. I guess. He doesn’t care what he did. He just regrets that he got caught. He feels sorry for himself, not for anyone else. He doesn’t feel sorry for Karen. Or for . . .” I stop, because self-pity is pathetic.

  “You?”

  “Come on. Let’s go. I’ll take you home.”

  Rachel doesn’t budge. “What’s going to happen to us?” she asks. “To you? What happens to clones of killers?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Will you move away? Change your name?”

  “Maybe.”

  Rachel nods. “That might be a good idea. Maybe. But maybe not. You’d always have something to hide. You’d go to college and graduate and get a job. You’d meet a girl and get married and have kids, and have this whole fantastic life. Then one day you’d wake up to the same headline, and you’d lose everything. It’s better, isn’t it, that people know up front?”

  “I guess. Maybe.”

  “You’re not that much like him, you know.”

  I’m ice inside. But a little sliver thaws, jolting my heart, and I feel it beating for the first time in ages. Still I shrug, because I don’t trust Rachel. She may be taunting me. Setting me up. Patting my cheek before slashing it with a knife.

  “He’ll haunt you forever,” Rachel says. “Won’t he?”

  “Yeah.”

  She sighs. Leans back against the tree, then slides down to sit there in the snow, looks up at the winter sky through the crown of naked branches. “Me too. I don’t even want him dead. I’m scared. I’m scared he’ll haunt me.” Her lips tremble. “Isn’t it silly? I don’t believe in ghosts, but I want him there, locked away, not dead so that his spirit can pass through the prison walls. I can’t sleep when I think about him being a ghost.”

  If I don’t get you in this life, I will in the next.

  “I know.”

  “What if they could give Rook a soul transfusion?” Rachel asks. “If they could kill all the evil in him, just like they
killed the cancer, and replace it with good? Would you give him a part of your soul?”

  “There is no such thing as a soul transfusion.”

  “If there was. If his evil were a cancer of his soul, and he needed a new one. Would you give him a part of yours?”

  “How would my soul help, if it’s just like his?” I growl.

  “Have you ever killed someone?”

  “Don’t be stupid.”

  “Have you?”

  “No!”

  “Not even in a computer game?”

  “Of course. You know that. You play too. I’ve killed inside a computer game a million times. That doesn’t count.”

  “Why not?”

  I look up and sigh. “Because it’s a game. They aren’t real people. They were programmed to be killed. They don’t have a soul or a mind or feelings or anything. And they re-spawn. They don’t drop down and are dead forever.”

  “Maybe it’s all the same to Rook. Computer creatures and real people, he doesn’t think there is a difference.”

  “I don’t know.”

  If we don’t have free will, Max isn’t evil. It isn’t his fault. It’s just the way he was made.

  But then I would be the same. Wouldn’t I?

  There has to be an explanation, a reason, an answer. Everybody keeps asking, but no one is answering. Not really.

  What if I’d been in Max’s place, and he in mine? Would I be the killer then?

  There is no answer. No satisfactory solution.

  I want to believe in free will. I want to believe Max chose to do what he did. I want to believe that he chose to ruin lives—including his own. But why would he choose something like that?

  Why did he do it? Because he wanted to?

  Why? Because he had to?

  Why? Because . . .

  It scares me that I can’t get to the end of “why.” It scares me because it means there isn’t an answer to “why not,” either—no guarantee that I’m not like Max. No guarantee, except that I know now what people can do, what people like Max can do, what people like me can do. At least that much I’ve learned from Max.