by Miles Hurt
I coughed. The clones looked at me.
'We could get drunk again,' I said, fetching up the bottle.
'That should take the edge off,' about three of my clones said simultaneously. We all laughed at that, and things began to look a bit brighter.
We cleared out the glasses drawer and poured the moonshine. Standing in a circle around the coffee table, we raised our glasses.
'Here's to good company,' we all said together, clinking glasses and downing our drinks. After some wincing, eye-watering and pounding of chests, we had another shot.
Then another.
And then another.
I said goodbye to my old friend Hangover, and hello to my new friend Drunk-In-The-Morning.
'Okay,' I said with a bleary smile. 'Hangover solved. Now for problem number two. We're all naked.'
'Why is that problem number two?' asked two clones at once. We were all so close to the same point of origin that we were continuing to think like an individual, our gestures and words echoing.
'Yeah,' said another, lifting his naked backside against my windowsill, giving us all a good look at the giblets in the process. 'Shouldn't problem number two be to work out what's happened to us?'
'Exactly,' said a fourth. 'Is this really happening? Or did someone slip something into our grog last night?'
'And did it only happen to us?' said another.
'And will it last?' said another.
I was beginning to get sick of the sound of my own voice. I never realised how uncertain I sounded, how whiney.
'I'm sure we'll get to that,' I replied. 'But I for one would like to consider this quandary when clothed. Or more specifically,' I gestured to the collection of pale, flabby sixty-three-year-old bodies around me, 'with all of you clothed.'
'Fair point,' the windowsill-sitter said. 'Let's get dressed.'
'But that's the problem,' I said. 'We don't have ten sets of clothes. We'd be lucky to have three.'
'Who gets what?' four of me asked.
'There's no fair way to decide,' I said. 'But I should get our blue three-piece pinstripe suit with shirt, tie, socks and shoes.'
'Why?' the clone to my left said.
'Because I'm the original, and you are all clones.'
'What?!' said all nine of them together. 'I'm the original!'
I blinked. I hadn't considered that. Could it be that I was a copy of the original Pops Allsop? Complete with his personality and a set of his memories? I refused to believe it.
'No,' I said firmly, as if trying to convince myself. 'I'm Pops Allsop.'
'No,' they all said. 'I am!'
We all pressed our fingers to our temples.
'This is a nightmare,' we said.
We grabbed some forks from a drawer, bent a tine of one of them, and put them in a bucket. We used the forks to draw lots for our clothes. The mangy pile on the floor of the lounge room wouldn't earn two bucks at a thrift shop, and wasn't going to stretch far between ten of us. We took turns drawing lots. Item by item, if you drew out the bent fork you got the garment.
It was tense. Modesty was on the line.
Interestingly, as the ten of us began to win pieces from the pile, the clothing helped to mark us off as individuals.
I got a pair of pants, a sock, and a black turtleneck left over from my jazz bar days. The turtleneck was woefully out of fashion, but I'd never been able to part with it. Not a bad score, under the circumstances. Underwear would be nice, but one of my clones got nothing more than a bowler hat.
'This isn't fair,' the guy with the bowler hat said.
I took pity on him. I gave him the sock.
'Right,' said the Me wearing our best outfit, the three piece pinstripe suit. 'We've gotten half-drunk and put on some duds. A productive morning. Are we ready to face the day?'
I looked around the crowded lounge room. We were an unimpressive lot. I saw the form of Pops Allsop, reflected before me as though in a hall of mirrors. White-haired, thin, hunched. In need of a decent feed and a shower. It struck me what a marvel it was that this creature had managed to survive for so long. I wasn't sure if having more of me around was going to be a benefit, or if it would make things harder.
An odd buzzing sound was coming from the street outside.
The clone sitting at the window, wearing the colourful knee-length poncho we wore to poker nights, cracked the blind and looked out.
'Uh oh,' Pops Poncho said. 'It's not just us.'
We all crowded to the window.
The street below was teeming. Rambunculans spilled out of buildings in packs. Individuals in groups of ten. Couples of twenty. Whole families of fifty, sixty people, the same gaggle of children repeated, straggled out behind the bemused score that was their parents. All up and down the street, people were looking from their windows like us, climbing onto balconies, lining the rooftops, in clusters of clones.
Something, Sod knew what, had increased the population of Rambunculous tenfold overnight.
I felt very claustrophobic.
'As far as apocalypses go,' said Pops Poncho, 'this is one of the weirder ones I've seen.'
'Okay,' I said, turning away from the window. 'We need to organise. Survival stakes. Speaking of which, who else is hungry?'
'I could murder a curry,' said Pops Bowler Hat.
'What about fish and chips?' said Pops Raincoat. 'Maybe all of the blue grenadier have multiplied as well.'
'Focus!' said Pops Rainbow Suspenders. 'It's not going to be that easy. If this has happened to everyone, the population will have...'
I knew he wanted to say decupled. Was it a word?
'Either way,' said Pops Three Piece Pinstripe, 'It's going to be a mad scramble out there in about five minutes. Let's call this base camp and mobilise.'
That was more like it. My survival skills, honed over six decades of sequential and sometimes concurrent catastrophes kicked in.
'Inventory,' said Pops Poncho.
Without a word needing to be said, we moved the coffee table, rolled back the tatty red rug, and cracked open the trapdoor that I (we?) hid my (our?) emergency stash in. We hauled out the heavy metal box and flipped the lid.
The Me wearing the t-shirt with a picture of Nog Shoth B'Zoth on it tapped at the contents with a pencil.
'Ninety cans baked beans, eleven packets dehydrated mash, thirty cans spam, forty litres water, first aid kit with empty band-aid box and expired antihistamine tablets, three pouches of Elk Full Aroma pipe tobacco, and a copy of Cootie Bunsen's autobiography A Dose of Cooties.'
'Enough food to last about three months,' said Pops Fedora.
'Or in this case,' said Pops Raincoat, counting on his fingers, 'nine days.'
I was impressed with Raincoat's quick thinking.
'So lying low is out of the question,' said Pops Mustard Jacket.
'Not necessarily,' I said, making a mental note that mustard did not work with my eye colour. 'Everyone else will run out of stuff ten times faster than usual.'
'Which means that three months of normal apocalypse time will go by in... nine days?' said Pops Plumber's Overalls.
I nodded. 'This'll blow over in no time. We'll lay low until the looting subsides, and let the hot-heads take each other out.'
'Society will collapse,' said Pops Rainbow Suspenders.
'Survival cliques will form,' said Pops Nog Shoth B'Zoth T-Shirt.
'A couple of strong men will take control again.'
'And then we can re-emerge when things are on an even keel.'
'Same as usual.'
'So, what's the plan?'
We all looked at the pile of food in the bug out box. Unappetising, sure, but a better alternative to mixing it with the masses.
'Let's sit on our arses and wait,' we said as one.
In fact, with enough moonshine and tobacco to go around, we all agreed that this would be the best apocalypse ever. Who better to spend it with than yourself, right?
We didn't last a day.
When y
ou're inside your own body, you can convince yourself that you’re a swell guy, fun to be around. Someone who gives off a good energy, who isn't annoying in the slightest.
When you're confronted with nine versions of yourself, packed in close proximity, this self-delusion is hard to maintain. The proof is all around you. Mannerisms you never realised you had become incredibly annoying. A gesture your clones won't stop doing eats at your patience. Turns of phrase you thought sounded erudite come off as pretentious.
It was a chance for projecting my self-loathing that my subconscious could not possibly pass up. And how I self-loathed. I didn't so much project my self-loathing as much as projectile vomit it, all over my clones.
And they did likewise, in every direction.
It was messy.
We moved quickly from polite phrases such as 'Could you please not pick your teeth like that?' to the more abrupt 'Clear your throat one more time. I dare you.' Everywhere in the tiny garret my clones and I were sniping at each other and becoming aggrieved. Getting in each other's body space gave way to jostling, which led to bumping and tripping. Nobody would ever accuse me of being a confrontational person, but by nightfall on the first day more than one pair of clones rolled over the back of the couch, locked in a vicious grappling match.
It turns out I'm a biter.
A fear of missing out gripped us at dinnertime, and we gorged ourselves on baked beans. The gas cut out, and we scarfed the beans cold from the can. Fist fights started over who got to eat the delicacy of beans with chunky beef, and who should get the cans with the ham sauce.
Pops Fedora was found flopped on the bathroom floor semi-catatonic, clutching the empty moonshine bottle. He'd picked booze over beans, and polished off our supplies in one hurried binge.
Pops Bowler Hat barely made it to nightfall before tearing the barricade away from the door and fleeing down the stairs to chance his luck on the outside. Pops Rainbow Suspenders slunk off into the night, leaving behind his two front teeth. Pops Poncho sat on a cactus and fell out of the window.
The remaining group of us spent a tense night huddling around a slow-burning candle for warmth, licking our wounds.
We sat around the small pile of left-over food, eyeballing each other. My first plan was to wait for everyone else to fall asleep, then nab the food and run.
Unfortunately I knew that everyone else had the same idea.
The silence was grim, and paranoia was rife. Any word could be misinterpreted as a threat. I spend a good half an hour trying to form an alliance with Pops Three Piece Pinstripe via telepathy and eyebrow movements. After a while he gave me a tight-lipped, wide eyed glare that I took to be a signal meaning, 'I'm with you all the way. Let's bop these parasites with a tin of spam and abscond, post haste.'
I think I may have been mistaken. After I responded with a wink and a knowing nod, Pops Three Piece Pinstripe picked up a butter knife from an emptied plate. He pointed it at me then mimed slicing it across his throat.
I took that to be a signal meaning, 'I politely decline your offer of alliance'.
Hatching a new scheme, I nonchalantly put on a record, the world's most snooze-inducing album: Denny Dee Plays Ballads Just For Himself. A sure-fire cure for insomnia. Even a lifelong addict of jazz such as myself found Denny Dee's meandering clarinet soporific. It was only a matter of time before my companions would fall asleep.
But not before I did.
I awoke the next morning to find myself tied to a chair, dumped at the bottom of the Slowcrawl River. Fortunately there wasn't a lot of rain that year and the river was bone dry. But I was still hurt, emotionally. Abandoned and betrayed, by myself no less.
But I wasn't alone. I had for company Pops Raincoat, tied to another chair joined to the back of mine.
Pops Raincoat and I stuck together for a while after that. Turns out just one clone of yourself is a comfortable number. A pair of eyes to watch your back. We got along just fine.
Rambunculous got back on an even keel quickly. Pops Rainbow Suspenders was wrong about society collapsing. You'd think that with ten times as many people around, the town would be chock-a-block. But the decupling of the population came close on the heels of a catastrophe known only as the Weirdening.
Nobody could put their finger on what had happened during the Weirdening, other than that it didn’t make any sense. It was described by the pundits as an 'ontological horror'. It killed a few Rambunculans somehow, and gave everyone the creeps. Lots of citizens evacuated to less confusing climes. It also made me feel stupid that I didn't know what the word 'ontological' meant.
With the city emptied out after the Weirdening, the population boost from the decupling was useful in the reconstruction effort. The city felt alive again. It was a good time, a positive time.
I learned to ignore the dilemma of not knowing if I was one of the clones, or the original Pops Allsop. But it was cleared up for me when the copies began to fade.
I noticed it in a bar one night. Pops Raincoat and I were having a beer, celebrating moving in to our new house together. We both had jobs in the same factory. Canning baked beans.
Our glasses clinked, and we smiled.
'Here's to new beginnings,' said Pops Raincoat.
I wasn't able to return the toast. I noticed that I could read the writing on the drinks menu that Pops Raincoat was standing in front of. Through his semi-visible chest.
Blinking didn't help. He was, in fact, becoming transparent.
'What's wrong?' he said.
I looked at my own hand. It was solid.
That night some anti-tech terrorists broke into the craggy lair of the scientist Herr Doktor Ernst Plab. Inside the clifftop laboratory they'd discovered a huge machine, emitting a strange radiation. It was this energy pouring out from the machine that caused 'quantum refraction' in the bodies of the citizens of Rambunculous, thus decupling the population. In his own kooky way, Herr Doktor Plab was trying to save Rambunculous. And as usual, a groovy troupe of young resistance fighters had to have their say.
The anti-tech terrorists smashed the machine. And the clones began to fade.
It was a sad week with Pops Raincoat. He became non-corporeal, a ghost. He couldn't eat, couldn't touch anything. After a day he wasn't able to speak aloud anymore. We could only communicate with gestures and lip reading. There was nothing we could do about the fading.
We spent the days wandering the streets of Rambunculous, my clone ghost and I, giving Pops Raincoat one last look around at our city. We watched the sun setting over the Slowcrawl River, the lights of the buildings coming on slowly in its grey reflection.
Twilight came, and the sight of hundreds of despondent ghost clones wandering the streets became too much to bear. We went home.
The next day, Pops Raincoat indicated to me he didn't want to go out, that he wanted to be left alone. He tucked himself up on the couch, light as a feather, almost invisible. I put the radio on for him, and said goodbye.
He'd evaporated by the time I came home.
Another week went by, and Rambunculous righted itself. The clones were all gone, leaving the place quiet again. I couldn't shake off the feeling of loneliness.
A few managed to cheat the fading, however. A few, like Pops Poncho, who'd gone to Herr Doktor Ernst Plab in time to get help.
THIRTY-TWO
I'm hiding in the pipe, in the pitch black. Gasping for air as quietly as I can so that the monster doesn't hear me.
My ears strain for any sound. Nothing.
My heart rate slows. I catch my breath.
I wait.
The monster didn't follow me down this pipe. It's gone, scrabbled out another way back to the light. So I'm safe for now.
Less encouraging for me is the fact that I know what it is.
Or rather, who.
THIRTY-THREE
Herr Doktor Ernst Plab used another of his unlikely devices to keep some fading clones corporeal. A gene splicer. His technique was to combine their refracted DNA with
sample sequences from other species, as a way of bonding their humanity to the 4D-membrane of reality. It sounded a touch implausible to me, but it worked, succeeding in stopping the clones from fading.
Which is all well and good. But the creatures Herr Doktor used were gross little insects. House flies, mosquitos, tics. People entered the machine with their insect, and would exit it changed, spliced into freaky hybrids. The authorities declared these new creatures to be too disgusting to live, and ordered them to be shot on sight. These miserable half-humans were brushed down off ceilings with brooms, squished against glass, or sprayed with insecticide until they curled up.
Pops Poncho was bonded with a pantry moth.
Poncho, who on that first fateful day the clones appeared took a cactus up the backside and fell out of the window. I usually feel an odd pang of guilt when I recall his confused tumble out into the fresh air. Perhaps because it was my fault.
More specifically, I had moved the cactus to the window. It was on top of a box of records I wanted to use as a seat. How was I to know that Poncho would sit on it? Let alone fall six storeys to the street below, via a few awnings and flowerpots on the way down.
He never forgave me for that.
Pantry moths. Gross little critters. Some months after the whole clone thing died down, I awoke one morning and decided to treat myself to some pancakes. There was something wrong with the flour jar; it was totally empty, except for a kind of dusty webbing inside the glass. That put me in mind of when I was a kid, and my mum chucked out an entire cupboard of dry goods because of an outbreak of pantry moths. These pesky critters could crawl into any jar, not matter how tight Mum sealed them, to lay their eggs. Once the eggs hatched and the larvae feasted on Mum's dry goods, they wriggled out and took a nap in a little cocoon hanging off the ceiling. They were up there above our heads for a week before Mum spotted them.
However, in my kitchen that morning as I stood looking at the emptied jar, wearing my pyjamas, I reflected that it would take a pretty serious feeding frenzy of moth larvae to clear out an entire container of flour.