by David Hearne
Mike was a gregarious guy who was very animated in his conversations. He sat down with us, and after Katherine introduced us to each other, he told me that she had informed him of the death of my father. He offered his sincere condolence. Mr. Hamilton exchanged greetings with Fuljenz and then excused himself, to return to his work of hosting the large lunch hour crowd.
I asked Mr. Fuljenz how long he had been involved in the coin business, and he said practically all his life. He gave me a quick overview of his company, Universal Coin and Bullion that he had molded over the last decade. He had turned his dream into a world-class operation that now held the respect of the numismatic community. Fuljenz and his company had become an icon in the precious metal world, as collectors and investors treated his market predictions as gospel.
Mr. Fuljenz told me it was an honor to have the Senator recommend his services. He assured me that whatever coins my father had acquired, he would offer me the best prices possible. His demeanor and wealth of knowledge in the precious metal market made me feel comfortable that I had finally found someone to help me liquidate my father’s collection.
I was surprised when Katherine glanced at her watch, and coyly asked Fuljenz if he would take me back to his office and give me an appraisal of my father’s collection, while she took care of some other business. To her relief, Fuljenz seemed more than happy to accommodate her and entertain me for the afternoon. She told Mike she would send a car or personally pick me up around 5:00 PM.
The lunch meeting was over and we all got up to go our separate ways. Mike Hamilton was still at the front door greeting the lunch crowd, but took the time to say good-bye to us. The exchange lasted only a couple moments, but as we started to walk away, we discovered that Katherine had already vanished. Mr. Hamilton winked at me and simply said, “She is gone to take care of some of her business. Don’t worry about her, she will catch up with you later.” I looked at Mr. Fuljenz quizzically, and he continued, “Time for us to get back to Beaumont.”
Mike Fuljenz showed me to his car and thirty minutes later I was in his conference room watching him categorize my father’s coin collection. He made little piles of coins from the collection and added up a few numbers on a notepad. Suddenly, his deep voice blurted out, “How does $85,000 sound for your collection?”
I looked at him to see if he was serious and waited for a scintilla of a second before I quietly said, “Great, thank you!”
While I was basking in my good fortune, Senator Laforge was speeding along Highway 69 towards Lumberton, TX. Her destination was a ten-minute jaunt north of Beaumont. She had driven this route on Highway 69 to Cooks Lake Rd. a hundred times. The final leg of her clandestine journey always gave her an eerie feeling of foreboding as she drove down the narrow road shaded by low hanging branches.
Cooks Lake Road was alive with the sounds of the bordering swamp. Her destination was in sharp contrast to its surroundings. Almost exactly two miles down the road on the left, a small house was visible from the road and Senator Laforge turned into the dirt road leading to it. Blending in with the trees bordering the approach were CCTV security cameras mounted on poles. They were perpetually scrutinizing every movement, she made as she drove down the short road. Their whirling sounds as they tracked you, blended in with the cacophony of spring peepers, cricket frogs, cicadas, other insects and birds of the nearby swamp.
The house was unassuming and set back over a hundred feet into the densely forested yard. It had the appearance of a folksy starter home that intentionally understated its true size, with the bulk of the complex hidden underground. It was made to blend into the landscape of this Texas road. Four large mastiffs sat menacingly drooling and panting in front of the building. A large man with a shaven head stood guard at the doorway. He was dressed in a tee shirt and jeans with a pistol strapped to his side. The Senator smiled at him and greeted him with a hearty “Hello Tony” Tony opened the door and let the Senator into the poorly furnished house, and nodded for her to proceed into the next room.
The room had one door on the opposite wall with a small box on the side of the door in which the Senator inserted her thumb. She waited a few seconds for the fingerprint scanner to recognize her print and then the door quietly swung open. It was a massive 4-inch solid steel door that was covered on one side with cheap paneling to camouflage it. As she stepped through the door, it automatically began to close in a quiet, smooth and steady arc.
Ten feet ahead of Katherine an armed guard sat at a table playing cards. He flashed the Senator a smile and greeted her with a thick Southeast Texas drawl. The Senator smiled back and asked him how was his solitaire game. She did not wait for an answer, but went ahead with inserting her security card into the lock. She heard the audible click and grabbed the handle to pull the door open and stepped into the freight elevator.
Outside it was a hundred degrees, but now as she rode to the laboratory five floors below, she felt the coolness, and it relaxed her. The laboratory door was straight ahead of her as she got off the elevator. Katherine quickly strolled over to it and looked up at the eye scanner mounted above the door. She stared at it, unblinking as her iris was interrogated and checked for a match in its database of iris patterns.
A green bulb flickered noiselessly above the steel door sliding silently into the wall. As it inched open, light from the brightness of the laboratory flooded the gloom of the dark hallway. Inside was a labyrinth of cubicles and rooms alive with the work of the best physicist, scientist and computer programmers that the CIA could hire for this clandestine mission.
The Senator always felt goose bumps on her arms as she entered through these doors. It might have been caused by the 65-degree coolness, but more likely it was from the excitement she felt for the work being done there.
Katherine knew what she was about to see and even was in control of when the vision would start. She had found it an emotional, mind-altering experience to watch a living likeness of herself materialize in front of her own eyes. She said at first it felt like an eerie dream or a drug induced hallucination as this replicate of yourself appears. But it is not a dream because you awake from them, and hallucinations are illusions you do not expect, and these visions were expected.
Before going into politics, she had been very much interested in physics. If she had not become Senator Laforge, she would have most likely became the physicist Laforge. Somehow these two career desires had merged, and now she was being exposed to the most remarkable science, since the work on the atomic bomb. Her first few exposures to the cloning experiments were extremely frightening and emotionally disturbing. The Senator would struggle with her own sense of reality and how to cope with what inevitably would appear before her in the glass observation booth. Each time as she was preparing for total molecular analysis and memory recording, she would feel highly agitated and nauseous. The biosensors attached to her body and her molecular imaging on the observation screens would reveal the confusion and reactions to her fears.
When the bays of electron guns started glowing red, beads of sweat would appear on her forehead. This moment would mark the point when the transformation of her biodata and molecular mapping was about to begin. The flooding of specifications, the trillions and trillions of details were spewed from the computer by a massive optical vortex that delivered the data at light speed. The control panel in front of her would turn into a blur of blinking green and red lights culminating with the distinct hiss of the electron guns firing in perfect unison. Then inside the glass observation booth in front of her, her mirror image would materialize. At that precise instant, ComDefC1 (Combat Defensive Clone) code named Hulagu would share the same fears and anxieties that Katherine had just experienced seconds earlier and even its facial expressions would parrot those of the Senator’s at the time her bio scan was performed.
Albert Einstein is quoted as saying, “Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile.” The Senator had burned this saying into her mind, and she hoped that Hulagu would use t
his shared memory to understand its destiny. Life’s call to die demands tremendous courage to accept, and she knew that Hulagu still feared death, just as she did, because they both shared the same consciousness and personal biography that live within her.
As odd as it may seem, the Senator felt the deepest compassion and respect for Hulagu and its destined sacrifice. Although they both shared the same memories and secrets of Katherine’s past, from this moment on, each of their futures would be unique.
Hulagu and Kat both knew what their immediate future held, and the psychological chaos that ComDefC1 would be experiencing as it resisted the inevitable, but at the same time acquiesced to it. Definitely, it was a far greater emotion than most of us could ever imagine.
The creation of each version of ComDefC1 was a precisely planned variation of the accuracy of the unique position, velocity and spin of each particle making up the individual being cloned.
The twentieth century Quantum Physicist, Werner Heisenberg, had discovered that certain pairs of measurements have an intrinsic uncertainty associated with them. When we attempt to measure anything at the subatomic level we are constrained by these laws. The very act of measuring depends upon light, which itself is a stream of photons. These photons have enough momentum and mass that when striking a particle being measured, its course or velocity is altered. Another obstacle to overcome in the process of quantum cloning was the calculation of the spin of each particle making up the individual being duplicated.
In 1922, Otto Stern and Walther Gerlach discovered that atomic particles possess an intrinsic angular momentum, or spin, and that this spin is quantized (that is, it can only have certain discrete values). The “Spin” of every particle being copied was calculated and stored along with all of the other biodata of the person being cloned.
At first, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle seemed to be a major obstacle to the cloning project. But they soon realized that the accuracy and the method of calculating the various properties of each particle of the person being cloned would actually allow them to more accurately control the degree and speed of apoptosis in the clone.
Apoptosis is cell suicide, which is orchestrated by T cells. They are normally associated with the immune system and are responsible for detecting foreign invaders. The goal of the physicist was to create clones that would only live a predetermine time and then die in what would appear as a natural death. They wanted the death of each clone to mimic nature’s natural disruption of cellular function or tissue destruction. The clone would die from a heart attack, stroke, or some other common condition resulting from the destruction or deterioration of critical cells of major organs.
Katherine had sat transfixed as she watched ComDefC1 gain its consciousness and recognize its situation. The Senator’s concentration was shattered by the voice of Dr. Sawtelle saying, “Hello” to Hulagu. Its head turned and looked at Dr. Sawtelle and responded back with a simple hello. It was Katherine’s voice heard coming from the speakers of the observation booth. Air washed lightly in and out of Hulagu’s lungs. It was the first breaths of air that its lungs had ever experienced. Its likeness and matters were so much like Katherine’s that even her modesty was reflected in its actions. The overhead monitors exhibiting ComdefC1’s biosensor readings clearly displayed its nervousness to its nakedness. This at first seemed to trouble ComDefC1 more than its realization of its transient existence.
Dr. Sawtelle asked Hulagu if it felt it would have any problems following the program that it had been taught through the Senator’s mind. The Senator had trained her own mind to accept that her thoughts, experiences, and fears would all be shared by Hulagu. ComDefC1 glanced at Katherine strapped into a control chair directly in front of the observation booth and gave her a smile and nod of agreement.
At first, ComDefC1 was asked to see if it had any problems with mobility. Hulagu walked to the glass separating itself from the observers and then proceeded to stretch itself in various ways. ComDefC1 said it felt nothing odd about its physical being or its ability to move about. On the Senator’s computer console the observation cameras scanned every inch of Hulagu’s naked body. Dr. Randall directed Hulagu to sit in the examination chair. The chair was complete with additional monitoring devices designed to measure normal human vital signs and the degree of decay or instability the clone was experiencing.
Hulagu sat down on the chair and strapped the various devices to itself and the monitors came alive with the new stats. Its blood pressure and heart beat rate was comparable to Katherine stats, which were also displayed on the screen. Both sets of stats were monitored in unison to help detect abnormalities in Hulagu’s vital signs.
Dr. Sawtelle continued on with the program by requesting that ComDefC1 provide details of its remembered past.
ComDefC1’s memory was vivid with the visions of what the Senator had done in the past 58 years. It talked of remembering its mother and its childhood and finally talked about the recent pass, about the feelings of love for Ira and Kat’s children. The development of ComDefC1’s autonoetic awareness was very important. It provided the ability to subjectively recollect experiences from memory, introspectively applying them to current thoughts and emotions to predict a future outcome.
Memory, in a very real sense, is reality. What the brain’s limbic system decides to ‘see’ and store away becomes the life we have lived. It is the smells, the music, the pain, the loves, the places you have been and all the experiences recorded by the brain. Memory is the core of what we accept as reality. ComDefC1 remembered companions who had enriched Kat’s life, family, folks at the office, neighbors, friends, and even people of whom Senator Laforge haven’t talked to in years. ComDefC1’s memories disturbed the Senator emotionally and she felt more connected to it then ever. She felt sorry that its existence would be so temporary.
Dr. Randall continued testing ComDefC1’s noetic awareness by talking about things and facts that were not present, but should be readily available in its mind to retrieve, visualize and understand their significance. Its anoetic awareness was also tested and graded by presenting situations that would cause ComDefC1 to react to certain stimuli. The success of these innate responses would define how human it would appear to others.
They went about discussing the mission as the Senator had trained herself to perform and how Hulagu would participate in it. They discussed Hulagu’s understanding of its inevitable demise, and that it should consider itself as an extension of the Senator. Dr. Randall asked ComDefC1 if it felt fear or problems controlling its emotions. Hulagu responded with the fact that it dreaded its own destruction. Hulagu said that it was hard for it to imagine that it was not real and did not have a past greater then the past few minutes in the glass observation booth.
A table laden with food rose through a hole in the floor. Dr. Randall asked Hulagu to drink the glass of water on the table. Hulagu obliged and as it drank the water, all watched its vital signs. A spike in its blood pressure stats suddenly appeared on the monitor and Hulagu stared straight through the glass wall into the Senator’s eyes. It had also felt the change in its body and desperation could be seen in its eyes.
Dr. Randall and Dr. Sawtelle began to console Hulagu. The monitors focused in on a lesion that opened magically down the left side of its back. Hulagu blurted out that it was in pain, and that it was afraid of what it was experiencing. The Senator felt so connected to ComDefC1 that she wanted to do something to protect and help it with the obvious pain it was experiencing. Dr. Sawtelle told ComDefC1 to use all its remembered experiences and training to help it accept this phase of its existence. Its temperature shot to 104 degrees and you could hear it gasping for air. Its body shuttered and bloody saliva bubbles appeared from its nose. The pores around the lesions started to bleed profusely and scarlet patches of skin appeared upon its body and face.
This was so macabre, the Senator was actually witnessing the throes of her own death, hearing the exhalation of her last breaths, and hearing the sound of her la
st heartbeat. She was seeing how death would inevitably embrace her. For Katherine, this was the most disturbing sight of all to see - your likeness, still alive, but dying slowly and desperately in front of your very own eyes, without a prayer of survival.
Katherine had never even experienced a relative going through the throes of dying, so seeing herself die in front of her own eyes was most disturbing.
Hulagu’s body began to tremble in anticipation of imminent death. Its face turned red, spittle dripped from its mouth, its stomach heaved, and Hulagu’s bladder and bowels emptied simultaneously filling the receptacle beneath the examination chair. Hulagu didn’t feel it happening as it kicked spastically and jerked in its restrains. The monitors showed that its mucous membranes were also hemorrhaging. Its skin turned purple and Hulagu’s mortality ended and it returned to the darkness it came from.
Hulagu had lived barely an hour, but its physical death, the end of its life in bodily form had somehow been considered a success by the physicist in their quest to control life and death. A cheer filled the laboratory when Sawtelle announced that ComDefC1 death occurred again within the intended time frame.
But for Katherine, its death was not a cause of celebration, but simply the acceptance of the amalgamation of her existence and Hulagu’s. To her, its demise was just an intermission in a series of resurrections with her phantom.