Image by Helmut Strasil from Pixabay
I am standing at the front of the control panel watching the lights as they flicker on and off. I have the red pill in my left hand and the injector liquid in my right. I know what I have to do; for three days I have carefully planned and prepared for this moment. Now that it is here however, some strange feeling is holding me back...
My name is Sharon, and this is the story of how we all died...
They called me special, they called me unique. But most importantly they said I am human, and they spent the most part of their days trying to understand why. But then they'll never know, because I'll never let them. I wouldn't let them create another me, only to subject the poor creature to the same life that I've barely had myself.
These people I refer to are the clones; for the last few hundred years, they have been the sole inhabitants of what used to be known as planet earth. They are what is left of the human race, they were anyway, until me.
No one alive has a record or memory of what had happened, but something did happen, and all humans became sterile. For centuries, the survival of the human specie depended on technology, with cloning as the only answer. Two original clones were the first ones, a male and a female. From their blueprint every other clone had been created, with minor advancements made as new technological grounds were opened.
Then seventeen years ago, I happened...
I was unexplainable by science, and it baffled even the most brilliant of clone minds. My parents, that is the word they chose to use for those who birthed me, weren't supposed to be fertile, no clone had ever been. Neither was I supposed to have been born naturally, no one had prepared for it. But the clones welcomed me with much excitement anyway, at least that was what I was told. And my first few years were spent in laboratories, under the close watchful eyes of the technological experts. It was in these labs that I had first gained consciousness, and in those walls too my death had begun...
No one killed me if you wonder, but then everyone did, everyone of those clones. It was difficult enough being the odd one among a million of my own specie, but it only got worse with the constant probing and examinations which I endured. Far from feeling special, I felt like a mistake of creation.
The clones however were determined, and they did all they could to recreate another natural childbirth. They took my cells, my fluids, my DNA. For seventeen years they took all that they could, and for seventeen years they had no success. That was until three weeks ago, when they discovered the optic effect.
I had just come out from three hours of induced coma, having been subjected to another session of intensive laboratory analysis. A clone nurse was repeating the now too familiar words to me, urging me to keep calm as everything was perfect again. I hardly listened, I was more interested in the strange new lines that now tainted my vision.
When the lab doctors heard my complaint, they set down to assess me some more. This time as they worked, I sensed a feeling of progress. I had been through too many sessions, and this particular one had a different vibe to it. The atmosphere had the feel of tension, like a pumped balloon at the verge of bursting. The clone doctors harried back and forth, and were joined at a point by others I had never seen previously. At different moments, the words "optic effect" were uttered, but at the time I had no idea what it meant. I simply knew that something new was being discovered.
I got to find out soon enough though; the clone scientists never knew how to keep discoveries to themselves. Soon as they made ample progress, the word went out. All the clones in the lab went on about the "optic effect", fist bumping themselves and patting each other's backs until I could bear no more.
I had closed my eyes that night and I had thought deeply. The optic effect; I had heard enough to understand it and I knew then what it meant. When humans still lived, they had destroyed their world with technology, thinking that they were bettering it. Somewhere along the line, they had ended up sterile, and the human race had faced extinction. The solution was a chemical mixture; the injector liquid.
However, when the humans used this mixture, It had resulted in strange lines of colour blurring their vision, the same lines I had seen earlier in mine. In a bid to remove these lines in victims, they had created the red pill, the final nail on their coffin. When this pill was used in a human who already had the injector liquid in the bloodstream, it resulted in instant death. So the humans had settled for clones, and for centuries both the injector liquid and the red pill were kept secured and away from the public.
It was a mistake that had brought the injector liquid to me, just as it was a mistake that had made them think to mix it in a clone for the first time. But it was no mistake that I was born, my clone parents having wanted to kill themselves, had thought the mixture was the answer. That was what made me; the combination which killed the last humans was also what had brought the next one back. But I couldn't allow it, no I wouldn't...
The kill switch on the control panel seemed to dare me to press it. I did, and that part proved easy. I felt rather than heard the crumbling of clones from far and wide. It was a pity the last humans had designed the originals with a kill switch, and that the clones never saw it fit to fix that flaw. It had a sort of poetic feeling that another human would hit that button.
But then I don't intend to take their planet, it had little need for me, I wasn't human enough. Life was never meant to be created, It was rather meant to evolve. I thought of how the earth must feel as I swallowed the red pill. My last thoughts was a vision of life, evolving from all the death that i had wrought... Then I collapsed...
Blackout.
THE END
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