The Book of Adam
Autobiography of the First Human Clone
Book One of The Books of Adam
A Novel by Robert M. Hopper
https://www.robhopper.com
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License Notes:
All rights reserved
Cover design by David Lowe and Rob Hopper
Coffin image by Michel Bigras courtesy of BigStockPhoto
Baby image by Beatrice Killam courtesy of BigStockPhoto
Lily photo by Christoph Riddle courtesy of BigStockPhoto
Redwoods image by Rob Hopper
Printed Version:
ISBN 1450560520
EAN-13 9781450560528
* Disclaimer *
* All characters appearing in this work are fictitious.
* Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental or the result of portraying a real person’s fictional genetic twin being born at some point in the fictional future.
* All fictional genetic twins of real persons are in no way meant to depict what their real-life genetic twin may do or say, nor has any character in this book been endorsed by any real person.
* No real persons referenced in this book, living or dead, are implied to have endorsed this book, its concept, or support of human cloning or cryonics.
To Grandpa
Table of Contents
Prologue
Part I: The Book of Sarah
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Part II: The Book of Lily
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Part III: The Book of Evelyn
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Part IV: The Book of Adam
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Epilogue
Table of Contents
A baby is an inestimable blessing and bother.
– Mark Twain
PROLOGUE
Nine months after I died, my daughter gave birth to me.
It was more than fifty years after my birth when I first saw the recording of our umbilical cord being severed.
“May I hold him?”
I caught my breath. I hadn’t heard my mother’s voice in so many years. Her gentle intonations conjured forgotten memories of an old form of happiness, before shadows of loss and sadness began to dampen even the best times.
I walked toward my mom’s holographic image, my fingertips trying to touch the laser plasma that comprised her face. She looked so much younger than the images in my mind. Her blond hair untouched by gray, her smooth cheeks and chin unblemished by worry, her blue-gray eyes still looking like those of a child delighting in an unexpected present.
Her name was Sarah. She was the daughter of the man I was cloned from. And she had just become the mother of her father’s clone with my birth. Or “Adam’s Rebirth,” as the home video was labeled. A video discovered in one of my Grandma Lily’s storage boxes.
Lily is in the holotape as well, hovering nearby as the nurse begins wiping off my small body. “Is Adam okay?”
I tense when I hear my great-grandfather’s voice from behind. Lyle Gardener, the man who recorded the event. The man who made human cloning possible. I turn to see the doctor and Lyle reviewing the medical scans. “Everything’s in order,” Lyle says. “Fingers, toes, organs, and brain.”
“But is it really Adam? I mean, his soul?” Lily asks. “Does he remember me?”
The nurse finishes my initial cleaning. Lily opens her arms to receive me, but frowns as the nurse instead walks to Sarah’s side. She eases my newborn body into my mother’s arms. My tiny head wobbles so that my face looks up at hers. Naturally, on that night of March 11, 2034, I did not yet realize that my mother within whose womb I’d spent the previous nine months was the newborn daughter I had once cradled in my own arms.
“You have a beautiful soul,” my mom says, smiling before kissing me on my forehead and nose. “I love you, Michael,” she whispers, calling me by my middle name as she cradles me to her, not bothering to wipe away her tears, breathing in the scent of her newborn who had moments before been a part of her own body.
I notice my own tears as my fingertips again attempt to somehow touch the 52-year-old images around me. Did I have a soul? If so, part of it must have come from my mother. Sarah’s hologram closes her eyes as she gently rocks me back and forth, humming a familiar lullaby. She seems to have become oblivious to everything else. Oblivious to her mother and g
randfather, to the doctor and nurses. Even to the throngs of people who had gathered outside the hospital in spite of a thunderstorm, the din of which I can just hear in the background.
A couple of the bystanders were awed; awed at me, awed at science, awed at the uncertain future my birth represented. The other thousand-plus were protesting “The Blasphemous Birth,” the baby created not by God, but by humans who believed they were gods. They saw the thunderstorm as a sign from an angry deity proclaiming the end of the world. As did Gabrielle Burns, the drenched woman standing quietly to the side, her calm face upturned to the hospital room window – the woman who would eventually murder my mother.
Even if I had known all this, my reaction would have been the same: the newborn image of me began to cry. A sure “sign” that the first human clone was a healthy baby boy, soul or not.
*
A half-century later, and the end of the world has yet to arrive. What did come to an end was my early fame. The widespread furor over my existence occurred while I was still the only clone, too young to realize what was going on, or to comfort my mother who bore the brunt of it. Cloned births became commonplace while I was a young child, removing me from the spotlight and affording me a mostly private life, if still not a peaceful one.
So why call renewed attention to myself by writing an autobiography? In part, I’d like to honor the memories of those who have touched me. I’d also like to set straight, or in many cases confirm, the rumors attached to my life. But it’s much more than that. Since my earliest memories, I’ve been told that I would be seen as the primary example of human cloning, and that humanity’s acceptance or rejection of human cloning might depend on how I was perceived. By writing this autobiography I hope to give others some insight as to what it was like to be the first human clone. I hope to help fellow clones deal with similar issues, and help convince non-clones that we are all human beings. Whether we are conceived naturally by a mother and father or, as in my case, manufactured in a laboratory from the cells of dead ancestors, we are neither more nor less perfect than others.
Most importantly, I hope to convince myself of this.
My dead ancestor’s name was Adam Silva Elwell, after my birth referred to as Adam Elwell-1, and he was my grandpa. Or, as far as some people are concerned, he was I. Which is why, unlike most autobiographies, the story of my life begins some sixty years before I was born.
Table of Contents
Part I
The Book of Sarah
I used to almost wish I hadn’t any ancestors, they were so much trouble to me.
– Mark Twain
1
I was born too early.
That was how it began.
I received my clone-father’s journal on my eighteenth birthday. He handwrote his memoir late in life in the hope that his next birth – my birth – would correct the mistake of his initial one. I read it for the first time while sitting next to his grave, the setting of my recurrent nightmares since I was very young.
Adam-1 was born at the University of California, San Francisco Medical Center on the sunny morning of June 12, 1974 to Michael and Sarah Elwell. Born too early. And his childhood stolen from him too early.
He was only seven years old when his father opened the door to his mother’s hospital room. Adam walked in alone, forcing his legs forward. His chin was trembling before he reached his mother’s bed. He felt like he should say something but didn’t know what, as if he’d forgotten how to talk to his mother. As if the person he loved most in the world was a stranger.
She looked like a stranger. Her bald head. Her emaciated body. Sarah made a weak smile, and then lightly petted his head. Neither said a word. There was only her shallow breathing and the sound of nurses passing outside the door.
The silence wasn’t broken until his mother began reciting familiar lines from their favorite book, The Hobbit, as Bilbo Baggins joins the quest, leaving his hobbit hole and setting off on his adventure.
Adam hid his eyes against her shoulder. He wanted to be near her, but he didn’t want to see her like this.
“I know, sweetie. I know,” she whispered. She kissed his head.
“Please don’t die,” he begged.
Sarah sighed. “I think I have to go, honey. I have to go on this adventure. But we’ll meet again in Aslan’s Country, okay?”
Adam didn’t answer. That was just another story they’d read. Made-up stories like the kind his father wrote. Places like Aslan’s Country and the Heaven mentioned in their ancient family Bible could be equally imaginary.
He held her tighter. She kissed him again.
“I love you, sweetie.”
“I love you too, Mommy,” he cried, but choked at the end.
She made a similar sound, as if mocking him. He felt her shudder and then relax. He pulled away, looking into her blue-gray eyes. They stared blankly through him, her chapped lips only slightly parted.
He prodded her timidly on the shoulder to wake her. The movement made her jaw drop down, her mouth falling silently open.
Adam jumped and must have screamed something. His father opened the door and a nurse rushed in behind him. Michael clutched him to his body and gently held his dead wife’s hand.
“We’ll get that,” the nurse said to Michael, glancing at the floor.
Adam looked down and saw that he stood in a puddle of his own urine.
His Aunt Mary pulled him out into the hallway and wiped his shoes. Michael came out of the room several minutes later, his face pale, eyes red and puffy. He embraced his son for a long time. Then he straightened up and slowly, silently led them out of the hospital.
***
Fifty years after his mother’s death, Adam himself was dying on a hospital bed.
“Where’s Sarah?” he asked, words he’d repeated for a half hour as the poison paralyzing his extremities moved slowly towards his heart.
“She’s on her way,” Lily answered again, more wearily by then. But Adam died minutes before his mother’s namesake, his daughter Sarah, rushed into the room.
His last journal entry, written the night before his death, appears to be an attempt to reassure himself: “It’s with great fear I end my life, but the hope outweighs it. With this cup I’ll escape the Gardeners, and have another mother named Sarah. My hemlock is not the cup of death. It is the cup of new life. The life I should have had.”
Yet I often wonder what was going through his mind as oblivion approached. Did he second-guess himself, wondering whether his dream of living forever had just slipped through his fingers of his own volition, fearing that he would never exist again?
Regardless, less than an hour after he arrived at the hospital, the man who had once sworn to himself that he’d never die was dead by his own hand.
Sarah reached the hospital shortly afterwards, Lyle Gardener a bit later. While Lyle talked with the doctors in Adam’s room, Sarah tried to comfort her mother in a private office. She told Lily how fortunate it was that Adam saved her by knocking the glass of poisoned wine from her hand, but Lily was despondent.
“I wish I’d drunk it too,” she mumbled, a shoulder strap of her evening gown dangling around her elbow.
Sarah grabbed her arm. “Mom! How could you say that?”
“I can’t imagine life without him. There’s nothing for me now.”
Sarah was quiet for a while. The last statement stung. She thought of her father’s clone with whom she’d soon be implanted, and wondered whether mentioning it would help her mother. On the other hand, she’d long since determined that her father’s clone would not be made to feel like he was the original Adam, but instead be raised to believe he was his own individual free to live any life he chose. It wouldn’t be right to tell her mother that Adam would soon be alive again.
“Adam would have wanted you to enjoy your life after him,” Sarah said as she righted her mom’s strap. “That’s why he knocked your glass away. If you don’t go on, then Dad’s saving you was in
vain.”
Lily shook her head, then leaned slowly into her daughter’s arms and cried quietly on Sarah’s shoulder.
“Besides,” Sarah continued as she found a more comfortable position in which to embrace her mother, “I’m going to need your help raising my son.”
Lily stopped her sobbing. After a minute she raised her head from Sarah’s shoulder and looked her daughter in the eye, a glimmer of a smile on the widow’s lips.
“You’re right. We have to be strong for Adam’s rebirth. That’s what he wanted.”
Sarah smiled at her mother’s brightening, but worried over the choice of words. Adam’s rebirth.
Within a couple weeks of Adam’s death, a fetus was growing within the womb of his 33-year-old daughter. In that way my daughter would become my mother and, just like the old vaudeville song, I would become “my own grandpaw.”
Table of Contents
2
As he’d been the CEO of the widely known U.S. Cloning Systems, the largest subsidiary of Lyle Gardener’s Ingeneuity, Adam’s murder received some press. But it was nothing compared to the commotion over Adam’s rebirth when it was announced six months later. Sarah’s pregnancy was made public January 2, 2034 in a news conference that began with a low buzz (reporters figured USCS had made another boring, minor medical breakthrough) and quickly erupted into a firestorm that blazed among satellites, televisions, cell phones, computer screens, and every radio tower on the planet.
It wasn’t the first time such an announcement had been made. In 2004 the Raelians claimed to have cloned dozens of children, and by 2034 several more supposedly successful human cloning attempts had been proclaimed – none of which had been scientifically verified. But the world knew this announcement was different. U.S. Cloning Systems was a giant in its field, the organization most capable of pulling off such an achievement.
Two months of chaos followed. Politicians convened from recess early to argue and spout off sound bites. There were calls for more intensive government oversight of all companies dabbling in the science of cloning. Religious leaders invited the largest protests, some demanding that the company be shut down, the executives jailed, the mother jailed, and the baby taken away so that it would never know it was a clone.
Then came the next big revelation. One of the obstetricians let slip that my mother was a virgin.
Post-Mary virgin births had been documented going back to at least 1994 thanks to artificial insemination, and none of those births had resulted in a devil so far as anyone could prove. But for some, the new development made it clearer than ever that the Antichrist was on his way, mocking the original Virgin Birth. Others assumed my mom was a lesbian, stoking the homophobic fear that this was the beginning of a social revolution in which homosexuals would breed through cloning and propagate an unnatural family structure that would decimate life as we know it.