Meanwhile, I began to believe my past might entirely fade away. I was made the CEO of Ingeneuity in 2068, and as such was able to bring U.S. Cloning Systems completely back under control of the parent company, thereby blocking Lyle from getting a job with us. We had soon assembled a team of doctors and scientists who were driven to solve the medical problems of cloning, improve our artificial immune system, and overcome the technical hurdles that still barred us from creating artificial bodies. I knew eventually Lyle-2 would try to challenge me in the industry, and I wanted to be so far ahead that he’d never catch up.
Supposedly I’d taken control and pushed Lyle out to punish him for taking Lily, but I suspect my primary motivation was to keep him as far away from me as possible.
Even my clone-father was out of my life. I rarely dreamed about him back then, my subconscious apparently content that I had won the battle for our soul. Or that he had won, and I just didn’t realize it.
*
The summer of 2069 was the centennial of Apollo 11’s landing on the moon. As we sat in Sardi’s celebrating the closing of Evelyn’s performance as Miranda in The Tempest, I tossed an envelope into Cain’s lap.
“Hey, what’s…” he began as he pulled the three tickets out of the envelope. His eyes bulged. “Dad, you’re kidding! How’d you get these?”
“Barebots has a lot of connections with NASA,” I said. “Nikki Menae got four tickets and asked if we wanted to join her.”
“We’re going to the moon!” Evelyn exclaimed, messing up Cain’s hair.
I laughed. “Yup! In one week. And on July 20th we’ll be at the Sea of Tranquility to see the reenactment of Neil Armstrong’s first walk on the moon.”
Needless to say, I was a hero. And I was just as excited as Cain. We had three of the 6,000 tickets to the biggest event on the moon since the opening of AstroDisney two years before. Lunar tourism had only become somewhat practical around that same time, and despite the $110,000 roundtrip flights and $20,000 hotel rooms, there was a two-year waiting list of would-be lunar tourists. Fortunately, the tickets to the Apollo 11 Centennial included the hard-to-get reservations on a lunar shuttle.
It’s difficult to describe a trip to the moon, as it’s so distinct from our shared earthly experiences. Floating in zero gravity on the flight, moving around in the low gravity on the moon, striding and hopping over the powdery surface near our hotel on the moon’s south pole, looking up at the earth surrounded by the stunningly starlit blackness of space. It was a “full earth” on July 18 when we arrived, none of it in shadow, making it all the more wondrous. Cain said being on the moon was sort of like visiting an illuminated Carlsbad Caverns under water. Buzz Aldrin had described it as “magnificent desolation.” Neil Armstrong had said, “It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn't feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.”
AstroDisney was still in its infancy with less than twenty rides and attractions split between the park on the lunar surface and the orbiting park above. Surface rides included roller coasters in the moon’s lower gravity, which could make loops and corkscrews at slower speeds so it feels like you’re floating through them and in constant danger of falling. Or you could take a ride on The Pirates of Tranquillitatis where space pirates attacked your shuttle and imprisoned you deep within a crater. On the orbiting section of AstroDisney we played a number of zero-gravity sports including an amazing game of handball. We learned how to fly with butterfly-like wings. And nothing was more fun than the swimming pool. Diving included many seconds of contorting your body as you floated down toward the water. The splash in the pool rose to terrific heights that others could ride, with the hole you made in the water taking several moments to fill back in. Instead of sand castles, we made orbs of floating water and played with those. You can swim like a flying fish, soaring a couple feet above the water before plunging back in for your next stroke. And, with a little practice, even normal human beings could walk on water.
The grand finale was the centennial celebration up at the Sea of Tranquility. An enclosed temporary structure in the shape of a horseshoe was placed around the historic landing site and filled with bleachers and breathable air.
As Nikki led us to our seats, someone called out my name. I turned to see Lyle-2 sitting about thirty feet from us, waving to me.
“I’ll be right back,” I said to Evelyn.
“Sure—” she started, then she saw him too.
“Lily!”
My head snapped back around at the sound of Cain’s shout. I hadn’t noticed at first. A nine-year-old Lily-3 peering out from behind Lyle-2, her mouth slightly ajar upon seeing Cain, and then me.
“Stay here,” I said as I walked toward them.
Another man stood up on the other side of him. At first I thought he might be some sort of bodyguard. None of us extended a hand in greeting.
“Adam, do you know Senator Barum?” Lyle asked.
“No. Good evening, Senator,” I said, nodding slightly at the man who had just stood. I knew him only by reputation. He wasn’t a friend of the GC Board.
“Evening? Who can tell out here?” Senator Barum asked, forcing his lips to curl up in a grin he used at campaign rallies.
“John’s the newest member of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation,” Lyle continued.
I gave a smile almost as genuine as the senator’s. “Then I’m sure we’ll meet the next time the GC reports to Congress,” I said.
“If his party takes the Senate next year, he may become the next chairman.”
“Hmm.” I said, looking down to see Lily leaning against the back of her seat so I could see her. “Lily, are you okay?”
Lyle grabbed my forearm. “Don’t ever talk to my daughter, Elwell. There’s a reason I’ve ignored all Evelyn’s requests to see her.”
I moved my face within a couple inches of his. “What are you doing to her?”
He clutched my forearm tighter, then relaxed his grip. “Things are good for you right now,” he said, completely letting go of my arm and looking over my suit. “You’ve got a nice family. You’ve got my company. But involve yourself in my personal life, and I’ll take it all. Just like you’ve tried to take everything from me.”
I moved in even closer. “Your problem, Lyle, is that you think you’re as powerful as your c-father. Deep down you know you’re not even his pale shadow.”
Senator Barum put his hand on Lyle’s rigid shoulder. “Don’t you think we should let Adam take his seat?”
Lyle nodded without looking at the senator. “Sure. Bye, Adam.”
I returned his nod. “Kiss my ass, Lyle.” I nodded to his guest. “Senator Barum.”
The senator frowned, possibly uncertain if the “ass” comment was meant for him as well. As I turned to head back to the others, there was Evelyn.
“Hi, Lily!”
Lily started to run past Lyle, but his arm flew down in time to block her way. Lily looked up to both of us for help. From Evelyn’s glare, I knew I’d better do something. I grabbed Lyle’s blocking arm with both hands and pulled it aside, giving Lily a clear shot past me to receive embraces from Evelyn and Cain.
“Has he hurt you?” Evelyn asked her, holding Lily’s hands in hers.
I watched in horror as Lily answered. Not verbally. Just with a trembling nod.
“You’ve gone too far,” said Lyle, his voice empty, shocked.
“We’re going to go a lot further,” said Evelyn. “Let us take her, or we’ll tell Child Protective Services.”
His blush deepened. “Get your hands off my daughter.”
Evelyn turned her attention to the senator. “Do you know you’re in the company of a child molester?”
“Well ma’am, I know slander when I hear it. I think you better go.”
“You’ll never take Lily from me,” Lyle said, starting to shove past me. We were about t
o get into more than a shoving match.
“Give her to us,” Evelyn said to Lyle, “and we’ll help get you counseling. You know what you’re doing is wrong.”
The senator took out his cell. “Security, we have a problem down here.”
Evelyn focused her frustration on him. “You rape kids, too?”
The senator went pale. “Maybe you’d both like to go to jail and let Lyle raise your son.”
Before he had finished the sentence, I turned to Evelyn and tried to keep myself wedged between her and the others, attempting to calm a fury I’d never seen in her eyes. The security was already on its way, and having Evelyn arrested for using her green belt against the senator would help nothing. Although it may have brought some momentary satisfaction.
“Is there a problem here, Senator?” asked one of the security guards.
The senator looked to Lyle, who shook his head.
“Can I show you to your seats?” the guard asked me.
“Thank you, I think we know where they are.”
Lyle used the interruption to take Lily’s hand and pull her away from Cain. I led Evelyn and Cain away. Cain couldn’t look away from Lily and Lyle. Evelyn kept her eyes on the floor as her anger melted into resolve.
“Mingling?” Nikki Menae asked as we sat next to her.
“Yeah.” I said. “It’s a small world.”
“Sure is,” said a vaguely familiar voice from behind.
I turned around to find ourselves sitting in front of a handful of Barebots employees and one famous Barebot couple. Elektro and Elektra were sitting right behind us. Evelyn and I hadn’t seen them since the World’s Fair ten years before.
Nikki started the introductions. “Adam and Evelyn, I’m sure you remember Elektro and Elektra. They, of course, remember you.”
Evelyn shouted, “Oh my gosh!” and turned around to hug them both.
I nodded stiffly, still tense, and shook their hands. “Great to see you guys again. Where’s Sparko?”
“Apparently no dogs are allowed. Even Barebot dogs,” Elektro answered. “He wrote an angry letter to NASA.”
“Another first for robotic dogs,” Nikki noted. “Now have you two ever met Cain?”
“No, we haven’t,” Elektra said as her fingers ruffled Cain’s hair. “But we’ve heard a lot about you.”
Cain turned around. “Really?”
She nodded. “We heard you have your mother’s spirit.”
Cain looked proudly at his mom, then back at the Barebot praising her. “So you were some of the first Barebots?” Cain asked.
“The first ones to meet the public,” Elektro said. “Yet we’re actually not much more than a year older than you. We were only a few months old when we met Adam and Evelyn at the World’s Fair.”
Elektra smiled broadly. “Your mother was wearing a sweater with all sorts of thin, brightly colored horizontal stripes, and a brown skirt with tall boots, and she had an orange scrunchie in her hair to make a ponytail. No makeup except a little lip gloss. I liked her immediately.”
Evelyn grinned. “I thought it was an amber scrunchie.”
“It was orange,” Elektra corrected, making a ponytail out of Evelyn’s hair. “These newlyweds walked right past some people who were jeering at us and protesting our existence, and she gave me a big hug. And while she was hugging me she said, ‘Elektra, you and your family are going to make the world such a better place. And I love you for it.’”
I saw Cain gaze at his blushing mom with admiration.
Elektra continued. “But you know what I never got to tell Evelyn?”
“What?”
“I never got to tell her that I loved her for saying that.”
I watched Evelyn stand up and give Elektra another hug, whispering in each other’s ears. When she sat back down, I rubbed her back and laughed at her embarrassment.
Minutes later the Eagle landed, exactly one hundred years after the first landing. As the astronauts planted the American flag, I wondered at the bravery of those first men on the moon, and I wondered at the bravery of my family at my side. And I wondered why I didn’t have it.
Table of Contents
49
By 2070, thirty-six years after my birth, almost a third of all Americans who died were having themselves cloned. The shrinking band of anti-cloners pointed to the troubling statistic that although the overall birthrate had risen during that period, the birthrate of non-clones had dropped almost every year. As a population, we were indeed giving ourselves new lives at the expense of other possible lives with original genetic sequences.
The Genetics and Cloning Board rarely had to make contentious decisions anymore, as all major and most minor legal issues regarding clones had been dealt with, and the majority seemed satisfied with the results, although Congress and state governments would at times overrule us on issues depending on the political winds.
Thorniest of all was the idea of publicly financing cloning among the poor. Only a couple states were providing this by 2070, though several charity groups had grown up around it. Those charities were mostly religious organizations that believed cloning was the afterlife. The largest of these, The Resurrectionists, was a quickly growing Christian denomination whose central tenant held that Christ had envisioned cloning as the path by which human beings would be restored to their bodies. They believed that the soul of the original was attached to its future clones. Their efforts to recruit me failed, but I did contribute to their efforts for the poor since church membership was not required for people to receive money from their foundation.
Then there were those problems that couldn’t be legislated away. On the medical side, Ingeneuity had made enormous gains in reducing the mortality rate and reining in genetic abnormalities, but there was still so much we didn’t understand and were unable to completely cure.
The suicide rate remained far too high – more than five times the rate of non-clones. Society had mostly become numb to the suicides over the past two decades, and in the end it took a personality everyone had heard of to shake up the debate anew.
Cooper Jones had been one of the most popular basketball players of his generation – the “five-foot-twelve” surprise star nicknamed “Too-Small Jones” who barely made the draft and went on to set multiple scoring records. His underdog story and charming personality made him a celebrity whether or not you wanted the Bulls to win. His death in 2054 from a rock-climbing accident shook us all.
On November 14, 2070, young Cooper Jones-2 killed himself after not making the first string of his freshman high school basketball team. He begged in his suicide holovideo for his DNA not to be cloned again.
The entire world grieved and searched for an answer to the tragedy. More than fifty thousand turned out for his funeral in Chicago – clones and non-clones. I was one of the speakers, officially sent as the GC Board representative, and in choking words I apologized for our failure to all clones who had ended their lives prematurely. We should have tried harder to let them know they were loved as individuals and had no reason to hold themselves up to the accomplishments or failures of their clone-parents. And if the GC Board had delivered better materials and classes to the counselors, parents, and the clones themselves, then we could have saved thousands of lives.
The day after the funeral, the tragedy was compounded. The coach who had made the decision to put Cooper Jones-2 into the second string was barraged by verbal attacks, phone calls, v-mails, and letters blaming him for the death. The vicious onslaught and outpouring of grief in the media led to yet another senseless suicide. In his note, the coach apologized to Cooper Jones-2, Cooper’s family, and all who grieved for them, and explained that at the time he thought it would have been unfair to cut a deserving student from the lineup to put Jones in, but in retrospect he wished he had done so.
The apology was scoffed at by some for dismissing Cooper Jones-2 as undeserving. That was, of course, the reason Cooper had been put in the second string, but even those wh
o recognized the fact thought it tasteless to say so after Cooper’s suicide.
I simply thought he was trying to explain himself at a moment of supreme depression, and I was disgusted by those who suggested that some justice had been done through the coach’s suicide.
We stayed in Chicago a few more days and attended Coach Bill Ballard’s funeral. I was afraid I’d say something in anger that I’d regret, and asked the more diplomatic and levelheaded Jack to speak in my place.
He did speak. Jack talked about Bill’s life and accomplishments, and said he was devastated at the tragedy of Coach Ballard’s death. But that he was also deeply saddened at the cruelty of those who unfairly attacked him with such viciousness – “especially those who, rather than feel guilt after his suicide, instead amplified their vitriol and rejoiced in the tragedy they provoked. This is the ugliness that will undo us.”
*
The funerals had a strong effect on Cain. He changed his Little League uniform number to Cooper-2’s and wore a black armband.
It all had a powerful effect on me as well. One week after my return to San Diego, I resigned as chairman of the GC Board and took a smaller, less visible position. With my encouragement, Jack Lewis took over the chairmanship. I was sure someone with his background in psychology and counseling of clones would be better able to spearhead a program to rescue clones from the suffocating tensions that lead them to suicide.
It was a lot to put on him, but Jack was determined to try, promptly beginning the ambitious I’m Okay, We’re Okay program that overhauled our literature and pushed the government into writing a bill that would require all c-parents and clone guardians to attend a class based on that literature. There was much opposition to compulsory education, but Jack struck while the iron was hot, and the legislation squeaked through. The significant drop in clone suicides following the implementation of his program proved he knew what he was doing.