The Daisy Genocide

The Flowers Were Screaming

My name is Lovino Vargas but that is not who I am. I am my brother. They put his DNA into a little ball of jello and grew me like a house plant.

You might have heard the term Pushing Daisies. If not, it means that you're dead in the ground, a lump of fertilizer that's being used to push up daisies. Well, those daisies symbolize death and are a very fragile thing to mess with. They have a very delicate balance. A long time ago, the daisies started screaming. We all heard them, some more blaringly than others, but we all ignored it until it finally dissipated into a funny little qualm that once dared to face man kind.

Death is dead. Man killed it. Now, it is us who control life. We create, we destroy, we incubate our surroundings to fit our desires. That's why I'm alive. You see, my brother is dead; taken in a terrible accident. Of course, that was no big deal back then. They just scooped up his body, took some blood, and made me. A perfect match. Just like that, they resurrected Feliciano. Only, I'm not Feliciano. I'm smarter. I was made that way. Feliciano was always the school dunce. My parents thought that this time, they could do a little better. I'm also taller and stronger than him and I look more like my grandpa. These were requests made by my parents.

The word clone is unethical. We don't say that. We call them a Pomaig. That's pronounced (Poe-my-g). It's an acronym for Person Of Modified And Inherited Genetics. When you say clone, you think of a robot army. That's not what it is. This is the ARK Era, as in The ARK corporation. They've frozen away countless test-tubes of DNA, making sure, like Noah, that nothing will completely die off. There's shelves of monkeys and horses and even people. It's hard to imagine. Countless people waiting in test tubes, waiting to be brought into a world that wasn't made for them.

Of course, it's not just Pomaigs. When a mommy and daddy love each other very much, they make a "natural". Back when ARK was new, most everyone was a natural. Only problem is, naturals aren't as perfect as Pomaigs are. Now, Naturals are rare. They're lower class people. A lot of them live on reservations, forest-like lands where they can run free like gypsies. The ones who live in the real world are often charity people or maintenance workers.

Then there are the Politia. They're different from the police. The police protect the people and the politia protect the system. They don't have to follow any of the rules. As long as they get the results, they won't be questioned as to how they got them. They watch, they monitor, they make sure everything works and that everyone does what they're supposed to do.

There's one last group. When you're cloning, every once in a while a batch comes out screwy. But it's all right. ARK will refund your money or try again if you like. What happens to the mistake though? It's unethical to kill it so it becomes an employee of the public. It takes on the lowest of jobs, the ones that real people have rejected. These people are referred to simply as the Curvus denomination. They're not right, to say it bluntly. They don't work right and for that reason, they have to be kept out of society. My mother said that they were going to make me a Curvus because that tell-tale cowlick turned up on the wrong side of my head but my parents let it be. They even gave me my own name. Well, actually, it was my grandfather who named me. He took one look at his Petri-dish grandchild and gave me the name Lovino, meaning "I ruin" in Italian. My father just said that the combination of Feli's death and science made Grandpa grumpy.

My bones ache knowing that they were meant for someone else. I'm living on borrowed time with borrowed blood and a borrowed face. I've always known that I'm not my brother and I've always wished that no one expected me to be but it took me a while to actually consider running away. Now, it's the only thing I want.

No, that's a lie. I also want to be dead but that's never going to happen. I could jump off a cliff and smash into a hundred little pieces. Doctors are used to cases like that, people do it all the time. They do their magic and just like that, you're good as new. I could make it really interesting. I could have someone chop off my head and burn my body. I would probably make the news. Suddenly, there would be this race to resurrect the poor murdered boy. They'd scrape my DNA off the charcoal and build a new Lovino, smarter and stronger than the last. Nobody dies, nobody escapes.

It's all thanks to ARK, our freezer warehouse where every species imaginable can be condensed into a Tuna can. People used to say, "If we keep killing everything, soon we'll be the only ones left on the planet" but now we say, "Just make another. I don't see what the problem is". You can't break ARK, it's not possible. All you can do is run away from it. That's exactly what I plan to do.

I woke up at six o'clock sharp. Every morning, everyday. I brush my teeth, wash my face and comb my hair, in that order, every morning, every day. Everything is perfect, everything has a pattern. That's the way we do it my house. Nothing out of the ordinary happens so we're prepared for everything.

When I look in the mirror, my eyes are always drawn to that quirky little cowlick. My genetic identical had one just like it. It was just a freak of nature happening but naturally, it had to be reproduced when I was created. Stop looking in the mirror. You should only look in the mirror for five minutes. It wasn't a rule but it was strongly advised. Any less and you won't evaluate yourself thoroughly enough, any more and you'll become obsessed with appearance.

Next, I get dressed. There's no dress code or uniform but it's understood in our society that you shouldn't stand out from everyone else. Boys wore button up shirts and slacks. It was summer, so I wore the short sleeve top. In winter, I'll wear the long sleeve one. That's how it is. There aren't written rules because most of them are upheld by the people. At six thirty sharp, we meet downstairs.

"Lovino, sweetie, how did you sleep? Well, I presume? I'm sure you did, of course you did, you've always been a good sleeper." Said the woman. She was my mother. I find it hard to be around her more and more each day. I've become so intolerant of her stupid oblivion. She is the product of careful propaganda, just like we all are. It breaks my heart. We don't know each other, nobody does. We just converse through pre-determined script and go our own ways. To each other, we are mother and son. We don't have faces, just roles to fulfill. She's all but a shell, sitting in her lonely chair, reading her lonely papers and thinking her lonely thoughts.

"Yes, well." I answered, feeling inclined to respond.

"That's good. The news was on just earlier, did you know that?"

"I did." It comes on at the same time each day, everyday.

"There was a commotion on the reservation. Some kids having a cult of a sort. Demon worship."

"What's happened to them?"

"The politia took care of it."

"How?"

She looked at me like I were crazy. Everybody knew that when the politia took care of something, that was that. No questions asked. She ignored me. "Are you going to study today? You are, of course. It's Tuesday, you always study of Tuesdays. Of course you're going to study today." I just nodded. "What will you study? Nerve cells, right? Of course, you're studying nerve cells now."

"Yes, I am. I going to leave now." I informed her.

"You usually don't leave until seven. What's the occasion?" I opened my mouth but needed not speak. "You want to get there before it gets warm, don't you? Yes, of course. You do that some days. That's what it is, that's why you want to leave early. Alright, good bye, Dear." I said goodbye as well and left.

I wasn't going to study. I was going to the reservation to read. I had a book hidden out there that I had been working on for a few weeks. They say that we should limit the amount of fiction we read. It's not real. It's make-believe people in make-believe worlds having make-believe problems. Reading books like that gives people crazy ideas. They make people argue and when people argue, there is chaos. They tell us to read more informational text. It teaches our brains to think logically and then we can end all chaos and mayhem. In short, fiction endangers lives and non fiction saves them. At least, that's what we're taught.

When I was seven years of age, I picked up my first book without an ARK approved seal on it. I liked it. It made me imagine worlds that were far beyond my own. I met people of all different kinds and I thought about things that were fantastically out of proportion. For instance, I thought to myself once, "What if a cow had six legs instead of four?" Can you imagine!? The pure absurdity of it! I loved it!

I started to read a lot after then. I read old books that told about a world before ARK. In school, they told us about the age of nuclear war and genocide but they forgot to mention everything amazing about it! There used to be real live people on the TV and everybody ate food all the time! Three meals a day! Can you imagine!? Nowadays, we don't eat food. They say that food is an unnecessary pleasure, much like drugs and alcohol. It corrupts us and drives us to insanity. Hunger keeps us from focusing on things that are actually meaningful so instead, we take a pill every Saturday evening. I've heard that some of the naturals eat big things like fruits and vegetables but they're not allowed to bring them into the city. Once you've eaten something, you're addicted. Still…I want to have chocolate someday…just to taste for a minute.

I hid this book on the reservation, under a pile of leaves at the trunk of a tree that had been split by lightening. I wasn't sure what the name of it was because the binding was old and torn. On the first page, it read, "To my Dearest Amelia, whom has taught me all I know about love." I named the book Amelia. It was a fantastic thing. It was about a man named Arnold who worked in a mine so that he and his daughter could take the train into a big city. It was hard for me to understand a lot of the references. They talked about railroads and airplanes and banquets, things I only knew from the pages of a book. This is how I learned about the old world. Everybody was natural and they all knew each other. There weren't schedules. People used to get in debates or sit down just to talk. Sometimes, I would close my eyes and pretend like I was in that room too. I would pretend like I knew the names of the famous actors and we'd discus a film for the whole night.

That's why I started going to the reservation. The forests were quiet and no one would watch you. In the city, there are always eyes. Everything you do and say can be observed though glowing red laser points. You can't trust the city.

Half an hour into my reading, I heard footsteps in the crumpled leaves. I quickly buried my book beside me and waited casually as if I hadn't been doing anything at all, just a pomaig minding his own business in the middle of a reservation. There's nothing suspicious about that other than the fact of social class segregation.

It was a boy. He was tall…at least taller than me and I can't say that I wasn't a little bit shocked by the sight of him. He had warm, autumn, skin and thick locks of dirt-colored hair. His eyes were green like the hanging leaves of great olive trees, they darted into mine, looking at me with divine curiosity. I couldn't figure him. Usually, when you meet a stranger, you know exactly what they want but this boy was neutral. He didn't seem to be up to anything at all. "Hello." His happy voice chimed.

I said hello as well, which is what you ought to say when someone says hello to you. He asked me for my name but I told him that I couldn't give it to him because I didn't know what he wanted to do with it. "I only want to listen to it." He assured me. "I know your face but if I can't put a name to it, it's like we never met at all."

"Well, just run back to what you were doing and there won't be a need for this at all."'

"But what if I want to talk with you?"

"Talk? About what?"

"About anything. Suppose we were to talk about fish. Would you like that?"

"People don't talk about such meaningless things."

"Fish aren't meaningless! We eat them after all, don't we?"

I was intrigued. "You eat?"

He laughed. "Of course I eat. How do you suppose I live?"

"You must be a natural then."

"I am. You must live in the city."

"I do."

"Why are you on the reservation? I didn't think that was allowed." My face instantly became flushed, cueing him in on the fact that I had something to hide. "Are you running away?" His curiosity impelled him to come around beside me and plop down into the masses of dry leaves.

"What business have you in questioning me!?"

"Come on! I want to know! What's your secret?"

"I haven't got one."

"A pomaig doesn't end up hiding on a reservation without a secret to tell."

I turned my head away from him, feeling rather frustrated with this stranger. I didn't know him for more than a minute yet he was breaking every code of barriers. I wanted him to leave.

"Oh! I've made you upset! I'm sorry!"

"I'm not upset."

"You're upset with me! Say you forgive me, please!"

"Shut up." I mumbled under my breath, earning a moment of shock from both of us. Nobody talks like that. Nobody argues and nobody practices name-calling, not ever. Surprisingly, when I looked back at the natural, his lips were smiling over his entire face.

" You're absolutely mad~" He commented, the smile not wavering. "I like you quite a bit. More than I like most strangers. You must tell me your name now. It's practically torture to keep it away from me."

"I can't tell you my name because-"

"Is it Leo? You look like a Leo."

"What?"

"Or maybe Lucas. I'm feeling the letter L. Suppose it's Luca, is that any better? No, not Luca…"

"What are you-"

"I've got it! Maybe you're a Liam! No…that's not right…What if you're a-"

"Lovino." He was so annoying. Definitely a natural.

"Lovino? That's your name?"

I nodded.

"It's great! Better than the ones I guessed. It suits you! It-"

"It means I ruin."

"It doesn't suit you at all."

"You don't know me. You can't know what suits me or not."

"I have a talent for judging people."

"I'm sure there are lots of other people waiting to be judged. Run off. Judge them before they loose patience."

"None quite as interesting as you. I still haven't discovered your secret."

"And what is your intent? If you must know my secret, what will you do with it?"

"Just listen. Maybe it'll become my secret as well."

"That's ridiculous."

"Is it? Isn't it much more fun to share a secret between two or three people?"

"Then it's not a secret."

"It is if nobody tells."

"Go make a secret with somebody else. It would be far easier for you to understand than my secret."

"Why is that?"

"Because you're a natural. Even if I tried to explain these things to you, you wouldn't understand. Like, for instance, do you know why it doesn't rain in the city?"

"No."

"See? And that's only because your brain hasn't got the capacity for a thing like that."

"Well, why doesn't it rain in the city?"

"It's very complicated. I couldn't possibly tell you."

"You could try."

"I'm warning you, you wouldn't understand."

"Come on now." He whined. "Give it a whirl, I might get it."

I sighed. It's useless. Naturals don't even understand that they can't understand. "It's a series of wires running from building to building that-"

"Well I know that. But why do people in the city not want to get rained on?"

"That's an odd question. Well…it's because… well they don't want all the electronics to break."

"They're all water proof. They fixed that problem before the rain-less roof was ever invented."

I tried to think of a solution but I didn't have one. Why can't it rain in the city? I didn't have an answer so I settled for, "You think too much." People sometimes told me that when we sat down to talk.

"Do I? I've been told I'm crazy before so I must be. I love the rain. Almost as much as I love the sun. I like to be rained on, have you ever been rained on?"

"I don't think I'd like it."

"Have you ever tried?"

"No."

"I have a hose in my backyard if you'd like to give it a shot."

"No, I'd like to go back to what I was doing before."

"The secret?"

"Yes."

"Go ahead."

"It won't be a secret unless you leave."

"I won't tell! I just want to know what it is that keeps my friend Lovino so intrigued." I was surprised by the boy's language. He spoke like a person from the city. Naturals are usually all slang users.

"You could get me in real trouble if you told!"

"I won't! Tell me! I so rarely get to hear a good secret."

"Maybe it's because you can't be trusted with them."

He groaned and flopped over into the leaves with exhaustion.

"Don't the leaves make you itch?"

"I suppose."

"They why do you lay in them?"

"I like it. Have you ever tried laying in the leaves?"

"No."

"Try."

So I did. At first, all I thought about was how much they itched and scratched at my skin. He told me to relax and not move so much. Suddenly, I realized the fantasy of the whole thing. I felt like a leaf myself, small and lost in the abyss of my caramel-colored brothers. I could feel the wind move across my belly as if coaxing me to stay low on the Earth like this and a divine scent rose all around me. For a long time, the only noise came from the whistling leaves and our breaths as they intertwined. "What's your name?" I asked the boy.

"Antonio." He answered softly.

"Antonio…can you tell me something?"

"What?"

"What do the leave smell like?" I was so blind in the ways of the world. It wasn't the smell I wanted to know so much as the feeling of it. What do call it when you feel like you could melt right into the ground? What do you call this odd sensation? It was so soothing yet it made my heart race.

He took a deep breath. "They smell like maple syrup… and sugar… and the end of a campfire."

I didn't know any of those smells. "What do they feel like?"

"Like being happy."

Just then, I felt like I hadn't ever been happy before. How odd. I was sure I had been happy before but the more I thought about it, the less I was able to pinpoint an actual moment other then right now. I'd been happy before, it's ridiculous to think I hadn't. Of course I've been happy before! Only… I'm too distracted to think of another time. "Antonio…"

"What?"

"It's…Nothing." I wanted to ask him everything. I wanted him to tell me what the sky looked like or what kind of pictures there were in the moon. I wanted him to describe the feeling of a cold breeze on your neck and grass in between your toes or maybe someday, how chocolate tastes. Stupid questions. He knew all of these things and his senses had developed in such a way that they were natural to him. He could feel a tree trunk and describe all of these wonderful sensations that I would have never noticed. I reached my hand down beside me and pulled out the worn stack of parchment.

He looked at it curiously. "What's it about?"

"A man and his daughter. They don't have any money so the man must work in the mines so they can take the railroad into a city."

"It's fiction?"

I nodded and opened the book, a daring task that I had grown used to. I glanced through the words. He told me to read what I was looking at. I asked him why but he retorted that it killed him that I knew the secret and he didn't. "Lacey hadn't had a good night's sleep in over a year. She couldn't, not while the truth weighted so heavily on her mind. She thought about her father and the mines and the dangerous growling of the caves but mostly, she reminded herself that she were alive and that while this was true, she wanted to feel alive." I recited from a yellow leaf of water-damaged paper. I followed it by clarifying that Lacey was Colonel, the protagonist's, daughter.

"Is that why you're hiding in the woods?"

I nodded again.

"How does it end?"

"What do you mean?"

"The book."

"I'm not in the business of book murder. Someone put a great deal of effort into writing this and to spoil it in a sentence or two would be considered murder of the first degree."

He chuckled a warm, comforting, chuckle. "You weren't made for the city."

"Yes I was. I'm a pomaig."

"You're still a person. You're just as much a person as I am, you just started differently." I looked into his eyes and found myself there, suspended in two dark drown pupils. My face watched me right back, just as surprised and unsure as I was. "But you're different. I've never met a person like you, , not even a natural. Will you come back tomorrow?"

"Back here?"

"Yes."

"I don't know. If I do this too often, people will find out."

"If you come back, I'll take you to see the abandoned train tracks."

"Where!?"

"A mile or two East."

"I can't be gone that long."

"I have a bike, it'll only take a minute."

I thought about this preposition. "What happens if you follow the tracks?"

"You leave." He said.

We were both silent, possibly thinking the same thing. I had no way of knowing what he was thinking but the way he was silent suggested that he wanted to ask me the same thing I wanted to ask. He was the first to say it. "Have you ever thought of leaving?"

"I have. You?"

He sat up and I followed his lead. "Yes… I don't know why but I feel like something very terrible is going to happen. This place is going to collapse in on itself, it can't stay like this forever."

"Where would you go?" I asked that question not to him but to myself, hoping that he might be able to produce an answer for me which I had failed to do every time I wondered it.

"Away, I suppose. Somewhere where nobody will discover me. Where I may die and stay dead forever."

"Why don't you do it then?"

"Can you imagine being alone for the rest of your life? It's possibly more heartbreaking than this reality."

"I suppose. Maybe it wouldn't be too awful. People are always telling you what to do and getting angry with you."

"Yes but you would miss them if you left."

"Are there other cities?"

"I don't know."

"How far have you gone?"

"To the fence."

"What fence?"

He looked at me curiously. "The one around the city."

"There's not a fence. I've never seen a fence." How could there be a fence? Surely, I would have at least heard about it. For the first time, I realized that there may be things I didn't know about this city. There may be secrets.

"The one around the city! You haven't seen it?" He asked in shock.

"No. Is there really a fence? What kind of fence is it?"

"It's a big wire one. It has censors on it, it'll shock people wearing chips if they try to climb it but I've seen natural kids playing on it before. They don't get shocked." Pomaigs have chips. They're our identity, implanted into our shoulders. Everything in the city is run on chips. You're house recognizes you by your chip and unlocks the door when you go to open it. The library identifies you when you walk in and recommends books for you based on what you've been studying recently. It remembers what page in what book you last read. Everything reads chips, even the politia can track you by your chip.

"How would you remove a chip?"

"Are you actually thing about-"

"Keep your voice down!" You never know who's listening, words carry farther than their projected sound waves.

"Oh, sorry." His eyes quickly glanced around, making sure there were no visible threats. "I…I know a person."

"Who?"

"A doctor. He's a pomaig too, a runaway. But look, you can't leave the city. It's too dangerous. If they found you, they'd make you a curvus. Even if you got over the fence, you wouldn't know what to do."

"Who says?"

"I do. Trust me, you don't know about the world outside the city."

"I'm not saying that I actually will. I just wanted to know. What would I have to know?"

He looked very conflicted. "I can't tell you."

"Why not?"

"It's a crazy idea!"

"You were thinking it too!"

"But I'm not crazy enough to try it!"

"Why not!? What's keeping you? Are you attached to this?" I pointed out toward the city. "You said it yourself, it's all fake. I can't do it! I can't live like this anymore. Someday, I'll be just as dead and brainwashed as everyone of them."

"But if you leave-"

"I may die, I know. At least I won't have to live for an eternity, caught in this vicious cycle of immortality. Every lifetime I'll become less and less human. Thousands of years of propaganda will make me into a circus animal. I can't." He was at a loss for words, unable to fight me off anymore. He knew I was right, of course I'm right. "Can you help me?"

High levels of anxiety and confusion caused him to twitch and pant endlessly. "I don't know what you mean-"

"I mean, do you know the way out?" If being a bully is what it took, I would pressure it out of him.

"Yes." He said as if condemning himself.

"And do you know the land? Like how to find and make food?"

"I-I guess I do."

"And would you ever consider leaving this place for good?"

"Well of course but that doesn't mean-"

"I'll see you again tomorrow, Antonio. Same spot, same time." I stood up and put one foot in front of the other with a newfound confidence. I hadn't actually thought this all out yet, it was mostly a rash decision but I'd give myself the night to think it over. In the heat of the moment, it felt right.

"Lovino!" He cried after me. "You forgot-"

"Keep it." I said. I knew he was going to read it, he's curious. Curiosity is all it takes. A few words from our prized poets can drive a man pursue the truth and a few quotes from our wise story-tellers will fill a man with images of grandeur. Give a man a book and he'll be smarter than the man trying to catch a fish.

I kept walking until I got into the city. Large buildings, many rooms, all housing their own little secret agendas. Nobody knows anybody, nobody looks out the window to wonder what shapes the clouds will make. They're all so, so busy with their assigned tasks. They strive for perfection, for a mastery of all elements. So then, where am I in all of this? I'm the one on the street, staring up at the rain-less roof and wishing that it would let just a drop or two fall down on my head. The grass on the lawns grows one inch tall, every blade, the exact same. Every house is white, every roof is brown. The dogs never shed their fur, the leaves never fall, the windows never smudge. Everything is perfect. Except that it's not. It's a house of glass composed of a billion fragments, all held together in a delicate balance. One ripple will send it shuddering. One rock will shatter the whole thing.

My mother was in the living room with a stranger. They were talking. The stranger wore the blue uniform of a police officer and chatted on delightfully with her. My mind flooded with images of my arrest. They must have heard me just now. They're listening. They know. "Lovino, sweetie!" Her ripe, red lips smiled when I came in. Hair so perfectly curled, nails so perfectly polished.

"Hello." I relied nervously and shut the door behind myself.

"Hey there, Sport." The police are the only people in the whole town who talk like that. I have no idea why they do it. Maybe it makes them seem more friendly or something. It just makes me more nervous. My mother proceeded to ask why I had only been gone three hours. Normally, I stay four.

"I don't feel well." It wasn't necessarily a lie. In fact, I was feeling quite nauseous. Even if it were a lie, nobody would question it. People don't need to lie. A perfect society is one in which we can all trust each other. If I said I felt sick, every brainwashed clone in town would believe it.

"Oh dear! Go take a Zimiplex, won't you? I'd hate for you to get a migraine." Zimiplex is the drug to end all drugs. It's a miracle of a sort. If you feel odd in anyway, you take a Zimiplex and within a minute, all of your troubles will be solved. I got it out of the bathroom cabinet and dumped one red tablet out onto my palm. I considered just taking the whole bottle. There was a point were people were overdosing on Zimiplex almost ten times a day so they changed the recipe. It's almost impossible now. Like I said, you can't cheat the system.

When I came back into the living room, all eyes were on me. "Are you feeling better now, dear? Of course you are, Zimiplex always works. Fit as a fiddle, that's what they say. Why don't you sit with us?" I took a seat and listened in on the conversation. The good news was that they weren't discussing my whereabouts. Bad news is that they weren't discussing much of anything at all. "Have you read any good books lately? I just read one the day before last. It was about birds."

"Fine creatures." The officer answered.

"Don't you think?"

"Just fine."

"Marvelous, really. I read about one called a Robin."

"A fine name."

"And another called a dove. They're lovely."

"Absolutely."

"And there was another. Oh, I think I've forgotten the name. What was it? Lovino, dear, do you remember? I was telling you about it last night. The blue one?"

"Blue Jay." I answered.

"Yes, of course! The Blue Jay!"

"Mom, I'm going to go up to my room."

"Alright, dear."

I stood up and began to leave when the stranger stopped me and called me back over to him. My heart just about exploded through my chest. Slowly, my feet retreated as ordered. I prayed that he couldn't hear my chest as loudly as I was hearing it. He stood up in an awful intimidating way. His giant hand lifted and stretched around to the backside of my head. He pinched my collar then pulled it back to show me a golden yellow leaf, held tightly between his fingers. "Stuck to your collar."

"Oh, thanks." I quickly felt for more.

"Where did you say you just came from?"

"The library." He inspected the leaf. I quickly came up with an excuse before he either put the pieces together or blew a fuse while thinking too hard. "I picked it off a tree. They look so nice this time of year, don't you think?"

He smiled. "Yes, they do. That's why we have to keep them on the trees, so everyone can enjoy them as much as you. You know you're not supposed to be pick'n 'em."

"I'm sorry. I won't do it again." He accepted this apology with a pap on the shoulder.

"We have to be careful where we walk around here, son. It only takes one person to mess up a beauty meant to be enjoyed by everyone. That's what messed up the world last time, everyone being greedy. They'd see something nice and want to take some for themselves. Either that or they'd destroy the whole thing so that nobody could have it. Now, it's only a leaf so I won't raise no fuss about it but you ought to be careful. You best be more careful where you walk. If I see you making more trouble for the city, I'll have to tell someone." He left his heavy hand on my shoulder for a moment longer, driving in the intimidation.

"Of course." I mumbled, hoping I didn't seem as terrified as I truly was. He knew, he definitely knew.

"Right then." His smile was large and drunken-looking, empowered by his ability to intimidate small children. "Well, run off. I'm sure you've got a great nerve cell report waiting for you upstairs."

I ran off to my room as soon as I got over the terror of him knowing my personal studies. How could he know that? My mother wouldn't have told him, she's too concerned with talking about herself and her own studies. What do they know? Do they watch me? Is the library safe? Where are the eyes, how many of them are there? I collapsed onto the bed. So close. I can't afford to be that close all the time. so much danger and it's all just waiting an inch away. It only comes down to what danger you're closest to first. Someday, I run out of lucky breaks. Today was just one step closer.

I looked at the tiny hairs on the back of my hand. They were standing erect. They were afraid. They were alive. I was alive. Why did nobody ever tell me I was alive? They just expected me to know this. They don't tell you that you're dead either. I guess it's not that big of a deal. Who cares? Being alive means the same as being dead nowadays. I wanted to do things. I had a list in my head of all the things I wanted to do while I was alive. I wanted to eat chocolate and take a nap and get rained on and stare into the mirror for a long time, just to name a few.

I began to think about Antonio, trying to block out the incessant laughter that echoed up the stairs. Antonio knew where that fence was, he had a bike, he knew the world outside, he was perfect. I needed him. Without Antonio, I wouldn't even make it to the train tracks. I wondered what made him such a curious person. He thought about such odd things and he had a way of making you believe you'd known him your whole life. Maybe he was like me. Maybe he read too much and it filled him with crazy ideas.

Where would we go? We'd follow the tracks. They have to lead somewhere. Maybe there are other towns. Maybe we'll just die of starvation or we'd be attacked by kill-mutant lab-rejects. I just hoped that when they got us, we'd at least be far enough away that the search team wouldn't find our bodies.

The chip situation would be rough. I've never had a knife in my skin before. I've never even seen my own blood. I mean, I've gotten a paper cut before but my skin is the best that our race has to offer. It clots instantly and scabs for no longer than a day. My red blood cell count dominates the white which was cripplingly near a mere 500. I would essentially die if I left the city for too long. You see, the city is clean. There are sensors in every doorway that asses your bacterial content and spray you with otherwise unnoticeable disinfectants. My body hasn't ever needed to fight illnesses so I don't need the amount that naturals do. I've been told that my white blood cell count is unusually high for someone who lives in the city full time but I suppose that's because I frequently visit the reservation. In any regards, I'd have to make some serious changes before I could even think about leaving.

I'm not sure how much I would miss my mom and dad. I would miss them but I would feel mostly sadness because I'd be leaving them to be cannibalized by the system. I can't save them. They wouldn't understand and I don't have time to make them understand. The walls are closing in, time is running out. It'll just be me and Antonio. I have lots of books stored up in my head to tell him. I can teach him what I know and he can do the same. I don't know what I planned to do. It's not like we were going to find some sort of hidden, uncorrupted village to repopulate and educate. We would just be a couple of idiots trying to run away from the destiny we were born into. No matter how much I denied it, I was a clone, something people only knew of in science fiction a little while back.

Back in the old world, when people started being cloned, there were protests. They were called the Dolly Died Riots, referring to the first successfully cloned mammal from an adult somatic cell, Dolly the sheep. It was a huge deal when it first happened. The thing is, she was born with minor deformities and only lived to seven years of age. These riots would crowd around labs that were practicing human cloning and hold up signs that said "DΩLLY DIED", drawing attention to the imperfections of cloning. A lot of people had to die before human cloning was accepted. Even then, it was rare. School children would be teased, called Lambs as if they were the offspring of that first sheep. As time went on, it became just a way of life. If you had the option of waiting around for a baby that may or may not have dwarfism or mental retardation versus waiting around for a baby that would look like your favorite popstar and be equipped with a set of perfectly functioning organs, which would you choose?

I just laid on my bed thinking until the clock struck nine. After going to sleep at the same time every day for your entire life, your body gets pretty used to the schedule. I fell asleep almost the instant I heard the clock chime. It was a slightly horrifying form of clockwork. It was hard to think that they had trained my body to become unconscious at the same time every day. In the old world, people would just lay around and slowly descend into sleep unlike now where consciousness is as fickle as trust, initiated and broken by the slightest whim.

It wasn't my DNA that made me a clone so much as it was the world. I do the same thing every day, say the same things, think the same things, never once taking action on my plans to break free. As far as anyone could tell, Feliciano never died. Finally, I had a way out. A curly-haired, tan-skinned, smiling way out. I hardly believed it would work myself but that didn't mean I wouldn't try. That dumb, skinny boy was my answer. I was going to see him tomorrow and all the while, my anxiety pooled in my stomach. Today, my world flipped. Today was the first day of Lovino Vargas' life.