Disclaimer: All material of familiarity is owned, copyrighted, and otherwise credited to the parties to which it belongs, that being Roald Dahl, who penned the book from which this story and its chapters are adapted, and perhaps Warner Bros. Studios for the production of the film adaptations of Dahl's book. This story merely borrows the characters for use in a different reality...

CH VI: Revelation

"Which room shall it be next?" said Mr. Wonka as he turned away and darted into the elevator. "Come on! Hurry up! We must get going! And how many children are there left now?"
Little Charlie looked at Grandpa Joe, and Grandpa Joe looked back at little Charlie.
"But Mr. Wonka," Grandpa Joe called after him, "there's...there's only Charlie left now."
Mr. Wonka swung round and stared at Charlie. There was a silence. Charlie stood there holding tightly onto Grandpa Joe's hand.
"You mean you're the only one left?" Mr. Wonka said, pretending to be surprised.
"Why yes," whispered Charlie. "Yes."
Mr. Wonka suddenly exploded with excitement. "But my dear boy," he cried out, "that means you've won!" He rushed out of the elevator and started shaking Charlie's hand so furiously that it nearly came off. "Oh, I do congratulate you!" he cried. "I really do! I'm absolutely delighted! It couldn't be better! How wonderful this is! I had a hunch, you know, right from the beginning, that it was going to be you! Well done, Charlie, well done! This is terrific! Now the fun is really going to start! But we mustn't dilly! We mustn't dally! There's even less time to lose now than there was before! We have an enormous number of things to do before the day is out! Just think of the arrangements that have to be made! And the people we have to fetch! But before we can do any of that...there's just one little thing." Mr. Wonka had by now herded Charlie and Grandpa Joe back into the Great Glass Elevator, and he pressed a button saying "PRIVATE OFFICE." A series of shafts took them in various directions down to another corridor, at the end of which was a magnificent set of double doors in a truly shocking shade of purple, and proudly bearing a golden plaque which read "Willy Wonka, Chief Executive Officer." Mr. Wonka opened the door and eagerly waved the two others inside, bidding them be seated in a pair of enormous armchairs before a magnificent desk. "Now," Mr. Wonka said with a smile, "wait right here for just one teensy moment...I have one brief little bit of business to attend to, and then we'll be right back on track!" He ducked out quickly, closing the door behind him. Grandpa Joe and Charlie looked at each other, and neither one of them noticed the gas seeping out of the vents until they were both struck by a sudden drowsiness...

With the future heir and his guardian blissfully sleeping away, ignorant of the passage of time, Willy Wonka ducked back into the Great Glass Elevator and flipped up what appeared to be a decorative panel, revealing another set of buttons. He pressed one, and the elevator plummeted straight down to a chamber far beneath the factory. The doors opened on a rather different sort of corridor, which led to a rather different sort of room. A dozen tanks full of pale blue liquid glowed in the half-light of a darkened laboratory chamber, attendant Oompa-Loompas busily tending the five cylinders at the far end. The chief scientist quickly made his way over to Mr. Wonka. "Ah, hello, sir."
"How are they coming along?"
"Nearly finished, except for Mike Teavee, of course. It was difficult to get a workable genetic sample. I estimate about four hours before he'll be ready."
"I'd like to see them."
"Certainly, sir." The head scientist led Wonka over to the cylinders, talking as they went. "You must forgive me, sir...when I first heard what you planned to do after Gloop and the transfer pipe, I must admit I had my doubts. Of course, we've been engineering and cloning specimens for years...sheep genetically modified to produce cotton candy, candy apple trees, the Juju-bees...I don't need to tell you that engineering a single specimen is exacting work, and so it is far simpler to clone from that one perfect template than to try to create a new organism each time. But for all the complexity of the things we had cloned thus far, I still doubted our ability to clone a human being. It was, however, far simpler than it looked. And I think we did extraordinarily well...all things considered."
"All things considered?" Wonka said, looking down at the scientist. But then his eyes caught the figures floating in the milky solution of the cloning tanks. "Hmmm. Well, that's... interesting."
The Oompa-Loompa shrugged. "I'm afraid it's the best we could do. I think we've got the memories all right...Research dug up everything they possibly could, and we filled in the blanks with some very good creative writing. But there are some issues with physiology...Gloop, of course, wasn't born that fat...we could try to plump him up a bit, but he's not going to look anything like he did before. Beauregarde, well...truthfully, I don't know what to say about her. Our tissue sample was irrevocably contaminated, and the blue color just kept spreading as we grew the specimen. The two that came out perfectly were the Salts, and we'll still have to see about Teavee. He's still in the inception chamber...his genetic samples were severely corrupted, and at the moment he's fully developed but about four inches tall. I don't presume to understand why, unless his DNA was affected by the television transfer process."
"Why not just stick him in the taffy puller?"
"Sir?"
"The taffy puller...or the gum stretcher. I don't care which."
"I suppose that would work, especially if we combine the stretching process with induced ossification of synthetic tissue, effectively using artificial means to expand the structures of his existing endoskeleton."
"You can say that again," said Wonka, beaming.
"Which part?"
"I don't know. I haven't a clue what you just said."
"I apologize, sir. Scientific terminology is a habit."
"Oh, I didn't mean that. I meant that I wasn't paying attention."
"Oh."
"What of the parents?"
"Ah yes...that. If you'll follow me..." The scientist led the way into another chamber where three adults, Mrs. Gloop, Mrs. Beauregarde, and Mr. Teavee, were all locked into restraining chairs, their eyes forcibly held open and a series of miniature television screens held in place above each of their faces. Above the various images and sounds of the rather harsh mental programming, one set of words could be heard again and again: "These ARE your children." The scientist looked at the scene with distaste. "I hated to do it this way, but there wasn't any other known method that would work in the time allotted. Oh well...they'll probably be better for it in the end."
As they entered the main laboratory again, Wonka stopped and stood, gazing reflectively at the cloning cylinders.
"Is everything all right, sir?"
"Yes, yes. I was just considering the future of this technology. That, and thinking about a new flavor of gumdrop I've been meaning to develop."
"what do you mean, sir?"
"About the gumdrop? Well, you see..."
"Forgive me, sir, but actually I meant the part about the technology."
"Oh, that! Well, there are any number of applications! Just think...you've proven that we have the means to make a perfect duplicate of an independent, self-aware being. And if we could make one clone, we could make a hundred..." Willy Wonka's voice drifted off then, his eyes seeming to look off into the depths of some wondrous and unknown future. And while he would trust his employer with his very life, the chief scientist still felt a chill at Wonka's expression. But neither of them, not even the great Wonka, could imagine just how important the work being done in this laboratory would become...

Grandpa Joe and Charlie both snapped awake at the same instant. For a brief moment, both of them felt a sudden and frightening sense of vertigo...but then the sensation cleared, and they both looked around, remembering instantly where they were. A few seconds later, Mr. Willy Wonka came through the door, and led them both into the Great Glass Elevator, his excitement palpable. Not long afterward, the elevator would burst through the roof of the factory and soar into the sky and Willy Wonka would reveal the incredible news that he had chosen Charlie Bucket to be the heir to his empire...though not before making a quick pass down over the front gates to watch as the other four children exited the factory, all of them alive and well. Augustus Gloop was much thinner, ostensibly from being sucked up the chocolate pipe...Violet Beauregarde was still an alarming shade of blue...Veruca and Mr. Salt were both covered from head to foot in smelly garbage...and Mike Teavee was now about ten feet tall and as thin as a wire. The Public Relations Department managed to put out good cover stories, and so everyone dismissed these peculiarities. And, in all the excitement of that great day, no one noticed the bemused expressions of the children as they left the factory, or the blank smiles on the faces of their parents. In the space of a few years, the effectiveness of the subliminal programming would wear off a bit, and the various parents would all come to realize that something strange had indeed happened on the day of the great factory tour, and that their children were all unmistakably...different. But by the time the realization came, all of the parents had also come to wonder how they had ever lived with their offspring before...or in Mrs. Salt's case, how she had ever managed to stand her husband. And so no one thought about it very much, and they all lived happily ever after...because, to be brutally honest, they were all much happier with the clones than with their own offspring.