88 walked into the observation room, where Alice kept vigil over Rain. "How is she?" 88 asked.
Alice gave her a tense smile. "She's, uh, stable?" she said hesitantly. "Beccers thinks that she neutralized the super-T." She gently squeezed the tentacles that had now fully replaced Rain's lower arm. "She doesn't think she'll be able to reverse what's already changed, though."
88 nodded as she looked at Rain's face, which looked fresh and healthy as a living human's now. "Is she… uh… alive again?" she asked.
Alice shook her head. "No, no heartbeat, no breathing. There's a big mass of solid tissue where her cardiovascular system should be. Beccers did an EEG and there's still brain activity, but it's, uh, minimal." Alice shrugged. "That doesn't really mean much, since Rain's soul should still be glued to her body thanks to our magical love connection, but Beccers has zero context for how magic works, and I don't blame her for that." She smiled wryly. "She also asked I stop calling her Beccers. When I called her Becceroonie, she ground her teeth together for a bit then said Beccers would actually be fine."
"I don't think it's very nice to tease Dr. Chambers," 88 lightly scolded her.
"I know," Alice admitted. "But I guess it's part of my love language. I tend to love most everybody, and I tend to aggravate most everybody."
"You don't aggravate me," 88 pointed out.
"Aw, thanks, little sis," Alice said, reaching over and giving her a little noogie. "But you're not even a week old. Give it time." She smirked.
They waited in silence. "…Is she gonna wake up?" 88 asked.
Alice shook her head. "I dunno. Like I said, her soul should still be stuck to her, but it's like… her soul still had knowledge and memory of speaking, but the damage to her physical brain prevented her from speaking coherently at all when she first came back. Even after years of self-therapy, the best she can do talking-wise is a slow slurring, usually. So she could be stuck in there, super-T having destroyed her ability to move or speak or even receive sensory input." She looked haunted considering the possibility.
88 shuddered in horror at the thought. "Um…" She bit her lip. "This might be a bad time, then."
"No, what's up?" Alice asked, turning away from Rain and going Full Business.
"Me and the other clones… we finally got our clothing situation sorted — we found boxes full of hundreds of red dresses, these weird skintight leather jumpsuit things, and scientist and soldier clothes too — but we don't really know what to do. Do you suppose you could, uh, give us some direction?"
Alice slowly shook her head. "Nah. I wish I could, but I think I'll be completely useless for a while, unless and until Rain wakes up." She gave 88 a sad smile. "I mean, if she never wakes up, I'll be depressed as fuck, but I'll still get off my ass and start coordinating shit with y'all in, like, a week or two, tops." She appraised 88 for a moment. "Until then, why don't you take charge?"
88's eyes widened in surprise. "M-me? Why?"
Alice shrugged. "Why not? I think you've got great leadership potential, personally."
"But I wouldn't even know what I'm doing!" 88 argued. "I'm barely a day old!"
"Hey, let me tell you a little secret," Alice said in a stage whisper. "Most of the time, I don't know what I'm doing either! I just kind of mosey along without a care in the world, reacting to whatever life throws at me as it comes. Besides, I have, like, two days' life experience more than you do, since I got my memory nerve gassed away and only walked around for two days tops before Umbrella put me on ice for half a decade." She gave 88 a big smile. "Trust me, you'll be great."
88 gave her a tentative smile in return. "If you say so…"
XXX
88 found Rebecca in the gymnasium facilities. She'd changed into a black sports bra (with the Umbrella logo, naturally) and matching shorts and was just aggressively running up and down a basketball court, sinking hoops into either basket as she saw fit, drenched in sweat, a primal grin on her face. She saw 88 and began speaking. "Five fucking years, can you believe it?" she shouted. "Five years going back and forth across the country, and not once did I see a single goddamned basketball. I mean, what are the fucking odds?"
"You like it, Dr. Chambers?" 88 said.
"Like it?" Rebecca laughed. "You know that there's a major stereotype that says intellectuals are repulsed by sports, and physical activity in general? I never understood that, personally. I love basketball!" She stood at the half-court line, aimed the ball, threw it, and watched as it bounced off the rim of the basket. She shrugged, scooped the ball up, and began travelling up and down the court again. "It's great exercise — if I sit on my ass in a lab all day, even if I eat healthy, my chances of keeling over from something besides advanced old age become unpalatable. And while I'll always be a biochemist at heart, I won't turn down an excuse to practice good old fashioned physics." She stopped at the three point line this time and made another shot. This time the ball sailed through the net, and she thrust her fists into the air triumphantly. "I was actually approached by a scout from the WNBA once, at college. I suppose if I gave more of a damn about competing in basketball instead of just playing it I would have gone for it, but I mostly just considered it as too much of a deviation from my goals, to work at a big laboratory and fight deadly illnesses."
"…I don't know what the WNBA is," 88 admitted.
Rebecca stopped and chuckled. "Sorry, I keep forgetting you're technically a newborn." She walked over to a bench on the sidelines, sat down, and took a big pull from a water bottle. "What brings you by?"
"Well, Alice put me in charge while her wife recuperates, so I figured the best place to start with was you and find out how the laboratory situation is going."
Rebecca nodded. "Alright, then," she said. "Let me just shower and change and I'll take you into the most fucked-up lab I've ever seen."
Rebecca emerged from the shower already wearing a scientist outfit and led 88 to the laboratory she was using. "Okay, it's got all the typical laboratory shit — refrigerators, computers, centrifuges, even a few electron microscopes. And then there's these things." She pointed to some contraptions that would be somewhat more familiar to us folks living in 2024. "These things are apparently called 3D printers, and using computer-generated 3D models and provided feed stock, it can manufacture physical copies of… well, a lot of stuff."
"That sounds good," 88 said.
"Well, yeah, it's good," Rebecca admitted. "But it's… this is Future Shit, you know? I know there were much cruder models than these in existence before the world went to shit, but if Umbrella actually had these things back then, and they weren't fucking selling them, they lost out on a shit-ton of money." She shook her head, unable to make sense of it. "Hey, then there's this thing. You probably remember it." She led 88 to a pedestal, where a faintly rippling transparent sphere was suspended.
"Oh hey, that's that thing I was in when you guys showed up!" 88 pointed out.
"Right," Rebecca nodded. "I've been reading up on this fucking thing, and it turns out this thing was actually born in that fucking Hive place — preliminary research on the psionic activity generated by T-virus patients. They actually figured out how to generate a constant weak psionic field using electronics. If they'd actually published this research — which admittedly would have involved admitting they were committing numerous crimes against humanity — it probably would have been worth at least two or three Nobel Prizes."
"Oh wow, those sound important," 88 guessed.
"You could say that," Rebecca nodded. "Over here is another one of those 3D printers, but for human flesh." She led 88 to a glass-domed sarcophagus. "This is where you were born, 88," Rebecca said with a flourish. "There's a tank buried beneath it with this… slurry of self-regenerating biomatter which gets converted through some process I still don't quite understand into whichever tissue it's synthesizing — first it knits together a skeleton, then it weaves together the organs and muscle tissue and so forth, and then it generates a layer of skin and pre-grown hair and nails and strobes the entire body with ultraviolet light, which I guess is supposed to jump-start the immune process or something." She shook her head. "Honestly, this thing is so far ahead of anything we had before the zombie apocalypse, if you told me it came from aliens or time travelers from 250 years in the future or… I guess a fucking wizard, since MAGIC IS REAL APPARENTLY, I'd believe you."
"Magic seems to bother you a lot," 88 pointed out. "Why is that?"
Rebecca took a deep breath. "It's a sore subject for me. My mom was all into this woo-woo shit and thought that medicine began and ended with burning herbs and wearing crystals. She got cancer when I was in high school — this was about the age of 12 — and sought the advice of a 'highly esteemed' magnet healer." She shook her head. "The last time I saw her, I told her I'd gotten a full ride for my biochem program, and she told me that she didn't want me to fall under the sway of a false prophet." She scowled. "She told me she'd had a Tarot reading done, and if I went into biochem I'd have only death in my future."
88 gave Rebecca a small smile. "I hope I don't offend you if I point out that… she was kinda right?"
Rebecca let out a very slow groan. "I hate, hate, hate that that's true." She looked up at the ceiling. "Well, ma, I guess you get the last laugh after all." She jerked her head away from the cloning machine. "Come on, one last machine."
It looked vaguely like a Viewmaster, except it had a strap to hold it to the face and had a bunch of wires and cables coming out of it and shit. "This is the memory machine, the one you and all your fellow clones were all subjected to to give you the basics — walking, talking, and so forth. You can have all sorts of memories implanted into you, and frankly this thing just scares the living shit out of me."
"Why?" 88 asked.
"Because of all the horrific ways it can be abused! You could kill someone and implant the memory of that murder into someone else, and they'd think they were the killer! You could copy someone's memories into a clone and replace the original person! Who knows, maybe it could even erase a person's memories? Ever since I found out about it I've been half-tempted to just smash it to pieces." She gave the machine a contemptuous stare.
"Could I use it to learn how to be a biochemist?" 88 asked.
Rebecca crossed her arms. "…I guess you could, but you need to understand that using that thing carries a big risk with it, okay? …Why would you want to be a biochemist?"
88 smiled shyly. "Well, I know that it's really just you by yourself, and I'd love to help you out. A lot of this stuff sounds really interesting!"
Rebecca gave 88 a half-smile. "Well, that's the first good news I've heard in a long time, I guess. I'd say give it a day and really think about if you want to use this damn machine, okay? I won't stop you if it's what you really want, but don't let this be just a spur-of-the-moment decision, okay?"
88 nodded. "Yes, Dr. Chambers."
XXX
It had been two days since 88 had flashed her brain with a degree in advanced biochemistry, and she found that helping Rebecca work on a cure was fun and stimulating. (Rebecca found her enthusiasm off-putting, but remembered what she'd been like at that age — and then had to remember that 88 was barely a week old and remembered she still had to recalibrate her internal Weird Shit meter).
88 had also been hard at work coordinating the other clones. She'd organized them into two subgroups: ones with psychic powers, and ones without. 88 wasn't sure if there was any correlation, but most of the psychic clones had stuck with the red dresses, while most of the non-psychic clones had donned tactical gear (with a few of each side opting for skintight leather jumpsuits). There were plenty of clothing options to choose from, so it's not like they dressed from a lack of something else. Just one of those odd little quirks, 88 figured.
One of the psychic clones, who had chosen the name Neo, was one of the jumpsuit wearers, and she was fixated on weaponry. She'd found an actual katana tucked away in the armory, and wore it everywhere. She unnerved 88 a little, but her tactical thinking was as sharp as her sword, and she'd suggested that the clones should work in pairs of psychic/non-psychic, which 88 enthusiastically approved of.
A dozen of these teams of two had already traveled up to the surface and finished clearing out the compound before repairing the gate. Neo had gone nuts with her katana, decapitating nearly fifty zombies all by herself. She'd proposed future expeditions beyond the gate, to thin the numbers of the zombies that kept travelling across the desert to the little hotspot of humanity, and 88 had agreed with that idea too.
Rebecca was intrigued by 88's formation of twin basketball leagues; she gladly participated in the non-psychic one (and frequently scored just as well as the more physically capable but less skilled clones — now wasn't that a boost to the ego?) but stuck to the sidelines for the latter league as all the psychic Alice clones quickly transmogrified the game of basketball into what was quickly dubbed 'brainball'. (Insert your own cool ideas about how two teams of telekinetic talents would change basketball, hahaha). It was an effective way to train and strengthen their psionic powers, and more than one basketball ended up destroyed. (Rebecca was briefly horrified until she realized the 3D printers in her lab could spit out a new basketball after a handful of minutes).
Only one of her new responsibilities troubled 88, and that was the care of her predecessor clone, 87.
She walked into 87's room with a tray laden with food. There was a bowl of white rice, a small bowl of fruit, and a small serving of bacon. (There was a large greenhouse in one wing of the facility where the fruit and rice had grown, and there was another bioprinter in the facility's kitchen that could produce various animal cuts. Rebecca had taken one bite of a hamburger made from the 'grown' meat, claimed it tasted funny, spat it out, and stuck with the veggies. It actually would have passed a blind taste test, Rebecca's ). "How are we feeling today, 87?" 88 asked.
"Hungry," 87 said. She was looking rather gaunt, too, like someone who'd gone weeks without food instead of just a few days. Rebecca said that her metabolism was likely supercharged from the T-virus' integration into her system, and regrowing all of her missing flesh had likely taken a lot out of her as a result. Her body, ironically, was cannibalizing itself.
"Well, maybe you can try to get a few bites down today," 88 suggested, giving her an optimistic smile.
87 snorted. "Yeah, maybe." She'd grown more lucid and rational since first being admitted and no longer tried to bite into her own flesh, and she still had yet to attack someone else. But that didn't stop the relentless craving for human flesh she possessed, and trying to force down other food simply caused a psychosomatic reaction which almost always led to her throwing it up. Rebecca had tried setting her up with an intravenous liquid nutrition drip, but she'd quickly began complaining of itching deep within her arm, and that quickly devolved into excruciating pain, leading to her ripping out the needle and lapping at the blood that began pumping out of the hole.
If something didn't change soon, she was going to starve to death, and soon.
"I worry about you, 87," 88 confided as she set the tray down on the bed. "I don't want you to starve."
"Why?" 87 asked, a bleak look on her face. "My hunger is never going to go away. I don't want to kill anyone. One of you — Alice, the main one, I guess — even tried to get me to eat one of the dead scientists." She shook her head, grimly stubborn. "I wouldn't do it. It'd only delay the inevitable. Unless you can keep a supply of ethically-sourced corpses around for my dietary needs, you may as well take that knife you have hidden inside your lab coat and slice my throat now."
Rebecca had insisted always going into 87's room with protection, and now 88's cheeks flushed, embarrassed at having been caught with the weapon. "Well… I don't know if Dr. Chambers would approve of it necessarily, but there's this cloning machine —"
"Dr. Chambers already tried that," 87 interrupted her. "She brought in a human liver. I tried it and almost managed to swallow a bite before my system twigged onto the fact that it had never been part of a living person." Her eyes bored through 88's. "I know that sounds ridiculous, but my body can apparently tell the difference. Dr. Chambers offered to try a double-blind study or something… I didn't quite catch onto what she was suggesting, but I turned it down. My body knows."
"Oh goodness," 88 murmured. "I suppose this might be one of those weird psychic/magic thingies that bother Dr. Chambers so much." She pursed her lips, deep in thought. "Maybe if we mix human flesh in with your food, it'll trick your stomach into accepting it?"
87 deflated, looking more and more tired as the conversation wore on. "Again, that's only delaying the inevitable," she pointed out. "There's only so many corpses laying around, and once those have been used up, where does that leave me?"
88 was at a loss for a moment. "Well, I for one refuse to give up," she said, steadfast. "Let's try something right now." Impulsively, she whipped out her knife and drew it across the palm of her left hand.
"What the fuck…" 87 trailed off as 88 held her hand over the bowl of rice, drizzling it all over with her blood. Once the rice had been coated, she moved onto the fruit and applied a liberal coating to the sliced fruits in the bowl. After that she coated the bacon, and she even tinged the glass of drinking water red with her lifeblood.
88 looked at her bloodied hand and grimaced, the pain suddenly striking her. She put on a brave face, though, as she put the knife back in its sheathe, vigorously stirred the bowl of rice, and offered a spoonful to 87.
87 took the spoon, gave it a hesitant sniff, then reluctantly popped the spoon into her mouth. She slowly began chewing, waiting for the gag reflex to kick in. When it didn't, she very cautiously swallowed her mouthful, looking pained at the expected gagging.
The food traveled down her esophagus and into her stomach.
The gagging never came.
87 took another bite of the rice, chewing faster, swallowing quicker. She shoveled another spoonful of rice into her mouth, and another, and soon she was relentlessly wolfing down the entire bowl of rice, licking it clean in three minutes flat. 88 watched with a joyous smile as 87 proceeded to gobble down the fruit with reckless abandon, then the bacon, and finally chugged down the glass of bloody water, spilling not a drop.
"Thank you," 87 finally said, tears forming at the corners of her eyes. "I feel… satiated, for the first time in days." She gave the other clone a hesitant smile. "If this works… maybe I might make it?"
"You'll definitely make it," 88 assured her. "Can I get you anything else right now?"
"No…" 87 said, reluctant.
"Are you sure?" 88 said. "Literally anything you want, I'll get it for you." 87 mumbled something unintelligibly quiet. "Could you repeat that?"
"Could I… lick your hand?" 87 said with barely a whisper.
88 was taken aback. She looked at the bloody cut on her hand. Rebecca would probably be upset with her if she agreed… but then, Rebecca never had to find out. "Sure thing!" 88 stretched her hand out to her bedridden fellow clone.
87 took her hand much more tenderly than 88 had expected. And she'd expected a vigorous tongue-scraping, much like the way 87 had licked her bowls clean. No, this was… slow… deliberate. She was relishing the pure taste of the fresh blood, even as it clotted and dried on her palm.
87 then moved onto the gash itself, and 88 forgot how to breathe for a moment. The sensation of the other woman's tongue probing the injured flesh was exquisitely painful… and yet altogether welcome.
She closed her lips over the open cut and began to suckle at the wound, drawing fresh blood into her mouth. 88 had to remind herself several times that she was also a carrier of the T-virus and not to worry about infection… or was she forcing herself to focus on the risk of infection? It sure made a handy distraction from the warmth that had suddenly begun blooming in her belly.
"Uh, okay!" 88 suddenly interjected. "I, uh, have important stuff to do around… here… and I need to go get this bandaged anyway," she said, pointing to the injury. "I'll, uh, bring you breakfast in the morning and…" Her face suddenly felt like it was on fire. "…And we can do this again?" Her voice almost squeaked out the last syllable.
87 was staring at her uncertainly, her pupils dilated, breathing heavily. "I… I would love that," she finally forced herself to say.
"Great!" 88 nodded. She left the room almost at a run, completely forgetting to bring the tray and its empty dishes with her. She was too busy worrying about her unexpected physiological reaction. What was happening to her? What the hell was that in there?
She took a few deep breaths and forced herself to calm down. She could worry about this later. Priority one: clean injury. She made her way to the nearest medical station.
XXXXXXXXXX
Part of me wants to see an AU where Rebecca splits her time between the STARS and the WNBA.
The movies never show the cloning machine/process/whatever, so I decided to lift the one they used in The Fifth Element (which is mostly set some 250ish years in the future). You know, one of those double entendre Easter eggs, considering who plays the titular fifth element, haha.
The memory thingie is a lot less sophisticated than the one in Final Chapter (which is, you know, a freaking CONTACT LENS), but I figure that that's the fancy shit for the higher-ups, and Clone Isaacs has to deal with the shit that's two or three generations behind.
Remember in the beginning of Afterlife, where the first Alice clone gets killed, and several more step out of the shadows, and one of them says "Hey fellas, is that any way to treat a lady?" (That's probably not verbatim, but whatever). THAT is Neo.
So yes, we are getting some incredibly freaky clone-on-clone stuff going on here, and it is only going to get FREAKIER. This story was originally going to be called 175, and I thought that would have telegraphed the 'clone romance' bit a little ahead of time, haha.