Cloned

In 1996 when members of the Roslin Institute in Scotland cloned the first mammal I was in the sixth grade. The cloned animal was a sheep and her name was Dolly. I can remember hearing this story on the radio the day it happened, as my parents were getting ready for work. Later that day at school, on the playground during recess myself and others who had heard about Dolly that day couldn’t help but to talk about it.

At the time what was interesting about Dolly wasn’t that she was the first cloned mammal; we kids had been talking about clones and cloning ourselves for years. Things like nuclear power and molecular transportation were old hat for us. Gene splicing and faster than light travel seemed tedious even. I myself had spent much of that year flying to school on the back of a resurrected pterodactyl, which wasn’t convenient but did serve as a reasonably interesting way of diluting an otherwise boring 7 a.m. car ride to school.

The reason why Dolly held our attention that day was that this was the first time we had heard adults talk about the science with as much interest as we had been doing all along. At last it seemed like the real world was beginning to catch up with our demands and expectations. Though we still had to brush our teeth the old fashioned way, and drive in cars to get from one place to the next, and eat our meals sitting down bite by bite, now, maybe, we are finally going to start getting genuine copies of ourselves, ready to do what we said when we said it.

“If I had a clone,” Brandon’s sister said, “I’d make it do everything for me I didn’t want to do.”
Brandon’s sister was older than me by a year or two, but I knew her brother and could usually count on her not sending me away or talking down to me when I stumbled into a conversation she was having. And she was always having conversations, and they were always her conversation so you had to be careful.

“You’d treat yourself like a servant?” I asked her.

As we had it worked out cloning was a way of duplicating another living thing. Maybe you would put the thing or person in one end of a machine and then a little while later, maybe minutes or maybe days, two of it came out the other side of the machine. We’d all been sent to the copy room before to make copies for our teachers and so we knew how a Xerox machine worked. Some of us had even made rudimentary attempts at the cloning process ourselves; pressing our hands and faces against the cold glass of the machine as the white heat of the light scanned and reflected against the contours of our aspects. We'd blindly stumble out of the copy room with the light of God the Creator still in our eyes and an elongated, gray skinned mutant of ourselves folded up and tucked away in the pocket of our corduroys.

“No,” she said, “I’d treat my CLONE like a servant. Or maybe a slave.”

I didn’t know what to say to this. For one, I was a white kid and she was black. Playground rules dictated that in the area of race relations and conversation discourse I was predetermined wrong and/or racist on any conversations concerning the names of skin colors and the usage of certain words, like ‘negro’ or ‘black.’ Also, Brandon’s sister was bigger than me, and kind of bully. I knew that if she was okay with bullying her clone than it’d mean much less to her to bully me. I had to be careful what I said to her.

“But if you don’t want to do something, what makes you think your clone of yourself is going to be any happier doing that same thing than you would be?” I asked Brandon’s sister.

“Listen, she’s my clone and she’ll do what I tell her.”

It was clear to me that Brandon’s sister had taken an entirely adult perspective on the situation. Or rather, that she had taken an entirely parental perspective on the situation. She was prepared to treat a clone of herself as she might treat a daughter: as her own property, endowed with thought and movement only because she had so willed it to be.
“And then, when I was done with it, when it got home from school for me or finished cleaning my room and taking out the trash,” she said, “I’d just kill it. And make another one the next day.”

“That seems wasteful,” I said. I could tell I was starting to reach that point where Brandon’s sister would no longer be able to tolerate my presence in her conversation, but I didn’t really mind, I was far more concerned with the fact that she was beginning to advocate not only the wasteful and lazy use and disposal of genetic materials (something I myself would not become comfortable with until much later in puberty) but that she was also beginning to fantasize about third-person, singularly neutral homicide. “What would you do with the bodies?”

“I’d dig a hole.” Brandon’s sister said. “Wait, no, I’d make it dig the hole and then I’d kill it.”
Years later I would remember Brandon’s sister saying that when I read Elie Wiesel. I have to consider myself lucky that what Brandon’s sister said resounded with me as an empty and hypothetical threat, entirely unlike Wiesel's own experience.
Our conversation was degrading from innocent daydreaming. As Brandon’s sister continued she stopped using the pronouns "she" and "her" to refer to her imagined clone and instead relied completely on the title “It,” which she had given her clone, her slave and her victim.

By this time other people had begun to interject there own ideas into our conversation. Max, who was a beast of a child and who's own clone I was positive would resemble a homunculus even more than he did, had his own ideas on the matter which rivaled Brandon’s sister’s in insensitivity if not entirely in cruelty.

"It would be wasteful to kill them everyday," Max said. "It would be a lot easier to just train one and pay very close attention to it. That way you could keep it for a long time and only have to kill it if you caught it stealing stuff, or touching your things or getting too smart."

"Or you could beat it like a dog," someone else suggested. "That's what we had to do with our dog. It kept yelping at my little brother so my dad threw his shoe at it. He told us if it ever did that to do the same thing."

A few older kids had more debauched notions of their clones. A boy from one of the advanced biology classes, I think his name was Eddie, suggested changing one of his clone's Y-chromosomes to an X in order to make it a girl. This had to be explained to the group. Smirks grimaces passed over everyone’s faces to think of Eddie like this.

I didn't understand it; some of the kids were okay with the idea of beating and killing clones but were repulsed by the insinuation of developing incestuous relationships with them. Eddie had only one eye; the other had been removed when he was just a baby. It seemed to me that a better use of an Eddie clone would be to supply a replacement eye for Eddie. I considered that even that type of harvesting and transplantation of a clone’s body was self-aggrandizing. This, coupled with the fact that I had already embarrassed myself and Eddie earlier that year when I’d asked him to take out his glass eye and show me the inside of his head was enough to make me keep my mouth shut.

Anyways, Eddie didn’t want a new eye. What he wanted was a girlfriend, or at least something like one. Too bad it would also be something like him. I tried not to think of Eddie in this way but I could not help to. I could not help but envision Eddie as I am sure everyone had. But, unlike everyone else, when I imagined Eddie copulating with his female self the two Eddie’s passed back and forth a pink and squishy eye while they humped themselves.

The conversation we were having was at its base a conversation of ethics. Or, and maybe more correctly, it was a conversation about a lack of ethics. Though the language we used concerned the bioethics of cloning we were each of us talking about not how we would treat our clones but how we would treat others. Many of us were so selfish and fool hearted as to misunderstand that we were talking about how we would treat ourselves. The self-destruction that our conversation extolled upon was amazing to me. Hadn’t we heard it a million times before, play nice, be kind, and treat others, as you want them to treat you? This conversation was cruel because it could be. It was unchallenged and in being so it had turned against us. This was not the curiosity of the playground that prompts you to bury trash in the sandbox and call it a time capsule or draw dirty pictures in the back of your notebooks. No, this was the idiocy that caused people to be pushed off of swing sets and left out of kickball games. This was calling each other “gay” and teasing the smelly kid.
"That is disgusting," Brandon’s sister said. She had a damning look on her face as she tried to reclaim the conversation. "You're all a bunch of perverts" she said. The bell rang and everyone sprinted away in different directions but ending up, eventually, in the same place.

I began to trudge back into the school building. I was left thinking about everything that had been said by our collection of playground philosophers. It appalled me, being the moralist of the group. Never mind how we might treat our clones, if and when we ever met them. How were we going to treat our children, our parents our friends if this was the way we would treat ourselves?

When Dolly was only six years old her body showed degenerative symptoms of aging. Her life expectancy at birth had been 12 years but gene have their own age and the mammary gland materials which were used to create Dolly were already six years old they themselves had been placed within an egg and began mitosis. Her body had some catching up to do and it did in 2003. Dolly was euthanised by the men and woman who had helped to create her. When she died she was suffering from crippling arthritis and lung disease. She was twice as old as she had lived, a concept I wish we could have known about that day on the playground.

When Dolly died when I was in high school and I had far more important things to think about then her. New sciences interested me, like the aerodynamics of a Dodge Neon, the volume of its back seat and the long overworked hypothesis I had constructed concerning the female orgasm. This is because when Dolly did die I was also a clone and had been for many years, as are each of us of our younger selves. Although in memories I still share all of the same genetic makeup as my former self, in reality I know that I am not he.