Fantastic Metropolis

He was getting soaked, was anxious to get back and take a hot bath, make a fresh tank of coffee. He left his dead offspring behind him, still satisfied with the way it had died and the way it would continue to exist as a work of art even in death.

 

HE ALWAYS KEPT full a large coffee tank that had once belonged to a local art cinema; its smell was a comfort and the aquarium burbling soothing. This brew was a little old, several days, so he drained it to mix a new one. He had already bathed, changed into clean sweat pants, a black t-shirt and kung fu shoes. Inspired by his discovery earlier that evening, he was anxious to get to work. There was a paying job in progress.

Was that it now, sloshing in its chemical bath? This also gave off a nice burbling, though the chemical stink was unpleasant, so he usually kept the partition drawn, as now, and the vent fans on. Like fetuses with troubled dreams, the clones often tossed and turned in their amniotic baths.

This one, as usual, was for a wealthy client. One clone took weeks, sometimes longer, to create, but one sale would pay a month’s rent and keep Drew in food for himself and materials for his work.

At first he had been naive about his sales. He had thought the clones he sold were exhibited in cell-like terrariums, perhaps, like exotic animals, or freely moved about at parties among the guests, to be examined up close. Well, yes, both of these guesses were true. But a friend, Sol, his contact with the wealthy, had once attended a party where one of Drew’s clones was given as a birthday gift. The thing had been chained all night to a faux marble pillar. At the end of the night, it had been taken out into the brightly flood-lit yard and made to swallow a tremendously expensive ring. Then, the young man whose birthday it was had been given a knife so that he could retrieve his ring, his other present. His young friends had howled and hooted, cheering him on as he began to carve and dig and chase the scrambling thing. Sol had told Drew that the youth had been disappointed when the thing finally vomited up the ring as it died. But the youth gutted it anyway, threw the offal at his hysterical friends, chased his girlfriend around the pool with the thing’s head before finally tossing the head into the pool amid roars of approval.

Drew had not known how to feel about all this, at first. For one thing, obviously, it was his artwork being destroyed, like a canvas slashed to ribbons.

But also, the clones were an extension of himself, weren’t they?

The most important thing to do with each clone, no matter what its final form would be, was to obliterate its resemblance to him. He did this through a multitude of means: chemical infusion, dyeing, branding, tattooing, scarification, burning, removal of limbs, addition of limbs, surgery, molecular tampering, genetic manipulation. He did not mean for the creatures to be self portraits. They must not look like him, or else that was merely nature and science at work, not an artist. He only used his own matter as a kind of clay, because it was available to him. And, if it ever became a legal problem (he had lost his art grant once he began making his clones), he could use the defense that it was his own body alone he was tampering with, and he could do anything he wanted to that. The ethics of cloning and the rights of cloned life forms were cloudy enough topics at this time that he felt reasonably safe in his activities. Just so long as it was only himself he cloned.

Just as important as the physical obliteration was to obliterate the mind, so that it also bore no resemblance to his own. He achieved this, too, by various means, some crude and brutal, some utilizing more finesse, but always rendering the clone a shuffling sub-idiot at best, not even capable of serving canapes off a tray at one of those upper-scale parties. It was another legal defense —he was making nothing more human than a starfish, in this way—but also, he did not want his mind to be duplicated in something so wretched. Something that might feel horror at its own condition.

In the end, he acclimated himself to the more sadistic uses of his progeny. The snuffed clones, the tortured clones, the hunted clones and gang-raped clones. Target practice for darts and arrows, Sol had heard—summer yard games. They were not himself. They were certainly not anyone else. He need mourn them no more than he mourned the skin cells he was constantly shedding, the fingernails he clipped. And if his art was destroyed, well, it was now another’s possession to do with what they wanted. The money they paid to own and sometimes kill part of him kept the main part of him alive.

And with that money he could create the clones that mattered most to him; the ones he turned loose into the world when finished, to wander the streets of Paxton/Punktown wherever their mindless minds took them. Some naked, some clothed for winter, some beautiful in their way and others hideous, like the four he had turned out last Halloween, to his great amusement.