Your One & Only(65)
We can’t make ourselves immune from the Slow Plague but, as the results of the blood tests prove, at least we know the clones won’t fall victim to it. We’re hoping that when they eventually sexually reproduce, they’ll be a population free of this awful disease. It’ll be a long time, however, before we can rely on sexual reproduction with a limit of only ten individual gene types. As we move forward, I’m sure we’ll find a way to develop more, and if we refine their scientific inclinations and educate them accordingly, they can continue the work of creating a more diverse gene pool after we’re gone.
After such a long time, and with so much happening in the world, it’s indescribable to see these tiny babies finally with us. I was thrilled that both the Althea clones and the Hassan clones were among the survivors. The Althea babies look exactly like me, right down to the birthmarks on their cheeks. My grandmother used to say it reminded her of a rose, so I’ve chosen one of the little Althea clones to call Rose. She is darling.
The new babies are a welcome distraction, and everyone is delighted with them. I’ve been too committed to my research to want my own children, and Hassan questioned bringing them into the world when they’re sure to suffer from the Slow Plague and we’re facing a planetary epidemic. He said their birth would be equivalent to “a death sentence in an empty world.” These clones, though. I feel such affection for them. I love seeing ourselves in their faces.
We held a celebration in the assembly hall, and after the speeches were over, Dr. Vispa called us—those whose genes now represent the survival of humankind—outside to have our picture taken. I have the photo now on our bookshelf, and it inspires me every morning when I go off to the labs. When I look at the ten of us lined up on the steps of the residence hall and think of our work guiding the Project, I whisper Dr. Vispa’s words to myself—a better world.
For the first time, I have hope for what’s to come.
The next several entries detailed the early lives of the first generation of cloned children. The Original Ten cared about them enormously, according to the Original Althea’s journal. They played with them and lived with them in some facsimile of family life that Althea couldn’t quite figure out. While reading, Althea thought for the first time about who this woman really was. Her Original had always been larger than life, a woman in a painting Althea saw every day, and now here she could read about her eating lunch in the dining halls and getting lost on the trails to Blue River. Althea found herself wondering what kind of place the Original Althea had grown up in, and what her life had been like. What had she done when she was Althea’s age? Had she enjoyed the same things, or had this woman, like Jack, read books of poetry and played baseball?
A number of details about life in early Vispera surprised Althea. For some reason, she had always imagined the Original Nine—Original Ten, she corrected herself—as living and working alone for all those years, but she realized now that was absurd. The community had teemed with countless others, whole families, and people the Original Althea talked about as friends, acquaintances, rivals, sometimes annoyances. A janitor named Chris cleaned her offices every day and complained of a pain in his back. Althea had the sense of many daily conversations like this. Was this what the humans talked about with each other? Aches, illnesses, poor eyesight, and other structural defects? As time went on in the journal, the effects of the Slow Plague appeared in virulent form. All of them, the Original Althea included—Althea Lane, Althea reminded herself, thinking how strange it was to see her own name with no number after it—suffered from rashes, blood diseases, things with complicated names like rheumatoid arthritis, diabetes, celiac disease, vasculitis, and Sj?gren’s syndrome. All manner of aches, pains, and allergies that were manifestations of their dying immune systems. They were diseases that had always existed, but they’d become more dire, more difficult to treat, and more widespread. The Slow Plague killed them young, and it killed their children.
Although they were dying, their troubles and pain didn’t consume their day-to-day lives. Althea Lane wrote about food, families, animals they lived with and inexplicably gave names to, parties they held to commemorate the day each individual was born. And they talked about weather, always and relentlessly, and the weather of Vispera especially seemed to preoccupy them. Most of the residents of early Vispera, she gathered, had come from elsewhere, places with very different climates, places called San Diego, New York, London, Tokyo, New Delhi, Burlington, Edinburgh.
The humans had spent evenings staring at televisions, appliances Althea had never really understood until she read about them in Althea Lane’s journal. A “show” would unfold elaborate tales pantomimed by humans pretending to be someone else. They watched the television often, and Althea Lane especially liked a television story called Family Days, about a human family, a mother and father, three children, grandparents, neighbors, and pets.
The television also showed real stories, things happening to people on continents thousands of miles away. Many of the stories were about money, another concept hard to grasp. Althea knew from the histories that money was coins and slips of paper, and those became plastic cards, and then those eventually turned into electronic abstractions, but nevertheless one the humans would compete over and trade for things they wanted. They didn’t work together as a collective, like Althea’s people in Vispera, but fought one another for resources, sometimes viciously.