Adams stared reverently down at the petri cells holding his first successfully injected eggs. The little spits of biomass looked like eyes – hundreds of fragile, half-transparent eyes – returning his gaze behind a half inch of plastic. As a collective, they watched him, trembling in their nutrient culture, naked, unprotected, and very much alive to him.
Adams couldn't help smiling.
Here he was, fresh out of college holding the building blocks of an actual military Clone: something he had dreamed of doing for most of his adult life. Here he was, playing God in a Cloning vat, one hundred miles off the coast of Florida, making future soldiers for the military. Adams was now an actual Geneticist, only twenty-seven years old, and being paid over ninety thousand bucks a year. His smile widened as he flipped down the casing lid of each of the petri cells and stamped on a serial number which connected the Clones to the social security of their dead Originals.
Plasma lights cast a harsh glare throughout the vat as he carried the eggs from the injecting station to the incubators, painting shadows on the mechanical wombs, illuminating banks of microscopes and providing light for the other three hundred odd Geneticists toiling for the government. He wound his way around orderlies pushing carts of cyclin tubes - a chemical used to jump start cell division – and garbage men collecting dead and aborted embryos from the insides of the gurgling green liquid wombs. Adams passed by the birthing room where tired nurses dumped babies, wailing and punching the air with balled up fists, into plastic bassinets. In the birthing room, there were no anxious fathers or irritated, drug-pumped mothers. No eager relatives. All the Clone babies met when their eyes first focused was a two inch needle and rough latex hands.
The Geneticist rounded a corner and passed into the incubation chamber. He glanced down at the eggs as he opened the glass door of a rotating cylinder. They were already dividing. Twos begat fours. Fours begat eights. Adams recognized it as the cyclin kicking in. The eyes trembled and seemed to blink.
Silently, Adams punched the button which halted the rotation of the cylinder and slipped the petri cells into a slot. They fit perfectly; keys to locks. A friend of his patted him on the shoulder and asked him if he wanted to take some time off of work to catch a movie with a date. Adams shook his head. He had no time for play. He was determined to become a rising star in the world of genetics within the year. Movies were for those who settled for mediocrity. The Cloning vat was only a temporary home.
As his friend shrugged and walked away, Adams shut the glass door of the cylinder and watched it begin to rotate again. Here he was watching millions of lives spin around in a carousel the size of a microwave. Here he was watching spits of biomass become even bigger spits. His eyes glowed and he smiled again. In less than three months his eggs would be coming out of a mechanical womb, covered in slime, and into the hands of a nurse, as a fully developed baby. A baby which would wield a gun for the military in the very near future. All across the nation vats like the one off the coast of Florida churned out these infants; some for the military, some for factory corporations, and some for organ harvesting. The army babies would be shipped off to foster families, the factory babies to sweat shops, and the organ babies would be euthanized and confined to a cubicle for the rest of their lives. It was the same story throughout the world. And here Adams was in the middle of it all, a Creator of Clones.
Smiling - always smiling - Adams walked away from the incubators and back towards the injecting station, checking off his first cloning of the day on a computer pad, his lab coat billowing out behind him, entering back into the heart of the assembly line which busily mass produced it's product of artificial human beings...
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