 "It’s All About Soul"
(Excerpt)
by David M. Fitzpatrick
The fact that the United Earth Convention
of 2244 had declared human cloning illegal didn’t sway John Benning’s
decision in the least. He wasn’t even concerned about the scores of
undercover Acolytic Police he knew were out there, dispatched by the
Church and constantly hunting for those breaking the morals. Anyone off
the street stopping by Benning’s genetics shop in search of something as
mundane as a new pair of eyes, even though appearing as an average
Congregationalist, could easily be an officer of the Church. Breaking any
number of morals could cause a business to be shut down, or worse.
For genetic alterations outside moral
allowance—a very rigid set of rules outlined by the Church—the punishment
depended on which moral was broken. Extreme tithing, public ridicule in
the stocks, or Net-broadcast whippings were not uncommon for small
violations. Deviances of greater extreme commanded more serious judgments,
and cloning a human was, by far, the worst. Certainly, only violations of
the Ten Commandments and a few other select Words of God were grounds for
death by crucifixion, but cloning could command amputation and organ
removal.
In all other respects, Benning was a
completely moral Congregationalist in society; at his genetics shop, he
sold completely moral things such as age reduction procedures, genetic
repairs, stimulated regrowth of limbs and organs removed by the Church as
punishment (provided the ordered suffering period was over), and certain
vanity replacements approved by the Church. But Benning knew he could do
it and could hardly resist himself.
He had several factors in his favor.
First, he was a geneticist by vocation and an extremely good one, and had
a lot of morally allowed cloning equipment used in animal cloning. Second,
he was respected by local Church authorities and was friends with several
street police Acolytes who trusted him. Third, he had a sub-basement
hidden beneath his shop in which to perform the lengthy cloning process, a
suitable hideaway that was impervious even to the Acolytic Police’s
periodic full-premises search-and-seizures that were routinely conducted.
But the most important factor of all was that John Benning had once had a
twin brother. Jacob had died three days after birth and John’s mother
hadn’t reported it to the Holy Authority. His birth, however, had been
reported, so as far as the Church was concerned, there were two humans
with the same DNA walking around on the Earth. A clone could easily be
explained as a long-lost brother come back to his sibling.
So, in the secrecy of his shielded
sub-basement, John Benning used his years of experience and chemical
concoctions not legally available since before the Great Crusade a hundred
years before to clone himself. Intensive, controlled accelerants and
constant nutrient baths brought quickly to life a full-size genetic
duplicate of him in under a month’s time. There were a few things to take
care of; even identical twins had different fingerprints and retinal
patterns, for example, but it was a mere hour’s work in his upstairs lab
to work up a new set of eyes for the clone. Reworking the DNA was a minor
task early on in the procedure; while twins’ DNA was identical to most
tests, a good geneticist with the right equipment could determine if it
were a perfect duplicate—and that wouldn’t do. Even with identical twins,
there were minor micromutations that began as soon as the fertilized egg
started dividing; so Benning had to artificially introduce such anomalies.
The final step was to imprint the clone’s
brain. If he activated the clone’s bioelectrical impulses now, it would be
little more than a newborn baby in adult form. In preparation for this
event, John had downloaded his own brain about a year before, so the clone
would not be an up-to-the-minute copy of himself.
Thus Jacob was brought to consciousness,
and it didn’t take long for him to understand the situation. Having all of
John’s skills and capabilities, they went into business together as the
Benning Brothers. The Church investigated them top to bottom, of course,
suspicions of cloning in their minds, but in the end there was no way they
could determine Jacob was a clone instead of the twin brother both claimed
he was. There were questions about Jacob’s whereabouts the past forty
years, but that story was easy enough. He had been stolen at birth by
Atheists, taken far north to the frozen Unholy Lands, raised in the
shocking denouncement of God. Jacob had always known there was a God,
however, and eventually escaped the terrible tyranny of the Unbelievers.
He finally arrived in the Free World of the Christian States of
Americanada and had sought out his brother. This was enough for the Church
to end their examination, since there was no way they could investigate
the savages to the north. Jacob was made a member of the Church, given
absolution for his sins, and finally allowed to live among them, free at
last from the atrocities of the Atheists.
The only person who could possibly have
been up for moral punishment would have been John’s mother for not
reporting her baby’s kidnapping in the first place, but she had gone to
God six years before. His father had been gone twenty, killed in an
anti-Atheist rally where he was accidentally trampled by overzealous
fellow activists supporting the Church rally. That left John and Jacob
free and clear to live as brothers without fear of further scrutiny by the
Church.
Business prospered for the Benning
Brothers as they worked side by side for twelve years. As time went on,
Jacob and John found their minds growing different ways; Jacob ceased to
be a carbon copy of John and became his own person. John had been divorced
ten years before the cloning and had no interest in women, but Jacob,
logicking that what had happened to John had not really happened to
himself, took an interest in the opposite sex and began dating. All the
while, they were a prize genetics team and they made more than enough
money to support themselves, pay heavy tithes to the Church, and live
comfortably.
They worshiped, as was their moral
obligation, but in the privacy of their home they would muse on the nature
of God and the afterlife. Jacob would wonder whether a clone had a soul;
John would reassure him that anything alive and aware of his existence
indeed had an everlasting soul, so long as proper worship of God was
observed. Their separate personalities allowed for different perspectives
on what began as the same insights and perceptions. It allowed for
intriguing conversations and explorations into the realm of religion.
Their bodies were like their minds:
vastly different despite their innate similarities. While Jacob was a
genetic duplicate of John, his body was a fresh, new version of the old,
untroubled by the years of physical maladies John had endured. It didn’t
suffer the ravages of time John’s body had: the broken pelvis from falling
during choir practice when he was nine, the mandatory brain surgery he’d
undergone to enhance his moral values when he’d been caught masturbating
at age fourteen, the ulcerative colitis that had left him with a stapled
stomach and missing parts of his small intestine at age twenty-six. The
most important factor, though, had been the years of eating foods that had
built up cholesterol in John’s bloodstream. Like a plumber who always had
a leaky sink, John was a geneticist who worried about his own body last.
So one day while Jacob was downtown
picking up their weekly required Volunteer Assignments at the Sanctuary,
John suffered a monstrous heart attack. The medics said the wall of his
left ventricle had been so weakened over years of unnoticed need of
genetic repair that it had finally given out. It burst, they said, like an
overinflated balloon. The resulting trauma killed him where he stood. John
had gone to God literally before his face had slapped against the cold,
hard floor.
Jacob had been terribly upset for a month
following. Everyone perceived the grief of a brother who spent forty years
trying to escape the Atheists and finally found his only surviving family
member only to lose him; but Jacob had a bond beyond brotherhood with
John. It was something like a father-son relationship, in a way, as well
as that of best friends. There were never any secrets to keep, since all
those for the first forty years they shared anyway. Now, Jacob was without
the closest friend he had in the world—the only family member, the only anyone, he knew. Eventually, he went on with his life despite the great
void. One day, he knew, he would be reunited with his brother in Heaven.
John had died at 52, and while Jacob’s
actual age was only 12, he appeared to be 52 as well. He ran the genetics
shop for thirty-three more years until, one day, the new church that had
been built in his neighborhood collapsed. Poor architecture and even worse
engineering, one investigator had said, was why twenty-seven people had
lost their lives, and it seemed to have had nothing at all to do with
God’s will. The man, a suspected opponent of the Church, had gone so far
as to say that uncaring oversights by the Church were why those people
were dead. He had been crucified as a result of his public lies, although
he argued until he died there on his cross that they were not lies, they
were opinions and, more importantly, truths.
Jacob Benning had been in that church
helping set up the new Net camera system. Only those in the direst straits
were excused from services, of course, and those excused were required to
cyber-attend as long as they were at least conscious. He was standing on a
ladder, a workerbot floating next to him helping with bolting a camera to
an upper beam, when the ominous splitting sound could be heard—the sound
of a synthetic support beam, improperly jointed, letting go at its master
coupling at the zenith of the massive hall. It was the main support on the
left side of the church, and when it went, they all followed suit like
dominoes. Jacob fell from his ladder, chased to the floor below by
countless tons of synthetic stone. He lived a few minutes deep beneath the
rubble, gasping for air, the debris above settling, crushing the life out
of him, and his last living thought had been, Well, managed to fool them
for forty-five years…
* *
* * * * * *
*
Jacob's troubles are just beginning.
Life in the Church-dominated society was treacherous enough, but upon his
death, he winds up in the Heaven he expects... only to find out that his
clone had already used his unique soul to get in! What's a guy to do when
he's faced with THAT afterlife?
To read the whole story, visit www.Atheists.org and order a back issue of American
Atheist Volume 41, Issue 2, Spring 2003. |
I couldn't sell this one anywhere, and I
think I offended a few editors. I'm non-religious, and so is this story,
and in fact it postulates a few sad ideas of what this country might end
up like if religion continues to overrun everyone's lives. Luckily, it
occurred to me to send this along to Frank Zindler at American Atheists,
and luckier still did it occur to Frank to publish it in American
Atheist Magazine.