One Up

Chapter 11

No...

My mirror stares back at me. I take in every detail of us... the dark red hair, the green eyes, the cupid-bow lips that refuse to smile.. frown.. give any emotion what-so-ever. Every part of my being is screaming that this is wrong, and yet there is nothing I can do about it.

"Now that you're awake, Miss Keys, you can meet your clone. Since you had such a great curiosity, I figured I'd let you have a chance to meet yourself. So, what do you think of you?" he asks, a glimmer of amusement hiding in his tone. I glare at him, but I refuse to acknowledge his jarring questions. Instead, I ask my own.

"What are you going to do with it?" I say, making sure to enunciate the it. The scientist smiles. "I'm glad you asked. Everyone we brought to this facility will have a clone to replace them. The clone will act as a fail-safe while we run our little experiment. Your family will never know you're gone." I lay in the machine's bed baffled. I ask the only question that is bothersome to what he just explained. "So, without any of my memories or personality traits, how will it know to act like me while I am here?" The man laughs once more, and as time goes on in this room with him, he starts to remind me of the Joker.

When his laughter stops, he elaborates. "Miss Keys, what do you think the electrodes in your head are for? You don't think we would have thought of this problem before? Of course we did. Within the cloning device, there are brain receptors that are waiting for information, and when we put these electrodes in-" he says, giving the device stuck in my head a tap. "-they relay information such as memories, dreams, and even your personality. The only difference between you and you-" the scientist gives a small laugh at the obvious joke he made. "-is that this you doesn't remember anything past the night of your little shopping spree. This you doesn't remember that she was taken as a government lab-rat. When she wakes up tomorrow, this will all seem like a bad dream to her."

I look at myself. The real me wouldn't just accept this as a dream. Maybe she knows that like me, she too, is stuck in this situation. We are stuck as the same person living in different bodies.

"Samara," I say, looking directly into my eyes. She stares back, her eyebrows raised. "You know this is wrong-"

"Silence!" the Scientist shouts. I ignore him and continue on. "Please, if you are anything like me, find help. Think of a plan. Do some-"

I never get to finish that sentence, because another needle is jabbed into my neck, and I become unconscious once again.

When I wake, I'm no longer strapped into the bed on the cloning machine. Instead, I'm laying on the cot in the room I woke up in. I rise slowly in an upright position, and for the first time since I've been captured, I let my tears fall.

I cry for my brother, my long, lost brother. I cry for my mom and Rachael. I cry for the predicament I'm in, and that no one will ever know what happened to the real me. No one will know if I live...

...or if I die.