Alive To Tomorrow

Chapter One: The life of a... clone?

I personally host in the body of a Natalya Bentzin, who's parents cloned her early on in the beta testing of the cloning project, as the original copy of their daughter, the truly human version, was dying in a hospital with doctors that inevitably, were unable to save her. I was never allowed to go see her, I assume that's because her parents didn't want their baby girl to realize they were replacing her with me. Eventually their visits to go see her became less and less frequent, and the time they spent with me became more so. I always acted like I had no idea what was going on, but quite frankly I found it extremely repulsive. I was like their new toy, or puppy, or something or other. They really were pathetic creatures, but sometimes I couldn't help but feel a twinge of pity for them as I could easily differentiate when they had completely dissociated themselves from reality and truly forgot that I wasn't their true daughter, and at times they were painfully aware of that truth. There would be small cracks in their speech as they tried to bottle up painful memories, now I realize the only reason they bottled those emotions was because they believed that their daughters soul must have transferred into this clone's body. But it hadn't.

I've always found it extremely disturbing that I have random memories of a now dead little girl. Sometimes I'll get little flashbacks to a lullaby that her mother used to sing to her that she now only hummed in quiet moments, but never actually sang to me. I've always wondered if it was the actual clone's mind that inhabited this body if they would have actually been Natalya, in the way these humans understand a soul. Usually whenever this question overcomes me I try to dismiss it with the likelihood that it wouldn't have, that my perception of a soul is that it is tied to that person's consciousness which I now inhabit in their place. But of course, if I inhabit their consciousness, who's to say they wouldn't have done the same.

Once the body I inhabited started to develop the more superhuman characteristics of clones, Natalya's parents began to fear me, they began to violently yell at me and lock me in my room. Calling their long dead daughter, or rather me, an unholy abomination. I never fully understood how they could think that I was so unholy, or in my understanding, unnatural if the body I inhabited was created from an organic source, their daughter no less.

Apparently the bodies of the clones had been chipped in the case of such a mutation because a few months after those characteristics began to manifest, the facility the body came from sent an armored truck to the house to take me away. Surprisingly, Natalya's parents were not eager to hand me off the facility, in fact, they put up quite a fight until they were tranquilized. I'd never been very attached to them, but it must have been part of Natalya in my brain that nearly caused this body to cry when these eyes saw her parents slumped over on the floor.

I was taken to a "correctional facility" with many other clones to be "neutralized" but the facility never followed through out of fear of what might happen if they got too close to the superhuman clones. When I arrived at the facility the overflow of thoughts racing through the clones' minds was overwhelming, it was the closest I had ever come to experiencing a headache. Their thoughts were stronger and far more potent than those of non-clones. The cloning process seems to have made their minds much stronger and more strongly willed, that's the only way I can think that their head voices would be so loud. Honestly, after all this time they couldn't have learned to quiet their minds a little? Pathetic!

I did meet one other clone at the facility that had a relatively quiet mind, though I believe that was due to her overall impulsivity and recklessness. Her name was Geneva Yueh, she had a similar origin to me, but the girl she was cloned after lived through her sickness, causing her family to practically enslave her. She had beautiful black hair that I envied, as for some reason, people had always teased me for mine being red. I always tanned fairly easily which genetically contradicted my hair type, this was likely due to Natalya's father as her mother always burned. But Geneva's skin was still somewhat darker than mine had ever been, and her eyes were a mahogany brown that could put any piece of wood work from that tree to shame. Mine were a glowing blueI was almost always complimented on, which was a nice break from the negative comments on my fiery hair, that I personally found magnificent. No one in my species had ever been born with red hair, so when I became a host of this body, it became a saving grace from missing my previous form.