immediately, dotting the “i” in her name with a heart. Russell, who was thirteen and of an age to make his own decision, immediately folded his contract into quarters and handed it back. Unsigned. No thank you, Mr. Government Man. Can I go home now, please?
At eleven years old, I was the youngest in our cell. Everyone else had to make up his mind within our month of isolation. But I had a full year to make my decision.
So that was when Dad started taking me to work, on the pretext that it was time for me to learn about the family business. I’ll never forget that first day. Mid-October. Dry leaves whisked across the streets, crackled beneath my feet and turned to dust. The sky burned blue and bright overhead. A cool breeze poured between the buildings like fresh water, a welcome respite after the unending summer. People had been dying all over New Orleans from an abnormally long heat spell. Mostly old people, but a few babies had passed too.
Fresh Start had been busy, everyone working double shifts. Two extra crews had been flown in from Los Angeles. I’m sure that’s why it happened. Somebody was too tired and the out-of-state crews didn’t know our procedures.
I have to believe it was a mistake. The other possibility, that my father let it happen on purpose to teach me a lesson—well, I just can’t go for that. Russell, in one of his dark moments, said that Dad did it to show us that life is, and should be, unpredictable, that we never should have pretended to be God.
Mom refuses to talk about it. I have to admit I admire her for not taking sides. I know she had an opinion about all of it, she always did. But for whatever reason, she let Russell and me make our own decisions, about Fresh Start, about the Ideal Plan, about what happened to the Newbie on that October day.
The inside of the plant was everything I’d hoped it would be. All stainless steel and molded plastic in the industrial sections; all luxurious leather and ceramic tile in the public areas. Not that anyone would want to, but you could eat your lunch on the floor anywhere in that 200,000-square-foot facility back then. It was that clean. And the smell was a bizarre mixture of dentist-office-scary and new-car-exciting.
For years, whenever anyone found out that I was Chaz Domingue, of the Fresh Start Domingues, a hush would sweep through the room almost as if something just sucked out all the oxygen. A long quiet would follow. And then when people started to talk again they would be ever so polite, opening doors for me, asking me if I would like some candy, asking my opinion about the weather. I liked the attention at first, but by the time I was a teenager I realized it was based on a combination of fear and envy. So I quit telling people my last name. Sometimes I pretended to be someone else entirely. When I got older I even pretended to be a Stringer, just because I wanted to fit in.
But on that October afternoon, when the sunlight was slicing through the warehouse at a steep angle, when the sounds of the city seemed muted because so many people had died, on that day I decided that I never wanted to jump. No matter how much I wanted to be like other people. No matter how much I wanted to live.
That day, one of the Newbies got stuck in between lives. In some nether world, where dark, swirling creatures spin traps like spiders. She got caught. Her old body, withered and white with decay, lay discarded on the other side of the frost-etched glass. Her new-cloned body, as beautiful as Eve herself, lay expectant on a metal gurney, modestly covered in white linen. Neither body breathed, neither had life. All the equipment was suspiciously silent, no beeps to register heartbeat or brainwave patterns. Too much time had passed. The technicians began to get nervous, but Dad just raised one hand to quiet them.
“Give her a minute,” he said, a tone of assurance in his voice.
But several more minutes passed and the clone continued to stare, sightless, at the ceiling.
And then, like it was straight out of a nightmare, she started to talk. The machines refused to admit there was life in either body, yet some alien consciousness caused the clone’s mouth to move and a hollow voice