Sci-Fi Short: Jump Start - Part 1

It was the fourth time in three days that Jason Pullman had tried to kill himself and he was growing weary of it, if he didn’t think of something soon he’d succeed and then where would he be?

He was lying on the second floor of an old warehouse on the outskirts of the western destricted district of New London.

He was hunched up against a crumbling wall shivering and wondering if this was the day when he would be murdered.

There was a gap between the wall and floor and he could see right outside; the rain fell in silver, grey sheets adding a sleek veneer of gloom to everything it touched. Blood was pouring from a wound at the side of his head and he was beginning to feel faint, for the millionth time he wondered what had gone wrong with his plan.

It was a good plan on the surface of it even though no one had ever attempted what he’d done before; a loud clatter downstairs the sound of a bit of machinery or maybe an old tool falling to the ground.

He was here and there was nothing Pullman could do about it. The clone was much stronger than he was, that was part of the plan; how had it gone wrong?

Pullman could hear him coming up the stairs now a slow and deliberate stride, his wooden footsteps playing in time with the steady rain pounding the ground outside and streaming in through various holes in the old warehouse roof.

He couldn’t just give up, he was the original one and he’d be damned if he was going to be the first person in history to be murdered by himself.

Technically he supposed he wasn’t the first he’d already killed three of his clones and so therefore in a sense had already killed himself, but Pullman considered ‘himself’ to be the original they were just clones of him; weren’t they?

Pullman wasn’t even a hundred percent sure of that anymore. Maybe, just maybe he could talk him out of it, after all his mind was Pullman’s mind. The same insecurities, the same strengths, the same weaknesses; maybe he could convince the clone that he wasn’t in fact him, that he too had been cloned and the evil Pullman was somewhere laughing at them both.

He didn’t hold out much hope, but he had to try there was no escape from this warehouse, he was only two stories up but in his current condition he wouldn’t be able to get very far after he jumped out of the window. His only weapon was desperately low on power, he might get one burst out of his flash rifle strong enough to stun the clone but he doubted it.

The clone had finished searching downstairs and was now trudging purposefully up the rickety stairs, even they were playing their part by creaking theatrically with every step the clone took.

Pullman fixed his gaze on the far door; he would appear there any second now, it could probably hear Pullman’s heartbeat by now. He thought back to how he got here it seemed to him like a lifetime ago. Even now when the concept of a lifetime had been muddied and fogged in his mind, maybe he was the clone and in fact that was Pullman coming up the stairs to kill him.

**********

Just eight weeks previous, Pullman worked for a company that made cybernetic augmentations that he himself would never be able to afford. He had worked in the processor units, writing integration codes which helped augmentations meld to the central nervous system.

Day after day he would sit at his terminal figuring out new ways to apply the chips that someone else designed.

Cybertec were the largest augmentation company in Western Europe, the augs they made where bought all over the globe. A Cybertec wrist joint cost around a month’s salary, Pullman had grown sick of working with things he couldn’t afford.

Modern society allowed human beings to live their lives over and over again in comfort and health, but only if you were rich. It was nothing for Londoners living in the Central Restricted Zone to kit their bodies out with the latest Cybertec augs and the must have BioDivision improved organs; they could afford it.

When it came to the end of their lives, they could draw comfort in the fact they had the latest augmented blank clones to upload into.

When Pullman died he would be uploaded into a standard issue government blank. The body wouldn’t even look like him, and it would have no augmentations no fancy brain chips, nothing but a standard issue consciousness chip and a very unfashionable body.

Pullman sat staring at his terminal it was five minutes till lunch and he needed to get out and think, for the last twelve weeks he’d been researching a rumour he’d discovered on the web.

He was fairly sure now that the rumour was true; what he was contemplating could get him in serious trouble it broke every corporate espionage law there was, but he felt it was worth the risk for what he would gain.

Pullman's thought patterns were interrupted when Steve Nixon stuck his head into his cubicle.

“Hey Jason, what’re you doing for lunch, do you fancy Mimi’s?” Steve was a fellow programmer on Pullman’s floor, he was OK and Pullman didn’t mind him; he didn’t particularly like any of his co-workers but Steve was a good man.

He was a short rotund fellow of around forty, with a ruddy complexion and a receding, greying hairline; a tell tale sign of mediocrity and poverty. Gone were the days when you could perhaps persuade a female that you where in fact a big success when you weren’t.

If you didn’t have perfect teeth, hair and jaw line and weren’t packed with augmentations it was obvious you didn’t belong to the top levels of society.

Pullman always felt a sense of resentment when he went to dine in Mimi’s most of the high fliers in Cybertec dined there, especially the bioengineers they were like rock stars. Pullman had never even seen the floor they worked on.

They would sit around at Mimi’s discussing the latest augs they were designing and the latest bits of gadgetry or upgrades they had just added to their own systems.

Pullman wanted to be like them they were the ones who got invited to all the best parties, they were the ones with the glamorous wives or husbands, society looked up to them, they were improving the human race on a daily basis as far as Pullman was concerned they were Gods amongst men.

“I think I’ll skip Mimi’s today.”

Steve looked at him as if he’d just ordered him to put down a puppy.

“Come on, where else are you going to go, Jack’s? That’s so last month.”

Poor old Steve, he thought that working at Cybertec put him with the in crowd. He was one of those people who thought that just because they were around amazing and cool people all the time, some of it would reflect on them. But it never does, Pullman knew that people like himself and Steve Nixon would always be needed, but only to make the beautiful people look even better.

“Well, I wouldn’t want to be thought of as unfashionable, come on, let’s go then.”

Steve’s cheery countenance returned and the two men made their way up through the Cybertec complex to the company restaurant Mimi’s.

The eatery was on the eighty second floor of Cybertec Tower South, it had been placed so that it looked over the CRZ. The CEO often brought bioengineers he was trying to poach from rival companies to Mimi’s as part of the enticement process.

Pullman looked around the vast shiny space, everything in here had been styled in all the latest fashions. The tables where chrome rhomboids, around which were deep, plush red leather couches, Pullman hated the way he sank into the couches and he always felt like the tables were too high and far away from him.

The human waitresses moved around on air skates, new wave teckno blasted from the speakers, there was a buzz about the place as bioengineers sat talking loudly, executives talked in hushed tones about their latest high powered deals.

There were other lowly workers like Jason and Steve spread about the place, but you could hardly notice them as if the glare from the company’s great and good blinded one to anything but them.

A bar ran the length of the entire north window, curving round to fit the shape of the room, its gleaming chrome surface reflecting the expensive cocktails of the Cybertec stars and there she was.

Pullman; like every other red blooded male at Cybertec, was completely and utterly in love with Angela Ladbury. She was Cybertec’s top bioengineer, she had invented an entirely new type of augmentation; the Ladbury DNA suite.

The product was the jewel in Cybertec’s crown, it cost over two hundred thousand euro credits to have one implanted, it gave the bearer control over certain genetic sexual functions. So if for instance you woke up on a Monday morning and wanted bigger breasts or a larger penis, you could just think it and make it so.

There was untold room for upgrades and improvements and fifteen percent of Cybertec profits the previous year had been attributed to selling Lad-DNA Suite plugins. It was clear that Angela Ladbury had installed a top level Lad-DNA Suite in herself. She was perfect in every way and Pullman was sure that she had given herself a pheromone plugin, even though it wasn’t yet out on the market.

Pullman had convinced himself that somehow his unrequited love was more special than any other Cybertec employee, merely because he’d been at the same college of learning as her. Not that she would remember him, even in college she was a rising star; she had scored the highest ever biogenetic scores on the Oxford cybernetics course.

Pullman watched as she drank at the bar the CEO was buying her yet another lunch, she had him eating out of her hands, laughing at the right moments, looking sincere when he thought was appropriate.

“Jason? What’s up with you today?”

He had been so transfixed with Angela Ladbury he hadn’t noticed Steve talking to him.

“I said what’re you having? I’m going for the swordfish and the modified greens.”

Pullman found himself opening his mouth and allowing words to flow out from it. Though if you had asked him what he was saying, he would have been hard pushed to repeat it.

*******

THANK YOU FOR READING PART ONE OF MY SHORT SCI-FI STORY JUMP START STAY TUNED FOR PART 2. LET ME KNOW WHAT YOU THINK OF THE STORY AND ALSO THE ETHICAL IMPLICATIONS OF CLONING.

Title image: Dean Rose on Unsplash

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