One Boy + The Internet

The first chapter of my creative dissertation.

So there I was, in the headquarters for the Treadmere Corporation, the creatively named Treadmere Tower. It’s a huge, plate-glass-wrapped monstrosity of a skyscraper. Stuck in rural England, with just fields and trees all around it. There it is plunging towards the sky, a monolithic reminder of the modern world, a middle finger to nature.

This is where Treadmere do everything. It’s an all-purpose building. They’ve got their offices in the top portion, filled with bureaucratic pencil-pushers and management types. In the middle portion they have their hospital, where all the patient rooms and operating theatres are placed, which is where I was, and in the bottom they have their reception room, canteens and PR displays in luxurious boardrooms for prospective clients. It’s a pretty swish place.

I woke up in the hospital bit after undergoing my third body-hop and found myself less full of energy than usual and in an extraordinary amount of pain. It also struck me that I couldn’t move in the slightest. I must point out here that it’s extraordinarily difficult to freak out when you’re fully paralysed. The shock of losing all motor function made me want to scream and fight, but I couldn’t. I have never felt more helpless. At the time it was the scariest moment of my life.

It took a couple of hours but eventually a nurse noticed me and rushed off to get a doctor. Another two hours, a truckload of painkillers and 6 examinations by 4 different doctors and they told me that this clone I’ve hopped into is somehow defective and that it hasn’t taken to the body-hop operation and has instead decided to shut down. In other words, the body’s giving up because of the stress of the operation, some kind of prolonged shock response.

            I forget the specific details about what happened with this body. Some bureaucrat tried to explain the finer points of genetic cloning to me but lost me almost immediately. I remember really hating that guy. He wasn’t welcoming or apologetic, in fact he made it seem like it was my fault and I was interrupting his important work or something. I tried to convey as much contempt through my eyes as possible, seeing as they’re the only part of my body I have any control over, but I’m not sure he noticed.

Luckily, this was a problem with what is essentially a Treadmere product. They had agreed to transfer me to a stand-by clone as soon as possible. Apparently they keep a second clone of all their clients in stasis should they be needed for simple organ transplant operations instead of a full body-hop. It was being defrosted as the bureaucrat told me all this but then he moved onto the bad news - Seeing as I couldn’t sign a consent form for the operation, they had to wait until the moment this body dies to transfer it.

According to that bureaucrat, the law says that to terminate a life prematurely the client has to sign a consent form and since I couldn’t physically sign the form I was stuck waiting around and unable to move. It was not the ideal situation when I had planned on being at home having tea at that moment. Of course, Treadmere were incredibly apologetic about the whole thing and agreed that the new body-hop should be free of charge as a form of compensation for my ‘inconvenience’. As far as I’m concerned it was the least that they could do. There are so many things I could have been doing that were far more productive than lying in a hospital bed waiting to die. I mean, my publishers were onto me for my next book idea already and while I wasn’t short of ideas I could have spent that time writing something at least, and I just had to email the London Book Fair to tell them I wasn’t going to be able to make their Author’s Corner that year. I could’ve mowed the garden too, I suppose. I was also missing out on going for drinks this evening in the local pub with a few neighbours. A nice cold beer would have gone down lovely and right then I was gasping. I suppose the nurses didn’t think a dying body needed to drink anything.

No one came to see me after my lovely visit from the bureaucrat, and there’s nothing to listen to except the beeping of heart monitors and the corridor outside my room. No one even left the television on for me. I don’t watch much, I think reading’s better for the mind, but at least it would be noise to listen to. It’s got to be more interesting than the bare wall directly opposite the bed, though.

So I wait a few hours more, trying to come up a name for my next main character. Names are always the hardest part of writing for me when I’m writing. I keep turning to names of people I know or really outlandish ones that don’t make any sense and they’re both things I try to avoid.

I decided to name my next character, a bumbling and incompetent detective in deeper than he realises, Roland. As if on cue, the door opens and in strides Louise who immediately begins fussing over me and asking incessant questions like I’m actually capable of answering her. In tow is my 2-year-old son Charlie. Back when cloning started people wondered if clones could have kids but I never understood why. They’re genetically identical and so they’d be anatomically identical and if one person can have kids then their clone should be able to as well. Little Charlie was probably the best thing that happened to me in all my long years.

At 2, he was already talking, sure it was only a few words, but every parent has high hopes for their kid. I hoped he’d be a writer like his old man. He had that gleam in his eye. No office-bound, pencil pushing job awaited this kid. He’d do great things, I was sure of it. Of course at this moment in the story he was sucking on his thumb while staring at the heart monitor going beep-beep, but I had every confidence he’d do fine.

Turning from thoughts of my son, I began to realise that Louise was still talking like she expected me to take part in the conversation. She initially informs me that her new haircut is a ‘pixie’ cut and was very fashionable back when she was younger and it had come back in vogue. I would’ve told her how pretty it looked if I could, she did look wonderful. Then she moved onto a story about her work friend Sandra, and how Sandra was sleeping with William from accounting while at the same time sleeping with William’s dad. I had no idea who any of these people were but according to her the office gossip was of the utmost importance.

Louise started going on about how Frank, the man next door, had begun complaining about our willow tree growing into his back garden and how she couldn’t believe the cheek he had to complain after his oak tree had destroyed their conservatory floor after roots began to push up from underneath.

I realised then that this was probably the longest that I’d heard Louise talk in all the time we’d been together. We got together in our early 20s, she wasn’t quite my childhood sweetheart, so there’s no fairytale romance in that respect, but she came close. Obviously, after a century together we’d talked and spent countless nights whiling away the hours together, but this was the longest period of non-stop speech I’d heard from her. I realised that most of it was inane chatter and gossip and stuff that I found really quite boring. I know we couldn’t start a dialogue but thinking about it, we rarely had much interesting to talk about at such length these days.

 I began to actually wonder if I’d married too young. I loved Louise, I’d never dispute that fact, but we’d grown apart as people. It happens in the best of marriages, but part of me wondered if there was someone better suited for me. I’d always wanted a partner who loved reading and writing as much as I did. Still, they were fleeting thoughts and we were happy and we had Charlie.

Louise talked for another hour or so until she revealed that she’d planned to go out with her friends this evening while I was at the pub with the neighbours and that she’d already hired the babysitter. So she and Charlie took off and mercifully Louise had turned the television on for me. It wasn’t anything interesting, just some 24-hour news channel but it was at least some connection to something outside of this room.

It struck me, as I watched a reporter covering the most recent atrocities in some backward part of the globe, that maybe I could write about this experience. I could write a book about being stuck inside your own body. It had been done at that point but that’s just more of a premise than anything else. It could even fit into the crime genre easily enough. It could be about a victim of an attack left paralysed and has to watch the world around him trying to solve the mystery of who did it. Classic stuff.

I repeated the idea over and over to make sure I’d remember it after the operation. The body-hop generally transfers all memories over, including the ones most recent to death, but those memories closest to the termination stage come across somewhat hazy when you hop. So I tried really hard to imprint it into my mind so that I’d remember my great idea and maybe stop my publishers getting too pissed at me.

The idea became a mantra as I felt the usual fatigue of death overpower me. When you’re in a specialised hospital like Treadmere’s, they make sure you go comfortably. My eyelids were beginning to get ridiculously heavy as a team of nurses and a surgeon began to wheel me towards the lift that would take me to the operating theatre. The doors slide open, the gurney moves forward and then it’s nothing but bright lights.

So this is the prologue to the creative piece of my dissertation titled ‘David’. I felt, with some creative criticism, that the world in which the story takes place needed a little exposition (ask my supervisor) and so I felt a prologue was needed.

That being said, the ages of the cloning procedures seems a little confusing and may need several reads. I think I wrote it as well as I could in the circumstances but then again maybe I’m biased.

Creative criticism is welcome, as are colossal amounts of praise.

Enjoy.

This is the story about how I killed myself, and lived to tell the tale. It all started, as most stories these days do, with one silly bureaucratic mix-up. It’s complicated though, and so you’ll need to bear with me while I set the scene. It’s apparently the done thing.

            The guys that messed up, the Treadmere Corporation, they began as a private medical group at the start of the 21^st century. By the way, when I say private I mean private. They were, and still are, an incredibly expensive medical practice and only the wealthiest of people could afford them. It became a status symbol to be covered by them.

            They gained so much money that they began their own medical research. It took them just 25 years to perfect cryogenic freezing. Now those who were rich enough and bored enough of the early 21^st century could go to sleep and see what the future holds. Treadmere were pretty okay about the whole thing though, they shared the technology with other medical institutions that allowed those terminally ill to be cryogenically frozen until a cure was found, if they wanted.

            After that they started working in genetic modification and creating synthetic tissues for use in transplant. They became pretty good at it too, so good that it allowed them to make the biggest breakthrough in medical history just 5 years after the cryogenic freezing process. In the year 2040 the Treadmere Corporation had perfected the human cloning process.

There were pretty big legal ramifications for them now. Human cloning was forbidden by human rights laws and there were a ridiculous amount of religious protests about the idea, but after successfully proving that there was no downside to the cloning Treadmere were allowed to create one human clone, just to test it out. The result was a kid called Escher. They named him after the European Society of Human Genetics (ESHG), seeing as they supervised the procedure and there weren’t too many names featuring the letters ESHG.

Of course, Escher was just a kid. They had cloned a human being, but it still had to grow from a foetus to a full person. He made completely new memories, became a whole new person, just the exact genetic twin of whoever they took the DNA from. This left people wondering if you could clone someone’s mind, to put all of the memories of one person into another body. It took Treadmere just 20 years to put together the technology needed and they called it the Organic-Memory Implant Transplant.

Now the real extent of their research was revealed to everyone. They were able, if you had enough money to pay them, to create a clone of a person and then age it to a certain number of years in cryogenic stasis. Then when the client’s body started to expire, or they were getting too old, they could use the memory transplant to move into their younger body. The process became known as the body-hop because that’s pretty much what it was. You went to sleep, woke up in a newer body. You felt pretty great, you looked pretty great. Everyone agreed the whole process was pretty great.

Of course, there were more legal problems. I mean, religious groups and philosophical groups all started arguing about whether it was actually the same person, the issue of a soul got pulled into it and stuff and assets were sometimes seized from these body-hoppers and whole bucket load of tort cases spilled into the public eye. Soon the law had to change and regulate the new process. The Full-Body Transplant Act of 2063 legally recognised the newest clone to come out of the body-hop operation as the recipient of all of their own worldly possessions. It’s got a lot of complicated wording to straighten it out. Took a hell of a long time to get it straight in most people’s heads.

Then there’s the social landscape change. Imagine if all of the richest people could never die and just keep going and going. Those with money, influence and power would never be culled by nature and as a result, things changed. The rich/poor gap worsened. The rich got richer, the poor got poorer and the world started to split in two. About 25 years ago, in 2080 or so, there was a massive socialist movement. There were violent protests, riots and bombings. Things got fucking terrible for a while. You couldn’t venture into the inner cities anymore and any vaguely socialist remark got you pulled in as a dissident  After the police sorted all these ‘dissidents’ out and the government started actually listening to the people, things got progressively better. They still aren’t great, there’s still a load of crime caused by economic problems and some areas of London and other cities are no-go areas for those with a decent wage, but they’re better than before.

But I digress, I was talking about the legal changes to make the clone the legally recognised bearer of all the hoppers assets. I’m guessing you can see where my problem occurred by now? Well, let me introduce myself. I’m David Wayne. I’m a bestselling writer of crime fiction. You might have heard of some of my titles, like ‘Business in Blood’ and ‘Criminal’s Creed’. No? Oh, well they sold pretty well anyway. I’m actually 125-years-old. I got my first body-hop operation done when I was 77, into a 28-year-old clone of myself. It was an anniversary present for my wife, Louise. I got one for her too. She was 70 at the time and went into a 27-year-old clone of herself.

She was so happy when she woke up. She cried every time she looked into a mirror. Still makes me smile to think about. That was our 50^th anniversary. We got another one 20 years later, when our clones were 48 and 47 respectively. It turns out that having money and this operation makes you pretty vain.

The third clone, that’s the body I’m in now, occurred three days after my 125^th birthday. My wife had her body-hop about a week before me and decided to go with a 32-year-old clone of herself this time, she said something about being a more ‘dignified older woman’. It wasn’t such a huge deal though because her clone actually looks younger than her target age, which suits us both fine.

That’s where the problems started though, with my third clone…

The story continues in Chapter One, coming here soon.

Never fear though, stalwart followers, there will be more content soon. It shall be filled with geekiness and oddities as well as some original content that I may or may not create.

That being said, watch this space for updates concerning my creative dissertation. Now that it’s all done and handed in, I think I feel comfortable sharing the work with you.

I hope you like it.