Bright Lights & Dark Secrets: A Sci-Fi Anthology

Dupes

Richard Batty built his first clone the day the President bit off his own fingers on live television. The day the Dahmer virus could no longer be denied.

By the end of the week, three hundred cases had come to light, and the President died trying to chew the veins out of his arms. Many other infected ate themselves as well, tried eating themselves, only to die from their ruthless self-mutilations. Then they started eating the ones that couldn't outrun them. Nothing could talk them out of it. The hungrier they got, the less their words made sense.

Six months later, Richard Batty made two more clones, one to guard his home and the other to roam the falling world. Three million cases of Dahmer by then. No attempts at a cure or vaccine came back successful. Public transportation shut down. Schools. Workplaces. The smell of blood was too much.

Then the first year came to an end. One in four citizens knew the taste of flesh, abandoning the surplus of produce and goodies on supermarket shelves for it. The way a Dahmer-infected person reacted to being fed anything beyond the contents of the human body, you'd think they were being force-fed their own shit. More real food for the ones with their minds still intact, for minds like that of Richard Batty, who'd mastered the creation of his Duplicate Automatic Fabricator, a machine that would create a new Dupe upon another's destruction. He lost a few to the Dahmer savages, who had mistaken his creations for pure flesh and bone, only to crack their teeth on titanium skeletons and lap up artificial blood laced with strychnine. They may have taken some of the fruits of his labor, but he still won in the end, having buried more bodies without a shovel, without needing to step outside his boarded-up home with its reinforced garage door and state-of-the-art surveillance system.

Batty sat before the six spectral-green holographic screens hovering above his desk, elbows planted on the table, eyes studying the desolate views. Camera One was the front of his brownstone, an empty street with cars that would never move again. Camera Two, the three-way intersection at the end of his street, two buildings down, swaying left and right with a view of the distant harbor. Camera Three, his backyard, a square lot of pavement with a patch of grass at each corner, barbed wire crudely wrapping around the peak of his fence. Camera Four, the hallway from his front door to the stairs and the living room. Camera Five, the desolate world through the eyes of one of his creations. And Camera Six?

The basement. A place he'd refused to step inside since he'd created Number Two, his prototype Dupe.

Number Two entered the room, his manufactured muscles tense, imitation blood pumping through his plastic veins, a rectangular wafer encased in plastic resting in the clone's hand. He approached the screens at the desk, trying to pinpoint his superior's favorite sight.

"Good afternoon, sir, I've brought your lunch," said Number Two, and he rested the wafer by his creator's hand. "You now have seventeen NutriBars left. Counting each bar as a single meal means you should have enough for approximately six more days before another supply run."

Without glancing away from the screens, Batty raised a thumbs-up to his creation before waving him away like a housefly.

Number Two tilted his head. "Are we amidst another supply run?"

"What do you think?" said Batty, gesturing to Camera Five. The Dupe providing Batty with a glimpse of the outside world halted before an enormous building.

"But, sir, we have sufficient food and water," said Number Two.

"I heard you the first time. But have you checked the Fabricator lately?"

"Of course. Every morning at 5 am, just as you've programmed me to do."

Batty forced out a chuckle. "Well, maybe I should make it necessary to check twice then, because we're low on everything. Titanium, strychnine, core fuel. Did you do something?"