In Their World

Machine Man

"It bears a deeper malice; lives to earn

It's masters bread and laughs to see this great

Lord of the earth, who rules but cannot learn,

Become the slave of what his slaves create."

~Portrait of a Machine,

Louis Untermeyer

Ian idly flicked the chain on his handcuffs with an index finger, staring coldly at the table in front of him. He'd refused to make eye contact with the man sitting opposite him, instead opting to examine his reflection in the scrubbed-clean metallic surface of the table he found himself cuffed to.

He looked like shit.

His stubble had grown out and was beginning to thicken into a beard. His clothes were disheveled, and his long, unkempt hair hung like frayed rope. His eyes had deep circles under them, and his lids were half-closed, giving him a lifeless look. Like a corpse. Like a clone.

Looking at himself was painful. It reminded him of Ken, and with it came the maelstrom of thoughts and feelings he had worked so hard to suppress. In a way, what he'd done had helped numb the pain. In a way, it had gotten him into this situation, into this room, sitting across from a piece of filth in a suit. He wondered briefly about whether he deserved any of this, and attempted some form of higher moral speculation, but really it was pointless. In the here and now, he had been arrested, and he was being interrogated.

That's what double murder gets you.

"Did you know my brother was killed?"

Ian despised himself for being the first to break the silence, even though it was inevitable. You can't win a waiting game when you're up against a clone. They can wait forever.

He looked up at the thing sitting across from him, taking it in for the first time. It was most certainly a him, though it disgusted Ian to think of one of them that way. Sex was irrelevant to them.

He had close-cropped black hair, pale, but not too pale skin, and a timeless, featureless, utterly forgettable face. He appeared calm and collected in his black suit, that stood in stark contrast to the shining desk he was resting his thin, lithe arms upon, and the wall behind him, white, clean, and sanitary. Ian might have remarked that he hadn't a clue how the walls were so clean, except he did; cleaning walls like these had been his whole life.

Until very recently.

"We have been made aware of the situation, and we are carrying out relevant investigations"

"Oh have you now?"

"Are you implying something about the nature of our investigations; conclusions that perhaps led you to other actions?"

Ian chuckled darkly. To give the filth his credit, he was sharp. But then again, they were all sharp. Inhumanely sharp. As they were designed to be. He'd seen four other copies while being marched to the interrogation room; same suit, same haircut, same damn face. Were they human? Biologically, scientifically, by the strictest definition, yes.

But Ian knew otherwise.

After all the talk. After all the years of failed democracy, of shattered hopes, of civil unrest; people got tired. They got tired of death, and disease, and poverty, all the things in the world that (they thought) made life less worth living. So when it was finally proven that we could create better, perfect men, each perfectly suited to his role in society, each designed to be rational, and intelligent, and peaceful, and to make the world a better place, we let them. We built their vat-factories, and their clone-labs, and their gene-banks, and we let them. And so, from our very hands, they came forth. We created them, our successors, our future, our hope. The perfect version of us that we could never be. Our Übermensch. And so he saved us all.

Humans were classified, normal from clone, mothered from vat-grown, random from engineered, and split. Type-A humans, perfectly produced clones, assigned 'proper' jobs for which they had been designed, and proceeded to perform excellently, proving their design had been flawless. No hitches. No disruptions. A perfectly oiled machine, executing its purpose - to work. The rest of us, the Type-B humans, were grateful. Our world had become better, safer, stronger. Our lives had become richer.

That was just the beginning.

Gradually, the pro-A policies were rolled out. Type-Bs were limited. Forced relocation. Restrictions on transport. Assigned occupations. All to improve the machine. All to make sure the world would improve. For the greater good.

Forced sterilization.

"Nothing further, Ian B-Newman?"

Ian flinched at hearing his full name, and the letter that had been added to its second half like a cancerous growth. Just another caveat of life in utopia; their classification had been added to their names. Like they were animals.

Next thing you knew, they'd have to start wearing armbands.

"I have nothing to say to you, filth"

The clone smiled at this, though it did not reach his eyes. Nothing did. His posture had not changed once since sitting down, but now he leaned forward slightly.

"Tell me about the events that occurred on the night of the fourth of October". Ian's eyes widened slightly, before narrowing.

"What's your interest in it?"

"Maybe we are just gathering information for the case of Ken B-Newman's murder?"

A vein throbbed in Ian's neck. He clenched his fist, knuckles turning from sun-browned to deathly white, before exhaling slowly. Hearing his brother's name come out the mouth of that thing filled him with disgust. Disgust and rage. He'd have to learn to control himself better than this. Ian's obvious fury elicited no response in the clone, negative or positive, and that only angered him further.

"Fine. You want to know? I'll tell you."