Previously, on Just Leave Me A Clone!

I, on the other hand, was not doing so well as my counterpart. I had been writing so much and ignoring human interaction to such a degree that I found it more and more difficult to interact with others, even for the most mundane purposes; if I went to the grocery store for more coffee, I would use the self-checkout. I hadn’t interacted with my wife and daughter since the cloning, and now I was feeling like somehow I had been gypped by the guy who was not only being me, but being a better me.

Worst of all, however, is the writers’ block. Or is it something else?

The ideas, in any case, have stopped flowing; they tapered slowly off as I wrote them down and got them out of my head, and no more ideas have come to replace them. My motivation is at an all-time low, and I no longer feel like writing, editing, or doing much of anything. I haven’t eaten solid food since the cloning, which is now fully two weeks past and I sit here, wondering why all I really feel like doing is going to sleep in my comfy office chair while watching Stargate reruns on my laptop.

November 05, 2013–

Well, I have to assume that my suspicions are more or less true; the alternative is to believe that there is someone else out there who is exactly me, running around and making me look bad. Or lazy, or whatever.

Maybe he’s naked, because when I went downstairs to the basement office to check on him, all I found were the clothes that he had refused to change for the past two weeks lying draped over the comfy chair and the laptop, open and running on the table next to it; he had been watching nerd TV, apparently. I thought I’d eventually find him dead; he seemed to have had no appetite since the cloning and I hadn’t been able to get him to eat anything, but I’ve also read the human body can live for a month at least without solid food, and at least he was drinking coffee. Still, if that happened it would have been strange trying to get rid of the body. I’d been trying to work out a contingency for faking my own demise and leaving the country with the insurance money, but two years’ salary seemed like a pittance compared to what I could have gotten had I actually planned it out.

Whereas I originally assumed that the cloning experiment was a success, I now must consider it a failure. My counterpart has, for the lack of a better explanation, vanished into thin air. If I had scrolled through the thousands of comments on that kid’s YouTube video in the first place, I would have discovered the point where he had posted a minor – but crucial – correction to the method given for modifying the Swashbuckler PSC to clone complex organisms; if I had scrolled down even more, I would have discovered that kid’s fate in the first place, and then perhaps I would not have played God in this manner.

So now I have no choice but to close the book on this matter, and on this blog. I think I’ll be switching directions and doing something different with the little spare time I have.

This post was prompted by the What If? Weekly writing challenge. What If you scared up a good story?