The Idea Gone Wrong

• Sonya Deligiannis, Grade 11, Canterbury Girls Secondary College
• Short Story
• 2011

Excellence Award in the 'Step Write Up 2011' competition

Now I see that this wasn’t a good idea. How I thought I could get away with it I’m not sure. It all started with an idea, an idea that could make me a billionaire and increase the life expectancy of a human being by a few %. After all, who doesn’t want to live forever?
First, he started having nightmares, strange dreams that even I couldn’t figure out. A boat, Latin writing, it all made no sense to me until one day I got it. These were all memories. How he was able to retain all that information I will never know though. After doing some research I came to a frightening conclusion that had the potential to put me out of business, if he could remember, then soon the others would too. At this point I was so frantic I was starting to lose it. I had millions of questions running through my head as I paced back and forth. What if they found out what I was doing to them? And the worst of all, what if the real world found out that their clones were alive?
I had to do something. I couldn’t just sit there and pretend everything was fine. I guess it’s too late now. Everything’s over. What’s done is done. I just wish I knew what the right decision was back then so I wouldn’t have ended up here.
It took me weeks to work out that the only thing I could do was to destroy and start over. I use the word destroy because I don’t like to think of it as killing or murder. I created them. They were like my mini robots. My theory was that I was simply pulling apart the old models to create newer versions.
Somehow, and to this day I am not sure how, he found out about my plan. I tracked the route that he and his friend used to escape. He was very clever that one. Always asking questions and wondering why. It wasn’t long after he escaped that the real world found out about my lab. I watched him on the news, if I didn’t know that this was all true then I would have believed him based entirely on the passion and urgency in his speech. Soon they came, protesting against my organisation and my plan to rebuild new models.
I was arrested that day and my organisation was shut down. The protesters took me to court. I lost my trial and I am serving my sentence here in jail for unethical practices in my organisation. They say I deceived the real world, that I tricked them into believing something different to the truth.
I hear my clones are still out there. They didn’t let me destroy them, instead they set them free. I guess they will be trying to live a normal life now. Well, as normal as your life can get if you are a clone.