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Random Acts of Cloning: The Complete Series
Random Acts of Cloning: The Complete Series
Random Acts of Cloning: The Complete Series
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Random Acts of Cloning: The Complete Series

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It is 1978. 

 

An alien substance is discovered which allows the near-instantaneous creation of duplicates of mammals. The substance becomes publicly known and is distributed inexpensively. What would happen to the Earth's economy? Political landscape? Technology? Religion? The Random Acts of Cloning series takes the science-fiction trope of cloning and adds a whole new spin. 

 

It's a long-term, epic look at the global changes over a span of thirty years, both good times and bad. As the characters age and the world changes around them, this alternate world diverges more and more from the timeline we live in. Will it end well? That's the question.

Includes all six books:

  • Impact
  • Division
  • Multiplication
  • Exponents
  • Explosions
  • Mutations

Combined into one volume!

LanguageEnglish
Release dateApr 20, 2015
ISBN9781513083599
Random Acts of Cloning: The Complete Series
Author

Brian Schell

Brian Schell is a College English Instructor who has an extensive background in Buddhism and other world religions. After spending time in Japan, he returned to America where he created the immensely popular website, Daily Buddhism. For the next several years, Schell wrote extensively on applying Buddhism to real-world topics such as War, Drugs, Tattoos, Sex, Relationships, Pet Food and yes, even Horror Movies. Twitter: @BrianSchell Facebook: http://www.Facebook.com/Brian.Schell Web: http://BrianSchell.com

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    Book preview

    Random Acts of Cloning - Brian Schell

    Introduction

    Send in the clones!


    What could be cooler than clones? Who wouldn’t want an identical copy of themselves? What could possibly go wrong? Well, if you’re a fan of science fiction, you already know of at least a dozen scenarios involving clones that have gone wrong or otherwise ended disastrously. It’s a common theme in sci-fi stories and movies.

    We’ve got our own spin on the cloning concept, and we think it may be unique. Imagine for a moment that an alien substance comes to Earth which allows the creation of near instantaneous duplicates of mammals. What would happen to the Earth’s economy? Political landscape? Technology? Religion? I think you’ll find our take on cloning is a little different, but also a lot of fun.

    Starting in 1978, it’s a long-term, epic look at the global changes over a span of fifty years, both good times and bad. As the characters age and the world changes around them, this alternate world diverges more and more from the timeline we live in. Will it end well? That’s the question.

    Prologue

    The small device whizzed through space, spinning and tumbling. As it entered the outskirts of the yellow star system, it slowed to nearly a third of light speed. In minutes it passed through the orbit of the sixth planet, a ringed gas giant. Only a few minutes later, it sped past the fifth planet, an even bigger gas giant with an enormous red storm spot swirling on the surface. As it neared the approaching asteroid field, it slowed drastically. Internal scanners carefully measured and scanned fifty of the nearest rocky bodies, selecting one that was appropriate. After a decade of travel, its journey was nearly over.

    The device changed course towards a targeted asteroid. As it neared, it sent out sensor beams to gather more detailed information. It retrieved mass, gravity, density, and distance information from the rock, making certain that it was suitable. Everything checked out within acceptable limits. The device soon slowed to a crawl, positioned itself on the side pointing away from the Sun, and made contact with the hard surface of the asteroid. There was no sound, no dust cloud, just a silent landing as the device stopped floating.

    Mere seconds later, as if the device were simply catching its breath, small jets fired on the backside of the device, pushing against the asteroid’s mottled surface. The asteroid shifted, and then started to drift, gaining speed. The device continued firing its small rocket until the trajectory had altered in accordance with calculations programmed long ago and corrected in real-time. The rockets stopped, while the asteroid continued on, traveling toward its final destination.

    A small door on the underside of the device opened, and a thick liquid substance oozed out. It spread out in a rough circle of approximately a meter in diameter. In the absolute zero temperatures of space, especially on the dark side of the asteroid, no liquid should have been able to exist without freezing, but this one did. It sought out the nooks and holes of the asteroid and penetrated deeply inside the rocky shell.

    The device performed one more calculation of the trajectory as a final check. Then with its mission complete, it detached itself from the rock and drifted off. Its course slightly diverged from the asteroid until enough distance had been reached. The device then overloaded its own engines and exploded silently, with almost no flash. It vaporized and was simply was no more.

    The asteroid, on the other hand, hurtled onwards towards its destination, the third planet: Earth. The journey would take more than three months at this slow pace, but there was no hurry. The asteroid was so small that it probably wouldn’t be noticed by the inhabitants of the planet as it approached. Even if they did, nothing the humans had could stop it.

    1

    Impact

    Bobby Michaelson walked along the gravel-covered road he always took on the way home after baseball practice. Instead of going straight home, he’d wandered some of the paths in the woods near the ballpark, and had quickly gotten lost. Not actually lost as in he didn’t completely know where he was, since the patch of forest wasn’t that big. It just took an hour longer than he’d planned to find his way back out to a spot he recognized, and now he was running late. He wasn’t worried though; he wouldn’t get in trouble for only being an hour late. His parents probably wouldn’t even notice. He kicked idly at small rocks as he wandered along, thinking things over.

    He was getting bored with playing baseball overall and had skipped out from practice a few minutes early. Baseball wasn’t really something he’d wanted to get into in the first place. He’d mainly signed up to impress Cindy Mulligan, but she had barely noticed that he was on the team. She showed up to watch the games all the time, and sat on the bleachers with her girlfriends sometimes when they practiced. They giggled as they watched the boys working their drills. But she was really only there to watch dumb old Tom Madison. Bobby remembered how he expected her to gush over his great athletic ability, only to find her completely unimpressed with him. It didn’t help that it had turned out that Bobby actually had very little of that athletic ability.

    It didn’t matter anyway, he thought with a sigh. She didn’t come to watch him. She talked to him occasionally in Chemistry class, and she seemed nice enough. But never had anything to do with him after school. He’d tried asking her out to a movie once, but she made excuses and turned him down. Still, he wasn’t overly concerned, since he knew he could find a way to impress her before graduation if he kept trying.

    Despite his young age, Bobby wasn’t worry-free or careless. As he took the slow walk home, he thought ahead to graduation. It was only October, so he had more than a half a year to go, but he was seriously worried about what would come about after high school was done. He wanted to go to college. Correction, he needed to go college. He wanted to be a doctor. The problem was that his parents had no money. They rented the old Robertson house because it was cheap. It was far enough out in the country that no one else wanted to live out here. His dad had banged his back up pretty bad at the lumber mill a couple years before. They didn’t have any savings. He was drawing enough disability pay for them to get by on. Dad didn’t seem to be in pain anymore, and there didn’t seem to be much that he couldn’t do if he put his mind to it. He just didn’t put his mind to anything. He milked it out for all he could, and mom spent her days waiting on him hand and foot rather than working herself.

    So where would college money come from? Billy wasn’t very good at sports. He got decent grades, but he doubted that he was smart enough for a scholarship. He thought he would have to work his way through school. That sounded like an uphill battle to Bobby. Mr. Johns, his high-school counselor, was even more gung-ho about him going to college than Bobby was. He was always saying that the class of ‘79 was going to make their mark in the new decade, and they had to do everything they could to get ready for it. Mr. Johns had told him earlier in the day that it was already too late to get into some schools for next year. He couldn’t procrastinate making a decision for much longer.

    It was normally an hour-long walk back home from school and the ball field. That was when he didn’t spend an extra hour wandering the woods. He enjoyed the trip most of the time. It was usually quiet, and the nature sounds were soothing. The crickets weren’t quite gone yet for the year. Birds were calling out and rustling in the trees. Squirrels and other small critters scrambled in the brush just off the road, and Billy could even hear even the occasional owl hooting. Because he was running late, it was just a little past full dark. It wasn’t quite to the point where it got really cold outside, but it was getting chilly. Bobby pulled his worn denim jacket a little tighter around his neck and continued moving. He took a deep breath and smiled. This was his favorite time of day.

    He heard a distant roar in the air. It was a sound that Bobby was used to hearing. He figured some fighters had just taken off from McReynolds base, a small training facility and airstrip just outside of town. They were always coming and going from there, to do maneuvers and practice battles and such. Sometimes they were so loud that it felt like the ground was shaking. The roar grew louder and louder as they approached, and Bobby looked up just as they passed directly overhead. There were three of them, flying in close formation. Bobby knew most of the fighter types. He’d looked them up at the library. But it was dark enough now that he couldn’t tell what model these were. All he could see of the planes above were their lights and the moonlit vapor trails they left behind. He watched until they had passed beyond the clearing in the trees above, and then walked on.

    For a time, he had considered enlisting in the Air Force to pay for college. Mom wouldn’t stand for it. Any time he brought it up, his mother would say, I don’t want to lose all my men. Then she would start crying until Bobby relented. Bobby’s older brother Jim had died in Vietnam five years ago, and it had just about crushed her with grief. But his mother would still have his father if he left. He guessed that wasn’t enough, since his father wasn’t good for much beyond drinking anymore.

    He walked on for half a mile further down the road until he heard another roar. This was very similar to the first one, but it was coming from the wrong direction. Bobby had spent enough days watching the planes that he noticed right away that this was unusual. The jets never came in that direction going so fast; they’d overshoot their landing field. The pitch of the noise also sounded off, like the engines were running faster than normal or something.

    As he listened, he was even more puzzled when the roar grew louder and even higher pitched, as if the plane was accelerating. Was it going to crash? Where was it? He looked around in all directions, looking for a vapor trail, smoke or running lights. He didn’t see anything. The sound continued growing louder and louder until he had to put his hands over his ears to muffle it.

    Then he saw it. There was a bright glow coming from very high up in the sky. At first it looked like a star, or maybe a plane shining its spotlight directly at him. But it didn’t turn away; rather, it grew brighter and larger as if it were heading right for him. The sound grew so loud that he could feel it vibrating in his chest.

    It occurred to him for a moment that a plane was going to crash-land right on him, and he almost turned to run. Then he noticed that it was angling a little off to one side. It was still going to crash, but not right in the middle of the road. Bobby estimated that it would hit somewhere on the Jonesboro Farm. He ran off the road in that direction, taking long strides up the hill towards where he thought the plane would hit.

    He ran as fast as he could through the dense plant growth, hopping a wire fence as if it weren’t there. He wanted to see the plane hit the ground, but it looked like it was going to impact before he got there. He hoped it wasn’t a passenger jet full of people or anything. He hurried on, dodging tree limbs and trying not to fall over the underbrush. It wasn’t hard to see in the woods. Besides the full moon, the falling thing was giving off a lot of light.

    He got to the top of the hill just before impact. It was a quick blur of motion, dazzling bright, but he could see that it wasn’t actually a plane. It didn’t look like an aircraft of any kind.

    There was a bright flash that left him seeing spots in his vision as the thing hit the ground. The ground shook with the impact of the thing, and the Earth shook under his feet so violently that he lost his footing. Bobby fell to his knees, but got right back up and continued heading toward the thing. He could feel a blast of heat washing over him, not enough to burn, but uncomfortably hot. Then it passed, and the night was cool again.

    He exited the woods and stepped into Max Jonesboro’s soybean field. Even in the dark, he knew exactly where the thing had hit. It was obvious. About 100 yards into the field lay a huge crater, probably 20 yards in diameter. Even more telling was the smoke coming out of the new hole. Without thinking of consequences, Bobby rushed to the pit. There was a lot of debris around the field that he deftly avoided; rocks and upturned dirt clumps, and even some burning soybean plants. There were no plane parts or anything that was obviously metal. He arrived at the edge of the crater and peered in.

    He knelt down to get a better look, and he noticed the complete lack of sound. At first he thought it was because his ears were ringing, but that wasn’t it. All the forest creatures and birds had gone dead silent. Even the crickets were quiet.

    He could see now that this definitely was no plane. It looked like a meteorite. He’d read about them in school. He’d even seen the occasional shooting star on his evening walks home, but he’d never been so close to one.

    It seemed to be rock, but bits of it were glowing red hot like embers in a campfire. He was no science whiz, but he knew that things got heated when they came through orbit. They showed a film in class about the Apollo spaceships when he was in middle school, and he remembered them telling how they had to come in with the heat shield pointing down in the right direction.

    He knew better than to touch the hot bits, but he really wanted a piece of a meteorite to take home with him. It would be a souvenir that might actually be worth something. He’d heard about the moon rocks that Neil Armstrong and those guys had brought back and how valuable they were. This could be his claim to fortune for sure. Maybe he’d even make enough to pay for college when this school year was up.

    He scrambled down into the hole, keeping far away from the really hot-looking pieces, and scanned the debris for smaller chunks. He spotted a likely candidate. It was about as big as his hand, but wasn’t smoking or glowing or anything. He fished his ball cap out of his backpack and scooped up the rock with the hat. It held the rock without a problem. He used the hat to transfer the chunk into his backpack, and then he zipped it shut. He put the cap on his head, and climbed back up out of the crater. He wanted to get home before anyone else showed up to take his rock away. He also didn’t want to wait for old man Jonesboro to show up and blame him for messing up his field.

    He’d gotten about fifteen feet from the hole when he noticed a pain on his head. It was sharp and burning, like that time when he’d splashed battery acid on the back of his hand. He yanked his hat off and used his fingers to probe his scalp. He still seemed to have hair, so it hadn’t scorched him or set him on fire, yet it felt like it was burning. He turned the cap over and looked inside, but it was too dark to see anything in there. He ran his fingers around inside and thought he might have felt something damp but figured it was just sweat. The burning sensation faded. Even so, his head still itched something fierce where it had touched his skin. He shrugged. He couldn’t do anything about it there. He’d take a look in the bathroom mirror when he got home and maybe shampoo his hair out. He’d probably just gotten into a little poison ivy or something. He held the ball cap in his hands and moved on at a quicker pace. Five steps later, he passed out, face down, in the soybean field.

    Carl Krieger drove down the road in his ‘77 Cadillac, listening to the radio as he went along. He had the window rolled down with one arm resting on the frame. The night air felt cool and refreshing after being cooped up inside all day. It had been a long day in Cincinnati, and he had an even longer drive home. He’d been in meetings all day trying to persuade the Kroger Corporation to carry the smokeless ashtrays he’d designed. He felt a little angry about how they’d given him false hope, passing him higher and higher up the chain of command. Then in his last meeting, one of the senior vice presidents told him they weren’t having any of it. They already sold another company’s model that was heavily advertised on TV.

    Carl had spent months and hundreds of dollars coming up with this design. He needed a market for it. Either that or he needed a new product. He kept turning over in his mind how things being shown on television were selling like hotcakes. It seemed like every week there was something new being hawked, and people were making fortunes. That Ronco guy must be a millionaire with all the things he had going. If Carl couldn’t sell his ashtray, was there something else he could come up with?

    He was mentally adding up various costs involved with the failed ashtray venture when a roaring noise started drowning out the radio. He slowed down and switched it off. There was something flying overhead that was getting louder by the second, and then there was a bright light in the sky that streaked past. He saw a bright flash off the road just ahead and felt the impact vibrate through the car. The bushes swayed immediately afterward, as if a high wind were blowing. He felt the car try to tug itself off the road away in the opposite direction. It was some kind of shock wave from the thing. Was it an explosion?

    He pulled the car over and parked. He didn’t see anyone else around. He looked up and down the road, and there were no cars in sight. He got out and headed for the field where the thing had come down. His knees creaked in protest as he started up the hill beside the road. He looked up and spotted a man, no a teenager, in the distance. His first instinct was to call out to the boy, but since he wasn’t supposed to be here in the first place, he stayed silent. By that time, the boy was hidden among the trees and shrubs anyway.

    A few minutes later Carl reached the wooded area himself and started to plow through. He was out of shape and carrying more than a few extra pounds. Between fighting his way through the plants and climbing up the slope, he didn’t make it through the woods with much grace. He came to a wire fence, but didn’t see it before he tripped over it. He gouged one of his palms on something as he went down and landed sprawling on the ground. Then he cursed when he realized that one leg was tangled. He yanked it free, scraping his shin painfully in the process. He felt his pants leg rip as he pulled it loose. Shit! he cursed under his breath, low enough so that the boy wouldn’t hear him.

    When he got to the top of the hill overlooking the field, he immediately recognized what he saw in the moonlight. It’s a meteor! He’d been slower than the boy; a lot slower. The kid was already on his way back with whatever it was that he’d picked up. He was making his way toward Carl, wading through the waist-high soybean plants. Carl circled far around to the left to avoid him and came up on the meteor from the other side. Carl hurried toward spot, feeling as excited as a child at Christmas.

    Forgetting the pain in his scraped leg, he ran the final steps to the edge of the crater. He could see a little steam or smoke rising from the hole, and when he got to the edge he could feel the heat still radiating from it. In fact, he could see some parts of it still glowing hot. He looked around and didn’t see anyone else around. No one was coming so far as he could see.

    He knew how rare and valuable a meteor could be, and his mind started turning over how he could claim this one for his own. He was the first one to find it, so he had that going for him. But what were his legal rights to it? And then he realized that he wasn’t the first one to really find it, that teenage boy was. Maybe he was on his way back to tell his parents all about it now.

    Carl ran around the edge of the crater to the other side, looking in the direction the kid had taken off. Maybe he could call him back and they could work out a deal. He squinted and looked off into the dim light, but he didn’t see any movement. Carl could see a path of trampled soybean plants heading off in the direction of the wooded hill. The boy must have already made it back there. He was probably halfway home by now.

    Carl looked back at the crater. This wasn’t his field; there wasn’t any way he was going to be able to keep all of the rubble. The best he could do would be to carry off a big chunk and see if he could get a museum to pay him for it. Or maybe find some kind of collector who was willing to shell out big time for it. Then another idea occurred to him, a good one. He could slice it into tiny pieces, set the pieces into clear plastic sealant and sell them as key chains or maybe necklaces. He thought he might be able to make more money out of it that way.

    He didn’t have any kind of box or container to carry off a piece, and he’d heard about radiation. Plus he’d see enough science fiction movies to make him leery of handling it. He sure as hell didn’t want to take a chance and touch it with his bare hands. He took off his overcoat and wrapped it around the biggest piece he saw that he thought he could lift. He picked it up with both arms, and found it surprisingly light and easy to carry, almost as if it were hollowed out. He sat it back down and picked up an even bigger chunk. He grunted with the effort of getting that one, but he thought he could manage it.

    As he crossed the field, he estimated how many keychain sized pieces he could cut the chunk into, times twenty bucks a piece - Hell, maybe even forty bucks a piece - and how much money he could be rolling in. He struggled across the field, totally oblivious to how close he came to stepping on the unconscious teenager laying hidden in the soybeans. He was grateful for the lightness of the burden when he got back to the woods. He remembered the fence and carefully stepped over it this time.

    Arriving back at the Caddy, he propped the rock on the bumper and unlocked the trunk. He was grateful that he’d cleaned out the trunk last week and all of his ashtray stuff was in the back seat. He dropped the rock sample in the back with a grunt, and it filled the entire trunk. Yessir, he thought as he wiped the dirt off his pants, there’s a fortune to be made there.

    He climbed into the driver’s seat and sat there for a second, debating whether to go back for another piece. He could put one in the passenger seat easily enough.

    Carl decided not to push his luck. As loud as that crash had been and as bright as the flash was, it wasn’t going to take long for people to start showing up. Plus, that boy was probably going to be coming back with more people any minute. He had his prize; he should take off with it while he could.

    The engine turned over beautifully, as it always did. About three miles down the road, Carl passed a convoy of military trucks heading the opposite direction.

    Just in time, Carl muttered to himself. He turned the radio back on, listening for any news reports, but he heard nothing but the Bee Gees and Eric Clapton on the radio.

    Sergeant Monty Meyers left the base with the convoy of trucks, but sped ahead right after they left the grounds. He’d managed to convince Commander Clarkson that someone should get to the site ASAP and that he should take one of the bases two motorcycles. Now he was grinning from ear to ear as he zoomed down the road with a camouflaged crotch rocket roaring between his legs.

    At 19:57, radar had spotted a falling object near the base, and they didn’t know what it was. The base had gone onto high alert. Judging by the trajectory it took, they didn’t think it was a plane or an incoming missile, but there was no way to tell for certain until they had visual confirmation. Their telemetry technician had done some quick calculations and told them approximately where the object had landed, based on its speed and angle when it dropped below radar. A quick check of a local map showed an area that was lightly wooded with miles of farmland. Hopefully, with all that empty space it hadn’t flattened a house when it impacted. Meyers definitely hoped that it wasn’t an airplane with people on board.

    Once Sergeant Meyers got to the approximate area, he gritted his teeth and turned off the pavement. It was rough, but the bike was designed to operate just as well off road as on. He dodged several trees and sped through a cornfield, empty except for a few flattened stalks and dropped ears here and there.

    He scanned left and right for any signs of fire or disturbances. He went for several minutes seeing nothing and then spotted a plume of steam or smoke up ahead. The cornfield met a soybean field, full of mature brown and green plants a few feet tall. He tried to follow the rows and do as little damage as he could as he sped through. As he drew closer, he could see there was a crater. He knew that had to be it. He stopped and radioed his exact location to the lead truck driver, directing him to the correct coordinates on the map they shared.

    He rolled his bike a little closer, pushing as he walked beside it. Then he parked it and cautiously approached the hole alone, weaving around large clods of dirt and chunks of rock as he drew closer. He was relieved to see that it clearly wasn’t an aircraft. However, it was so dark that he couldn’t be sure that it wasn’t a badly burned up rocket or a chunk of fallen satellite. The Soviets were getting better technology all the time, and there was no telling what they were up to. It was possible that this had been a failed attack on the base, something they’d intended to fall on them from space.

    Still, McReynolds base was a comparatively small operation, probably not on anyone’s list of first-strike targets. Probably not even in the top twenty. He wondered if the Russkies had even heard of it. He guessed this thing was a meteor or satellite with a decayed orbit. They knew that Skylab was on the way down eventually, but not this year.

    Moments later, the convoy arrived. He winced as they barreled through the field, leaving deep tracks in the soft ground. So much for subtlety, he thought.

    All in all though, he was proud of their response time. They were there at the site less than an hour after the thing had impacted.

    The trucks pulled up and parked nearby. Meyers was

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