Irreconcilable Differences

I’m supposed to go straight from my cell to the return room, but I grit my teeth and etch my poem into the concrete walls of the clone factory. Someone, at some time, will read these poems and know that I too questioned my role. My latest one reads:

Would we all just be machines

if we couldn’t do bad things

on purpose.

I wipe my hands on my starched surgical gown and jog through the soup wing of the factory. At the return room, I open the doors a little and peer in at Jeff. Most clones are returned because of a glaring genetic fuck up by the cloneists—a six fingered hand or a moustache gone wrong. But some returned clones have no perceivable flaw. Like, for example, Jeff.

Jeff is tall, well-built, handsome, and there is gentleness in his face. He would’ve been expensive. He believes he is here to get his hearing checked or some bullshit, but on the clone return form under ‘Owner’s Reason For Return’ it says Irreconcilable Differences, which aside from Malfunction is the leading cause of death among clones.

I enter the return room, smiling welcomingly, because I am under strict orders to do so, and I escort Jeff into the soup factory. I walk mechanically, but it should be okay. It should be fine. I’ll wrestle him into the shredder. And he’ll get sluiced back into the DNA soup and his Original will get his money back, that’s how the 90-day money back guarantee works. But Jeff tugs at my sleeve, he looks concerned. Maybe it’s the slaughterhouse smell. “My hearing is fine,” he says quietly.

Jeff was made too gentle, maybe. I hope it is so, and I hate that I hope for that.

“I’m the real Jeff,” says Jeff, taking a step back. “The other Jeff is the clone.”

Jeff’s Original is 5’8” whereas Jeff is 6’5”.

I feel sorry for him—I won’t pretend this is virtuous, my feeling isn’t based on any rational logic, this guy could be a serial killer for all I know, my feelings are irrelevant, but I can’t help but sympathise—and it weakens me, it tests my resolve. But, anyway, I get Jeff in a headlock.

Jeff is strong. His grappling strength is enhanced by desperation.

Jeff is inhumanly strong. Why the fuck do people order these huge, muscular clones?

For a moment it seems that Jeff will overpower me and become the new clone wrestler, but I’ve come to know that those among us who are least flawed, like Jeff, those who are the best versions of themselves, are often too kind and gentle to be able to kill with their own hands. I knee Jeff between the legs and it weakens him enough that I’m able to shove him into the shredder’s toothy maw.

The thing is there are people out there, like Jeff’s Original, they buy a clone because they want to see what the best version of themselves is, because they aspire to that. But then, seeing their best self in real life and seeing how far they are from their best—how their undisciplined life has turned them into a fat, low potential—it’s maddening, and so of course they choose to have the better version of themselves, the beautiful them, destroyed.

The shredder revs uncertainly and begins to grind, then an alarm squeals and, as I step back from the machine, it burps Jeff back out only half shredded.

I turn away. But then I force myself to look. Jeff makes no noise, he is beyond noise, because, yeah, Jeff is a mess. I sink to my knees, and gather what’s left of Jeff in my arms. His heart is on the floor, still pulsing.

The shredder shuts off and the factory falls silent apart from Jeff’s ragged breath. Can art process this? Could a poem transmute this horrendousness into forgiveness? I don’t think so. I am sorry, Jeff. Having seen so much death I should be a font of wisdom for the dying, but no. What can I tell him other than we are all destined to end up here, in itty bits, those among us most beautiful and those most flawed, our fate is twinned, and yet right now, right here and now in this moment, we’re still living, and we can love and we can offer comfort to another while the machines wait.