Popular Clone (8 page)

“Good man,” Fisher said, patting his clone on the shoulder. “Now get some sleep. You need your rest. The mission begins tomorrow.”

CHAPTER 7

School teaches you many things. For example, it teaches you to really not like school.

—Fisher Bas, Personal Notes

Fisher lay under his covers, tense, with FP curled up next to him. It was Tuesday morning. This was it. Two was dressed for school and on his way downstairs. Fisher counted sixty seconds, then crept after him.

Two's steps were light and purposeful as he descended to the first floor. So far, so good. Fisher heard the distinctive ringing sound of a spoon scraping the sides and bottom of a cereal bowl.

Fisher had carefully typed up an “intelligence document” about the “mission” for Two. Because Two had destroyed the info-upload machine, he'd been forced to turn to the Internet. He'd directed Two to Wikipedia, and Two had stayed up reading all night.

Additionally, Fisher had typed up a simple overview of all the information Two would have to know in order to imitate the original Fisher. Two had so far shown himself a remarkably quick learner, and his mind was nearly as sharp as the original's. The document read like this:

YOUR COVER NAME: FISHER BAS
.

YOUR ASSIGNMENT: INFILTRATE WOMPALOG MIDDLE SCHOOL. GATHER INFORMATION AS IT BECOMES KNOWN TO YOU. (PLEASE TAKE NOTES NEATLY ON COLLEGE-RULED LOOSE-LEAF PAPER, WITH BLACK OR BLUE PEN.
)

—
YOU WILL NOTE THAT MANY OF THE TEACHERS AT WOMPALOG ARE CAPABLE OF HYPNOTIC POWERS OF SLEEP-INDUCING SPEECH. TRY TO REMAIN ALERT THROUGHOUT CLASSES TO AVOID ATTRACTING TOO MUCH ATTENTION
.

—
ALSO, TO AVOID ATTRACTING TOO MUCH ATTENTION:
DO
N'
T TALK TOO MUCH IN CLASS, NEVER WEAR BRIGHT COLORS, AND AVOID EYE CONTACT WITH FELLOW STUDENTS IN THE HALL
.

—
THERE IS A SQUAD OF THUGS THE ENEMY MAINTAINS AMONG THE SCHOOL POPULATION. THEY ARE CALLED THE VIKINGS. THEY ARE TRAINED IN CLOSE COMBAT, SPYING, AND ADVANCED RESTROOM-BASED INTERROGATION TECHNIQUES. AVOID AT ALL COSTS
.

Fisher had also listed his classes, teachers, and class-room numbers, and advice on which food in the cafeteria was edible, since most of it was not.

“Good morning … Mom and Dad,” Two said. Fisher, listening on the landing upstairs, flinched a little at the slight pause. But if his parents noticed it, they didn't say anything.

“Morning, Fisher!” came his dad's voice. “Sleep well?”

“Indeed,” Two said cheerfully.

Fisher's stomach flipped.
Indeed?
But again, his parents said nothing, and there were more cereal bowl clinks.

“Ready for a new week?” said his mom.

“Yes,” Two replied in the same flat voice. “Could I have some grapes to take to school?”

Fisher stifled a gasp and clenched his fists.

“Grapes?” said his dad. “Don't you hate grapes? You always say it feels like you're eating human eyes.”

Please think fast, please think fast,
Fisher pleaded silently.

“I, ah … yes, exactly,” said Two. “They're not to eat. I'm doing a physics experiment to test the effects of impact stress on the human eyeball.”

“Oh, how lovely!” said his mother. “Let me get you some. Would you prefer green or red eyeballs?”

As Fisher heard his father get up from the table, he quickly retreated to his room. He hopped back into bed and rolled himself up in his sheet to wait. After a few more minutes, he heard the front door open and close. That must be Two headed for the bus. Another few minutes, and he heard his father leave for work and, finally, his mother.

With his parents safely out of the house, Fisher swept the covers off, leapt from his bed, and threw a fist in the air in triumph. In the process he wrapped his sheet entirely around his left ankle and came crashing to the floor in a heap, but he was too happy to care. The first part of his plan was a complete success. If he could keep everything running smoothly, he might
never have to set foot in middle school again.

“Waaahhooooooo!!!!!!” Fisher screamed, throwing his head back as he did. FP oinked and bounced around him.

Fisher had the whole day ahead to himself, and it was the best feeling in the world. No classes, no obnoxious kids, no toxic-sludge lunch, and, most important of all, no Vikings. He'd have to spend the day in his room; if he ventured into the rest of the house, some of the intelligent appliances might tattle on him. Being the kid of two genius inventors had its perks, but also its drawbacks: it's tough to keep your presence at home a secret when the toaster can mention to your mother how interesting it was that you came into the kitchen for a snack at 11:13
A.M.

But Fisher had already stocked up on necessary supplies and had plenty of food to get him through the day.

Fisher pulled his leg out of the sheet and leaned against his bed. FP trotted toward him, and Fisher reached down and lightly stroked one wing-flap. “I think I've done it, boy. I'll be around a lot more from now on.”

At 10:00
A.M.
, third period, he'd ordinarily be sprinting full tilt down the hall, trying to stay far away from any object of head-stuffing-in size. Today he was sitting at his lab table, petting FP, and testing out a new growth-accelerating formula. He usually spent fifth period listening to a teacher whose voice made a foghorn sound chipper and excited. Today he was playing video games, saving a tiny peasant village from the wrath of elder snake gods. Lunch period on a normal day would involve feeding crumbs of unrecognizable “food” to ants to see if it killed them. Today he was on his bed, popping Cheetos into his mouth and reading the latest issue of Vic Daring, Space Scoundrel— flipping pages with the non-cheesy hand, of course.

The rest of the school year—which Fisher usually imagined as an endless prison hallway, each day a separate cell—now stretched before him like an endless sunny day. As he hummed happily around his room, checking on various experiments and munching on his favorite post-meal dessert of M&M-coated Starbursts (one of Fisher's favorite inventions), he could barely stop himself from bursting into song. Even FP seemed happier than usual—happier than he
ever
did, except when he was eating.

There was no doubt about it. The lying, the stealing— even the singe marks on his ceiling from one of the more fiery, failed cloning experiences—had all been worth it. In this case, the ends really did justify the means.

In the afternoon, Fisher put the finishing touches on a little chamber that he'd been building. Underneath an older lab table near the back of his personal lab space, he had placed a small mattress, a lamp, water, and food. This was to be Two's hidden living area. Fisher's room was so big and cluttered, that the little nest would go completely unnoticed.

But as the end of the school day approached, a faint twinge of guilt started to build in Fisher's stomach. Two might be Fisher's creation, but he was still a living, breathing, thinking being. And Fisher had just thrown him into a pit of lions. Who knows what could have happened to him on his first day at Wompalog? What if he'd wandered into the wrong room and gotten laughed at by a whole class? What if the Vikings had tossed him into the cafeteria Dumpster with his underwear pulled up to his ears?

Fisher was imagining his duplicate stumbling through the door battered, bruised, covered in grass stains or chocolate pudding or sea kelp. Maybe his first day was so bad, he'd refuse to go back. Maybe he'd be transferred to a mental asylum.

All of the terrible possibilities tumbled through Fisher's head as he sat at his worktable, trying for the several hundredth time to re-splice the DNA of his attack mosquitoes. Making a duplicate of himself hadn't involved any genetic rewriting. Strangely, the mosquito work needed a lot more fine-tuning. And it was hard to focus, worrying about all of the terrible things that could have happened to Two.

He heard the front door open and close. He heard Fisher-sized footsteps coming up the stairs, and then a frantic banging at his door. He sprang up from his chair and ran for the door, ready with a medical kit, some antibacterial soap, and a case of anti-radiation medicine (in case he'd eaten the Cobb salad), just in case.

“It's okay, Two. I'm coming. I'm—oh, no.”

There he was. He had some kind of orange sauce dotting the top of his shirt and striping his hair. Little scraps of paper and plastic wrappers clung to his clothes.

But in spite of all of that … he looked perfectly calm and collected. He walked … no, not just walked,
strode
into the room, picked up Fisher's bag of BBQ potato chips, and set himself down in Fisher's reading chair, nodding to Fisher.

“Hey. Get some work done?” he asked, reaching in and pulling out a chip.

“I, uh … yes. Yes, I did. How was school?” Fisher could barely choke out the words past his disbelief.

Two shrugged.

“Fine. I didn't get any leads, but I guess this operation is going to take time. Anything valuable is probably buried pretty deep.”

Fisher's eyes went wide. “Er … what about the, uh …” Fisher gestured at the food and junk on Two's clothes.

“Three guys gave me a hard time,” Two said casually. “Probably the agents your document mentioned. I have to say, I'm not impressed. Their brains process information about as fast as sponge cake, and I told them so. Besides which, they have a totally bad vibe.” He popped another handful of chips into his mouth.

Fisher swallowed. “You
said
that to them?” He could barely choke the words out. “You can't—you're not allowed to—you shouldn't have—”

“Why not?” Two asked, shrugging again. Fisher realized he didn't know how to explain, or where to begin.
That's not how things work
, he wanted to say.
You just don't understand.
But his mind was spinning so fast, no words would come out.

Two threw his feet onto the desk. “I also told them I'd seen better-looking larvae than their little trio. They didn't seem to know what larvae were, but they under-stood when I said ‘worm.'” Two chuckled. “That's when they upended a garbage can over me. But they're gonna need a lot more than a bad-smelling ambush to stop me. Did you know that most aggressive behavior comes from having inherited unevolved ape genes?”

“That's not true,” Fisher said.

“Is so. Read it on Wikipedia,” Two said.

“You shouldn't believe …” Fisher started to say, but Two cut him off by springing out of the chair, chips in hand, and whipping out a small plastic case from his backpack. It was a video game disk case.

“
Super Bayonet Frenzy 6
?” said Fisher, his eyes lighting up. “Where did you get a copy of that?”

“Borrowed it from a friend,” said Two.

Fisher opened his mouth to reply, but no words were in his head, and so a simple
hhhhsssmmpphh
sound escaped him as Two dropped his things on the other side of the room.

A friend? He borrowed it from a
friend?