‘Supress your nature all you want, you sick bastard. It’s still in there, waiting to come out. Not fighting, no, just waiting. Because it knows that if it just keeps hanging around in there, eventually you’ll have to let it out or go crazy. In the end they both come to the same thing, anyway.’

In truth, the man staring back at Anton Kave through the mirror and saying these words with him looked pretty damned crazy. His hair was messy, his eyes were so black around the sockets he looked like he was wearing two layers of eyeliner, and he hadn’t shaved or eaten in days. Not a good look, but then it was exactly fitting, considering the kind of things that were going through his head.

He looked down at the basin and saw a few drops of sweat fall onto the porcelain. When he looked up again, he thought he looked a bit more composed. Someone it was conceivable to do business with, maybe. He hoped so, but he was mainly relying on the fact that someone seedy enough to sell him a Cloner wasn’t used to dealing with trustworthy types, anyhow.

He cleared his throat.

‘At any rate,’ he went on, watching his reflection to make sure he maintained an air of respectability, ‘it’s none of your business what I want it for. You’re a seller, and I’m a buyer, and that’s all there is to it.’

He slammed his hands on the sides of the basin, stood up, and nodded at himself.

‘Now let’s do business.’

The central New York City business district was simply named B1. In a world where there were simply too many districts, streets and cities to name, everything was reduced to letters and numbers. There was still slang, though, and so B1 was also known as ‘Shark City’. That was the place where the high rollers and the big dealers and the real business tycoons went to build their empires, where the streets were squeaky clean and not a single begging hand could be seen extended from a dingy alley. That was not where Anton went this day.

Anton went to B9, ‘Dark Towers’. It was the kind of place you’d get if you condensed the whole of 21^st century India into one city and then propelled it two hundred years into the future: better technology, same problems.

As he shuffled down B9-19^th street, he found he was glad for his dishevelled appearance, because he fit right in with everyone else. Hell if anything, he was overdressed. People saw him, but a rough snarl and a wild look deterred anyone who gave him a second look. He was just another broke nutcase in the city to them, and that was good, because if anyone had so much as guessed that he had over sixteen million dollars under his tattered overcoat they’d have fallen on him like starved wolves.

He made it to the Ragman without any holdups, but he had an idea the journey back was going to be harder. He wished he’d thought of buying some piece of trash bike to ride in, so no one would bother stealing it. Then again, it would have made the whole crazy hobo act a little harder.

‘No shit. You got the money, huh?’ These were the Ragman’s first words as he brushed past the dirty curtain in the shop front.

‘That’s right, I got it.’

The room was small and cramped, but it was just a front, like the dirty curtain. To a casual eye the Ragman was just that, a poor bastard trying to make his way with a cramped little shop. Truth was, he owned most of the building this little room was in, and most of that was storage space.

‘Sure I got it,’ Anton said, pulling out the wad of cash from his inside pocket. He sat down in a splintery chair and laid it out on the table in front of him. It was all in ten thousand dollar bills, and as a result didn’t look like much. The Ragman raised a grey eyebrow at it and rolled his fat body forward in his wheelchair. He leaned right over the wad and brought his head in close, analysing it. After a few moments, he nodded, grinning.

‘That’s the real deal, alright,’ he said.

‘Okay, so where’s my Cloner?’ Anton said, leaning over his cash protectively, for all the good it would do.

The Ragman chuckled and winked, pushing away from the table and swivelling around to the door in the back. ‘Just gimme a second. No need to be on guard so much, buddy. I gotta do business, ya know. I’ll rip you off, but I won’t steal. I’m an honourable man.’ This last was called back to him from the next room, which Anton already knew was a place the size of a cathedral.

When he came back, he was holding a bundle of electronic parts and wires. He rolled over and dumped it on the table in a grey mess, which he began to separate into its various elements.

‘That’s it?’ Anton said, frowning.

‘That’s it? You a dumbass? You come askin for a Cloner, I give you a Cloner. You think this isn’t a Cloner?’

‘No, I’m sure that’s it. I mean… But how’s it work?’

The Ragman rolled his eyes. ‘Give me a minute, will you?’

Anton gave him a minute, though he wanted to get the hell out of this dingy, oily den as fast as he could. It smelled so strongly of petrol he swore he was getting high on the fumes.

Finally it was all separated into different components across the table. Anton noticed, to some dismay, that his money had vanished.

‘Okay. So you got the processor here,’ the Ragman said, pointing to a long rectangular compartment. He slid open the top and showed that the insides were clean and empty. ‘You stick a bit of yourself in this part,’ he said gleefully. ‘Could be anything, but the more matter it’s got, the quicker the clone. So, you stick in your baby toe, it’ll be a few months before you got a full clone. Put in your leg and you got one in a week. My advice, kill the first clone and freeze him so you got body parts for the next ones.’ He chuckled, ‘and they wonder why this shit was outlawed.’

He slid across the desk and pointed at a pile of four metallic cones.  They were dark silver, and not connected to any of the other pieces. ‘These are the makers. You stick em up around a room, any room. The one that has TOP engraved on it, goes highest up, and you gotta have the pointy part aiming at the middle of the room, where the compartment is. Next one says TOP MIDDLE, then BOTTOM MIDDLE, then BOTTOM. You get it?’

‘Yeah.’

He nodded and pointed at the final piece. It looked pretty unimpressive in Anton’s opinion: just a metal box with a few knobs and dials on it.

‘That’s the operator. See all those different knobs and dials and shit?’

‘Yes,’ Anton said, anticipating a headache.

‘Ignore that shit. I already set it up for you. Don’t touch it or your clones are gonna come out like fucking mutants. Same thing if you pass through the room where the cones are while it’s going on. See the green button on the side? That’s all you gotta press. It’s that simple, man. You set up the cones right, you dump the body part – the fresher the better – in the compartment and close the door, and you press the green button. The clone will come up in whatever room you set the cones up in. Leave the machine running until your clone moves away from the original spot, and I dunno, says something or gives you the finger or whatever. Then you press the green button again and it shuts off, and you got yourself a clone.’

‘Okay. That easy?’

The Ragman chuckled again. ‘Sure. He gives me sixteen million and then asks if it’s that easy. Yeah, sure. Listen, I’ll give you some advice because I feel sorry for you. Put the cones in a secure place. Don’t let your clone out for a while.’

This time it was Anton’s turn to chuckle. ‘Don’t worry, that won’t be a problem.’

‘Oh yeah? So what, you gonna talk to him for a bit? Explain to him why you so desperately need a clone army to take over the world?’ He gave that dry chuckle again. ‘I mean, shit, you wouldn’t believe the reasons I’ve heard. I had this one chick come in to buy a Cloner one time, no joke man, she was planning to put herself out on the streets as a whore. Use herself to make money. Oh, and she told me she was gonna make six. Six! You believe that shit?’

Anton smiled blandly. ‘Sure.’

‘Anyway. Nine times out of ten, dudes that clone more than once get arrested in about a month, so good luck. And don’t come crying to me, either, this baby is untraceable. Oh yeah, one final thing.’ The Ragman leaned forward so far across the desk that he would have touched noses with Anton if he hadn’t reeled back at the last moment, surprised. ‘You point so much as a finger at me if the law comes… I’ll kill you.’

He didn’t need to say more than that – didn’t need more detail. It was all there in his eyes. Anton nodded. He stood up and packed the three parts of the Cloner into a compact bag he’d brought with him, realizing for the first time that it was going to be much harder getting out of B9 than it was getting in.

‘Hey, by the way. What the hell do you want this for, anyway?’ Anton looked at him sharply, all his prepared answers and suave retorts disappearing in a moment. He was in a hole within a hole within a hole: It didn’t matter.

‘I’m going to satisfy the lifelong homicidal urges I’ve had by murdering my clones,’ he said. And then, because his mouth had already started running, he added: ‘I’ll probably torture them, too.’

Ragman stared at him with a look that was shocked but not totally surprised, and as always, there was a hint of s mile there. ‘Shit,’ he said after a moment’s silence. ‘You think you heard it all.’

Before he finished the last word Anton shoved aside the curtain and stepped back onto the street.

How he made it out of there alive he wasn’t sure, but he again he attributed his luck to his acting and attire. Whatever, it didn’t matter. He was home, and the Cloner was set up. The past eight years of fantasy had suddenly become reality, and now he didn’t think he could deal with it.

‘You sick bastard,’ he told the mirror. ‘Don’t even do it. Go back to the Ragman and get a refund, and if he won’t take it back then chuck it in the street.’ He said this with conviction and determination, but he didn’t believe his words. He didn’t believe that he was a sick bastard – in fact he knew he wasn’t. A sick bastard would have started killing as soon as he got those strange, compelling urges. But he hadn’t, he’d held out, fought them for eight years. He’d never so much as harmed a hair on the head of an innocent, and he wouldn’t for the rest of his life, either. It wouldn’t even be murder, what he was doing – just suicide. Perpetual suicide. He chuckled, didn’t like the look of the grin in the mirror and turned away.

The Cloner was exactly as easy as the Ragman had told him it would be, except for one part. The salesman had so nonchalantly mentioned putting a finger or a leg into the compartment, but he’d neglected to go into detail about the removal process. Anton spent about half an hour with a butcher’s blade poised a foot above his left hand and his teeth gritted. Try as he might he couldn’t bring himself to chop.

Eventually, he decided it would be enough to cut all his hair off and drop that, along with weekly nail clippings and daily drops of blood into the compartment. After a month he thought he had enough. The compartment was packed with these scraps of him, and as he looked down at them he couldn’t help but wonder if it hadn’t been a swindle after all.

But there was no going back, now. He’d spent too long on this project to stop – his whole life, it seemed. The clone room alone had taken an eternity, and not least of that was getting hold of the Halothane gas that waited to be pumped into the room from a large black container fitted into the wall like a perverted air conditioner.

He went into the darkened room, and put the compartment in the middle, laying it down as though it were made of glass. He couldn’t help but feel the prickle of the ‘makers’ as though they were loaded guns pointing at him from the corners of the room, and as soon as it was down he backed out of the room fast and shut the door.

He’d installed a thick window into the room (one way tinted – Halothane gas was sensitive to light and he couldn’t risk his clone waking up early) and he looked through it now. He could practically feel the potential for life radiating from the metal box, as though another version of himself could explode from it at any moment. He bent down and picked up the operator, and the sense of potential grew.

He moved his finger to the green button and let it hover there for a moment, running over the process in his mind. The clone would appear in the next room, which was locked from the outside. It was airtight, and there was no escape, and if he knew that then so would his clone. He’d flip the switch and the gas would pump into the room, knocking Anton 2.0 out long enough for Anton 1 to enter and set up the kill room. After that…

The thought of things to come turned his stomach to jelly with excitement and goose bumps rose on his forearms.  He closed his eyes and listened to his quick breaths, savouring the moment, the same way a sky diver might savour the moment before jumping off the plane. His eyes still closed, he placed his finger firmly on the button… and pressed.

There was a sensation of being pushed on the back, hard, and he fell forward with both arms out to protect his face. But instead of falling into the adjoining wall, he kept going until his forearms hit the cement floor.

He lay there for a moment, his eyes screwed closed. Something was wrong. The floor in the living room was carpeted. The only room in the house with a cement floor was…

He opened his eyes and saw nothing at all. The room was pitch black, which meant the door was still closed and locked from the outside, just as it was meant to be. He swore and then flinched at the loudness of his voice in the small room. As he struggled to his feet he knocked the compartment and froze. There was something wrong with it.

It took a few minutes of scrabbling on all fours before he realised that the metal box was no longer a box. It had unwrapped, opened up like a Christmas present with all sides flat on the floor. And it was empty. His hands should have touched the crusty mess of hair and nails and blood but they hadn’t.

That was when he heard the hissing of gas entering the room from a small hole in the wall near the tinted window. That was impossible – that had to be manually turned on with a dial that was outside the room and there was no one… He froze.

‘No.’ His instinct told him to back away from the gas, press up against the far wall and hold his breath, but his despair was far stronger, because it was born of everything he knew of himself. And everything he planned. Numb with horror, he could only wait for the gas to take effect and pray that he’d calculated the wrong amount and that he’d never wake up.

He woke, and God help him he woke exactly the way he expected to: tied fast to a steel chair in the middle of the kill room. Next to him was a fold out table decked out with over thirty different tools. The idea, he recalled, was to test out as many different things as possible on the first clone to see which were the most fun. The light was on, and so the next thing he laid eyes on was himself, standing in the open doorway.

Anton Kave was not used to feeling strong emotions of any kind, but he felt something at that moment, and it was pure and unadulterated terror. Terror because no sooner had he seen himself like a reflection come to life, he knew there was no hope. Still, he tried.

‘Stop, please. You don’t understand what’s going on. I am not the clone, you are! This should be the other way around.’

The clone stared at him, eyebrows raised, a mildly curious expression on his face.

‘I know you think you’re real, but just hang on a minute and try to remember the rest of the day. What were you doing this morning? Do you remember the rest of the week – or the rest of your life?’

The clone nodded slowly, fixing Anton with that bloodshot stare he’d seen just that morning in the mirror. ‘Yes, I can. I’m sorry, but I’m the real boy, it’s you who has the fake memories.’

Anton stared at himself, speechless at first. But as the clone chuckled and reached for the shears, a thought occurred to him and a thin, mad smile broke out on his face. Anton 2.0 hesitated. ‘What?’

‘Oh, nothing,’ he said in a shaking voice. ‘I just realised that whatever you do to me, you’re going to get worse yourself. Much worse.’

‘Really?’

‘Damn straight. You know why? Because I’m only the first one, remember? After me, you’re going to want to make another one, and when you use the machine, you’ll see exactly what I mean. You’ll be sitting in this chair yourself in a month or so, looking at Anton 3.0, and he won’t believe you either because he’ll have all your memories. And I’ll be laughing, alright – dead or not I’ll be laughing. Unless you stop this now. Let me go, who knows what we can achieve with two of us? We’re too smart to get caught out.’

The clone stared at him for a moment, his brow furrowed. He shook his head, slowly. Anton managed to hold his gaze, but he had an idea the other saw only the sick fear of death in his eyes.

‘You really believe you’re me, don’t you?’ the clone said. He put down the shears and reached for the pliers instead. Anton struggled, but his heart wasn’t in it even then, because he knew exactly how he’d planned to restrain himself and there was really no hope of escape. And now the clone had his index finger between the two blunt edges of the pliers, right at the second knuckle.

‘I’m kind of disappointed in myself, you know?’ he said. ‘I mean, of all people who should have known me better than to make stupid arguments, it would be you, right?’

Anton gave up and just sat, blinking cold sweat from his eyes.

‘I mean, what were you expecting? Hey, you’re right, you really sound like your memories are the real ones, and I’m the clone instead of you. I guess we should just switch places now, huh? I’ll strap myself into that chair there, and then you can have all the fun.’

He shook his head, chuckling, and Anton closed his eyes as he felt his own hot breath in his face and this time felt not just terror but revulsion. Only now did he realise what a monster he was – in a way worse than a serial killer who’d given in to his urges, because at least that man would have looked after himself.

‘God damn,’ said the clone, grinning as though he’d heard the best joke of his life. ‘I can be so dumb sometimes, huh?’

And then he gripped the pliers with both hands and began to squeeze.