A warm summer’s day, a harsh winter night; these things, like all other things we can see, touch, make up the world. Along with these things come all things in a larger scale: planets, nebulae, stars, galaxies, universes. All these things make up something bigger.
But what is that something bigger, a few of the good people in the world might be inclined to ask themselves or perhaps someone else. How come, when all else in the world is still, there is always something moving—atoms, electrons, protons, all moving in their own state of flux.
How, those same people could ask, raising their precious voices to the stars and beyond, can the earth be so contradictory to itself, bending in its own little universe as bubble-headed as those people who don’t care how big the universe is—or alternatively, those who don’t care about anything?
How—? Why—? When—?
These questions, I found out, were the questions I had been sent to answer. The ones I had been made to answer.
No, I was not born in a test tube, as you might think from the previous sentence; I’m a clone, the last one, free-roaming—a runaway experiment, fashioned by the Old Master’s eyes and hands, himself.
Nor was I true-born, like most clones. These true-born were made to serve and were then forced into slavery. I had been created by the Old Master to stop this—to stop the fighting, to bring peace.
The Old Master was victim of his own folly, and just like the people who followed him, were considered insane and thrown in confinement, imprisoned forever.
Everyone always forgot the people in confinement and, just like everyone else, so were they—defeated, they had stormed off to congregate in their own little three by three yard cells to talk about the next big war.
But no one had listened because everyone had forgotten. They were made to forget—the ultimate government cover-up; mind control.
It was fairly common these days, I knew. Being the last true free clone in the world—the last free person—she alone was open minded. She alone knew the truth. And now the earth was in the middle of a planet-wide war, or at least that’s what the government said; the war was more like interplanetary, millions—trillions, even—dead. So many deaths, and yet no one had listened.
The Old Master used to hold power over the government back in the day, as sort of a scientific seer. When he foresaw this war, he cloned volunteers as fast as possible, trying to prepare the masses for revolution against the government, against mind control.
But no one had listened.
They had killed all the free clones and imprisoned more; only I escaped. No one bothered to remember the world as it had been a hundred—maybe even two hundred—years before; lush, green forests and grasslands with tropical fish and birds and other animals now extinct like tigers and polar bears. Now, in the present, if you were to say any of those words at random, in public, no one would know what you would be talking about; it would sound like the long extinct Russian language to them. They had never thought to look them up in an old dictionary—why should they? It was old. Old was disgusting to them, even the imprisoned clones who had been surrounded by these thoughts for far too long.
It was like a disease, slowly spreading through all the human civilizations in all the planets that were inhabited. The Old Master called it cockiness, a strange word so out of date I barely even knew what it had meant at the time.
I was his favorite, and it didn’t surprise me why: I had been made in the appearance of the Old Master’s long-lost and long-dead daughter; light brown hair, full lips, golden-bronze skin, and a bit chubby around the cheeks. But of course all the chubby was gone, now that this war had started and I was older, without the comfort of my dad at my side. I remembered those short nights when I had stayed up the whole time with him, just talking. I couldn’t even remember what we had been talking about, but now that he was gone—forgotten forever behind black curtains of the government’s ignorance—the memory was more precious than ever. And I could never forget, because I was a clone and clones never forget anything—or at least that’s what I told myself. Even now, I could feel the fuzziness of those wonderful days that flashed by so quickly deepening as if submerged in one of the polluted oceans of the day.
How could I possibly forget?
Once I peeled away the fuzziness, the memory was clear as the protein shakes that were clearer than water—those that didn’t bend the light so it looked like you were sipping air when you had it in your cup. And, just like the memory, you could feel the drink on your lips as it flowed, almost willingly into your mouth as if it was alive; if you closed your eyes, just for a second, you could just imagine that the shake was a brilliant, bright crimson, just how it tasted….
But then, no one had listened.
That was the thought that kept me going all these years, and that alone. My actions were fueled by anger, as if I had collected all the peoples’—forgotten along with their memories and free thought—and channeled it into one little peephole inside me, so that it came out in a hard stream, intense and shining, yet soothing and screaming at the same time, like a bucket of cold water thrown over your head after a long days’ work in the hot, summer sun.
I had almost laughed at that the first time I thought of it: work! The only work people got these days is pushing buttons on the TV remote.
Every time I almost get rid of all my anger, I remember how everyone forgot—how they all, a collective mind, left me locked in a closet to die with the promise of the Old Master and my game of hide-and-seek coming to an end soon and that he would come any moment and unlock my door, saying “Found you! Come on, supper’s going to be ready soon”.
But he never came, and I had found myself being carried away, not in the Old Master’s arms, but in some strangers’, being mistaken for the Old Master’s real daughter. Strange men in a familiar house. Confusion; it all speaks for itself.
At this point in my life, I have no clue where it’s going. All I know is that somehow I need to avenge the Forgotten and bring them back home whether they’re alive or not.
No one remembered, and the Old Master—along with my true past—was forgotten.
I sighed; but now to sleep.
