All of this happened because she looked at him and he noticed. Normally it was so noisy and busy on the factory floor that he never looked up from his work. But for some reason on this day, at that moment, he happened to look up to catch her looking at him. And it made him stop. 

This beautiful young woman, a brunette whose name he didn’t know, a seemingly random chance encounter at the human clone factory where they were working or maybe he was one of the test subjects… and instead of treating him like just another piece of equipment she took the time to treat him like a human and she looked into his eyes as she walked over and asked him a couple questions. He couldn’t help but feel her compassion and sincerity. He doesn’t remember who instinctively reached out and took the hand of the other, but from that moment he knew that for as long as he was alive he wanted to spend time with her, listening to her voice and looking into her eyes.

So, the human clone factory… there was a mess-up, someone moved a decimal point in the programming of one the calculations and it might have been in the number of clones being made or in their life longevity or their core intelligence, but that one error resulted in a very bad day that caused an economic/social/civilization-level disaster that would take the world over a century or maybe two to settle down from. 

Of the millions of clones accidentally made that day, one of them snuck out of the factory and hid somewhere trying to quietly figure out what to do with his accidental life. He instinctively knew he had to leave the region and made it over to a place that was not technologically-dependent and learned the language and customs of those people. He loved their ways and honest interdependence with each other. And even though he could survive well-enough without any of them, he valued the connections he made with them and respected the connections they made with one another. And as far as anyone else was concerned, he disappeared into the community. 

After a decade or so with these people he moved on to another also not technologically-dependent area and mastered their language and customs. He tried to blend in, even though he clearly was not one of them, and after it was clear he wasn’t a threat either physically or culturally, they accepted him and he learned their ways. He did this over and over again, through dozens of communities for maybe over a hundred years, because he was apparently one of the clones with extended, maybe endless life longevity. 

He saw the common things that these humans intrinsically yet unknowingly shared in their beliefs about their communities and ways of life, and the differences that they equally believed were important and essential for their survival. And he learned that there was no point in trying to convince them that the differences in customs and culture were more cosmetic and a mechanism of group-identification than anything truly essential for survival. Okay, essential for “group survival” as a specific identifiable group but not really for the survival of their communities. But most of them had never traveled beyond the walls of their region or had any interest on what was “over there,” so most of them would never know what they shared or how they differed from their neighbors. 

Eventually he returned to the region where the factory error/world-changing event had happened. Most of the clones had not survived the decades, especially the ones who tried to leverage their intelligence to take over the region and subjugate their creators. That didn’t go well. They were smart and there were a lot of them, but they didn’t learn to work together or to trust each other. So the more aggressive ones either picked-off each other, seeing the other clones as competition, or were betrayed by the humans because there just were too many humans who were really good at hiding their true intentions. There was even one clone who tried to run for political office. That worked for a nano-second but he was betrayed and blamed for the original factory error and sent to prison where he died under suspicious circumstances. All of this took a very, very long time and all the region’s energies and expertise was being spent trying to fix the clone disaster which caused the advance of other technologies or cultural intelligence to stagnate and in some cases go backwards, such that technology became a lost art or magic. 

While all of this was happening there were some clones, who were like our traveling friend, who quietly snuck away and hid during the beginning of the chaos. Some of them actually banded together and left the region as a group to places completely uninhabited by other humans or clones. A few of those groups didn’t survive because they didn’t learn how to adapt to the regions they’d moved to, and still being biological, they failed to learn the lesson as to why no humans live where they were trying to live. There were even rumors that one group of clones figured out a way to leave the planet and venture out into space. But no one ever heard back from that group again, so it was assumed they didn’t survive their adventure. 

Our clone, made his way back, found work in a menial service industry job, serving coffee or maybe he worked as a bartender in a small pub. Enough time had passed that no one cared that he looked an awful lot like them clones that used be all around. He was courteous and quick with a drink and an ear and he made people feel important and all. When he wasn’t working, he started crafting art pieces based on the arts that he’d experienced and learned from his many travels and the thousands of hands, human hands, who had kindly guided him in their ways and expressions of their cultures. He didn’t know if he was any good at whatever medium he was experimenting with, but the art pieces were interesting enough and evoke enough of the world they came from that a few local gallery owners expressed interest in displaying and buying his work. And over time he amassed enough wealth to buy the bar where he continued to serve customers, listen to their tales and frustrations and see him through the rest of his very long accidental life. 

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Tags: accidental life, sci fi, short story, survival story, writing project

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