12. PLANS FOR IMMORTALITY

The Professor explains...

The scene in the mansion was one of near-confusion.

Two police officers and Dolly Styx were seated on barely comfortable chairs whilst the Professor was standing there, pistol in hand, and glowering. His apparent personality had undergone a metamorphosis at the utterance of one word.

“You shouldn’t have said that, Dolly,” he grated, “you should have kept that stupid mouth of yours fast shut and got on with your chores! Now if I let these two go the whole world will be told of our relationship, and that must never be!”

“You mean, that whole world wouldn’t find out anyway?” There was a harsh note in Dolly’s voice, and she stood up to face her brother. “And I’m not really your sister, am I? And you’re not really my brother, are you? Our shadows might have been closely related to each other in that way, actually were brother and sister, but that doesn’t mean we are, you fool! It doesn’t matter how long you think you are identical to the old man with a brain big enough to devise this whole thing, you are not him.”

“Don’t you dared speak like that!” The professor was on the edge of pulling the trigger of the gun he was holding. “You know we are identical in every respect to our shadows,” he added as if to trying to clear the air of any doubt. “It was planned that way in the beginning. We must be identical. There must be no deviation from the original plan. We must be the one person for me and one person for you walking down the long years that lie ahead for an unseeable distance. Just the one, continuing in every singular respect.”

“Except there has been,” she whispered, “except one big change you made.”

“It had to be.” His tone was adamant, but neither policeman had any idea what the two confessed clones were referring to.

“And that one thing makes us as different to the two old folk who wandered mindlessly off as chalk is to cheese,” whispered Dolly. “You see, they had something to live for, but we don’t.”

“That’s nonsense!” The gun wavered uncertainly in the direction of his alleged sister.

“And that’s probably the only answer I’d expect from a man! Oh, you can reckon to rule your world. You can have a long future planned out in which you are some sort of all-powerful deity, striding the generations, forever young, forever in charge… You can own everything, have eyes everywhere, dominate everyone, but you can only do that in your mind.”

“Stop it, Dolly!”

“You can reckon to be still walking over everyone in a thousand years, in ten thousand, and that’s possible if every clone that comes after us is as identical to the original as you are to your shadow. We can have cosy rooms for those shadows living their short lives until age or dementia or both claim them and nobody would be the wiser. A whole cemetery full of them, rotting in the ground, our unwanted flesh once its time is over. Years, the generations of humanity, would pass by while we lived in this Heaven apparently unchanged and gaining in power and strength, rulers of all we survey and if nobody saw the truth and turned your gun on you, you would have ultimate power. And that power would be the prize gleaned from knowledge and immortality.”

“We can and will have that power,” grated Professor Styx. “We’ve discussed it, you and I. We see that future, that shining future with me as the architect of a new religion based on actual reality rather than some hocus pocus involving invisible men in the sky! For I would live, not among but beside, my people, an immortal, plain as the eyes on your face, in a world of mortality. I would be … worshipped for it.”

“That’s all gobbledegook of course,” put in Sergeant Stone, aware that his contradiction might prove to be the last thing he did but having to say it anyway.

“And so it is,” agreed Dolly Styx.

The professor was becoming increasingly edgy as if he was scared he might have forgotten some vital ingredient in his recipe for a future he dreamed of. Or maybe he did know but had chosen to overlook it.

“What do you mean, PC Plod?” he asked, and in a way he was sneering, but Stone wondered if that sneer was for himself rather than his audience.

“Well, you reckon you might be around for thousands of years?” asked the sergeant.

“You can see how well our cloning works,” replied the Professor, proudly, indicating his own person with a wave of one hand, “you can see how I have the attributes of youth and the mind and personality of decades of experience? I can remember things that my flesh as you see it couldn’t possibly recall. I can remember, as though it were yesterday, my first day at school, how my mother fought to hold back tears and how I ran off to join other tiny children in play and hope. It happened to other flesh, but I am that other flesh because I have its memories. And that, chum, was well above half a century ago! And it will always be like that When the years have worked their magic and I’ve been around for a thousand of them I will still have that beautiful memory, and others, thousands of them, grist to the mill you might say, food for a vast superiority over other mortal men.”

“And then?” asked the Sergeant.

“And then I will be as a god! Men and women will look upon me in the certain knowledge that no matter how many generations of other men have passed by, I, and my Dolly will always be the same. Constant, the one stable thing in a slowly changing world. The river that runs through time…!”

“Through the underworld, you mean,” muttered Wasp.

“That will do! How can a simpleton like you, Inspector, get to understand the glory that is my future! The wealth that will be mine for the taking? The serenity of eternity to live and love through.”

Sergeant Stone stood up and faced the Professor. “And when you have achieved that, and you are the Neanderthal ruling over a world of ethereal beings who have evolved way ahead of you, how long will you survive? A clone from a forgotten old bod from the twentieth century when it’s the thousand and twentieth century? And being immortal, how great will your fall be when it inevitably comes?” asked the sergeant, almost sneering.

“Bridges will be crossed when we come to them,” muttered the Professor.

“And don’t forget you insisted on being sterile,” murmured Dolly, almost mischievously.

There was an uncomfortable pause as he seemed to be mulling over what Sergeant Stone had said, a silence that was suddenly broken by a chilling voice from the open doorway.

“Goo goo,” it said, “goo-goo-goo, dadda.”

© Peter Rogerson 22.09.19