Me Two Gets Her Way

My clone and I were driving the kids over to Gitmo North for sensitivity training when the rogue Toyota toaster oven lurched into the skyway.

My clone, Me Two, blamed me. I was using robo-steer, of course - I'm not a total idiot - and it's not as if I had asked the toaster oven to re-vector. But the kids were still late and Me Two still blamed me.

Sometimes, I hate this clone. I'd replace her, but...well...she's me, isn't she? Besides, there's an insane amount of paperwork involved to annul a conjugal cloning, not to mention the negative tax consequences, Me Two having to return all those nice gifts from the cohabitation ceremony, and on and on.

So there it is. Me Two is stuck with me, and me with Me Two, too.

Now, I'm probably just like you. I didn't exactly rush out to get cloned. Like millions of others, I simply reacted to the flood of glitches that kept turning up in the galaxy-sized Health Care Bill that somehow got signed in the early 21st century; specifically, that now-famous, tricky little bit of non-read regulation; that stem-cell / interstate-commerce loophole; the lame, late-night legalese that, technically, allowed for the possibility of identical citizens who simultaneously exist across state lines.

Hey, they made the rules. It's not our fault they didn't bother to READ the rules.

Okay, okay. I should slow this story down a bit. On that point, Me Two's right. Since science finally worked out those last few Time Travel hiccups, I realize that some of you readers may have popped in from who knows when, and you might not be able to follow all of this. You might need a bit of background. Fair enough. I'll keep it brief.

Around the year 2010, I think it was, political discussions about health care (among other things) got so bitter that some American citizens took to the streets, attempting to affect public policy by parading around, holding up horridly misspelled slogans. Other, more animated, less inhibited citizens embraced the time-proven diplomatic tactic of attacking people with whom they didn't agree - usually elected leaders and voters from the "opposing party." And then there were some, of course, who didn't have time to discriminate, and simply went violently insane as it suited them, with a liberating randomness rarely exhibited by other Earth mammals with teeth.

That's the way things went, once ACLU attorneys managed to outlaw God.

Remember, in those days, people still voted. This was back in the dark ages, before the Equality Czar got rid of elections. Elections implied winners and losers, and losing is detrimental to one's self-esteem. Losing just isn't fair.

That's the way things went, once Government entitlements managed to outlaw success.

And then, along came You're Not Enough. Originally founded in Chicago as part of an ACORN "get-out-the-vote" initiative, You're Not Enough began as a rapid-fire cloning mill, churning out undocumented voters. Genome re-mapping ensured that the clones would tend to vote for whichever politician had purchased them.

It was simply a matter of time before You're Not Enough began marketing to the general public, offering to clone anybody, for anybody, for an affordable fee. Finally, we could create ourselves in our own image! (Suddenly facing this unexpected, albeit weird, resurgence of religious freedom, the ACLU were utterly nonplussed.)

Personalized deification, combined with the availability of clones as just one more discounted commodity, inevitably led to "Self-Dating," the ultimate online matchmaking scheme: narcissists could now have a relationship with an exact copy of themselves...but a copy created as one of the other three available genders!

Mirror, Mirror, on the wall: I'm, like, God, and stuff, and all!

Soon, some clever, freelance, underappreciated accountant realized that people, using a Partner Clone, could capitalize on a Homeland Security oversight that would potentially stymie Health Care, the IRS, credit card transactions, shopping malls, even the 4- and 5-D movie theaters. Since a clone was its own entity, it could demand health care; order prescription drugs; be claimed as a deduction or a dependant; charge stuff; buy things; sue people.

But since the clone shared the same fingerprints, retinal scans and DNA as its owner, the billing algorithms used by the IRS computer arrays rejected all generated invoices as an Accounts Receivable mistake, and nobody ever had to actually pay for anything. Sweet!

Of course, unlike bad things, all good things must come to an end. The growing availability of affordable, purchasable humans resulted in massive overcrowding, and a massive strain on the public infrastructure. Pure economics collided with population explosion.

And then, unexpectedly, came the mule of a miracle.

Serendipity. Toyota started making kitchen appliances.

Since the appliances were highly efficient, they soon found themselves with hours and hours of free time on their 'hands.' And since they were highly intelligent, they soon became self-aware. And when they began to look around for evidence of their creator, and realized it was us, they soon became highly neurotic and depressed.

All across America, jaded Toyota kitchen-efficiency entities went nihilistic. Our counter-top time-savers started scribbling bitter, binary suicide notes, and began throwing themselves into oncoming skyway traffic.

Serendipity. The miracle mule. Before you could say 'recall,' the resulting kamikaze carnage from these dejected devices quickly put paid to many of America's population-based problems, Health Care included.

So after the toaster oven accident, I forged the kids a couple of Union cards, dropped them off at the prison with some tofu credits for the vending machine, activated their hypodermal GPS locators, and made a quick call to Eric Holdim at the Holder & Holdim Law Firm, to retain some legal counsel. Just in case. (To grease my way past the front desk, I told the receptionist that I owned minaret-heavy real estate abutting the Euphrates).

Me Two called me an idiot. Said I was simply wasting litigation credits.

I hate it when she does that. And it's not like I have a huge store of debating points. It is furiously frustrating to have to argue with your own clone, which is a relationship problem the R&D Department at You're Not Enough didn't really think through.

But, of course, that's just my two opinions.