My name is Charles Marshall and I was hired to play God. I’m not at liberty to reveal my client’s name but suffice it to say that they were quite wealthy. Wealthy enough to supply a state-of-the-art cloning facility and wealthy enough to more than quadruple my already handsome salary to work on this project. You see, I’m a genome scientist at the top of my field. And I’ve successfully cloned numerous animals for the government who previously employed me. But the Holy Grail of cloning has always eluded me.
There are many debates involving the cloning of humans, moral, ethical, religious, etc. The furthest we have ever gone is to clone stem cells to cure diseases or certain tissues. I have always been of the opinion that to be able to clone an entire human was a miracle and could only bring forth good things. I have never been so wrong in my entire life.
I can’t share many details about how I was contacted or when I quit my job and began working for my client. Suffice it to say that it took months to convince me that this wasn’t some elaborate prank and months more to get all the contracts in order. Only once I had signed multiple non-disclosure agreements was I filled in on the gritty details.
You must be wondering about the non-disclosure agreement and how I am breaking it by telling my story. Well, I can tell you that the agreement is now null and void due my client’s untimely demise and I find myself morally obligated to shed light on what happened. Those who are ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it, and all that jazz, right?
I must again stress that I will not be revealing who my client was, though I suppose the details might be unique enough that you may be able to guess. Unfortunately it is necessary that I give some background.
My client was orphaned at a young age in the jungles of the Congo. They witnessed rebel soldiers kill their father, mother, and older brother in cold blood while they hid under the floorboards of their hut. It was something they had never forgotten. Eventually, and I will keep this vague intentionally, they escaped Africa and made their way to America. Destitute and starving, all they kept from their family home were some clothes and hairbrushes. They became wealthy through various smart investments but they were never happy. No matter how much money they received, they could not get over the fact that their family was no longer with them. They became interested in genomics and cloning and in their research they came across my name. And as they say, the rest is history.
At first I was dubious that cloning a human would work, not to mention cloning three. But my client was insistent that I at least try and with what they were paying me, I was a fool not to. They supplied me with the hairbrushes they had brought to America with them and though the odds were almost astronomical due to time and degradation, I was able to extract three complete separate DNA profiles. I also ran the profile of my client, to ensure that the three I had were the three people who had been killed. Once that was confirmed, I began my work to try and clone three complete humans.
It was a difficult and slow process. The DNA I was working with was old and fragile and with each failure my frustration grew and grew. My client was calmer. With each report of a failure, they only shook their head and told me to try harder.
And I did.
The first human that I successfully closed was the client’s older brother. When we took the baby out of the artificial womb where it had developed for 9 months, the thing did not cry. That should have been the first clue that something was terribly wrong. My client was instantly smitten. He gave the child his brother’s name. For privacy purposes, we will call the child One.
One was only a few months old when Two and Three were born (the father and mother). That is where I thought my involvement with my client would end. Due to the non-disclosure agreement, no soul would ever hear of my accomplishment as the first to create human life, but I did not care. I knew and that was enough for me. But my client did not want to let me go just yet.
“What if something goes wrong?” They asked. I didn’t have an answer. No one had ever gotten this far before with cloning. My client offered even more money to stay on for a few more years. I agreed. I’ll not lie here, I was excited to watch my creations grow. I felt powerful. I had created life. I had brought back people who had long been dead. It was a great feeling.
As the children grew, I began to notice how strange they were. Though they attended school, they had no friends. They did no extracurricular activities. They did not play outside. They did not play at all! It was as though they had no interests in anything but each other. They mostly spoke amongst themselves and in a language my client and I could not understand. But the oddest thing about them was their faces. They looked like normal humans, but if you looked closer you could see it. I don’t know how to describe it, but beneath their faces was a flatness. Almost like they had no substance. Like something was missing. I thought at the time that it was my mind playing tricks on me, but I know better now. I know what we forgot.
One was the ringleader of the group. My client often remarked how odd it was that his brother bossed around his mother and father, but I reminded him that they were not his brother, mother, and father. Still, the oddness persisted.
It was around the time they turned ten that I started noticing some of the signs of what was to come. I should have known then, but I didn’t. There was no way to know what was going to happen.
It began at school. Kids began complaining to the teachers that One was hurting them, that Two was touching them, that Three was scaring them. My client ignored the complaints and just kept switching the children to different schools, but the trouble kept following. I stayed on the payroll though, thinking there was some way to turn this around and make the children behave. The final straw was when I began finding dead creatures in the children’s rooms. Birds, cats, dogs, squirrels, all mutilated almost beyond recognition.
I pleaded with my client to put the children in therapy. I showed them the studies that had been done on psychopathy, but they refused to listen. They dismissed me from the payroll and I was loose for the first time in over a decade. But no matter. I had learned a lot from those years and wanted to offer my knowledge to the rest of the world.
I brushed up my resume and began searching for a new job. It wasn’t long before I found one in another private laboratory, doing much more mundane work. Occasionally I would reach out to my old client to see how the children were faring, but I never received a response. From time to time I would wonder what happened to them, but life went on, as it does, and eventually I stopped thinking of them.
Until the news story broke tonight. “Serial Killer Siblings” was the headline that flashed across the bottom of the television as a picture of One, Two, and Three was projected on the screen. They were older now and looked even flatter than I remembered. Their eyes were dead. As the news anchor spoke, the horror I had inflicted upon the world became known to me.
The triplets had begun with their “parent”, my old client. Apparently when police finally accessed the house, they found their body in a makeshift dog crate in the basement. There was evidence that they had been there for years and the signs of repeated trauma were evident to the eye, according to the news caster. Apparently the client had died of starvation and there was evidence of them trying to gnaw off their fingers. It was quite impossible to do as the children had broken and extracted all their teeth. This news made me sick to my stomach and I almost turned the television off. But the newscaster began speaking of their other victims.
The triplets had been killing people for a long time and they each had a different MO, which is why the police had a hard time tracking them down.
Three liked to gouge out eyes while the person was still alive. Once the person was sightless, she liked to stick long needles into the back of the eye socket to see how long it took the person to pass out. When they woke up, she would shove the needles into the socket forcefully until they reached the person’s brain and they eventually died.
Two was a rapist and a necrophiliac. It didn’t seem to matter to him what happened, if the person was living or dead when he stuck it in them. He would choke them to death while engaging in the act and keep going until he was finished. Sometimes it was a long time before he was done with them.
One was by far the worst. He killed people slowly and would make them beg for death before he gave it to them. He liked to beat his victims into submission, then torture them in different ways. One victim had every joint in his body dislocated before he died. Every joint. Fingers, toes, hips, jaw, everything. Another had every bone bent and shattered in a vice-like contraption. One liked to start with toes. One victim was whipped to death. One was hung from his testicles until they ripped off his body and he bled to death. One was slowly impaled on a post that One had sharpened.
I was physically ill by the time the newscaster finished, heaving my dinner into the sink in the kitchen as I couldn’t make it to the bathroom. I re-entered the living room just as the report was finishing up.
“The triplets are now on the run from authorities. If you see them, you are advised not to approach them, as they are considered armed and very dangerous. They were last seen in the vicinity of Akron, Ohio.”
It was then that I knew who the triplets were coming for next, for I live in Akron. Their creator was a loose thread that they needed to cut. My end was nigh.
And with a start I realized what I had always forgotten. I realized why the children had always seemed so flat. Why they always seemed to lack something. I had been so blindsided with wondering if I could clone a human rather than asking if I should. Man is not God. God would never have been so careless, so proud, so utterly stupid as to make the mistakes I did. You see, man has all the technology to create life. But what we don’t have is the technology to make a soul.