my name is Michael Warren.
i have a loving girlfriend who means the world to me.
i am 38 years old, and the experiments were a failure.
this is what i say to myself in the mirror every morning.
my name used to be different. i was 1. i wasn’t really the first of them all, but i was the first one to truly prove the potential of the experiments.
i knew i was fake, but the memories he implanted into me, they felt real. i looked real too, but what gave it away was the age. i was 18 again, my youth was a reminder that i wasn’t really Michael.
every clone before couldn’t physically handle it. their brain would shut down from the overload of information.
i was the lucky one. each one before me was dead before they could be considered human, and each one after me… well invasive was an understatement to what he did to them.
he tortured them, gave them horrible mutations for the sake of progress, and the worst part is that i helped.
at first i thought it was the right thing to do, but it got worse, it got so much worse.
he was hungry for power, i knew it. something was different between us, something that could only come from age. he knew he was getting older, i knew i was still young.
but i didn’t think he would go so far.
he was… changing, transforming. i saw him lose his humanity before my very eyes. he injected himself with his final design, without even testing it on a clone first.
he wasn’t himself anymore, he was feral, like a predator, and i was his first prey.
i ran. i ran for my fucking life. i ran straight for the shotgun kept in the back and took my best aim at the monster he became.
it took 6 shots before he went down. by the fourth he was on top of me, by the fifth i lost a pint of blood.
my mind was rushing and my body was failing. i patched up my wounds with the emergency medical kit he kept in the lab and then did the only thing i could think of.
i called his girlfriend.
using the phone i managed to salvage off his corpse i called the number i knew by heart.
her voice was familiar, just like i remembered, even if i knew this was the first time i truly talked with her.
i told her I’d be home later than usual, and to not worry about me.
i destroyed everything. the experiments, the corpses, every piece of evidence to what happened in the lab.
and i left. i drove home, and knocked on the door.
my name is Michael Warren.
i have a loving girlfriend who means the world to me.
i am 38 years old, and the experiments were a failure.
this is what i said to myself before i entered my house.