Standing in the kitchen, her preparations complete, Mary knew she should take a moment to enjoy the calm before the storm. Elizabeth was in her bedroom playing with her toys, the presents were wrapped, and the cake was cooling on the counter. Mary was pointedly ignoring the fact that there was a swarm of news-drones at the end of the block. She would take this moment for herself. She would try to relax.

She knew she was too old to be the mother of a seven-year-old, but that was the whole point wasn’t it? It was because she couldn’t conceive that she’d chosen to take this route. The protests, the blaring headlines, the violence in the streets, none of that mattered, not when compared with the miracle of her daughter – her perfect seven-year-old girl. And how could she not be perfect? She was a marvel of science, the shining outcome of the largest research project conducted in the history of mankind.

Mary placed her palms flat on the countertop, looked out the window over her garden, and smiled. She was content. More than content. She was for all intents and purposes immortal. If that wasn’t satisfying, she didn’t know what was. When she’d been chosen as a participant in the human trials, she had felt unbelievably lucky. She could finally have the child she so desperately wanted. It seemed impossible that seven years had already flown by. All she knew was she loved her daughter with all her heart.

She had almost given her daughter the same name as herself, but it had seemed like a step too far, an expression of arrogance that might tempt fate and tip them both into disaster. She’d decided that clones shouldn’t be named after their parents, so Elizabeth had been given her own name. Mary was determined that Elizabeth would be her own, unique person.

As she was thinking these thoughts, the view out the window flickered, a panorama of dense, grey buildings bleeding through the fruit trees and garden in her backyard. Mary was surprised by the sudden failure. She hadn’t ever been shown the unfiltered view without having chosen it. She triggered her interface, reinstating her preferred filter. The buildings blurred and fuzzed, then blinked out of existence, her backyard returning to greenery.

She watched for a moment longer to see if it would happen again. When the filter seemed stable, she turned away from the window. “Elizabeth! Come down! Are you ready for the party?”

When Elizabeth didn’t respond, Mary’s face creased into an unaccustomed frown. She walked through the dining room to the long, white-carpeted stairs, and called up toward her daughter’s room. “Elizabeth, can you hear me?”

Still no response.

This silence was unlike her. Elizabeth was usually so responsive. Maybe it had to do with turning seven? Mary thought back to her own seventh birthday. Had she been worried about turning seven? She honestly couldn’t remember. Raising a clone was so confusing at times. It was hard to stay inside her own head.

Mary checked her watch. There was still thirty minutes until the first guests would arrive. She walked up the stairs to the second floor, trailing her fingers along the hand-rail. She stopped at Elizabeth’s room, placing one hand gently on the door. “Elizabeth, can I come in?”

The room was silent.

A sharp pang of anxiety spiked through her. The feeling was there and gone in an instant, a liquid flutter in her stomach. Surely she was overreacting, but there was something about the dense silence emanating from her daughter’s room that seemed particularly ominous.

“Elizabeth?” she called through the door. Even as she said it, she realized that her voice had come out louder and more frantic than she’d meant for it to.

She waited a moment longer, and when there was still no response, she made up her mind. Mary pushed the door open and entered the room to find her daughter sitting cross-legged in the middle of the floor, a doll in each hand, head down, her hair falling in a loose cascade over her face.

Mary took a deep breath, one hand on her chest to cover the frightened beating of her heart.

“Honey, is everything ok?”

Elizabeth was oddly still, nothing like her usual boisterous self. Mary tried to tell herself that it was a normal seven-year-old thing. It couldn’t be anything too serious. She forced herself to calm down as she crouched in front of Elizabeth. When there was still no response, she pushed her daughter’s thick brown hair back over her forehead, revealing her eyes, surreptitiously checking for a fever with the palm of her hand.

“Are you nervous about your birthday party?”

Elizabeth didn’t respond. For a long, pregnant moment the room was utterly silent, a frozen tableau of worry and doubt. Then Elizabeth lifted her head in one smooth movement and looked Mary in the eye. “Who are you?” Elizabeth asked, her face twisted with some intense emotion.

It was an expression Mary had never seen on her daughter's face before. The anxiety returned, sharp and cruel, twisting within her. Something was wrong. She knew it. Elizabeth wasn’t well.

“Honey, listen to me, do you feel sick?” Mary asked, tripping over her words in her concern.

Elizabeth’s eyes darted around the room, as if she was trying to figure out where she was, before landing back on Mary. “Why are you doing this to me?” she asked.

“It’s time to get ready for your friends. Everyone is coming for your party,” Mary said, trying to return a sense of normalcy back to the conversation.

“Party? Where the hell am I?” Elizabeth asked, her voice rising.

Mary pressed her hand to Elizabeth’s forehead. It was still cool to the touch, but it wasn’t enough to steady her nerves. Taking a deep breath, she picked Elizabeth up. It was time to talk to the doctors at the lab. They had told her that if anything unusual happened she needed to bring Elizabeth in to them immediately. This definitely qualified as unusual.

As soon as Mary picked her up, Elizabeth started to struggle, kicking and twisting to get free. Mary rushed toward the stairs, one hand gripping Elizabeth around the middle, the other grasping the hand-rail as she fought for control. Partway down the stairs, Elizabeth suddenly went limp. It was such a surprising change that Mary stopped in her tracks, fearing the worst, the animal part of her brain crying out in shock and alarm. But she found that Elizabeth was looking at her calmly now, her eyes flat as she spoke.

“Mother?” she asked.

“What is it darling?” Mary responded, trying desperately to keep the rising panic out of her voice.

“Put me down,” Elizabeth demanded.

“We need to see the doctor, honey. It’s important.”

“Put me down,” Elizabeth repeated, her voice taking a deeper tone. Commanding.

At that moment, Mary’s mother, Elizabeth’s grandmother, opened the front door and bustled in. “Hello, sweetheart! Happy Birthday!” she called out. She was carrying a bag of presents, beaming up at them where they were standing on the stairs, unaware that anything unusual was going on.

“Mother! Thank God you’re here,” Mary began, but she didn’t get a chance to finish, because at that moment Elizabeth grabbed the metal chopstick from her mother’s stylish bun and stabbed it into the exposed flesh between Mary’s neck and shoulder.

For one long moment, Mary gawked at the end of the chopstick sticking out just above her dress line, blood welling up and starting to run down her chest. And then her legs gave out and she toppled forward, falling down the stairs toward Grandma who stood at the bottom, eyes shocked, mouth open, a scream stuck in her throat.

The lab was quiet, all of the typical noise and movement and energy having faded with the end of the day. Nearly everyone had gone home to their families, to their dinners and their feeds, each scientist reverting back to ordinary life once the lab coat came off and the pressures of work faded. Those who stayed behind were the most dedicated, or the ones without family, or the ones who stayed at work to avoid facing something even more painful waiting for them back home.

Jill rubbed her eyes and looked at the analysis one more time. She knew she could find a pattern in it if she looked long enough. With enough time, she’d start to see the connections that had been eluding her. Then she could figure out the right questions to ask of the data-set; the correct paths to follow through the massive maze of information that her team had been collecting.

`The tip of her tongue pushed up against the back of her teeth and there was a deep crease between her brows as she leaned in toward the data-model projected in the space over her desk – as if getting closer to the data would make any difference. A few strands of her brown hair had sprung out of her ponytail and were hanging over her eyes. She pushed them back behind an ear, her mind totally focused on what she was doing.

With a sharp, percussive exhale of pent in breath, she leaned back in her chair and stared at the ceiling, her dark eyes focused out to infinity. What was she missing? She felt so close. Something was prickling in the back of her mind, and she knew from experience that if she could let it germinate, some beautiful new idea would flower forth. And this one felt like a doozy. Like the breakthrough she’d been waiting for.

“Burning the midnight oil again, Jill?” a man’s voice asked from just behind her.

Jill let out an undignified squeak and shot straight up out of her chair, her fight or flight instincts on full display, balanced precariously between sprinting toward the exit and striking out at the source of the voice. But it was just Matt, sneaking up on her. Again. She forced her arms down to her sides, hoping Matt hadn’t noticed both her hands balled up into fists.

He stood with his feet planted confidently shoulder-width apart, hands crossed over an excessively fit chest, his green eyes appraising her with smug satisfaction. She noticed that his hair was starting to grey again. A sign, she thought, that he couldn’t afford to keep up with his treatments. Nobody went grey on purpose these days.

Matt was the closest thing she had to an enemy at the lab. She didn’t have enemies. Not normally. But she had a sneaking suspicion that he was trying to steal her research and claim it as his own. He was on the cleared team, working in the cleared facility. Something for the Department of Defense, or maybe it was Homeland Security. She didn’t care. They were all the same to her. A bunch of ethically suspect sell-outs conducting research that would be turned against humanity, either as weapons or as a better way to spy, subvert, or manipulate other human beings. She hated it. Matt wasn’t a scientist. He was a hack. And he had a bad habit of looking over her shoulder and showing up when she least expected him. He was a creep.

“Hi, Matt. Yeah, I’m working late tonight. I, uh, have something I need to finish up,” she said.

“What are you working on? Maybe I can help,” he responded with obvious enthusiasm.

“No, that’s ok, I was just getting ready to leave. Thanks anyway.”

“Maybe next time,” he said, disappointment coloring his reply. “We really should work together more, you know.”

“No Matt, I don’t think so. Not in this lifetime.”

He looked genuinely chagrined, and for a moment she almost felt sorry for him. Almost. Then she remembered the time she’d found him looking through her data-node. Or the time he’d come instead of IT when she’d needed someone to deal with an upgrade procedure, and she’d caught him inside her research folders. No, she didn’t feel sorry for him at all. Creep.

She turned her back on him, shut down her lab-station and started stuffing her things into her bag. She could hear him breathing behind her. Breathing, and shuffling his feet. She turned slowly, her hands full, and gave him as much of a glare as she thought she could get away with. “Do you need something Matt? I would think you’d want to get back to work, or you know, go home.”

“Well yeah, it's just…” he trailed off.

She didn’t need this. She really didn’t want to be dealing with Matt right now. Whatever was germinating in her mind required time and space, and what she didn’t need was to be stuck here dealing with this crap.

“Whatever it is, it can wait, right? I need to leave.”

“Yeah, ok, it can wait. But tomorrow, first thing, come to my office, will you? There’s something I need to talk to you about.”

When she looked hesitant, he leaned forward, crowding into her personal space. “Promise me, ok? You’ll come to my office? It can wait till tomorrow, but it's important. It's something you need to know.”

“Whatever, Matt,” she said, resisting the urge to roll her eyes. “Yes, I’ll come by in the morning. But right now… I just need to get home.”

Matt stepped aside. He still looked hesitant, but he seemed willing to let the conversation end. Jill took one last look at him and walked away from her desk, down the hall, and toward the elevators. There were a few lights on in other parts of the lab, and she could hear other people working, but it wasn’t enough to make her feel completely comfortable. She could feel the pressure of his eyes on the back of her head all the way out. Even after she’d turned the corner and knew she was out of sight, she still had an uncomfortable feeling in her gut, telling her that something wasn’t right.

Back in the lab, Matt stared at the last spot Jill had occupied before she’d turned the corner and disappeared. The look on his face was intense, his hands were clenched, and he was rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet. He took a moment to moderate his breathing and settled back down onto his heels. He ground his teeth, jaw muscles standing out in ropy cords. A flash of what might have been anger, but just as easily could have been fear, crossed his face. Then he settled his expression into the bland placidity of a professional poker player. His bluffing face. His lying face. Commander Tros was waiting for him to report back and he would have to play it carefully. Very carefully.

When Matt left the room it was quiet except for a slight clicking emanating from the lab equipment as it sorted, classified, and labeled genetic material. In the next room machines were using advanced gene editing techniques to enumerate small changes to the DNA, one allele at a time. They incubated the combinations, documented the results, and then destroyed each sample of generated tissue in turn.

Every combination tried, each classification made, every single data point gathered, took the project one step closer to its ultimate goal of creating a fully reprogrammable human. A human who could be modified to be anything wanted of it. Stronger, smarter, healthier. A human that would not be held back by doubts or worries. A human that would do what it was told without question or complaint.

First, the scientists needed to figure out how to create a viable human clone. Once that breakthrough was complete, the rest would come in due time. Matt knew that this was true; like knowing that the sun would rise in the east tomorrow morning. His whole team knew it was true. It’s what they were all waiting for.