Chapter 1 : 2088 World Zero

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.