Jorgenson; or, The Modern Moreau

Dear Diary,

That’s how B0N1 started her journals in the book we read in class. The hazmat in this wing gave me papers and told me to write daily, but I can’t tell anyone, not even other hazmats. I know it’s the same hazmat who runs the scans because his chest says K.C. even though all the hazmats look identical in their white suits.

We have our own rooms now because so many girls failed the last trials. Right now most days are the same. We have exams, breakfast, scans, class, scans, recess in the Garden, scans, dinner, then sleep. Sometimes the food tastes funny or the ceiling in the Garden has different lights, and then we get extra scans. Times like that are usually when more girls get sick and fail.

***

Dear Diary,

I want to know if the other girls were told to write but I can’t ask them. We shouldn’t talk much since we are competing. I found a dictionary on my bed today. It’s much thicker than the one in class and has words I’ve never seen, even short ones like “city” and “abuse.” K.C. must have left it. I love reading about the words even though I don’t understand them all. Maybe I will replace “Dear Diary” with interesting words now.

***

Infection: a disease caused by pathogens

Today’s exam was different. Usually the hazmats attach nodes to us and sometimes draw our blood, but last week they gave us all little cuts on our fingers. D3B1’s hand started swelling yesterday, and now she’s gone. Those of us who healed got larger cuts on our palms today. Mine hurts, but the hazmats said that the faster we heal, the faster we win. If we don’t heal fast enough, we fail. It’s a competition, like always.

***

Conspiracy: a secret ploy

I sit near a few of the same girls for dinner like S4L1 and C0TN. D3B1 used to sit with us but it’s already getting easier to ignore her absence. She looked just like the rest of us but didn’t have S4L1’s cheek freckle or C0TN’s dimple to make her easier to distinguish.

S4L1’s upset because she and D3B1 talked the most. Now she talks to me. She wonders what the hazmats look like inside their suits. I figure they look like us. She says we’re all the same height, but they’re shaped differently underneath and have different voices. She thinks they’re hiding something from us because they go through locked doors using keycards. Maybe she will fail like D3B1 did soon.

***

Tumor: a swelling, lump, or abnormal cluster of cells

Dinner was hard to stomach. At one point S4L1 whispered, “Put some of the jelly on your cut. It’ll heal faster.” When I asked how she knows it works, she said, “I accidentally got some on mine last week. It healed right up.” Then she reached past the jelly, brushing her cut against it on the way.

It was so curious. I tried it myself. But then I asked why she shared that with me when we’re competing. Doesn’t she want to win?

But she shook her head. “I already know I failed,” she said. Like it was nothing. That made no sense.

But then she pointed to her head and told me about her tumor. It’s one of the words they say about the girl in front of me during the scans that tells me I won’t be seeing her tomorrow. I don’t see a lump on S4L1’s head but I’m not sure how well I understand what “tumor” means. Maybe she’s lying.

***

Friend: a person who shares values, trust, and affection with another

S4L1 is still here. I don’t know how that’s possible if she has a tumor. She didn’t lie about the jelly because my hand feels better. She found a book on my bed and berated me about where I got it. My only guess is that K.C. left it.

I was mad at her for snooping, but she read some of it and noticed that the character has a weird name sometimes. It’s not letters and numbers, but just letters like a word. Most of the time the book calls the character “D0L1” but on some pages it calls her “Dolly.” I thought it might be an error, but S4L1 insisted it’s not. She thinks the hazmats changed “Dolly” to “D0L1” as part of their lie.

“Dolly” takes weird adventures in the book. In class we read about people who do the same things we do, but “Dolly” goes “outside.” The outside sounds like the Garden, with ground and plants, but it also has a blue “sky” above. S4L1 thinks the sky is real and that it’s proof that there is something beyond this place. I think she’s crazy about all this, but I almost want her to be right.

S4L1 said she doesn’t like being called S4L1. She wants to be called “Sally” instead. Ridiculous! But then she said maybe instead of R0S1 I could be called “Rosie.” It seemed strange at first. But maybe it’d be nice to have a word name. Rosie. Rosie Rosie Rosie. I like the sound of it.

***

Eugenics: the practice of regulating human reproduction to select for desired traits

K.C. left more paper for me today. Two sheets in the back already have writing on them. I think it was an accident because they start in the middle of a sentence.

of the minds that came before. On one hand, where would we be without their mistakes to caution us? On the other, the seeds of their depravity sprout in our minds today. Centuries ago, the Germans collected twins for inhumane experimentation. Jorgenson shot me down when I voiced concern about the similarities between our procedures and theirs. He believes they’re not comparable because they were committing genocide, while our species’ survival depends on our work.

Is he right, Ian? The only way I can stomach watching these girls suffer is by reminding myself that we face extinction without their sacrifice. Still, it isn’t easy. Did they volunteer for this? Dianna may have, but these modified clones of her have their own consciousnesses. They do not know what we’re doing or who they are, nor did they consent. Can a time of crisis justify a betrayal of morality? Can it justify eugenics? Is that not what we’re doing?

The more I write the more disgusted I become with myself and this facility. Perhaps the end of humanity is worth not exposing more helpless subjects to torture until we produce the subject who can withstand all the things that kill most humans. Jorgenson says the labs at Trento and Edmonton are faring better and wants to rush this phase so we can isolate the strongest variants sooner. Maybe Dianna’s genes aren’t good enough no matter what sequences we alter. Too many of our clones are developing tumors from the radiation tolerance testing. I fear the limb regeneration trials will fail too. What a fool I was to agree that implanting and testing those genes was worth extra corporate funds. Eventually we’ll end up with nothing but mutilated corpses to toss into the incinerator alongside the septicemic and cancer-ridden ones. The only silver lining is that we won’t have to kill any more treatable subjects once they stop being useful. Our experiments will kill them first.

I tried convincing Jorgenson to release some of the failed subjects so they could live out their last days outside instead of having us cull them. He said that’s crueler than our methods. Even if they managed to survive outside, they would need help, and the sight of another human face would traumatize them. Why Jorgenson decided to let them see no human faces besides their own confounds me. “Real socialization will interfere with the experiment,” he claimed. “We cannot let them become real people.” Perhaps our tests of their intelligence have been stunted by this type of carelessness. Not to mention the cruelty.

I tried remedying such pitfalls by encouraging high-performing subjects to read and write outside class. I also let one subject stay yesterday despite my scan revealing a glioma. I did not have it in me to dispose of her. Jorgenson will force my hand once he catches on. I won’t write to you again, Ian. Find a use for my past disclosures. Tell people. Change this. The time to rid myself of the guilt is approaching. At least I was not bred to withstand this toxic air.

Farewell,

Keith

This is all wrong. I looked up the unfamiliar words, but their definitions only confuse me more because I don’t understand them. Am I a clone? What does that mean? I don’t know what to do. I need to understand. I don’t know how.

***

Liberation: freedom from involuntary restraint

The sky does exist. It is not blue.

Sally and I saw a hazmat lying in front of a locked door. With no mask.

He looked unlike anything I’ve ever seen, with wrinkled pale skin and white hair, and hair on his face! Hair all around his mouth and jaw! Was he even human?

He was so hideous, so unlike us. I couldn’t stop staring. I barely noticed that his tag said K.C.

Sally pried a keycard out of his stiff hand and opened the door. She beckoned me, but I said, “I don’t want to fail.”

“You’ve seen their secret,” she said. “You’ve already failed.”

She took my hand. We ran through the door and through another labeled “Airlock” into foreign halls. We didn’t get far before alarms blared, a voice chanting “CONTAINMENT BREACH.” Grotesque maskless hazmats lunged at us but started choking and falling, and then suddenly I saw the sky. Gray. Dark.

The door slammed behind us, leaving us in tall yellow grass. We ran until we couldn’t. Sally collapsed first, then so did I. We awoke to strange things around us. They had suits like hazmats and said strange words. One said, “Let us help.”

We had no choice. They took us to an odd place and gave us strange food. I was too hungry to refuse.

Under their masks, they look like the hazmats looked under theirs. Some dark, some pale, some with hair on their faces. One stranger gave me paper and a dictionary when I asked. Her name is Ariadne. A word name. They all have word names. Ariadne’s a girl but looks so different from us. I thought “girl” meant looking like me and Sally. I have much to learn.

***

Community: a unified group of people

It’s been long since I wrote because there’s too much to do, but it feels so much better than before. These people work together and help each other. They teach us things. There’s no failure. Everyone provides what they can.

Sally and I help, but she’s been stumbling. Her head hurts and she can’t stand right or remember things. The others look at her like they look at the elders. Those are the ones who first watched the world burn and still have it burning inside of them.

***

Mourning: a period of grief after someone’s death

Sally lay down and didn’t get up. Ariadne held me while I screamed. It’s been days and I can’t move. They don’t care that I’m not helping. They said they understand loss. I am ashamed I did not understand it before.

***

Survival: continuation of existence

The hazmats wanted to make humans better as individuals, but these people say any people can survive with cooperation. They are still surviving.

They buried Sally with their own and gave me a heart-shaped locket containing a lock of her hair. They called us twin sisters. I think that makes the other girls my twin sisters too. I said there are others in the place we came from. I don’t want to go back, but Sally gave me my chance at freedom. Our sisters deserve their chances too.