Clone Agent: The Story that convinced me to write.

The first story I remember writing was from back when I was 9 or 10. It was a very well thought out and invested piece, with carefully crafted characters and settings... that I'd "borrowed" from other pieces of ficiton.

Jokes aside, not ALL of it was stolen. But we'll come back to that.

Tragically, the only draft was lost to the computer gods some decade or two back. But, here's the story, so far as I can remember.

Title: Clone Agent.

A man emerges from a cloning chamber, surrounded by people who seem familiar, but he has no other memories. Before they can fully explain to him what has happened, they are attacked by a mysterious and evil figure with a robotic arm, riding on the shoulder of a giant robot. Through clever trickery and physics, they escape the hangar on their ship, and travel to New Earth, which is still being constructed on the opposite side of the sun from Old Earth.

That is about as far as I had gotten. Among some of the elements I planned to steal, the cloned man begins to regain his memories, and realize that his donor was in love with one of the people who revived him. However, she doesn't view the clone as the same person, and her feelings have grown towards another. This creates some personal conflict, culminating in him appearing to snap on her and her new interest when they're alone in the wild, only to reveal he was aiming at an assassin sent after them. The clone comes to terms what he is, and who he is. And who he isn't.

I had also stolen the final escape sequence from the Lost In Space film from 1998, wherein New Earth would become unstable and begin disintegrating. The team would have to fly through the hollow core of the planet to build up the necessary speed to escape the destruction.

While I do cringe today at the cliches and choices I made while writing, as well as some of the dialogue I can vaguely remember, I can't say I'm ashamed of it. Even if I can't ever re-read it, it's a personal time-capsule, and I think of it as one of the cornerstones of my life.

Before then, I kept coming up with all sorts of gadgets and gizmos. Some plausible, others ridiculous, but I was convinced I would grow up to create and build each and every one. And that each of these inventions would be used exactly as I thought they might be, in those exact imaginary circumstances.

So, when I was writing this story, it seemed only natural to put some of my inventions in it! The giant robot, the cool guns, even the idea of an artificial Earth! And it was then that I first realized that instead of being a scientist or inventor, I wanted to create stories, and have those inventions in those stories. I wouldn't be limited by real life physics, or the plethora of degrees needed to build even one of these creations! I could create whole worlds where my ideas could live!

It's been decades since then, and I haven't exactly crafted whole universes. But this story will always be a nostalgic starting point for me.