Beta (part 5) by JoLyn

Or on closer inspection, mirrored her own as she might look in 20 years.  Beta felt off balance and had to drop her gaze before Diana did.  Although they were officially discouraged from speculating, Beta had often sat up at night with the girls in the dormitories, wondering whose DNA she might have inherited.  Diana cleared her throat causing Beta to look at her again.  Diana smiled, but the warmth didn’t quite reach her eyes. She extended a hand.  “Welcome, Beta.”  Zenith stood to the back, her arms folded.  “You will be well cared for here.”  Diana nodded once and then checking her clipboard, practically marched out of the room.  Beta had been dismissed.

Beta looked around uncertainly and saw that Zenith was appraising her from the far side of the room, her forehead furrowed.  Beta recognized that face.  It was the same one she made when she was working on a particularly tricky data set at school.  Despite drastically different environments, the two girls were genetic equals.  Perhaps in a world where nothing was making sense, Beta might discover a little predictability after all.  Would knowing herself make knowing Zenith and possibly Diana inevitable?  How different could they be after all?

Beta found herself standing a little taller, aping Zenith’s stance.  Unlike her encounter with Diana, her realization made her feel bold and she stared back at Zenith, assessing her in the same way her twin did her.  Zenith met her gaze and the two locked eyes.  Beta knew she could win any staring contest.  And she was sure Zenith thought she could too.  How long would this last before one of them finally flinched?  Just as Beta’s eyes began to burn, Zenith broke the tension by laughing and walking forward toward Beta.  She grabbed her by the arm.  “Come on, I don’t want to see what we would do to ourselves in order to win that game.  There’s no losers today.  I’ll show you around the place.  You can share my room.”

Adjusting to life in a cave wasn’t hard--Beta was used to the confines of the Training Center after all,  but it was disappointing to be stuck inside again after receiving one of her first glimpses of the great outdoors on the helicopter ride in.  Zenith took Beta under her wing and introduced her to life on the compound.  Zenith was probably a year older than Beta. She was more muscular too with a no-nonsense, sleek haircut.  She strode about the compound with a power that Beta found difficult to emulate.  Beta retained her long ponytail and deferential demeanor that had been been a way of life at the Training Center. People deferred to Zenith.  No one deferred to Beta.  Beta couldn’t help thinking that Zenith was a much better version of herself.  

Beta wondered what she might have become if she had been raised by a family.  All her life, she’d been told the natural-born world was so risky--that it had none of the controls that assured a quality upbringing.  Now Beta was jealous of the life she had never had.  Beta felt disappointed that Diana remained aloof.  Beta knew that Zenith and her mother interacted quite frequently, but Diana never had more than a few words for Beta when they ran into each other.

Despite Zenith’s guidance, Beta felt at loose ends.  Everyone was busy doing something--bringing down the Society undoubtedly, but the details of how that was happening were not disclosed to Beta.   No one asked for her help.  She knew her way around the cave and had memorized its myriad passageways with ease once the initial shock of being there wore off. But she was not invited in anywhere unless she was accompanying Zenith.  

Beta tried to keep herself busy while she awaited Zenith’s return to the room.  Once again, Beta had been stymied from hacking into the compound’s system.  The encryption protecting the system was complex, but she was getting closer each time she tried.  No one had provided a password to her and she thought if she could just hack in and find some game to play or something she wouldn’t go crazy.  Or she might discover some of the things that no one was bothering to tell her about.  

Beta jumped up from the table and its screen as she heard Zenith begin to open the bedroom door.  She jumped on the cot she’d been sleeping on for the last week and tried to look calm.  

“Don’t try to look all innocent,” Zenith said as soon as she caught sight of Beta.  “I know exactly what you’re doing.  It’s the same thing I would be doing if left to my own devices in your situation.”  Beta had discovered already that she and Zenith could  practically read each other’s thoughts.  Even with different upbringings, there was so much DNA prewired in their brains that there wasn’t much they could hide from each other.  There were too many tells.

“Can’t you just enlighten me a little bit?”  Beta implored.

Zenith sighed and checked the lock on the door before she turned to Beta.  “I don’t know why they don’t want you to know things, but as long as you’re here, I think it’s only fair for you to know what’s going on.”  Zenith took a deep breath and considered her words before continuing.  “As I’m sure you’ve guessed, I’m actually Diana’s clone.  I’m an experiment. Our cause wanted to see what it could do with a clone that grew up in a natural-born world.” Beta wasn’t shocked.  Even though 20 or more years separated Diana and Zenith, it was obvious that there was much more to their similarity than the normal mother/daughter resemblance.  Zenith continued.  “Gam is a clone too.  Of our father.  He died when we were both young so I never really knew him.  But I know Gam of course and people say it’s pretty much the same thing.”

“Are there more clones here?” Beta asked, hoping there might be someone who had shared her upbringing.

“Gam and I are the only non-society clones.  Our cause decided to take a different direction after we were born.  There are a couple atrophies though--ones that we were able to intercept before the camps.  Like we did with you.”  Zenith paused here and Beta knew intrinsically that she was holding something back.

Beta didn’t even speak.  She just raised her eyebrows questioningly.

“It’s just the atrophies can be a little off sometimes,” Zenith finished.

Nobody had ever really been off that Beta could remember.  All her life, her cohort had developed as expected.  Except ,of course, for her.

“Speaking of things being a little off . . .”  Zenith’s voice trailed away and Beta knew what was coming next.  She glared at Zenith who recognized Beta’s annoyance, but chose to ignore it.  “So the problem with you, obviously, is that we don’t know how you got created.” Beta suspected that was why she wasn’t trusted here yet.  She gained some respect by hanging with Zenith, but everyone was still standoffish.  “We’re not sure if you’re my clone or Diana’s.  Either way, your existence is frightening to a lot of people.”

Talking about this made Beta feel sick to her stomach.  It was the elephant in the room that no one discussed with her, but kept her up at night.  One of the tenets of cloning was to never clone a clone.  Science had progressed enough that if the original DNA remained uncontaminated, then an indefinite number of clones could be made from the source material.  But, to clone a clone?  Beta felt her heart thud.  Every time a clone is made, a little information gets dropped.  The telomerase buffering the ends of the gene sequence drop off with each successive cloning, leaving the resulting individual vulnerable to premature aging and cancers.  You should always work with source material.  Beta hadn’t felt any effects yet, but if she was a clone of a clone, maybe her time was limited.  She had spent time in the ramshackle medical unit where her blood was analyzed, but no one had determined exactly whether Diana or Zenith was her original source material.

Beta wished she could rewind to a week ago when life was more predictable and precise. She would take the uncertainty of her Pathways class anytime to what she was facing now. She used to know who she was--just Beta.  Not Zenith or Diana’s freakish twin.  Not possibly a clone of a clone.