The Road to R-Day

On March 18th, 2067 in the suburbs of Toronto humanity made two major breakthroughs, one in science, the other in religion.

A small start up known as TSD Biotech1 had come about with a revolutionary way to clone anything with a DNA strand, they called their patented process DOPPLE, because they claimed that their cloning process, unlike their competitors such as Ringwald Biotech, or ClearHealth, and even the aptly named DoppleU2, could create a perfect cell to cell copy of a specimen. But despite the proclaimed revolutionary technology TSD had created, most of the hype went under the radar, at first.

The cloning industry at the time was relatively young, only really catering towards cloning individual body parts for transplants, pets for those rich enough to afford it, and animals for consumption3. At no point had anyone successfully cloned a human being as we do today, either due to technical issues, or legal reasons the cloning of a full human was unheard of until TSD changed everything.

However, across the Niagara River, just north of the DoppleU’s headquarters in Buffalo, the Canadian parliament had just passed a law in 2056 (colloquially known as the Deus Act) allowing the cloning of a human being if (and only if) the person had been legally declared dead, and that the revived body had to be brain dead. It was a revolutionary piece of legislation that was wildly criticized. Why had the Canadian parliament pass such drastic legislation? Well to understand that we have to look at the state of cloning at the time and the state of neuroscience. First off, the cloning.

As previously mentioned, cloning at the time was in its early stages, there were a lot of issues and complicated problems that now, with the benefits of hindsight, seem trivial to us. One of these issues dealt with cell division. You see, at the time cloned organs failed a lot, and I mean a lot. You would only ever get one if and only if there were no organ donors available or your body repeatedly rejected organ transplants over and over again. A cloned organ either would grow cancerous or just stop functioning altogether.4 Even the best cloned liver had an expected lifespan of just five years. A patient with a cloned organ had to be kept on constant watch, either through remote monitoring, weekly checkups, or a live in caretaker, just to ensure they could be taken to the nearest hospital in case something failed. Once they arrived, they would be kept on life support until another one of their cloned organs could be delivered and surgically inserted. When you bought a cloned organ you were literally buying time. This issue of longevity of cloned organs was becoming a major concern for the industry and was one of the many reasons why lobbyists had fought so hard to get Parliament to consider fully cloning humans. The theory at the time was that if they could clone a full body, they could grow the organs wholesale and thus allowing people to have a fully functioning liver, heart, kidney or whatever they were in need of. The US Congress was the first to debate this topic, but it kept on being shot down by the more fundamentalist members, so the battle was brought to their northern neighbors. In Canada maybe they couldn’t save the original person, but they could grow a brain dead body and allow their family members access to their closest living relative’s organs. A martyr for the family’s good health.

The second breakthrough at the time was in neuroscience. Another revolutionary procedure had been completed in the winter of 2053, the first ever successful brain transplant. In a lab in Beijing, a team of neuroscientists and surgeons had successfully transplanted the brain of a mouse to its cloned body. This was beyond revolutionary and took the world by storm. Another push of human cloning legislation made its way through the US Congress, it cleared both chambers this time, but was shot down by President Sophia Tucker, who was strongly against “unnatural” medicine5. Despite this setback the research continued on mice and other small mammals. If a fully grown cloned body could show to sustain the brain of another’s then this could open up the doors to immortality.

After the Deus Act was passed a whole new slew of biotech startups boomed across Canada. Many failed, but one succeeded, TSD.

Taylor, Syracuse, and Darwin left their jobs at DoppleU to get in on the excitement. They, like the many other optimistic startups encountered many hurdles along the way, both legally, and scientifically. Legally, they couldn’t find just any dead person to clone, no they would need to find someone who’s family was willing to sign over their deceased relative’s genes and likeness. Plus there was the additional rule that prevented no one person from being cloned more than once after their death. This led to somewhat of a bidding war between companies and put a premium for deceased people’s DNAs. Those who sold their relatives to the highest bidder could make an additional few hundreds of thousands of bucks just for selling away their relative’s DNA. This led to some rather serious unforeseen consequences. It didn’t take long for people greedy for a quarter of a million dollars to grow eager to get their money sooner than later. An epidemic of “unexpected deaths” flooded the nation, in 2058 the total number of unnatural deaths increased by nearly fifty percent. Parliament facing the struggle between the immoral behavior they had perpetuated, and not wanting to lose the lead in the cloning business, quickly amended their law and made it legal to clone a human being if they died, only if they allow it in their will and if their death was declared a natural death. This only caused a “tolerable” spike in deaths afterwards.

Scientifically there were many hurdles as well, mostly on the process of growing and aging said clone. The first wave of clones had been implanted within surrogate mothers, then after their birth immediately placed into a medically induced comma and underwent many treatments to rapidly age the body. After artificial wombs were created in 2060, the surrogacy went away overnight, and the industry went through a “Second Renaissance.”

The development of artificial wombs actually made it easier to experiment with the aging process, and after a major breakthrough by CleanHealth aging the normal way became a way of the past6. This was fine and all, but there were a few hurdles: most notably, the bodies were aged, but without any sort of external stimulus the muscles and organs were severely atrophied and unable to function in a fully grown body. Enter TSD.

TSD, for the most part, was well behind the curve. They had less funding than other startups at the time and didn’t exist in any sort of fancy office building. In fact, TSD was based out of a former fast food chain’s storefront. They managed to convert the kitchen area into a lab, keeping the fridge and freezer to store specimens, and turned the front of the house into a small cubicle farm. But, despite all their setbacks they cracked the code in 2064, they were able to not only grow a full sized human in a vat, but also create one with a perfect cell to cell ratio of the one who passed. After they had cracked the code it was off to the big leagues.

Their revolutionary new DOPPLE tech allowed a human to be grown in a vat but with enough artificial stimulus to have a functional human body. This opened up so many doors, however they were soon shut on the fateful night of March 18th, 2067.

On March 18th, 2067, now more commonly known as R-Day, one of TSD’s clones had been released for “harvesting”7. As with standard procedure the body was removed from the tank once it reached the peak physical age of the previous owner’s life, and was prepared for surgery. Typically the body would be placed under general anesthesia as was common at the time for all sorts of surgeries, however this time the anesthesiologist had been lacking sleep from a bachelor party the previous night and had made a miscalculation in the dosage. Before a single scalpel had been placed upon the clone’s skin the clone shot up off the table and gasped. The clone, as you might know her today, is one Mindy Breaker, the Second Lazarus.

Mindy had died nearly a decade ago due to a brain tumor at the age of sixty eight. Although it was in her will to have her body donated to science, her widower denied it over and over again, it wasn’t until he had passed that the surviving family was able to sell her DNA rights for science. So you must wonder what it was like to have suddenly returned to the world of the living ten years later and in a body forty four years younger.

Having never encountered this situation before the doctors panicked and attempted to subdue the woman, but she resisted, and managed to escape. She was eventually apprehended by the police and brought in for questioning.

She claimed that she had returned from the afterlife. She had spent a decade with her parents and siblings who had passed once again. And after ten years of waiting, she had finally seen her husband once again. They were dancing together in their old living room, until she had been suddenly dropped through the floor and into a deep void, only to wake up in a cold sterile lab. She didn’t understand what had happened, and if it wasn’t for her renewed energy and younger physique, she would have thought it all to have been a dream. Mindy was let go and returned to her closest living relative, her son who was now thirty years older than her.

Her resurrection had been a nuclear blast upon the moral, religious, and legal world. Morally, was harvesting organs wrong if that meant they were bringing back people from the dead? Now after millennia of religious debate there appeared to be proof of an afterlife, but which one? Nobody could agree, but it had opened a whole new world of study: the spiritual world. Scientist started having people consensually agree to die and be brought back to life. And legally, legally who “owned” Mindy and the others who had sold their DNA to TSD and the like? Mindy fought for years trying to regain ownership of her genetic code, and eventually won, even if it cost her family everything. She eventually died of old age, again, and made sure her will did not include any language regarding cloning this time around.

Thanks to an unfortunate mistake made by a hungover medical professional8, humanity had made their first jump to discovering immortality. Either through the afterlife or cloning here in the physical world, the future looked bright.

Footnote 1: TSD officially stood for Taylor, Syracuse, and Darwin, the initials of the three cofounders, but to those in the industry it was a bit of an inside joke. TSD also was short for the very campy action movie The Sixth Day staring the late actor turned politician, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Which in itself was named so because of the Biblical verse “on the sixth day, God created man.” The film was a bit of a cult hit among biologists specializing in clone tech, mostly for its horrible science.

Footnote 2: DoppleU would later go on to sue TSD for their usage of the word “Dopple”, but would later be shut down by the courts as DoppleU never officially cloned a single human before the TSD breakthrough. Ironically, DoupleU eventually had to change its name to Replika in order to avoid being confused with TSD.

Footnote 3: Although given the general concern about cloning at the time, most people would avoid eating cloned meat due to its unnatural origins, and falsely spread rumors that it would cause cancer despite plenty of studies showing otherwise. But there were a select few who indulged in it, otherwise the cloned meat was given out as animal feed for dogs and cats.

Footnote 4: This often brings up the question of pets. How could cloned pets live much longer (proportionally speaking that is) than a cloned human organ? Most cloned pets tended to live up to three quarters of the original pet’s life expectancy, meanwhile these organs would fail after just 6 percent of their theoretical lifespan. Well, that question is one reason why the Canadian Parliament spent years debating the legalization of fully cloned humans.

Footnote 5: For those not in the know, Misses Tucker had previously found her fortune in the alternative medicine industry at the now defunct Woop, a brand touting treatment to cancer with things like honey water with sprinkles of vitamin, along with “healing” stones. During her time in the House as a representative from California she frequently fought against pushing for more conventional healthcare funding. As president she swore she would “keep a close eye on the cloning industry.”

Footnote 6: Unlike what we know today, the technology at the time only allowed for aging forwards, it would be another one hundred and sixty two years until de-aging could be done cheaply and reliably.

Footnote 7: A now outdated term for taking the organs out of one clone and placing them in storage for future use.

Footnote 8: The anesthesiologist, despite being the one who had triggered this new discovery, was later disciplined and lost his license, and fined severely. He still had to be made an example of to deter any reckless medical practices.

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