I was born into ash.

  That is what the history recordings tell us, anyway. Before my time, before the collapse, the world burned through itself with remarkable efficiency. Wars over resources. Pandemics that jumped from animals to humans and back again. Economies that pretended to be stable until they simply weren’t. By the time the dust settled, half the population was gone and the other half was desperate enough to accept any solution.

  The biotech corporations offered one.

  They had been growing in power for decades, quietly patenting genes and owning the rights to modified crops and experimental treatments. When governments finally collapsed, there was no one left to say no to them. No one left to regulate. No one left to ask whether cloning humans was something we should do, only whether it was something we could do. And we could. So we did.

  At first, the clones were presented as a miracle. Workers for the fields no one else would tend. Soldiers for the conflict no one else would fight. Organs for the children of the wealthy who needed second chances at the lives they had barely begun. The Originals, those lucky enough to have been born before the worst of it, or those with enough money to buy their way into the protected class, embraced this new order with relief. Let someone else suffer. Let someone else die. Let someone else be manufactured for the sole purpose of service.

  Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

  Natural birth was phased out within a generation. Why not risk the uncertainty of pregnancy, the mess of a child, when you can simply order one? Not that they called it that. They called it population management. They called it economic stability. They called it progress.

  The cities changed to match the ideology. The old architecture, with its crack and character and history, was bulldozed to make way for glass and steel and sterile white corridors. Biotech Corp towers rose in every major city, gleaming monuments to the new god of genetic purity. Clones were issued gray uniforms and tracking chips. Originals were encouraged to display wealth, individuality, color, everything that marked them as real, human, as worthy.

  Education became obedience training. Dissent became a medical condition. Question the system, and you were labeled defective. Defectives were replaced by more compliant clones, often before their bodies had even cooled.

  I learned all of this in school, of course. They taught it to us as a triumph. They taught it to us as necessary. They taught it to us as the only way the world could continue spinning.

  I believed them. Or I pretended to. The line between the two has always been blurry for me.