Interview with a Clone Chapter 10

Interview with a Clone
Chapter 10

By Mary e. Gerdt
All rights reserved 2012

The Unknown Fortune Teller of 2036

As Alice’s story progresses, unfolds, words and mental images peeled off, one chapter at a time,
As the time line begins to shape up, the imagination leaving gaps as yet to be filled in.

The Author.

I am the author of this tale about Alice and her clone-liness and how
The world might have gone in 2064. I have no name significant to you. No I am not the name at the top of this page. She is merely a scribe.
I am an unknown fortune teller of 2036.

When I was born, in 2020, my parents abandoned me in a temple
On a mountain you will never know where.
Sworn to secrecy and vowing silence, the priests hid me away
And I never knew any other life. My needs were met, my nun
Attendants schooled me, nurtured me, like a hundred mothers.
As I grew older, I was restless and at the age of 16, I abandoned the Temple lifestyle for the streets of the city.
That was when I discovered a great power within me, I saw the future,
Once free and hungry, finally scared, or just
Smart enough to know what scared was, finally.
No one to meet my needs, no one to lean on.

I sat in a park at midnight. A pigeon cooed and a street lamp flickered.
An old man walked by, slowly. My heart pounded, he was large, looked fearless, maybe a desperado as they were called, homeless sharks, desperate for anything you had.

“What took you so long?” He remarked in a voice that sounded so serene, so mellow, so safe. (Was it a trick?)

I sat there, no name, no home, barely alive, hungry desperado myself,
Only I was 16, tender skinned, green, naïve.
I could not speak.

“Come,” He said softly, as he put his arm on my shoulder.

“Come and I will show you your powers. You are the One.”

I relented and figured if he was going to kill me, then perhaps at least it would be over, my inability to fend as a single unit, a lone pillar topples, I had hit rock bottom in that park. And he would be a demon or an angel.

He took me in and fed me, clothed me, gave me separate living quarters. He gave me privacy and instruction in the ways of the world. The hard world. The one that would step over a hungry cold 16 year old girl as they walked through the park.

The first night after the first day in my new place, the old man as I called him, spoke to me once.
“You are free to come and go. You have powers and you are unaware. Your parents were from my country and I will never speak of this again. You must write down any visions you have, no matter how silly they seem. In exchange for you recording these visions, you will live here rent free and all of your food and living expenses will be provided for.”

It was not really a matter of whether I would do this.
We like to think we have many choices but when it comes right down to it, there is usually only none or two and we have to pick the better one even between bad choices.

It is in this manner that I came to write down the story of Alice Karma and her life. I wrote it decades before it happened. He knew I would be able to tune in somehow and write this story. There must have been a connection somehow with my parents, those unknown entities, a mystery to me which tormented me until I died. I could tell you everything about a mythical future clone and yet nothing about my own parents.

The old man told me one day that we were all put on the planet for a purpose, a challenge, a love and a legacy. It is up to each of us to carry out our purpose. When evil intent motivates an action, nothing good can come out of that.
One day early on I walked through the department store downtown. A clerk screamed when she saw me. “I thought I saw a ghost. “, she said, with exasperated panting and fanning her chest, as if from “the vapors”.
When I asked the old man, he said not to worry about such silliness.
Deep down, I knew it was because the clerk thought I was my mother.
Puzzle piece solved. I look like my mother. Over the years I would find a few of these pearls, yet none led me to discover who I really was, or how I got here.
These facts are irrelevant.
This story is all about Alice.