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Page 5.

Alex didn't know how long he stood in the gloom beside his birthing tank, with water plashing around his ankles.

Nor did he know where his mother was, nor why he was Alex. Or if he was Alex, and he was sure he was not. So who or what am I, he wondered.

He hugged himself and cried like a small child, though he was a grown man. It wasn’t cold exactly, but the water droplets drying on his skin made the still air feel chilly. Nothing happened except his nose got stuffy, and he stopped crying after a while. Nobody came to help him, which was sad. Then again, nobody came to eat him, and that was good.

Sniffling, he remembered the Other’s cloak. The Other’s body floated on the surface as a tangle of indistinct lumps. Alex walked with sloshing ankles around the outside of the birthing tub to grab hold of the Other. Alex worked the cloak loose of its cold rubbery corpse, pushing it away. The garment was repulsive. It was wet and heavy and smelled of decay. Only Alex’s own pitiful state caused him to overcome his revulsion and slip the garment over his head. It was still faintly warm from the Other.

Far away, as if outside, an animal roared hungrily. Was it getting closer? Was it finding a way in?

Alex slumped in a corner and wrapped his arms around himself , shivering as needles of cold invaded his bumpy skin. His teeth chattered, and his vision came in rocking bursts. He was cold and terrified and hungry. Where was he? What was everything? He knew part of it—a small part—but not enough to make sense of it. The memories of Alex Kirk came rushing like faint, flickering holograms through his bloodstream, the way subway trains went crashing through a lighted station and one could see right through its glass windows. What was glass? What were windows?

How long did he sit there? Probably a day or two. He slept.

The roaring woke him several times. There were animals somewhere nearby—big ones, from their sounds—and something in the way they circled outside (if this was inside, there had to be outside, he could only guess). From something in the way their roars triangulated in on him, he knew they wanted to taste his flesh. He didn’t know his name, but he wondered if somehow they might. He called himself Alex but knew he wasn’t. He was only a few hours old. Surely even in the wild dumb beasts knew more than he did. But they did not have the meme soup of Alex Kirk rushing along the metro rails of his inner grand central union station where the lights were going on, one by one. Or was he hallucinating at that?

Stiffly, he dragged himself erect. The cloak had dried to a warm dampness by now from his body heat. It smelled faintly of rotting meat. It was roughly square except at one corner, where the Other must have chewed on it in its hunger. Alex wondered if he would be reduced to the same. Remembering fine milled soaps and warm baths and freshly folded linen shirts, he wanted to cast this abomination from him, but he needed it to stay alive.

Glowing things were stuck to the walls. At first he thought they were Art Deco wall sconce lights. When he examined them more closely, he found they were glowing sponges or fungi. They were glowing mushrooms; he recognized their layered shapes. He drew away in disgust. But he lingered a little, fascinated by how his hand glowed in their eerie light. He went from mushroom to mushroom, waving his hand—here yellow, there green, in a few places amber. He wondered if they were edible, and remembered horror stories of poisoning. Never eat wild mushrooms, a voice said in him. Then again, perhaps it would be better to end his life here, now, as it began, before any more pain, any other horrors.

Outside, if that was the right word, somewhere, the beasts roared his name in their language.

The water around his feet fascinated him. It was neither warm nor cold—it was almost exactly human body temperature, and filled with fine, lacy green kelp that resembled stringy spinach. At first he was repulsed, but when he touched the water and sniffed his finger, he found it had a faintly pleasant, clean taste almost like parsley. Yes, somewhere between parsley—and oats. They had oats in their barn in New York... what was he thinking? Heart beating fast with longing, he had a fleeting glimpse of a barn, and a horse with a girl on it—Maryan Shurey at 14, long-limbed, blonde, in jeans and a flowing white shirt, laughing as she waited for him to mount his horse Baldwin—how did he know these things?

His hands hurt where the Other had bitten him, his stomach bled where it had gored him with its teeth and claws, bits of his intestines hung out along with rotting chunks of torn umbilical cords and cheesy cakes of that wart-like mass through which the feeding had gone. At times, he doubled over with pain, holding this squishy pulp that sprawled on his gut like a twenty-pound tumor.

Always, whenever his mind wandered into the past, into his past or someone else’s past, he wasn’t sure, he heard that powerful throaty roar. The beast was somewhere close by. Its roar was strong enough so he could feel it in his frame. It sounded as if it had its snout to the ground—was there an opening, a door, a way in and a way out? He sensed its terrible and one-track intelligence. It had him and only him on its dog or bear-sized mind.

He was thirsty, so he knelt and drank. If the water wanted to kill him, let it. But it was sweet water, pleasant tasting, with a faint almost anise tinge, just enough to seem astringent without burning. Because of the dim lighting, he could not see well, but now he realized there was a film on the water, a bubbly sludge, that smelled like sweet kelp. The sludge had the same pleasant taste as the water. After a while, when it didn’t kill him—in fact, he felt great—he knelt down in the water and ate handfuls. He ate slowly, gingerly, and with increasing gusto. It didn’t feel much different from eating watery vegetable soup, or maybe oatmeal, and it filled the stomach.

With his most dire needs met, he explored around his environment more and more. He now realized that he was not yet thinking clearly. For example, did he not hope somehow to find sunlight and fresh air? He was a newborn, and he longed for a mother’s touch more than he cared about breaking out of the safety of this dark cocoon.

Perhaps he already sensed the utter hopelessness of his situation, and wanted to avoid confronting the truth.

Most puzzling was the fact that he saw no evidence of human artifice. Were all the memories that were unfolding in his head fictions? Had there never been a human race, a Beacham University, an upstate New York?

As his eyes finished developing, and his pupils dilated, he became accustomed to the soft bacterial lighting around him. Taking his cue from bite marks on the mushrooms, he peeled bits of them off the walls to eat. They tasted dry and oaty—not bad at all when washed down with floor water.

Something else he noticed—his wounds were healing incredibly fast. He readily guessed that the water was more than just runoff—it smelled so fresh, it must have antibacterial and other fabulous healing properties.

Alex Kirk—who he was and wasn’t—had been a smart young college student—and he was his clone, yes, that was it—but how? And why? And where?