DANIEL VACCERELL HAS TOO MANY CLONES

Dear Mr. Fuckclone, Bring Me A Dream

Thu, 23 May 2013 21:18:46 -0400

The not-there spit Daniel the Dead out in corridor 714C-E, in the nest labs. He landed on his hands and knees and thick, red tears escaped his eyes. “I’m back, thank you, back,” he whispered. “Oh god, oh fuck, oh fucking fuck.”

“It doesn’t get any easier,” a voice from the shadows said — guess who — “and I work for the mean bastard.” shadow Daniel eased his way out of the shadows, combing his hair back and over, in quick, steady movements.

“Stay the fuck away from me,” Daniel the Dead spat, and crawled backwards, against the wall. Shadow Daniel shook his head.

“Things are different now,” he said, and pointed at Daniel the Dead. Daniel the Dead sneered at this, only to realize — he sneered.

The skin on his face tightened up and his lips crawled up and down and his nose twisted and one eye opened exaggeratedly wide. His face and lips and skin and Daniel the Dead grabbed his face and pulled, and looked down at himself. He was whole. He put a hand to his shirt and felt his heart beat, ka-thud, ka-thud, ka-thud. He looked up at Shadow Daniel, who was looked at him pointedly while adjusting his tie.

Daniel the Dead didn’t know what to say. He wiped the red, scummy tears from his face and stared up at shadow Daniel.

“Am I alive?”

“Not for long,” Shadow Daniel looked apologetic, “but all contact with the bleak man constitutes an immediate reversal. That’s why he lives in the damnation house.”

“What?”

Shadow Daniel shrugged. “You probably won’t ever understand. I have to go. Enjoy what you have. Hope it doesn’t hurt bad.”

Daniel the Dead stood up, hesitantly. Legs — just legs now. Shadow Daniel melted away, tipping an invisible hat as he went.

Enjoy what you have, Daniel the Dead thought. Hope it doesn’t hurt too bad. Cryptic fucking bullshit all over this place. Then he thought of the bleak man, and that awful face, and all the spit in his mouth dried up, and his throat felt like hot glass, and he thought he may puke. “Shit,” he said aloud, finally. The bleak man’s face faded from his mind, like a mercy.

He stuck his hand under his shirt, and felt his warm skin, and marveled at the simple feel of his heartbeat. He could feel the blood moving around under his skin. He could feel all of it, and it filled him with joy and dread. He was alive, now.

Enjoy what you have, Shadow Daniel had said. Hope it doesn’t hurt too bad.

Under his hand, Daniel the Dead’s heart stopped.

Violent, galvanizing pain leaped from his chest to his head, and down to his guts. Daniel the Dead toppled over, clutching his chest, foaming at the mouth.

“Shit,” he said, and then he died.

After awhile, he stood back up. No sense just lying around all day. He dug and tore at his face until it was shredded and bruised, and found some bandages in a locker to clean it all up.

Enjoy what you have. That sanctimonious prick.

Daniel the Dead walked into Daniel Prime’s lab, where Daniel was attempting to balance several whiskey bottles on top of each other, upside down.

“We need to do something about Shadow Daniel,” Daniel the Dead grated.

Daniel turned to him, and squinted his eyes. “BrainDan, you look kinda different today.”

They both laughed at this.

An Interlude Of Fuckclonery: Damnation House

Thu, 23 May 2013 20:36:00 -0400

The white washed away from the world, and Daniel the Dead was in a blue-walled room. The bleak man turned around and Daniel the Dead shrieked. The bleak man’s face was awful, so awful.

“You’re here too soon,” the bleak man said, some of his eyes narrowing, “You’re here too soon.” and it would have been comic if he hadn’t been so terrible, and Daniel the Dead shrieked in fear again and turned around and ran, and there was nowhere to go, and he scrabbled his many-fingered hands against the wall, howling, and the white filled the world again, and it was the white of the void, the pure white of the not-theres, and Daniel the Dead welcomed it, anything to get away from the bleak man’s face.

An Interlude Of Fuckclonery: The Replicant Tank

Thu, 23 May 2013 20:26:00 -0400

A small office of crowded cubicles, all that cheap green-gray color that companies indifferent to their employees use. Daniel the Dead found himself standing there, across from a tired employee, who of course had a Daniel face and a typical Daniel scowl. His tie was a muted green.

“Name, universe of origin, destination,” the Daniel gestured tiredly.

“Where am I?” Daniel the Dead looked around.

“Processing, idiot,” Daniel replied. He pointed at the sign at the very end of the cubicles. It read “PROCESSING” in tight red letters.

“I came through the replicant tank — “

“Yes, yes, after you had a personal awakening, and wanted to do what no Daniel had done before, hurrah, hurrah, the ants go marching on and on.” There was a lethal boredom to this Daniel, a surly exhaustion that transcended bitterness and jaded wisecracks. “You are truly the paragon of surgery and deathy ways. Alright, you don’t know nothing, so I shall send you over there.”

The Daniel with the muted green tie pointed at the door on the far end. It said POINT OF ORDER and was painted, sloppily, a dark indigo color. Daniel the Dead pointed at it and the Daniel nodded.

“Get a move on, g’wan, hoss ya freight.” The Daniel’s affected southern thickness vanished and he went back to his work, putting a big black check on the paper.

Daniel the Dead stalked over to the door, and looked at it. The blue paint had splashed onto the walls, and POINT OF ORDER was written in tall, lean strokes, in some pitch black strokes.

He put his hand on the doorknob and turned it, and when the door opened the light washed over him.

A Martyr For Your Fuckclone

Thu, 23 May 2013 19:49:19 -0400

Daniel the Dead thought: I am capable of tremendous sweetness, and I am capable of the most vile murder.

He stood inside his lab, consumed in a whirling mess of thought. His lab reflected him — it was lean, and tall, and every possible mutation or algorithm of skin and machine possible was grafted or latched onto itself, and a great number of fuckclones, in stages between life and death, hung in a latticework, looking something spookily akin to power lines. If asked what they were there for, Daniel the Dead would have shrugged and said transformation.

Daniel the Dead thought: I am a fuckclone, designed for sex, yet I’ve never actually had sex.

He hadn’t. The illusion machine had provided a brief — what had Lecter called in, in Silence Of The Lambs? — sticky fumblings. An experience intangible as it was the definition of his first, painful, short existence. At the end of his life, Daniel the Dead had not known satisfaction, but only confusion, and then pain, and then this rebirth. Behold, the American dream. Lo, the superman. Life had begun with a stickly fumbling and ended with a sticky fumbling. From Francis Gary Powers to Francis E. Dec. Make a metaphor out of that, Rob McKuen, Daniel the Dead thought grimly. It’s all blood and cum in the end.

Daniel the Dead had two dicks — he’d grafted the second one on himself, but he’d never so much as masturbated. He couldn’t see the point. There was no fantasy. He’d left such things behind.

Of course, he could remember all the sex he’d had — he was a fuckclone who inhabited a telepathic net that stretched around one man and yet several men, and he knew the curve of breast, the taste of mouths, the sweet exhaustion and the bitter, flagging energy that comes with a medley of sexual exhaustion. He knew the cupping of a woman’s ass in your hand and the right places to bite on a neck. He knew promiscuous women with both the best in bed and occasionally tremendous disappointments and he knew that love made it great but sometimes simply having worked so hard for it made it great too, that echoing triumph. In this sign, you will conquer. Sometimes you have to spend forty days and nights in the desert before it rains, but when it rains, oh it is very wet indeed. Daniel the Dead had never masturbated, no sir, he hadn’t jerked the chain or choked the chain, yet he had this formidable retinue, this library of incidents. Not so much as it seemed at first glance, yet replete with strangeness.

Daniel the Dead grinned hollowly. But to him, none of that had happened. It was like hearing a story about a friend you half-remembered. There was a dizzying distance from it. He had both felt and not felt these things, and in that paradox he found both comfort and a repugnance.

Paradoxes all the way down.

His body had been stuffed, implanted, altered, spliced, burned, shattered, shot, butchered, recreated, transformed, transubstantiated, changed, changed, changed — but there was something he’d never done. Something he’d never thought to do — and he knew, in the part of his mind that was simply made of knowing — that had never occurred to any of the other Daniels either. Not even Shadow Daniel, who shied away from the telepathy like a skittish girl at the dance.

The doors of the replicant tank opened, and a fuckclone stepped out, his eyes full of lust and acceptance. Daniel the Dead reached down, and picked him up by the neck. “You’re on the great adventure, friend,” he said to himself, who stared in the face of this bandaged, oozing apparation. “Where you go, I only dream to follow.”

Daniel the Dead ripped his own head off, and tossed it aside. Blood fountained from the fuckclone’s neck, but he didn’t even notice. He hunched over, and stepped into the replicant tank. Here we go, he thought. Let’s see if the world is all rabbit holes and stepping stones. Paradoxes, he said to himself, again, all the way down. All the way down.

The doors of the replicant tank hissed shut.

For The World Is A Clone And I Have Touched The Fuck

Wed, 22 May 2013 21:15:00 -0400

Shadow Daniel smiled, and brushed back his hair.

“I’m glad you came to me,” he said. “I knew one of you would, eventually, but I was surprised it was you.”

He shot his cuffs and inspected them — still a pristine white, same as ever.

“Do you know how I came to serve the blue wall?” He unbuttoned and re-buttoned his cuffs, fingers moving quickly. “It wasn’t by choice, at first.”

He looked around the facility. The walls towered over them. Great girders and rails and blinking lights everywhere. This particular room shot up, like a tube, something meant to contain a giant missile or a reactor.

“I was a fuckclone, of course. In a place far away, but like this. I was being beaten to death with a crowbar by our version of Daniel Prime. He broke my jaw in four places and fractured my skull, and before he could plant the crowbar through my brain, he suffered a massive heart attack, and fell over. And I grabbed the crowbar, and beat on him, as he twitched and begged, and he died, not I.”

The Daniel of Shadows smiled again, then. “Not I, no sir.”

He checked all the pockets of his neat black suit, removing their contents; keys, wallet, a phone, headphones, change.

“I was still beat to shit, of course. I was crawling out of the lab when it shifted, it changed, and it threw me into a not-there, but the not-there wasn’t just something that wasn’t there…it wasn’t just the expanse. It led places. I wandered. I wandered in the void.”

Shadow Daniel let out a breath, shakily. He arranged the things from his pockets — the phone on top of the wallet, the change on top of the phone, the keys on top of the change, and the headphones wrapped around all of it.

“After a very long time, the blue wall found me. Or I found it. Either or. It took me to where it lived. Or where it was from. Damnation House. There, I…” He trailed off, his Adam’s apple working. “I saw things. The bleak man. The fire mirror. The burning…”

He waved his hands, that Daniel gesture. “It doesn’t matter. I saw what was at stake, that’s what mattered. I saw what the blue wall was attempting to do. It was attempting to contain the damage that radiated outwards from the Daniels. It existed because the Daniels existed. What they tore open through all of the universes, when they let the facility become something more…” He trailed off again. “Listen. There is an order to things. Not fate, not predestination, nothing like that, but there are foundations to the universe. The facility, and the Daniels together, represent something unhealthy, that rots away at those foundations. They’re not unmaking reality — but they are sickening it. A blight.”

Shadow Daniel unwrapped the headphones, and put all his things back in his pockets. He stood up, and buttoned up his jacket.

“That’s what they call this, in some places. The project. The Blight. Some places, it’s happened, and it’s wrecked the whole world. Some places, they managed to stop it in time, and eventually, most everything healed. Where I’m from — it didn’t. Everything stopped. Like a broken clock.” Shadow Daniel tugged on his tie, straightening the knot. “Just…up and stopped.”

“I’m glad you came, anyway,” he continued. “It’s nice to see we are, at least, finally on the same page.”

He looked up from adjusting his suit creases, and saw that his visitor had walked out. Shadow Daniel scowled into the darkness, and then shrugged.

“Ah, well.” He laughed. “I do go on.”

The darkness closed around him.

An Interlude Of Fuckclonery: The Blue Wall (II)

Wed, 22 May 2013 19:26:19 -0400

The man in the dirty black coat walked down the main street, spurs on his boots jangling. Past the jail, past the brothel, past the undertaker’s — take a good eye, that is, the undertaker in this dusty little town has never gone out of business, no sir, never has — past the church, towards the saloon. Always the saloon. The man in the dirty black coat grinned, and his lips were painted blue.

As a matter of fact, his whole face was.

The sun was marching steadily overhead. This was East Capital, a tiny mining town surrounded by a couple big horse farms and with a long history of men with guns making other men with guns say goodbye to this wild, dusty world. Was a time that men didn’t need a shooting iron to make the law or say their peace, but those times was long over. The world was built on the back of death, the Reverend had once told them, but we will all live again.

“Reverend!” called the man with the dirty black coat and the painted blue face. His eyes were a flat, silvery color, and the people in the street shied away from him. He looked like a man, but he didn’t, at the same time. Simple as that. “Reverend! I’m calling you out!”

Silence decended upon the town. Even the whores on the balcony said nothing, fanning themselves in the heat.

“I’m havin’ a drink,” a reply, drifting out of the saloon. “Hold your horses.”

“I ain’t got horses, Reverend,” said the man with the blue face, “but I got a sixgun that I’m aiming to empty into you. I’ll march on there and unload it in your back if I have to, I ain’t afraid to spill your drink or your blood.”

He spat in the dirt, then.

“What time is it?” A man marched out of the saloon, squinting at the sunlight. He looked up, and scowled again. His black coat and white collar were pressed and even. Above them, a gaunt and craggy face, lined with amusement. His vest was buttoned and on one hip, a gun.

Rare to see a preacher packing.

“Reverend Daniel,” the man with the blue face said, “it’s the End Times, like the ones you always been preaching.”

The reverend looked at the man standing in the dust a few yards from him, and smiled. It was a gentle smile. The townsfolk agreed on that, later.

“It’s high noon,” he said.

“Don’t matter,” the man in the blue face spat again. “Fill your hand, you son of a bitch. Fill your hand, you selfish bastard o’ fate.”

“How many times do we have to do this? How many times will this end?” The reverend — Daniel — rested his hand on his hip, just above gun.

“Well,” the man with the blue face replied, and then he moved for his gun. So did the reverend.

The gunshot echoed for miles.

The Little Fuckclone That Could

Wed, 22 May 2013 18:53:00 -0400

Daniel2 was having a nightmare. It consisted of the graveyard — which had consumed many of Daniel2’s thoughts — and being buried there. The implacability of shadow Daniel’s soft contempt for how all the other Daniels operated and the cost of it all weighed upon him. He knew the agency of all the Daniels was important, and yet he knew himself — the mutation that kept him separate, the mutations between all of them that let them interact and survive, in whatever shape or form it may be — he knew that was somehow just as ugly as the deaths of all the fuckclones.

They were tearing great holes in the universe to bring the fuckclones into being and for what, so they could be disposed of moments later, they could be used and discarded, they could be brought to life and shattered and thrown into the garbage. Daniel2 had done it. They had all done it.

Daniel2 awoke and stared at the four large trees that served as the pillars of the sunroom he lived in, that branched up to the giant skylight, and when he sat up the light of dawn broke through the windows and everything leapt into vivid light and he saw he had finally transformed fully into a woman and she screamed and fell out of bed in a thrashing confused pile of limbs.

“My…dick.” she said.

In a lab a couple of miles away, Daniel Prime began humming to himself “My Dick” as he stabbed himself with a machete. “My insular cortex, bigger than a fridge,” he sang at himself, who was looking up with dying, frightened eyes.

Daniel2 looked at herself. She was naked. She had a woman’s body. Stem to stern. Wind to water. This was strange.

There was a knock on the door to the sunroom. What was this, a fucking eighties sitcom? Should she yell to not come in while the laughtrack roared?

The door hissed open and Daniel the Dead tromped in, and looked into the sunroom.

“We were supposed to see if we could isolate some of the screaming walls ten minutes ago! I’m a very busy dead man!” Daniel the Dead flinched from the sun coming through the ceiling and stepped back. “Finish doing your hair and come on!”

Daniel2 stepped out from behind one of the trees, buttoning a shirt, trying to fit a blazer on. Too big. She’d shrunk. How tall was she now? How anything was she now? She was a she now. No longer some halfway. The parameters of the world had to be redefined in their entirety.

“Ho-lee shit.” Daniel the Dead drawled. From beneath his bandaged face his mouth gaped open. “Hoooooo-lee shit.”

“I know,” Daniel2 replied, “this doesn’t change anything. We’re going to Subsector 11B, right?”

Daniel the Dead tilted his head and leaned down at her. “Jesus tap dancing Christ, you are short.” Daniel2 pressed her hand against his bandages and pushed him away.

“You’re like seven feet tall. Fuck off.”

“You have tits! You have tits.”

“Screaming walls, dead man.”

“Why are your tits so big? We’d be a big titted girl if we were a girl?”

“Daniel,” Daniel2 said, “we have lived our entire lives talking about tits, and I don’t expect us to stop now, but I’m going to set you on fire with my mind and throw you into a not-there if you don’t shut up about my rack for ten seconds.”

Daniel the Dead raised his hand pointedly, and then lowered it.

“Good.” Daniel2 looked down at his — her, shit this was confusing — breasts, and then back up at the towering form of Daniel the Dead. “The screaming walls, then?”

“Screaming walls,” Daniel the Dead agreed.

They walked down the hallway together. Daniel2, sensing the churning thoughts behind Daniel the Dead’s bandages (you didn’t need to be a telepath to pick up on that) rolled her eyes.

“Just say it,” she said.

“What’s it like, having a…y’know, pussy?” Daniel the Dead looked at her with an honest curiosity.

Daniel2 stopped, and looked down at herself, and then back up at him.

“You know what it’s like? It’s like having a fucking pussy. What’s having a dick like? It’s like having a dick. It’s a part of you that exists to do exactly what it does.” She sighed, frustrated. “It’s no more and no less than itself.”

Daniel the Dead didn’t look terribly satisfied with that answer. “I figured it’d be like owning a nuclear weapon that’s somehow rich.”

You want to know, Daniel2 thought, you really want to know? She stepped nimbly over and reached inside one of Daniel the Dead’s various open wounds, to one of his spines with rich cable and brain tissue implanted in it, and squeezed, and in that moment, Daniel the Dead knew everything about having a pussy, everything about what it felt like. It was not what he would have imagined, not even in all his surgery and evolution and change.

“Oh,” he said, in a small voice. It was the only time Daniel the Dead had ever sounded small.

Daniel2 nodded. “Screaming walls?”

He nodded back.

They came across Daniel, who was attempting to pull a sword out of a locker, with a giant golden hilt. “I’m King Arthuring this shit,” he said, without looking up, “though I do believe I’m already king.” He tugged and tugged and cursed and when he looked up he said “oh” and tilted his head at Daniel2.

“God damn it,” she said.

Midnight In The Garden Of Fuck And Clone

Wed, 22 May 2013 17:27:00 -0400

Daniel was drunk.

BrainDan, not being capable of such things anymore, was tired. Inasmuch as a floating brain in a jar could experience exhaustion. If he could have gotten drunk, he certainly would, though he suspected introducing alcohol to his jar would be extremely unpleasant, if not fatal.

“You remember Sally Salino?” Daniel asked. He was past the slurring stage and into the blurry, quavering words stage.

“THE BARBER?”

“Yeah.” Daniel reflected into the bottle. His face stared back at him, tinted blue and distorted. “He taught me a lot.”

“HE TAUGHT YOU LIFE IS SHIT AND ENDS QUICK. EVERYTHING HAS TAUGHT YOU — US — THAT FACT.” BrainDan was tired of these sessions of spiraling nihilism.

“Sally was a good barber.”

“WE HAD — HAVE — CURLY HAIR THAT WAS TOO THICK AND HE COULD ONLY CUT IT TOO SHORT. HE CALLED IT THE JEWBOY CURSE. HE MADE FUN OF OUR NOSE AND OUR FATHER FREQUENTLY. HE CALLED HIS NEIGHBOR MR. WENG DOWN THE STREET ANY NUMBER OF SLURS. HE TRIED TO HAVE THE PATTERSONS KICKED OUT OF THE NEIGHBORHOOD. HE DRANK AND BEAT HIS KIDS.”

Daniel waved his hand at the jar. He put the bottle next to it and stared at both. They were full of poison and genius, the both of them. He would laugh about that later. “I said good barber, not a good man. They can be mutually exclusive things. You can be a lot of good things and not a good man.” Daniel stared glumly into both bottles. One with a genie of regrets, the other with a genie of malign wishes.

“Why did I create you?”

“I DON’T KNOW,” BrainDan rasped, “BECAUSE ALL YOU’VE EVER KNOWN IS HOW TO MAKE AND BREAK THINGS?”

Daniel pondered that for a moment.

“I can accept that.”

He grabbed the bottle and took a long, galloping swing, and then spat, rubbing his mouth. “Sally Salino died of eye cancer.”

“I KNOW.”

Daniel stared at the jar. Such a strange creature BrainDan was. A man had to have a code, sure, but BrainDan was such a distant evolution of that, concerned vastly with not just ramifications, but the ideas of morals, the legislation of action.

“You remember Paul Novelli? Or what about Jimmy Patronello? What about Olivia from Northie? We used to call her Ollie North.”

“OLIVIA DELARCO. THE STOOP KIDS. YES, I REMEMBER THEM. WE — YOU AT LEAST, WOULD STEAL DAD’S CIGARETTES AND PASS THEM AROUND.”

“It was good.”

“WAS IT? I REMEMBER OLIVIA STOLE YOUR JACKET AND SOLD IT TO PAULIE. AND JIMMY RATTED YOU OUT TO THE DOC WHEN YOU STOLE THE FITZGERALD’S FROM THE LIBRARY.”

Daniel sighed, inwardly. “It’s good to have friends, even if they’re shitty friends.”

“DOES THAT APPLY TO OUR CURRENT PREDICAMENT?” BrainDan buzzed, and fell silent. The liquid in his jar churned. Daniel had no reply to that, so he took another swig, and stared outwards. Sometimes when he looked up, there was a skylight, staring up at the stars. Sometimes there were giant white ceiling lights, patrolled by fans. And sometimes there was nothing but a sludgy blackness, stretching far up and away.

Daniel put his face in his hands. BrainDan peered at him (as it was the only way he could look at things) for a long time.

Eventually, he looked up.

“What do you think is going to happen?”

“IN REGARDS TO WHAT? THE PROJECT? THE OTHER DANIELS? THE BLUE WALL?”

“Any of it,” Daniel said. His eyes were rimmed with the alcoholic’s near-invisible red wetness and his shoulders slumped, but he looked into BrainDan’s camera with a bitter intensity.

“THE DEVIL’S ACCOUNTANCY,” BrainDan finally rasped. “COMING WITH OUR BILL. IT’LL BE A COST.”

They stared at each other after that.

Goodnight Mr. And Mrs. Fuckclone And All The Fuckclones Overseas

Wed, 22 May 2013 00:18:00 -0400

“It was a graveyard,” Daniel2 said, aghast, and buried his face in his hands. “An endless graveyard.”

Everyone had noticed that Daniel2’s feminine features were becoming slightly more exaggerated. The hair longer, and wavier. The cheekbones defined in a less angular and more alluring fashion. It was strange. Sure, living in a dissolving self-contained universe that seemed to be tottering towards some sort of all-involved damnation was strange too, but turning into a girl? Definitely strange. Daniel the Dead leaned forward onto his elbows and stared.

“Well,” said Daniel, after a long silence, “I guess that’s another ramification we’ll have to address.”

“IN A LONG LINE OF,” began BrainDan, before Daniel made threatening gestures towards his speaker volume. “Alright,” continued Daniel, “further business. Shadow Daniel is still at large and the blue wall still continues towards some strange agenda. The facility is undergoing more structural changes that are increasingly dangerous to all involved. Anything else?”

“I’ve begun seeing visions of the future,” Daniel the Dead stated.

“VARIOUS HARBINGERS HAVE ATTEMPTED TO REPLACE ME OR TRANSMIT INTO MY JAR,” BrainDan rasped.

“The dead will no doubt be crawling out of the Cairn at some point, given how things are going,” Daniel2 added.

“Okay,” Daniel said, “we have some work to do.”

“The not-theres are beginning to overtake the screaming windows,” Daniel2 continued.

“I HAVE BEGUN RECEIVING TRANSMISSIONS FROM RAPIDLY DECAYING INCURSION REALMS BEGGING FOR ASSISTANCE,” BrainDad added thoughtfully.

“The visions of the future are fucked,” Daniel the Dead said, looking up at the ceiling.

Daniel sighed inwardly. These lunatics were off-topic again. Daniel2 scowled at him, catching a bit of that.

Two cables sunk down from the ceiling and plugged into wire-covered orifices in Daniel the Dead’s bandages and began to pulse with red light. The others stopped and stared.

“Improvements,” he said, shrugging, and they all shrugged with him. Funny that a gesture of apathy would be their most common connection. Or maybe it wasn’t all that funny at all.

“I say we shut down the graveyard.” Daniel2 looked at all of them, the set of his mouth firm. BrainDan buzzed his harsh cricket laughter at this.

“WHERE WOULD THE DEAD CLONES GO, THEN? JUST PILE UP IN THE HALLS? I’VE GOT IT! WE COULD BUILD A LADDER OF THEM TO HEAVEN AND ESCAPE THIS PLACE.” BrainDan’s speakers distorted with laughter. Daniel the Dead laughed along as the tubes popped from his chest and vanished back into the darkness of the distant ceiling.

Anything that BrainDan and Daniel the Dead agreed on couldn’t be good, Daniel thought. They both stopped laughing and stared at him.

Shit, Daniel said to himself, are we getting even more telepathic.

A loud “yes” rose from the whispering swamp of the great-mind.

Alright, Daniel said. Then we’ll do the rest of this meeting telepathically.

Good.

Shadow Daniel the blue wall the war the walls the screaming windows the great mind whispered, the dead the cairn the broken illusion machine the shifting halls the incursions tomorrow is coming tomorrow will be here harbingers ramifications harbingers tomorrow we will we will our will is our will we will.

They sat there in silence, staring at each other, screaming at the top of their minds.

Above them all, perched neatly on a rafter, the Daniel of shadows sat swallowed by his namesake. The telepathy floated around him, but he could only pick up tidbits and pieces, he thought.

“We will,” shadow Daniel whispered to himself, “oh, we will.”

To Fuck A Clone

Tue, 21 May 2013 17:13:10 -0400

As Daniel Prime awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself — within the lab, still. Shit. He’d passed out on one of the tables, and his back was killing him. The facility could have at least given him a couch. He rubbed at his eyes and found his glasses on the floor and marched over to the replicant tank and hit the combination.

When the glassy-eyed fuckclone first step out, he shot him in the face, blowing bits of skull and brain across the lab. He typed in the combination again, that shredding, thudding violin music started again, and then he left the room, to look for breakfast, the chute rising up to swallow the fuckclone’s carcass. He scratched his temple with the gun as he stepped into the hallway and stared outward. What the hell was the name of that weird Czech western? Coca-Cola John? Orange Juice Jim?

At some point it occured to him that the hallway was sideways, the lights to the left, the floor to the right, and the wall with the signs underneath his feet. Whatever.

When he came back, he stared at the door outside the lab. Was the hallway upside down? Did it even fucking matter? What was that fucking Czech western?

Daniel walked into the lab, and of course he was standing there, naked. How many times had he done this before. He could do this in his sleep.

“See,” he told himself brusquely, “it’s your insular cortex.”

And Daniel fell down dead.

The other him, the naked one, stared. He had just been developing a headache when impossibly, bizarrely, this other him in a suit and lab coat had strolled in, and then toppled over. A thin stream of blood issued from one of his ears, and his eyes were rolled up in his head.

He looked down at his dead body, confused — yet not frightened. The closer he got, the more it seemed to make a kind of sense. The project, after all. The project needed to get done. Even if the facility was going mad. Even if a dead man — a dead man, what the hell — and the girl were having it out. Even if that stupid jarhead — what, a marine — was going to nag him every time he made a decision. Daniel looked down at his own corpse, his face shifting through an unruly cascade of emotions. He began to unbutton his suit, and lab coat, and left the Daniel on the floor on the floor, a red spike falling from his ears.

Of course his clothes fit perfectly.

They were his clothes. Everything fit perfectly. It was his body. He ran a hand through his hair back and forth, giving it that windfucked look, and slid his glasses down his nose a bit. He sneezed, and it came away bloody. Oh, fucking gross. He wiped his hand on his lab coat. Daniel looked, and as he watched, the hallway rotated on its axis, spinning around to the correct (or at least most common, in these soft times) orientation.

Down the hallway, another meeting. Another congress of Daniels. In that stupid parlor that Daniel2 had made. Or found. Whichever. Which Daniel the Dead had denounced as girly and awful, and BrainDan sulked over. At this point he thought they could all anticipate each other and predict each other’s unpredictability so much that telepathy was probably fucking useless now. They might as well not have the meeting. But of course they would. Because everyone wanted to yell.

Then it struck him. What he’d been missing for all this time. Perhaps it came to him in the constant whisper of the great-mind.

Lemonade Joe. That’s what that Czech western was. How could he have forgotten Lemonade Joe?

Daniel Prime walked into the parlor, where all the other Daniels were. This wasn’t going to be any fun.

“Gentlemen,” he said, wearily.

The Organized Fuckclone Saga In Order (Because You're All Fucking Lazy)

Tue, 21 May 2013 00:03:00 -0400

In order. As I write more, this will be updated.

Prequel: The Tweets of Origin

If There's A Fuckclone Below...

Mon, 20 May 2013 22:49:00 -0400

Daniel2 sat in his sunroom, checking off his pile of notes on places the chute couldn’t lead to.

It wasn’t in Lab 1 through Lab 604, though after six hundred and four labs, Daniel2 was confident that none of them were the chute’s exit point. It wasn’t in the hallways or corridors intersecting outside the labs. It wasn’t in the atrium. It wasn’t in Daniel the Dead’s giant menagerie of gristly, interconnected body parts he had woven into some dead, flailing tapestry. That was fucking disgusting, but for all the parts involved, it couldn’t be where the chute ended. It wasn’t in the oubliettes or the window rooms or the screaming doors or the not-theres, which Daniel2 only experimentally ventured into, for fear of simply being erased. It wasn’t in the vast, crawling libraries. Or the shadowy observer room, where the shape of a man screamed and laughed, even though no one was there.

It wasn’t in a lab, hallway, light power grid station, a coliseum or a dungeon. It wasn’t in the sunroom or the stairway maze or the forest of black lights.

He had arrived at one conclusion, thusly — he would have to find out in the most direct way possible. And there was one very direct way.

Daniel2 let himself into Lab 1065-B, and tapped the combination into the fuckclone tank, and sat down to wait.

The green doors slid open and the air of life puffed out before dissipating. Daniel stood there, naked, confused. The illusion machine made an alarmed, noise, confused by the presence of Daniel2 — some flickering halfthing, undefinable attempted to lock into shape, and then it sputtered out. You could almost hear the illusion machine sulk. Daniel looked from the green-eyed girl — wait, no, it was a boy, holy shit it was him — to the hissing, chugging machine, and then at himself.

“What?” Daniel said.

As far as last words went, it wasn’t anything special.

Daniel2 reached up to his own neck and pressed harsly to the left and twisted to the right, and lifted up. Damn near ripped Daniel’s head right off. The dead fuckclone made a confused gurgling noise and went limp. Daniel2 held onto it, tight, and fell to the floor, where the chute opened up, a hungry grin, and sucked them both down.

A sensation of falling from a great height.

A sensation of tearing, almost.

He landed face down in a pile of dirt, the dead fuckclone still in his arms. He pushed it off, and looked around. Dark. Something under his hands like mud and gravel.

Daniel2 reached into his pocket of infinite usefulness and brought out a flashlight and turned it on.

This was surprising, he thought. A graveyard.

The graveyard was vast. It stretched, seemingly, for miles outwards. There were small headstones and great, statued graves, and tombs, and at the top of the hill, Daniel2 could see there was an ossuary the size of a small house.

He shined the flashlight on one of the gravestones. “DANIEL”, it said. Another. “DANIEL”. “DANIEL”. They all said nothing but “DANIEL”, thousands upon thousands of “DANIEL” tombstones of varying shapes and sizes, scattered everywhere.

Daniel2 walked through a row of headstones (each scattered with either paisley or striped filigree) towards the oversized ossuary. All the headstones read “DANIEL”, but had varying degrees of age and wear. As he walked along he saw more odd things — a war memorial reading “FOR ALL THE FALLEN DANIEL” with rows and rows of “DANIEL” etched upon it, a pent series of crosses covered in intertwining rows of “DANIEL”s. The ossuary had only looked to be a half mile away at the most, but it seemed as though he had been walking forever, through these rows of “DANIEL”, walking over fields watered with the corpses of himself, past headstone and plaque and flowerless grave.

The ossuary finally loomed ahead of him. On the door it read “THE PLACE OF DANIEL’S BONES”. Daniel2 pressed the door, and it opened with a familiar horror-movie creak.

Inside was an explosion of bones, tied together by ties. Red ties, blue ties, striped ties, paisley ties, polka dot ties, plaid ties, crosshatch ties, skinny ties, wide ties, tying together what must be the bones of five hundred men. Some where tied to be like the muscle and sinew that held men together, some were ties haphazardly and recklessly, in strange and looping knots.

Daniel2 shut the door, confused and surprised. There was nothing like this in the facility, he thought. Nothing.

He walked through more rows of “DANIEL” and along a grave wall of tiny scraps of “DANIEL” beloved son “DANIEL” loving husband “DANIEL” the graves of politicians and priests and lords and peasants, “DANIEL” here and “DANIEL” there, and Daniel2, for the first time since his rebirth, felt a chill.

Atop another hill, surrounded by crumbling tombs and yawning, open crypts, he saw it. A mausoleum the size of a mansion, surrounded by a black iron fence. A bit cliche, he mused to himself. Apparently whoever made this had seen the same horror movies he had as a child.

The letters above the fence read D A N I E L D A N I E L D A N I E L and he pushed through them with a rusty squall of acceptance and saw the mausoleum was somehow bigger and smaller than he expected. Victorian and brusque. The great double doors at the front had a knocker in the shape of a yawning Daniel’s face, and a strange legend sat emblazoned in a plaque above the doors.

“THE CAIRN OF THE CARELESS“

and beneath in smaller letters;

“mors nos non disiungit”.

Daniel stared at the doors, and realized the doors were not lined with his name but unrecognizable hieroglyphics. Black-headed birds and snakes and many-armed men and the sun and statues and horned things and ram’s head and fat men with many eyes and hissing cats and so on. Strange, that.

He reached up to knock on the doors, and then drew his hand back. No, he thought. You never do that. You just go in.

Daniel2 opened the doors to an immense golden light. It was only a second before they slammed close in his face, but he saw —

— he saw a lobby, like of a beautiful hotel, full of immaculate Daniels, Daniel at his best, lean and angular and square-jawed and full of determination, wearing fitted suits and smoking cigarettes, Daniels laughing with each other and clapping each other on the back, Daniel lighting another Daniel’s cigarette and clinking his glass against the other’s, Daniel sitting on a couch reading a book, a pile of three books in front of him, Daniels surrounded by brisk light, Daniels boxing the air, or hands waving describing some story, Daniels laughing, Daniels shaking their head disbelievingly, Daniels at a bar being served by a smirking, cheerful Daniel in a crisp red bow tie, flipping the bottles around —

— and the light pushed him backwards, gently, and he almost toppled backwards on the stairs.

A hand, white sleeve and neat black jacket, caught him. “It’s not real,” his voice said.

Daniel2 turned to see the coiffed, clean face of the Daniel of shadows. He dusted off Daniel2’s shoulders, comfortably.

“Do you know what Hell is for some people, sugar?” Shadow Daniel pointed over Daniel2’s shoulder, at the Cairn. “Hell is exceptionally creative.”

“It was so…happy. So full of light.” Daniel2 wasn’t entirely certain how shadow Daniel had gotten here, but shadow Daniel wasn’t playing with the same rule book, that was for sure.

“I know,” shadow Daniel stepped back, and brushed the knees and elbows of his own suit off, checking quickly for grave dirt or mud. “You know who hates being happy?”

Shadow Daniel gestured at his own face, and then Daniel2, whose face crumpled. A single harsh sob escaped him, and he saw that the both of them were still surrounded by the soft gold light that came from within.

“Oh hey,” the Daniel of shadows soothed himself, “It’s alright. Everything’s all right.”

“Why,” asked Daniel2, trembling all over, tears oozing out of his overbright green eyes. It wasn’t the hell itself, it was how right shadow Daniel was. It was how something beautiful like the golden paradise wasn’t what it seemed. It was how this graveyard went on forever, and was full, and growing, the dimensions ungluing to make room for more — well, more dead. Everything was coming apart everywhere, and the rows of headstones would just go on forever and ever.

The graveyard would never go out of business. Neither would this particular hell.

Shadow Daniel’s eyes were the worst part — they were full of mercy, and understanding. “This isn’t the blue wall’s work, or the Damnation House,” he explained, carefully, “this is all Daniel. This is how he made it. He built a half-finished world, and he left this, this mess — “

Daniel2 ran, then, ran away from shadow Daniel’s indomitable, knowing tones, ran down rows of “DANIEL” past crypts and legions of wartime memorials with unforgiving rows of “DANIEL” marching down them, past the ossuary and past the tall statues of cherubim Daniels and general Daniels and ran until he felt the muddy cemetery roads vanish and he felt himself rising upwards, a sensation almost like ripping open, and he was still running, running on the steel floors of the facility, running, and he burst into tears as he burst into his sunroom and fell to his knees.

He was sure if he’d stayed there, shadow Daniel would still be standing with him, there in front of the Cairn, explaining the dancing hell on the corpses of Daniel and the destruction of self, explaining how the world just ticked and tocked away, in his inevitable and horribly understanding way.

He wept, then, for himself, for all his selves.

An Interlude Of Fuckclonery: Shadow Daniel (II)

Mon, 20 May 2013 21:08:24 -0400

Spying into Daniel the Dead’s lab, the shadow Daniel suddenly clutched his head and screamed, falling backwards, through walls, through pipes, through grates and doors, until he hit something solid, and stopped. He lay there for a moment, disbelieving, clutching his head.

Black blood dripped softly from a gash, right beneath his immaculately combed hair. He brought his fingers to it experimentally, winced, and then gaped at them, shocked. He had not seen his own blood in a very, very long time.

“What…?”

He took out his handkerchief, and pressed it to his wound.

An Interlude Of Fuckclonery: The Great-Mind

Mon, 20 May 2013 21:03:36 -0400

— we are we will be we know what is we know the project the project we are what is the project the daniels the boygirl the dead man the prime number the jar of thoughts open the jar of thoughts let the thoughts out the boygirl will fly away the dead man will fly away we will all fly away the shadow will become light on the wall the prime number will be added the we will we are we know what is the project this is the project the mind projects itself is the body the plaything of the mind is the body the plaything of the mind the prime number will be subtracted the dead man will fall the boygirl will die and be reborn the jar open the jar open the jar the we will be we will be us we are all daniel there is only daniel the light will wash away the shadow the blue wall is nothing one wall cannot hold us we are we are will we will be will we are will the will is strong the weak will perish the daniels will die we will be nothing but will the project will the shadow will weaken the project the project the project will is the power the will power —

GUEST POST: I Have No Fuckclone And I Must Scream

Mon, 20 May 2013 20:42:49 -0400

The grated floors clink slightly when I walk on them now. They didn’t used to be grates, they were tile before. Before that I think concrete. Next they’ll probably be some kind of mutagenic ooze that is buoyant enough to walk on. Everything keeps changing in ways I don’t understand yet, but that’s the rub. The original intent of the whole thing was to see how far it could go anyway. We wanted to see, and now we know. Now we know.

When Daniel first approached me about the project, he said it would only be a one time thing. That we’d make a clone, have it try out some different positions, and that would be that. I don’t even really remember why anymore, because it’s not like it even had a point to begin with. Daniel was just like that sometimes. Well all the time. He is, all, the time. Or times. I don’t know how to refer to it anymore, goddammit. There’s been too many and thinking about it too much gives me a headache. In the normal confusing way you get when trying to understand calculus or something. I could hear the hims blathering on about sub-cranial synchronizing something or other, and how that caused some dual positronic molecular matrix to collide and create an anti-matter fuck drug or something. It just looked to me like he was taking huge amounts of LSD and dry humping the air, before finishing another clone. Then finishing him. Then finishing on him.

Yes he fucked the bodies. No I didn’t watch. At first.

I’m getting ahead of myself though. Originally he knew he’d need some objective observer. He asked me to oversee the whole thing, and thinking it’d be a weekend long thing at most, I agreed. He walked into his lab, I walked into the control room, we both locked our doors, and then he almost immediately shot himself in the head. I think. Or was it? It’s really hard to remember now. I spoke with one of the Daniels about it, and he explained it was some universal contextual memory filter thing. Something about memories and things bleeding into your brain and being there when it shouldn’t be. That probably explains the headaches too. And the tail.

Wait, I’m getting ahead again, because I don’t have a tail. Or I do? No, I do. Now, it was then that I didn’t. Hold on.

He asked me about the tail and I told him he shouldn’t have been able to get through the locked doors, but I couldn’t remember why, because that’s how things are. He told me a new door led here, and I laughed at him and he shot himself in the face again. Not himself, himself. You know what I mean. I didn’t even have to get rid of the body, a chute just opened up and took care of it. Everything keeps shifting, and I want to leave but every time I use the keys the doors lead back to this room, which is impossible but when you see impossible things every day it tends to lessen the effect of how impossible impossible is until impossible is extremely possible and possibly you’re the impossible one making the possible. Possibly. Possum. Possumbly?

Oh wait, that’s the cortex shifting. Another Daniel explained that. Seeing all the unmaking and bending of reality tends to do bad things to every center of your brain. So sometimes he’d walk in and find me babbling about horses or possums, and then I’d have to kill him before the other Daniels saw me. The original Daniel I would say has been long dead, but who even knows anymore. One of them fucking came back to life even, I mean how the fuck does that work?

I think the floor is turning into that ooze now. Did I make that happen? I wonder if Daniels can hear me, or if they even know I’m here, watching them? How long have I been here watching them anyway? I know I am still the only me but for how long? Once he looked right at me through the camera lens, and reached out through the screen. I told him to not do it, and then he stuck me with a vial of the Fuckdrug. That’s how I got the tail. I guess another me had a tail somewhere. He said the drug was a failed byproduct of the overall larger experiment, but I told him it didn’t want the fucking tail. He said he could “correct” the issue so I turned on the gas and killed him again. That time anyway. That Daniel was more insane than the rest, so he deserved it. I should have gassed them all when I had the chance, but now the whole facility has shifted and doesn’t work the same anymore.

There’s a big pulsing button where my coffee cup holder used to be, and it’s soft like skin and covered in hair. I was about to press it until I placed my hand on it and I swear I heard a moan. That was a bit too much for me. It opened up once, and I could hear it whispering.

give me your tail, give me your tail, give me your tail

I still don’t know if it was real or not, because ironically the one thing I was put her to do, objectively spectate, I can now no longer do. It’s the one impossible thing in an entire lab based around impossibility. Possums. Hah.

The door shifted again. I’m shifting. The world… the world is shifting. He wanted me to watch. I’m watching.

How many questions cane you ansk befare fall mantel brakedowen und wards no mefore meening etwas mach brukafe sa borwas? Clowan marnie e sulatango mit tronbathey con queso amarillo, por es no mach was du ist ein cranio curium et lingo potus von etripsum lotus files lotus file lotus file lotus file lotus file lotus file lotus file…

An Interlude Of Fuckclonery: The Blue Wall

Mon, 20 May 2013 19:57:00 -0400

A lone campfire in the darkness. Above it all, rotating madly, the stars and all the galaxies.

The man with the painted blue face looked at everyone else around the fire. Children. Adults. The old, though none so old as him. Visitors to this land, who by tradition were made to attend this night. They all looked to him. His eyes were a bright silver, and his face was painted the same blue as the sky in the hour before the sun fell, the paint filling in the vast cracks and lines.

He crouched down, and stared deep into the fire. No heat came from it. Not anymore.

“There came a time,” he said, deep and resonant, “when our people had to fight the science of the outsiders.”

No Country For Old Fuckclones

Mon, 20 May 2013 19:38:00 -0400

Daniel sat with the bottle between his legs, idly listing the ingredients to himself. Seems like some liquors aren’t that complicated after all. Things shouldn’t come with warnings, he thought. You should learn the hard lessons in the hardest way possible. That’s how they stick.

“You know, it’s funny,” he said to BrainDan, who sat on the table furiously calculating his own business (much of which was concerned with Daniel the Dead’s increasingly violent attempts to crack his jar), “I have a bunch of clones who are designed to fuck and I’m the only one who’s ever got actually laid.”

“I GUESS IT IS A BIT FUNNY,” BrainDan buzzed, distractedly.

“A bit?” Daniel scowled at the jar. “It’s fucking hysterical. That’d be like being working with chefs and being the only one who’s ever actually eaten food.”

“YOUR LOGIC IS SPECIOUS.”

“Bah with you,” Daniel waved a hand at the jar, and took a swig from the bottle.

“I’VE BEEN RUNNING SIMULATIONS,” BrainDan rasped, “AND THERE IS A 78% LIKELIHOOD THAT THE SHADOW DANIEL WILL STRIKE AGAIN SOON IN SOME UNANTICIPATED MOVE. THE BLUE WALL WILL NOT STOP.”

Daniel peered owlishly at the jar, sliding his glasses up his forehead. “I didn’t know you could run simulations.”

“NEITHER DID I.”

Daniel took another swig. “Dead man’s been after you more, I see.”

“DANIEL THE DEAD’S ATTEMPTS TO PIERCE MY JAR HAVE BEEN UNSUCCESSFUL AS OF LATE. I HAVE ESTIMATED THAT IT WILL BE AT LEAST SIX MORE TIMES BEFORE HE IS ABLE TO ASCERTAIN WHAT SUBSTANCE THE JAR IS MADE OF AND BREAK IT.” BrainDan sounded disconnectedly worried, like a man hearing about a tornado in a different state. “OF COURSE, WERE I TO KNOW THE MATERIAL, OR HAVE YOU REINFORCE IT, NO DOUBT HIS ATTEMPTS TO END MY LIFE WOULD EVENTUALLY CEASE.”

Daniel inhaled, and then another swig, and let out in a hot, whiskey-laden storm of breath. “No,” he said, finally, “I don’t think you want to know what it’s made of. The timing isn’t right.”

BrainDan buzzed unhappily at that.

“If you can run simulations,” Daniel continued, “what are the odds all of us kill each other long before the shadow Daniel and the blue wall finally get it in gear?”

Silence. “54%.” BrainDan sullenly explained, “THERE IS A HIGH LIKELIHOOD DANIEL THE DEAD WILL ATTEMPT TO REPLACE YOU AS DE FACTO LEADER, KILL ME, AND USE DANIEL2 AS SOME SORT OF BREEDING GROUND FOR REPLICATION.”

Daniel nodded genially. “Good, good.”

“I WOULD LIKE,” BrainDan rasped, “FOR YOU TO EXPLAIN TO ME EXACTLY HOW ANY OF THAT IS GOOD.” He was furious. Daniel stared at the bottle. It was near empty. He polished it off in one swig and heaved it across the room.

They both watched as it stopped, in midair, and broke against nothing, and the tinkling glass simply dropped through the floor, vanishing, soundless.

“Because,” Daniel gestured at the faceless wall, “It means something will actually happen.” He looked directly into BrainDan’s camera. “Fifty four percent isn’t high enough.”

BrainDan had no response to that.

GUEST POST: Though I Hear You Fuckcloning, I Will Not Answer

Mon, 20 May 2013 15:30:41 -0400

The first Daniel awoke in his bare cot blanketless with his nostrils clotted with black gore. He keeled over to his side and coughed up a loosed tooth that sprang across the steel floorplates and came to a rest in some dusty corner. He opened his eyes.

Fuck me.

A large jar stood on a stainless steel surgical tray. The optical array affixed to it swung around its lens diaphragm contracting with an audible mechanical whir. Inside the jar a ghastly graygreen mass of fleshy convolutions immersed in some fluid. With much labor Daniel got up and raised the jar before his face.

I think we have to be somewhere.

A bubble rose to the surface of the fluid in the jar.

I had a dream.

Daniel punched the entry controls and the doors slid apart with a hydraulic hiss. The hallway outside was dark except for the LED lights glowing from beneath the catwalk. He stepped out and the metal portal was sealed once again.

A…dream?

He made his way down the hallway in long impatient strides almost marching and somehow reached the terminus of his course without having considered where precisely he was going. As if this had all happened before and the successive occurrences of it carved deep ruts into time that led inexorably toward a predetermined outcome. He stood before a door.

Another door, Daniel muttered to himself. So many fucking doors. You open one ten more appear.

He operated the entry controls and the doors slid apart this time with a bellring.

The fuck?

He stepped one foot through the threshold and before he could register what was happening found himself plummeting down a dark shaft without beginning nor end in sight. He braced for the impact lethal though he assumed it would be. Then total blackout.

He was woken this time by birdsong. The jar stood beside him. Beyond the jar a great stand of birchtrees. The sky was gray. He got up taking the jar with him and as before simply walked and as before came to a place that seemed to be the only possible destination in his going. A humble little cabin appeared before him at the foot of a monolithic boulder shagged with moss. On the front porch of that dwelling an old man in a chair.

Hello stranger! the man called out.

Daniel went to him and stepped upon the floorboards of the porch and they sounded with an ancient creak. He gazed upon the old man and found that it was himself only aged many decades. White in the whiskers and gray at the temples and creased along those lines of pain and joy and terror on his face. The old man gestured toward an empty chair and Daniel set the jar on a crate between them and sat. As if compelled.

My name is Ephraim Rosengarten the old man said. This as you may have concluded is not the laboratory. But actually it is. This does not surprise you does it?

ACTUALLY IT DOES BrainDan at last spoke up. Bubbles rose to the surface of the jar’s liquid contents. WE KNEW THE LAB WAS GROWING. CHANGING. BUT THIS?

Sounds of some human commerce came from within the cabin.

That would be my wife. She will serve you some refreshments. Abigail?

The woman emerged through the entryway carrying a tray of beverages and shortbread cookies. The woman however was also Daniel clad in a housedress and apron.

Boys this is Abigail Rosengarten the love of my life. We were married in the year 2018 in—oh well it no longer matters. That city is gone now. As you know.

NO WE DON’T KNOW said the brain in the jar. Daniel accepted a glass and pastry.

Thanks ma’am.

The old man also took a glass and cookie and his wife emptied the contents of the remaining glass into the open top of the jar. Then she disappeared back into the dark recesses of the cabin.

You would like an explanation said the old man. Look around you. What do you see? He nodded at Daniel who set his drink down on the crate beside BrainDan.

Woods. Just trees. And.

Yes and not a soul to disturb its primeval tranquility. Not a soul Daniel.

Where the fuck is everybody?

You possess the knowledge Daniel. As do I. And Abigail. And BrainDan. And Daniel the Dead. And Daniel2. And the shadowy one. Or rather it possesses us.

The sky brightened and a breeze swept through the trees emitting a murmur like the gentle lapping of waves on the shore of some beach. A shore beyond which stood the specters of skyscrapers draped with algae like bunting.

The fuck was that? Daniel peered out into the wood its patterns of interference giving him the queasy illusion of a labyrinth. He felt his head swimming.

The old man went on. Your desire to understand births great forks of truth. Truths of such great fidelity as to appear…queer. Wrong. Like a fractal it spreads dazzling the eyes in its kaleidoscopic wonder and complexity. He taps on the jar. The brain is only so plastic. The networks of neural linkages only so malleable. A net that catches only so many fish in an ocean poisoned by the voracious labors of man. Eat the cookie Daniel. My wife makes delightful shortbread cookies.

Daniel took a bite of the pastry. BrainDan’s jar began to bubble again. Daniel pushed it off the crate. With the breeze came the sudden inkling of a fragrance. Floral with a touch of herbs. The air felt like the hair of a woman blown across his face. Furling and unfurling and sparkling with daylight. His face was wet.

Why must it go on? Why can’t I just.

The old man laid his hand upon Daniel’s shoulder.

Why can’t I just be like you? This place. This place is. Nice.

The old man erupted in raucous laughter.

You hate the outdoors Daniel! From behind his chair he brought a doublebarreled shotgun and jabbed it up under Daniel’s chin. My daughter’s name is Samantha. Now my Samantha’s mighty lonely. And I ain’t got long on this earth. You will give me a grandchild. Right now. Undo your trousers you gigolo! She’s in the back with her legs spreadeagle on the bed waiting to accept your filthy jism. Oh that raven hair those lustrous green eyes the ample bosom! Put it in Daniel! You just have to put it in or god help me I will blow your fucking face off!

YOU FUCKING FUCK BrainDan cried out from the floor of the porch.

From within the cabin the old man’s daughter emerged. Except it was again Daniel in heavy makeup and a minidress like some ghastly tranny prostitute.

OH SHIT WHAT THE FUCK the brain in the jar rasped.

And then the old man pulled the trigger.

No Sleep 'Til Fuckclone

Mon, 20 May 2013 13:49:00 -0400

Daniel the Dead had removed his sleep long ago, but he could still dream — though, in his case, it was more like being attacked by dreams. His dreams were hazy moods, vestigial mental acrobatics he was no longer capable of. He was assaulted by emotions. He was, to say, experiencing a subconscious guerrilla war of feelings.

He’d isolated his medial temporal lobes (as he was installing new ones) and cut away at his amygdala time and time again, but he could not escape these dreams of panic and unthinkable grief.

It bothered him. And more to the point, it bothered him that it bothered him.

Daniel the Dead realized he’d been flexing his hands, opened and closed, again and again. Recently he had tried to graft himself to have four arms, but they other two arms simply wouldn’t work, they hung there uselessly, and he thought of erectile dysfunction, now it was arm dysfunction, and he laughed and laughed and ripped them off. Why not?

It didn’t hurt.

He’d tried putting in a third leg (besides the one god gave him, bless ya, oh lord we do give thanks) but that didn’t work either. He was starting to run out of improvements. If he got any faster and stronger he wouldn’t be able to move without darting across the room or do the delicate microsurgery he thrived on. Just the other day, he’d been extracting a living fuckclone’s eye, as neat as could please, and he moved the scalpel a bit, just a fraction of a microbe over, and it gashed right into the fuckclone’s eye socket and into the brain beyond and the fuckclone had begun to scream the world oracle over and over again, gibbering and senseless, the scalpel sticking out of his eye like a fence post, before Daniel the Dead gently snapped his neck.

Just the other day.

Daniel2 knocked on the door frame. “You rang?” He stood there, light tan blazer over an unbuttoned blue shirt. Daniel the Dead didn’t have to turn around to know who it was. Daniel2 arrived with an aura of complex, uninhibited hermaphroditicism, a creature between genders, a rebus, a freak, a mutie in a circus of psychotics. Brought to life by the alchemy of a mad machine and a madder scientist.

And damned if Daniel2 didn’t look good.

“Have you considered my offer?” Daniel the Dead said, not looking at himself, “Our mutually beneficial arrangement.”

“If you’re talking about how you want to dissect me while I’m still alive,” Daniel2 scowled, “then I’m going to pass.”

“It’s not a dissection. It’s an open analysis.” Daniel the Dead spun on his chair. Daniel2 stepped back, hand rising to his mouth. He’d never seen Daniel the Dead without his bandages.

Above his neck, a crusting, suppurating red fracture. It was implanted with several clicking tiny mouths over the largest, tooth-choked maw. Two eyes swam in a pulsing brain, and blue, livid nerves crawled everywhere. Yet it still suffered a dreadful absence — it wasn’t a face, just a placeholder, a spec house without a roof, something lonely and terrible and not alive at all.

“C’mon, sweetheart,” Daniel the Dead said, and the tiny mouths embedded in the muscle beneath the exposed brain whispered sweetheart in their invisible voices, “it’s for science. For the integration. Telepathy brings us closer together. The joining of the flesh will bring us closer still.”

Daniel the Dead stood up, and his body of open wounds and grinning red savagery flashed behind his open shirt.

“I know what joining of the flesh means, motherfucker,” Daniel2 replied, raising his hands in a fighting stance.

Daniel the Dead smiled, with his terrible jaw full of teeth, and it seemed every open wound on his body smiled with him.

“It means I eat you alive,” he said, thoughtfully, “It means we are all Daniel, and we are all one, and you will feed me and become me and feel me.”

His giant enhanced legs slammed him down, and his foot, clawed and rotting, was on his neck. Daniel2 stared up at this freak colossus, this horror that he, they, had become. Daniel the Dead, abomination. He leaned over himself, his spines curving, his brown eyes shifting loosely. They had no sockets to anchor them. They stared into Daniel2’s green eyes, and he waggled his tongue at himself, leering.

“Stop it,” Daniel said.

They both looked up at that, but he wasn’t there.

Daniel2 shoved Daniel the Dead’s foot off him, and stood back up, brushing himself off. They looked at each other again, and Daniel2 opened his mouth, and closed it, turned around, and left the room. Daniel the Dead walked back over to his table, and picked up a scalpel. He stared at it, bleakly, for a couple seconds, and then jabbed it into his arm, hard.

There just wasn’t anything to say.

An Interlude Of Fuckclonery: Daniel Prime

Mon, 20 May 2013 11:02:00 -0400

Lonely is the clone, when you find yourself alone, your clones have come alive, and your mind is not your own, Daniel thought. Lonely is the night, when there’s no one left to kill.

Daniel threw the bottle at the wall. He didn’t even look to see if it broke. The laws that governed consequence and sense were over. There was no cause and effect anymore. Causality had hit a wall, just like the bottle. Try and run a project when the results wouldn’t correlate.

A dead fuckclone lay on the floor. Probably. He didn’t even know. Two plus two equalled another dead body and another headache, at this point.

The gun was in his hand, cold and smooth. His hands were clammy and he made his decision. He put the gun to his head and pulled the trigger three times in quick succession.

Click-click-click.

“Of course,” Daniel said, softly.

He threw the gun at the floor. It went off, and a single bullet buzzed and clacked around the lab. Daniel cried out and looked at his shoulder, where the bullet had grooved a shallow dash in his arm.

The project isn’t over, he thought, it’s not over until all the results are in.

His thoughts — erratic, drunk, and paradoxical — filled the room, like toxic gas, and all the nearby clones and copies and incursions and beings in rooms steered clear, lest it touch upon them, and damn them as his thoughts damned him.