I saw my old clone on the street the other day. He made a face at me when no one was looking, wiggled his eyebrows up and down--then immediately regained his mask of civility. He was hoping to make me lose my cool and scream at him, maybe attack him. TommyTwo knows better than anyone about my problems with anger management. He also knows that if I attack him again, I won’t receive another ninety-days of psychological counseling, but a mandatory two years for second clone rights violation. Then I would be a completely broken man--which is what he wants.

Walking away, in the safety of the street crowd, he glanced back over his shoulder and stuck his tongue out at me. That was when I knew I had to kill him.

TommyTwo and I had been bitter enemies since he had received his emancipation. There were a lot of clone "divorces" in the first few months after the passage of the Clone Rights Act of 2095. Senator Michael Iverson was the author of the CRA, and it served the old goat right when he lost his seat to his clone, MirrorMike Iverson (who at least had the good sense to dry out before going on the campaign trail). See, the problem is--and the shrinks found this out much too late--that clones provide a focus for self-loathing. It is amazing how many people really can’t stand themselves. We become comfortable with our own petty faults and idiosyncracies--since we take to bed with us and wake up with them--but we are particularly sensitive to those same petty faults and idiosyncracies when personified by someone else. And when that person is your clone, you realize just what an irritating jerk you really are! You start asking yourself Who is that worthless, labor dodging braggart? Who is that shiftless, amoral libertine? And the answer is painfully evident: it’s you.

And what if your clone has none of your faults or psychological defects--being he wasn’t subjected to your dysfunctional parents, or warped by intense pressure from your over achieving siblings? Well, if your clone is better than you--or in Two’s case, able to fool the public into thinking he’s a nicer guy--you hate him all the more. See?

I originally had Two produced because I felt I needed help with the business--we produce nano tech weight suppression products--and there was simply no one else I could trust. The thing was, I thought Two and I had a good working relationship. I stayed home in my bathrobe and slippers most days, watching the holo, smoking Ukrainian weed, and handling the creative side of things, while Two handled the little details involved in running the plant and making social appearances. It was a fair deal, I thought, as it kept us away from each other. Then the aforementioned Clone Rights Act whipped through our lives like a Kansas tornado going through a mobile home factory.

Clone divorce became the fad, and the courts were beyond generous in dividing up assets ("Oh, the poor, poor clone, " I heard the bleeding heart judge say of Two).

After his emancipation, Two bought out my share of the business; I had been out of touch with things so long, and the courts gave him half in the settlement--so I had to sell: Partnership was unthinkable. Along the way he had estranged me from my friends, seduced my girlfriend and, worse, alienated the affectation of my cat, Charcoal (the latter technically my fault, I guess, since feline loyalty lies with whoever feeds them--another onerous task I had delegated to Two). Anyway, the allegorical long and short of it was, Two’s little red balloon rose high, my little red balloon deflated.

So for several days I had discreetly watched Two as he moved about the town, mingling and being preposterously fashionable. Now here I was, watching him sitting at a table at a sidewalk cafe with DupliaDave, CopyKate, AnotherAnn and ReplicaRobert--all emancipated copies of my old social set, by the way--waiting for him to finish whatever trendy drink he was having and then take his usual solitary path home by way of the park.

I stepped suddenly from behind a tree and directly into his path. With his flare for the melodramatic, I knew he’d appreciate the move.

"Hello, Two, you faithless creep," I said.

"The name 's Irwin, now." He propped his hands on his hips and pursed his lips as he slowly regarded my disheveled appearance. "My, my. Have we been reduced to skulking about in the forest now?" When we were alone, Two always exaggerated his feminine side--in an ill conceived effort to infer something about what he perceived as sexual repression on my part.

I pulled my Smith and Wesson cellular blaster from beneath my ragged coat.

"Oh, my. I suppose you’re going to kill me?"

"No. I’m going to commit suicide." Having watched a lot of old holo mysteries lately, I had a variation of the old "murder-your-twin-identity-switch" in mind.

Two’s eyes shifted to the tree line, as if expecting something. I pressed the trigger and my cellular blaster made a sound like the hum of angry summer bees. Moments later, Two had cooked down to a quivering mass of non-verbal genetic soup.

As I replaced the blaster in my coat, a voice behind me said, "Your turn, now."

I swung around.

"That’s right. I’m TomThree. You think that loafer could have handled the business all by himself? He’s been baiting you for a week to set this up. I guess I was a little late stepping in to save him, huh. What an idiot."

Two was an idiot. I knew that the same way I knew an appeal for mercy from Three would be useless.

Three raised his blaster and pointed it at me. I heard a sound like a swarm of angry summer bees.