Nano Bytes

Outside in the sky above the clone watched for the sign. The clouds broiled and then he saw it. A streak of light and then a flash burnt high above.

In the room machines hummed into activity and pulsed with energy. As the guards unlocked his enerbinds the clone pretended to fall but spun around grabbing a scalpel with one hand and kicking the table up into one guard’s face.

The clone leapt up and smashed his two hundred pounds of muscle into the guard who crumpled against the wall. As the second reached for his stunblade the clone swung out with the scalpel slitting his throat and sending a shower of blood out onto Morgan.

Alarm bells rang and the magistrate yelled for the clone to stop. The clone ran quickly up the stairs and threw the magistrate to the ground below with a sickening crunch.

Morgan screamed as the window exploded. Outside the fastship had used its cannon to blast a hole in the glass. Wind roared in and a doorway opened in the ship's side.

The clone watched in awe as his rescuers beckoned.

Morgan’s voice hissed out. «Such insolence! You were made, not born. You have no freedom, no life. No soul. You are my vessel made anew!» He coughed and more blood spilled. «And you dare to defy us? We shall destroy you. All of you!»

The figure in the ship beckoned, making an urgent sign with his hands. The clone knew that the sentinels would soon rush in.

Walking to the old man, the clone tilted his head and reached out. With one hand he tenderly wiped the blood from the man’s lips.

«Your time has been long and rich» intoned the clone «but you are well overdue.»

Raising his fist high the clone smashed it into Morgan’s chest feeling the brittle bones snap. The old man cried out in pain.

The heartbeat indicator began to spike erratically. With a smile the clone ran and leapt into the waiting fastship. As the sentinels burst in the fastship soared away, a flare of light in the morning sky.

PaulLev Synchronicity

It’s been this way all of my life. Like when I was in high school, and we’d be reading our homework assignments out loud, and some kid would stand up right before me and read pretty much what I had written. Not that he’d cheated or anything. I never showed my work to anyone. And yet he’d written my ideas, even using my words. I had a hard time proving that I wasn’t the cheat. «Great minds think alike,” the more enlightened among my teachers would say. But that was too pat. I knew something else was going on‑I just didn’t know what.

It happened on the radio, too. I’d be singing a song, driving somewhere, and I turn on the radio and that very same song was playing. Yeah, I know that they played the Beatles a lot back then - still do on the oldies stations I listen to - but I mean, the Beatles have a pretty big catalog. What was the likelihood that «Dr. Robert» was on the radio right after I’d been singing it?

When I got to college and grad school, I began to search for similar patterns in history. There were plenty. Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray invented the telephone, independently, at the same time. Pretty much the same for motion pictures - invented independently by Edison in the U. S., Friese—Greene in England, and the Lumiere Bros in Paris. And of course Wallace came up with a theory of natural selection all on his own, at the same time as Darwin.

I was starting to put together a dissertation proposal on this very topic, when I came across an article published in an obscure journal — «On the Ubiquity of Independent, Simultaneous Invention.» I was crushed, but not really surprised. I left the doctoral program and took a job in my uncle’s shoe store‑I was in de feet, ha ha.

It was not that bad, though. I had no talent for shoe sales, so I wasn’t vulnerable to the trauma of someone else coming up with my ideas. No danger of someone stealing my notion of a better display case, because I wouldn’t have had that dumb idea in the first place. That was a relief. I went along like that for a good few years.

But the job also gave me lots of time to think and look around the Internet on my iPhone when there were no customers in the store. I began looking into quantum mechanics. Some scientists thought that just thinking about subatomic things was enough to affect them, and our mentalities might actually be in touch in some way with the past and the future, through some kind of time–unified quantum mechanical field. Maybe I and all the people who seemed to co–opt my ideas were connected to some future Omega point, the Platonic source of all ideas!

And sure enough, a few hours after I came up with that hypothesis, I found a book on Amazon on the exact same topic by some physicist I’d never heard of.

No problem. I should have known. Better to sell shoes. Yes, ma’am, we do have that style, and right in your size.