Rose 21: Part 1 of 3
Stunning Revelation

“I have something I’ve been meaning to tell you… something you should know… about me,” Rose Potts said to me nervously, putting a sudden stop to our long rambling conversation. That’s how it all started, and although neither of us knew it yet, those thirteen words sealed her fate. She stood from the bench we’d been sitting at and took a few steps towards the exit of the circular garden area of the park we often walked over to from her parent’s house. She looked scared and uncertain as she faced away from me and pulled anxiously at her flowing hair. I’d known Rose for almost two months, ever since we met in a class at the local university, and I’d never seen her like this.
“What is it?” I asked her worriedly when she didn’t continue even after several seconds of silence.
She turned back towards me bitting her lip, before taking a deep breath and blurting out, “I’m a synthetic human!”
“Wha…?” I questioned, stunned. It felt like the wind had been knocked out of me! A Synthetic Human, I knew from news reports and advertising, was a person who wasn’t born but had been quick-cloned and purchased. They were mostly human but for a few difference. Their bones were formed around some advanced, highly engineered man made material that closely mimicked the real thing. Bone, for whatever reason, couldn’t be reliably quick-cloned like most other tissues. They also had some small amount of mechanical and electronic implants to keep certain bodily functions operating correctly, not that I could recall the specifics. They were, to put it rudely, cyborgs. Whenever I heard the term “cyborg” I always thought back to the military cyborgs used against China almost thirty years ago in the war of 2061. Those machines were walking mini-tanks that were piloted by an experience soldier’s quick-cloned brain, with other absolutely vital organs tucked away inside. They were weapons, not people. In the years since then had improved and commercialized the processes to the point that they could create fully formed human beings of nearly any age that contained only a tiny fraction of the cybernetic parts of those dated war machines. I never expected, however, that the pretty girl I had been seeing for the last month and a half was one of them.
Rose’s eyes teared up and her bottom lip began to quiver as she stared at me, waiting for a response. I opened my mouth in an attempt to say something, anything, but nothing came out. I was still reeling, and then I was too late. She sobbed once forcing those built up tears to go running down her face then turned and ran away from me, crying as she went. It wasn’t until she had rounded the corner of the garden and disappeared out of view that my brain finally popped back into gear, and I gave chase. Rose was a bit quicker than I had expected but I soon had her back in sight and was gaining rapidly.
“Rose! Wait!” I shouted to her as she reached the midpoint of the bridge that arched over one of the park’s two winding creeks. She reflexively glanced back towards me and promptly tripped over her own feet. She went tumbling down the cobblestone slope, ending up at the bottom of the bridge’s far end. My legs were already starting to burn but I pushed myself harder and broke into a sprint, reaching her in time to help her up.
“Are you okay?” I asked her as she used my arm to pull herself to her feet.
“Just a couple of scrapes, and I landed on my wrist wrong… but I’m all right I guess,” she answered cradling her injured wrist in her left hand. She looked up at me, still breathing heavily like I was after our cross park dash, and again waited for me to make the next move. I couldn’t let myself screw things up again with more silence so I said the first thing that came to mind.
“Why did you run?” I managed to ask, before instantly berating myself with ‘Stupid question! Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!’ Still, she answered.
“I was afraid of what you were going to say…” she said, looking over to the creek so she didn’t have to meet my gaze.
“I didn’t know what to say. You really surprised me,” I told her shaking my head.
“It was supposed to come out a lot smoother than that. At least that’s how I planned it,” she said offering me a small nervous smile. She pulled in a deep breath and asked sadly, “This changes things doesn’t it?”
“I… I don’t know,” I answered honestly. “I never considered that you might be… I mean… should it?”
Rose cracked up a bit and said laughingly, “I think it’s up to you and how you feel about what I am. It’s not like I’m suddenly a different person or anything.”
“No, I suppose you’re not…” I agreed with her. That was enough for Rose apparently. She rushed forward and embraced me in a tight hug which I returned after a second.
“You don’t know how much it means to me to hear you say that,” she said, clearly relived. “I was afraid you might be one of those bigoted people that wouldn’t want to have anything to do with me. I didn’t think you would be, but…” she trailed off.
It felt good to hold her close in my arms and to see her happy again, but deeper down I was still just as confused and unsure about how things would proceed between us. I had never like the idea of creating people on demand, yet here was one that I’d gotten to know pretty well. It was a contradiction, one I didn’t have a clue how to solve.
“I think I need to get some ice on this wrist,” Rose told me after she withdrew. She was holding it now like it was really starting to hurt her. “Walk me back home?” she asked.
“Of course,” I said. Synthetic Human or not, helping her home felt like it fell into the same category of ‘things a guy is supposed to do for a girl’ like holding the door open for her or waiting for her sit down to dinner before sitting yourself.
“You don’t think it’s broken do you?” I asked as we walked together towards the park’s entrance at the top of the hill.
“I should hope not. It would be insanely expensive to get it fixed,” she said. “Since my bones can’t heal on their own…” she reminded me slowly when I gave her a confused look.
“I… I knew that.” I said, stammering a bit. “But you can’t really break them either, because of how they’re made, right?” I asked, trying to show that I knew something about the subject.
“That’s what they tell me,” she replied as we exited the park onto the sidewalk that lead straight back towards her street. “They’re supposed to survive a car crash intact so nobody has to go bankrupt to pay for the surgery to glue them back together.”
“Can I ask a question about you?” I asked a minute later after we crossed our third busy street. It was another half mile back to Rose’s house so we had plenty of time left to talk.
“Sure. I’d be more worried if you didn’t,” she answered, laughing a little.
“Okay, here’s the thing I don’t get. Well things… and I’m pushing my knowledge here just asking, but you don’t age right? You told me you are twenty-four, but they’ve only been selling Synthetic Humans for maybe ten years now, so how old are you really?”
“First off,” Rose said sounding as if she was struggling to be patient with me, “I wasn’t sold. Or bought. Nobody owns me. I was commissioned for my parents, and they adopted me, but I have the same rights and freedoms as you do.”
“I didn’t mean…” I started to say but she cut me off.
“I know you didn’t,” she said reassuringly, “but I wanted to get it out of the way just in case. To answer your questions, I was commissioned four years ago, quick-cloned to be a twenty-one year old. The process took about a year and I was adopted three years ago on September 21st, 2087. We count that as my birthday, and so does the government. And as for not aging, of course I age,” she laughed. “I think what you’re thinking of is back in the late seventies and early eighties when they hadn’t perfected the synthetic bone material yet. Back then a quick-cloned child’s body couldn’t age properly because real bone tissue wouldn’t grow around the false bones like it will now. They were stuck as midgets basically, or had to have their brain’s transplanted to a quick-cloned older version of themselves.”
“Oh, I guess I did have it mixed up, but then why don’t yours heal?” I asked.
“Because I’m fully grown already,” She said as if it was obvious. “Don’t feel bad though, there’s things I still can’t wrap my head around,” Rose told me.
“Like what?” I asked.
“Okay…” she said, trying to figure out how to explain what she wanted to say. “I don’t have any memories from before adoption day. As far as I remember I woke up in bed that morning at Synthetic Creations and got dressed and ready to meet my new family. But I can… carry on a conversation with you, I can ride a bike and drive a car, I can even paint really well.”
“They erased your memories before you were adopted?” I asked.
“They do that to all the Synthetic Humans, so we can live our lives as our own person, not as a copy of our genetic and brain map donors. They erase the audio-visual part of the memories but leave the accumulated knowledge and experience intact. I didn’t have to learn how to talk or drive from scratch, for instance, but I’ve found if I try different things I’ll stumble on ones that the original Rose was really good at, like painting. Still it’s weird only having three years worth of memories but still being able to do everything that everyone else can.”
“Rose was the name of your donor too?”
“My parents named me that to honor her,” my walking companion answered as we turned onto the street of her fancy neighborhood.
I found that a bit odd but left it alone and instead asked, “Did you ever meet her?”
“No no,” Rose said, “she was long gone by the time I was commissioned. I believe she’s in her mid thirties to early forties by now but that’s all I really know about her. That and she was good at painting.”
“Do you want to find her or anything like that?”
Rose made an unpleasant face and shook her head no saying, “Uh uh. I don’t want to know what I’m going to look like fifteen years from now. I’d rather just think of her as someone who I’ll never meet who happens to look a lot like me, and who shares my name.”
“I’d be freaked out if I came up on myself,” I mused aloud. “But then I guess they can adjust things like eye and hair color right, so it probably wouldn’t be an exact match.”
“My parents didn’t do that with me, so it would actually be very close.”
“So you’d be like her much younger twin,” I said as we came up to expensive two story house Rose’s parents had bought the year before.
“Something like that, I guess,” she said.
“Are you going to be okay?” I asked as we stood awkwardly in front of her driveway.
“Uh, yeah. And it looks like mom is home, she’ll take a look at my wrist as soon as I get inside I’m sure,” Rose replied after glancing up into her parent’s garage. “Thanks for walking me home, and talking with me, and everything.”
“You’re welcome,” I said. Rose started up her driveway and I turned to my sleek motorcycle I’d left parked in front of her mailbox.
“Promise me you’ll come over tomorrow, or at least call?” She asked from her driveway before I had time to fish my keys out of my pocket. “It would be very nice to have someone I could talk to about all of this stuff, someone who wouldn’t call me an abomination or anything like that.” She said obviously hoping I’d say yes.
“I’ll call,” I said, not really sure if I meant it.
“Okay, bye!” she said, waving with her good hand. I waited until she was safely inside before I fired up my bike. For some reason Rose was terrified of the thing, but she’d never been able to give me a good reason why. She wouldn’t go anywhere near it when it was running and was more than wary of it when it wasn’t. I couldn’t help but wonder, as I headed back to my dorm, if it was another one of her donor’s experiences she’d stumbled upon. Maybe the original Rose had some kind of bad accident with motorcycles that Rose Potts didn’t know about? I’d have to ask her about that tomorrow.

Rose 21: Part 2 of 3
Disagreement, Fear, and Understanding

“I think you’re overacting, nothing’s going to change between you two,” my roommate Bobby Blake chided me when I revealed the news to him that evening. “She’s still smart, attractive, and funny right? And now on top of that she’s a freaking cyborg! How cool is that?” Bobby asked. Bobby was smart, but we disagreed a lot. I didn’t like some of his friends and he always seemed to take the opposing side of every issue. We got along well enough most of the time, but even after a semester of living under the same roof as him I still couldn’t tell if we saw things that differently or if he was just really good at playing devil’s advocate.
“It’s different, I’m not sure I’d call it cool.” I replied from the couch behind him.
“If it’s too much for you could dump her and set us up together.”
“I wouldn’t inflict you on any girl, cyborg or not,” I told Bobby jokingly, not that there wasn’t a small element of truth to it. I’d had to lock the door on his various ex-girlfriends on three separate occasions during the course of the previous semester. He sure knew how to get the ladies angry at him.
“Ouch,” he said, pretending to wince at my stinging comment. “But seriously man, I don’t get what you’ve got against her.”
“I’m not against her personally,” I corrected him, “I’m against the whole process. The cloning, the memory copying and erasing, the custom ordering of a human being. She talked about it as if it were just another form of adoption, but it’s not.”
“You’re right, it’s better,” Bobby said.
“Better?” I asked, finding that very hard to believe.
“Sure,” Bobby replied confidently. “With normal adoption you have all sorts of downsides. Kids waiting for years to be adopted while watching their friends find homes. The hardship of bouncing from place to place never sure how long they’ll be somewhere. Sometimes there’s even neglect or abuse. You don’t get any of that with synthetic humans.”
“You don’t think anyone abuses the fact that they can custom order a person of the age and gender of their choice that matches their physical and emotional preferences? The whole thing is practically set up to be abused!” I shot back.
“Again you’re blowing things out of proportion, by a lot this time,” Bobby argued as he finished off another enemy on the game he was playing on our TV. “There are much tighter controls and background checks than there every were in normal adoption, and the ultra-high cost keeps the numbers so low that they can actually follow up on each person they clone to make sure abuse isn’t taking place. Given all that I’d say it’s pretty easy to believe that there’s very little abuse.”
“You’re just over there reading from the Synthetic Creations PR feed aren’t you?” I asked accusingly.
He laughed and said, “Yes, but their arguments seem legit.”
“I still don’t like it,” I grumbled.
Bobby swiveled around in his gaming chair and asked, “Honestly, does it matter where this girl was born, or how? Are you really going to hold something she had no control over against her?”
“No, no I’m not,” I said after a moment.
“Then go over and see her tomorrow like she wants. She’ll like it a whole lot better than some lame phone call.”
“Fine, I will,” I said admitting defeat before letting out a big yawn. It had been a long surprising day and I was ready for bed.
“Oh, don’t tell anyone about this. Rose had a hard enough time revealing it to me. I doubt she wants the rest of the world to know about it.”
“Eh… Sure thing,” Bobby replied guiltily. He made a big show of closing out a couple different chat windows letting me know that the secret was already out.
“Well don’t tell anyone else, okay?” I urged him.
“Got it. You heading for bed already?”
“Yeah…” I answered him.
“Goodnight then,” Bobby said before turning back to his games.
I nodded and stumbled back to my welcoming bed.
I rode back over to Rose’s house the following afternoon and parked my bike in front of her mailbox again before walking up to her front door. I gave the bell a ring and waited patiently until she appeared half a minute later. She peered out at me through the frosted glass then excitedly undid the locks and threw open the front door when she saw it was me.
“I thought you were just going to call,” she said, “not that I’m not glad to see you,” she amended happily.
“I had to check up on you, to see if you were okay. It was kind of my fault that you got hurt yesterday,” I told her.
“No it wasn’t, I tripped all on my own, but it’s nice of you to say so,” she replied. “Do you want to come in? I’ve got stuff to eat and we could talk or something,” Rose offered.
I was never one to turn down free food so I agreed in an instant. “Just let me pull my bike up into the driveway.”
Her smile faded noticeably when I mentioned my motorcycle, but she nodded and said, “Sure, I’ll meet you outside the garage.”
I quickly retrieved my bike and parked it out of the way deep in the back corner of her driveway. Once again I noticed that Rose shied away from the machine. She didn’t even open the garage door until I’d shut off my cycle’s quiet engine.
“I was thinking yesterday,” I said to Rose as I walked over to her, “that maybe the original Rose had some kind of bad motorcycle accident or something. I’ve never seen anyone react as fearfully to a bike as you do.”
“Maybe… Yeah, it could be,” Rose said thoughtfully. “I look at it sitting over there and it’s like there is a big magnet trying to push me away. An… and I pretty much have to hide when you start it up,” she said, her voice quavering a little. I have no idea why I’m like that. I’d never even been around a motorcycle before I met you.”
“That you know of,” I reminded her.
“That I know of…” she agreed, shaking her head a little. “Come on, let’s find something to eat,” she said, quickly leading the way inside, not caring whether I actually was following her or not. She really didn’t like my bike.
“I meant to ask before, how’s your wrist doing?” I asked Rose once I caught up to her in the kitchen. Obviously it wasn’t doing great judging by the small sports wrap that held her right hand immobilized.
“It’s hurt. I sprained it pretty good when I fell. The ER said it’ll be okay eventually, but it’s going to take some time to get better,” she answered a bit negatively as she fumbled with her left hand in an attempt to pull some snacks down from the cupboard.
“Here, let me help,” I said walking over to her. She directed me to which ingredients she wanted and I grabbed them for her. Together we prepared two bowls of a delicious looking snack mix.
“My parents are gone until tonight so we’ve got the rest of the day to ourselves. Do you want to go out somewhere, or stay here and watch a movie?” Rose asked me after we chatted and munched on our snacks for a while.
“A movie sounds good actually,” I said, not wanting to impose on her injury. “What have you got?” I asked.
“Everything. Come on, I’ll show you,” Rose said with a smile before leading me upstairs to her parent’s impressive home theater.
We ended up picking a more recent release that we were both familiar with but we barely paid any attention to it. It played on the screen in front of us with the volume turned way down while we spent the afternoon and evening talking about anything and everything we could think of. We had more in common and agreed on far more things than I ever though possible. I fell for Rose Potts hard that night, and she for me. From then on we did practically everything together, neither of us expecting things to end the way they did.

Rose 21: Part 3 of 3
Ashes

For the next two months Rose and I spent as much time in each other’s company as we could. We signed up for as many of the same classes as our differing majors allowed, we ate lunch together every other day, sometimes skipping class on the off days when we felt the need, and there wasn’t a single weekend that we didn’t do things together from dawn to well after dusk.
“If I die do you think God will accept me?” Rose asked me as the sun set during our last weekend together. We had taken her small blue hatchback out to one of her parent’s lakeside tracts of land out in the country. I had been holding her in my arms as we leaned back against a tree at the top of a beautiful grassy hill when she asked her question. Rose always seemed more comfortable with what she was than I was with it, but there were times like now that she got deeply introspective. I looked out at the sunset reflecting off the nearby lake and considered my answer.
“Of course He would. I was there when you accepted Him,” I told her soothingly. She sighed and leaned further back against me, but seemed unconvinced.
“I wasn’t made the same way you were, and I’m mainly just a copy of someone else’s genetics, personality, and experiences. I’m not even sure He made me at all,” she said sadly.
I kissed the back of her head and told her a story I’d heard some time ago. It wasn’t actually more than a short joke, but it answered her questions almost perfectly.
“One time a group of scientists challenged God saying, ‘What you did was nothing special. With our science and technology we can now form a man from the dirt just like you once did. The only difference between you and us now is one of scale, and we’ll get there sooner or later.’
‘Show me,’ God said.
The scientists agreed to do so and went about setting up their labs and equipment. When they were ready one of the scientists bent down and began to shovel dirt into his pail to be used in the experiment.
‘Wait,’ God said to the scientists, ‘before we can be considered equal you have to supply your own dirt.’”
I could feel Rose laughing gently against my chest and could almost see the smile that had surely spread across her face.
“The same stuff that makes up the dirt, and you, and me, and even your fake bones, all came from the same Creator,” I told her. “You’ve met every other requirement He’s asked of you, so you have absolutely nothing to worry about.” I reassured her. “Even if you are an evil cyborg clone,” I said, teasing another laugh out of her.
“I love you,” Rose said looking back to me with a big sleepy smile before nestling her head against my shoulder and drifting off. I stayed awake a while longer enjoying the moment while watching the sun dip fully below the horizon. It didn’t take long before the shallow breathing of the warm girl in my arms pulled me off to dreamland with her. I’d give almost anything to be able to hold her in my arms one last time…
The day Rose was taken from me at first seemed like any other. We had our morning classes together, ate lunch together, then went our separate way for the afternoon. Rose always got home around four-thirty while I got out of class an hour later. I was readying my bike to leave the campus and join her for some evening studying when Bobby called.
“Man, I’ve got to warn you, I think Rose might be in some danger,” he began but his voice was drowned out by a lawnmower passing near my parking spot.
“Hold on, let me get my helmet,” I shouted to him. I pulled my rather expensive motorcycle helmet out of my pack and fit it over my head. It powered up and used it’s external microphones and internal speakers to deaden the sound of the noisy lawnmower, then it grabbed the call from my phone allowing me to speak to Bobby without subjecting either of us to the outside racket. “Okay, go ahead.” I told him in a normal voice.
“I said I’ve got to warn you about Rose. I was having some drinks with some guys and we got to talking about friends and girlfriends and I sorta accidentally let slip about Rose. They know what she is man,” Bobby said.
“So?” I asked, not seeing the danger.
“These aren’t the nicest guys, or the most open minded. They got all wound up and left to ‘go pay her a visit.’”
“It’s not like you told them where she lives, right?”
“Of course not, I tried to talk them out of the whole thing,” Bobby huffed, “but there was a guy there from one of Rose’s classes and he knew.”
A chill ran up my spine. “You really think they were serious?” I asked.
“If you’d seen the way they tore out of here… I’ve tried contacting Rose but she hasn’t picked up or replied. I guess I’m not important enough for her…”
“I can get a hold of her,” I told Bobby. “These guys left from the campus right?” I asked him.
“Yeah, from House 3 maybe five minutes ago,” Bobby confirmed. “There’s five or six of them in a beat up red truck,” he said. I cringed, the residents of House 3 were well known for their rowdy and sometimes violent behavior.
“Okay,” I said, “I’ll get a hold of Rose and beat them over there. Meet me at her house, all right?”
“I’m halfway to my car now,” Bobby said, sounding a bit out of breath, “I’ll get to you when I can.”
I hung up on Bobby then spoke into my helmet, “V.A., Contact Rose, use all methods to get her the message, ‘call me’, and retry cell and voice chat every thirty seconds.”
My V.A. or Virtual Assistant sent out my message to every one of Rose’s accounts I had on file. Whatever she was doing she was sure to check at least one of them. I revved my bike’s quiet engine and gunned it out of the parking lot. The digital speedometer on my helmet’s heads up display shifted in color from green to red and began to blink, warning me that I was violating the current street’s speed limit by a wide margin but I ignored it and moved into the center lane to better avoid the evening traffic. Finally, after four retries, Rose answered her phone.
“What’s up, you just messaged me, like, everywhere.” She asked innocently in sharp contrast to the adrenaline pumping through my veins.
“Rose,” I said seriously, “I need you to stop what you are doing and go make sure all your doors are locked.”
“Wha…” she started to ask, but I cut her off.
“Just do it,” I said firmly before explaining, “Bobby accidentally let slip what your are to some friends of his from House 3 and he thinks they may be heading your way to cause trouble.”
Rose cursed, something she rarely did. There were a few moments of bustling over the phone as she moved about her house. “Doors are locked, you’re going to be here soon right?” she asked once she was done.
“I’m on my way there already,” I told her. “Just be on the lookout for a red truck and call the police if you see it.” I instructed her as I slowed for traffic backed up at a light, and pulled up right next to the very truck I was warning her about. It’s five passengers, two in the cab and three in the bed, were loud and wild, drawing the annoyed looks of nearby drivers.
“We’re going to get us a cyborg!” one of them shouted while waving some kind of shotgun or rifle for all to see. This was bad, very bad.
“I just pulled up next to the truck, they’re heading your way and they’ve got a gun.” I told Rose. “I want you to wait for me outside. I’m going to beat them to you and we’re going to get out of there and leave them for the police.”
“Okay…” she replied, a bit of fear evident in her voice now. I again pulled into the center lane and surged forward into the intersection in front of a line of cars turning from the left. Horns blared angrily as I zipped between two cars to narrowly avoid being hit. The red truck, several spots back in the line I’d left behind, shrank rapidly in my rear view mirrors then vanished completely as I made a fast sweeping turn onto the street that ran past Twin Creek Park. Driving at over one hundred miles per hour I reached Rose’s street in a matter of seconds and parked in front of her driveway. She came running down towards me but stopped when she realized she would have to get on my bike.
“Let’s get your car,” I said recognizing her dilemma.
“It’s still in the shop,” she reminded me unhappily. I’d forgotten that she’d had a friend drive her home this afternoon.
“Come on, it’ll be fine,” I said, holding out my hand out to her.
“I can’t…” she said in despair. It was obvious that she wanted to come, but she actually took a small step backwards instead.
I was at a loss, there was nothing I could think of that could get past her fear. I was about to order her back inside when the red truck came careening around the corner. It nicked the curb but straightened out and accelerated towards us. I looked back to Rose but she wasn’t in the driveway. An instant later I felt her climb onto my bike. She wrapped her arms painfully tight around me, as if hanging on for dear life, and shouted:
“Go!”
I tore off down the street with the truck trailing close behind. My bike was the faster of the two vehicles but the truck continued to gain. For a few seconds they had the advantage of simple momentum, but then we overcame it and started to pull away. Rose was whimpering now, with her head tucked into my back, but I was sure we were about to be in the clear. Her street curved gently to the right up ahead then connected to a quiet winding back country road with plenty of room to run and several side roads that we could turn off on once we were out of view. I smiled confidently as we bent around to the right. Cutting a sharp left turn onto the country road wouldn’t be a problem even at high speeds, I’d done it at least a dozen times in the past, but the old truck would have to slow considerably or risk running off into the heavily wooded lot directly ahead.
Then I saw the water.
The owners of the last house on the right were drastically overwatering their yard and sending a large stream of wasted water flowing into the street, right where I had planned the apex of my upcoming turn to be. I squeezed lightly on my rear brake in an attempt to bleed off some speed then leaned into the turn and prayed that somehow my bike would find the traction to stay on the road, but it didn’t. I’d brought the front of my bike around and we were traveling in almost the right direction when the rear tire slipped on the water and slid out from under me. We fell onto our left side and skidded along the pavement until my bike’s tires struck the far curb and bounced us back into the middle of the street. I glanced around desperately for Rose, finding her lying on her side maybe ten feet behind me, and almost directly in the path of the rapidly approaching truck. Its driver attempted to preform the same banking turn I’d tried with even worse results. His front tires hydroplaned on the water sending him sliding straight ahead. The truck missed Rose to the right by inches before jumping over the curb and wrapping itself around a large tree. Bodies went flying into the woods but there were no sounds after everything came to a halt. I watched for movement for several seconds, hoping, but didn’t see any. They must have hit at fifty plus, and as far as I could tell they were all dead.
I tore myself away from the horrific accident and crawled painfully over to Rose. She was still on her side, breathing shallowly, her face contorted in pain. I pulled off my helmet and gripped her right hand firmly with my own.
“Talk to me Rose, tell me you’re okay,” I pleaded.
She returned my grip with ample strength and opened her eyes saying, “Now I’ll know why I’m afraid of motorcycles.”
We laughed together for a moment but then she laid her head back down on the street, her smile fading as the pain caught back up to her. My heart sank as I took in the extent of her injuries. The heavy biking jacket and pants I wore were ruined, but they had afforded me a good deal of protection. Rose hadn’t been nearly so fortunate. All she had been wearing was a thin cotton sweater, her t-shirt, and a tattered pair of jeans. None of them had held up to the intense friction, leaving Rose’s left side badly torn up. She was bleeding profusely and her skin was so scrapped away in places along her left arm and leg that I could see exposed sections of her pale greenish white synthetic bones. Still as bad as it looked I’d heard of worse, and skin was easily repaired. I reached back for my helmet again and slipped it on. My bike should have called for an ambulance after the crash, as should have the red truck, but I couldn’t tell due to the large crack that had spread across the helmet’s head up display.
“V.A., tell me there’s an ambulance coming,” I spoke urgently, but there was no response. Either the helmet was damaged, its battery had been jarred loose, or my phone, where the V.A. Program actually lived, had been smashed in the crash. I reached down to retrieve my phone, but I couldn’t seem to work the zipper with my shaky hand. I started to try again but a noise from the direction of the wooded lot caught my attention. I turned my head in time to see a large, bloodied, and dangerously angry looking student stagger onto the street. He was carrying, of all things, a sizable plastic fuel container in his left hand.
“You killed them you freaking clone! All of them!” he shouted, pointing at Rose. She looked up at him startled, then glanced worriedly over to me. I struggled to get to my feat and head off the truck’s sole survivor, but I was more badly injured than I had first thought. It took all I had just to limp pathetically into his path.
“I’m going to send you to hell where you belong, you… you sick cybernetic abomination!” he yelled again as he continued towards Rose.
“I was the driver! Not her!” I yelled into the boy’s face, trying to divert his anger away to me. It worked, but only for a second. The crazed student lashed out at me with the near full container, swinging it in a fast flat horizontal arc so that it struck me hard in the temple. I crashed to the ground, unable to stop him as he staggered on past me. I tried to get up, but my head hurt so badly I could barely manage to stay awake much less impede his progress. I could only watch helplessly as he uncapped the container and began to douse Rose with gasoline. She tried to kick out at him with her good leg, managing to score one solid hit but he just stepped back and continued pouring. He finished emptying the container then sat in on the ground beside her even as she tried vainly to drag herself away. I could hear emergency sirens approaching in the distance, they would arrive in another minute or two, but Rose didn’t have that long.
“This is for my friends…” her murderer told her as he showed her the lighter he had pulled out of his pocket.
Rose locked eyes with me in the short moment it took him to make a flame. I could see terror in them, but it was quickly replaced by a look of serene kindness.
“Don’t watch,” she ordered me calmly before closing her eyes and awaiting her fate. I closed mine as well just before the tossed lighter hit the ground beside her and set the gasoline ablaze. The heat was so intense that I instinctively rolled over to face the other direction. I don’t know how long Rose screamed in agony as the fire consumed her. After the first minute I covered my ears and forced my eyes shut even tighter, willing myself not to hear so hard that it actually worked. The next thing I knew a paramedic had appeared out of nowhere and was shaking me, trying to determine if I was all right.
The area soon became a major crime scene with multiple ambulances and a dozen or more police cruisers lighting up the dark street with their red, amber, and blue flashers. A police officer questioned me to obtain the basic facts and a medic checked me out, determining that I’d need further attention at the hospital. Before they took me away I risked on last look at Rose. She had curled up into a ball in her final moments with her hands covering her face and her legs pulled up to her chest. Much of her clothing and skin had been burned away leaving little to look at but further areas of her odd colored bones and featureless charred flesh. That memory would haunt my dreams for years to come.

Rose 21: Epilogue
Impossible Decision

Of the seven people involved in the wrecks that night three ultimately survived.
- I was treated for cuts and bruises, a broken leg and rib, and a hairline fracture on the left side of my skull where the gas container stuck me.
- Although I didn’t know it until later, one other student survived the red truck’s devastating crash. He had been one of the three in the back of the truck and had been throw clear when it hit the tree. He suffered a broken neck in the crash and was out cold until the paramedics arrived on the scene. The authorities threw the book at him, charging him with everything from trivial traffic violations, to accessory to murder and he pleaded guilty to it all. He explained in a prepared statement before they took him off to jail that he was deeply sorry for what had happened and serving his time for his crimes was the least he could to do make amends.
- The final survivor of that night, the nineteen year old who murdered Rose, suffered serious injuries in the crash and sustained additional life threatening burns from standing to close when he lit the fire. Ironically his life was saved by the use of cloned organs and synthetic bones. In addition to Rose’s murder he was charged with three counts of vehicular manslaughter. It turned out he was the driver of the truck and was thus responsible for the other three students killed that night. I testified against him during his trial for Rose’s murder but was ambivalent when I heard his sentence. On one hand it was good that he got life in prison with no chance of parole, on the other I couldn’t help but wish I lived a century ago, at the turn of the millennium, back before the death penalty had been abolished. That way my tax money wouldn’t be going towards his health and well being for the next seventy to eighty years.
- Bobby and I parted company two days after Rose’s death. He’s tried to contact me since then but I ignored, avoided, or just plain walked away from him every time. I know I should forgive him for his small role in what happened, but I haven’t been able to yet.
- Rose’s parents were supportive and sympathetic but I said my final goodbyes to them when I learned that they had commissioned a new daughter from Synthetic Creations. They chose to have a nineteen year old based on a donor named Robin quick-cloned for them. She’ll be “born” in a few months time but I plan on staying far away.
-There was one other person I met because of my all to brief friendship with Rose Potts. Someone who neither Rose or I ever expected or even wanted to meet. She was waiting for me in the parking lot, away from the press and the hoopla, after Rose’s killer’s final trial.
“Can I talk to your for a minute,” she asked as I approached. Her familiar voice froze me in my tracks and I stared at her in disbelief. The woman standing before me wore different, classier clothes, had a shorter style of hair, and a face with nearly twenty more years of age on it but it was unmistakable to me that I was looking at Rose. The original Rose.
“What do you want?” I asked softly, doing my best to contain the swirling emotions threatening to tear me apart.
“My name is Rose Ma…”
“I know who you are,” I interrupted disagreeably, “you’re Rose’s genetic donor. Now what do you want?”
She sighed, exactly like my Rose used to do, and said, “It’s disturbing to see yourself, even a copy of yourself, on the national news after having been murdered. Burned to death… I was at the trials as well, and I saw what you did for her, attending every trial, talking so much to the press, honoring her memory, and I wanted to express my gratitude for what you did, and my remorse for your loss.”
“I don’t want either,” I told her bitterly as my vision clouded with tears. “You can’t imagine how hard it is to see her… you… standing here. Please just leave me alone.”
“Okay,” she nodded… even her mannerisms and movements were the same… “but first let me give you something,” she said, handing me a fairly standard looking data module.
“What is this?” I asked.
“I was a genetic and brain map donor four times, for Roses 12, 15, 18, and 21. Each time in addition to my payment and royalties they gave me one of those. It’s an authorization to have a clone of myself commissioned. I’m giving it to you.”
“Wha… what am I supposed to do with this?” I asked shakily.
“You could sell it,” she offered, “it would be worth around eighty million dollars now. Or, you could bring her back, almost exactly as she was before. Synthetic Creations agreed to disregard their usual background checks and procedures for you this one time, if that’s what you want to do.”
“I can’t do that… either of those,” I told her. “Selling it would be like selling her, to a stranger. And bringing her back… It goes against everything I believe.”
“Then just keep it,” she said simple, just my Rose used to do sometimes when we disagreed on something. Neither of us seemed to know how to continue so she turned and walked away to what was apparently her luxury car and drove away without saying another word. I should have talked to her more, asked her more questions, but instead I let her go and let her leave me with the hardest decision I’d ever have to make. Every few days I’ll pull out that small memory module and reconsider my options. It’s so tempting to sell it, so tempting to try and have Rose back… What would you do?

The End.