28 December 2002

Attack of the Clones

There is no BBC World Service on my National Public Radio station on the weekends. I awoke alone in the cool darkness of the apartment and turned the coffee and a symphony on. The sound George Auric's rich strings filled the small I turned on the computer and stepped out onto the balcony to survey my domain. Venus is bright against the darkness and the moon is half, hanging at zenith. A meteor, a large one, streaked across the sky, headed to an appointment with oblivion to the southwest of Washington. I had not known there was a shower scheduled this morning or I would have arisen even earlier for the show. But it is cold out there. I reentered the apartment and scanned the headlines on my start page, looking for word about the election in Kenya.

I got sidetracked, which is the actual function of the Internet. In years past I would have bought a paper and The Washington Post would have told me what was important. It would have led me through the top news to the OpEd, where they would have told me what to think about the news I had just read and then soothed me with the comics and a horoscope to help me predict the rest of the weekend. The world's chaos rendered into a linear path of newsprint. Nowadays, the web just offers up everything simultaneously. A cacaphony replicated endlessly.

I clicked on a hypertext link next to my inbox icon. The story was that two youngsters opened a Barney the Dinosaur book and discovered a photograph of a man and woman in a naked embrace. The publisher has had similar problems in the past, noted the article. You know exactly where this stuff leads, and it got more alarming. The next story indicated there was a scandal at the Mattel Corporation.

Barbie's longtime pal, Midge is now married and pregnant. I was concerned. I didn't even know she was dating! The doll, thousands of genetically identical copies, was yanked from Wal-Mart shelves earlier this month after customers complained about the doll, a company spokeswoman said. They apparently forgot how their daughters got here. Others are not in the dark, and in fact have struck out boldly in this season of the Virgin Birth. According to the AOL service, a chemist said her company has produced the first human clone, an infant girl genetically identical to her 31-year-old American mother. The picture of the chemist is scary. She looks a bit like Brigitte Bardot, or maybe Midge, left out in the sun too long. She is of French extraction and apparently believes that the human race was cloned from aliens eons ago and left to colonize the planet. She further claims there are four more clones coming, so this would be the Attack of the Clones, I suppose. Just a very slow one.

Moreover, and correct me if I am wrong here, if we are clones of the aliens, doesn't that mean that we are just aliens ourselves? And therefore they aren't aliens at all, strictly speaking?

I dunno. The nation has no specific law against human cloning. But a spokesman for the Food and Drug Administration, which attempts to regulate all human experiments, alien or not, contends that its regulations forbid human cloning without prior agency permission. FDA officials already are investigating whether Clonaid- which I think sounds like a sports drink- illegally performed some of the work on US soil. The FDA is a thing of wonder, another of those genetically identical Federal activities that litter our city, churning out regulations and ensuring compliance.

There is reporters broad support in Congress for an overt ban of cloning to produce babies, but many senators are not averse to cloning embryos solely for research that could cure Alzheimer's or produce replacement livers, two topics of intense interest to the Hill. When they remember.

I don't know. I do know this: the Internet has fundamentally changed human life. It is now possible to clone stupid jokes in the safety and comfort of our own homes, many of them on American soil. The FDA cannot stop us. I freely admit that I was one of them, forwarding all manner of idiocy to my friends and loved ones. This came across the web yesterday morning, and I got distracted as I tried to get my arms around the world situation from the BBC. A coworker sent me this clone of a joke, genetically identical to zillions of others stored in server farms around the globe:

"A major research institution has recently announced the discovery of the heaviest element yet known to science, surpassing the yet-unnamed "Element 110" discovered in 1994 with atomic mass of 281. This new element, not yet verified by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC), has been tentatively named "Administratium." Administratium has 1 neutron, 12 assistant neutrons, 75 deputy neutrons, and 111 assistant deputy neutrons, giving it an atomic mass of 312.

These 312 particles are held together by a force called morons, which are surrounded by vast quantities of lepton-like particles called peons.

Since Administratium has no electrons, it is inert. It can be detected, however, as it impedes every reaction with which it comes into contact. A minute amount of Administratium causes one reaction to take over 4 days to complete when it would normally take less than a second.

Administratium has a normal half-life of 3 years; it does not decay but instead undergoes a reorganization in which a portion of the assistant neutrons and deputy neutrons exchange places. In fact, Administratium's mass will actually increase over time, since each reorganization causes some morons to become neutrons, forming isodopes. This characteristic of moron-promotion leads some scientists to speculate that Administratium is formed whenever morons reach a certain quantity in concentration.

This hypothetical quantity is referred to as "Critical Morass." You will know it when you see it."

I was alert and knew I had to do something to stop this thing. I needed to call the FDA clone hotline, purge my cache file, delete it off the server, stomp on it and all it's cloned brothers. Instead, my fingers trembled on the keyboard and I answered it:

"Thanks! Excellent recap but they glossed over one of the more interesting aspects of seasonal influences on atomic weight. This is a phenomenon in which the isodope loses many morons temporarily, actually causing time to move backward. This happens many times during the year, normally for three day periods. At the end of December, however, so many morons are freed from the electromagnetic bond that a hollow cavity is formed. When entropy brings the loose morons back to the nucleus it takes weeks for the isodope to begin even sluggish atomic motion."

Then I sent it. I swear I only sent it once. I didn't clone a thing, not on US soil. I think. The server farm where they process this stuff could be on Mars. Or Africa for that matter. Oh, the word from that continent gives me hope. The Kenyan opposition National Rainbow Coalition (NARC) is about to overturn almost four decades of dominance by Daniel arap Moi's KANU party. NARC leader Mwai Kibaki is leading Uhuru Kenyatta by a three-to-one margin with 41,453 votes counted. Democracy seems like it is about to work.

If it had been in Robert Mugubwe's Zimbabwe, they just would have cloned more votes. Just enough to win.