Melissa Klein was a girl who could clone herself. It hadn’t been something she’d discovered, no; she’d been born with it.

This made things very awkward as a baby. Parenting, as her mother and father would often say, was hard enough when it was just one child. When you suddenly had two or three or five children to take care of, things became a lot more difficult. And being a baby, Melissa had no way of understanding her family’s desperate pleas to limit the ability.

Fortunately, Mr and Mrs Klein had been smart about it and reached out for help. It had taken a little bit of doing at first. Rude names had been thrown around; names like ‘lunatic’ and ‘irrationally hysterical’. But when it came right down to it, insults could only go so far against reams of video footage, eight physically-identical infants, and the fact the ninth was currently in the process of undergoing mitosis from the eighth in front of the skeptics. It wasn’t pretty, but it did the job.

The Klein family found themselves relocated to an expansive apartment in a wealthy part of the city overlooking the river. They received a healthy government stipend, all the toys the thirteen Melissas could want, and a salaried staff on duty to take care of the twenty-one Melissas.

The idea had been to conduct humane experiments on the Melissas in a loving, secure environment. However, it became quickly apparent that even the spacious apartment wasn’t going to be enough to contain the thirty-four Melissas. The food and cleaning bills were starting to approach those of a small community organisation and the stipend wasn’t cutting it. The question on everyone’s mind, but which no one wanted to ask, was what they were going to do if they couldn’t stop the Melissas from duplicating.

The Klein family moved to a secret compound out in the countryside, abandoning their city home for the necessity of space. The growing army of staff moved with them. The focus of the experiments shifted from investigating the source of Melissa’s remarkable powers to finding a way to turn them off.

While the DNA tests were being looked at, the country’s greatest educational and developmental minds were being flown in to deal with the problem. Behavioural therapists, advanced educators, and parenting experts. If biological science couldn’t find an answer, maybe developmental therapy could. If they could advance the fifty-five Melissas’ childhood learning far enough to be able to control her ability, it could be another avenue to success, after all. Fifty-five was a big class, though; so big they had to split it into two. Classrooms full of students who were still bawling babies.

They were close, the experts were saying to Mr and Mrs Klein. The parents would wander around the compound, hugging their daughters and trying to extend all the affection they could – but could only spare one eighty-ninth of their time per child among the crowd. The problem was that the Melissas were duplicating too fast. Even with the country’s leaders racing against the clock to find a cure, it was only a matter of weeks before even the compound failed to contain the one hundred and forty-four Melissas.

Sad-faced and fearful, scientists began to whisper around the compound paddocks, where two hundred and thirty-three happy Melissas giggled and cried and did typical baby things. Abrupt silences would fall when the Kleins entered a room. Drawn faces and tired eyes gazed out at the field of Melissas, all three hundred and thirty-seven of them, several dozen of them undergoing mitosis at any given point. And when the exhausted parents were gone once more, their hushed tones betrayed the discussions no one wanted to have.

It was never recorded, exactly, what happened to Melissa and her clones. The files were wiped, the evidence deleted, the area above the compound a blank patch in the all-seeing eye of Google Earth. All we know is that the location of the compound was barred off, a perimeter drawn and its staff evacuated. Mr and Mrs Klein departed with them, by all accounts haggard shells of their former selves.

What we do know is that it was a very large perimeter.

And that we may have very little time.