Most outside humans don’t know that donor families are allowed to visit the compound. The compound does everything it can to avoid the situation: not informing donor families, then advising of the likely trauma if visitation is requested. But they’re trapped by early cloning laws designed to reassure the public and increase donations.

They pulled me from the Ethics lecture without explanation. I was on edge already. The teacher had been repeating an early lecture—a sure sign that deployment was coming. Now my hand had been upgraded, it couldn’t be long.

The enemy soldiers would destroy Aotearoa. They had committed monstrosities. Their countries were run by dictators who would do anything to win. And besides, most of the soldiers were clones, so we wouldn’t actually be killing. You couldn’t kill something that wasn’t truly alive.

As they marched me down the corridor, the voice I imagined as Kali’s raged in my head.

If we’re human, this is murder. The government is murdering us. They’re making us murder for them. Anything to win. The same as every other government in the world.

I’d had my morning serum shot but they were less effective with every day. I’d found my free mind, thanks to Kali, and I wouldn’t let them drug it away from me again. They dropped me in a room I’d never been in before. Dr Walker was waiting. I held my fists behind my back so she wouldn’t see them clenching.

“The Macdonald family have requested visitation. This will be a difficult meeting for them, so best behaviour. Just repeat what you have been taught and it will be over shortly, then you may return to class.”

She approached with a serum shot—double the normal dose. I held out my metal arm. It had a slot built in by my elbow, where wires plunged into skin, designed for a short lifetime of serum shots.

Overworked, naive Dr Walker moved the serum shot closer. She’d be fired for this. She’d missed all the signs.

I grabbed the shot and crushed it in steel fingertips. Glass and liquid shattered, slicing her fingers but harmless to the artificial arm they had forced on me. She released one breathy squeak of surprise before I chopped at her windpipe. She crumpled without another sound.

I walked into the next room, and came face to face with my donor’s next of kin.

Mr Macdonald had my long nose. Mrs Macdonald mirrored my square chin and small eyes. I stood in the doorway, staring at them with no expression on my face—exactly what they had been told to expect. An emotionless clone who looked like their child, but wasn’t really. Just a robotic copy. A body created to save Aotearoa’s human soldiers.

They glanced at each other with their watery eyes, clinging on to one another under the table.

“You can sit, Al—” Mrs Macdonald caught herself. Her eyes flicked down to the paper in front of her, with information about my training as a bomb defusal specialist. All my life’s history, according to this institute… and it was only half a page. “Uh… 5031. Please, sit.”

I sat, as ordered, my back perfectly straight. A soldier’s perfect posture.

“Tui. I call myself Tui.”

They blinked, caught off guard. I knew I didn’t have long to deal with their confusion, so I barged on.

“Why’d you do it? Why’d you donate me?”

Their eyes met again, and the wife shuffled closer to the husband.

“Well, our Alex signed up,” Mr Macdonald said quietly, when his wife failed to speak. “We didn’t even know they had, until after the accident. The letter said it was for the good of the country. To… to save a kiwi soldier from being deployed. And if that’s what Alex wanted… we weren’t going to prevent their wishes.”

My jaw clenched, as if it had been stuck that way with glue. We chose our names and pronouns—unofficially. Our one act of individuality that the nurses and counsellors and other staff never acknowledged. I had never felt like I fit with anything but ‘they’. But I had never expected that might have come from my donor. Even if it was coincidence, this evidence of humanity hit deep. Just another snippet adding to Kali’s conclusion that we were just as human as those in the outside world, numbed into machines by serum.

“So… uh… you are being deployed to—” Mrs Macdonald checked the paperwork again, like she wouldn’t already have read it a dozen times. “Northern Australia?”

“That’s the plan. But maybe something will go wrong. You know, with all the experiments.” Noise came from the reception room where I had knocked out Dr Walker; voices, more urgent and staccato with each word. They would come to get me soon. “I don’t know anything about Alex. I don’t know if I’m the same or different. But I used to draw. Birds. People. Landscapes that I’ll never get to see.” I lifted my metal hand. My skin still shone pink where the wires poked like needles into my body. “I can’t anymore. Being an effective bomb defuser matters more than anything else. Drawing won’t matter, when I die in the name of your child.”

Mr and Mrs Macdonald’s blue eyes were comically wide, like a cartoon character’s. The door slammed open behind me.

“5031, you are required to return to class.”

I knew his deep voice, even when it was laced with panic. I also knew that if I really wanted to get into Block A, I had to push this. So I stayed seated, directing an emotionless smile at Mr and Mrs Macdonald in turn. They were frozen, staring at the mirror image of their child who was being prepped for war. Mr Macdonald couldn’t take his eyes off my metal arm. I turned it slowly, revealing more of the scars near my elbow.

“Drawing won’t matter, when your child’s face is blown off my a bullet.”

“5031!”

My donor’s parents were reeling back in horror.

“But it doesn’t matter. Because I’m not really human. Am I?”

The serum shot stabbed into my neck, and in seconds I felt how strong the dose was. My muscles slumped and head lolled as strong hands grasped me on either side and lifted me from the chair. I could do nothing to fight them. My whole body was useless, the free will to move stolen from me like everything else.

“We are terribly sorry, Mr and Mrs Macdonald. There seems to be an issue with 5031’s programming. Would you please come with me, and we can continue on our tour of the facility…?”

I was manhandled out of the room, past the medic leaning over Dr Walker.

“…serum no longer effective…”

The security guard’s words faded into buzzing as even the sensation in my fingers vanished. The world turned grey…