I know this is getting long winded, but I’m hoping you’re still with me. The best parts are yet to come, trust me on this.

So, I found out later that the corporation liked to keep the people who worked here close. That the people who worked in other departments also worked at the restaurant. In fact, all of the employees that worked in The Grasshopper already worked for the company in another capacity. That went for the night club as well. It was also why only employees were living on the third floor.

The corporation liked having a tight knit family and I found out later that not just anyone could get in to work for The High Castle Corporation. They almost never advertise for jobs and always recruited, either on their own or through designated headhunters who could find the right people for them.

I kind of figured that out already. Frank and I had been hired without any real interviews. Clearly Frank had been on a headhunter’s radar for months or maybe even years. It was Sheila who told me that if they did not fully trust us or understand our abilities or who we really were, then we never would have gotten through the front doors. I had sort of figured that out already as well. So, I was not surprised when she confirmed it. Frank had already said as much himself. But with Frank, I never know. I still do not fully trust him even though he is a father figure to me and a close friend. The man could be secretive and that kept me from trusting him fully.

Jaz took about a week before he got over his fury about how much better I was paid than him. He had been at the company for five years and I had been there a month now. For him it was the principal of it.

The day he got over his anger, he marched down to accounting and demanded a raise. He got one. After that, he was sweet as apple pie to me. I just motivated him and gave him reason to deserve that raise. He was my best buddy now, always making a point to say hello and converse with me. I quickly became a regular at the restaurant and he always made sure I had the best treatment when it was his shift. I also made damn sure Jacob wasn’t completely wrecked whenever I was with him. The food was damn good. I was surprised that more of the staff did not eat at The Grasshopper on a regular basis.

As for my other new friend Dominic, the conversations just got stranger the longer I knew him. We were sitting outside for lunch one day. The building was faced by parking lots on two sides and loading docks in the back, but the fourth side was a small strip of well-manicured lawn with a few picnic benches that nobody had ever used. At least not since I had been there.

Maybe the run-down neighborhood kept people indoors, but once and a while I needed to get out and breathe some fresh air. That day I had convinced Dominic to join me while the others only grumbled and made excuses for why they could not break their routine.

“Alright, so you have been in this town for what, six weeks now?” Dominic questioned me.

We had finished our lunch and now we were just lounging at the table and smoking our vapes. I needed some CBD just feel normal whenever I talked with Dominic. I nodded and replied. “Yeah, that sounds about right.”

“You like the restaurant?” He was squinting at me. It was a sunny day. He forgot his sunglasses inside.

“Yeah, it’s great. I have been eating there for weeks now,” I confessed. My shades hid my own eyes.

“Yeah, I go there sometimes myself. Some people think it’s kind of weird, but I like having the place right here at work, you know what I mean?”

“I’m beginning to feel the same way,” I agreed.

“Now have you been to the night club yet?” He inquired. “You know, the Friday and Saturday night thing they got going on here.”

“Actually, no,” I had not been in the mood for such things yet. Not that I was completely against the idea, I had been meaning to check it out. I just hadn’t gotten around to it yet.

“Tomorrow is Friday, you should come out,” Dominic said. “There is a group of us going!” He gave me a knowing look and added. “That’s where you will find all of the pussy!”

“Yeah, I’ll keep that in mind,” I said absently. I puffed some more on my vape. I wasn’t really buying what he was trying to sell.

“Now, don’t tell me you have a girlfriend or some ex you’re pining for right now, do you?” Dominic questioned. “I don’t know what you had back in New York, but I hope it’s nothing like that!”

“No, no,” I said a bit too defensively. “Nothing like that.”

“Then come out with me tomorrow! We’ll hit the club!?” He encouraged.

“I don’t know,” I responded. Then I confessed. “The club scene isn’t for me. I hate trying to get hooked up like that. I’m not very good at picking up girls, going on dates and such.”

“Then just get drunk with us!” He suggested. “Who cares!? You only live a floor away. The bouncer can carry you home! You already know him anyway.”

“Who!?” I demanded.

“Steve, in security,” Dominic stated.

“The Jet Li looking dude that always says hello to me when I come in to work!?” I said in surprise.

“Yeah, that’s him!” Dominic replied. After a long silence he said. “Look, I think you really need to get laid soon, so I think there is another option…”

“No hookers!” I said before he could even finish. I should have let him finish. What he ended up telling me was way more fucked up than hookers.

“Nope,” he said. “Better than that!”

He waited and finally I said. “Alright…”

“Make your own clone,” Dominic stated.

“What the hell are you talking about!?” I stared at him like he had two heads.

“I’m talking about making another person, preferable a woman, to be your wife, mistress or just a sex toy. Whatever your deal is man!” Dominic said like a stage performer trying to blow my mind with some magic trick. It wasn’t working and only left me confused.

I thought about it for a moment before saying. “Are you sure you’re only putting nicotine in that thing, because I know Jacob has been working on a few things…”

“I’m serious!” Dominic proclaimed. “Make your own… partner. Whatever you want to call it!”

“That’s impossible,” I said dismissing the thought out right. I assumed Dominic must be fucking with me somehow. “You can’t just make a fully grown person.”

“Yes, actually, you can,” he insisted.

“It’s impossible!” I insisted. It’s far too complicated to do something like that… I think!?

“What do you think we are working up on the second floor?” Dominic said in a cold and serious way that sent a chill down my spine.

What the hell was going on here, I thought. My eyes went wide with disbelief. Without thinking I said. “Bullshit!” But something in the back of my mind was telling me this was authentic.

“I’m telling you, it’s true!” And he meant it. He really meant it. And what was worse, he was excited about it. Like a child with a brand-new toy on Christmas.

“Even if it was real,” I started to say, but my words were unsteady, faltering. My voice cracked as I spoke. “It’s illegal to clone a human being!”

“Not anymore,” Dominic replied. His voice was deadly serious now.

Something tasted like metal in my mouth. I said. “What do you mean by that? They passed a law against it, the whole world did! Decades ago.”

“You haven’t heard of the Supreme Court ruling, have you?” He questioned.

I shook my head. I hadn’t been paying much attention to the news lately. I should have been. I should not have missed this. It was too big. No one else had mentioned it to me.

“The Supreme Court struck the law down,” Dominic told me.

“What!? How!?” I demanded. I was stunned.

“It was that couple in the news a few years back. They wanted to clone their dead son,” Dominic explained. “They were denied by the government, so they took the case all the way to the top and they won the right to clone him!”

He let that fact sink in before adding. “Under the law everyone owns their own DNA, right?”

I nodded. I remembered there being a Supreme Court ruling years ago that made it illegal for anyone to claim a right to your unique DNA. It kept corporations from patenting the human genome.

“Then by extension, logic would dictate that you would own your own clone,” he concluded.

I shook my head. That sounded impossible. “What!?”

“You could make a clone from your own DNA, say a woman. And you would own her,” he pointed it out for me. “She’s you, your DNA, and you own your DNA.”

My mind was spinning as I thought about the implications. “That’s insane! You can’t own someone! What you’re talking about is legalized slavery! That’s unconstitutional! There’s like amendments against that shit!”

“Is it legally a person if you make them, if they are you?” Dominic questioned. “The company is arguing that such clones are property. The company is very wealthy, JR, they have a lot of friends in Congress, hell they have their own lobby group!”

“But the implications of this… I mean, you could make someone and then harvest their organs!?” This conversation was starting to make me feel ill.

“Why!?” Dominic retorted. The idea did not seem to repulse him in the slightest. “You can just clone your organs already. We’ve been doing it for years. You don’t need a whole human for that!”

“I don’t know what to say here Dominic,” I replied. “This is just too crazy to even consider theoretically!”

Dominic stood up. “Come on inside,” he said to me. “I want to show you something.”

“Sorry, I have to get back to the lab…” I tried to protest.

“The lab is not going anywhere. You never got a proper tour of my department,” Dominic told me.

“I don’t want to be late. They already don’t like me…”

“Relax, they won’t care if you gone an extra ten minutes.” Dominic reasoned. “It’s total fine I have shown other people my department. Just come on.”

“Alright,” I said. “Make it quick.”

We went inside and he took me to the second floor. It looked like a typical bio lab, the kind you might find anywhere across the country. As we got deeper into the department, the equipment got more advanced. I started getting more spooked. There were a lot of people in lab coats, but they looked random and generic, like they could have been anybody or even extra from a movie. It made me feel uneasy about being here. I just kept taking deep breaths and trusted that Dominic had good intentions and that I wasn’t going to be turned into some kind of creepy experiment.

Then there was a layer of security where Dominic had to show his card to get the door to open. When we got inside, it was darker. I saw vats that were shaped kind of like coffins. But they were closed we could not see inside. Finally, we came to one that was open. What I saw was frightening. I started to shake with fear when I saw it.

It lay there under glass, floating in a nutrient rich fluid with a bed of cold steel beneath it. It was fully formed human brain, but worse because there was more there than just the brain. The eyes were also there and so were the ear cavities with all the nerve endings. It looked like a horror without all the flesh around it as it should be.

The entire nervous system came down from the brain stem and was splayed out. Thick knots of nerves like roots of a tree running down from the brain twisting out in all directions. Reaching searching desiring a form, something to connect with for input, but nothing was there.

Does that mean it could feel, see and hear!? It was eerie and the creepiest thing I have ever seen in my life. Dominic pulled a leather cushioned stool up to it and sat down next to it. It was then that I noticed the lights were much dimmer in this room then in the rest of the lab. Was that needed?

I swear, when I first entered the room, the eyes moved as if they were trying to look at me. I almost bolted from the room, but something had me transfixed. Frozen in place. My feet would not move, and my heart would not calm down.

“This is it,” he told me. His voice was strangely quiet like he was seeing the greatest thing ever and he wanted to give it the respect it deserved. “This is all we are, JR. A brain to do the thinking, using electrochemical signals to store information and process data coming in from the senses. It’s a computer really but made of jelly and proteins.”

“This is fucked up,” I said shaking my head.

“No, this is what a Human being actually is,” Dominic corrected me. “Some say that we’re merely ghosts, piloting these biological computers attached to a skeleton molded in flesh. Throw in some organs and skin and you have a person. But the truth is we don’t know all the details as to how consciousness arises in the body or brain. Or at what stage in development we become self-aware.”

“Jesus… fucking… Christ,” I swore quietly as much to myself as to Dominic. “Is it alive right now? Can it see us?”

Dominic shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe?” He suggested.

“You just throw a bunch of cells together and it comes to life?” I questioned. “How? Do you shock it like Frankenstein?”

“How does any life form work?” He posed back at me. “The cells are just made form proteins and yet somehow they just know what to do once they are together.”

“That seems impossible,” I commented.

“Do you know much about physics?” he asked me.

I shook my head. “Only in so much as it applies to chemistry. Theoretical Physics is beyond me.”

“Consider this. Everything you've ever done, seen, felt, thought or will ever do is nothing more than electrons changing places inside the brain. Isn’t that incredible?” He was pointing out things that on a subconscious level I knew to be true but had never really thought about before until now. I was frozen, unsure of how to respond without sounding stupid. Dominic was very well educated, which I’m sure he had to be to work here, but he comes off completely different in outside of work. Then he added. “As a chemist I’m sure you can appreciate that idea.”

I could not answer him, so I stood and stared at this thing in silence. Next to this horror show there was a large cabinet with many draws of different sizes in each row. Dominic opened one. Inside was a clear container. It contained a fully formed heart pumping fluid through it. “I 3D printed this the other day using our handy bio-chem printer. See how it’s already beating? Cool, right?”

I nodded absently. Cool!? I thought it was eerie as fuck! I can only hope whoever reads my account would feel the same way.

“I didn’t have to do anything. No electric shock, just nutrients to keep the cells alive,” Dominic said to me. “Once the cells were all together. They just started beating, on their own. Like they had been waiting to do it. Maybe that’s how the brain works? Maybe that’s how we become ghost in these flesh shells?”

“Is that heart for this?” I asked indicating the brain in the vat. Was he building a person. This was insane!

“It was just an experiment really,” he commented. “I suppose it could, but you would need to make everything else too. But who says the body needs to be of flesh?”

“What!?” By God was this going to get worse, was he going to say what I think he was going to say. Do you know where he was going with this?

“We could build an artificial body,” yep, he was going there alright. “As long as the living part is in a nutrient rich fluid. It could be done.”

“We don’t have the technology yet…” I started to say, but I realized he was about to tell me I was wrong.

I was right.

“The tech already exists,” he informed me. “We have been playing around with a limited form of AI, but its not working out the way we hoped.”

Holy shit! Holy shit! Was all I kept thinking. They are playing with life and consciousness like it was some sort of game. But to what end!?

“What if we took this right here and put it in an android body?” He was speculating the possibilities now. At least I hoped it was speculation.

I was left utterly speechless. I mean, I get the premise. We are ghosts controlling a machine made of flesh and bone, but who says it has to be flesh? Theoretically, it could control an artificial body. Holy shit! What if consciousness could be transferred to an artificial body? You could live forever.

What the fuck was that book series? The one with the alien technology that allowed consciousness to be transferred from body to body. Altered Carbon! Have you read it? I’ll wait while you get up to speed. Okay, do you get it now? Was Dominic talking about doing something similar only with a human brain and nervous system instead of alien tech? It was a frightening thought and I really hoped this wasn’t actually happening.

I looked down at the horror, the idea that this brain floating in a vat could be alive right now was insane to me. Call me old fashioned, but what about a soul? What if there is no soul and this is all we are!? Just brains floating in a vat hooked up to a giant machine that gives us a variety experiences. It would bring us full circle back to the Matrix idea again. Fuck! Do I really want to consider all this right now?

“Anyways, as I was telling you outside. This isn’t theoretical. This is something that is already being done,” he stated. “The experiments are under way as we speak. The lab is looking for people. We need individuals to join in the experiment and I can get you in as one of them.”

I reeled like I had just had a bucket of cold water thrown in my face. Did he just say what I think he said!? I shook my head. “I’m not the right person for this Dom.”

“Come on man,” Dominic said a bit disappointed. He really thought he could sell me on it. “Why not? This is a chance to be a part of cutting-edge science.”

My knees felt like buckling, but I remained on my feet, nonetheless. This brain with eyes kept staring at me. I couldn’t take it anymore, so I said. “Because this isn’t right. This is Frankenstein! This is science run amok! This scares me!”

“This is the future. This can’t be stopped JR,” Dominic countered. “In the future everything is going to be different. Mankind will have control over everything… physics, chemistry and biology. We are on the cusp of something great…”

“No,” I told him. I didn’t want to hear the rest of his speech so I summed it up the best way I could. “Corporations will have control and that’s the real problem. Corporations don’t have a conscience, shame or a soul. If they have control over this, they will produce monsters, supermen or worse prison guards for the rest of us. They don’t give a shit about us, only profits.”

“You’re overreacting just a little here,” Dominic said shaking his head. “If our entire lives are just electrons, then that can be copied somehow. Maybe into a younger or stronger body. Or maybe create a totally new person. Maybe you could choose to be female or whatever you want. We could build you a whole family. Why stop at a wife? Why not make children to go with them. Want a family? Done. Just give us your DNA and a couple of weeks you can have it all.”

“I can’t,” I said shaking my head. “I just can’t.”

“Don’t worry I get it. We make them sterile. These clones… they can’t reproduce,” Dominic explained. “We’ve been working on this for a while now. I get why you’re against it, but trust me, we have thought of everything.”

“No,” I said as I started walking away. “No one can ever think of everything. I’m sorry Dominic, but I have to get back to work.”

Dominic let out a sigh. “Alright, but are we still on for the club tomorrow night!?”

I turned around to face him. I was ready to open the door and leave. “I’ll see you there!”

He smiled like a Cheshire cat.

I opened the door and left. I had to get out of there. I could not get to the elevator fast enough. I needed to get outside into the fresh air.

That bastard got me after all though, didn’t he!?

I was going to have nightmares tonight, no doubt about it.