Chapter 59

  CLONE ALONE

  NEW YORK/2059

  Sophia sat alone on the lower level of the office block—affectionately known as the Junkyard. It wasn’t garbage that filled the space, but the salvaged remains of discarded robots, now transformed into functioning prototypes. The order, the precision, the eerie beauty of the space—these were Sophia’s handiwork.

  Mechanical limbs hung from the walls like modern art installations in a gallery for the post-human age. Bundles of metal tendons intertwined with next-gen silicon-rubber musculature, designed to mimic the strength and elasticity of human tissue. They held a strange elegance, as if frozen mid-movement—half machine, half phantom.

  Across aluminium racks, stretched canvases of synthetic skin glowed beneath the soft wash of overhead lights. Taut, translucent, almost breathing, they shimmered with the motion of capillary-like conduits beneath the surface, pulsing with nutrient solution and oxygen. The skin was grown from genetically engineered fungi, lab-modified to replicate human texture and tone. Invisible to the naked eye, trillions of symbiotic microbiota lived on its surface, feeding on the fungal layers and excreting compounds that kept it moist, supple, and eerily lifelike. A microcosm—thriving, adapting, surviving.

  But Sophia wasn’t admiring her work.

  She sat still, staring at nothing, her mind replaying the moment she filed the bug bounty report to Stipe Industries. She had included just enough—the outline of how Adam had breached the firewall, key details scraped from his laptop. But the core method, the exact exploit, remained locked inside Adam’s mind.

  This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

  Only ten minutes after sending the email, her phone rang.

  The voice on the other end had a faint Scottish lilt, just enough to send her pulse racing with disbelief. Ethan Stipe. The Ethan Stipe. He said he’d be in New York next week. He wanted to meet—her and Adam. To finalize the bug bounty payout. And maybe... something more.

  Now Sophia was working furiously. She had defrosted her own stem cells, hoping she had eradicated any viral contamination through gene editing—a technique effective in a petri dish, but not viable inside her body. Time was running out. The illness—Pandorion—would begin degrading her physical and mental capacities within months, maybe less. A cure was theoretically possible. But realistically? Even with advanced AI, even with her overlapping areas of expertise, Pandorion virology was a foreign language. The learning curve was steep, and the window of opportunity was vanishingly small.

  So she had chosen another path: replication.

  They had struggled for years to create robots that truly thought like humans, that felt emotions. Sure, they could make them clever. But human emotions required biochemical reward loops—"selfish genes" aware of their own existence, driven by evolution to survive. To simulate that, they needed more than a cluster of cells—they needed substantial brain mass.

  She would have to clone her brain. At least half of it. Just enough to create something like her.

  She had considered cloning her entire brain—but that felt wrong. That would be creating a person. An individual. Someone she couldn’t control. Someone who might feel no loyalty, might leave her cryo-frozen body to rot on the Moon.

  But half a brain? That she could code. Control. Shape its reward systems like a dog owner handing out treats for tricks—roll over, jump through a hoop.

  It would be far easier to build the robot she and Adam had always dreamed of if she took this route.

  But of course, it was unethical. And illegal.

  No one had ever done it before.

  But Sophia was sure she could.

  Adam, however, wouldn’t cross that line.

  So, she would cross it alone.