Cloned

Davis is a small town, neatly nestled off the bustling Highway 80. Placid fields of green encapsulate paved streets; paved streets provide the canvas for vivid scenes of town life—restaurant after restaurant, bicycle after bicycle, blue after red after yellow—but the soul of this painting, the pallet from which these vivacious strokes pass, is a campus. University of California: Davis. It is an educational institution of the highest prestige, with students of the most ambitious expectations.

Despite its factual and learned disposition, nature encroaches ceaselessly onto the campus: birches whisper as the wind rustles their leaves; carnations gussy themselves with dew and swoon in the breeze; grass blades stand rigid and proud in the glorious daylight. Clean, alabaster buildings sport teal trimmings around glistening windows, which peer into lecture halls as great as stadiums. Here, professors pitch calculus, nineteenth-century literature, the French Revolution, and Newton’s laws at record-breaking speed, as amateur batters frantically swing and flail at the pelting information.

In the peripheries, dormitories of a less animated beige quietly reside; the Segundo Dormitory shies behind sprawling ivory and under protective trees. Seas of students swell in and out of the dorms, through and about Davis; tides rise and fall at dining hours, and people create the constant motion of swaying and rocking between class and social life. Swaying and rocking,
swaying and rocking—those who fail to adjust may experience severe sea-sickness.

Upon entering Segundo, susceptibility to this illness increases: characterless, stony white walls enclose a linoleum brown floor. A cold black rail provides aid up the steel staircase, the clang of hurried shoes on rickety stairs reverberating up and down the corridors. Each floor is identical to the first and identical to the last. Dorm, after dorm, after dorm, all are the same size, same color, same furnishing. One student in particular ambles along the fourth floor past many dorms, past the static television (which each floor contains a specified room for), and stops at a rectangular wooden door without any distinguishing feature, save the bold black digits, 436.

He shuffles into the room, which is dimly lit by a single window, half-covered by an average wooden desk of average size and quality, with the average potential to shelve working space. The desk’s twin resides directly beside it; hundreds of their clones slumber in the dormitories, genetically processed to be exact replications in identical cells, coded by serial numbers. The same bed on either side of the desks, the same dressers on each end, the same clock plastered to the same wall of every room ticks dully and monotonously, like a heartbeat pounding in one’s ears in the shattering silence of night.

The resident of Dormitory 436 carefully slides his laptop onto the desk and reclines in the grey office chair. He then opens his textbook with surgical precision and mechanically types, pausing momentarily to think and gaze out the partly obtruded window. The California sun pervades warmth and light throughout the campus; other windows glitter high above the mirth of people strolling through simplistic nature, unlike his own window, casting shadows about the deserted Segundo Dormitories. He eyes smoke dissipating into clouds, their grey trails still smell of the simmering coals of the grill in town. The tree branches scrape against the stony building
and the leaves’ shadows dance across the walls, perfectly choreographed and synchronized with the drumming on the window and singing of the finches. More foliage rustles outside; a gust of wind whisks a few crimson blossoms in the crisp air, and they join the leafy dance.

The clock ticks. The typing drones on. The natural light of the sun fades, and florescent beams of artificial light blind the young student, yet he continues to work. Tick-tock, type, tick-tock, type, the keyboard is his instrument, swiftly and diligently pressing the keys; the textbook is his score, providing the complex language he is to translate into music; the clock is his conductor, waving its hands about, pointing to specific measures and keeping time. Other musicians gather in the dorms and begin playing, bringing their own individual talents and personalities to the song until such an elaborate concert is composed, Segundo is alive.

Frivolous, bright flowers open their petals and sway in the breeze, free to dance, free to blush, free to simply exist. The dormitories isolate students in the institutional confinements of endless rows, floors, buildings of cloned rooms, sustainable to regiments of androids. Outside, Davis composes music with vivacity and the wisps of nature; in Segundo, the notes emerge from the persistent clicking and ticking of hard work—labor intensive and highly industrialized education. They produce different melodies, but both resonate throughout the rural little town around the world-renowned university.

-Macile