This story was originally publishedin Slate in December 2022. It is republished here as a part of the Future Tense Fiction project, presented by Issuesin collaboration with ASU’s Center for Science and the Imagination.
Author’s note: Unfortunately, not much has changed since I wrote this short story in 2022, whether it’s the devastating consequences of climate change, such as extreme weather and people being forced to flee their suddenly uninhabitable homes, or the brutal treatment of nature and wildlife by humans. New species are going extinct as we speak—the saddest thing is all the species we never knew about. I’m angry at how ignorant and bad-willed many are about this. There’s also the fact that humans continue to explore the possibilities of genetics and technology, both legally and illegally, and maybe we will manage to convince ourselves that animals can be replaced with just-as-good copies. I fear that. I worry that we could have a future world without wildlife and wild animals, even if ecological awareness spreads. However, I see that, as many have pointed out, we shouldn’t give up on nature completely, that there are several examples of how wildlife adapts. So maybe there’s some hope for the future after all, and perhaps also the next generations can hear the magnificent lion roar in the night.
Electricity was rationed at night in Longyearbyen, yet a few lights blinked stubbornly over the empty streets. Automated trash collectors alternated from side to side. One of them paused, as if sensing the tall man’s presence, then buzzed on, sucking up glittering confetti from the frozen ground.
The man lit a cigarette and tilted his head back, trying to discern the tops of the towering skyscrapers, but the buildings were engulfed in darkness. The city’s residents were still in their beds, many sleeping off hangovers after the Third Light Parade. But even if they had been awake and peering out their windows, they still might not have seen him. Between his height and the huge rifle strapped to his back, you’d think he’d be fairly noticeable, but he was so calm, so unnaturally quiet, that he blended in with the shadows. Only the tiny swirl of smoke from his cigarette gave him away.
He’d been one of just a handful of passengers on the flight from Wainwright. Nearly empty planes were rarely permitted to take off nowadays, but on the last night before the holiday madness started, not even the airport staff in Danmarkshavn had bothered with questions when the plane landed to recharge.
With the massive Christmas Parade only a week away, he knew people would soon be flocking to Longyearbyen to see the spectacle, despite the recent steep rise in flight costs.
The city’s light festival lasted all of December, with smaller parades every week. It was as if the inhabitants wanted to block out the winter darkness and use every opportunity to bring lights and noise and fun to the streets. But the grand finale—the Christmas Parade—was exceptional. Svalbard archipelago, a haven long known for its religious and cultural mix, welcomed new citizens from all over the world, and the Christmas Parade had thus evolved over the years into a synthesis of traditions from everywhere; no one would be surprised to see a man dressed up as an odd combination of Scandinavian barn gnome and scary goatlike Krampus standing with a Catholic priest or an imam on one of the floats.
It was as if the inhabitants wanted to block out the winter darkness and use every opportunity to bring lights and noise and fun to the streets.
The tall man gazed at the trash collectors wheezing past and sneered at the innocent cheerfulness of it all. The pulsating Arctic metropolis was—in his view—merely a puttering, provincial town.
He observed lights coming on high above, one by one, in the ocean of windows. The city was awakening. He tossed his cigarette on the frozen ground and twisted it under his boot a little.
The townspeople, he mused, had no idea how lucky they were that he was not here for them.
On the other side of Longyearbyen, in a building at the mouth of the Advent Valley, Trym yelled at his alarm clock to make it stop. Unfortunately, it hadn’t yet learned to recognize his groggy morning voice. Not even hurling a pillow was effective. Grumbling, he dragged himself out of bed, turned off the piercing noise, and then glanced out the window, a habit he’d formed over the past week.
In the summer season, he could see the tall mountains surrounding the valley. But on this December morning, he saw only lights from nearby windows and the little gathering of people waiting outside his building.
Narrowing his eyes, he studied them. They didn’t hide their presence. On the contrary, several relaxed in camping chairs, chatting, lanterns at their feet. Now and then they’d glance up at his window, and one of them even waved to him.
“Vultures!” he muttered and yanked the curtains shut.
Seething, he pressed the small bird-shaped tattoo concealing the chip in his inner arm, activating Thelma. Instantly, the big screen stretched bright and colorful across his kitchen cabinets.
“Thelma,” he commanded, “one triple espresso!”
The coffee machine whirred into action, and the rich scent of freshly ground beans filled the air. Trym plopped down onto a kitchen chair.
“Open the inbox!”
If you went by the flood of messages he currently received, not even counting the advertising junk, Trym had become a celebrity. Most were inquiries from journalists or letters from people he’d never met but who still felt like expressing their views. “Delete, next, delete, next, delete, next,” he muttered.
Skimming through the news, he noticed that the Third Light Parade was the main topic, with lots of pictures and interviews with enthusiastic onlookers. Trym frowned. He’d never grasped the point of the whole December spectacle. The food was OK, but all those parades and costumes, not to mention the crowds—he just hated it.
Then, below all the merry news, the headlines he’d been looking for:
Still No Sign of Levi Police Widen Search to All Basements Governor Promises Levi Will Be Found Before Christmas Fans Fear Levi Is Dead
The articles were accompanied by various pictures of Levi and, to Trym’s shock, pictures of himself. Swearing, he told Thelma to switch to phone mode. Thelma’s soft voice flowed into his ears: “Your voice mailbox is full. Your first message is from …”
Impatient, he listened to only a word or two of each notification before commanding, “Delete!” Only four messages caught his attention—one from his boss: “It’s chaos here, Trym. Stay away until this is sorted.” One from his co-worker Kaya Kunene, the zoo’s public relations and communications manager (and—more importantly—his ex): “Good news! The film company has moved up the documentary’s production. The crew is here working with me already, and they’ve hired a really esteemed director to attach to the project! We’ll be famous! Call me!” One from his mother: “Why haven’t you returned my calls? I’m your mother. It’s Christmas, and you haven’t even told me if you’ll make the family brunch!” And one, received just minutes earlier, from an Ernst Douglas: “I know what you did. We need to talk.”
He told Thelma to send noncommittal short replies to the first three and sat mulling over the last one. The man’s voice was so cold, so sure. Unnerved, Trym listened to the message a couple of times but still had no clue: Who was Ernst Douglas?
He jumped when the doorbell rang. Then, with a loud beep, words popped up on the kitchen cabinets, a text message from Ernst Douglas: Let me in. I’m at your door.
In the corridor stood a tall stranger, slightly hunched, with the low-set brim of his hat hiding most of his face. Trym’s eyes widened as he saw the rifle sticking up behind the man’s neck, the muzzle covered in worn leather. The man stared back at him, a steely glint in his eyes. When he spoke, his voice was hoarse:
“Where’s the lion?”
They say important things happen by coincidence. If the city hadn’t been so distracted by the Second Light Parade, Longyearbyen Zoo would have been packed with the usual crowd. If the zoo hadn’t been left on its own but for a couple of security guards with hangovers, someone would have noticed the vacant cages sooner. But as it was, no one had noticed the penguins were missing until a shop attendant stumbled across one in the freezer room at Nordlys Supermarket. Since the zookeepers were occupied with catching the squeaking birds, it went unnoticed that the lion Levi was missing until its keeper arrived with the cat’s usual nighttime snack—raw factory lamb. By the time the alarm finally sounded and the zoo’s manager called the governor, the animal had gained a head start of several hours.
“Where’s the lion?”
You might find it strange that a missing creature could create such a fuss in such a big city. But then you haven’t comprehended the significance of either the zoo or the lion. The zoo animals, despite all having been created in laboratories—though not in the factories, mind you—were great entertainment. The zoo itself was an important social gathering spot on weekends. It had shops and cafeterias, even a roller coaster. The animals were the main attraction, of course, weird as they were with their fur and claws and many limbs. But the animals also tugged at the humans’ souls, reminding them about the lost world, about things they knew only from pictures in ancient books.
And then there was Levi.
The zoo owned two male lions. That there were two was, in itself, sensational. The zoo’s manager had never heard of any other zoo that possessed more than one.
And of the two, the older lion was one of a kind.
No one knew for certain where this lion had come from, except that it’d stayed for a short time in the Copenhagen Zoo and St. Petersburg Zoo. The mystery surrounding the big cat had resulted in countless myths about its origin. Though critics claimed that the tales were fabricated by Longyearbyen Zoo, many believed the lion was the real thing—born in the wild, some even asserted. Levi had a dedicated website and fan club, managed by Kaya, and people traveled to Longyearbyen solely to see it. The lion meant big business and money.
But for the people who visited every weekend, Levi’s existence meant that the world had not completely fallen apart, that there was life where they’d thought there was only death.
Levi meant hope.
Svalbard had become a popular center in the Arctic Ocean after the Great Ice vanished. Then, as the world became increasingly uninhabitable, people sought out the Arctic for more than holidays and business. Fleeing the deadly sunlight in the south and the wars that had broken out in the wake of the fatal climate change, the swarms of refugees had steadily grown over the past century. This posed a challenge for Longyearbyen, which in its very earliest days had housed only a few thousand hardy people. Now, centuries later, it wrestled with the limits of how fast a city could expand. Temporary barracks housed the new arrivals outside the city while the governing council debated what to do with them.
For the people who visited every weekend, Levi’s existence meant that the world had not completely fallen apart, that there was life where they’d thought there was only death.
In December, it was difficult to tell when a day started and ended, but Kaya figured it was midday. Although Arctic winters were still dark, they were not as they’d been in ancient times, when snow had covered everything. The ground still froze hard once the sun left for the winter months, but much of the surface ice thawed in the daytime. In Refugee Town, though, ice glazed the narrow alleys all day. And now it glittered in the white beam of the police spotlight.
Kaya stood huddled outside the barricade tape, watching the officers work. The cold breeze ruffled her curls. Her toes felt numb inside her boots. She wiggled them, trying to get the blood flowing, and glanced at the small group of refugees waiting in silence behind her. Frightened, she thought. As newcomers, they hadn’t yet acquired the affection the locals had for the lion. To Kaya, they seemed as fragile as the windowless buildings surrounding them. The governor had proclaimed that the temporary shacks were built of sturdy material, but Kaya suspected that any powerful gust of wind could easily blow them over.
Unaffected by the police officers’ scowls, she leaned over the tape to scrutinize the package on the ground. She couldn’t see its contents clearly from where she stood, but she knew it was factory meat. Despite the frost, there was no mistaking the smell. She wrinkled her nose.
“Officer, is it factory lamb?” she called to the uniformed man standing a few meters away.
Not really wanting to answer but hesitating because she had such a lovely smile, he muttered, “We don’t know yet. Got to take it to the lab.”
“It looks like it’s wrapped. That indicates someone put it there, right?”
“Could be.”
“What do you think? Was it meant for the lion?”
He shrugged and made a gesture that could be interpreted as either yes or no.
“Do you think it’s poisoned?”
An officer, his face wrinkled, stalked up, his broad shoulders stiff.
“We’ll send out a press release later, Miss Kunene,” he said gruffly, then turned his back to her. His colleague quickly followed suit.
Amused, Kaya studied their backs briefly, then sighed, realizing she wouldn’t gain anything further of interest in the refugee settlement. Before having to settle for the zoo gig, she had wanted to become a real journalist, an investigative one even, or a leading spokeswoman for an important cause, and she found it energizing to question the authorities. She made her way out and over to her parked sail rover. It stood out with its pink sail, but its somewhat decadent look portrayed exactly the image Kaya wanted. Fondly, she patted the vehicle and climbed onto the sturdy seat.
She didn’t put up the sail right away, just sat gazing at the bustling scene. Since cars were so expensive, Longyearbyen’s streets were full of rovers whooshing past its many bicycles. The city had so many rovers that competition to train as a sailmaker’s apprentice was fierce. Tram systems crisscrossed the archipelago, with major stations at the university, airport, and Platåberget space station. Yet many inhabitants preferred the sail rovers, even though they couldn’t rely on a constant wind flowing between the skyscrapers. Still, at this time of year, the days were more often windy than not.
Kaya thought hard. It could be that someone wished to poison the lion, of course, but she had another hunch: The meat in Refugee Town had been put there by an abettor, someone who wanted to feed Levi, someone who had probably placed similar packages all over the city. Someone who cared about Levi …
Trym.
Frowning, she activated her Thelma. The screen flashed over her hand. Trym had replied to her call with a short text: Fabulous news! I’ll call you later. She mulled it over. Kaya knew Trym well enough to be alarmed by his contrived cheerfulness. They had worked together for several years, and their workplace alliance had escalated into a short-lived romance, followed by an unfortunate de-escalation back to a flirtatious workplace alliance. That was the way with Trym, a frustrating pattern of two steps forward, one step back, that even his mother complained about. The more Kaya cared for him and confided in him, the more he seemed torn between reciprocating and placing distance between them. Distance had been winning out in recent weeks, and forced cheerfulness was Trym’s preferred means of staying detached. She knew that something wasn’t right.
She couldn’t have come this far without trusting her gut.
Never ashamed, Kaya didn’t hide her ambitions. She simply knew she was destined to be something greater than a lion’s publicist. The prospect of a major documentary film about Levi offered an unexpected opportunity after what had seemed like an unfortunate detour in her career. It had taken some persistence to persuade the film company, but Kaya had succeeded—just before Levi’s flight became global news. Kaya couldn’t deny she relished the limelight the film would now provide, and she had tried hard to convince Trym that this attention could prove advantageous to him and his cause as well. But being in the spotlight was definitely not Trym’s thing—even if the zoo manager had enthusiastically endorsed the idea—and the present holiday cooling in their relationship coincided with the greenlighting of the film project.
And the lion?
No one needed to know the truth, but indifference came close to describing her feelings for the animal. If she were honest and not being paid to flack for the feline, she would call it ugly, hairy, stinky, and very, very scary.
Maybe she was just jealous of old Levi?
Trym appeared to prefer the lion over the company of humans. He cared for Levi for Levi’s sake. For Kaya, the lion’s significance lay in advancing other things: her career and her connection to Trym, which she was eager to preserve and deepen. But too often, the lion they had in common seemed to deepen the chasm between them.
Trym wasn’t the only one obsessed with the lion. Levi had hordes of dedicated fans. They volunteered for the many search groups. The children drew pictures of the lion and hung their art on the zoo walls. Priests gave intercessions for the big cat’s survival. More and more fans gathered outside the zoo, waving homemade posters proclaiming what Levi meant to them and how much they wished the lion would come home.
Even the other lion seemed upset at Levi’s absence. The zoo manager had told Kaya the younger cat had started to pad restlessly back and forth in the lions’ enclosure, panting and growling.
Fascinated, she observed the mass hysteria surrounding Levi’s disappearance. You’d be a fool not to capitalize on it.
Kaya Kunene was not a fool.
As someone with unrestricted access to the zoo, and one of the last people to see Levi in captivity, the police had questioned her, of course. She didn’t mind; she’d used the opportunity to look around the police station and chat with the officers. It was a coincidence, she had told them—a stroke of luck, you might say. She’d been in the zoo that night talking with Trym about the documentary film, trailing after him when he’d gone to feed Levi, so she was with him when he found the lion’s cage empty.
Trym.
Her mind kept coming back to him. Creasing her forehead, she examined his message again. He’d seemed upset and sad at the police station, but she’d spotted an amused gleam in his eyes too, as if he were secretly pleased by it all.
The media folks surrounded his apartment building and followed him everywhere. But Kaya believed they watched him closely only in the daytime. Anyhow, day or night, she suspected he could easily escape his stalkers. Like Kaya, he was a local and knew his way around the city.
Did he know where the lion was? Would he try to capture it? She inhaled sharply.
“Thelma, call up the cameraman!” In seconds, his voice spoke into her ear. Not bothering with niceties, she said, “I have an idea.”
While talking rapidly, she raised the pink sail and steered out onto the busy street.
In Longyearbyen, a lion roared in the darkness, the sound so powerful it shook many humans out of their sleep and out of their beds, frightened by the wild presence in their streets.
The lion roared, raging against the foreign night smells, so different from those of the zoo. Then it whimpered and became quiet.
The night, a peaceful balm, was Ernst Douglas’ favorite time to be in a city. The quiet hours, when even the most stubborn nightclubbers have headed home and before the city has woken up. He found Longyearbyen nights particularly pleasing, since most of the lights were turned off so early.
In Longyearbyen, a lion roared in the darkness, the sound so powerful it shook many humans out of their sleep and out of their beds, frightened by the wild presence in their streets.
The battered sign outside the old airport hung at an odd angle on its tilted pole, but the image on the rusty surface was still visible: a red triangle with a polar bear in the middle. Shaking his head a little, Ernst marveled at the thought of the giant white bears waddling freely about, a deadly threat to any unfortunate humans crossing their paths. He’d seen photographs, of course. Breathtaking fierce beasts that feared nothing.
Oh, how I wish I were there.
Often, Ernst felt sure destiny was playing games with him—there had been a mistake; he was meant to live in another time, back when the world was filled with wild animals. These days, a hunter had to be content with tracking down the rare stray animal, usually an escapee from the laboratories. There was more money in manhunts, assignments received through the dark web.
He contemplated his conversation with Trym. The police reports had said nothing Ernst hadn’t already guessed. Nevertheless, the meeting with Trym had been revealing. It always paid to be a little bit aggressive with people. Not that the younger man had admitted anything to do with the escape of either the lion or the penguins, but Ernst had a gut feeling the zookeeper had played a significant role in both incidents.
Ernst Douglas always hunted on instinct.
So now he was keeping watch over the zookeeper. Not hanging around outside his apartment like those media lunatics, of course, but tracking Trym, certain the young man would lead him to the lion one way or another.
He felt he understood Trym now.
Whenever he was out on surveillance or a hunt, Ernst took pride in getting to know the individuals he stalked. The so-called superiority of humans made him laugh. In his eyes, most humans were like animals: easy to read, their movements so very easy to predict.
But even so, he always felt a deep respect for the object of his pursuit. To really get close to someone or something—to get under their skin, to understand their fears and pleasures, their desires and wants—you had to accept that it went both ways; you had to become involved in the relationship, use the necessary time to build a close connection.
The hunt was a commitment.
A hunt was also the truest form of relationship Ernst knew: the forming of the bond between hunter and hunted. The kill was, in the end, merely a necessary trifle. Ernst was not one of those hunters who needed to decorate their walls with the heads of their dead prey. What Ernst hungered for was the prey’s growing acknowledgment that he, the hunter, was the one who would end its existence. This was what Ernst craved, this final acceptance. Ernst didn’t view himself as a religious man, but he saw this acceptance almost as a sacrament.
Hunting a predator was the supreme challenge: It forced the predator to admit that it too was hunted. A true survival of the fittest, he thought.
Hunting a predator was the supreme challenge: It forced the predator to admit that it too was hunted.
And the lion …
The lion would be his ultimate test. Not an animal fabricated and genetically modified by humans but a beast of pure instinct. Of course, confinement in various zoos for so long might have muted the lion’s wild nature. Ernst realized that. But he hoped—oh, he longed—for its free spirit to still be there, hidden beneath that thick fur: a true predator.
He’d sensed its presence all the time he’d been in Longyearbyen, its pungent smell carried in the wind.
And that roar the other night. Goose bumps rose on his arms just thinking about it.
Grinning, he saluted the bear on the sign, then strode to the runway, his boots crunching on the ice. The runway, unused for centuries, was barely visible under the mosses and stubby arctic grasses growing there undisturbed. Perhaps it was nostalgia for the old days, maybe cultural heritage preservation issues, but this spot was curiously one of the few in the city that had been left to its own devices. With the housing crisis the city was enduring, he guessed it was only a matter of time before massive building machines interrupted the peace of this place.
He pushed the rusty gate wide open, its metal hinges squealing, and set his package down behind a dumpster, tearing open a corner to bare the contents.
Ernst had calculated that it would be hard for Levi to find food, habituated as it was to humans feeding it on a regular schedule. It could seek out restaurants and grocery stores. However, few places threw away food these days. Ernst suspected that Trym had planned to feed Levi somehow, but that would be difficult with the media watching him.
The lion would be hungry. Awfully hungry.
Ernst had been leaving these packages around Longyearbyen for several nights, in places where he knew the lion would be able to find them—not downtown, but at the fringes of the city. Refugee Town had been a blunder. The lion would want to stay away from people.
The factory meat from Ernst would curb the worst of its hunger. And because the meat packages would smell like Ernst, the animal would associate the food with him and hopefully track him down outside Longyearbyen.
There, it would meet its end.
Levi lifted its broad nose up in the air, sniffing. Following exciting scents that were both familiar and not, the lion headed out of the city. It didn’t move quickly; its limbs were stiff with age and the chill of the night, yet it trod smoothly, silently, its heels never touching the ground, the large footpads cushioning the sound of its footfalls.
Perfect. Satisfied, Ernst surveyed the entrance of the cave and the view outside. He’d placed the last package of factory lamb below the opening. When the lion found the package, Ernst would have good aim from just inside the cave. The valley was deserted except for the space shuttle launch site in the middle. The station was only a black silhouette, but the towers were clearly visible against the night sky. He guessed the station was abandoned, since no tram tracks led to it. Not many could afford to travel to the space colonies anymore, and the few who did would leave not from here, he reasoned, but from the newer station at Platåberget. Anyhow, most people would be at the Christmas Parade tonight, so he’d have the place to himself. Perfect.
“Sure took you long enough.”
Ernst swung around, raising his flashlight high to illuminate the inner cave. “Who’s there?”
Astonished, he stared at Trym, who was walking toward him. Ernst burst into laughter.
“Wow,” he said after a while, catching his breath, still chuckling. “Not many have surprised me. But you …” He reached over his shoulder to loosen the rifle from his back. Shaking his head, he narrowed his eyes. “How did you know I’d be here?”
“It wasn’t that difficult when I got why you were in Svalbard.”
“You understood?”
“Oh, yes! You’re a hunter. Of course Levi would be a temptation. It wasn’t a smart move to seek me out first thing, though. I’d never heard of you before and would have proceeded in blissful ignorance, but your visit made me curious. I did some research to find out who you are. You’re not a very popular guy, are you?”
Ernst listened, his mouth set in a hard line. He held the rifle loosely by its strap.
“I followed you, of course,” Trym continued.
“You followed me?”
“Yes. Not that difficult, actually. I’m also aware you’ve been trying to keep an eye on me. You probably didn’t think I’d notice, but that hat of yours is easy to spot. Did you think I would lead you to him in case you didn’t succeed with the meat? I gave Levi food the first week, you know, made sure he had warm places to rest during the day. But when you arrived and started feeding him too, I had to change my plan.” Trym shrugged. “It was easy to guess you planned to kill him somewhere deserted, someplace where you could lie in wait. I guessed a cave, since we don’t have many mines anymore. This cave is close to the city, so I took a chance and waited for you here. And it fits nicely with my original plan for Levi.”
“Why didn’t I see your sail rover?”
“There’s another entrance that only locals know about. I hiked here often as a kid.”
Ernst was silent. He noted that Trym, unlike everyone else, referred to the lion as he. He pondered this, along with everything Trym had just told him. He was pleased to have been surprised. There’s a lesson here somewhere, he thought, his lips curling up at the corners. With his other arm, he felt around in his pocket and pulled out a cartridge. He’d underestimated Trym for sure.
He noted that Trym, unlike everyone else, referred to the lion as he.
A shuffling sound made him go utterly still. Wordlessly, he watched the lion emerge from the depths of the cave and pad around Trym. It stopped in front of the younger man, keeping its golden eyes fixed calmly on Ernst. Bulging muscles trembled under its thick fur. Its tail whipped from side to side. Levi appeared to be protecting Trym.
It’s enormous! Despite all his preparations, all his expectations, Ernst felt awe. Its head alone was almost three times the size of a human’s.
He sensed greatness in this animal, something old and majestic. Underneath that matted mane, something powerful and wild lurked. He could easily picture it lying in the shade of heavy baobab branches on the African savanna, just like in the images he’d seen in ancient books.
He smiled broadly. “Thanks, Trym. I’ve not had this much fun in a long time. But now I must ask you to leave. You see, there’s a bond between the lion and me. I needed to hunt it; I need to kill it.” He sounded almost apologetic.
The lion cocked its ears and growled as if understanding what he’d said. The hair on Ernst’s arms bristled. He raised his rifle and aimed it at the animal. The lion was a little too close for his liking, but Ernst always followed his instincts—and they told him this was the way it must be.
Trym stepped in front of the lion.
“Get out of the way. I don’t want to hurt you,” Ernst snarled.
“No!”
“All right.” Ernst pointed the muzzle at Trym. “If you insist.”
Levi roared, the deep sound reverberating through the cave. Its dagger-like fangs glinted in the dim light. Distracted, Ernst fumbled with the trigger. With the lion’s roar still ringing in his ears, he never heard the thud of paws hitting the stone floor, approaching rapidly.
Along Longyearbyen’s main avenue, the Christmas Parade moved downward toward the docks. The floats inched past the crowds cheering from the sidelines and from the thousands of windows. Out on the fjord, brightly lit ships of all sizes glided by. Even the colossal wind turbines far outside in the Advent Fjord were festooned with lights.
Longyearbyen Zoo’s float displayed a gigantic lion covered with blinking lights, a Santa hat, and a banner displaying the words Come Home, Levi! The zoo manager stood at the front, waving to the crowds, which went wild with chants of “Levi! Levi!”
Trym hoisted Ernst up by his armpits and sat him with his back against the mountain wall, then picked up the rifle and sat down on the other side of the cave opening, facing the hunter. He anchored his flashlight in a rocky crevice behind him, the light beaming toward the ceiling, bathing them in a faint white glow.
Ernst held his hands over his stomach. Trym squinted, unable to see much in the meager light, but the bloodstain on Ernst’s torn shirt appeared to be growing. The lion had not bitten the hunter but had swiped his powerful paw across his chest and stomach, and Trym guessed the extremely sharp, strong claws had dug deep into the man’s flesh.
Levi sniffed at the wounds. Then it huffed, came over to Trym, and laid its large body down next to him with a thump and a heavy sigh. Trym reached up and scratched behind Levi’s rounded ears. The animal leaned toward him, rumbling deeply, and bumped its head against Trym, almost knocking him over.
Trym’s gaze flicked back to the hunter.
“You weren’t supposed to be here,” he said, spitting the words out in anger. “This …” he tapped the rifle. “This is not right. It’s not fair.”
Disgusted, he pushed the weapon away, the metal grinding against the rock floor. Levi looked at him, eyes glimmering yellow, then lowered its head to rest on its forepaws.
Outside, northern lights swept the sky. Trym admired the display for a moment before eyeing the hunter again.
“I have planned this for too long for you to destroy it. You see, Levi is old. No one has ever heard of such an elderly animal before.”
Ernst’s eyes were closed, his face twisted in pain, but Trym knew he was listening.
“Levi is unique,” he continued. “I feel closer to him than to anyone else. We have a bond you could never understand.”
Ernst opened his eyes and squinted at Trym. “You’re wrong.” Grimacing, he shut his eyes again and grunted: “I understand better than you think.”
Trym nodded.
“You thought he followed you. But he was following my scent. He trusts me. I’ve been his keeper since he came to Longyearbyen. I know him.”
Shivering, Trym leaned closer to Levi, seeking the lion’s warmth. It didn’t open its eyes, but Trym felt it press tighter to his side. He should make a fire, he thought. There were firestones in his backpack. But he didn’t want to leave the lion alone with the hunter.
“He’s dying. The past few months, he’s been stiffer and stiffer, though I massage him every day. I’ve known for a while that he’ll die soon. He’ll die tonight. My gut tells me so.”
His eyes glistened with tears as he gazed at the northern lights dancing green across the sky.
“I decided to free him when the boss told me they’d started searching for a female. They hoped for cubs,” Trym said. “They weren’t sure it would work with a lab female but wanted to try while Levi is still alive. His offspring would bring lots of money. They all wanted to use him. Money, fame, careers. It’s disgusting!”
The hunter sat motionless, head bowed.
“Now he will die in peace,” Trym said. “No cameras filming, no people fussing and gawking all the time, commercializing his misery.” He thought of Kaya with regret, wiped his tears away, and smiled wistfully. “Now he will die as a free animal.”
Far away, behind the mountains, the Christmas Parade fireworks burst into myriad colorful stars and other shapes.
“Did you know that the people of the North used to celebrate the turn of the sun, the return of the light and the warmer seasons?” Trym said. “Christmas should be a new version of that, a pure celebration, but instead …”
His voice trailed off, as he realized there was no longer anyone there to answer.
“They have to be here,” Kaya whispered. She pulled a red cap down over her curls, flicked on her flashlight, and began to walk up the slope, treading carefully. She’d been trying to locate Trym’s whereabouts for several days before thinking of the cave, where he’d taken her for a hike on one of their first dates.
The cameraman unpacked his equipment from his sail rover, yawned, and followed Kaya. They had started out quite early. He’d stayed up too late after the Christmas Parade, but Kaya had been so sure on the phone, so convincing—“We must reach them before they leave!”—so he’d said yes. He regretted it now. Even if Levi was quite possibly born in the wild, probably the last real lion the world would ever see, the thought of encountering a large lion in a cave was terrifying, to say the least.
The camera was heavy, the frosty ground slippery. The land was nothing except sand and rocks with a few tufts of grass here and there. At the top, he spotted Kaya standing motionless. Then he saw it, too. Out of habit, he lifted the camera onto his shoulder, but Kaya pushed it down.
She shook her head, staring at him intently, her eyes filled with tears. “You can’t film this.”
He gave her a long look, then slowly set the camera down.
“You can’t film this.”
The gap in the mountainside was right in front of them. Three figures were visible in the dimness of the opening, as if on a stage. On one side, Trym sat with his back against the wall, sleeping. The lion lay halfway over him, its great head covering his lap and legs.
The golden eyes staring toward them were empty, just like the eyes of the unknown man who lay so still on the other side of the opening, one arm outstretched toward Trym and the lion, as if he’d been trying to reach them.
Trym stirred, blinked, and watched them for a while, unseeing. Then, as if becoming aware of their presence, he shoved at the lion, trying to get up. The cameraman quickly walked over to help him. Finally, Trym was able to stand. He gazed at the big cat, then crouched down and stroked its face.
The cameraman leaned over the hunter, shaking him a little.
“It’s no use,” Trym said. He sauntered over to Kaya.
“Why are you crying?” he murmured.
“It’s so sad.”
Baffled, he studied her. “I didn’t think you liked the lion?”
“What … ?”
“I know you, Kaya.” He gently wiped away the tears on her cheeks. “You didn’t care a fiddle about Levi, did you? Yet here you are, crying.”
“Yes,” she whispered. She sounded surprised.
They stood in silence for a long moment. Trym’s face was pale, but Kaya thought he seemed oddly peaceful.
“C’mon, let’s get going,” he told her, putting his arm around her. “We have a Christmas brunch to go to.”
In Longyearbyen Zoo, a lion roared.
A Healing at the Triple B Trophy Lodge
The three-and-a-half-hour drive from Portland Jetport to the former site of Baxter State Park reminded Zayna of her midnight scrambles through the Jammu and Kashmir territory while embedded with the Indian light infantry. Just with fewer IEDs and more abandoned pawn shops. She flipped through her frustratingly thin research file on Parker Rodion as the white rental van cruised north past Bangor. There was essentially zero record of his existence before he became synonymous with kill therapy, and to make the research even more confusing, his aesthetic was so consistent it looked as if all the images of him from the last 10 years were taken on the same day. A cream cable-knit sweater, a sharply defined beard that evoked a slab of sequoia bark, square glasses with black frames on his rugged oval face, a thick brown faux hawk that somehow always maintained a windswept naturalism.
“This is a shit assignment.”
Lincoln, her producer on the back half of his career, pitched himself forward from the backseat.
“You’re going to a luxury lodge for a piece that people will actually want to watch. Try to enjoy it,” he sniped. “But, no, you’re right. Risking your life to cover a war nobody cares about is much more fun than documenting the guy who found the cheat code to life.”
“It’s aggro vomit wrapped in a pseudo-psychology puff pastry. Excuse me for not eating it up,” she groaned.
From behind the wheel, her cameraman Dimitri bashfully cleared his throat. “I kinda like him.”
“Oh no. Not you too,” Zayna said with a deflated sigh.
In the decade since Parker Rodion opened the Triple B Trophy Lodge as an exclusive wellness retreat for his kill therapy patients, every news outlet had vied for the chance to cover it from the inside. He resisted, choosing instead to control the narrative by creating a social media presence that gave the public a window into the practice and philosophy behind kill therapy. Sure, most people would never occupy one of Triple B’s 12 reclaimed barnwood patient-guest rooms, however they could apply the nonlethal aspects to their own lives. But 10 days ago, for reasons Zayna suspected had to do with a PR blitz ahead of hearings in DC to renew his Special Innovative Research Zone designation, On The Record Tonight got word from Parker that he was ready to talk exclusively to Zayna. And that’s when she found herself flying back stateside from covering the phosphate wars in China.
The van passed a simple private property placard on the edge of the park around noon. Ahead of it, a collection of small granite mountains under a blanket of conifers poked into the foggy horizon.
“The government just privatized 200,000 acres for him,” Zayna said. “I thought Special Innovative Research Zones were supposed to be for moonshots. Ag breakthroughs. Cold fusion. Geoengineering Mars. Not a murder sleepaway camp.”
It took another half hour to reach the sprawling lodge with the hand-carved sign for Triple B Trophy Lodge hanging above its wraparound porch. A 2,400-square-foot repurposed hangar surrounded by a 13-foot-tall chain-link fence topped with razor wire sat 15 yards away. The van pulled into an unmarked spot alongside a row of several small helicopters and ATVs. As soon as the crew got out, they heard a cloud of raucous stomps and loud whoops emanating from the lodge. It took a second to make out the signature power chant of kill therapy: “Begin! Become! Break! Begin! Become! Break! Begin! Become! Break!”
Just as the crew realized what they were hearing, the front door swung open and Virginia McPherson, the all-time leader in PGA Tour wins, rocketed out. A pump-action 12-gauge shotgun on a sling bounced against her back as she blew past Zayna, jumped onto one of the ATVs emblazoned with the Triple B logo, and let loose a war cry as the vehicle roared into the Maine wilderness.
“Hello there! You made it!” said the voice of a consummate host.
It took a second to make out the signature power chant of kill therapy: “Begin! Become! Break! Begin! Become! Break! Begin! Become! Break!”
Zayna turned back toward the lodge. On the porch stood the great thought leader. The keeper of the cheat code to life. The creator of kill therapy. Parker Rodion. Lincoln eagerly began the introductions.
“Hi, Parker, Lincoln Hendrie. On The Record Tonight. We spoke on the—”
“—phone, yes! Lincoln Hendrie, welcome.”
“Hey, I’m Dimitri. Just the camera guy.”
Parker gave Dimitri a warm smile and placed a hand on his shoulder. “No, Dimitri. You are so much more,” he said, finally turning to Zayna. “Zayna Rafael. I watched your piece on Yunnan and Guizhou. Brilliant reporting. So moving. What a tragic situation. I hope this week we can lift the weight you must surely carry.”
She looked at Lincoln, who silently begged her to play nice, and mustered every ounce of her professional charm.
“Thank you so much. I look forward to exploring what you’ve built here. Love all this,” she said, waving her hand across the expanse like a real estate agent pointing out crown molding. The pantomime made her feel like her insides were liquifying. This could be a long week.
Parker embraced her hand with both of his and studied her face.
“I can see you trying. Swallowing your bias, perhaps even revulsion? And I appreciate that. Truly. But while you’re here, I have one request. Let us be honest with each other.”
She smiled. “Of course.”
He released her hand. “Wonderful. Well, let’s see, if you’re hungry, I believe there’s still a few exceptionally tasty venison pastrami sandwiches in the dining room. But, if you still have some pep in your step after your long drive, I was just about to leave for a session and you’re more than welcome to join me.”
After a 20-minute ride, the ATVs rumbled to a stop at the base of North Brother Peak. Parker lowered his mud-splattered vintage motorcycle goggles and signaled the group to wait as a single shotgun blast rang out overhead. Lincoln and Dimitri hit the ground, while Zayna looked up as several thrushes took flight.
“It’s happening,” Parker said. “Up there, by the cairn.”
Zayna squinted to see a stocky man in a golf visor and polo cowering behind a large stack of rocks. On the other side, Virginia McPherson discharged a shotgun shell and prepared to fire again. Zayna gestured to Dimitri to get up and start filming.
“Please! Please! I don’t know why I’m here!” cried the man in the golf visor.
“You ruined my putt!” screamed Virginia.
“I’m sorry! I’m so sorry!”
“Sorry won’t heal me!”
From below, Parker cupped up hands around his mouth and yelled. “Virginia, can you hear me?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Now, to leave Triple B Trophy Lodge you must achieve all three Bs. The first is …”
“Begin!” she yelled.
“And that you did. Congratulations. It’s no small feat. For most, the road to self-empowerment never begins. Now for your second B. Become. Have you become the version of you who will do whatever it takes in order to heal?”
Virginia trained her weapon on the man’s golf visor. “I have become!”
“Excellent! Two Bs! Now, achieve your third B, Virginia. Break. Break through. Break in order to heal. Break what must be broken. Break!”
“Please! No!” begged the man behind the rocks.
Virginia squeezed the trigger.
“Have you become the version of you who will do whatever it takes in order to heal?”
The combination of the bullet and the rock shards launched the man backwards and sent him tumbling down the peak for what seemed like hours until his battered corpse smashed into a lichen-covered slab of granite about a dozen feet from Zayna.
“I got my triple B!” Virginia yelled, her triumphant cry echoing across the green landscape. “I got my triple B!”
The ride back was quiet except for the arrhythmic thump of a body bag tied to the back of Parker’s ATV. It bounced over the terrain like a sprinting dolphin popping out of the ocean. When they pulled into the lodge, Parker excused himself and dragged the bag into the fortified hangar. Zayna, Lincoln, and Dimitri stood outside, waiting as metallic smacks and hydraulic squeezes emanated from inside. Finally, Parker emerged, locking the door and wiping his hands against his sweater.
“Okay. We agreed to three sit-downs during the week, yes? Let’s find a quiet place and knock out the first one now.”
Zayna nodded.
Dimitri framed his shot as Parker took a seat across from Zayna in the lodge’s parlor. The room was curated to the hilt. A wall lined with vintage editions of the classics, a large antique globe, oil paintings of hunting, an ever-roaring stone fireplace. Like any trophy lodge, mounted heads of game watched with unblinking eyes over the room, but the faces were those of an absent mother, a predatory coach, a CEO who reneged on a deal, an arsonist who burned down a nursing home, and even a baker who screwed up a seven-year-old’s birthday cake.
“I’m so thrilled that you’re here. You all do such exceptional work,” said Parker as he lit his hawkbill pipe.
Dimitri gave Zayna the nod that he was ready and she began. “We have all seen the carefully curated testimonials of your guests who leave here euphoric at having killed off their demons, but what is your response to those people who say what you’re doing here is unhealthy, irresponsible, and morally bankrupt?”
“‘Those people.’” Parker smiled and slowly puffed on his pipe, slightly shaking his head at having to respond to rhetorical straw-men conjured up by this critic. “Okay then,” he said after a sigh, “let’s begin there. First, I would say this world has an epidemic of revenge, of resentment, of unfulfilled dreams that metastasize into cancerous rage. This epidemic stops us from achieving our best selves. The Triple B Trophy Lodge is here to help. Nothing more.”
“By being a fantasyland for murder,” said Zayna.
“By being a safe, healing environment—for murder. Yes. Of therapeutic clonal re-creations.”
“They have blood. Bone. Memory,” she countered.
“Yes,” said Parker.
“They’re humans.”
“They’re organisms. The question of their humanity is subjective. This has all been litigated. Not humans. Therapeutic clonal re-creations,” insisted Parker.
“But you’re not a therapist.”
“They’re organisms. The question of their humanity is subjective.”
“No. But I am filling a gap. The American Psychological Association–approved bot therapists brought us all accessible and cheap mental health care, sure, but what have they really cured? Nanomedicine wipes out pancreatic cancer in three months. Need a new lung? Give a pharma-pig a year and he’ll grow you a custom one. Broken femur? A shot of osteo stem serum and you’re good as new. Given our biotechnical capabilities, why don’t we demand the same results from our mental health care? Why can’t we replace years of psychological exploration with one swift cathartic physical act? That is kill therapy. So, no, I’m not a therapist. I get results.”
“Only for those rich enough to stay here.”
“No, I have to stop you right there. Are some patient-guests wealthy? Yes. I have bills like anyone else. But I offer generous financial aid on a case-by-case basis. Look, you can’t paint this healing sanctuary as some twisted playground for the elite.”
“No?”
“No. Don’t fall prey to stereotypes. Don’t be glib. Triple B exists for health. Not entertainment. Or politics. Or sport. Or betting. We’re not hiding on a secret island. We have a robust online wellness community where I distribute content free of charge. If the basis for a therapeutic clonal re-creation is alive, they are adequately compensated. We pay our taxes.”
“Some would contend indulging in murderous desires is not healthy,” said Zayna.
“Again with these imaginary critics. Do you masturbate?”
Zayna blushed. “I’m not going to—”
“Fine. Fine. Let me put it this way: Should people be allowed to masturbate?”
“When and where it’s appropriate.”
“Yes. Good. I agree. People should have a safe, healthy outlet to express their sexual needs,” said Parker.
“That is not the same as—”
“Their anger needs? Why? Sex and death are the twin pillars of humanity. Why is self-pleasure acceptable, but not the responsible exercise of lethal pleasure? Kill therapy is not about bloodlust. Patient-guests are screened. They have trauma to confront and resolve through the killing of specific individuals.”
“Virginia McPherson killed a ‘therapeutic clonal re-creation’ of her caddy because she said he ruined her putt. That’s trauma?” asked Zayna.
Parker grinned. “You’re not a psychologist. And as you insist on pointing out, neither am I. So, I guess neither of us can make a diagnosis. What I do know is tomorrow an 82-year-old will find relief he’s sought nearly his whole life. You would deny him that?” Parker took another puff and slowly leaned forward. “I wonder, would you deny yourself that?” he asked, adopting a more consoling tone.
Zayna froze. Was that a hypothetical question? Or had Parker been researching her while she was researching him? “Let’s cut.”
That night the dozen patient-guests gathered in the great room of the lodge for a Triple B breaker ceremony to toast the completion of Virginia’s kill therapy. In the morning her helicopter would take her away, a changed woman. Parker live streamed these soirees to Triple B’s online community, insisting that the worldwide show of support would cement the therapeutic results. To Zayna it just looked like marketing. Parker served as part-emcee, part-sensei, regaling the crowd with the patient-guest’s journey to wellness, praising them for breaking what must be broken, and leading chants of “Begin! Become! Break!” with its accompanying gesture, a balled-up right hand punching three times into the palm of a vertical left hand, meant to evoke a lowercase b-shape. The motion of his punch was so forceful that Zayna saw it nudge the cuff of his sweater, revealing the edge of a tattoo of a face.
“I know it looks like some cult bullshit but I gotta admit it puts me in the fighting spirit,” said an elderly patient-guest who stood by Zayna along the wall of the great room as he sipped on Oban 14 and bit begrudgingly into a venison bao bun. “I am getting sick of deer meat though. Nathan Boyle.” She figured this was the 82-year-old Parker said would be going out tomorrow.
“Zayna Rafael.”
“I know who you are,” he said with a wry smile. “I still watch the news.”
“So you believe in Parker’s methods? Despite the—your words—‘cult bullshit’?”
The old man sighed. “I’m coming up on three decades of sitting in rooms with throw pillows and tissue boxes. I don’t feel better. Eventually you get tired of processing the problem.” He took another sip. “I just want to kill it.”
“Eventually you get tired of processing the problem. I just want to kill it.”
“You think killing it will work?”
“Don’t know. But at least this all feels …” He searched his head for the satisfactory word.
“Productive. Guess we’ll find out tomorrow.”
“Would you mind if we tagged along to see?” she asked.
“Don’t know if all my nonsense is as worthy of your attention as a war, but sure. I’d be honored.”
Zayna’s eyes opened at 4 a.m. to the sound of knocking. Despite knowing a trophy head of a nun was mounted over her bed, waking up to the frozen screaming expression still startled her.
Lincoln and Dimitri waited outside as she got dressed, and then they headed over to the converted hangar where Parker was already preparing for the hunt. Upon opening the chain-link gate, he took one look at Dimitri holding the camera and shook his head.
“This is proprietary technology in here. No filming.”
“What do you care? Don’t you have temporary monopoly status as part of your Special Innovative Research deal?” asked Zayna, making no attempt to hide how dubious she considered the designation.
Parker let that go, merely replying: “I don’t think the Chinese or the Brazilians care about honoring US legal protections, do you?”
Dimitri put down the camera and they entered the facility.
Inside, the therapeutic clonal re-creation lab was sparse and underwhelming. Industrial LED warehouse lighting beamed down on a long lab table with a DNA analyzer and a desktop computer. Utility shelves housing hardcopies of patient-guest files lined the walls. A few large steel tanks that looked like they belonged in a beer brewery were connected via two large aluminum tubes to a morgue-like containment unit.
They had barely stepped foot inside before Parker stopped them. “We agreed this is all on background, yes?”
Lincoln jumped in before giving Zayna a chance to renegotiate. “Absolutely. Absolutely, Parker.” Zayna reluctantly nodded her agreement.
Satisfied, Parker gave them a tour of the facility, rattling off the process of birthing a therapeutic clonal re-creation as if it were the recipe for a blueberry muffin. Using his access to the National Gene Registry afforded to Special Innovative Research Zone projects, Parker would input the genetic code of the individual he determined his patient-guest must “break” for their kill therapy. Then, the proprietary synthetic biological soup in the development tanks would be calibrated to create a therapeutic clonal re-creation matching the age and appearance of the quarry at the time of his patient-guest’s trauma.
The proprietary synthetic biological soup in the development tanks would be calibrated to create a therapeutic clonal re-creation matching the age and appearance of the quarry at the time of his patient-guest’s trauma.
“Honestly, pumping out the bodies bores me,” Parker said. “It’s rote science. It’s not hard. It never was. It just required the will to do it. But crafting the behavioral profile? Using a person’s digital trail and personal accounts combined with genetic psychological predispositions to mold an accurate, holistic personality re-creation? That is art. Believe me, if my patients see their TCRs as some kind of pale AI imitation, the only thing that dies is their motivation to kill. It completely castrates the therapy. Anyone who thinks this can be accomplished with robots or holograms or dressing up death-row inmates as stand-ins has a truly sad estimation of human emotional intelligence. As if the patient’s mind wouldn’t know the difference.”
A ding from the containment unit interrupted Parker’s speech. He opened one of the square unit doors and slid out a metal slab that housed what looked like a cocoon of spray-foam insulation. Piece by piece, he broke off sections until all that remained was the slimy, naked body of a man in his mid-50s. Parker injected the buttocks with a syringe containing proximity poison so the TCR would die if it left the perimeter of the Triple B grounds.
“Who is he?” Zayna asked.
“Dr. Oliver Salva. Circa 2029. Nathan’s son found him at one of those VC-backed concierge clinics. Gave him a prescription for anything he asked for. Then just before the kid’s 19th birthday, he gave him more than he could handle.” Parker looked at Zayna. “This isn’t a gimmick, Miss Rafael. Kill therapy accepts what traditional therapy does not.”
“And what’s that?”
“Consequences are necessary. It astounds me whenever people who claim to understand the human mind don’t accept this simple fact. You cannot heal without consequences. They are scar tissue for our psychological wounds. And there is no more powerful consequence than death.”
Zayna stared at the custom-aged body of the TCR, studying the curve of its potbelly; the patches of graying body hair on its chest; the bald, freckled crown and pockmarked face. It was real.
“You cannot heal without consequences. They are scar tissue for our psychological wounds.”
“Would you like me to create one for you?” asked Parker. “Of the man who killed your mother? I would do that for you, Zayna.”
“Oh my god, your mom was killed? I’m so sorry,” said Dimitri.
Lincoln looked rattled. He and Zayna had always maintained an unspoken, mutually understood distance, but he still couldn’t believe this had never come up before. “You never mentioned … If you need to take time or …”
“It was a trillion years ago. I never think about it. It’s fine,” said Zayna, waving off their expressions of sympathy. She had more pressing concerns. How did Parker have access to a sealed case that she had never spoken about? Did he actually know who killed her mother or was it a general offer?But, to her own surprise, the most perplexing question that came to mind was: Did she need kill therapy?
She shook her head. “No thanks.”
Parker gave her a moment to reconsider, then nodded. He packed up the unconscious TCR, got on an ATV, and drove into the park to rouse and release it.
An hour later, Nathan and Zayna were trekking up Hamlin Ridge Trail as lightning cracked around them. The ridge would have been challenging for any 82-year-old, but with torrential rain pounding the granite, it was dangerous for all ages. Behind them, Dimitri kept slipping as he filmed, even as Lincoln tried to steady him. Parker trailed behind, observing like a coach on the sidelines. Zayna was about to suggest to Nathan that they turn back, but the mere look in his fixed eyes told her it would be useless. He was locked in, muttering “begin, become, break” as his hands tightened around the forestock of his rifle.
Zayna could barely make out her own outstretched hand through the rain as they reached the peak.
“Where are you?” screamed Nathan. He fired a shot into the air. “I have become! I have become and now I will break! I need to break what must be broken. I have to. Please. I have to …”
Even with the rain soaking his face, Zayna could see the old man begin to cry. The psychological whipsaw of kill therapy was on full display, all at once beset with rage and vengeance, sadness and regret, driven by a clear mission of annihilation, born out of aimless despair.
Through the gray wall of rain, a flash of a white lab coat burst through, and suddenly Nathan and the therapeutic clonal re-creation of Dr. Oliver Salva were wrestling on the jagged ground. Parker had outfitted Salva in his work attire, and now the TCR was strangling Nathan with a stethoscope as Nathan struggled to maintain control of his weapon. For some reason it had not occurred to Zayna until now that despite being unarmed, the TCRs could fight back.
The psychological whipsaw of kill therapy was on full display, all at once beset with rage and vengeance, sadness and regret, driven by a clear mission of annihilation, born out of aimless despair.
“Do not intervene!” yelled Parker at Zayna. “This is Nathan’s journey!”
Zayna would have defied the instruction but through the chokehold Nathan shook his head to let her know he agreed.
“I didn’t make your kid swallow a bottle of hydrocodone,” said the doctor. “It’s not my fault you were a weak fuck of a father.”
Nathan’s face twisted up as his legs flailed against the granite boulders that covered the peak. He tried to pivot to position his rifle as the chaotic struggle inched toward a precipitous drop-off, but he couldn’t overcome the strength of a TCR that was biologically 25 years his junior. Finally, Nathan secured a foothold on a rock. He couldn’t create enough leverage to turn, but he realized he could do something else. He looked at Zayna and smiled. The look of serenity was so infectious that for a moment Zayna thought she could feel every individual drop of rain hit her skin in slow motion. In that fleeting second, Nathan pushed his legs against the boulder and sent both tangled bodies hurtling down 1,800 rocky, fatal feet.
Zayna spent the next day walking the grounds of Triple B, getting footage with Dimitri and Lincoln for the segment, and trying to make sense of how Nathan, in his final violent moment, could look so at peace.
She stopped at the rifle range where patient-guests were completing their required firearms training. They rarely came to the Triple B Trophy Lodge with much hunting experience and Parker insisted he screened for anyone simply seeking to bag the Most Dangerous Game. Recent arrivals often fumbled with their guns, but with targeting tech and a few hours of practice they always became proficient enough to kill their unarmed prey. Inside the meditation room, two patient-guests sat on the floor while rubbing smooth stones between their fingers and chanting the name of their trophy TCRs. “Judge Raina Svec. Judge Raina Svec. Judge Raina Svec.” “Hen-ry Vin-cent. Hen-ry Vin-cent. Hen-ry Vin-cent.” Zayna moved on to an outdoor talking circle with wide tree-stump seats where Parker held nighttime group sessions under the light of torches. Finally, she returned to the parlor where she first interviewed Parker. Dimitri framed his shot and counted her in.
“The methods are unorthodox and, in the eyes of the medical community, unsound. But ask any patient-guest here and you will hear a familiar refrain: What does it matter? After all, it’s not killing a legal person. And kill therapy, they say, has provided a shortcut to overcoming trauma and finding emotional and psychological peace. To see the transformational change patient-guests experience at Triple B Trophy Lodge, it can be hard to argue with them.” She signaled for Dimitri to cut and sighed.
Dimitri checked the playback. “You wanna change spots and do that again? It looks kinda weird with like 30 copies of Crime and Punishment behind you.”
Zayna turned and saw the collection. Dimitri wasn’t exaggerating. Behind her was a wall of the Dostoevsky novel in dozens of languages. She flipped through a copy, stopping one page in. “You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me,” she said, looking up at Lincoln. “When’s the next interview?”
“Tomorrow. Why? What’s up?” asked Lincoln—but Zayna was already running to her room.
The next morning, Zayna and Parker rowed a two-seater boat to the middle of Wassataquoik Lake. Dimitri and Lincoln rowed beside them to record. One of the park’s many moose, undeterred by the humans, lapped up water nearby.
“Maybe we can keep this interview a little less feisty,” Parker said.
“Oh yeah! Yeah, we’re just having fun here,” assured Zayna. The recording light on Dimitri’s camera turned red. “It’s very pretty here, by the way.”
“Isn’t it? The Penobscot tribe believed that in the highest peak over there, Mount Katahdin, lived the thunder god Pamola. Head of a moose. Wings of an eagle. The name translates to ‘he who curses on the mountain.’ An angry, awful, vengeful lord. Detested the men who lived below,” Parker said.
“A creature with a god complex and a dim view of humanity. This place has a type.”
Parker smiled. “Very good, if a bit feisty. But wrong, I’m afraid. What I do here uplifts humanity. I make us better. And I believe we can do so much more. Currently at Triple B, we aim to resolve trauma, yes? To heal psychological wounds.”
“Because consequences are necessary.”
“Yes! You’ve been paying attention! But imagine—imagine—if this place could be an arena for crises once thought too intractable, too existential, to resolve. You’ve seen the horrors of war firsthand. What if all those convulsions of violence were played out here? Against battalions of therapeutic clonal re-creations?” Parker pontificated.
“Like a battlefield of healing,” Zayna said.
“Oh I like that. I might steal that.”
“So if a country wants to commit genocide, or a terrorist group wants to murder civilians—”
“Do it here, yes! Get it out of their system—in a safe space.”
“And you think expressing that violence would lead to peace.”
“The most peaceful people on earth are those who achieve Triple B,” said Parker, smiling.
Zayna paused. “Let’s talk about that. You have a maxim: ‘Break what must be broken.’”
“Break what must be broken, yes.”
“Beautiful. But not original, right?
“… No.”
“Guess you had plenty of time to read Dostoevsky at Meridian Juvenile Correctional Complex,” Zayna said.
“You know about Meridian. You’ve done some digging. Well done.”
“Mhm. Yeah, you left a bread crumb about the size of a hoagie roll. Warden make all the kids read Crime and Punishment?”
“He believed it would help us reflect on our misdeeds. Ground us.”
“You must’ve loved it. Naming yourself after Raskolnikov. Rodion Raskolnikov.”
“I guess you caught me being clever.”
“So were you a part of the Dioscuri Project at Meridian? I did some crash reporting last night, enough to get the gist of it. Sounds like it wrecked a lot of kids. Is there a clone of you running around?”
“The knowledge I gained from participating in the project led to this sanctuary, so I am thankful for it. And no. No clone. Dioscuri was shut down prematurely by Meridian and its private partners. ‘Too many gray areas.’”
“I guess you had fewer moral hangups,” she scoffed.
“No. Just more imagination.”
“I see. What were you in there for, Parker?”
“I want to help you, Zayna. Let me set up a session for you. Let me show you that kill therapy works.”
“What were you in there for?”
“I can find the DNA of your mother’s killer in the gene registry. I can give you peace.”
“I’m good. It was an accident. What were you in there for?”
“I can find the DNA of your mother’s killer in the gene registry. I can give you peace.”
“Yes, you are good. So good. It didn’t affect you one bit, did it? Other than the fact that you’ve devoted your career to being in war zones. Never settling in one place. Only being in relationships with people who could be bombed out of existence at any moment.”
“Anyone can be bombed out of existence at any moment.”
“Ah! Yes! There’s a psychologically healthy worldview! You’re clearly doing great!” Parker exclaimed with a clap.
“Whoever killed my mom—their identity was sealed,” she said quietly.
“I have no shortage of powerful patients who can unseal it.”
She looked down the barrel of the camera.
“It’d make the segment more credible! A firsthand understanding of the process!” Lincoln chimed in from the other rowboat.
“If I do this, we’re not filming it. I’m not the story. I’m not sensationalizing this.”
“Fine,” moaned Lincoln. “Kill the guy on background.”
“This is why I selected you, Zayna. You have an ethical heart,” said Parker, inching closer as if to share a secret. “I understand your skepticism. In fact, I commend it. But if you won’t challenge your skepticism, is it any less foolish than blind belief?”
Zayna watched the moose. It had stopped drinking and stood still with its head tilted up like it was listening to the wind. Water dripped off its muzzle. A wet, placid face. It reminded her of Nathan before he went over the side of the mountain.
She nodded her consent. “Okay. One session.”
“That’s all it takes.”
“We’re still gonna do one more interview though, right?” asked Lincoln.
“Of course,” Parker said. “To be conducted by a reborn Zayna Rafael, fresh off achieving triple B. Give me one day and then you will begin. You will become. You will break what must be broken.”
At dinner, Lincoln and Dimitri watched as Zayna pushed a cube of venison around her plate, leaving a white trail bisecting a slick of cherry demi-glace.
“Think word got out that you’re up next,” said Lincoln.
She looked around the dining room. It was quieter than usual. No swapping stories of the day’s target practice or discussing where they would mount their TCR’s head back home. The patient-guests ate, hunched over their plates, stealing glances at Zayna when they couldn’t resist.
“So, are you, like, worried killing this guy, or I guess the TCR of the—you know, whatever—are you worried it might mess you up?” asked Dimitri.
She pierced the cube and took a bite.
“No. I’m worried it won’t.”
Zayna had just hit her pillow when three patient-guests began banging on her door.
“Parker says it’s time,” said Karolina, an attorney originally from Putingrad who had come to Triple B to kill the eighth-grade classmate who outed her over her school’s loudspeaker. She dangled an assault rifle by its sling.
“Now? Where is he? He’s not taking me out?”
“Parker said he will be with you when you break through, but that you need to begin your journey alone.”
“It’s almost midnight,” said Zayna.
“Parker does not work doctors’ hours.”
“Right. He’d have to be a doctor to do that.”
Karolina ignored the comment, handed over the weapon, and punched her right fist into her left palm three times. The other two patient-guests did the same.
“Begin. Become. Break,” they chanted in unison.
Karolina pointed out a window behind Zayna to Mount Katahdin, barely outlined by moonlight, and left with her compatriots.
Crunching across the park trails in the darkness proved strangely meditative. Even with the large weapon in her hands, Zayna kept forgetting she was on a hunt. The star-pierced blackness and gentle night wind allowed her mind to drift to places it hadn’t gone for a long time. The face of the white Maine moon, beaming like the one working headlight of the truck that slammed into the car her mother drove. The memory had been hazy since the moment it happened. Zayna was six, concussed, and hanging upside-down in her booster seat. Images would flash in her head on occasion. Her mother turning her lacerated face toward her, gasping to ask if Zayna was okay. Crumpled sheet metal and sagging airbags. Looking through a spiderweb of shattered windshield glass at brown hiking boots running to the car. She had always considered the memory malformed, rather than repressed. She never actively avoided thinking about it. She just didn’t trust it. And there were other things going on. A succession of schools and foster homes of varying degrees of shittiness. Discovering her passions. Navigating her way to a career with no legs up and no guidance. Maybe her life would’ve been drastically different if that night had never happened, though the journalist in her set an impossibly high bar for proving a negative. She had, of course, wondered about who drove that truck, but it wasn’t until this moment, while hunting them on the vast grounds of the Triple B Trophy Lodge, that she mined her thoughts for deeper meaning. Arriving at the foot of Mount Katahdin, a question clawed at her brain.
Fuck, she thought. Is this shit working?
The all-night hike up Katahdin had the feel of a sadistic prank. She lost count of the number of times she nearly broke her ankles on uneven mossy granite slabs or slipped to her death on aptly named paths like Knife Edge Trail. After her time at Triple B, she could hear Parker in her head preaching some belief that the arduous journey would add to the psychological benefits of her kill therapy. Alone in the bracing quietude of nature, he might’ve been right, but she still loathed him for it. It was around 4:30 a.m. when the eerie sounds of great horned owls and nighthawks making fresh kills gave Zayna a jolting reminder that she needed to watch her back. She didn’t know where or when she’d find her quarry, but with the peak coming into view, she had the sense that the encounter could come at any moment. And as she had seen, the therapeutic clonal re-creation might not want to go down without a fight.
A thin band of blood orange appeared on the horizon as Zayna hiked past the 5,000-foot mark and approached the summit. Up ahead, she could see a human silhouette sitting still on a boulder pile. She raised her weapon, confident in her form, and moved cautiously. Over the course of her many embeds she had picked up a few tricks from the special ops guys who got a kick out of teaching the little lady reporter how to fire the big bad assault rifle.
As she had seen, the therapeutic clonal re-creation might not want to go down without a fight.
She edged closer. She knew she should take the shot from a safe distance but the temptation to engage with her mother’s killer was strong. The debate in her head was interrupted by an outside voice.
“Hello, Zayna. I’m glad you made it,” said the silhouette. She knew the voice.
“Parker? What the fuck?” Zayna said, lowering her weapon in disappointment.
She trudged up the last few feet to the summit as Parker stood and clasped his hands to greet her.
“Where is my therapeutic clonal re-creation, or—what?—you just felt like fucking with me for making you look bad in the interviews?”
“I don’t think I looked bad in the interviews,” said Parker.
“You did.” She sighed and plopped down on a boulder, shaking her head. “You had me convinced I was going to see the guy though. I’ll give you that. I was ready to pull the trigger. Fuck.”
Parker sat down next to her and smiled. She looked at him. “What?”
He outstretched his arms and pointed to himself. “I’m ‘the guy.’ Let’s do that last interview, shall we?”
She could feel a rush of blood to her head as she jumped up, the assault rifle slapping against her torso.
“No! No!”
“Yes, Zayna.”
Parker stood, vibrating with excitement. He gripped the cuff of his cable knit sleeve, slowly pushing it up as if he had rehearsed the timing. Zayna watched as the sliver of the tattoo she had noticed before revealed itself to be the face of a woman. Long black curly hair. A straight nose with a slightly elongated tip. Dark lashes framing deep, caring eyes. Open wounds and impact bruises. The face that turned to Zayna in the car that night.
“I’m so glad I finally got you here, Zayna. I wasn’t sure if you’d recognize me. I’ve, well, rebranded,” said Parker, gesturing to himself.
Zayna stared at him as memories of the night, longer and more vivid than ever before, flooded her mind. The brown hiking boots approached. A teen boy crouched down to peer into the wreckage. He stripped off his camo hunting jacket, as if to use it to wrap a wound, but he stopped upon seeing Zayna’s mother’s face and broken body and ran back to his truck.
“What the fuck is this?” she screamed as the sunrise encroached upon the night sky.
“This is kill therapy, Zayna. Pure kill therapy. No clonal re-creations. No artistic liberties or AI-assisted approximations of personalities. And I want it to heal you. I want you to break what must be broken. I want you to see that it is real and it is powerful and I want you to share the truth with the world.”
Parker puffed his chest and put a hand on his heart, directing Zayna where to put the bullet.
“You are the only patient I would make this sacrifice for. Without you, without your mother, none of my work would exist.”
Zayna shook her head. “I’m not your patient. And you were a kid. You made a mistake. It was an accident. And maybe it ruined my life, but revenge won’t change that.”
Parker looked at her cockeyed. He took a step closer.
“Is that what you were told? That it was just a car accident? Is that how you remember it? Lift the gun, Zayna. Point it at me.”
Zayna defiantly kept her weapon by her side. Rage filled Parker’s eyes and he lunged at her, grabbing the barrel-end of the rifle and pressing it into his forehead.
“Let me tell you what happened,” he shouted. “Because I remember. I remember everything. I remember heading home after hunting with a friend. Whitetails. Came up empty. Just an excuse for two 16-year-olds to drink—”
Zayna shrieked and writhed to free herself as Parker continued.
“I saw your mother. Broken. Bloody. She was in so much pain, Zayna,” said Parker, grabbing her hand and forcing it on her trigger as spit washed over his face. “People think they know what they’d do in that situation. They don’t. Something overtakes you. It blinds you. It convinced me that there was only one thing I could do.”
Parker’s body sunk down, brushing against her along the way. He went to his knees, keeping the barrel tip on his head, and looked up at her with a suppliant’s eyes. That’s when she remembered the brown hiking boots running back to the truck and returning seconds later. That’s when she remembered the sound of ammo dropping into a chamber and a shotgun blast.
Her grip tightened on the trigger. It was now Zayna pressing the barrel into his skin.
“When the cops found me an hour later, they told me you were in the backseat. I hadn’t even seen you. She could have lived, Zayna. But I killed her. I did. Not the crash. Me.”
Zayna lost her words. She could only release a rattling wail from atop the mountain that spread over the park.
Parker released his grip on the weapon, opened his arms again, and smacked his chest. “Now, break me, Zayna. I want this for you. I want you to heal. Do it. Achieve triple B.”
Zayna took aim as Parker leaned back and closed his eyes. A small, tranquil smile formed.
“Achieve triple B, Zayna. Achieve triple B,” he repeated.
“Achieve triple B,” she whispered to herself, letting the words linger. She lowered the weapon. “That is so dumb.”
Parker’s eyes shot open. “What?”
“All of this is, objectively speaking, fucking dumb. ‘Achieve triple B’? ‘Break what must be broken’? You’re just making stuff up. You don’t know what you’re talking about. And you don’t want this for me. This is for you.”
“You don’t want this for me. This is for you.”
“No! I’m sacrificing myself for your kill thera—”
“So why aren’t I killing the 16-year-old therapeutic clonal whatever-the-fuck of you? You said it’s best for kill therapy, right?”
Parker staggered to his feet. “I—no, no. No, you have to kill me. I need to die. I need you to kill me!”
“Guilt got you twisted up real tight, huh? Using every neuron in that junk science brain of yours just to prove a theory you pulled completely out of your ass? My god, you convinced all these people that a revenge killing getaway is the cheat code to life when you can’t even live with yourself.”
“You’re wrong! I’ve seen it. Kill therapy works! Shoot me and you’ll see!” he pleaded as tears began to form.
“It’s not going to make us even. It’s not going to make me happy. It’s not going to make you any less full of shit,” Zayna said calmly.
She took off the rifle sling and hurled the weapon off the side of the mountain.
“No!” roared Parker as he stumbled backward and collapsed into a rock pile. “Why won’t you kill me? I need you to make it right. It has to be you.”
Zayna let him sob it out. His glasses askew, his faux hawk fallen, his cable-knit sweater stretched. Even for her, pitying him was impossible to resist. She walked to him and stood over his splayed body.
“Maybe,” she said gently, “you should talk to someone.”
Sorry, Clone
The most compelling case for reproductive cloning is often made by infertile people or those who have lost a child. In the early days of 2001, a US congressional hearing on human reproductive cloning heard from two grieving parents. One man’s words were read aloud by a scientist working with couples interested in cloning. The man’s 11-month-old son had died after heart surgery, and in a letter to the committee the man wrote that he “hoped and prayed that my son would be the first; I could do no less for him. He deserves a chance to live … I would never stop until I could give his DNA—his genetic make-up—a chance.”
The other parent was a bioethicist named Thomas H. Murray, who at that time was a member of President Clinton’s National Bioethics Advisory Committee, which in 1997 had delivered a report on cloning. Murray, also then-president of The Hastings Center (an organization I joined two years later, in 2003), pointed out that cloning was not safe. Just four years after the birth of Dolly the sheep, it was already clear that offspring of cloned mammals had numerous medical problems. Clinical trials would therefore be unethical. Murray spoke in favor of banning reproductive cloning, with carefully crafted exceptions for laboratory uses of cloning techniques, and he criticized those who “provide false hope and possible exploitation of parents desperate in their grief over having lost a child.”
In an op-ed published shortly after the hearing, Murray shared that his 21-year-old daughter Emily had been murdered just five months earlier. While he sympathized with the other grieving father, neither Murray nor his wife would seek to clone their beloved child, even if the procedure were safe. A clone wouldn’t grow up to be the daughter they had lost—it would be a separate, new individual born and raised in a different time. Nor should any child “have to bear the oppressive expectation that he or she will live out the life denied to his or her idealized genetic avatar.” But perhaps most compellingly, Murray argued that the emotional ends of reproductive cloning were illusory. As much as he and his wife might wish to turn back time, he wrote, “cloning cannot change the fact of death nor deflect the pain of grief.”
Perhaps most compellingly, Murray argued that the emotional ends of reproductive cloning were illusory.
The antagonist of “A Healing at the Triple B Hunting Lodge,” Scott Sherman’s Future Tense Fiction story, might beg to differ. Parker Rodion, the owner of the wellness retreat whose high-paying guests seek catharsis by hunting down clones of their enemies, is not offering to return a lost child (that might require a more convincing replica than he is able to assemble). But he claims that his clones are close enough copies to deliver emotional healing to those around them—in this case, by dying instead of living. Rodion’s use of reproductive cloning promises to deflect, perhaps even erase, the pain of grief. As a bonus, the cathartic vengeance is supposedly victim-less because the clones don’t count.
“The question of their humanity is subjective,” declares Rodion. But by flipping the motivation to clone from love to hate, Sherman invites concern for the clone, much as the viewer develops concern for the robots in HBO’s Westworld series. The ultimate means to an end, Rodion’s clones are without rights, thoroughly dehumanized—a problem anticipated by legal scholar Kerry Lynn Macintosh in her 2005 book Illegal Beings: Human Clones and the Law.
Zayna Rafael, the story’s protagonist, is disturbed by the killings taking place at the Triple B Hunting Lodge. “They have blood. Bone. Memory,” she says of the clones, who are created onsite to be hunted down. Rodion concedes that the clones are organisms, but insists that they are not human beings, not persons. “This has all been litigated,” he explains. They are “therapeutic clonal re-creations.” Their deaths are of no concern.
Sherman’s story took me back to the late 1990s, a couple of years before that landmark congressional hearing, when I got my start in the field of bioethics at a time when human cloning seemed imminent. Asexual reproduction, where the offspring is genetically identical to its parent, is fairly common in plants and microbes, and is a backup option for some reptiles like the Komodo dragon. In 1958, the British scientist John Gurdon and colleagues managed to clone a frog (the word “clone” had not yet been coined; they called it a “transplant-frog”). Yet it wasn’t until 1996 that the first cloned mammal was born. Dolly, a Finn-Dorset ewe, was created using a technique called somatic cell nuclear transfer, where the nucleus of an egg is removed and replaced with the nucleus of an adult cell to create an embryo that has all the same chromosomes as the adult cell donor. No sperm required. When her birth was announced to the world, it was compared to the atom bomb. Newspapers, TV stations, and commentators felt sure—a cloned human wasn’t far off.
Rodion’s use of reproductive cloning promises to deflect, perhaps even erase, the pain of grief.
Two years later, in 1998, pluripotent stem cells were derived from human embryos for the first time. These cells have the potential to become any cell in the body. Their successful culture in vitro suggested that a different type of cloning might be possible, where a human embryo is created that is identical genetically to a living person, but instead of transferring that embryo to a uterus for gestation, stem cells could be derived and grown in the lab. These pluripotent cells would be useful for research into diseases suffered by the cell donors and, it was hoped, could one day be manipulated to grow into specific types of cells, tissue, or even organs for transplant back into the cell donors without the risk of rejection.
Neither of these uses of cloning has yet been fully realized. As far as we know, nobody has been cloned, nor has regenerative medicine yet advanced to the point where a person’s cells can be cloned and grown into an immuno-compatible kidney. This would have surprised some of the most daring scientists of the past, who expected to see a cloned human before the turn of the last century. Indeed, something like these two types of human cloning—reproductive cloning to create a genetic copy of another person and therapeutic cloning to grow cells, tissues, and organs—have been discussed by scientists for at least a hundred years.
In a speech at the Heretics Club at Cambridge University in 1923, the British scientist J.B.S. Haldane described “a few obvious developments” in biological science that would occur in the 20th century. Among them was eugenics by way of ectogenesis, which Haldane predicted would involve removing the ovaries of specific women and repeatedly stimulating them to produce eggs in the lab. The eggs would be fertilized with selected sperm and fully gestated in the lab. The resultant offspring would be siblings, not clones, yet Haldane imagined using this kind of selective breeding to manufacture hundreds of genetically-superior sibling groups, foreshadowing the idea of clone armies (although Haldane hoped for enhanced musicality and decreased criminality, rather than superior fighting power).
Haldane’s speech, published as an essay titled “Daedalus or Science and the Future” was quite controversial at the time. It apparently inspired one of Haldane’s friends—Aldous Huxley—to write Brave New World, a haunting dystopia in which human beings are not born, but mass produced in “hatcheries” using a version of the process imagined by Haldane.
Newspapers, TV stations, and commentators felt sure—a cloned human wasn’t far off.
Haldane revisited some of these predictions in another speech, delivered in 1963, a few years after the frog cloning and the year before he died. Still optimistic about “conscious evolution” or eugenics, although only if voluntarily embraced, Haldane imagined taking cells from “persons of attested ability” to produce clones (Haldane is considered to have coined the term). Clones could be raised by their originals in environments and with expectations suited to their extraordinary abilities. Haldane acknowledged that some of these clones might disappoint their originals and also saw the potential for clones to be created in pursuit of more problematic traits, such as an inability to sense pain. But overall, he was confident that reproductive cloning would be part of a future utopia.
A few years later, in 1966, the Nobel prize-winning scientist Joshua Lederberg published an essay on experimental genetics and human evolution which claimed the benefits of reproductive cloning almost self-evident: “Leave sexual reproduction for experimental purposes,” Lederberg wrote, “when a suitable type is ascertained, take care to maintain it by clonal propagation.” Lederberg saw a therapeutic benefit as well, speculating that cloning would enable “the free exchange of organ transplants with no concern for graft rejection.” He might have imagined that this exchange would be voluntary; a more sinister version was brought to life in Kazuo Ishiguro’s brilliant 2005 novel Never Let Me Go, which follows a group of teenagers whose sole purpose in life is to replenish the bodies of their originals in old age or ill health.
This type of therapy—where a human clone is grown to adulthood and then sacrificed—is not what is generally meant by the term “therapeutic cloning” (although it shares some similarities with Sherman’s “kill therapy”). Aware of public sentiment against reproductive cloning, Nobel Laureate James D. Watson argued in 1971 that it would be unconscionable for societal concerns to prevent laboratory research using cloning techniques, which he thought could advance “understanding the genetic basis for cancer” and “unravel the biochemistry of diseases like cystic fibrosis.” When the topic of cloning publicly resurfaced in the late 1990s, scientists made a similar argument for reserving space within international moratoria and anti-cloning laws so biomedical uses of cloning technology could proceed.
For some years following the birth of Dolly the sheep, countries adopted policies to prevent reproductive cloning, often but not always with an exception for so called therapeutic or lab-based research uses. At that time, cloning and stem cell research seemed among the most important issues facing elected leaders. Today, public attention has moved to other scientific possibilities, from AI in medicine to genome sequencing all newborns. Some technology traverses similar ethical terrain. Whereas cloning seeks to replicate a whole desired genome, since 2012, we have been focused on gene editing, a tool to alter the genes of living or future individuals. In this debate, too, distinctions are drawn between reproductive (or heritable) uses, which are widely if not universally decried, and therapeutic (or somatic) applications. Many of the same worries remain: that we might cause harm to another human, but also that we might create something that is less than human, or whose humanity we refuse to recognize, and that our use of the technology might separate us from ourselves.
Sherman’s Rodion character, deploying science in the service of reality TV-style revenge spectacles, certainly sees his “therapeutic clonal re-creations” as less than human—a means to an end, a quarry to be hunted. In this character, Sherman captures not only the hubris of some eugenics proponents, but the persistent invitation to dehumanize. We’re always struggling to realize equality, it seems, in science and beyond. Maybe we should talk to someone.
