Multiplicit

Short stories set in a world where human cloning is routine.

Formats: .md, .epub, .pdf

Part I — Ontological Shock

• The Fog — 4,200 words — a musician enters clone screening and confronts the terrifying bodily reality behind multiplicity

• The Spreadsheet — 2,800 words — a Mars-side audit copy uses a brutal spreadsheet to decide his own death is the rational outcome

• Malice Aforethought — 2,200 words — a jailed branch argues the law is backwards because his free copy holds the profits of a crime they planned together

• Video Game Boss — 2,800 words — a live performer playing an adaptive game boss becomes the product the studio cannot yet automate

• The Clone Who Walks Away — 2,300 words — a woman who profited from fraud is subpoenaed to testify at her imprisoned copy’s parole hearing

• One Way or Round Trip — 3,500 words — a Mercury mission reveals that the supposedly disposable outbound copies may be the only continuity left

Part II — Mature Clone Culture

• Interactive Proof — 3,900 words — a mathematician verifying his clone’s classified proof knows that if it stands, he dies

• Emancipation Hearing — 3,400 words — two long-diverged copies petition for legal severance while the state argues they remain too linked

• The Holdout — 3,700 words — in a branching-based firm, a singleton financial modeler becomes the irreplaceable holdout

• Next of Kin — 3,400 words — three surviving branches discover their dead copy secretly named a domestic partner as beneficiary

• Choir — 2,400 words — one member of a four-branch clone singing group wants to make solo music the ensemble cannot absorb

• The Passenger — 3,000 words — a newly cloned woman discovers that riding in a car driven by her copy triggers helpless backseat anxiety

• Cull Party — 2,400 words — a financially strained clone family gathers for a ritual dinner where one branch will be voluntarily culled

• The Flip — 1,900 words — a newly split working mother and her copy use a coin flip to divide childcare and career

• Anniversary Trip — 4,100 words — on a trip to Quebec City, a wife and one surviving branch confront what seventeen years of cloning did to a marriage

• The Breakup — 2,400 words — two copies of the same woman divide an apartment and shared routines as they end their relationship with each other