Dustin picked himself up off the floor, with a ringing in his ears that slowly faded. Looking around, he saw Olivia also picking herself up. 15 was laying on the floor several feet away, not moving, and the robot AI was on its side, attempting to pick itself back up. The table where they had tools laid out, and where they had put the bombs, was gone. Most of the equipment in the room was damaged, and Dustin knew that alarms were probably going off somewhere.

  “We have to get out of here. Now!” he said, waving at Olivia and going over to check on 15. His eyes were open with blood dripping slowly from his nose and ears. The guy was dead.

  Sorry that he couldn’t get more information from him, Dustin grabbed up guns with Olivia and rushed out the door, ready to shoot whoever they encountered.

  “Follow me, I will lead you to the genetic engineering lab,” said the AI, shooting ahead of them at top speed. They followed at a run.

  Only once did they run into Josagn, and they shot them with the guns as the birds turned in surprise. Their guns hit the floor, before they could get them up to return fire.

  “Is it only me, or are these guys really not that good at hunting? All of my memories, had them as big evil hunters that could take you out easy because they were raised to hunt and kill. These things are a joke.”

  “I’ve never been impressed with them,” said Dustin, pausing at a corner the AI just turned. It was waiting in front of a door, for them to join it, when a whole platoon of Josagn came around the end of the hall.

  Olivia opened fire on them, as they scrambled back around the corner for cover. Dustin hit the panel so hard to open the door, it cracked, but the door still opened and they all dived inside.

  The Josagn scientists inside, threw up their hands and squawked in alarm when they saw the guns.

  “Don’t shoot! We’re not hunters!” screamed one, almost falling on its butt trying to back into a corner.

  Dustin and Olivia paused in shock at what they saw. Stretched out on a table, partially covered by a white sheet, was a female form. The lower belly was opened to expose the internal organs. As Dustin tried to make sense of what he was seeing, he heard Olivia’s breathing pick up. She aimed her gun and started firing on the Josagn in the room.

  Dustin moved towards the body, in a kind of daze. It was like in a nightmare. Everything was moving in slow motion. The body was missing its left arm, and it was covered in crystalline scales.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  As his breathing picked up, there was a click in his brain as he finally realized what he was looking at. They were aborting the fetus of his kid. This was his Olivia, and they had killed her to harvest his kid!

  With a strangled cry, he looked around to kill the monsters who had done this, but they were all dead. Without a thought, he moved to the door, but Olivia grabbed his arm. Turning to her with a scowl, he finally stopped himself.

  “They will all die before we leave here, I promise you!” she spat.

  Of course, she had realized what they were doing before him. Shaking himself, he couldn’t look at the table again. The rest of the room was full of equipment designed to engineer different creatures. There were several started that looked horrifying. He was glad he hadn’t had to fight some of these. Then he saw something that stopped his breath.

  In a corner, there was a hologram of himself. There were notes attached to it, and he dove into reading them.

  ‘Subject shows high levels of intelligence in mechanical areas. Attempts to narrow this trait down have failed. A drive to survive seems overwhelming within the subject’s trial runs, and despite numerous failures, the subject seems to learn. How the subject knows what to do and not do from previous runs is a mystery. The decision to allow the subject free reign in an attempt to escape has been decided, in order to see how far the subject can be pushed.

  ‘Genetic sampling will be conducted at the end of each run to see the differences in choices made by the subject based on different obstacles. Perhaps something will present itself to provide insight into the subject’s race.’

  As Dustin scrolled through the information on his file, he found what had happened to each of the clones. The first clone died before it could land, due to a miscalculation on the amount of air needed to survive till landfall. The second died before it could find a sample to evolve in order to breath. The third died from the venom of the squid. The fourth was eaten alive by the black bugs. The fifth and sixth were killed by the scorpion bug he hated so much.

  Seven and eight were the two roaming the halls together. Nine blew up on his shuttle when he ignored the warnings of the bomb on board. Ten was killed by the white snake, and eleven drowned. Twelve was hunted by the Josagn, and thirteen was killed in the underground city. Fourteen was killed by the spear tree, and fifteen made it to the station twice. Sixteen died in space when his shuttle failed to keep a tight seal, seventeen was shot by the laser gun at the shuttle port, and eighteen and nineteen were killed by the two on the station.

  Dustin looked at the data for a long time, before shaking his head in disbelief. What was the point of all of this? None of it made any sense.

  “There’s info on my too,” said Olivia from next to him. She had found the same thing on herself that he had found on him, except all of them where she had gotten pregnant, ended with the Josagn retrieving her for sample extrusion. They had killed nine babies so far.

  Gritting his teeth, he turned to her and held his gun tightly. She was staring at the information blankly.

  “I was sterilized. I shouldn’t be able to have kids.”

  “You’re a clone. Clones don’t come sterilized.”