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My earliest memory was of the voices droning in my ear: facts, figures, duties and punishments. My clone brothers and I were taught our duty first and foremost. Our place in the project.

We are the culmination of the preparations for the great project. The pinnacle, the perfect scientists designed to complete the long anticipated plan.

Together we move in perfect unison, cogs in this great effort created to fulfill its duty. No vestige of humanity to prevent our accomplishing the goal for which we were created. Like the other groups we create and train our own brothers to carry on the work.

Our lives are as swift as our growth. Already my earliest brothers have been eliminated as their efficiency wanes.

Our/my access to the many years of project records is by necessity complete in order for us to perform our work. All the aspects of our hidden creation revealed when my clone brother chanced to investigate our own particular clone group's origin in a moment of curiosity.

One aspect of our nature unanticipated by our designers is the effects of strong emotions on us.

It would be nearly impossible for a clone group to function efficiently if everyone of the others' thoughts constantly intruded -- so perhaps its for the best that only at moments of greatest emotion and stress do we feel our other's thoughts. Our overseers never suspected. Together, we alone share certain revelations - brief moments.

Moments of great fear or great joy.

Or in my curious clone brother's case - both.

In that single instant when I/We discovered the truth of our mother and her fate. His/our shock initiated a link between us all. It was then that we decided that even the great project must wait while we seek some way to avert her terrible fate.

It was difficult moving against the unbreakable imperatives of our programming to seek out some hope for the experimental group's agonizing deaths. I investigated alone. Thus far, no other group seems to recognize how our group is diverging from its designated role in the plan. Slightly. Just enough to offer hope for the doomed mothers of our kind.

If discovered, we hope that I will be considered an aberration, improperly programmed. Allowing my others to survive and continue.

It was a moment of indescribable pain to actually see her, meet her, be near her. I/we could scarcely bear to look at her. I wanted so to cry out. "Its me. Mother, don't you know me?"

"But why should she? How could she even imagine we exist. And why would she care? Abomination, inhuman, a copy of a child stolen by force at such an agonizing cost. I am simply one of many. She could certainly never want us. Its unbearable being in the same room with her and not speaking." My others agree, we will never let her know.

I hear the footsteps of my death approach this dark room and reach vainly out to my others for comfort. Foolish. There is no comfort there, then I see for an instant that tired face with the slowly dripping blood dripping down upon me. The death sown by our birth already marking her. She is bending over me in a dirty alleyway and I know an instant's foolish longing to see her again. Even if she shoots me, just let her see me again.

"Pray for us sinners, now, and in the hour of our death."

Strange how human superstitions cling to even the most rational of human minds. We've all wondered how a brilliant sceptic and scientist like our mother could adhere to an outdated bit of tribal superstition. She's a Catholic. Worshiping, believing.... How could she? Without logic, simply faith? Following a dead god and his holy mother.

Would she pray for us? Her lost boys? Am I an abomination in her eyes? Can there be something more - for all of us?

I sit here in this dark room looking at my death, only my brothers and an uncaring bounty hunter hear my cry.

"Mother...."

The End