This piece was inspired by images from Jack Slomovits

Dr. John Rumford discovered his first subject in the glossy back pages of a gay magazine. His eyes were riveted to the blunt, headless photo entitled “Franco—True Italian Top”. The scientist ran his thumb along the thin trail of hair that bisected the youth’s abdomen, and over the black ellipse that barely concealed a prominent erection, described as a “fat 9 inchs”. It was the misspelling that clinched it. The boy would become the first human subject and secure his funding for life. He imagined parading his beautiful creation in front of those half-wit junior Frankensteins on the Board—their hungry mouths would gape with envy.

The doctor drove straight back to the Complex, the magazine folded over to Franco’s picture on the seat beside him. He called the listed number from his lab, and scowled when an automated baritone instructed him to leave a message. The boy received a brusque lecture on phone etiquette when he called back later in the evening; pumped up from his verbal release, he was able to state his immediate needs without any hesitation. Franco confirmed that he could be there within the hour. Dr. Rumford hung up directly after providing him with directions to the Complex—there was no reason to question the boy over the phone, his tests would provide him with all the data he required.

Ninety minutes later a young man in a Harvard sweatshirt was escorted into his office by the night guard. Franco flashed Dr. Rumford his neon-pink visitor's pass and smiled precisely. The doctor motioned for him to stand still and circled carefully, as if nearing a startled horse. The boy's dark brown eyes blazed in the florescent lights and made up for a host of minute flaws that would have otherwise been distractive. He asked the boy to remove his sweatshirt. The trail of hair remained but the flat abdomen had grown soft, though not unattractive. After ten minutes of superficial inspection Franco was instructed to remove his shoes and pants. Dr. Rumford ran his hands over the boy's buttocks, thighs and the thick penis that dangled from a neatly trimmed patch of hair. He nodded silently, clicking his tongue against his dentures as he marked off each trait, pro or con.

The boy asked innocuous questions which the doctor regarded as a matter of course. Franco did not understand what genetics research was, nor DNA mapping, and Dr. Rumford was in no mood to attempt an explanation. Without his knowing it, Franco’s ineptitude got a mental checkmark in his favor—the doctor had previously ruled out subjects with an above average IQ as he did not want the end result to be able to think for itself. He was of the opinion that unintelligent people didn't have the capacity to question their environment, grow bored and rebel. His own father had proved his point a thousand times over.

Franco flinched when Dr. Rumford approached with a hypodermic needle. The doctor explained that a blood test would be necessary if he were to become a repeat customer. He would be checked for STDs, AIDS, substance abuse, as well as all known genetic disorders. The boy claimed he was as “healthy as a horse” and a test would not be necessary, but Franco extended his left arm with a smirk when offered an extra hundred for his cooperation. After he removed three vials of blood, Dr. Rumford requested oral sex, given, which was performed expeditiously. The boy was sent away with a wad of twenties in his faded blue jeans and a small Band-Aid on his arm.

The doctor moved into his lab to perform all the necessary blood-work. His underlings at the Complex were infamous for tainting samples and swapping results. He would not allow careless mistakes at any stage, nor could anyone know about his experiment until he was assured of its complete success. He spent the night systematically testing the blood sample, and was guardedly hopeful when Franco’s blood tested negative for all determinable diseases, and showed no signs of recent narcotic activity. As soon as he verified his results with a second battery of tests, he called the boy to schedule a follow-up appointment.

Franco returned the following evening and submitted to the scientist’s closer inspection. The doctor put the boy through a series of sexual positions and techniques to judge each of their merits, but was disappointed to find the young man less flexible than he appeared. After their perfunctory intercourse Dr. Rumford slipped Franco a potent tranquilizer so he could collect the tissue sample he needed for his experiment. He took a biopsy from inside of the boy’s mouth as this wound would heal quickly and probably go undetected. He submerged the plug of flesh in a glucose-based elixir that he had been perfecting. Although he officially named it Amino Plus, he imagined future children learning of Rumford’s Fluid in their schoolbooks.

John Rumford knelt beside Franco while the cells began to multiply in the fluid. He explored the boy's body with more confident caresses, probed him with powerful fingers and drank in the meaty odor of his flesh with abandon. He kissed the silent lips, the salty stomach and hairy legs. The doctor nearly giggled when he noticed the boy beginning to wake up. He dressed Franco before he was fully coherent and stashed $200 in the back pocket of his jeans with a mumbled promise of another meeting later in the week. He called the security desk and had Franco escorted out of the Complex.

The cells, to the doctor's delight, flourished in his opaque fluid. Within 24 hours they had been tricked into forming a zygote, a fertilized egg which would bloom into a clone of the boy whose scent still loitered on his fingertips. The process had worked with lab rats, monkeys and that newsworthy ewe, but this was the first time it had been attempted with a human being. He transported the nearly invisible life form into the artificial womb he’d had created for this experiment. The womb was nothing more than a customized Pyrex jar filled with Amino Plus, but it was utopia for the forming cells.

The developing fetus was irradiated with low-level radiation every ten days to accelerate the growth process and establish the correct pace. For a future when organs would be grown on demand the clone needed to mature into a full adult in a matter of months. He kept careful notes and videotape on the development, nodding sternly and clicking his tongue against his dentures as his own expectations were quickly outstripped by reality. The zygote developed into a fetus within three weeks, a process that normally took nine. It grew at an astonishing rate in the nourishing fluid and a fat, pink infant filled the jar in under a third of the normal gestation period.

The doctor birthed the Franco-clone and swaddled him in an old lab coat. He tested the baby's reflexes, sight and hearing, and though weak, the infant was as normal as a vaginally-birthed child. He popped the cork on a bottle of champagne and toasted himself on creating the first cloned human in the history of the world. His position at the lab would be cemented for life and his place in history documented for future generations. Mr. Henry Rumford, his ignorant progenitor, would be forced to teach infantile high-schoolers about his own son along with Darwin, Salk and Gallileo. John Rumford later passed out on his office couch, drowned in complex fantasies of a world populated with teenage boys genetically geared for his pleasure.

The infant was put on a diet of Amino Plus fed via baby bottle. He matured rapidly, growing from infant to toddler to preteen in a matter of weeks. This aggressive growth showed immediate problems. The boy's body was unable to fully develop; his muscles were near useless and his bones were extremely brittle. He could barely hold himself erect and typically lay slumped on the cot in the corner of the lab. The second problem was the boy required constant nutrition to maintain the energy for his exponential growth, and this caused him to urinate and defecate continuously. Doctor Rumford was forced to keep him in diapers.

Once the boy had achieved a physical age of approximately fifteen, Dr. Rumford found he could no longer contain his urges. He approached the boy with gentle hands in an attempt to bond with his beautiful creation. The Franco-clone responded with a frightened whimper and evacuated his bladder in a long, thin stream of urine. The doctor swapped the baby bottle for his own penis, but the clone was unable to achieve more than an infantile suckling. Dr. Rumford cut back the boy's feeding schedule to allow a window of opportunity for penetration, but this disruption caused his body to deteriorate; his thick and beautiful brown hair fell out in clumps, his taut skin swelled and then sagged limply on his shrinking frame. Twenty-two hours later the boy sank into a vegetative state. Dr. Rumford hovered over the body unable to postpone the inevitable, but kept careful notes on all contributing factors so that he might be able to prevent this type of failure in the next experiment. One hundred and eight days after being birthed from the artificial womb, the clone’s body was carefully autopsied and then secretly burned in the incinerator on the Complex.

Dr. John Rumford vowed that the second one would be different. He carefully checked all his notes and projected alterations in the course for accelerated growth. He would cut back on the radiation and soften the Amino Plus with ionized water to slow the process. He tested four boys from the back pages of the same magazine he had discovered Franco in, but all failed his tests; either they were genetically inferior or were infected with an unacceptable disease. The fifth boy tested was Blake, a silent 26-year-old who was stronger and more handsome than any of the other men he had interviewed. He also appeared reasonably intelligent, though he did not seem to utilize this capacity, much like Dr. Rumford’s father. Blake even asked fairly astute questions about genetic research for a layman. This almost disqualified him, but the doctor imagined creating a companion who could not only satisfy his physical cravings but also understand and feed his mental endeavors. Then he reminded himself of the reality of the situation; the boy would eventually be sliced up and sold off to the highest bidder to save the lives of “real” humans.

The Blake-fetus was irritated on a 21-day cycle. It developed quickly in the artificial womb moving from zygote to fetus in a four-week period. The softened glucose seemed to help pace the process that had been too accelerated in the previous experiment. The doctor continued to keep detailed notes and video of the growth process for posterity, including the birth of the second cloned human after only six months of gestation. The infant was nursed on the softened Rumford’s fluid and grew on a less radical curve, aging approximately 2 years a month. This new child was much more active and curious, and even adapted a primitive language that expressed basic needs and emotions. However, like his predecessor, the Blake-clone had an underdeveloped musculature that forced him to lie on the cot most of the day.

Once the clone attained an adult form, Dr. Rumford, nearly blind with impatience and desire, arranged for a month-long sabbatical. He brought the boy to the house he barely inhabited himself and canceled the weekly maid service so as not to be interrupted. Dr. Rumford spent the first few days satisfying every physical urge and whim his body had, but he found the boy to be uninterested in reciprocating. Within a week the doctor began leaving the boy at home to have quick trysts with the local men who populated the gay bars downtown. Their aged and imperfect bodies were incapable of quenching the vicious need that burned in the pit of his stomach and he would return unsated to his creation and marvel at his developing beauty.

The doctor attempted communication with the man-sized infant, but the boy could not understand anything other than the most basic words and exaggerated gestures. The Blake-clone usually ignored his overt attempts at establishing a bond and sighed dramatically around his baby bottle. To make matters worse, the boy began to masturbate to the exclusion of all other activities. The doctor was forced to bind his hands, but the punishment was rescinded after the boy cried continuously for two days. Dr. Rumford moved the clone into the guest bedroom, but continued to monitor his development and occasionally sat for hours watching the boy fumble with his erection.

The degradation of the boy’s body began three weeks into their failed honeymoon. The Blake clone experienced painful abdominal cramps, then repeated vomiting, and bled from the mouth and anus. The darkly handsome clone slipped into a coma and died at the chronological age of ten months. Dr. Rumford sat next to the body and berated his incomplete research for having resulted in such a crippling death. His vision of a tribe of genetically perfect and eternally-teenage boys flickered before his eyes and nearly faded. He blinked away frustrated tears and packed the boy in a large, cardboard box and dragged it out to the car.

He returned to the lab and performed an autopsy to confirm his worst theses. The boy, though appearing to be a teenager physically, had the internal structure of an octogenarian. His organs had aged faster than his external body and then failed. If the boy had been cloned for organ harvesting, his failure would have forced him out of the scientific community. He would be dubbed a madman, a Frankenstein and a fool. Maybe his father had been right, there were things between heaven and earth that men were not meant to control.

He re-crated the body and called the porter to help him take it to the incinerator. He made sure the box was placed in line with the other refuse to be burned and waited as it trundled along the conveyor belt. The white heat burned through the wall and the doctor patted his thin face with a handkerchief. He took off his glasses, wiped his forehead against his sleeve and massaged his weary eyes. Dr. Rumford admitted that it was time for the Board to be rid of him, if he stayed on at the Complex he would only be misusing vital resources. Nor was he playing martyr, he wanted to avoid their approaching him first. When the box disappeared from view he dipped his head in defeat.

He watched a drop of sweat accumulate at the tip of his bulbous nose, build into a miniature ocean and plummet to the concrete floor below. He remembered his father joking that the human body was just a glass of seawater with feet and if he drank too much he’d spill over and become a puddle. It was just the kind of asinine comment he would always make, the barbarian, but what if…

Dr. Rumford ran back to his lab and went over all his data. The first two clones had been grown in and fed Amino Plus, the second softened with ionized water, but they didn’t stop aging once they reached their adult size. The Amino Plus was too potent to ingest and caused their cell growth to be radically accelerated, like cancer. He needed to soften the fluid, not with ionized water, but with saline, the very liquid that comprised the bulk of the human body. As the clone reached adulthood they needed to be weaned off the fluid to slow the process and stabilize their aging. He immediately started a new series of experiments with samples grown from Blake’s original cells. He altered the Rumford's fluid so it would have a saltier base, changed the radiation schedule and the dosages, even darkened the lights in the lab, but the zygotes would stop growing after two or three weeks and float to the top of the jar like lucid shrimp.

After four months of testing he finally divined the appropriate measurements of Amino Plus and saline and developed a radiation schedule which accelerated the growing cells only when they reached critical stages of development. Dr. Rumford would finally have results to show the Board before they cut his funding. He would prove that a human could be cloned on demand for whatever justification they wanted to use. To increase his chance of success he decided to run six simultaneous experiments.

The only thing that delayed him was the lack of fresh samples. The Blake cells had been altered and damaged after months of testing. He also wanted to work with the cells of an African American since their genetic structure was far more complex and ancient than other races. He postulated that this would stabilize their development and have a better ability to adapt to the pressures of accelerated growth. He also decided to use a Caucasian in his experiments to prove that the new regimen worked over his previous results.

He selected two candidates after two months of interviews—the first was a tall, white youth named Brian who appealed to his eye, as well as a powerful looking black man who went by the name of Eagle. Eagle's bald head glowered under the florescents and he radiated a powerful energy, one that excited and frightened the doctor. Both boys submitted to a blood test and both came back negative, though Brian’s reflected cocaine use. He got a willing tissue sample from Brian, but slipped a tranquilizer to Eagle. Asleep, the large man appeared less intimidating and the doctor visually caressed the man’s sinewy, brown skin while he masturbated. He could not look Eagle directly in the eye when he woke up, but merely slipped him the amount agreed upon with a hundred dollar bonus before the guard came to escort him out of the Complex.

In the lab the cells of both boys took with amazing alacrity to the conditioned Rumford's Fluid. He split the samples into three units. The first pair were submerged in the new Amino Plus softened with saline, the second in the new fluid with a lower radiation dosage, and the remaining samples were grown in a fluid that closely resembled what was produced in utero but enhanced with Amino Plus. Though the latter was established as the control group, the doctor was oddly disappointed to find it was the only sample that continued to grow after four weeks. The two fetuses grew only slightly faster than normal and were birthed fully-grown after seven and a half months.

Side by side on the cot the two babies were almost identical except for their skin color. The boys were healthier and stronger than the previous experiments and Dr. Rumford was overjoyed by the certain success of his project. He almost shared his results with a colleague but refrained at the last moment. He could not dispense any details until he was certain that the boys would develop into adults quickly with no complications, then level off before they failed as the previous clones had.

However, their slower development caused an unforeseen problem. The children could not stay with him in the lab for such an extended period of time, perhaps as long as two years it would take for them to fully mature. His only alternative was to place them in his home with a full-time nanny until they could be presented to the Board as his crowning achievement. The second problem in arranging care was that their growth pattern would be hard to disguise; the children would age approximately one year every two months. He couldn’t have the same nanny for more than a month or his work might be discovered accidentally. The hiring and firing of nannies began to take up the majority of his attention and he was forced to spend less time at the lab. He watched over his two wards with a doggedness which scared off a number of the women who came to sit with them and finally dismissed them all together when one refused to feed the boys with bottles because they appeared to be four years old.

When he approached the Board to arrange a leave of absence, he was not shocked or disappointed when they told him to clean out his office. The members of the Board blamed funding cutbacks, but he could see in their faces that they wanted him out of the way. The doctor destroyed the Pyrex jars that had served as wombs and personally dragged the boxes of documentation and videotapes to the incinerator. Dr. Rumford would leave no rewards for those who had the audacity to dismiss him. If they wanted his results they would need to open up his head and pry them from his mind.

He spent his free days teaching the children speech and reading. Their abilities, though rudimentary, went far beyond his previous experiments. The clone of Eagle was especially adept at reproducing sounds and words and was able to communicate some basic sentences at the chronological age of one. However, Eagle remained wary of Dr. Rumford and would often disappear with the clone of Brian to hide in the backs of closets and beneath beds. It would sometimes take the scientist hours to find them curled up together, asleep in each other’s arms.

By the time Eagle was physically nineteen, he and the doctor were fighting constantly. The endless battles could be triggered by almost anything and would escalate quickly. Dr. Rumford would berate Eagle in a continuous verbal attack—Eagle would reply with grunts, then fists. Their fights became brutal when Dr. Rumford approached Brian—Eagle would fly across the room and pounce on the doctor, lashing with weak punches until the doctor backed away. Then Eagle and Brian would snuggle up together in the corner and kiss playfully until Dr. Rumford left the room.

The clone of Eagle, though the healthier and more mentally developed of the two, had to be removed from the situation. He was a catalyst that could lose control at any moment. Unfortunately the boys had already been weaned off Amino Plus so he could not simply withhold it, nor could he think of any way in which to cause the boy harm. To destroy such a beautiful creature was impossible to contemplate. Unable to comprise a plan, he locked Eagle in the guest bedroom with the “Gothic” notion of starving him as Victorian parents had done with their retarded children. Eagle stamped and banged against the door in defiance as Brian cried helplessly from the hallway.

Dr. Rumford sedated Brian and carried him to his bed. The act of intercourse with him was rushed and unfulfilling, and he feared Eagle was about to rush into the room and injure him. Afterwards, the doctor sat quietly next to the sleeping boy and admired the structure of his face, lean body and creamy skin. His own body by comparison looked shriveled and hairy, like moldy bread; imperfect in all senses of the word. He shivered and dressed quickly in loose pajamas. He could not bring himself to look down at the boy in the bed for fear of being reminded of his own erosion.

He moved down the hall to the locked door and told Eagle to be quiet so that he could come out. He unlocked the door and pushed it open to the darkness within. Eagle burst into the hallway and slammed the doctor down into the dirty carpet. John Rumford, shocked and breathless, lie still as the boy pummeled him with unformed fists, slapped his nose, face and pulled frantically at the old man’s white hair. He growled, “Brian mine,” in a deep bass voice like rolling thunder. Dr. Rumford rolled Eagle off and attempted to stand, but was kicked down as Eagle rushed into the bedroom to revive his partner. He shouted at Brian plaintively and shook the boy’s body.

Dr. Rumford crept awkwardly to the bedroom door and sat with his back against the inside wall. He watched Eagle jostle Brian until the boy showed a response. The two boys twined together and cuddled on his bed, kissing and fondling each other with contented coos. He pictured them remaining that way until death, perhaps twenty years hence if his calculations proved correct. By that time, he himself would be seventy-three, too old to enjoy the company of two mentally underdeveloped man-children. He imagined himself at that age, wandering around his squat, ugly house in a tattered robe, speaking to himself and the dust in the air. No, that was his father’s fate, not his own. It was his father who would be a broken, lonely man; he was the one whose vision was limited.

John stood and wobbled to the bedroom window and unlatched it, opening it to the spring night. The breeze swirled in, thick with fragrant new life. He turned to the boys and parted the curtains to show them the world outside, but they paid no attention. He lay out a set of clothes for each boy and returned to the bedroom door. He locked it from the outside and inched painfully down the hall to the guest bedroom. It was in complete disarray but he lay flat on the bed and cradled his aching head in his palms. His mind descended to focus around the kernel of his new problem; there had to be a way to reverse the process of aging rather than accelerate it. He clicked his tongue against his dentures as he pictured rejoining the hordes of teenage boys, strong, hard and young, with all the time in the universe to prove them wrong, every single one of them. He closed his eyes and felt the years roll off in his imagination.

 

© 2004 Sean Meriwether - Contributor's Bio

Read the Interview with Sean Meriwether by Jameson Currier

"Rumford's Fluid" was selected for the Million Writers Award for top online short stories of 2004.