What Happened to Shorty?

“Jake always said not to mess around in his shop,” Shorty #1 said. “But that was the old Jake. I didn’t think the new Jake would mind. That blinking light was bothering me so I checked it out and watched the message. The old Jake shot me! Or, I guess not actually me me. But another version of me. Then he talked about a factory. I got spooked. I tried to play it cool the rest of the day but I went home all nervous. I think that’s why things were different this time.”

“Home has always been this small apartment building built next to an abandoned shopping building in Drummond. I hesitated before I walked in the door. That’s what saved my life! A mechanical arm tried to grab me. It managed to get my backpack as I tried to run away. It lifted me up and I squeezed out just before it dropped the bag down a chute. I ran the rest of the way in and saw the building wasn’t an apartment at all. It was a huge cloning factory!”

“I found a place to hide and sleep that night. I was woken up in the morning by the machines pulling another me out of one of the tanks!”

“That was me!” Said Shorty #2 proudly. “I didn’t think anything was unusual until Shorty #1 stopped me from going back in the apartment at the end of the day.

“Every day was the same,” Shorty #1 continues. “A new Shorty would be pulled out of a tank and set to go out, never knowing he was a clone. At the end of the day the machines would try to capture him and ‘recycle’ him back into the factory.”

“It took us days to figure out how to shut it down,” Shorty #5 took over saying. “By then, there were nine of us. We were terrified to tell Jake about any of this, or anyone else. What would they do? Would we be killed?”

“That was when I came up with a great idea,” interrupted Shorty #7. “I said we should each take turns being Shorty for the day! Every day it’d be a different Shorty. That way we could hide what happened.”

“It wasn’t your idea,” Shorty #4 chastised. “We all remember seeing that movie. You just said the idea quicker than the rest of us.”

“Yeah, I was just about to say it myself when you did,” Shorty #8 mumbled.

“I still think we should’ve finished watching it before we decided to try and live like that,” Shorty #9 complained.

“I was saying it already when you interrupted me!” Shorty #3 said angrily. “You’re always like this!”

“It’s not my fault that you came out too early and that made you slower than me!” Shorty #7 yelled back to him.

At this point the conversation devolved into a pack of adolescent boys all arguing with each other. It gave everyone else a chance to get a good look at this nightmare facility. It was massive; with the controls broken one could enter it from the fake apartment building. This secret laboratory stretched entirely underneath the abandoned commercial complex next door and, it turned out, had an access shaft which allowed entry or egress from the sub-basement of the abandoned complex.

The machinery which used to enable the daily Shorty production hung suspended in mid-task. The conveyer/ assembly line of clone tanks sat unmoving, their dead fleshy contents a grim reminder of the Shortys’ origins. It wasn’t hard to reconstruct how the factory operated after a little time investigating.

An unsuspecting Shorty would return “home” and be scanned upon entering. In the soundproofed entrance way he would be ambushed by the machine and dropped into a tube where his matter would be recycled and re-used for another clone. Meanwhile in the factory a ready clone tank would be prepped. The scan taken of Shorty would be used to download memories and recreate a Shorty in perfect health who was otherwise identical in every way to the one who entered the factory. It was a process as efficient as it was inhumane.

Richard was pretty insistent that the right way to handle this location was to report it to Alpha Prime anonymously as an alien technology workshop. That would get it dismantled quickly and safely. Of course, anything that could trace it back to the team would have to be removed first. But if the team has a different idea of how to handle this situation he’d be willing to listen.