Chapter Text
Gem’s first pair of creations are… A failure, to say the least.
The theory behind the project was sound. Unknowingly obtain high-quality cell samples from Jimmy and Martyn, replicate those cells, extract the nuclei, and transfer those nuclei into egg cells. From there, the cells should replicate and diversify into all the different cell types needed for a body. The problem lies in finding a suitable surrogate to carry the undeveloped clones. Nobody would be willing to help her with her experiments in this way, and she sure as hell wasn’t doing it herself. That’s a little weird, even for Gem.
So she’d replaced flesh with machine. Two giant tanks full of green fluid stand in her laboratory. It’s a real classic mad scientist look. The tanks model the conditions of a human womb, hopefully fostering typical embryonic development. They maintain a constant temperature, chemical balance, and oxygen supply. Gem’s put a few… accelerants into the growth medium, so they are sized for adult people. Her dolls will be born full sized.
The first two clones had started promisingly. The egg cells she’d implanted the genetic information into had appeared undamaged and high-quality under the microscope. She’d put them into the tanks and waited. All there was left to do was monitor the tank’s conditions, cycle nutrients into the growth medium, and watch for signs of several biomarkers that would indicate successful cell division.
Martyn is on the left, and Jimmy is on the right. Or, rather, Martyn II and Jimmy II, as she’d taken to calling them. At first, it seemed kind of odd to give the clones the same names as the still-very-much-living people. But when she thought about it, she realized it would be even weirder to give them different names. There’s no point in pretending that they’re not copies. She thought about not giving them names at all. “Subject 1” and “Subject 2”, perhaps. But again, they are clones. Even though they’re not conscious, she can’t deny them their connections to the original people. That’s a fundamental part of who they are. Who they hopefully will be.
So she settled on keeping their names, but numbering them for clarity’s sake.
Days passed. The conditions in the tank held steady. Every day, she took a sample of the growth medium, analyzed it for evidence of cellular replication, labeled the samples, and flash-froze them for posterity. The concentrations of key compounds slowly ticked upwards. The cells were dividing, but at a much slower rate than anticipated. She’d already assumed the development would be slower than normal human pregnancy, but those numbers implied about half of the growth she expected is actually occurring.
Nonetheless, she carried on. It didn’t worry her too much. No scientific endeavor ever went perfectly on the first try. As the time passed, she grew excited. Soon, she anticipates that she will be able to actually see the embryos. The embryos were initially microscopic, so the tanks had appeared empty the whole time. But if they kept up this growth, soon she should have been able to see them for the first time.
One day, she is going about her routine lab work on the samples, checking several chemical components. There has been a worrying stabilization in the levels of one particular growth promoter. While some of this could be attributed to measuring error, it’s been going on long enough that it doesn't seem like a coincidence. And today’s numbers actually show a decrease in this number. That shouldn’t be possible. There’s no applicable chemical process that would change this particular hormone into anything else. It should only increase over time. Where is it going?
Jimmy II and Martyn II depend on it for cellular signaling. It’s one part of a complex network of hormones that tell cells when, where, and how to divide. Without it, they can’t grow.
That’s when it hits her. She cycles the growth medium. Like water in a fish tank, she periodically removes a small part of it and replaces it with fresh medium. That keeps unwanted byproducts from accumulating. The problem is, it also keeps needed growth factors from accumulating.
Stupid, stupid!
Of course. The human body solves this problem by using specific chemical processes in the womb that filter byproducts from amniotic fluid without reacting with necessary things. It’s an elegant, biological solution that machinery can never perfectly replicate. Immediately, her mind looks for a solution. She could manually add the missing hormones in. But she’ll never know the perfect amounts. And are they something she can buy? Or would she have to synthesize them in the lab? That’ll never work. She’ll have to modify the way she cycles the tanks. Maybe use a filter that could remove byproducts? She knows that’s possible with blood. She’ll have to buy one of those machines and modify it for her purposes. In theory it should work.
Jimmy II and Martyn II are going to have to be abandoned. The irregular cell division is something they likely can’t recover from this early on in their development. So she drains the tanks and disposes of the fluid. After a thorough cleaning and new growth medium, they’re ready again. She thaws new egg cells and gets to work on the nuclear transfer. It’s almost like IVF. Hold the egg in place, puncture it with a microneedle, and inject a cell nucleus (or a sperm cell, in the case of IVF).
Maybe Jimmy II and Martyn II were lucky. After them, there’s a string of failures. J&M III’s tank’s conditions crash almost immediately after they’re placed inside. Suddenly, the conditions are unexpectedly acidic. It kills the cells before Gem has a chance to do anything. J&M IV go marginally better. They last about two weeks before a brief power outage takes out their life support. Gem makes sure to buy a generator. Next, Martyn V doesn’t even make it out of the petri dish. A careless move during the transfer of the nucleus, and the egg cell is permanently damaged. Technically, Jimmy V is still viable. But he’s so… lonely. Gem’s always seen the clones as a pair. It seems unfair to have one and not the other. So when she drops the glass test tube holding Jimmy V’s egg cell, she doesn’t try to catch it. The next pair of clones, J&M VI, suffer a similar fate to J&M II. An unexpected chemical process takes them out quickly.
She’s reaching the point of exasperation. She scrubs and sterilizes the tanks as thoroughly as she can. She fine-tunes the filter. She buys a completely new set of microneedles. She crosses her fingers really, really, really hard.
It must pay off, because J&M VII are tentatively stable. They looked not only viable, but high-quality under the microscope. They’ve now outlived all of the other cloned cells. The machine to filter the growth medium is working. All of the unwanted things are not present, and all of the wanted things are at their anticipated concentrations.
Seven is a lucky number, after all.
Every day, she presses her nose against the tanks, looking for the faint visual signs. Right within the window she expects, she sees it. In Jimmy VII’s tank, a tiny, white shape. Barely large enough to see. But there nonetheless. She’s ecstatic. It’s a milestone she never expected to cross. Now that she can see it, it feels real.
The clone lives.