Lost Past by Teresa McCullough, Zachary McCullough

average two hours a day. No wonder he exercised so much with Arthur.
                  “But then you decided you wanted to live there permanently. You always enjoyed slumming, but I never understood how you could live with the animals.”
                  “Perhaps I didn’t consider them animals,” he said, keeping his temper. “Why did I leave?” When she hesitated, he added, “For that matter, what did I do when I was on Earth?”
                  “It was Plict business,” she said in a shocked tone. For her, that settled it, and John’s initial reaction was that it did for him too. No, he had a right to know. It was his life, and he knew once.
                  “Hernandez and his clones were involved, but I never knew the details. I asked you why you were leaving, and all you said was you were going to Earth to make reparations.”
                  She was lying about not knowing, but there was no point in confronting her, since he suspected she had other knowledge he wanted and antagonizing her wouldn’t help him get it . “Tell me about Hernandez and his clones.”
                  “You disappointed the Plict ,” Katrine said. “You were in your mid-twenties when they decided you weren’t the right tool. They took some of your genetic material and altered it to make Hernandez.” She had a dreamy look on her face, which made him wonder if Hernandez was her lover. He decided he was.
                  “By the time he was eight, they knew he was what they wanted, so they cloned him. Alvar , Franz, Goran , and Teo were raised together and always follow Hernandez. They go to Earth and do things for the Plict ,” she said.
                  There was no point in asking what they did. “What’s with the brown hair?”
                  “That was done when he was a teenager because blonds are so noticeable in many places on Earth. It’s permanent, but not genetic. He likes to be noticed, which is why he changed his name to something not Swedish.”
                  “Swedish?”
                  “The Founding Foundlings were Swedish. The Plict give us Swedish names. Yours isn’t. The Plict gave us all our names, but yours was special. Zhexp is a Plict name.”
                  John wasn’t yet comfortable with the name John Graham, but didn’t find Zhexp any more natural. Perhaps it was significant that he didn’t consider it less natural.
                  The Swedish names took on a different significance now. Didn’t pandas get Chinese names and lions African names in American zoos? Did the name Zhexp make him an honorary Plict ? That seemed almost blasphemous.
                  He led the conversation to other matters, asking her what she did since his absence. As she talked, he gradually concluded she was stupid. He wondered how he could love a stupid woman, but he may not have cared when he was eighteen. As she told him about her bureaucratic job and the minor happenings in her life, he realized that she didn’t have enough challenges to develop intelligence. For all the technology and advances in this society, there were no real difficulties to overcome. There was little crime or real production. People wore identical clothing and mainly ate identical food. Wealth meant moving to a two hundred square foot apartment and strawberries, but poverty had food, safety, and shelter. She was at least sixty years old and lived in a world as unvarying as a prison.
                  A few questions led him to the knowledge that was hidden in his mind. Even children were not the reward given to successful people, since the Plict controlled the breeding. Every Vigintees , male and female, was sterilized. Fertile eggs were implanted in women’s wombs. Although people spoke of these as their children, they had no way of knowing if they really