The People Copier

This post was inspired by 29 august @mariannewest's Freewrite Writing Prompt Day 2144: copy of me.

I don't normally put myself under pressure to write, so this is probably good practice !

Starting in 5...4...3..2...1....

So one day, Professor Smithers invented a people copier. As a mad inventor, it was the kind of thing he liked to do. It's a shame he never thought about the consequences. This was one of those things where he just came up with it, patented it, then forgot it and moved on to his next crazy idea.

Sadly, the patent was spotted by the Acme Corporation. Famous for having lots of money and the inverse in the way of morals, they paid their lawyers to appropriate the patent. Six months later, the first copied person rolled out of their machine. It looked just like the "original". But was a blank slate. No personality, barely enough instinctive knowledge to feed itself.

But Acme persevered. Within six months more, they'd found ways to program the copies. Perfect workers ! It was at that point that they realised over-population could become an issue. Luckily for them, and unluckily for the human race, Acme's people-copies had made them a huge amount of money. So they had the funds to lobby the government, who passed a law that only one of each human could exist, and when an ersatz human was made, the original had to be destroyed.

Image created by AI in Nightcafe Studio. This is what it made of a prompt asking for an artificial person !

Well that turned out a bit more dystopian than I expected !

Memo to self; don't let my subconscious take over when I'm writing in a stream-of-consciousness kind of way with no particular pre-planned storyline.