Clean up and Think This Through

You decide it's no use cursing your own stupidity now. You need to think, to figure out what to do next, but mostly you need to get all this slime off of you.

You step into the next room, which is the bunker's bathroom, if it can be called that. It's the size of a custodial closet and it has a sink, toilet, and shower all jammed in right next to each other. Uncle Leroy didn't engineer this for comfort, and you honestly never gave much thought to living here, much less waking up as a clone in the vat in the next room. You wonder how you'll manage as you weave through the tight spaces and step into the shower, which is really just a low spot in the cement floor with a drain in it. It does come with a nice stainless steel shower head: the kind that pulls off the wall and can be moved around on a steel hose, but that's its only redeeming feature.

You turn on the water. It's pleasantly hot. You remember where that heat is coming from: a radiothermic generator that Leroy had installed to provide power and warmth inside the bunker. It's very effective, never needs maintenance, and can run for decades...but all that convenience comes at a price since it gets all of its power and heat from a lump of dangerously radioactive metal sealed away in the bowels of the bunker. It's perfectly safe, as long as the casing remains intact (and knowing Leroy, he probably designed the casing to withstand being run over by a freight train), but that doesn't keep you from being nervous about having your hair suddenly start falling out due to radiation poisoning.

Not that you have much hair to worry about. Uncle Leroy said the machine was supposed to grow a clone to maturity in just 9 weeks, and hair and nail growth can't quite keep up. So you're left with a half-inch fluff on top of your head and that's about it. More will grow in, in time.

If you live long enough.

That's what your mind keeps going back to. Waking up as a woman is a minor inconvenience (and quite a bit of kinkiness, you admit), compared to the fact that you woke up as a clone. That means the original you, the real Carl (if he's the real Carl, who does that make you?) is either dead or missing. And has been for over three months. How did you die? What (or who) killed you? You search your memory, but it provides no clues. The last time you checked in with Leroy and uploaded a brain scan your life was going pretty well: steady job, safe apartment, nice but somewhat conservative girlfriend of a few months (but then, who are you to complain about girlfriends when you couldn't even get a date with anyone for years before Amanda). You were pretty reserved and friendly with everyone you did interact with. You had no real enemies and you can't think of anyone who would kill or kidnap you. But clearly someone or something did.

Could you still be in danger? It seems unlikely that your killer (or killers) knows about the bunker--or else they probably would have destroyed you--the clone--before you could awaken, but beyond the private bunker Leroy built for you, his larger survival complex is much easier to find. They could be out there looking for you, or maybe waiting for you back at your apartment.

Of course, if they are waiting for you they're expecting a bearded 30-something beanpole of a man, not a woman...Certainly not a woman who is, to be honest (as you check out your reflection while toweling off), young, slim, and attractive. You have an ace in the hole after all.