The Man Who Didn't Take Over the World

Many years ago in a town north-west of Melbourne on the way to the ski resorts there lived a man with aspirations to take over the world. It had been his dream ever since he was a boy. All through school he kept his head down and studied hard. He graduated high school Dux of his class and had his pick of universities.

He attended Melbourne University and threw himself into his business course. He knew that only the rich and powerful had any influence in the world and figured that he would slowly work his way up to their level of wealth and power, all the while expanding his corporation across Australia and the rest of the world. He knew that taking over the world would be an extremely slow process and that he would likely be an old man when he succeeded. But he believed that by that point he would’ve worked out a formula that would keep him alive forever, he was an avid comic book reader and took most of his inspiration from them.

He graduated university, once again the Dux and also engaged to a woman who had also been studying the same course as him. She shared his dreams of world domination and came from a wealthy family. They both started working for her father, both excelling at their jobs.

One night, the night he planned on proposing to her, she was hit by a car and killed instantly. He was devastated by her death. Before leaving the scene of the accident, he pulled a few hairs from her head and sealed them in an airtight bag. He planned on cloning her and pretending that she had never died. Her father had a laboratory in one of his buildings. However, her father refused to let him to clone her. They argued fiercely over it until he killed her father in the heat of the moment.

Realising what he had just done, he drove over to the laboratory and stole the equipment he would need to clone his beloved back to life again before driving back to his home town north west of Melbourne. There he settled down in a large house on the edge of town and opened up a fish and chip shop.

By day he ran the fish and chip shop, getting to know everyone once again. By night he worked in the laboratory he had set up in his house, trying to clone his beloved back to life. It took him years and many failures before he was able to do this. But once he was able to figure out how to get the clones to form human shape instead of the hideous misshapen blobs they originally took he knew he was very close to seeing his beloved again. It still took him a few years to get the process right so that the clone didn’t immediately die as soon as he removed it from the test tube.

The first clone to survive being removed from the test tube was a disappointment to him. It had all of his beloved’s memories, including being hit by the car, but it or she felt nothing for him. In fact, she screamed at him and tried to leave his house, wanting to go to her family in Melbourne. He subdued the clone and put her back in the test tube in suspended animation. He knew that he should kill and dispose of her, but she looked just like his beloved and he couldn’t bring himself to kill her.

This happened with each resulting clone he made. Try as he might, he couldn’t replicate the feelings the original had had for him. His house was now filled with clone filled test tubes of his beloved. Until one night when the latest clone became violent when he tried to restrain her and return her to the tube. She viciously turned on him, and ended up sending him staggering backwards against one of the tubes. She lunched at him, swinging his work stool at his head.

He ducked the stool and scrambled to get away from the clone. The stool smashed the glass of the tube, and the liquid holding the clone within in suspended animation gushed onto the floor. The latest clone threw herself at him with a wild scream, and they both tumbled to the ground, both desperately fighting for their lives. In the process, they smashed another tube.

The two newly released clones joined the fight, and within moments the three of them had throttled the life out of the man. Together, the three of them explored the house paying little attention to their exact replicas in the tubes. In master bedroom they found a scrap book containing clippings of their father’s death. Wordlessly, they agreed that there was nothing for them in Melbourne and that there was nothing to be gained for them by releasing the rest of the clones. They burned the house down, and then set out into the world, each going her own way.

Years later, the first of the three clones returned to the town. Several months later, the second clone returned as well. Almost exactly a year after the first clone, the third clone also returned to the town. Despite themselves, they were drawn to the place. They also regretted burning down the man’s house with all of the clones and cloning equipment inside of it. They all got jobs at the local supermarket, and spent all of their free time trying to figure out a way to continue the man’s work and clone themselves so that, once again, there would be an army of clones.