With 3762 words at the close of Day 2, I haven't exactly got off to a rocket-propelled start, but I'm on track and not too displeased with that. Hopefully I can keep it going steady through the week. (Although given that I’ve got two busy weeknights today and tomorrow, that may be tricky...)

Still, I guess I should follow through on the promise I made to tell you a little bit about my story, shouldn't I?

I have a working title: The Unknown Clone. Those who work, have ever worked, or know someone who has worked with me, will find this substantially more funny than the remainder of the world. I think that makes it particularly appropriate as a working title. :)

Okay, so the story’s set in a near future pre-apocolyptic earth. The environment is on the verge of complete collapse. The situation has passed the point of no return: the planet cannot continue to sustain human life for more than a century at the outmost. And so the race save mankind--the race to the stars--is on, before the biosphere dissolves into a puddle of primordial sludge.

Unfortunately, sending a sustainable human colony into space is... well, it's hard. There's no convenient life-sustaining planet within short term range of Earth. A generation ship beyond the range of any assistance from Earth, wouldn't be able to hold the necessary resources to be self-sustaining. Even if they did manage to find a place and a way to get settlers there, how could they begin to deal with the vast human population of Earth? Every advance in space-faring technology also shifts the goalposts slightly--a high density hull material also makes better cyclone-resistant walls for housing, etc--so with every advance, it’s possible to last out longer to give the population more time, but the entire thing is still well beyond the technology of the day in many, many different ways.

It simply can't be done, at least not in time.

But it must be done.

And so, to increase the rate of scientific progress beyond what can reasonably acheived merely with top priority on education, strong gifted programs, massive research budgets, and loosened ethical supervision, the government begins a program of cloning to give great scientists another (several) bites at the intellectual apple and the gene pool in general. The clones themselves are raised until school age by their surrogate mothers, who get financial considerations in exchange for undergoing IVF with a clone. Apart from being streamlined into the gifted program due to their genetic heritage, they have full rights as human beings, and are more like much younger identical twins than anything else.

My story follows three clones of the one genius who have grown up very differently--one's been raised away from the corruptions of modern science in a scary religious cult; one's had every advantage modern education can offer her, but hasn’t managed to make any kind of progress on her project for an embarrassing five years; and one's spent the last fifteen years in a mental institution, because when inspiration strikes she loses track of what's real and what's only elegant theory, and becomes completely incoherent--as they encounter each other for the first time, and... well, I'm not actually sure yet, where it's going.

But it sure sounds like it'll be fun to find out, doesn't it?