100 short fiction tales in 100 days. 077

The window mirrored his sour expression with glints of the outside world filling in his cheeks and forehead.

The sun cleared the clouds and his reflection disappeared completely. A dog sniffed at his trash cans out front. A girl no more than ten crushed ants with her finger. A woman yelled at a boy faking his crying.

He was unsure why he had picked this day. He had not been outside for three months. The world did not need him.

He took off his clothes, then lit the paper and kindling in his fireplace. The scraps of clothing he had warn did not need any coaxing to burn to nothing.

He started up the program on his laptop and activated the small wormhole. The hairs stood up on his arms. 

He scanned his naked body and marked the results as test subject-32. It would work better this time.

He turned on the external diesel generator. The wormhole grew to the size of a man.

He hit, Enter.

Within the wormhole, elements are more readily accessible and pliable. It would work.

Crying came from hole. Then a voice. "Hello? Did it... am I me?"

An exact replica of himself walked from the wormhole.

"It worked," the created human said. 

"It did." The original smiled.

At the same time the two of them said, "Let's make more."

Splitter

It was almost midday. Soon the cycle would start again. His forehead was already shiny with beads of sweat that trailed down into shallow riverlets to the tip of his nose and dripped onto the paperwork in front of him. He wiped at the splash of water smearing it across the semi-dried ink while still writing with his other hand.

The itching had already begun at the peak of his scalp just like it had done over the last three times at seemingly random times during the 36 hours since he had drank the vile concoction. He felt the top of his head with his left hand while he continued writing with his right. There was a split there now. It was starting. His body convulsed as the drug in his body took effect and began to change him.

Doctor Ferris Balder, theoretical scientist, not commonly found to be testing his own theories with physical experiments, found himself to be doing just that and it had worked! However, it had not worked in the way he had expected.

The itching became a tearing and he felt his face split directly down the middle. His left hand explored the area where his nose should have been; it was in two halves, no longer one single nose. Each half began to grow skin and cartilage to become two separate wholes. The rest of the two seperated faces grew more skin, lips, a new eye, hair and an ear until there were two heads.

Balder had spent the last seven months researching the idea of being able to regrow organs from the damaged hosts body so that there would be no need for organ donations and then no risk of organ rejection. He had finally been able to find limited success from his own calcualtions as well as the biology team that had undertaken physical experiements using rats. The doctor had looked over the results from each experiment and had finally been sure that this last serum would be the answer to every surgeon’s and waiting organ transplant recipient’s dreams.

Doctor Balder collapsed to the floor, not because of shock or because he could not cope with the changes occuring within his body but because he had successfully split himself in to two.

The body on the left went further into spasm as more parts of the body on the right were formed. The half that lay on the other side of the chair, with the right hand still gripping the pen, moved in an almost identical way while the new skin, bones and ligaments grew at an impossible rate to make him a whole person.

Moments later the two men that were once one, stood. They looked over at the other identical men that had also experienced the same process. Now there were 16 people in the room and they were all him. As one, the doctors shook their heads and said quietly, ‘We’re going to need a bigger room.’