The Doctor pulled the stack of porno magazines out from under Paul’s bed, shaking his head with some irony he happened to find in it. After glancing at the covers to determine when the collection had started to build (April, three years ago), he picked them up in his arms and went into his office, to throw them out in the wastepaper bin.  And just as they fell into the wire basket, a sheet of paper poked it’s way out of the pages. The Doctor picked it out, and slowly unfolded it’s creases. He stared at the page for a few moments, piecing it’s meaning together in his mind. In those moments, his features shifted from confusion to horror. He was a man to fret constantly over the possibility of the worst outcome, but in this case, his racing heart was justified.

The paper was covered in black lines, and he could see that they had been measured out poorly with a ruler, because they would often veer towards each other, leaving caverns on one end and miniscule gaps on the other. It was the product of a low artistic ability. In these lines, which were divided into sets of five, sat many different figures which had been roughly penciled in. There were sloppily curled treble clefs and bloated rings with stubby tails pointing up and down. It was sheet music.

In a panic, the Doctor pulled the magazines onto the carpeted floor and began frantically to search through their pages. His thumb ran along the edges of the pages, and he pinched them by the spines and shook them vigorously. Every time he caught sight of another music sheet, he snatched it up and scanned it over with mounting disbelief. By the time he had gone through all of the magazines, he had found twenty three pieces of paper, all with the same bars and all with music notes written across them. Hastily returning the magazines to the trash, he stood up, holding the sheet music in his hands. He stared at the stack for a while, shaking ever so slightly in his hands, with no idea of what to do with them. Eventually, he stuffed them into the bottom of his desk drawer, which had a little lock on it. He put the matching little key in his pants pocket, and went back to Paul’s room.

Like every other room in the house, Paul’s room was nice, but he had kept it a mess. There were dirty clothes on the floor, the bed was unmade, and everything that had been taken out had never been put back away. he walls were covered with posters for old westerns, with Clint Eastwood and strong- muscled horses. They would have to be taken down.

The doctor was not sure what it was he would find, but he was quite sure that there was more to be discovered. He looked back under the bed, but there was nothing left there.

He started to go through all of the things on the floor, desperately throwing aside whatever was in his way. He soon became conscious of his son, Mark, standing in the doorway. He slowed down and turned to face him. “How’re you doing, Mark?” he asked in the most consoling voice possible. Mark shrugged and slowly blinked his blue eyes. He was tall and handsome at eighteen, as he had been all his life and would be all his life. Paul had been his twin brother. If nature had its way, they would have been born identical, but instead they were like opposite sides of a coin. While Mark was smart and good looking, Paul was rather stupid and ugly. And while Paul couldn’t play sports or carry a tune or draw more than a stick figure for the life of him, Mark had been captain of the school football team, was an excellent guitar player (to the joy of his cheerleader girlfriend), and could paint a lifelike portrait of anything, whether it be a friend or a lemon tree. Mark was also funny and strong, tasteful and self-assured, whereas Paul could only poorly deliver crappy jokes, and had given up on them years ago when he got embarrassed at the awkward silences that met his punch lines. Mark had been living in Cambridge, Massachusetts to attend his Freshman year of college at Harvard. But he was back in Chicago, awaiting the funeral of Paul (who did not get into any colleges), and had died two weeks before of a heroin overdose in some slum or whorehouse or something like that.

Mark had been quite aware of the fact that his brother would die young, but he was still disappointed by it, as someone like him, with a kind heart and innocent, selfless hope, would be. He stood in the doorway. “So we’ve got to get rid of all of his old stuff then, huh?” he asked softly to his feet. The doctor nodded. “You can keep something sentimental if you want,” he said. “But I don’t know what could be of value with all of this junk.” Mark nodded. “Could I see his movie collection?” he asked. The doctor, going back on his recent word, said “There’s no need to rot your brain with all of that cowboy garbage. You’re better than that.” Mark nodded again and began walking away. “Dinner’s at six thirty, sharp!” the Doctor called behind is retreating figure.

The chef had made a filet fish for them that night, and the food shrunk when put in the proportion to the enormous table, used many nights for big, stuffy parties. Tonight it was only seating two, and the doctor sat down in his seat, at six thirty sharp, very frightened. He could feel every blood vessel in his body pulsating. “Mark,” he said, when Mark sat down, “you’re three minutes late.” Mark didn’t say anything, but sat down in front of his plate, which was next to his father’s spot at the head. “Now,” said the doctor, looking around to make sure there were no servants around, “I have something very important to show you.” He leaned in closer to Mark, who sat like a statue. Slowly, the doctor pulled out one of the papers from his pocket- twenty two were still locked in his desk. He flattened the sheet music out between them. “What do you think of this?” he said. “Your brother wrote it.” Mark did not look at the music. He did not even look up from his plate. “Good for him,” he said in a voice as flat as old champagne. “Mark! Look at this.What is this?!” Still staring at the fish in his plate, he said, “It’s music.” The doctor shook his head. “Please, tell me, what do you think of this music?” Mark shrugged, and put a forkful of fish in his mouth. “Mark! Answer when you’re spoken to!”

Mark took his time swallowing despite the doctor’s visible building anger. “Why do you care?” he asked eventually. “He’s dead now anyways. Don’t worry about your precious name. We will be the only ones who know.”

“Just tell me,” said the doctor, “Please, Mark, tell me, how bad is it?”

Mark picked up the paper and looked at it for a while. “I’d burn it, if I were you,” he said. Then he stood up and left the table. The doctor left a minute later, and went up to his office, where he lit the fire in the fireplace, and sat, waiting for it to grow. When it was strong enough, the doctor unlocked the desk drawer, and threw in the pages, one by one. Then, when he was finished, he put it out. There was nothing left but a pile of ashes.

---

That night, the doctor lay in bed, staring at the ceiling. His red-hot panic had melted into a smokey, gray glurp of misery. The world would never know about the music, but the doctor knew that it meant he was a failure. Everything he thought he had had for the past eighteen years was just a big lie. He had not been the father of Mark or Paul, and this they had known. They were simply zygotes that had split from a single egg cell when he got them. The two zygotes of Mark and Paul had 46 identical chromosomes, but through genetic alteration,  Mark’s genes had been changed, so that he was given more superior traits than he would have been born with. Paul was to be the controlled variable, observed as Mark’s outcome had he not been changed.

Creating the first designer baby was the life work of the doctor, and he was paid aborbanantly by the government for his work, for the same reasons a nuclear physicist would have been during the second world war. He didn’t care much for the money. More than anything, he wanted to make a name for himself in the scientific and medical world. He wanted to be the pivotal figure in the course of humanity’s future, he wanted to have biographies written about him, he wanted to give speeches on national television, he wanted to be a celebrity, and he wanted people to see him as a god. He was, in his mind, and already, in the world’s mind, was a bit of a god. By Mark and Paul’s first birthday, it had already become apparent to the scientific community that the doctor had benefited Mark- Paul was already suffering from diseases, while Mark’s strong immune system allowed him to remain unbothered. Science papers and newspapers alike talked about all of the benefits for humanity that the doctor’s work would be able to provide in the future.

Of course, just in case, extra steps were put in place, which would make it harder for Paul to succeed. Mark was aware that he was part of this experiment, for example, while Paul was shielded from it entirely. Paul was encouraged to watch Tv when Mark was encouraged to read. Paul was discouraged from pursuing anything that he happened to show talent in, while Mark was coddled by a number of special students and teachers brought in to give him all of the abilities he did not already possess a knack for. The point of this was to create an even greater contrast between the two, so that ark, and in turn the doctor, was even more successful.

To have this power was a large part as to why the doctor had wanted to raise his parentless zygotes into children in his own home.

But Paul had been writing music, which meant he must have had a great skill at playing whatever instrument it was. The only instruments they had in the house, though, were Mark’s guitars, and the music for guitars, the doctor knew, was not written like that. So how could he have learned? Either way, Mark had seen it and said he burnit, which meant that it must have been something very impressive, something that could prove that Paul was superior to Mark in a way… and then the whole experiment would be overthrown. Nobody could ever know.

The misery crept all over the doctor, engulfing him, until he felt like he wanted to curl into a ball and clench his fists and swear out loud. So he did. He felt no better.

Upstairs, Mark sat in his bedroom. Like every other room in the house, Mark’s room was nice. It was neat and organized, and the walls were bare and white. Everything was immaculate. He knew that the doctor, paranoid as he was, was curled up in bed downstairs, crying over his lost, foolish dignity. The scaffolding he had built below himself, his god’s throne, had come crashing down, leaving him bruised and hurt on the ground. It was such a small thing, the twenty three papers, but the doctor’s world was always existing in a fragile balance.

Smiling a melancholy sort of smile, which was cold and sentimental on the edges, Mark opened his own desk drawer, which was also locked. Inside, there were two objects. The first was a roll of paper. Locking his bedroom door, Mark took out the paper and spread it across the desk. It had 88 rectangles consecutively drawn onto it, with the same poor, slanted lines. It was the product of a low artistic ability. Yet it was beautiful. It could not make a sound, but it was a piano all the same. The black keys were colored in with sharpie. The white keys had visible marks on them from where fingers had crescendoed a thousand times before. It was slightly bruised on the corners and the edges, but it was a piano all the same.

Mark had watched his brother take it out at night. Paul was not as stupid as the media made him out to be, or as the doctor perceived him to be. Paul understood how he was manipulated out of achievement. Whether he knew of the experiment or not, Mark would never know, but it was probable. Either way, he knew that he would never have anything to his name under the doctor. He would never have been allowed to play a piano. The doctor was too fragile for that, the world too naive. Only Mark and the Doctor knew that Paul had a musical ability, and only Mark knew that Paul was the best pianist that ever lived. He would watch him sometimes, when the doctor was sleeping and the servants had left. He would watch from doorways, mesmerised by the gusto and passion in which his brother would play. He could still see now, on the back of his eyelids, the image of Paul’s hunched figure, toiling over notes, writing them out on the paper and erasing them furiously just to rewrite them again, this time a line above or below, or with the tail pointing north instead if south. The cowboys were on the walls, the way a pianist with a real piano might have pictures of Beethoven and Mozart on their walls.

Mark had not known, though, for a while, whether or not Paul was really good or if he just tried really hard. Until one night, they had gone out to a bar together, to celebrate Mark getting into Harvard. The doctor had not come, because he had a speech or lecture or whatnot to give, so they were alone. They were below the drinking age, but had pretty good fake IDs, and didn’t have a problem. The bar was seedy, but in one corner, it had a dusty old player piano. After a few drinks, Paul had sat down on it’s bench. “I know that you’ve watched me, I know you’ve figured me out,” he said. “Wanna hear what I made of it?” Mark had nodded his head vigorously. “Yes, please, show me.”

It had been a gorgeous piece, evoking vivid colors and lovely scenes in the mind’s eye. Paul made the keys scream and swoon, call out mournfully and flit with joy. His fingers moved with blurring swiftness, full of dexterity and grace. It was absolutely brilliant and fantastic.

Mark rolled the piano back up. He had taken it from the room the moment he learned of Paul’s death, so that it would not be found by the Doctor. The sheets of music, however, the twenty three paged masterpiece, was gone forever, but it had done some of it’s work. Paul had finally proven himself to the doctor. The world would never hear what he had to play- never again would that beautiful song reach another soul. Mark knew that fact was the greatest tragedy of these whole events.

But he had wanted the doctor to find them, but leave the story incomplete, so that he could mull over it for as long as he wanted and never draw a real conclusion or know the whole truth.

The piano burning in his peripheral vision, Mark took the other object out of the drawer. It was an orange tube of prescription pills. He held them in his hand, feeling a swelling hatred in his chest for the doctor. It was not a loud anger, but a quiet, brooding, smoldering one. He remembered a time when Paul had come home from a night out, God-knows-where. He had been a junkie at that point. He had arrived a mess, the product of a low ability. The destruction was beautiful for the progress of the experiment. He came to Marks room, and did not make a sound, but communicated all the same.

He had a black eye and red knuckle marks across his cheek, where a fist had pounded a thousand times before. His lip was split, and his mouth bruised and bleeding a little in one corner. But he was the world’s greatest piano player all the same. All Mark had been able to think was that the Doctor had done this to him. Not directly, but in everything, the doctor had ruined his brother as much as he could. His brother, Paul, beautiful and damned.

Mark knew that he was the most valuable card in the doctor’s hand. He knew that he was the one with the power to end this, to stop the doctor from making a name and putting this horrible technology on the world. Mark was the one, not the doctor, who had the pivotal role in the path of society. He could take this where he wanted.

He was nobody. Mark was absolutely nobody. All he had were his abilities, his talents, his good looks and high IQ. He had never needed to work for anything in his life. Everything came to him so easily. And imagine a new generation of this. People pre programmed by their parents, people made to one- one version of perfect, one version of normal. Mark was ignorant of every struggle in the world. He would never be able to grasp life. He never had life. The realest thing he had ever felt was this hatred. Everything else was shallow, artificial, and pre programmed. He was like a robot. He was empty, he was nothing. He was a pathetic excuse for human. He was nobody.

He could save the future. All he had to do was prove the experiment a horrible failure.

He looked at the pills. Inside of him, two sides were fighting each other, tussling for the greater good of nothing more than Mark or the greater good of the world. The battle was over quickly. Mark was not quite sure if he was born weak or made to be weak. Either way, he put the paper piano and the bottle of pills back into the desk drawer. He took the key out of his pocket and snapped the lock shut.