Michael felt his skin crawl. "So you're suggesting I… or he… is a clone? Or a copy?" His voice wavered.
Devon looked at him apologetically. "It's a possibility. Maybe not a traditional clone grown from scratch — that would take time. But maybe a bio-printed body stored here, or a quantum-entangled mind copy in an android. I don't know. The tech is beyond anything on the public books, but corporations often are a few steps ahead in secret."
Michael struggled to process that. He had volunteered for this mission with some knowledge that he was more asset than person to the company, but this? Growing a spare him? Without asking? It was monstrous.
The other Michael was shaking his head vigorously. "No. No, I don't buy it. I remember everything. I feel like me. I bleed, I think," he gestured to the dried blood on his side bandage. "I'm not some lab-grown creature. I'm me!" He looked around the room, eyes pleading for someone to believe him.
Juliet stepped closer to him, gently placing a hand on his shoulder. "We're not saying you're not real, Michael. But we have to explore explanations. However incredible they sound."
Elena cleared her throat. "Let's get evidence. Devon, can you check if any hidden system activated during the storm? Power surges, unexplained machine usage, anything in medbay's restricted files?"
"I'll try," Devon said, fingers already dancing across his console.
Meanwhile, Juliet moved toward a storage cabinet. "There's one straightforward test," she said. She withdrew two small kits and held them up. "Genetic assays. If there's any difference in DNA, we'll find it."
Michael and his double locked eyes again. That was the ultimate proof, wasn't it? Except if one was a clone, the DNA would likely be identical too, he realized. Still, maybe a clone's telomeres or slight mutations could differ. It was worth a shot.
Juliet approached Michael first. "Arm, please." He extended his arm and she swabbed it with antiseptic. With a quick prick of a needle, she drew a vial of blood. She then repeated the process on the other Michael, collecting his sample.
As she fed the vials into the portable gen-scanner unit, the other Michael spoke up, voice laced with uncertainty now. "If one of us is a copy… which one is it?" His question hung in the air, dread-filled.
Michael tensed. This was the question gnawing at him too. If Devon's theory was right, logically it would be the one who "died" and then was suddenly fine. That would be the clone.
His eyes drifted to the other Michael. By that reasoning, the inside Michael would be the copy, since the original (himself) was left outside. He felt a flare of defensive pride—he was the one who actually survived that hellish EVA. Surely that meant he was the original.
But then, a small voice in his mind whispered: What if I'm the copy? After all, he did black out. What if he actually died and the other consciousness is the original continuing inside while he was the duplicate awakened outside somehow? No, that doesn't fit; a backup wouldn't wake outside in a failing suit. That had to be the original him continuing. Right?
His head hurt. There was no clear answer without evidence. Each of them only had their own conviction.
The scanner dinged, and all eyes turned to Juliet as she examined the results. She glanced between the two Michaels. "No significant genetic divergence found," she said quietly. "If one is a clone, they're an exact one, at least at the genetic level. Both samples match Michael Chan's genome perfectly, down to the last marker we can read."
Michael let out a breath he hadn't realized he was holding. It wasn't a surprise, but hearing it confirmed was still jarring.
"Could one be an android?" Sera asked tentatively. "Like a really advanced synthetic that bleeds and all?"
Devon shook his head. "If so, it fooled the scanners and the DNA test, which means it's beyond cutting-edge. It would have to be a fully biological construct, indistinguishable from a human."
"Which is basically a clone," Elena said. She rubbed her temples. "Either way, we have two real, living Michaels. Let's treat them as such."
Michael felt a small measure of relief at her words. She was acknowledging him as real, not just something.
The other Michael looked up, eyes glistening. "Thank you, Captain," he said quietly.
Elena nodded. "However, we can't ignore that this is… highly irregular. For your own safety and everyone's, I think it's best if you two stay under observation. Together or separate, I'll leave to you for now. Can you both manage to be in the same room without... incident?"
Michael glanced at his double. Now that the initial shock and anger was ebbing, he mostly felt a deep unsettledness. But he didn't hate the other man; how could he? If anything, part of him pitied him—or pitied himself, it was hard to separate. "I can," he said. "I just… want answers."
The other Michael nodded. "Me too. I won't start anything."
Juliet stepped in. "In that case, I'd prefer to keep you both in the medbay for monitoring a while longer. At least until we're sure neither of you is about to collapse from radiation or stress."
Michael wasn't thrilled about being cooped up with his duplicate, but medbay was at least a controlled environment. And he did feel bone-tired now that adrenaline was ebbing.
Devon cleared his throat. "I've got something," he said from the terminal. "Access logs show around the time of the storm, there was a spike in power usage in a medbay sub-system labeled 'BioMat S7'."
Juliet's head snapped up. "BioMat S7… There's a sealed panel in the storage room labeled S7. I assumed it was some experimental bio-material locker. The manual didn't detail it, classified by the company."
Elena exchanged a look with Devon. "Could it be a bioprinter or clone vat?"
Devon nodded. "It drew a lot of power for about three minutes, right when the station was reeling from the EMP. Then it shut off. My guess? That's when one of you was… created."
A shiver ran through Michael. The idea that some machine spat out a version of him in three minutes was nauseating.
"Can we open it?" the other Michael asked, standing up abruptly, color returning to his face in the form of anger. "If there's equipment, evidence—let's see it."
Juliet looked hesitant. "If it's sealed and classified, tampering might break corporate rules."
Elena's expression hardened. "Given the situation, I'll take responsibility. We need to know. Show me the panel."
Juliet led Elena and Devon to a small side door in the medbay, essentially a closet. Michael and his double watched from their cots, not entirely trusting each other even now, but their attention was drawn to that panel.
Juliet keyed in a master override code and used her captain's keycard that Elena handed over. With a hiss, a section of the wall slid open.
Inside was a cylindrical chamber about the size of a human body, now empty but with glistening residue on its inner surface. The chamber walls were studded with organic-looking tubing and metallic interfaces. It looked like something between a high-tech MRI and a cocoon.
Michael felt sick. That thing looked like it could indeed grow or house a body.
"Mother of God," Sera whispered.
Devon carefully stepped forward and scanned a small console next to it. "Logs encrypted… but it definitely activated recently." He pointed to a canister slot. "Nutrient gel is almost depleted. Whatever was in here… absorbed it. Either grown or sustained."
Juliet ran a gloved finger through the gooey residue inside the chamber, her face a mix of horror and fascination. "It's like an accelerated cloning pod."
The other Michael had come up behind them despite being told to rest. "So one of us came out of that… thing," he said quietly, fists clenched. He looked over at Michael, who had also stood, unable to stay seated after this revelation. They locked eyes. Which of us? was the unspoken question.
Elena closed the panel gently. "We'll secure this room. This evidence is… well, it's beyond any of our clearance. But now we know." She turned to face both Michaels, her face solemn. "This strongly suggests that one of you was created in that pod when the system thought Michael Chan had died."
Michael took a shaky breath. It was real. All of it. He had a clone, or he was the clone. He felt simultaneously vindicated and utterly lost.
The other Michael looked devastated, rubbing his face with one hand. "I never consented to this," he muttered. "We never did."
"No, you didn't," Elena agreed softly. "None of us knew."
Michael tried to muster something to say. A joke, maybe, like he sometimes did to lighten a mood: Hey, at least I'm one of a kind, twice. But the words died in his throat. There was nothing light about this.
Instead, he asked the one question that mattered now. "What do we do next?"
The room fell silent. No one, not even Elena, had a ready answer.
In that silence, Michael realized the true horror of their situation wasn't just that he had been duplicated. It was the suffocating uncertainty of what it meant for all of them—practically, ethically, personally. Who was he, if there was another him? What would the corporation do when they found out?
He looked at his double—his brother? His self?—and saw the same hopeless question reflected there. For now, they were both Michael Chan, both alive. But eventually, wouldn't one have to be considered the "real" one? And what would happen to the other?
The answer remained elusive, hanging in the stale, filtered air of the medbay as the crew of Janus Station grappled with a reality that defied everything they thought they knew.