Dave heard his clone come home.
He’d been doing the laundry and had found a pair of panties and a bra in the dryer and had gotten very confused. The huge orca had set them down, wondering which of their clones was dating a human girl, when he looked back down and saw a wetsuit where the undergarments had been a split second ago.
Dave had stared, confused. Hadn’t that just been a pair of panties?
Finn hadn’t announced himself. Dave set the wetsuit down, putting the panties out of his mind. His gut instinct told him that there seemed to be something wrong with Finn today.
He lumbered out of the laundry room to greet his son like always and saw the younger whale staring at the ground, not even saying hello like he usually did, heading straight upstairs. Dave wondered what had gotten the poor clone so down, his tail had even been dragging through the streamers of water that crossed the plastic floor.
Upstairs, a door slammed shut.
Dave sighed. Kids.
Had he been this moody at 18? Dave was pretty sure he’d gotten over that phase when he was 14 or 15. It had been so long ago now, though, maybe he was misremembering? No, he was sure he’d gotten over it by the time he’d turned 18. And Finn was always pretty consistent in his moods. Had something happened at school?
Dave glanced at the clock.
Mike wasn’t home yet, doing drills with their junior squad. Dave was an officer, so he only really managed the paperwork. Unfortunately, he wasn’t allowed to fraternize with Mike, so the two had to deal with being distant at work while being married at the same time. It was awkward, but they were handling it so far. Days like today, however, reinforced the difference in enlisted soldiers and officers and the privileges allotted to them.
As he considered going upstairs to talk to Finn, his mind drifted back to the panties.
Something about them seemed oddly familiar. But wait, no, hadn’t he mistaken his wetsuit for them? How the hell does someone confuse light purple panties for a thick wetsuit? Something was off about this whole situation.
Dave took a few minutes to look around the house.
In the bathroom, he found packages of tampons. Almost as soon as his eyes fell on them, however, they shimmered and became a package of ‘ball wipes’, products for men to clean their groins and armpits. Other things were changing-his shower had a pink loofah which transformed into a black colored loofah, and then his trash had been filled with used tampons which shifted into used ‘ball wipes’. They were a lot less bloody but still kinda gross.
Dave went back to the ‘dry dock’-what they called the living room with the TV where they could entertain human guests. He sat down on the couch and stared silently at the TV, wondering what the hell was going on. Was he losing his mind? Hallucinating? It could be a side-effect of the treatment-Lord knows he’d had a huge change of life.
What he’d experienced couldn’t be written off-he’d noticed things out of place and they’d simply shifted as soon as his eyes had flicked away.
Dave stood and paced, feeling panic rise in his massive chest. No, no, being afraid wasn’t going to help him. He’d learned that on the battlefield. Fear killed because when you were afraid, you stopped thinking.
He took a deep, calming breath, and focused on what mattered right now.
Finn was upstairs, upset, and needed to talk. Dave could sense that. He pushed away the strange occurrences, filing them away to investigate further later. It was time to help his clone.
He walked upstairs and knocked on the door.
“Finn?” Dave asked, his voice deep and load. “Can I come in?”
“No.” Finn’s familiar voice rumbled back. “I’m tired.”
Dave opened the door anyways.
Finn looked up from his computer desk, eyes wide in panic and fear. “Dad! What the fuck, go away!”
The orca scrambled to push Dave away, but Dave easily turned the push into a hug, patting his son gently as he sobbed in his arms.
“Hey bud. What’s wrong?” Dave asked softly.
“I’m so lonely!” Finn burbled into Dave’s heaving pecs. “I want a pod!”
“A pod?” Dave cocked his head.
What a weird thing to say. Dave had never experienced this. Maybe… the cloning had altered Finn’s wants and needs? Perhaps, having been human, Dave had never really been affected by the whale’s instincts of his anthro form. But Finn, having ALWAYS been an anthro, experienced the full brunt of those instincts.
It was a theory, and he made a mental note to log this new development in the files he and Mike kept on their clones. This could become a problem with other herd-type clones. And if instincts always cropped up, he could only guess what a shark’s instincts might be like. Dave shuddered.
“So, let me get this straight,” Dave said, pulling back. “You’re an orca and you need a pod?”
Finn nodded, tears rolling down his rubbery whale cheeks.
“Guess what, pal? There’s a pod of whales in the bay right now. Why don’t you go take a swim with them and I’ll see what I can do about this issue, okay?”
“Y-you can make a pod?”
Dave lied. “Sure, son.”
Finn nodded and silently stalked off to the moon pool.
Dave watched his son trundle away, then took a quick look around the room. He normally never snooped on his own clone. Lord knows he loved his privacy as a kid, and intruding on that privacy just felt… wrong. Even if Finn was technically an exact copy of Dave.
Mentally, the doctors had said, the two of them were completely different.
Finn was his own person. Sure, he had the same likes and dislikes, for the most part, but his life experiences had made him a much more emotional person. Finn had never grown up in Georgia, for example. And he certainly didn’t have twenty years of experience as a soldier or seen combat as Dave had.
But Dave knew himself.
He walked over to the computer and checked out what Finn had shut down when he had walked in. Dave had only seen a rather bland computer program, but Finn had been panicked enough to close it out before attempting to push his father out of the room.
“Chronivac?” Dave mumbled as the program came back into view.
The orca read over the instructions and what is could do. The more he read, the more that cold feeling of dread crept over him. Reality shifting? Awareness? Transformations?
He didn’t want to believe it was real. After all, what program could possibly do any of this? It sounded like something from a sci-fi or horror story. Dave went through all the prior transformations and his eyes widened.
Oh, so that was why he had found panties in the dryer.
Dave sat down heavily in the chair and contemplated his new reality very carefully. He had no interest in becoming a woman, even if he knew, intellectually, that he had been one. From what he could tell, he’d been a struggling single mom barely holding it together trying to balance her officer rank and her home life and slowly failing at both.
Now he was a successful Navy SEAL, and an anthro with an extended lifespan.
Things were different, but they weren’t bad. He’d half-expected Mike and himself to be locked up forever. And maybe, in reality, they would have been. But thanks to this… device, he and Mike lived happy, mostly-independent lives with their cloned ‘sons’.
Right, and now Finn was depressed because being special wasn’t very fun.
Strangely, the Chronivac hadn’t inserted any prejudices in the reality shift against those who chose to undergo the procedure. So the longing and loneliness Finn was experiencing must have been from being an orca and not from the program. Dave sighed, trying to figure out how to help his son adapt better.
If Finn was too alienated with himself, things could go bad. Whales were moody fucking creatures in general. Dave didn’t feel like walking in on his son floating belly-up in his tank like a guppy one day.
Dave pulled up the profiles of people close to Finn.
There weren’t that many-Jeff and two 18 year old girls named Sarah and Alexandra, both on the swim team. He snorted. Of course they’d tried to recruit his son for the varsity swim team. That was basically a nationals win in the making.
He looked deeper into their profiles and realized their ‘caring’ dispositions were a big facade. Sarah and Alexandra wanted to become Olympic swimmers. According to their stats, they might have a shot-if they got scouted. Hence why they were getting so close to his and Mike’s clones.
A smile crept over Dave’s blunt muzzle, exposing his sharp teeth.
Well, if they wanted to be Olympic swimmers, why not make them exactly that? He started typing, considering different variations and species. In the end, he settled on seperate clone germ-lines, so they weren’t all his kids. That would be nerve-wracking.
He set the duration to permanent, the time of transformation to be 8 hours, delayed until the start of the school day tomorrow (he knew how messy reality shifts could be from personal experience, keeping them away from their houses should let the changes settle without any real interruptions), with their awarenesses set to ‘off’.
Dave hit enter.