Contextless Exciting Event: I Wanna Be Objectified

Friday night in your zone of the planet. The girl who lives next door, scarcely sixteen, in nothing but a bath towel, is hauling in her rubbish bins and waving at your husband. Difficult to say which of them you hate more.

In a final desperate attempt to save your marriage you have been contemplating having a threesome to reignite your husband's interest. The problem is that you don't have any female friends, you hate every woman you meet and you're fiercly jealous of your husband's attention and affection. What to do? Get a sex clone, obviously.

Don't question the clone thing too much. Let's just say it's 2023, an alien spaceship crashed near Adelaide four years ago and it was full of cloning technology (as well as alien corpses and this ominous machine which started slowly counting down from 666,666 on Christmas day 2022 when a drunk scientist accidentally spilled gravy on it). So cloning technology quickly made its way into the mainstream consumer market: people clone themselves for back up organs, they clone back up kids and pets, and they clone themselves so they can avoid breaking up with their partner. It's gotten really out of hand: people clone themselves just to see what their hair looks like from the back. Unlike robots, clones aren't bound by any internal laws so initially, people were cloning themselves so the clone could commit crimes on the original's behalf. Lawmakers quickly fixed that loophole so now the original is responsible for the actions of the clone. The only trick which remains: it's not against the law to kill yourself so murdering your own clone, while frowned upon, is legal.

You can see where this is going - but just in case you can't, this can only end a few ways:

You wait until your husband is knee-deep in his Friday night routine (beer and televised sports) before you sneak out to the nearest 7/11. Even though you live in the seething depths of suburbia, you can see five 7/11s from your driveway. Ominously, the night sky is filled with bats who crowd around the convenience stores, attracted by the swarms of bugs who are in turn attracted by the eternal flame of the fluorescent lights. What wonders has the future wrought.

The clone machine (7/11's own brand is the Echo Chamber) sits next to the Slurpee machine - the floor is sticky from amniotic fluid and high-calorie cola flavoured slush. You place your finger in the DNA Extraction Slot (someone has used permnanent marker to helpfully label it as The Glory Hole) and when you remove it, the machine has extracted 1ml of blood and bandaged your finger. You scan your universal currency card on the reader to confirm the transaction and the Echo Chamber deducts 5,560 units. A super sized Slurpee costs 5,999 units. The machine will take ~5 minutes to do its thing. You are completely alone in this 7/11. You stand around sucking on your Slurpee and trying to look unobtrusive. You think about how people used to jokingly call themselves corporate drones for working as mindless robots in retail jobs and now machines have replaced them. You wonder if drone in this sense referred to a worker bee, a drone for the colony, or maybe to the low, monotonous sound of a machine at work. Both seem to fit. This convenience store is really just a bank of vending machines grouped together under the glowing 7/11 sign and the whirling bats.

Eventually, the door to the Echo Chamber opens like a fridge and you see your clone. No liquid nitrogen or scifi music. She has the same hair as you - how do they do that? That's the creepiest part of this whole thing - how do they perfectly recreate your hair? She even has the same razor burn and wrinkles and pimples and scars as you. She looks around stupidly. Her paper dress rustles in the air conditioning.

You stash your clone in the garden shed for the night with a 2L bottle of pre-mixed sangria, a bag of potato chips and an iPad so she can watch Netflix and porn - you want her to be a convincing simulacrum of an adult woman by tomorrow and a sleepless night spent watching Friends and masturbating is the quickest way to get her there.

When you check on her in the morning she's reclining on a bag of potting mix and well into season four of Friends. Your husband will be out for most of the day getting tattoos dedicated to his ex-girlfriends removed. You spend the morning cleaning and cooking an elaborate feast for him. You teach the clone how to use a mop and make potato bake, then you devote the afternoon to beautifying yourselves. You take a shower with your clone. You wash the amniotic fluid from her hair and help her remove the peg from the stub of her umbilical cord. You teach her how to shave and then you paint her toe nails. You loan her lacy underwear and she falls asleep in your lap while you do her hair. At 5pm you hide your half-naked clone in your bedroom closet and ask her to trust you.

Your husband gets drunk over dinner and spends half the meal on his phone. He knocks over a candle and accidentally sets the tablecloth on fire. He questions why you even bothered to light candals and put out a tablecloth. He complains that his steak is overdone. Instead of going to his tattoo removal session today he played basketball with his friends. A tattoo is just visible on his collar bone. He never got a tattoo of your name and you are always very careful not to touch him anywhere you see another girl's name (in addition to the 'Jasmine' on his chest, there's also a 'Kim' on his thigh and an 'Ashley' on his hip bone). His sweaty socks are lying at the foot of the sofa where he left them. He is the dad in every sitcom. You're never been more repusled by anyone but the clone is in the closet and you shaved so it's too late to back out now.

You tell him you have a surprise for him, you tell him to meet you in the bedroom in 5 minutes. As you shut the bedroom door, you hear the sound of the TV from the other end of the house. You free your clone from the closet and brush your teeth together. You light candles and put on your sex playlist. You lie together on the bed and wait for him to come in. You pat your clone's head and she looks at you adoringly. Besides the cast of Friends and the anonymous people of PornHub, you are the only person she has ever known. No one else in the whole universe has ever touched her.

The TV is echoing from the living room - he's watching the last minutes of Shrek the Third. Your clone feels very warm against you. You try to remember the things you liked about him in the beginning: the veins in his forearms, the way his jeans fit and your mutual interest in historiographic metafiction featuring Robert E. Lee.

You hear the end titles of Shrek the Third and tell your clone to copy what you do. You tousel your hair, you arch your back, you suck in your belly, you point your toes so your legs look thinner, you open your mouth a bit and push out your lips. You lie perfectly still waiting for the door to open. Then, from the other end of the house, you hear Shrek Forever After start. He's forgotten about you. Your clone looks at you uncertainly: this isn't what happens in porn.

You flop back on the bed. The sex playlist now seems grotesque.

"How you doin'?" asks the clone.

You shouldn't have let her watch so much Friends.

Apparently unsure of what to do, the clone begins to paw at your breasts and clumsily lick your neck. You leave your hands limp on the bed. She takes your underwear off, stradles you and rubs herself against you in a wildly overblown performance of ecstasy. Probably shouldn't have let her watch so much porn either. As her fingertips approach your cervix, you wonder: does what's happening to you right now count as sex or is this just masturbation? Either way you're not really in the mood, but the clone is valiantly trying to turn a 'meh' into a 'yes'.

She hasn't even kissed you yet. You should have made her watch porn from the romantic category. You cup her face in your hands to still her industrious genital kneading and she looks up at you along your naked body. She's been alive for less than 24 hours. From the far end of the house you can hear Shrek grumbling about his outhouse.

You grab a fistful of her hair and pull her up to kiss you - she tastes like you and toothpaste. It's not great but at least she's enthusiastic. You pull her further up and shuffle around until she's sitting on your face. You start to hum through her underwear. She stops her fake moaning and looks down at you. Gently, she runs a finger down your cheek then she grips you so tightly with her thighs you think you might suffocate.

Eventually she spasms, squeaks and goes limp. She's arched over you, resting her forehead against the headboard. Feeling pleased with yourself, you kiss her inner thighs and reach up to stroke her face as the sex playlist croons. From the living room, you hear your husband laugh at Donkey. You lie peacefully for a minute before tapping her hip to prompt her to move off you. She doesn't move. You shove her and she tilts to the side, her forehead sliding down the headboard onto your husband's pillow. Her groin is still in your face.

When you wriggle out from underneath her, she doesn't move. You've seen enough crime dramas to know she is dead. Dead girls always look like this on HBO: naked. Just in case, you feel for a pulse. Zilcho. Her fingers are still warm and sticky. On your phone you Google the phrase "clone dead after initially awkward but then surprisingly pleasant lesbian sex" - you uncover an error inherent in all clones produced by the Echo Chamber: they die when they cum. Forums are packed with panicked dudes who bought cute girl DNA online and accidentally killed the clone of their dream girl by fucking her too hard.

You spend half the night burying your clone under the dirt floor of the garden shed so your neighbours don't see. When you come to bed, you're covered with sweat and filth - blisters have burst open on your palms. You throw the underwear you loaned your clone under the bed: they're covered in potting mix and girl slime. Your husband is so drunk he doesn't stir when you slip into bed. He's got almost all of the covers but you're still sweaty anyway. With your aching hands you reach out and rest a finger against him. He's very warm. You lie there staring into the dark: sweet, topless, pretty unhappy.

Oh shit

In booty shorts you make your way down the street, your slippers slapping against the bitumen. The 7/11 beckons to you in the night. Bats circle, insects perish, machines hum. They're playing a mash-up of "Rich Girl" and "Uptown Girl". It's a particularly compelling kind of torture. You buy a long neck from a vending machine and lean against a machine full of live seafood. Crabs tap at the perspex display window. You're halfway through your beer when the door to the Echo Chamber opens. There she is: doe eyed, dumb, brand new - a perfect copy of you.