The Imposter

The Imposter | Chapter Six [Inconceivable]

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[Chapter Six]

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inconceivable \in-kuhn-SEE-vuh-buhl\

(adj.) not capable of being imagined or grasped mentally; unbelievable

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"I'm sorry, what did you say?" my mother asked breathlessly.

I grimaced and started tracing patterns on the table. "Lately, a lot of unexplainable events have been happening, like the detention and our fight last night. It's not me. I-I mean...I didn't do any of this stuff and it's freaking me out. I was at the party last night when I apparently fought with you. I promise I'm not making any of this up to get out of grounding, I really don't know what's going on!" I knew I probably sounded a little crazy, but I was trying to get my point across. Nervously I watched my parents as I explained everything, hoping that they would believe me.

"I made a chart of all the stuff that's happened, when and where it occurred and where I was at the time. None of it matches up." I explained hurriedly, fumbling the paper awkwardly as I passed it to them. "I worked on it all day, uh, piecing things together..." I trailed off awkwardly as they glanced over it.

Their faces turned even paler and they exchanged a guilty look. My curiosity was piqued. What did they have to be guilty about?

"I decided to come to you and see if you had any suggestions for me. I don't know what to do anymore, and that scares me." My voice wavered at the end, making me realize that I really was scared not to mention stressed.

My mom looked at my dad, conveying an unspoken message with her eyes. He seemed to debate something for a minute then nodded slowly. "I talked to Faux today," she said deliberately, "he okayed it." My father nodded again and then looked at me pityingly.

"What's going on?" I asked worriedly. I could tell they were keeping something from me. If they knew what was going on, I'd really like to know. In fact, if they could fix it, that would be even better.

My mom took a deep breath, closing her eyes and rubbing her temples before directing her stern gaze at me. "You know that your father and I are robotic scientists, working for the government, right?" When I nodded, she continued. "Do you remember that robotic dog we showed you one time? Our job is to create lifelike robots, but recently, our director asked us to work on something classified. He wanted us to try and create a clone with little to no robotics involved. The dog was our first experiment, just to get a feel for creating something lifelike. However, we had to develop everything else because it couldn't have a metal inside." She paused and my father took up the explanation. I was at a loss for words and frankly, I was scared to see where this was heading.

"The government sector we work for, NANO, wants us to create clones to use as spies. That's what NANO is, a covert operation sector. So, we researched how to harvest organs and from there we worked on harvesting some of our own. We attempted rats at first, just to see if we could get it to work. Scientists had been able to successfully reproduce livers and lungs, and one scientist even claimed to have harvested a brain, so we figured we could harvest all of the body's organs. Our rat was a success, except that it died only a few days later."

I held up a hand to interrupt them, "Are you trying to tell me that you created a real live rat from nothing?" The idea was sacrilegious and impossible.