I reached the gates of our housing district and had to wait in line at the gate as we all scanned ourselves in. For how hard they tried to keep the clone populations separate from the world, they worked even harder to make sure everyone else stayed out. Clones and any humans who weren't their owners were not allowed to associate.

I stared up the line impatiently, waiting for the people in front of me to get a move on. I saw the curly haired head of Bea as she scanned herself through the gate. Her dark skin glistened red against the brightness of the scanner. Its turned red as it read the chip under her wrist, the gate sliding open wide enough to let her through until closing again.

The area around us was already awash in darkness, despite it still being before sunset. This far in Drowner territory, where the clones were allowed to live on the flooded land, darkness was nearly a permanent shadow, filling every nook and crevice as it struggled to reach the ground from so high in the sky. Audi, her dark hair pulled back in a tight ponytail under the hood of her transparent plastic jacket glared at me, placing a hand over her short bangs to keep them from frizzing as the rain dampened our skin.

“In late tonight, Mari,” she said, pursing her lips. She eyed my hair, which I had shaved about a year ago, the short blond curls just starting to grow back to frame my face in a rather un-Marilyn hairstyle. Audreys, unlike Marilyns, had always preferred to look as much like the original as possible, despite being nearly as numerous as us. Probably because their original had a much better reputation than ours, but they often used it as another reason to look down on Marilyns as the cheaper ‘classless’ clones.

I rolled my eyes. Of course, she would draw her own conclusions.

“Yes. I was at work,” I said, emphasizing the word 'work'. She didn’t seem convinced, her lips turning down disapprovingly.

“Oh, I am sure you were very hard.” The forced politeness in her voice was so fake, there was no way to decipher it as anything but sarcasm.

“Fuck off, Audi,” I muttered, turning away, and pulling my hood down further over my face. Not that it did me any good. It was just as see-through as hers. It was to make sure we didn’t hide anything underneath. Another little bonus of being a clone. None of the humans trusted us.

She made a high pitched sound, one that I was sure was supposed to sound offended at my ‘harsh language.’ But then it was her turn to scan herself through. Thank whatever alien life-form that is playing god, good riddance. I hated how she and the other Audreys always pretended to be so wholesome. When in a pinch, they were just as desperate as the rest of us.

Finally, I could scan through. The little sensor gave an approving little ding as I raised my wrist to it. My Number flashed up on the screen over it in green. Of course, it couldn’t fit the whole thing. Numbers like 1,834,406,350 didn’t fit, and no one ever bothered remembering it anyway. 350 was fine, anyone older than that was long dead already anyway.

I entered the compound, passing through the thick metal fence which made the housing look more like a prison than anything else. Still, even prisons usually had better living conditions. I jumped from one side of the sidewalk to the other, jumping over a dark murky water to get to the other side. There the ground was filled with puddles and small pools of water below where it had settled from the last high tide. Garbage settled there, along with a rancid stench that filled the air. There was no escaping it down here.

I walked along the crumbled down pavement, reaching the small apartment building where I and the other Marilyns lived. It was old enough to have survived the Great Sinking, but just barely. The little ramshackle building might have been nice at one point in time, its once clear glass windows now murky from a build-up of grime and dirt. Though apartments here had sat upon a high enough elevation before the flood to stay above water, any semblance to a yard was long washed away by the tides that rose without warning. This left streaks of mud across the ground and a cracked structure that might have been a charming brick fence outside our door.

I walked up the cracked concrete steps and opened the door with another flash of my wrist. The yelling from within hit me almost immediately as I stepped inside.