The reason why Lola hates kids– they ask too many questions.

     Su asked about everything living and not living that he saw on the way back to the apartment. She thought many times of a distraction like showing him a plane and run away to leave the kid. But she remembered the usual deathly or disappointed tremble of Billy’s leaves.

     Putting the groceries on the kitchen counter, she ponders and stares at a tomato. “Did they teach you how to cook by any chance?” Lola asks the boy, but he shakes his head in a negative response. The lab people only taught him how to speak, to move and they showed him documentaries of the World on a small TV in his room. Lola didn’t know what to expect of him; to be some kind of a genius machine that knows everything? But the kid is flesh, just like her…

     When the first news that human cloning was possible went public, people almost started a war. There were –and still are– many people who protested against it, saying how we shouldn’t play the God’s game. And what is the reason for creating something stronger than us? What if they will turn against us? But Doctor Harper made sure to make the clones incapable of thinking for themselves. They are just puppets for the people to use.

     But what about Su? What was Doctor Gallimore’s plan with him?

     After calling John, her former partner, to teach her to cook something simple, Lola tells the kid to cut the vegetables at the table while she boils some pasta.

     A few awkward minutes pass in silence and Su says something she didn’t expect, “You look sad.” 

     How does this kid know how sadness looks like, if he doesn’t know what it is? Lola coughs, “What makes you think that?”

     “You stare a lot at the wall and your eyebrows arch up. Humans should be happy; they have all the reasons to be.”

     “We were not born to be happy, kid. Happiness comes to people who really fight for it, I guess. Even for you.”

     “Why don’t you fight for it?”

     “…I stopped fighting for the things that I want long time ago—“

     “What are the things that you want?”

     With a sigh she turns around with her arms crossed and a smirk, “What about you? What do you want, now that you got out of the labs?”

     Su bows his head and continues his chopping, “What I want is not something that can happen in the future.”

     “You mean is not doable?”

     “I mean is something that belongs to the past.”

     Before Lola can ask what is he talking about, Su cuts the tip of his finger with the knife. In a panic, after seeing the blood, Lola rushes to him but stumbles on her feet and falls like a log to the hardwood floor.

     The boy helps her get up and shows her his uncut finger. “We clones don’t feel any pain and we regenerate. But you are the first human to react like that when this happened to me.” The others used to cut his fingers and just looked back with a curious look and scribble in their notebooks.

     “I can see that you are happy about it,” Lola says stretching her back.

     Su blinks. “Happy?”

     “You are smiling.”

     Su quickly brings his fingers to touch his lips. Smiling? He runs to the hallway mirror to see the change. But it is gone. His usual emotionless face stares back at him. Then he remembers something, “But you said we have to fight for happiness…”

     Lola snorts and ruffles his hair. The kid is cute. “Sometimes we find it in the smallest things. It won’t last long, but they are important enough to lighten up a day.”

     Someone reacting that way about his wound lightens up more than a day for Su. But it makes him feel lonely. He never thought that he can have someone like that. And because it will never happen again, Su feels very lonely…

     Lola returns to her pasta. When was the last time someone was also worried for her? Lola’s heart starts pounding faster as an uneasy feeling washes over her. She can’t remember her parents’ faces... 

     She can’t even remember why she has retired from the field and the promise to not hold a gun ever again.

     Her head numbs her with a pain. Lola turns around to look at the kid. Then she realizes– she retired 3 years ago, the exact number of years when she had that mission to stop Doctor Gallimore. If that is a coincidence or not, Lola has a bad feeling about it.