Microstory 824: Make All Ends Meet

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When I first found a way to clone myself, I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with this new technology. As a trust fund kid, everyone had always underestimated me, and I had always ignored them. Now, even though I had done something great, I had no connections. I just spent every waking hour of the last ten years working on this one project, and only now am I realizing that I could have set aside a little bit of that time to plan for a future where it exists. I decide I need to keep it secret, at least for now, and maybe test it out. Part of the reason I have all this money is because my parents were both killed by one of the mafia families. In the end, they weren’t the best of people, because I ended up discovering they had been working for all of them, but they were also not as despicable as the people who brutally gunned them down. I didn’t feel the need to avenge my parents so much as I had to consider how much better this city would be if there was no more organized crime. As rich as I am, I still need some support, and access to resources you can’t just get anywhere. So I become friends with a local police officer; someone low on the totem pole, who I can convince that I’m an undercover federal agent. It’s not as hard as you would think, and that’s not because the cop is an idiot, but because I’m a pretty charming and persuasive fellow, if I do say so myself. Working together, we build what I’ve told him is an elite team of other undercover agents. They’re each going to be sent into one of the city’s crime families, and bring them down from the inside. Of course, since I don’t actually have independent individuals to take this on, I have to claim to my new friend that he’s not allowed to meet any of them, or it would compromise the compartmentalization of the operation.

It takes more than a year to thoroughly infiltrate all of the families, but I do, and since they’re notoriously suspicious of each other, there’s no way anyone will find out that they’re all essentially dealing with the same person. Bonus, since they’re just my clones, I’m free to live my life as I always have, leaving my duplicates to fully immerse themselves into the crimeworld. Since I maintain a quantum connection to each clone, they don’t risk getting caught by reporting back to the handlers, which is always the most dangerous part of an undercover job. Tragically, I did my job a little too well, and inadvertently smoothed relations between the families. They start talking to each other on an unprecedented level, and ultimately schedule a gargantuan meeting the likes of which this town has never seen. Since I’m so high up in the food chain for each family, I’m expected to be there. What am I gonna do now? Well, about the only thing I can do is out myself to my partner. He’s surprisingly cool with it. Even though he knows there’s a strong possibility he’ll lose his job over this, if he goes out as the cop who took down the entire crime network, he’ll be able to move on with pride. He says that the only way out of this now is for him to go back to his superiors, and organize a massive interagency operation to arrest everybody all at once. I build a small army of my clones, and send them to the perimeter of the warehouse, to keep all the mobsters from leaving, being totally fine with sacrificing them for the greater good. Once it’s all over, before any of them realize that half the people they killed all look exactly alike, I set them to self-destruct, and destroy the evidence. Now my only problem is figuring out what to do about the corrupt cops who used this opportunity to take over the crime network.