In the past couple of days, a schoolwide debate has taken over campus as conjectures, arguments, and even acts of physical violence have risen over the theater department’s controversial move to install and put to use a state of the art cloning laboratory to duplicate many of this school’s theatrical students. Located directly beneath the auditorium, the laboratory has been fitted with several hydrostasis tubes for storing the clones and monitoring their vitals, gene splicing stations to replicate DNA, as well as a small stage on which the clones are required to perform multiple acting exercises to determine if their abilities are on par with their (original) copies. Stage manager Lila Clarke was hastily charged with overseeing the genetics portion of the department, without having any prior experience nor knowledge of cloning in general.
“I guess I kinda freaked out when they first brought up the position to me, but it’s honestly not that bad. Building and arranging DNA sequences has proved to be difficult, but I’d rather do that than be in Mrs. Hanes’ class,” said Clarke, the newly appointed chief scientist of the subterranean lab.
Mrs. Saleh, however, has full control over which of her students undergo the cloning process. Selections are made based on performances, physical characteristics, and personal preferences to personalities before a session of the signing of several legal documents, finally followed by the gathering of both blood and urine samples to safely reconstruct the most accurate versions of themselves as possible.
“My intentions are to form an army of my little superstar actors so that there will never have to be a single pesky audition at this school ever again. Cloning simply felt like the most practical solution to this,” said Mrs. Saleh.
The clones’ lives are spent entirely inside the claustrophobic walls of their vats, soaking and floating in unsanitary recycled water until they are either taken out for tests or performances. In addition, they are sometimes recalled to help build the sets and run tech for many of the theater productions. This alone has caused a separate spike of massive concern, pinning Saleh and Lila Clarke liable for potential violation of child labor laws. Since these genetically identical teenagers have been brought into the world with the sole purpose of servitude for Saleh in her productions, many speculate that the physically arduous activities of set design and building are violating tasks for these otherwise infant cast members.
Similar speculations have been made in the past regarding the school’s music department’s ESP (Extrasensory Perception) and telekinesis experiments on many of the musicians. The mentally altered band members were tasked with loading and unloading equipment and instruments using their telekinesis as part of their “training,” however, it has been concluded that whether it was used as training or not, such practices were acceptable given that the students’ uses of telekinesis was mostly harmless.
Circling back to theater, the Santa Barbara courthouse will be housing the debates and trials for Lila Clarke and Mrs. Saleh which will be open to the public. In the meantime, the theater department will continue to clone their students until further notice.
