The Piracy of Tiffany Wyatt - Electric Dreams Contest #11

Here are the prompts for Electric Dreams round #11

#1 your protagonist wakes up in a room with 2 other people who look exactly like him/her and has no idea where he/she is or how he/she got there. Who are the others? How did everyone get there? What happens next?

#2 girl in a Pikachu onesie

#3 the story must include the sentence - “What I really want is a piece of cherry pie”

The Piracy of Tiffany Wyatt

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“Are you the real Tiffany Wyatt?”

Tiffany wiped the sleep from her eyes, surprised at the aching she felt all over her body. She sat up slowly alarmed at the shooting pain running up her back.

“What happened?”

Her voice cracked.

She peeled the scratchy woollen blanket from her body and glanced around the room, all she could see was white. She rubbed at her eyes again, the lights reflecting off the shiny tiled floor.

“Are you the real Tiffany Wyatt?”

The voice asked again forcefully.

“What sort of question…?”

Tiffany stopped speaking the moment she registered the faces of the other people in the room.

Two women stood facing her. The closest one had her arms crossed and an angry snarl across her face. The second woman calmly leant against the opposite wall.

Tiffany balked at the women as she traced the features on each face. They matched her own face, from the freckles across her cheeks to the little scar on her chin. Tiffany would have fallen over if she hadn’t already been sat down.

“Are you the real Tiffany Wyatt?” The closest one asked for the third time.

“Yes.” She struggled to speak, her voice coarse.

“Well, she’s not going to admit to piracy.” The women against the wall said.

Piracy. Tiffany had heard that word before. Piracy was the illegal act of copying someone else's body. It was a crime with a low success rate, people were always caught out in the end.

“Where am I?”

“You’re in prison. You’ve been arrested, same as us.”

“How did I get here?”

The women shared a look.

A shiver ran up Tiffany’s spine, renewing a spasm of pain. She would have cried if it weren't for the two women watching her.

“What’s the last thing you remember?”

Tiffany shook her head. She wasn't about to admit the truth to the two strangers wearing her face. She remembered being in pain before falling unconscious.

“Why do you both look like me?”

She eyed them wearily. The three women were indistinguishable apart from coloured wristbands. Tiffany had a yellow band, the one closest had blue and the other had red. She wondered if that was for the prison guards to tell them apart.

“Well, I think you look like me if we’re going to be pedantic” The closest one laughed.

Tiffany registered the women's laugh as if her mind was moving through clay. It was her own laugh. It was also her brothers' laugh. She hoped he was safe.

She started to feel frightened by the two women, their voices were identical to hers. She knew that illegal cloning was something that happened rarely these days, but they were usually caught out on the voice. It was something that they couldn't match exactly, or so Tiffany thought.

“How do you sound exactly like me?”

“Maybe you sound like me”

The one with the blue band said while sitting down on a cot.

Tiffany noticed for the first time that there were four cots in the room and only three people. She barely has time to consider there being another version of herself when the door to the room opened.

A girl wearing a bright yellow onesie walked in followed by a prison guard. The guard removed the handcuffs and left. The girl jumped on one of the cots and looked over at Tiffany.

“Is that a…?

“Pikachu onesie? Yes, isn’t it amazing?”

Tiffany watched at the ears flopped about when the girl moved her head.

She was in prison. She had been arrested. Two of her cellmates looked exactly like her and the fourth was a child.

Tiffany looked at her doppelgangers again. The one with the red band was still watching her intently from her position against the wall.

“I still don’t understand how you look like me. I thought cloning was a difficult procedure. It's supposed to be illegal..”

The red one stepped forward.

“Will you shut up. They’re watching us.”

She pointed out a camera in the corner of the room.

Shaken by the sudden aggression, Tiffany stopped talking.

The next few hours are spent in silence as the women refuse to acknowledge each other. Tiffany tried to start conversations with the girl several times with no luck.

The day was finally broken up when the door was opened and the women were handed trays of food.

Tiffany looked at the bowl of slop with disgust. The others ate without complaint.

The girl looked at Tiffany noticing she wasn't eating.

“You should try it, it’s not bad.”

Tiffany shook her head.

“We usually try to imagine its something else that we like to eat, right Blue?”

“Mine is a piece of chocolate cake.”

The women with blue said holding a spoon up to her lips.

“Oh I could be eating banoffee Pie”

“What I really want is a piece of cherry pie ”

The women laughed as they starting discussing their favourite desserts.

The women with red eventually joined the conversation.

“Will you stop talking about food.”

She was holding a piece of paper. With a closer inspection, Tiffany recognised her brothers' handwriting.

“We are being broken out in ten minutes. GEt your shit together.”

“Who’s breaking us and why?”

The one with red looked directly at Tiffany.

“You know who.”

She passed her the piece of paper.

Tiffany looked at the writing, her eyes jumping to the signature. It was her brothers. She looked up at red with confusion and panic.

“He did this to you? He did this to me?”

An explosion rings out of the building and an alarm sounds. Tiffany looks at her roommates, they are all prepared for what's about to happen. She is not.

You can find the contest here.

Image from Pixabay

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