Ronald Hoover looked in the mirror and adjusted his tie. He winked at himself and smoothed his hair. He had changed his clothes three times now, not because he couldn’t decide what to wear, but because he liked looking at himself in different outfits.
After one final glance, he walked out the door and drove to the grocery store. He wasn’t planning to buy anything, but instead was going to check out all the pasta sauces.
First, he found the sauces that he had tried before, and read the ingredients list on the back of each one. Then he wandered over to see what was in the cream sauces. Most of the ingredients were what he expected, but he did not know how preservatives and manufacturing affected each final product.
Ronald was researching the pasta sauces because of the idea he had for a company, and he knew that the product needed to be familiar. In a way, it could have been anything, because his true dream was about the company itself. Ronald Hoover’s plan was to clone himself and start a company made of workers who were all him and him alone.
He decided to go ahead and buy a few of the sauces, added some boxes of pasta to his armful of groceries, and went to check out. He looked across the checkout lines and imagined if all of the workers were essentially the same person. It made him feel a sense of urgency, like a need to hurry and achieve his dream before anyone else thought of it.
The next week, he met with the cloning team at the science lab associated with his old college, and he told them his plan. They said that they could actually produce thirty duplicates of himself within just a few weeks. But they also said, “how do you know they will all be willing to work for you?”
“They will simply have to,” Ronald said. “I will give them a legal document stating that they signed a contract previously. And I will sign that contract myself right before they are cloned, so it will be true!”
The scientists smirked. This was exactly what they had signed up for when they had endeavored to clone people.
The process was easy. Ronald literally cut a lock of his hair and gave it to a scientist, and two weeks later, a bus full of himself drove up to the new warehouse and office building that he had bought for his company.
The clones talked to each other loudly, some of them raising questions about the contract. Ronald handed each of them a random envelope assigning them their job at the new company. Some would be salespeople, some would be factory workers, and a chosen few would be vice presidents and corporate strategists. Within days, the different Ronalds were showing up to work and clocking in.
Mostly the Ronalds got along well for a while, but some had questions. “Why are we all named Ronald?” one Ronald asked. “Why are we all the same person?” another one said. “I’m gay,” said one Ronald, and indicated that he liked one of the other coworker Ronalds.
“I don’t believe in that,” said that Ronald. He then chased after a dame at their bingo group, but she liked one of the other Ronalds.
Some of the Ronalds started a union and tried to leverage their work for higher salaries. There was plenty of money for it, because the company was very successful. But the competition among workers was still a problem. Some of the factory workers showed up in the board room one day, pretending to be the head bosses. They agreed to give the whole company a week off and a budget for vacations. By that time, the original Ronald was very tired, so he agreed.
He took off to a tropical island away from all the other Ronalds. While he was there, he met a bartender named Lisa, who talked to him about his work.
“It’s just a mess,” he told her. “I don’t know what to do.”
Lisa smiled and listened and said, “Wow, you really have worked hard in life, and I would almost say thirty times as much as most people. I think I have some ideas of what could help you. Also, I love you, Ronald.”
Ronald married Lisa and she shared her ideas for the company with him. Her main idea was to clone herself thirty times as well, so all the Ronalds could each marry a Lisa. Everyone thought it was a great idea, so they all did in fact marry their own Lisa and moved away to start new pasta sauce companies with regular workers. The original Ronald also hired a variety of people to replace his selfish crew, or rather, his crew of selves. The pasta products, however, remained the same at all the companies. After all, it was a family recipe.
