I am violating a non-disclosure agreement by allowing this testimony to be published. The settlement I received included a clause stipulating that any breach of confidentiality would result in forfeiture of the settlement amount and criminal prosecution under GLMZ corporate charter intellectual property statutes. I have been advised that this document, if traced to me, could result in imprisonment. I am publishing it anyway, because what Lazarus Pharmaceuticals did to me is not a proprietary secret. It is a crime, and the fact that they were able to settle it as a civil matter tells you everything you need to know about whose laws these are.

In 2285, I underwent a routine gynecological procedure at a Lazarus-affiliated medical center in the Mid-Ring district. A tissue sample was collected as part of standard diagnostics. I signed a consent form that authorized the use of my tissue for "diagnostic purposes and related medical applications." I did not read the fine print. Nobody reads the fine print. The fine print, I later learned, included a clause granting Lazarus Pharmaceuticals and its subsidiaries a perpetual, irrevocable license to utilize collected biological material for "therapeutic development, including but not limited to regenerative cultivation." Regenerative cultivation. That is the phrase they used to give themselves permission to grow a copy of me.

I found out eighteen months later, when a billing error routed a monthly maintenance invoice to my residential address instead of to the client account it was intended for. The invoice was from Elysian Health Partners — a Lazarus subsidiary — for "Continuation Suite 14, Unit BRU-7741, Maintenance Cycle 14." The amount was 14,200 Φ. I did not have a continuation suite. I did not know what a BRU was. I called the number on the invoice and, after being transferred four times and placed on hold for forty minutes, was told that the invoice had been sent in error and that I should disregard it. Something about the way they said "disregard" made me not disregard it.

It took three months, a private investigator, and 80,000 Φ in legal fees to confirm what the invoice implied. Lazarus had used my tissue sample to cultivate a full Biological Reserve Unit — a brain-dead clone of me — which was being maintained in a private facility as an organ reserve for a Tier 5 client whose tissue profile matched mine. My body. My DNA. My face on a body I never consented to create, breathing in a room I had never seen, maintained for a person I had never met, using genetic material that was taken from me under the pretense of a routine medical exam. The clone had been active for fourteen months. It was physiologically twenty-four years old — two years younger than me. I was told it looked "healthy."

The legal proceedings lasted five months and never reached a courtroom. Lazarus's legal team argued that the consent form I signed constituted valid authorization for clone cultivation, that the BRU was their intellectual property rather than a derivative of my person, and that I had no standing to claim ownership of or rights over a "cultivated biological asset." My legal team argued that a reasonable person would not interpret "related medical applications" as permission to grow a full human clone. The judge — a corporate arbitrator appointed under GLMZ charter law — encouraged settlement. The settlement was substantial enough that I will never need to work again. It included the termination of BRU-7741. It included a non-disclosure agreement that I am now violating. It did not include an apology. It did not include an admission of wrongdoing. It did not include any guarantee that Lazarus would not do the same thing to someone else, because of course they will. They already have. The consent form has not been revised. The fine print has not changed. If you have visited a Lazarus-affiliated medical facility in the last ten years, I suggest you read your paperwork. Then I suggest you be afraid.