You are listening to a Clarksville magazine podcast with your host and narrator, Kate Baker.

Greetings, Clarksville citizens to the middle of the month, March 2023 issue 198.

I hope you have been enjoying these stories thus far. We have a few more left for you for March,

and then we do it all again in April. I do hope you are doing well though, and thank you for your

ongoing support. If you have a dollar a month or more to spare, please consider giving it to

Clarksville. We're going to need your help in the coming year. Please go to patreon.com

for slash Clarksville to see how you can contribute. Our story is titled Failure to Convert

and is by Shit Lee Cow. Shit Lee Cow is a former chemical engineer and real estate manager.

She is the author of a novel, the sum of our follies, and a short story collection ripples

in other stories. Her short fiction has also been published or is forthcoming in fusion fragment

parsic, flash fiction online and elsewhere. She lives in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

So my Jellison, I hope you can sit back, relax, and let me tell you a story.

The second time I met Jean, she was in a junkyard. I tracked her signal through stacks of

rusty machinery, half cut cars, wheel rims, and old tires to a shipping container cabin where she

was assembling an egg-sized gadget under a magnifying glass. I said, Jean, I'm Zikaria,

from Fila. Remember me? She looked up and said, you came from me after

neural died. I often think of you, although I don't remember your face.

She stared at me, clear-eyed and confident, she no longer had the day's expression and sickly

pallor at typical of new clones. When we first met a year ago, she was barely three weeks out of the lab.

After her sponsor, Neural died in a car crash. Fila's health surveillance system had picked up

distress alerts from Jean's biochip, and I was dispatched to retrieve her. I found her alone in

Neural's house, disoriented, and weak from hunger, but thankfully unharmed otherwise. She had been

...