1) College is busy, so it is important to set up a schedule with your significant other. When the schedule invariably fails, retrieve your significant other’s lock of hair from beneath your pillow.
2) Using that sample of DNA, along with a combination of the most up-to-date research on CRISPR and excerpts from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, create a clone of your loved one.
3) Get to know your clone. Take them out for dinner, and order them chicken tenders with a side of fries. They’re a young clone and still developing their clone palate. During dinner, contemplate the morality of cloning and the philosophical question of what creator owes creation. Conclude that your moral obligation aligns with the cost for dinner. When your clone gets up to use the bathroom, pay the bill.
4) Slowly begin to recognize that you’ve grown stronger feelings for the clone than for the original. Wrestle with the thought of breaking up with your high school sweetheart. Wrestle with the philosophical conundrum of whether experiences or DNA plays a greater role in shaping a person.
5) Dump your loved one for their new and improved clone. College is about growing and becoming a better version of yourself. You should be with a better version of your partner.
6) Start to resent the clone for making you dump the original as well as distracting you from your college experience. No one should date freshman fall.
7) Watch in horror as your human ex finally buys that plane ticket not to visit you but to team up with their evil clone and slowly sabotage your life.
8) Decide that a good clone would never go around telling everyone that their clone defect is a result of an STD you gave them. Go back to the lab and edit the betrayal gene out of your ex’s DNA. While you’re at it, maybe make them a little taller too.
9) Reevaluate the ethics of the medical field as you watch yet another clone turn on you.
10) Repeat steps 8-9 until you have completed an evil clone army.
11) Face the moral repercussions of having to kill your own creations. Once you’ve finished that, it’s time to get back out there. I highly recommend dating apps or the Innovative Genomics Institute’s laboratory.
