"Fine," said Jon. "I wish the device has a control panel on it that lets the user control the mix."
"And the minds..."
"Hmm," said Jon. "I wish I had a little booklet describing how a cloning machine works."
The booklet appeared as scheduled, and when Jon and Karyn read it they realized they had gotten things completely wrong. "Look," said Jon. "A clone is just a copy of the body. No minds copied at all. I bet the only reason clones in sci-fi copy the mind is that someone once saw a description of clones and didn't understand what it meant by copy."
"And look at this," said Karyn. "It says a clone is just another person with the same DNA as the first. It doesn't mean you clone someone who's 16 and get another 16 year old, unless you have some kind of fast aging thing. Otherwise it takes nine months and you get a baby."
"Well, it could," said Jon. "We're using a magic stone, we can make it do anything we want! It doesn't matter if science says that clones don't really work that way."
"So let's do it, then," said Karyn.
"Okay! I wish that this machine lets us make the clone at any age we pick, but if we don't pick one we get the same age as the original. I wish that it lets us make any combination of memories we want, or none. I wish that if we make a clone without memories we can set it so the clone can still speak. I wish... hmm... that the clone machine has a sex override switch so we can make the clone any sex we want, no matter what the original was. Finally, I wish that we'd have a nice set of blood samples from everyone we know that we can use in this machine."
The control panel shimmered and got larger. There were more knobs and buttons. And beside it was a device that looked like a small freezer. Jon opened it up and it was incredibly cold inside. There were also rows and rows of tubes full of what looked to be frozen, diluted blood.
"Ow!" yelled Karyn.
"Yowch!" said Jon.
Jon looked at his arm and saw that it looked like he was bitten by something. Or at least there was a puncture mark in his skin and blood was oozing out of it. There was a similar mark on Karyn.
"Uhh, I wish nobody except us would notice losing any drops of blood right now."
"I guess that's it," said Karyn. "So shall we get to work?" she said, pointing at the machine.
