Relay: The Mayor Is Being Cloned

    It is too late to stop: The top-secret project is under way. A group of East Hampton residents ages 11 to 17 are cloning the mayor of East Hampton Village located in the State of New York, United States of America.

    At some unknown point in the last three to four years, somewhere in their trajectory from Club Penguin to more advanced computer games, a group of East Hampton children decided they were going to make a lifelike, completely functional clone of the current mayor. One teacher in the East Hampton Middle School heard a rumor about the project. Some 11-year-old student told him, “Say anything and we also have a device that if we point it at your laptop, it will play reruns of ‘The Muppet Show’ for two weeks and then your computer will go blank.”

    He, or she, whatever teacher it may be, has chosen to remain silent. Of course, the project is all completely legal, aboveboard, and in the best interest of East Hampton Village residents.

    The kids involved, boys and girls, saw the mayor, or heard about it through their younger friends — the mayor was spotted riding a Jet Ski at a Santa parade one of the last few years. The kids started sending one another coded top-secret messages by e-mail, eventually switching to scraps of paper for communication.

    The scraps of paper are small and have lists of incomprehensible numbers and symbols in sequence. The parents in East Hampton have been finding them around their houses — the parents are clueless. These lengthy sequential numbers are the computer formulas the children have devised to clone the current mayor, as he is right now in the year 2013. The clone will have all the thinking capacity of the current mayor, plus all kinds of future updates to take care of anything that might happen for the next 50 years.

    They have a program that is not finished that will allow the mayor to stand in one of the antique rescue boats stored at the East Hampton Village Public Works facility on Accabonac Road. The cloned mayor will order the boat to the parades and stand astride it like a bayman. They secretly videotaped some kid’s father who is still working the bays and ocean, put the video into a transcriber, and produced a program that will allow the cloned mayor to be at his finest even if there are high winds and snow during the parade.

    Every other year, the cloned mayor will order the Jet Ski to ride in so he seems modern. One of the kids videotaped his dad operating a Jet Ski at Main Beach. Of course, none of these parents have any idea that they were videotaped and then transcribed to the programs that will run the cloned mayor.

    One of the kids has a famous parent, a sculptor of Italian heritage. Said sculptor is the only other adult besides the middle school teacher who knows about this. The sculptor is almost finished with a perfect lightweight titanium replica of the mayor. The sculptor has been strictly sworn to secrecy. He is a little odd, an artist, you know — who would believe him anyway?

    Why are the kids doing this? The answer is rather elementary, simple, straightforward, rational in substance. The kids want no more change! They want life as it is, in their village, to remain as it is. They like their mayor because he is a caricature of a small New England village mayor. He waves at them in the parades and then doesn’t bother them.

    The kids clearly have the technology. They are doing this. Their plan is rather devious! When the current mayor decides not to be mayor anymore, the kids and all their friends will be of voting age. What do you think they are going to do? They are going to elect the replica clone with extraordinary programming and updatable software to be the mayor of the Village of East Hampton.

    They need a master painter to paint all the lifelike features onto the titanium figure, but that is a bit later. That artist will be contacted in complete secrecy by a kid wearing a hat with a picture of the mayor on it on Main Street at some point in the next three years. This is not a rumor or hearsay.

    Morgan McGivern is a staff photographer at The Star.