"I'm still not very comfortable with allowing the general public into our facilities," Mason said, unbuttoning his lab coat again.

"I know," Dr. Travers said, heading toward the door to follow the tour crowd, "but we have to show our financiers that what we're doing is worthwhile."

"They'll know," Dr. Mason began, "as soon as we're finished with the first prototype."

Dr. Travers delivered a hasty, tight-lipped smile and nodded slightly before exiting the lab. Dr. Mason let out a deep sigh and poured over his paperwork. There was still so much to do, even with how far they'd come.

In the other room, a video played detailing the progress of the Sapling Project. Dr. Mason walked around the screen, revealing the few details on the project that the financiers permitted him to.

"Project Sapling is the forerunner of human cloning projects for one simple reason," his visage continued, "we use full grown clones. Rather than starting with the same DNA and growing within a test-tube, we start with the same DNA and create a full body."

"This affords us some great opportunities in research of pollution, general life expectancy and even viral and bacterial infections. You see, the human body at the age of 30 is not merely the sum of its genetic coding, but is affected greatly by environment and lifestyle choices of the individual. Therefore, a clone developed from raw DNA is without scars, tissue degradation, atrophied of organs, trauma-induced mental instabilities and much, much more."

The figure of Dr. Mason paced toward a diagram showing a double helix and continued, "One major obstacle of this project has been the realization of how tainted human DNA gets later on in life. We've discovered that DNA is constantly changing in the average individual, and shows some distinct differences from infancy to seniority. Former generations dealt with a deadly disease called Cancer, if you'll recall, which was caused be the deformation of human DNA. Even though this degree of DNA mutations is now all but extinct, we still see it happening to a much lesser degree even to this day. The Sapling Project hopes to eliminate this issue entirely by the end of the decade,"