Making a Man from Scratch

Jane Marlowe, whom her friend, John, a sheriff in a nearby county, had designated "pro bono attorney extraordinaire" for finding a solution for an extraordinary problem for her last client, Clyde Piggott, was struggling to get her mind around the words of a potential client.

The man was Hollywood handsome and dressed in a custom made suit, with a huge diamond ring flashing on his left hand. He told her that Clyde, who'd been on the same space ship he'd returned to Earth on, had recommended her..

She'd helped John when he'd found Clyde, dressed in Nineteenth Century clothes, trespassing on a local farm, which he claimed to own. Neither Jane nor John had bought his story of alien kidnapping in 1897, medical experiments on him in space, and return with a bag of what he called "rocks," which turned out to be huge diamonds worth a fortune. Clyde said the aliens had returned him to his farm, but, obviously, not in the few seconds of human time they had promised.

But who was he? And why the bizarre story? When he never deviated from his story, John and Jane both struggled to answer this question. After John had contacted prisons and mental hospitals for escapees, looked into theft reports, and checked every database he knew of, they still had no answer. Finally, Jane realized that she had a client who didn't exist, concluded that he needed a 21^st Century life and created one for him.

Was she looking across her desk now at a human being or at an alien creature, merged into a human body he claimed to have created in a laboratory in ancient Egypt centuries ago?

She needed a break!