The Uncanny Career of Harry D. Moore, Rock 'n' Roll Simulacrum

Disclaimer: The following article exploring the imbrications of the keywords “cloning” and “celebrity” is the product of a joint venture between creators of BuchGeist, a German AI program for ghostwriting, and Beijing University’s faculties of computer science and history who are behind the ongoing development CHROnicler, a virtual historian AI construct. 

Any stylistic inconsistency, or errors of narration, grammar, diction, or historical accuracy are not to be attributed to Harvard University’s Professor Emeritus Hank Sterling, an advisor to the joint venture whose topic was selected for purposes of generating the experimental article, but to imperfections in the programs that have yet to be resolved.

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The feasibility of human cloning has been around in science fiction form since at least the time of The Boys from Brazil, a 1976 novel by American author Ira Levin. 

As a conscientious, paranoid, and dubiously talented writer of Jewish descent, Levin imagined a sinister application of cloning science in the suspense-filled plot to his story, a plot in which Josef Mengele, a veridical concentration camp “doctor” at Auschwitz who conducted ghoulish experiments on Jewish and Gypsy detainees at the camp, was portrayed as the mastermind of a fictive scientific conspiracy that cloned 94 replicants of Adolf Hitler. 

Rising above the enemy, as any American left-of-center artist and intellectual of the 20^th century did, Levin made sure his protagonist, the impecunious, yet dedicated, Nazi hunter, Yakov Liebermann, did not succumb to the same murderous inhumanity of the Jews’ World War II nemesis, but rather saw the possibility that the Fuhrer’s clones, each aged an impressionable 13 when he discovered them, could grow up to be harmless, productive and protective citizens of the non-German lands where their surrogate mothers gave birth to them. 

Levin’s conclusion indicated a disbelief in, or at least an ambivalence toward, the notion of genetic determinism—the idea that the set of coded macromolecular instructions found in the structure of DNA determined a person’s fate.      

Two decades after Levin’s book, with the laboratory birth of Dolly, a Finn-Dorset sheep, on July 5, 1996, organismal cloning made the fantastic, but inevitable, leap from science fiction to science fact. 

Dolly was cloned from an adult somatic cell by associates of the Roslin Institute in Scotland, using the process of nuclear transfer. The procedure entails extracting the chromosomes from the cell of a fully formed adult organism and relocating them into a totipotent embryonic cell. 

It is no little coincidence that the artificially created progeny sheep was named after the female country singer whose last name was Parton. 

Jim McWhir, the prankster and practical joker on the team of four scientists who carried out the historic experiment, was known for his extremely poor taste in humor and considered “Dolly” an apt name for the clone, given the momentous, and metonymic, relationship between an otherwise run-of-the-mill ruminant’s indistinguishable mammary gland cell and the monumentally-sized breasts of the iconic American country music celebrity.

The biological replication of human beings was preemptively banned shortly after the announcement of the Roslin Institute scientists’ groundbreaking experiment, and Dolly died due to cloning-related complications, but more recent developments in technology that have verisimilitude as their primary objective indicate that the desire and potential for creating iterations of living specimens still lurks in the collective unconscious.

The introduction of AI voice cloning in the early 2020s made possible the satisfaction of the otherwise insatiable public demand for new music from the public's most adored, not to mention deceased, singers. 

With the advent of the imitative technology, a relative nobody could be made to accurately sound like any divo or diva whose voice had been extensively recorded using voice cloning data banks.  

This meant any chanteur whose voice had been subjected to digital replication and analysis could be reproduced. Anyone who sang through a mic hooked to an AI voice replicant processor could be made to sound like an echo of his or her favorite singer, be that singer a member of the 27-club, the Notorious B.I.G. or Tupac Shakur, Johnny Cash or even the artificially imitable Dolly Parton, who was still living at the time voice cloning technology was developed.

An American company named Metaphysics contributed to the momentum that eventually led to the replication of celebrity simulacra by fusing image cloning technology to its aural counterpart. 

Metaphysics called their invention virtual replicant technology, or VRT. By means of this invention, an anonymous performer could not only be made to sound like a famous singer, whether they be extinct or extant, but to look like that singer in a larger-than-life sized projection. 

Elvis Presley’s estate was amongst the first to cash in on the company's VRT, giving an exclusive contract for the use of Presley replication to a professional musician—born Harry Delano Moore in Las Vegas, Nevada on May 4^thof 1982. 

The contract sounded the death knell of the Elvis impersonation cottage industry. 

Moore had been mimicking the King of Rock since his teens. In his early 20s, he became the front man of an experimental band that fused jazz, rock and funk and had over thirty original compositions whose lyrics Moore penned himself. 

The band’s name was Future Fix, and previous to Moore’s signing the contract that sealed his artistic destiny and guaranteed the ongoing fortunes of the Presley estate, Moore’s rock band almost had a hit with a melodic song entitled “Finally Free.” 

In a state of disappointed resignation, Moore destroyed all recordings he had made with the band before finally surrendering himself to his new calling as sole legal impersonator of The King of Rock.

Once he became the only performer licensed to use Elvis’ voice and image, Moore took his vocation very seriously, so seriously, in fact, that he claimed in a 2002 interview that it eventually began interfering with his ability to exercise freedom of choice.   

Moore was driven to re-live the more significant moments of the deceased rock star’s life, and broke off the nuptial engagement he had with a high school sweetheart to marry Lucinda Belle, a look-alike of the real Presley’s wife, Priscilla Ann Wagner. Moore met Belle using the dating app Dead Ringers, a cell-phone application that caters to the niche market of people who resemble, claim to resemble, or emulate celebrities.

At the insistence of Moore, Lucinda terminated her first pregnancy when the couple tested for the sex of the embryo and discovered it was a boy. When their first child was born, Moore, despite the protestations of his wife, insisted the newborn girl be named Lisa-Marie. 

Toward the end of his life, Moore adopted the unfortunate habits of overeating and painkiller usage. In the latter days of his fame, he even put a bullet hole in the screen of a 96-inch flat-screen television he routinely watched in his luxury residential apartment, located in the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, where he had an exacting contract to perform two shows a night, six days a week. 

He demanded much of himself as a virtual clone performer and never failed to tantalize international audiences with his physically-demanding and emotive performances.   

When questioned as to why he reproduced these momentous occasions, the impersonator, who had adopted the habit of speaking about his natal identity in the third person, claimed, “In order to be true to himself, Harry Moore strives to be as authentic to the King’s legacy as possible.” 

In a televised appearance, Moore made the following, even more cryptic statement: "I am the chosen hero of Elvis Presley, god of rock, and I do everything within my means to enact his will."

In the last year of his life, Moore refused to speak to acquaintances who did not address him as “your majesty” or to Lucinda, whom he had become estranged from, as “Priscilla.” 

After generating over a quarter-billion dollars in VRT performance ticket sales, the virtual clone died of pharmaceutical-drug induced complications in 2024. 

Moore uttered his last agonized words as he sat on a toilet trying to void his bowels, fatefully obstructed as a result of a truculent years-long addiction to oxycontin. 

A groupie present on the other side of locked bathroom door at the time of the virtual replicant’s death claims the millionaire impersonator repeatedly gasped an alternating melody of the words, “I’m finally free/not to be me,” as he sat on his porcelain throne and exhaled his last breaths. 

Only people who knew of Moore’s dreams previous to his becoming the virtual embodiment of the legendary rock ‘n’ roll royal are aware that those final words were the laconic and entirely prophetic chorus to Future Fix’s hit-that-never-was.