Primeval

24"x36" oil paint on canvas.
What if you best friend in high school looked exactly like you? What if you high school bully looked exactly like you? What if almost everyone you went to high school with looked exactly like you? This is the bizarre situation members of an illegal human cloning religion find themselves in in the last quarter of the 21st century. A cult of science based reincarnation took hold and the leader of this illegal cult cloned himself over 200 times in a handful of years and told others he could start to feel himself being pulled into his clone's minds more and more with each successive clone birth. The followers of this religion (or cult depending on who you ask) had few strongly held beliefs aside from cloning but one meme that persisted was the idea that primeval prime numbered clones were bad luck. A sort of caste system left primeval prime number clones as "untouchables" to their clone siblings. This belief was later rejected by the church but didn't go away so easily. In the year 2099 two clones, from the same clone parent, nicknamed "37" (left) and "13" (right) became best friends as outcasts. They have other formal names but their peers would only use their numbered nicknames to shun them as lepers. As the new century fast approached the two best friends couldn't wait to finally graduate high school and leave the religion for a new city somewhere far away.