House of the Scorpion
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Born in a laboratory from ancient cells, to live a life with sole purpose to be scrap parts to keep another alive, Matteo AlacrÐon, upon revealing himself to the estate he is kept on from his isolated habitat, at first, though he is to be the most important figure on the estate, is treated as a wild animal would be. When you find out that Matt is a clone you take a whole new perspective on how the book is going than from when you first start reading. Matt is a boy who starts out separated from people for the whole start of his life until he meets Maria and her friends. The story progresses when he meets his mirror image, older, yet stunningly similar, a powerful drug lord who owns the country of Opium, also named Matteo AlacrÐon, nicknamed “El Patron.” Matt is horrified when he realizes how El Patron gets his work done, prisoners with implanted computer chips inside their head do two and only these two things: they were to do anything that they were told, and they were to do all the work to harvest the drugs – which is Opiums income source – Eegits, forever bound to a life of servitude.
Matt is treated as a king for the first part of his life; however, when the time comes that El Patron is deathly ill; he is summoned to donate a heart to El Patron to prolong his life and end Matts. The actions of all of Matts friends make it impossible to transplant the heart to let El Patron live, so he sadly succumbed to death after avoiding it for so long. During this time, Matt found himself out of the country of Opium and into the sad slums of a neighboring city and, coming from a home where he was treated so graciously, Matt was astonished. He was sent to work harvesting plankton in a factory, rebelled against the staff, and escaped with help from a few newly acquired friends. He is taken from a castle on a hill, where Maria resided, and traveled back to Opium with her and her mother to terminate the country for the good of the world. This proved an arduous task because the country was in lockdown, and they were outside of the country. No one could come in, and no one could get out. No one, apart from El Patron himself.