Thank you so much for reading my story. for your question it wasn't said directly but I tried hinting at the AI creating the defective clone for its own amusement; that's why when the AI was talking about John winning a game before it kills him. The defective clone was just some thing the AI made to entertain it self in a dark way. And a fun thing that I didn't really mention in the story was that the AI had some control over the defective clone. And for the ending I was originally going to just have him die in space but I thought it was boring and just not a good ending, so I made the open ended one instead . I hope this cleared up some confusion.