The Clone Redemption

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

Who do you trust in a time of war?

I once had a lieutenant named Thomer with a debilitating drug addiction. He used to sit through staff meetings in a near-catatonic state staring at walls, never speaking unless he was spoken to. Against my better judgment, I kept him in place during a big showdown with the Unified Authority Marines. He fought brilliantly and saved lives.

The first time I had met Ray Freeman, I wrote him off as a thug. Now I considered him my closest friend. I needed more friends.

Freeman and I sat in an empty transport. On a ship as small as the cruiser, the transports were the only place you could go to be alone. Freeman sat in the pilot’s chair. “Have you reached Sweetwater and Breeze?” I asked as I sat down in the copilot’s chair.

“I’m here,” said Breeze. Freeman must have routed the signal to the transport’s communications system. We had an audio signal, but the video was off.

“Is Dr. Sweetwater there as well?” I asked, as we only had an audio connection. I heard him through the communications console.

“It’s just me this time. William is checking the results from the survivability survey,” he said.

Freeman sat silent, staring straight ahead through the windshield. He looked big and strong and vanquished, like an evil giant in a fairy tale who has been tricked but not yet killed.

“General, do you remember William’s mentioning the auditors that the Linear Committee has sent to oversee our work? He is leading them on quite a wild-goose chase. I think he has them counting the number of stars in the Galactic Eye.”

I thought he was joking; there were billions of stars in the Eye. When I laughed, he asked, “Why are you laughing?”

“He’s really making them count stars?” I asked. “Aren’t there billions of stars in the Galactic Eye?”

“Seventy-eight billion in the section he has given them,” Breeze said.

“They can’t count seventy-eight billion stars. It would take a lifetime.”

Freeman sat beside me, either not listening to us or not caring what we said. He stared out the window, his face impassive.

“No one is going to count that many stars,” I said.

“He told them it was an accounting irregularity,” Breeze said.

“An accounting error in the stars?” It didn’t make sense.

“He found a glitch in their programming,” Breeze said.

That caught Freeman’s attention. He stared at the communications console, and I saw the old intensity in his eyes.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“How long have we been dead?” Breeze asked.

I did not answer.

“Am I a brain scan? Is this a simulation of the Arthur Clarke Wheel?”

“What are you talking about?” I asked, desperate, scrambling to take control of the conversation.

“Sweetwater loaded a list of stars and locations into an accounting ledger and gave it to those men. They didn’t even bother looking at the number of entries. They didn’t care that there were billions of entries. Men get overwhelmed when you hand them a ledger with seventy-eight billion entries. Computer programs begin counting without checking the volume of the work.”

“They’re government number crunchers,” I said. “They probably get paid by the line.”

“Seventy-eight billion lines?” Breeze asked. “William built a randomizing engine into the database. Every time they complete one billion lines, the engine shuffles the data and reinserts it back into the file.”

“They probably think they hit the jackpot.”

Beside me, Freeman looked up from the console and shook his head in warning. Real or not, we needed the scientists’ help. Their work could determine the future of mankind; and if Breeze shut down, Sweetwater would follow.

“Whoever programmed this simulation didn’t understand the physics of the Arthur Clarke Wheel,” Breeze said. “It uses centripetal force to create gravity instead of a generator.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

“I visited the control room last night. It has a gravity generator.”

“Maybe it’s there for backup,” I said. “Maybe it’s there in case something goes wrong with the rotation.”

“It’s cosmetic,” said Breeze. “I turned it off, and nothing happened.” I heard an odd tone in his voice that might have been irritation or anger.

Freeman remained mute. He ran the show during assassinations and invasions, but this was a delicate matter. He left it up to me.

“Maybe the people who built the Wheel built the switch in as a joke,” I said. “You said it yourself, the Wheel generates its own gravity.”

“When did I die?” asked Breeze. “When,” not “if.”

I did not answer.

“How did I die?” he asked. He sounded so reasonable. I heard no panic in his voice. No hysteria.

“You died on New Copenhagen,” I said.

Still absolutely silent, Freeman gave me the slightest nod. He approved. I had risked everything. Hearing that he was dead, the ghost of Arthur Breeze could shut down, and he could very well take Sweetwater with him; but Freeman wanted him to know the truth.

“I died in the mines, didn’t I?”

“Yes,” I said.

“And William? He died, too?”

“He died taking the bomb into the mines.”

Breeze sighed. I imagined him taking off his glasses and smearing the dandruff and grease on the lenses as he tried to wipe them away. Maybe the Unifieds did too good a job programming his emotions. He must have felt hollow at that moment, the moment in which he learned that he was not human. I’d been through that.

“I remember the day I learned that I was synthetic,” I said.

“I never liked that term, ‘synthetic,’” Breeze said. “General, you have a heart beating in your chest. It’s not made out of plastic. You have a brain and hands and lungs that hold air. None of those organs are synthetic. You’re not like a human, you are a human.

“I suppose I am, too,” Breeze said. He sounded dazed. He sounded like a young soldier coming off the battlefield for the first time, alive and questioning his own existence.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

He grunted as if he had just hurt himself.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“I just pricked my finger,” he said.

“What?”

“I pricked my finger with a dissection pin,” he said. “The pain was exactly as I always remembered it.” This was a tall, dried-up old man. He had spent his life in science labs. He did not handle pain well. His real, violent death must have been excruciating while it lasted.

“Why did you do that?” I asked.

“I wanted to see my blood. I bleed like a living creature.

“You’ve seen me, General. Do I look like a real man through human eyes?”

Homely as ever, I thought as I said, “Exactly like you looked the day you went into those caves.”

“They did a better job simulating my blood than they did simulating the space station,” Breeze said. “It’s perfect.”

I answered, “You are a perfect virtual model of the man I knew on New Copenhagen.”

The heads of every major religion could only find one topic on which they all agreed—cloning. They said clones did not have souls and, therefore, were less than humans. They might have been right, too; but as I spoke to the ghost of Arthur Breeze, I realized the computer program that brought him back to life had perfectly captured his soul.

“But I am stuck in this machine,” he said.

“Your universe is as vast as mine,” I said. “You can visit simulations of every known world.”

“How about a world in which I would really exist?” he asked.

I did not answer.

“When Andropov figures out we’re helping you, he’ll unplug us. I suppose that wouldn’t be as bad as dying.”

The real Arthur Breeze had been ripped apart by giant spiders.

I did not say anything.

“Thank you for being honest,” he said. “You and Raymond, you were always truthful with us. You always were.” His voice seemed to shrink as he spoke. “What did you do when you found out you were a clone?”

“I went to a bar with my sergeant. We drank three glasses of Sagittarian Crash and got so drunk we nearly died.”

“Did it help?”

“The next morning, I felt like someone had stabbed a knife into my skull, that wasn’t helpful. I was still a clone, getting drunk didn’t change that. It softened the blow. It got me through that first night.”

“Maybe I need to do that,” he said. “We’ve got an excellent bar on the Wheel.”

“Don’t hit it too hard, we need you sober. They made you so you puke and piss and fall down when you get drunk. The original you didn’t handle liquor so well, and the virtual you won’t handle it any better,” I said.

“I doubt they will allow me to die in an intoxicated stupor.”

Still sounding battle-weary, Breeze said, “There’s enough air to start a colony on Terraneau, but you’re going to need an oxygen generator until you establish a significant plant population. Farming is going to be a problem. The surface soil is ruined. Your colonists are going to need to dig three feet down to find soil that can sustain life.”

“But it can be done?” I asked.

“I am always amazed by the things human beings achieve when their backs are against a wall, General.”

Was he talking about our colonists or the men who programmed him? Was he talking to them or me?

“We ran soil and atmosphere samples on an area near Norristown. Planetwide, the radiation levels are stable and acceptable. The air quality is low but tolerable. I recommend wearing rebreathers until you get oxygen generators in place. I’ve also checked for tachyon residue. There is no trace of Tachyon D on Terraneau.” Breeze was all business as he said this. Then his tone lightened as he added, “Now, if you’ll excuse me, General, I am going to go drink myself into a coma.”

With that he signed off.

Ray Freeman smiled. He even laughed. It wasn’t much of a laugh, just a quick “Huh” that sounded a little like the noise some Marines make when they are doing sit-ups.

“Maybe I shouldn’t have told him,” I mumbled to myself.

Freeman shook his head, and said, “I would have shot you if you’d lied.”