The Clone Republic

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Learning about my creation did not kill me. Identity-programming and the death reflex were components of modern cloning. I was a throwback, an early-production model that somehow found its way back on to the assembly line for a limited run.

“Do you understand what I am telling you?” Admiral Klyber asked me.

A few moments before, I had been wrestling to gain control of my thoughts. Suddenly I could think with absolute clarity. I felt neither sad nor confused. I nodded.

“You are a Liberator, and knowing it will not kill you.”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“Perhaps we should stop for the evening.” From behind his desk, Klyber stared at me suspiciously, the way I would expect a parent to examine a child who should be hurt but claims to be fine.

“I’m okay, sir,” I said.

“All the same, Corporal, we have accomplished enough for one evening.” Klyber stood up from his desk, and the meeting was over.

***

“It never occurred to us that we were anything but clones,” Sergeant Shannon said as he choked back his first sip of Sagittarian Crash, easily the worst-tasting drink you could find in any civilized—or uncivilized—bar. They called the stuff “Crash,” but it was really vodka made from potatoes grown in toxic soil. Congress once outlawed the stuff; but as it was the only export from an otherwise worthless colony, the lobbyists won out.

Shannon and I picked Crash for one reason—we wanted to get drunk. Crash left you numb after a few thick sips. “Damn, I hate this stuff,” Shannon said, frowning at his glass.

“You ever wonder about …”

Shannon stopped me. “Knowing you are a clone means never having to wonder. You don’t wonder about God—he’s your commanding officer. Good and evil are automatic. Orders are good because they come from God. I even know where I’m going after I die.” He smiled a somewhat bitter smile. “The great test tube in the sky.”

“Isn’t that blasphemous?” I asked.

“Blasphemous?” Shannon’s revelry evaporated upon my using that word. “I’ll be specked! I suppose it is.”

“I thought you were the churchgoer?” I said. “You’re the only one in the platoon who goes to services, and you’re the one Marine I would think was the least likely to attend religious services.”

“Least likely?” Shannon said, looking confused.

“You’re the only Marine on this ship who specking well knows he’s a clone. Clones don’t have souls…Remember, man may be able to create synthetic men, but only God can give them souls. Isn’t that what the peace-and-joy crowd is preaching these days?”

“If you are anything like me, and you are exactly like me, you don’t really give two shits about what peace and joyers are preaching.”

“I still don’t feel like going to church,” I said. “Do you believe that stuff?”

“Yeah,” Shannon said, “I just don’t know where I fit into it.”

It was only seven o’clock. Most of the men were at the mess hall eating dinner. When Shannon saw me returning to the barracks, he had suggested that we drink our meal instead.

Except for the laugh lines around his eyes and his old man’s hair, Shannon looked like a man in his midtwenties in the dim light of the bar. “How old are you?” I asked.

Shannon grinned. “There’s old and then there’s old. After the GC Fleet, the boys on Capitol Hill decided that they wanted kinder, gentler clones, so they opened up orphanages and raised them like pups. Now they have eighteen years to teach you good manners.

“Back in my day, you came out of the tube as a twenty-year-old. I got my first gray hairs as a ten-year-old or a thirty-year-old, depending on how you look at it. Nothing else has changed. I’ve seen my physical charts—nothing’s changed.”

“Are you the last Liberator?” I asked.

“I’d say you are,” Shannon said. “I’ve heard rumors about Liberators in the Inner SC Fleet, but you’re the first one I’ve seen. Klyber is partial to us. If there were other Liberators around, I think he’d be the one to have them.

“What I don’t understand is where you came from. Why make another Liberator after forty years? They didn’t make you by accident.”

“An experiment?” I suggested.

“Maybe Klyber ordered you up special,” Shannon said. “If it was him, he did it without telling the politicos. They hate Liberators on Capitol Hill. Whoever started you on Gobi was trying to protect you. Somebody wanted to keep you a secret as long as possible, but that went down the shitter the moment you were at a card game with Amos Crowley.”

Shannon held up his drink and stared through the glass. He swished it around. “Watch this.”

Shannon took a deep breath, then drained his glass. He shivered, and for a moment he slumped in his chair. Then he looked at the bartender, gave him an evil smile, and turned his glass upside down.

“Goddamn!” the bartender said.

“Another one,” Shannon said.

“Another one will kill you,” the bartender said.

“You try it,” Shannon said to me. “One good thing about Liberators, we don’t get shit-faced.”

I looked at my glass. In the dim light, Crash looked like murky seawater. “Drink it in one shot?” I asked.

“Kid, he’s trying to kill you,” the bartender warned.

Closing my fingers around the glass, I brought it up to my lips and paused.

“Don’t do it, kid,” the bartender warned. “You’ll pickle your brain.”

Sergeant Shannon watched me, his eyes never leaving mine. Heaving a sigh, I put the glass in front of my mouth and tipped it. The syrupy drink spilled over my bottom lip and onto my tongue, leaving a numbing tingle everywhere it touched. I swallowed quickly.

“Whoa!” I said. First my throat felt painfully frozen, then my lungs burned, and finally I felt a flash of nausea; but all of those sensations went away quickly. I looked at the bartender, smiled, and turned my glass over.

“You want another one, too?” the barkeep asked.

“No,” I said. “I really don’t.”

“Give him another,” Shannon said. Sergeant Shannon fixed the bartender with a most chilling smile. He did not glare, did not snarl, did not do anything overtly menacing, but the bartender understood the unspoken message. He looked at both of us, shook his head, then took our glasses.

When he returned, he handed us our drinks. “I’ll tell the infirmary to send a doctor.”

I took my drink. “To the great test tube in the sky?”

“You kidding? They’ll melt us down and reuse us just like any other equipment.” Shannon picked up his glass. “You think you can handle it?”

I laughed. “I’m drinking it, aren’t I?” I said, and I emptied the glass in one slug. Fighting the chill and nausea, I tried to sit straight on my seat and lost my balance. I almost fell but somehow managed to catch myself.

Shannon, watching me with some amusement, said, “Rookie,” and drank his shot.

“You going for thirds?” the bartender asked.

“No!” Shannon and I answered in unison.

***

That night, before going to sleep, I slipped on my mediaLink shades and found an eight-thousand-word philosophical essay about the Platonic justifications for building the death reflex into clones. I barely finished the first page before I realized that the booby-trapping of clone brains meant nothing to me. Klyber’s engineers had placed different glands in my head, and I no longer cared about what might or might not have been placed in other clones’ brains. Closing the article, I noticed that there was a two-hundred-word synopsis.

Plato understood that the warrior class would envy the ruling class and that the ruling class would fear the warrior class. He sought to keep the classes in place with the most childish of lies:

Well then, I will speak, although I really know not how to look you in the face, or in what words to utter the audacious fiction, which I propose to communicate gradually, first to the rulers, then to the soldiers, and lastly to the people. They are to be told that their youth was a dream, and the education and training which they received from us, an appearance only; in reality, during all that time they were being formed and fed in the womb of the earth, where they themselves and their arms and appurtenances were manufactured; when they were completed, the earth, their mother, sent them up; and so, their country being their mother and also their nurse, they are bound to advise for her good, and to defend her against attacks, and her citizens they are to regard as children of the earth and their own brothers.

—The Republic Book 3, Page 16

According to this article, Plato’s deceit is made true in that the modern-day warrior class is of synthetic origin. Further, the death reflex is shown as analogous to erasing an individual’s belief in his personal history and therefore his identity.