Want (Numbered Book 1)

by Magus Tor

  “This isn't everyone waiting, is it?” Aurelia asked him as they walked.

  “Nah, we're all divided up. The Ruling Class have their own waiting room, obviously, and then the rest of us are divided up by which decks we'll be flying on. Makes the shuttles easier to load.”

  “Right.”

  “You know, coffee used to be made from beans,” Nicholas said idly as they joined yet another queue to get a hot drink.

  “Mmm, I know,” answered Aurelia. “Weird, isn't it, thinking of drinking something made from beans?”

  Aurelia knew as well as Nicholas probably did that what they called coffee was nothing more than a chemical formula designed to stimulate certain taste buds and replicate a particular taste in the mouth.

  “Here, there's a table over here,” said Nicholas, as Aurelia paid for the coffee with a small token.

  “So, which shuttle are you on?” Aurelia asked him, pulling back a chair.

  “The 18:30,” he answered. “You too, right?”

  “Yep. I'm a bit nervous about flying, though. It's a whole lot higher than a public transport shuttle.”

  Nicholas laughed. “It's a piece of cake. Nothing to it. You won't even realise we've left the atmosphere, promise.”

  “Are you stationed in Lunar City?” Aurelia said, stirring her coffee and then taking a sip.

  “Something like that, I...”

  But he was interrupted by someone shouting Aurelia's name. Looking up, Aurelia saw a familiar face: Jaki, one of her classmates until recently. Hurrying over to the table, Jaki squealed with excitement.

  “I can't believe you're here too!” she said. “Are you on your way to your posting?”

  Aurelia nodded. “Yep, and what about you?”

  “Ugh, no such luck,” Jaki said. “But I do get to do a week of training at Lunar City Hospital before coming back down. After that I'll be at Hospital 1-24 right here in the city.”

  “Cool,” said Aurelia, knowing full well that Jaki would kill to have her posting in Lunar City.

  “It's pretty exciting. There's a group of us going up, all for the same training,” Jaki told her, her eyes lingering on Nicholas.

  “That's nice.” Aurelia knew damn well that Jaki was angling for an introduction and wondering just exactly what Aurelia was doing sitting with a Human Clone, but she wasn't going to give her the satisfaction of an answer. Jaki could be so nosey, a quality that wasn't much admired in a society where everyone lived so close together. Plus, if Aurelia were being completely honest with herself, she felt a little uncomfortable about the situation. She hadn't really given much thought to the fact that she was sitting opposite a Clone, but, well, it wasn't exactly normal.

  “So, er, well, I guess, you know...” Jaki trailed off, her eyes still directed towards Nicholas, who was smiling blandly.

  “Yeah, I guess,” said Aurelia. “Have a safe trip.”

  “You too. And congratulations.” Jaki took one last look at Nicholas, then gave Aurelia a fake smile and walked off to rejoin her group.

  “Sorry about that,” Aurelia said, turning back to Nicholas. “Just an old school friend. That's all.”

  “And does she have a name?” His smile was gone, though he looked more sad than angry.

  “Yeah, Jaki.”

  “I see.”

  Aurelia shifted in her chair, feeling uncomfortable but unable to quite put her finger on how to solve the situation. “I think I owe you an apology,” she said, finally.

  Nicholas nodded. “And why is that?”

  “I, er, I should have introduced you. It was very rude not to, and I'm truly sorry.” Once she'd made up her mind to do something, Aurelia generally just did it. Life was easier that way, she'd found.

  Nicholas smiled again, but he still looked a little sad. “It's okay, I understand. You feeling a little strange?”

  Aurelia raised an eyebrow at him. “Strange?”

  “Well, I'm guessing it's not every day that you have coffee with a Clone, right?”

  Gods. At least he was joking about it, though. “No, it's not. I'm a bit unsure about the etiquette.” She smiled.

  “You're having a big day, aren't you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean,” said Nicholas. “Your first shuttle flight, the first time forgetting your new number and now your first time having coffee with a Clone. Jeez, it must be exciting to be you today.”

  Aurelia started laughing, and Nicholas joined her. His openness encouraged her to question him more closely. She knew what Clones were, of course, and knew their role in the Empire. She also knew that their lives were far more strictly controlled than her own as a Worker. Clones weren't allowed to breed, for example, though there was good reason for that. Clones’ being copied was considered dangerous, since the more times a code was copied, the more chance there was of a mutation. All Clones were created directly from source material rather than from other Clones. Even as medical personnel, there was no chance that Aurelia would be called upon to treat a Clone. They had their own doctors more skilled in the kind of specific genetic diseases that could occur in Clones, so she knew little about their biology. But she was curious.

  “You can drink coffee,” she began.

  Nicholas laughed at her. “As you can see, yes.”

  “Do you eat the same things as we do?”

  He shook his head. “For a future hot-shot medical girl, you're not exactly making a good impression,” he said. Then he grinned. “Let's take it from the top. I'm a Human Clone, right?”

  Aurelia nodded.

  “Which means that I've been cloned from original Human source material, right?”

  Again she nodded.

  “Which means, in turn, what?”

  She bit her lip, annoyed at her own stupidity. “That your body systems are identical to that of the material you were sourced from, so essentially you're human.”

  “Right. In every way except one I am exactly the same as you are. Well, not exactly.”

  Aurelia looked puzzled, and Nicholas leaned a little closer over the table as though about to impart a secret. “You're a girl,” he whispered. “I'm not.”

  Aurelia startled herself by laughing at this. “Indeed you're not,” she said.

  “So really, the only difference between us, other than that, is that whilst you had a mother and father, I simply had a donor. That's all.”

  “Not quite all,” Aurelia said, draining her coffee cup. “I mean, you were bred to be a particular way, right? I mean to specifically be a soldier, so you're strong and agile.”

  Nicholas nodded. “Yes, that's true. But that's not me. I mean, it is, but only because my original human donor was chosen because he had precisely those qualities. And then I've been trained to nurture those qualities, that's all.”

  “I understand.”

  “And,” added Nicholas, grinning again. “I don't eat exactly the same as you do.”

  “No?” she asked, furrowing her brow.

  “Nope. I bet I get way bigger rations than you do. Gotta build up these muscles, after all,” he said, flexing his arm like a cartoon macho man.

  Again, Aurelia laughed. She was starting to like this cheeky young man. Clone. Whatever. “So, it looks like we've exhausted the possibilities of the snack bar. Unless you want another coffee to build up your muscles?” she asked him.

  “Nah, I'm cool. Wanna check out the viewing deck?”

  “I presume that's where we can go and watch the shuttles land, right?”

  “Yep, come on, I'll show you. It's pretty fascinating if you haven't seen it before.” Nicholas pushed his chair back and stood.

  He led her to an elevator shaft in a corner of the waiting hall. No one else was waiting, and when he hit the button, the elevator dinged and the door opened.

  “After you,” he said with a mock bow. “Looks like everyone else is too jaded to want to come up and have a look.”

  The viewing deck was a circular room on the very top of the te
rminal building, with huge glass windows so that Aurelia could glimpse every angle.

  “Whoa,” she said, watching as a shuttle shuddered, hovered for a moment and then pushed itself off the ground and began its vertical climb.

  “Yeah, I know,” Nicholas said, coming to stand beside her at the window. “Amazing, huh?”

  As the first shuttle disappeared into the gloom, a shimmering silver reflection began its descent.

  “There's just so many of them,” Aurelia said in wonder, watching the next shuttle grow bigger as it neared the Earth.

  “There's a lot of business between here and there,” Nicholas told her. “And they're not all carrying passengers. Most of them are cargo shuttles, or even just messenger shuttles. The trip is relatively cheap these days, especially now that we can use syntho-fuel, so most people don't think twice about sending a shuttle down with a couple of drones in it.”

  Aurelia could feel his warmth, though he wasn't touching her. He seemed to emanate heat, making her aware of her own pulse under her skin.

  “Come here often?” she asked jokingly, turning to him.

  “Here? Or here?”

  Aurelia raised an eyebrow.

  “The viewing deck, not so much, not since my first couple of trips. Earth, yeah, a few times. Whenever I'm sent. I trained here for a while, but I was stationed back at Lunar. Every now and again I come down for more training, or sometimes just with a message pack that can't be trusted to a drone.” He shrugged. “It's no big deal - just a long trip, that's all. Tiring sometimes.”

  He didn't look tired. But then, Aurelia wasn't sure if Clones ever did. Since they were bred for their strength and fighting abilities, she assumed that whilst they weren't exactly superhuman, the Clones were more than just regular human.

  Nicholas looked up at the sky, where the faint ring of the moon was just visible. “And what about you?” he asked, still gazing upwards. “Going to be back and forth a lot?”

  Aurelia sighed. “I doubt it. I've got a lot of work to do up there; there's not going to be much time for travelling. Besides, I won't get my seven vacation days for another twelve months after I start.”

  “Are you excited?”

  “Yes. And no.” She paused to collect her thoughts. “I'm excited about the work. This is what I'm good at; it's what I was trained and bred to do. It will be challenging, but I can make a difference. Like...” She started to blush. “I mean, it sounds grandiose, but I'm a med Worker. I can literally make the difference between life and death.”

  This caused him to turn and look at her. “Life and death.”

  “Yes. You know, in the old days they believed that life was given by God and that when you died you went back to him. Some even prevented med Workers from giving treatment because they felt it was interfering with God's plan.”

  Nicholas nodded.

  “Now, we do it for the Empire. Every person I save will give more to the Empire than I could give individually. They will work again, produce again, contribute again. Does that make sense?” She looked at him earnestly.

  “Yes,” he said. “But what about the ones you don't save? The ones that you give to death?”

  Aurelia had never struggled with this idea before. It had been a part of her training for so long that she didn't question it at all. “I give them to death because it's better to die than to be a drain on Earth Empire. I do it only when there's no other option, only when there's no way that the patient could be a productive member of society if they survived.”

  “I see,” said Nicholas quietly. “And do you not think about the right to live? What if those patients wanted to live, even if they no longer worked? What if they wanted to see a sunrise again, or have one last cup of coffee?”

  Aurelia shook her head. “It doesn't work like that,” she said. “Part of having my responsibility is sacrificing one to save many.”

  “Or sacrificing many to save one,” Nicholas murmured, looking up at the moon again.

  “What?” Aurelia thought she had caught his words but wasn't sure; they hadn't made sense.

  “Oh, nothing, don't worry about it.” He looked down at her again and grinned. “We're getting awfully serious here, don't you think? Far too serious for someone who should be celebrating a whole day of firsts. You can't get on your first shuttle all depressed.”

  “I'm not depressed!” Aurelia protested, and then something caught her eye. “Whoa.”

  “Ah,” said Nicholas, looking up at the looming ship blocking out the light. “That's a merchant shuttle, bringing resources back and forth. Ore, that kind of thing. Big, isn't it?”

  They watched as the humongous shuttle delicately floated down, seemingly not moving and yet growing bigger and bigger by the second. Finally, just when Aurelia thought the ship would crash into the earth, long ropes where thrown down and the ship was tethered.

  “Back and forth?” asked Aurelia, who had just taken the words in. “Stuff goes from Earth back to Lunar City?”

  “Of course.” Nicholas looked puzzled at her question. “Why?”

  Aurelia tried to fit the information into everything else she knew, but it just wouldn't work. “I don't know,” she said after a moment. “I just sort of thought that Lunar City was organising Earth to be self-sufficient, but taking resources from the planet up to the moon doesn't really fit with that, does it?” She lifted her shoulders. “Oh, well. There are plenty of things that I don't understand.” She turned away from the window. “Tell me about Lunar City.”

  “Ah, so that's what's worrying you about going up there?” Nicholas said, looking amused. “Look, you've no need to worry. Lunar City is definitely special, but for the most part it's not going to be terribly different from right here. I mean, everyday life is pretty much the same. The only real difference is that you're likely to see more Ruling Class up there than you've met before.”

  Aurelia looked a little disappointed and yet relieved at the same time. “Oh,” was all she said.

  “Well,” Nicholas added in a conciliatory way, “you might find a bit more trouble to get into in Lunar then you're used to.”

  “I don't want trouble!” Aurelia said, horrified at even the thought of making waves.

  “I didn't think so,” Nicholas smiled.

  The two spent another ten minutes watching the shuttles land in the increasing twilight. Pollution made the nights fall faster, and it would be fully dark before their shuttle left at 18:30. The big fans that cleared the centre of the city had some small effect on the outskirts but not enough, and they were switched to low power at night, anyway.

  “Why do we have to wait so long?” Aurelia asked after a while, growing bored.

  “Told you travel was all about glamour,” Nicholas teased her. “Wanna go back down?”

  She nodded.

  “Mostly we're waiting for security reasons,” he explained as they waited for the elevator to return. “They need to check everyone getting onto the shuttles. The longer passengers are kept waiting, the more impatient and nervous they become and therefore are more likely to give away tell-tale signs of being up to something. It's simple psychology.”

  The elevator doors hummed open, and they got inside the cabin.

  “Plus, we're all given different arrival times so that the roads around the terminal don't get too clogged up. There's enough pollution around here as it is.”

  “Really?” said Aurelia. “I didn't know that. About the arrival times, I mean.”

  Nicholas nodded. “One of the privileges of being Ruling Class is that you can swan up ten minutes before your shuttle is supposed to leave. Some of these low-grade Workers, on the other hand, have been waiting since this morning.”

  He found them both seats in the waiting area and then excused himself. “Got some things to take care of. I'll be back in a while. Definitely before we get called for boarding.”

  Aurelia looked around at the other passengers, and then, to distract herself, she reached into her top pocket and pulled out
what looked like a pen. Pressing a button on the device caused the pen to unroll into a screen, and Aurelia loaded up some of her training notes and began to get a head start on what she guessed would come up during orientation.

  Wriggling in her seat to find a comfortable position, Aurelia found herself constantly scanning the hall for signs of Nicholas. Weird. They'd known each other for just a few hours and already she felt a connection with him. If she didn't know better, she'd say that she might just have a little crush on him, like the ones she’d had on fellow students in school. Of course, Nicholas was a Clone, though, so she didn't have a crush. Nope, not at all. He did make her laugh. He was funny, that was all.

  Her stomach writhed a little again as she checked the time. Only an hour until the shuttle left. Gods. She just wished it could be over with by now. After spending the trip with her father and wanting to remain earthbound as long as possible, now she just wanted to already be in Lunar City. Or Lunar, as Nicholas called it.

  “Guess who?”

  His voice came from behind her as he covered her eyes with his hands.

  “I hate this game!” she squealed, trying to escape from his grasp.

  “Oops, sorry.” He removed his hands and plopped down onto the seat next to her.

  “You're back,” she said, rolling up her screen and putting it back in her pocket.

  “Obviously. Told you I would be. We'll be boarding soon, so I wanted to keep you company for a while.”

  Three bells rang in succession from an intercom in the hall, and a garbled announcement was broadcast.

  Aurelia looked worried. “I didn't hear a word of that,” she said.

  “Yeah, it's just the pre boarding announcement. If you've got a good reason, you can board first. Like flying with a kid or having one leg or something,” Nicholas said airily. “You don't have a good reason, do you?”

  “Two legs,” said Aurelia, looking down at them. “Nope, no good reason.”

  “They'll call us soon, and then we board by deck number. It's easy. See the channels over there?”

  She nodded.

  “When they call your deck number, go stand in the channel that has an orange flashing light and follow everyone else. When you're on board, the steward will show you your seat.”