by Dan Davis
“Is he a clone of me?” Ram asked Zhukov, still looking down at the figure struggling to fit a square block into an octagonal hole.
“You are both clones,” Zhukov said. “Or rather, you are genetically very similar. As close as identical twins gestated in two different wombs. There are a number of differences with regards to gene expression.”
Ram wondered how many more looking glasses he would have to step through. “But how is this possible? I have a mother and a father.”
“You do. And yet they are not genetically related to you.”
“I have seen video of myself being born and it was my mother I came out of, not a tank.”
“That is correct.”
Ram looked down at Zhukov then. “Did they know? Did you put a fertilized, cloned egg in my mom?”
Zhukov’s shoulders were hunched. He nodded once, sharply. “As I recall, your parents were granted a license for a single child but after trying for some time they discovered that both of them were infertile. UNOP has for decades had standing arrangements with thousands of clinics all over the world. You parents were offered an egg that your mother would bear. The agreement was that they would be free to raise that child to adulthood as their own with no interference from anyone else.”
“They told me they had fertility treatment but they always said their genetic sequences were combined in a donated egg. Why didn’t they just do that?”
“I’m afraid I do not know the details of your particular case, just what is on file. I must say, that in most cases a large lump sum was offered to encourage the parents to make the right decision.”
“They were bribed.” Ram couldn’t believe it. It seemed so mercenary. He remembered that his parents had moved to Delhi around the time of his birth and then his father had been able to get his engineering job building the new airport.
“I don’t know their reasoning, I am afraid, only that your mother was impregnated with you. Despite being an abnormally large baby, you both survived the labor and then your parents were free to raise you however they saw fit.”
Ram did not know what to say.
He pulled out a chair at the table - a table and chair made to fit his huge body - and sat. The support worker smiled a greeting across the table. His newly discovered identical brother carried on jamming a red trapezoid against a square hole. Ram picked up a yellow tube shape and held it out to the clone. It took a long while for the clone to notice it. When he did, he swiped it from Ram’s hand and gave him a quick, lopsided grin. The clone jammed it against the square slot, grunting in frustration.
“How long has he been learning this?” Ram asked the support worker.
She looked at Ram over the box. “Oh, they can’t learn,” she said. “Not in any meaningful sense. We are very careful to stop any mental development beyond a certain level. Manipulating objects like this is simply a way to maintain the fine motor control that a subject would require should the body be needed.”
A subject.
Ram laid a palm across his eyes for a moment. The body he now occupied had belonged to a clone just like the one sitting beside him and that clone had been euthanized, had his head and central nervous system removed, to make way for Ram’s own to be transplanted. It was hard to not feel bad for the guy, mindless automaton or not.
His years of alienation with his parents suddenly seemed to make sense. The arguments and conflict must have come from them, not from him as they had always asserted. It suddenly made sense why he was so much taller than anyone in his mother's or father's families.
“That's why you knew all about me,” Ram said. “Why you were recording me, following me in Avar. Not because of my achievements.”
“Actually,” Zhukov said, standing behind and to the side with his hands clasped together. “It was both. Your genome was developed decades ago, along with many others that had the right mix of traits for the project. And we could create these incredible bodies in ectogenesis pods with no serious problems. But you cannot raise a person in a laboratory and expect them to become a hero. Only the real world has enough randomization, enough variables and challenges to create a truly rounded individual with what the old American astronauts called the Right Stuff. And so we sent you out into the world, dozens of each clone type, and waited to see what you would become.”
“There are dozens of clones of me?”
“Your genome was one of the earliest and best performing but it was gradually supplanted by others as our engineers perfected the processes involved. Still, yes, there are dozens of your brothers out there. Almost all of them on Earth, some here and there elsewhere. And we brought fifteen of you onboard this ship when we left home. Unfortunately, Noomi destroyed your brothers with her explosive device, the damned fool.”
“And this one,” Ram said. “And the other one you grafted me on to. They’ve got the same genetic code, only they’re eight and a half feet tall.”
“Precisely. The differences being that certain of the gene sequences were switched on, others switched off and other processes were done to them from birth through to adulthood in order to grow them into these vasty specimens we have here. But they are not human. As you can see, they are not self-aware at all. They have no consciousness. They were raised simply to be host bodies for you, the fully rounded humans with your great life experience.”
Ram handed the AP a red pentagonal shape. It took it and eagerly tapped it on the box, twisting and turning it. “And there are dozens of clones, just like me? What are they like? What jobs do they have? Where do they live?”
“They are not just like you, no. I don’t believe there are many left on Earth, if any, and we brought all the potentials we could locate onto this mission because we had the spare bodies of this model. But environmental factors played a huge part in the individual variation. You, Rama, achieved much with your time. Your parents had the right socioeconomic background and geographical location to allow you a number of options. We hope that our potential subjects will achieve not only great things with their lives but great things that will be relevant to the project. In your case, as with the others, we selected for Mission Four, you had the Right Stuff to be brought along as one of our backup models.”
“We weren't good enough for the final round?”
Zhukov jerked his head in a nod. “As you know, your model is actually rather old now when compared to the others. Thirty years ago, you would have been in the top ten, certainly. Top three, perhaps. But now? You saw the report that Diego obtained. We brought you into the ludus mainly to be sacrificed to Mael's insanity. And yet here you are. Our Subject Alpha. Bearer of our hopes and our dreams.”
Ram looked at the other Artificial Person in the room. “Were all the subjects also clones? Did they know?”
“We think Alina knew. None of them had official disclosure but word gets around, who knows for sure?” The Director tilted his head while he gazed at the Artificial Person. “UNOP needed huge bodies to fight the Wheelhunters. They started the program decades ago, growing fighters instead of recruiting them. But tank-grown warriors never had the real world experience needed. You have to have experienced traumas growing up that shape you into an adult with the drive and ambition to give this Project your all. Only the real world provides that. We created controlled environments and ended up with people who had no depth of character. We tried downloading minds into these bodies but there is so much loss of fidelity. When the information is mapped onto a new brain we see errors and losses creep in. Stands to reason, really. Everyone has an opinion about why but none of them really knows the reason that the data is lost. They have tried with synthetic brains and with Artificial Person brains but the personality that comes back is not quite right. I mean, think about it. There are 620 trillion synapses in a human brain. 90 billion neurons and over a trillion glia. Processing this volume of data strains our most powerful computational and storage systems so it’s no wonder we see memory loss and personality changes after overlaying the data bac
k into biological brains. We can allow a certain amount when we fill in gaps, as we did with Bediako after Mission Three and like we did with you when you were first revived and then again a few weeks ago. But an entire mind leaves us with a person without any verve. Transplanting the nervous system of clones that became fighters.”
Like we did with you...
Ram shook his head in disbelief. “What’s that? You downloaded parts of my mind, too? What other revelations are you going to spring on me?”
“That’s the very last one, I promise this. After Alina’s incident, you received a wound to the brain. Dr. Fo replaced the damaged cells and mapped your lost synaptic pathways onto it.”
Milena spoke up from behind his shoulder. “And when you were first woken.”
“Indeed,” Zhukov said. “It was discovered that almost three years in a minimal-temperature coma state had lead to some mental degradation. Dr. Fo overlaid your brain with the data gathered from a scan before you were recruited.”
“I don’t remember being scanned.”
“A side effect of the process is that you do not remember the process. Your memory is wiped by the scans before they can be stored long term.”
“How many scans have I had?”
“Oh, I do not know this. Perhaps four since you were woken.”
Ram rubbed his face and sighed. He almost laughed as he got to his feet. His cloned, Artificial Person brother paid him no attention. “Why even hide this from me?”
Zhukov half-turned to Milena. She glared at him but answered Ram calmly. “They felt that since your main problem is self-confidence, revealing your cloned nature would have adverse effects on your performance.”
“You didn’t think that, did you, Milena?” Ram said.
“I think I know you better than that.” She shrugged. “I was overruled.”
Zhukov looked confused. “Are you not feeling a loss of identity in this moment? You have had a lot to process and no doubt you will need time to come to terms with this. But you should remember that our genetic potential and even our own personal experiences are not necessarily the sum of who we are. If you so choose, your actions and decisions in the moment can be the way you define yourself in the future.”
“You never met my parents,” Ram said, looking down at his idiot clone, fumbling around with a green cube. “My dad is a violent asshole and my mom is a coward. Remembering my childhood, you know, this makes a lot of sense. I actually used to hope that I was adopted. Truthfully, I think this whole clone thing is pretty cool.”
“Cool?”
“Wait, did you tell my mom and dad to make me take up wrestling?”
“Part of the UNOP agreement was that the children would be encouraged to take up combat sports and sport in general. Not mandatory but I think they would receive a range of financial bonus depending on the engagement.
“I can’t believe this. My dad beating me for years, trying to force me to take up wrestling and go to cricket. I thought he hated me but he was just trying to earn himself some money.” Ram laughed, bitter but relieved. His childhood suddenly made more sense.
Milena smiled along with him. “I’m glad we could provide you with closure.”
Zhukov seemed confused.
“This is like the last piece of the puzzle for me,” Ram explained. “I always knew something was up, that there was something no one was telling me. My parents were hiding all this. Then you guys, no matter how much I learned there was always the feeling that there was something else. I told myself I was being paranoid or that it didn’t matter but it was always there. And now it isn’t. You’ve told me everything and who I am makes sense. My life, since before I was born, was on rails. Some of those rails led to me living in Avar, in my apartment and dying young and fat and lonely. Another rail led me here and I might have been a victim of Mael’s of Alina’s. I might have been Subject Omega and made it through until after the Subject Alpha fought, maybe heading back to Earth until the joints and organs in this ridiculous body started to fail. How many years can these bodies take all these growth hormones and training, three? Ten at the most? Anyway, this is the rail that I found myself on. This was always somewhere I might have ended up, back when my genetic code was stitched together forty years ago. I know that now. I know who I am. Knowing the constraints of my life has freed me. I can focus now, a hundred percent.”
Zhukov looked at him warily, as if suspecting he was being lied to or that Ram was being sarcastic. Then he jerked his head in a brisk nod. “I am impressed with your attitude. Now you know where you came from, yes indeed. The full story, nothing held back. Good, it is over. Now, we are only days away from the final battle and there is much to be done.”
Ram pursed his lips. “The mind scans stuff, though, I don’t like the idea of losing my memories to a loss of fidelity. And, I have to know, are you sure you’re not adding in a little extra stuff here and there? Or taking things away on purpose? I don’t quite feel like myself all the time.”
The Director wrinkled his nose. “No. We do not know how to do that. One day, we will and then we will do so. But no, we only use it to fill in the gaps, to make you back into who you, not take you away from it.”
Ram drummed his fingers on the table a few times. “Alright, I believe you, Zhukov. Sounds like it helped me out and I’ll be dead in a few days anyway, right? So what does it matter if I’ve got a few extra glitches?”
Zhukov stood up straight as an iron rod. “We believe in you completely,” he said, with undisguised impatience. “I wish that you would do also. Now, can we continue with your training?”
Ram clapped a hand on his clone brother’s shoulder.
“We can finish it.”
PART FIVE – CONQUEST
CHAPTER THIRTY– ORBIT
The UNOPS Victory achieved final position in orbit around Orb Station Zero with less than 36 hours remaining before the Orb’s deadline.
All the crew had to do now was wait for the Wheelhunter ship to appear through the Orb-generated wormhole. The meeting room in Ram’s quarters had once again become the de facto location for the department heads to witness the momentous appearance as well as agree the final plans for Ram’s boarding the Orb. Zhukov, Dr. Fo, Bediako, Cassidy, Milena and a handful of key personnel.
Ram needed the meeting so that he would feel prepared to fight a giant alien to the death the next day. He knew that he had a limited number of hours of life left to live. 35 hours and 24 minutes, roughly, until Zero Hour so he was keen to get the meeting finished. And yet it had not really begun. The officers could not relax until the Wheeler vessel popped through the wormhole into the Sol System. On the other hand, no one knew precisely when the alien ship would appear and so they sat staring at a screen showing an empty region of space.
“How do you know it will come from the spot where the telescope probes are pointing?” Ram said, watching the screen while he ate. He still had five thousand more calories to get through before the end of the day and his pile of brown rice and kidney beans was unusually unappealing. Especially as it was likely to be the last proper meal he ever ate.
Some last supper.
“The alien vessel always appears in the same area of space, relative to the position of the Orb and the Sun,” Zhukov said without turning away from the screen. “Five thousand kilometers on the dark side and that’s where we have the probes pointing. One in orbit, another on a flyby of the wormhole area.” He was holding a glass of the Stolichnaya vodka he had been saving for this moment. Marine Captain Cassidy had declined a glass as his Marines were on high alert. Bediako, grim and lurking at the back of the room, had sneered at the offer. Milena threw a few down her neck right away. Ram was not allowed any.
“How big is the wormhole?” Ram asked, just to be speaking. No one else was talking much and the silence was putting him off his food. Anyone would think it was all
“We do not know,” Zhukov answered. “One of the Mission Four experiments will be to measure the size and
shape of it. UNOP scientists back on Earth developed it but too late to go on Mission Three. We have a mission specialist who will analyze the electromagnetic distortions and capture the dimensions, almost immediately.”
Ram nodded, chewing his rice. “What do you think would happen if the Victory tried to fly through the wormhole from this end?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Zhukov said. Bediako snorted from the corner.
“Mission Three sent a probe into the area when it was in orbit,” Milena said. “The wormhole wasn’t there, we believe that the Orb creates the wormhole for the Wheeler ship each time it comes and goes. Otherwise, all we can detect is the particular environment that exists everywhere within the Orb’s powerful magnetic field.”
“Just a thought,” Ram said, shrugging. He wondered if it was worth trolling them any further. “Do you guys think it’ll be the same design of ship this time? If they’ve kept the exact same design ship every year for the last hundred and twenty years, what do you think that says about their technological development? Are they so advanced that they don’t need to upgrade, their ship design is perfected? Or are they just really slow to make adaptations? I know you guys enjoy hiding all this stuff from me but our ships have definitely gotten bigger, way bigger, with every mission. Don’t they want to be in an arms race with us? Are we so far behind them technologically?”
Zhukov tutted.
Milena sat in a chair, leaning forward with her forearms on her knees. She looked like she didn't want to even blink in case she missed what they were all waiting for.
Bediako lurked at the back of the room, a massive, brooding presence that Ram felt confident enough to ignore. He knew that he was better than Bediako, stronger. He was not afraid of the man anymore. But he did appreciate him as a trainer and Ram respected his advice.