I swear, the kid tried to stand at attention while strapped to his seat. “Sir, yes, sir!”
“Are you panicking?”
Another gulp of air. “Sir, no, sir!” But his eyes were open now, and haunted.
“You’d better not panic, soldier. Your buddies are counting on you.”
“Sir, yes, sir!”
God damn the military, and the way they turn human beings into robots nowadays. Used to be, a soldier—a good soldier—was trained to think for himself. Since Mars, though, the emphasis had been on hammering out every bit of individuality and creating a brain-dead automaton that obeyed orders very well indeed, but who had precious little personal initiative.
“Unstrap your upper seat harness!”
“Sir, yes, sir!”
“Lean forward, elbows on your knees!”
“Sir, yes, sir!”
“Cup your hands over your nose and mouth…and breathe!”
“Sir, yes, sir!” This last was muffled by his hands. His eyes were a little less glassy and unfocused now, though he still looked terrified.
“Where are you going, soldier?”
“Uh…Heinlein, sir.”
“That your new duty station?”
“Yes, sir.”
The Quito Accord declares both the Beanstalk and the Moon’s Heinlein Station to be a part of New Angeles, and over the years some trillions of dollars have flowed down the Stalk and into the city’s coffers—not to mention those of the Weyland Consortium and the invisible host of organizations behind them: triads, mafias, banks, and investment cartels from all over the world. Even so, the Feds keep a small U.S. garrison there. Memories of the Lunar Insurrection are still raw.
“Coming off boot leave?”
“Yes, sir. Uh…how did you know, sir?”
Good. I had his interest.
“You’re traveling ACT—Available Civilian Transportation. If you were being transferred with your unit, you’d be packed into a military dropship right now with sixty other grunts.” I grinned at him. “Lucky you. You get to travel luxury class.”
“I…I didn’t know it would be like this.”
For a moment, it looked as though the kid was going to panic again. “So…you get to visit your family back home after boot camp?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Where’s home?”
He actually had to think about that one. “Uh…Mason, Ohio, sir.”
I continued to draw him out, asking questions about his family, his pre-Army life, his girlfriend—a girl named Kathi Morena. He had an animated image of her on his upper arm.
Sometimes, in my more philosophical moments, I wonder why people surrender themselves, who they really are, to what other people expect of them.
And after a while, rebreathing his own carbon dioxide as he cupped it in his hands, Raul Kaminsky began to breathe normally.
The clone was standing next to me. I hadn’t noticed him cross the deck. “That was very well done, sir.” The voice was weak, almost watery. The creature made me uncomfortable…and that made me angry at myself.
“What was?”
“The way you calmed him, sir.” Its—his—head tilted to one side and he blinked. “Are you a doctor?”
“No.”
“A psychologist, then? You show a superb practical knowledge of the human condition.”
A philosophical clone? It was possible, I suppose. I was grappling at the moment with my own feelings. Clones made me uncomfortable, where bioroids did not. I know, I know—lots of humans have the same response; there’d been all of those dead clones in the streets last year.
But I wanted to understand. Damn it, clones are human. Bioroids are not. Why did I find my gene-altered human siblings…creepy? It wasn’t just the bar codes tattooed on the sides of their necks.
I glanced at Kaminsky. He appeared more relaxed now, as the sky outside darkened to black despite the continued glare from the sun. He was also far enough away that I could talk about him without being overheard.
“He’s a soldier,” I said, shrugging. “I was in the military, too, about a million years ago. I just had to get his mind off the problem for a moment, and get his breathing back to normal.”
“I see, sir.”
“Don’t sir me. Like I said, that was a long time ago.”
The Moon, I thought, is not Mason, Ohio. In some ways it was more dangerous than the streets of Earthside New Angeles. Taking an eighteen-year-old kid who was terrified of heights and could barely find his butt with both hands and dropping him into that environment was tantamount to murder.
I hoped Kaminsky had buddies in his unit who would look out for him.
I looked at the clone. “So what’s your interest in…what did you call it? ‘The human condition.’”
His face contorted, as though twisted by some strong emotion. That, I thought, is part of my trouble with the things. With clones, you couldn’t read the thousand subtle clues natural humans gave off during conversations. They had facial expressions, certainly, but they seemed pasted on, almost as though they wore them for effect…and often they didn’t match the situation in which they were used.
“All of us have a considerable interest in full-human psychology, sir.”
“I imagine you do. Did you have any trouble back at the Root?”
“I beg your pardon, sir?”
“That mob in the Plaza. Making a lot of noise, mugging for the newsies, and chanting ‘no clones.’”
“Ah. Them. No, sir. I took an elevator up to the station’s interior. I didn’t go outside.”
“How do you feel about that sort of thing?”
“What sort of thing, sir?”
“The Anti-Clone Movement. Human First.”
“Ah. I can’t say that I feel anything, sir.” His face was bland as he said it, completely without expression.
And I knew he was lying.
The term “clone” is really a blatant misuse of scientific terminology. I blame Hollywood and a century or so of 3Ds and sensies portraying clones as soulless automatons out to take over the world…or at least trying to ravage the wives and daughters of real humans. Originally, the word meant nothing more than taking a cell from one individual and growing a new organism, identical to the parent in every respect. The second individual was no more inhuman than an identical twin. It was an identical twin, in fact, except that it was a bit younger than the original. The very first successful clone of a mammal was a ewe, a female sheep, named Dolly.
We’ve progressed a bit since then. Eventually, the old laws against human cloning were overturned. As with stem cell research and nanomed, there were pressing reasons, both medical and economic, to explore the field—individual human organs, for example, can be cloned and stored for use in organ transplants without danger of immune-rejection problems.
Eventually, though, companies like Jinteki began…tinkering.
Today, clones are still human, no matter what Cardinal Reese might say about it, but they’re also the product of both extensive gene modification and considerable neural conditioning. They’re made to be obedient and single-minded about their work, though that has nothing to do with genetics. I understand they use neural channeling—same as the brain-taping that gives bioroids human-like personalities—to make clones feel happiest when they’re part of a team, following orders, productive, and fitting in.
Like a lot of other members of the more traditionally created individuals of the human species, I didn’t think clones were subhuman things. Caprice Nisei, who was rented out to the NAPD by Jinteki on a regular basis as a kind of beta-test model for the “new” detective, was one of my favorite people. A bit moody, maybe, and the way she seemed to pluck evidence others had overlooked out of the air could be startling and a bit scary, but she was a person, damn it, not a thing.
But a lot of people don’t see it that way—especially those people who are out of a job because of cheap clone labor. For the corps, clones are spare parts, human replac
ements, simulants that can be grown in batches, hired out to customers, and used as cheap labor until they’re used up, discarded, and recycled, with no need for health insurance or social security.
There’s a word for that in my book, and it’s not pretty. Slavery.
If this clone riding up-Stalk with me claimed he didn’t have feelings about the anti-clone movement, he had to be lying. No brain-tape conditioning could be that good.
I held out my hand. “I’m Harrison, by the way. Rick Harrison.”
He took my hand. I tried not to think about it feeling cold and a bit clammy. He’s as human as I am, damn it.
“John Jones,” he said. He hesitated, then added, “Jones 937, Melange Mining Corporation, Block 1280.”
First-generation clones—the ones used in large numbers in mining and in the military—were usually given bland, pedestrian names, with the surname used for everyone in that individual’s batch. On the job, there might be a thousand other Joneses or Smiths, so they were given numbers to keep them sorted out. I understand that the British Army did the same thing in the 19th century, when recruits from Wales all tended to be named “Davies” or “Williams” or, for that matter, “Jones.”
“I don’t believe you, you know.”
“You don’t believe what, sir?”
“That you don’t care about the ACM.”
He kept that bland and empty poker face on. “I really have no opinion on the matter, sir.”
“Uh-huh.” There was another problem with Mr. Jones, now that I thought about it. He was awfully well-spoken for a mining clone.
As with most clones, his voice came across as weak, little more than a voiced whisper, an unobtrusive murmur. I’d always taken that to be part of the clone I-want-to-fit-in group mentality. Don’t speak loudly, don’t call attention to yourself, don’t offend real humans or intrude upon their conversations.
And most of the clones I’d met over the years had a rather narrow range of interests. They were force-grown in vats—a bit more of Jinteki’s genetic tinkering, that—and were considered to be fully grown at age three or so. Their training—which included their social conditioning—tended to be narrowly specialized. Why waste quantum calculus or transcendental philosophy on someone who’s going to spend his entire, rather brief life running a regolith strip-miner on the surface of the Mare Crisium?
As a result, clones rarely had much to say to full-humans, and tended to come across as a bit dim-witted—“developmentally challenged” as the psychs like to say. Add the fact that they weren’t socialized like human children—they didn’t even have a childhood, for Skinner’s sake—and you can see why they didn’t fit in with their natural human sibs. Most came across as extremely uncomfortable when they were forced to interact with humans one-on-one.
John Jones was an anomaly—a clone interested in human psychology and brave enough to initiate a conversation with a stranger. The last I heard, Jinteki clones weren’t into facilitating group therapy sessions. His interest in the psychology I’d just used with Kaminsky suggested at least some knowledge of the topic, and that just didn’t square with what I thought I knew about clones. He also didn’t seem at all ill at ease, the solitary clone in a beanpod with seven humans. He’d approached me and struck up a casual conversation, not clone-like at all.
All of which meant either that my knowledge of clones was deficient…or that John Jones was more than he appeared.
“So…you headed back to Heinlein?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You’re with the big 2M?” I asked. Melange Mining, “2M,” handled most lunar helium-3 mining and processing. “What do you do?”
“I operate a D9Y surface conveyer,” he told me. Was there actually a touch of pride in the near-whispered words? “I dump incoming regolith into the first-level converters, to separate out the helium as the first step in refining helium-3.”
Helium-3 is the whole reason for the Heinlein colony on the Moon. It’s an isotope of helium, one neutron and two protons in the nucleus instead of the usual two and two found in ordinary helium-4. It’s fantastically rare on Earth. It’s rather rare on the Moon, too, but the lunar surface has been collecting the stuff from the solar wind streaming out from the Sun for four billion years or so. Regolith—the fancy name for lunar surface material—has about 28 ppm—that’s parts per million—of helium-4, and only .01 ppm of helium-3. It takes a hundred million tons of regolith to recover one ton of helium-3. Of course, we can manufacture the stuff on Earth. Tritium, with a half-life of twelve years, decays into helium-3, and that can be trapped and concentrated for industrial use, but it’s a lot cheaper to strip-mine the lunar surface and dump the regolith into a converter.
And if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing on a massively industrial scale. Modern fusion reactors require helium-3 for the deuterium-helium-3 reaction. That process is less energetic than deuterium-tritium, and needs a bigger power plant, but it’s cheaper, simpler, and safer to operate, doesn’t pollute the air or water, produces very low-level radioactive waste, and doesn’t use radioactive fuel.
Someday, we might mine helium-3 on a really big scale from the atmospheres of the outer gas giants, Uranus and Neptune, but until that happens we’re dependent on the lunar mines for ninety percent-plus of our electrical power. I do not want to think about what would happen to civilization if our sources of the stuff were interrupted.
“You like your work?” I asked.
“I do, sir. It is satisfying and fulfilling. ‘We supply the life’s blood of human civilization.’”
He was quoting a 2M advertising slogan, and the blatant propaganda almost made me gag.
“You’ll have to excuse me for asking,” I told him, “but…your speech…”
“Is there something wrong with my speech, sir?”
“No. Not at all. You just seem unusually well-educated for a conveyer belt operator.”
Another indecipherable expression crossed his face, a slight tic pulling at his eye and the corner of his mouth, instantly gone. “I…was also specially trained, sir, to work in Personnel.”
My eyebrows went up at that. “Impressive. A management position?”
“Admin, sir. I was a file clerk.”
“I see. I guess that makes sense.”
But it didn’t, not really. File clerks didn’t need to be imprinted with a knowledge of human psychology, and they didn’t need to speak English with the gentle elocution of a college professor.
He studied me for a moment, then added, “Ah…and for a time I was on the help desk out in the main lobby. They enhanced my vocabulary for that, but I ended up being there for only a week.”
He was either reading my mind—and mining clones couldn’t do that—or he was reaching blindly, looking for an explanation that would satisfy me. The idea bothered me. Ever since Jinteki had begun introducing clones, the corporate line had been that they can’t replace humans, not as human beings. Clones weren’t supposed to be as flexible, as adaptable, or as all-round clever as normal humans. In the work force, they were supposed to be more like highly trained chimpanzees than real people; hell, they couldn’t be people, because if they were, they had rights, and using them would be a form of slavery. Jinteki’s marketing and legal departments worked endlessly to see to it that people saw them as biological machines, not human at all.
“You seem like you’d get on well, uh, unsupervised. Working with humans. Ever thought of doing that?”
For the first time, I saw a crack in the emotional façade. Jones looked scared, but the expression only lasted for an instant, and then it was gone.
“I have a satisfying and fulfilling relationship with my employers,” he said. “I will happily perform whatever duties they require of me. I enjoy working with full-humans, and I enjoy working toward the betterment of humankind.”
“Okay, okay,” I said, raising a hand. “It’s getting so deep in here I need my thigh-highs.”
He cocked his head again. “I don’t
understand the expression, sir.”
“It means—”
But then the holographic attendant materialized in the middle of the room, all smiles and brisk professionalism. “Ladies and gentlemen, we are approaching the midpoint of our ascent. In two minutes, acceleration will be cut off, and we will experience momentary low-G conditions. Please remain strapped into your seats. The outside view will be switched off momentarily, in order to prevent feelings of disorientation or vertigo. Some of you may experience some minor discomfort. Please be assured that everything is as it should be. Deceleration will commence once the midpoint maneuver is complete.”
For the past twenty-five minutes, we’d been under an acceleration of 1.5 gravities—that half a person sitting in my lap. During that time, the sky had gone completely black. No stars, because even in space the brightness of the sun washed them out, and I suspected the view they were putting up on the walls was stopped down a bit to keep us from going blind from unfiltered light at both optical and UV wavelengths.
Jones leaned forward, extending his hand. I shook it—a bit reluctantly—and he dropped his other hand on my shoulder. “It’s been wonderful talking with you, sir,” he said.
I disliked the overt familiarity of his touch…and not for the first time I had to dig down inside, looking for deep-lurking feelings of prejudice or anti-clone bias. I didn’t think I had any…but I didn’t like his touch. Then again, I wouldn’t have liked it if a human had put an overly familiar hand on my shoulder, not unless I’d known him for a long time.
It was so difficult reading clone expressions and emotions, and I knew their behavior had essentially been conditioned into them. Usually, though, their demeanor toward full-humans wasn’t so personal or direct.
Before I could comment, he returned to his seat and strapped in. I noted with interest that he walked right through the holographic projection of the uniformed woman. Most clones, I’d noticed, tended to shy from any human contact, even the anticipation of contact created by a good animated hologram.
A short time later, the attendant’s voice gave us the countdown. “Low gravity in five…four…three…two…one…and we are initiating the midpoint maneuver.”
Android: Free Fall Page 4