Once Upon a Future

by Robert Reginald (ed)

  At the time, sitting in that almost empty lecture hall, along with the other seven people whose bodies would soon be imperfectly duplicated for what amounted to built-in obsolescence, Annemie Alpha had reached over to give Duncan’s hand an apprehensive squeeze, as if to say, Hey, they haven’t done this to us yet...we can leave; but he’d merely brushed her hand away, as he’d leaned forward in his hard plastic chair, his eyes glittering with excitement. Midway through the lecture, the balding, slightly plump doctor stopped speaking about the group’s minimal number of naturally occurring single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs (which he pronounced in his crisply over-enunciated Midwestern accent as “snips”) within their genomes, which was one of the reasons why the eight of them had been selected for the trip, due to the low incidence of possible diseases, medical conditions, and other genetic screw-ups within their three billion base pair sequences, something most desirable for long-term space travel; not to mention their eventual roles as colonists on some still-unnamed Earth-type planet billions of miles and decades away…and addressed a problem specific to them as both a group, and as individuals: How does a person, or a group, adjust to going through several deaths and rebirths within a century? The need to make sure that not only the memories would be passed on, but the person’s actual identity as that specific person, and not merely fungible clones filling in the gap between Here and There. The question of how best to maintain the delicate internal balance between knowing that one was a physical continuation of an Alpha original, yet also a vital part of the Alpha’s eventual reawakening had been (supposedly) solved by a group of consulting psychiatrists, psychologists, therapists, behavioral profilers, and even concerned lay people who’d offered their input on-line to the other members of the group...and at the time, sitting in that echoing lecturer hall, Annemie had thought, All those degrees, all those hours spent rebuilding shattered psyches, and this, this is the best they can come up with? while the lecturing doctor had brought up a chart on the graphic-screen behind him. A paired list of twelve India-Indian names, in columns marked

  “Male” and “Female”:

  “Mosi” “Alula”

  “Manu” “Hili”

  “Mensah” “Ottah”

  “Badru” “Rabiah”

  “Anum” “Layla”

  “Msrah” “Nura”

  “Quaashie” “Sabah”

  “Haji” “Neema”

  “Nkrumah” “Masika”

  “Chenzira” “Mukantagara”

  “Mukhwana” “Kahra”

  “Adeben” “Akila”

  “Does this mean my wife won’t need to tattoo ‘Boog’ One’ through ‘Boog’ Twelve’ on everyone’s asses?” Jansur Lea had deadpanned from where and his wife sat in the row behind Annemie and Duncan; turning her head, she’d seen the couple for the first time that day, and found herself wondering how she could stand either seeing or listening to either of them for the duration of their training, let alone the next century or so. He had one of those blatty, slightly nasal voices, like a teenager whose voice had just begun to break upon hitting puberty; only considering that the man was a medical doctor, he had to be in his early thirties, or possibly more. His lack of any discernible beard stubble on his bony face didn’t help much in guessing his age. Both he and his equally scrawny wife had nondescript blondish-brownish lank hair, worn straight and limp around their pasty faces. But he wasn’t kidding about the tattoo part—each of the Leas had numerous tats on their exposed skin (both their arms were sleeved from what showed under their short-sleeved shirts to their wrists), plus she had piercings in her nostril, lower lip, eyebrow, and ears. Annemie started to wonder if more than a few of the couple’s three billion base pairs might not be damn near identical as Veronica added, “Did whoever thought this up have a fixation on India, or were they just flexing their creative muscles?”

  “Considering that most of the people responsible for bringing cloning to this current level came from India or Pakistan, the focus group felt it best to utilize pre-existing names which indicated, for the most part, birth order...although the first clone names are both female, while the second set are male, due to there being—”

  “So...lemme get this straight. By giving all the clones within a series the same middle names by gender, that makes them...what? Like a family? Or a caste? Members of the same scouting troop? This will help my future clones avoid a mind-altering paradigm shift when they wake up in age-reversed bodies every eight to ten years? Having the same middle name as all the rest of the Boog’s around them?”

  “Dr. Lea, the term ‘Boog’s’ is more than a bit derogatory, and certainly politically incorrect—”

  “So how are my clones going to be different from the clones of that woman’s pit bull, Booger? They all looked like the original, and I’m assuming that all my clones will look just like me...and he was the first pet cloned en masse, same as we’ll all be—”

  “Dr. Lea, I assure you, there is a major difference between five cloned pit bull puppies and twelve clones each from eight highly talented, individualistic people—”

  “What, volume?”

  Things went on like that all during their training (which was more for the benefit of their first “Mosi” and “Alula” clones, who began their accelerated lives within hours of that first chaotic lecture than for the Alphas themselves); the Leas continually questioned and mocked their handlers, until that weekend prior to the eight of them being put into cryo-sleep, when they were all shown their Nexts, lying in their womb-like nurturing liquid murk, where only parts of their developing bodies were visible—a floating hand there, a bobbing big toe, a swirling nimbus of kelp-like hair. The tanks which held the first clones were different from those on the ship; thanks to their highly engineered genetics, their gestation chambers had to be unique, and thus less viewable. But the sight of the eight blank bodies in those clear chambers was sobering for all of them, and even shut up the ever-gibbering Leas. This time, Duncan had squeezed her hand back as they stood side by side, looking down at themselves; they’d been told that the first clones would exactly resemble their Alphas, down to expertly applied matching tattoos, piercings, and other assorted cosmetic enhancements (plus barely visible vasectomies and tubal ligations, for zero population growth within the crew), all designed to avoid any emotional shock for the clones upon awakening with their freshly implanted memories just prior to lift-off; but none of that work had been done yet, so each couple saw themselves in a primitive state, with long hair and nails, and eerily bland, unmarked body parts.

  Right before cryo-sleep came an entire morning and afternoon of lying on padded tables, with a myriad of electrodes and sensors attached to their scalps, while needles were eased into their necks and temples for biochemical extraction—of all the eight people in the group, perhaps only the gratingly obnoxious Dr. Lea fully understood the entire process of memory extraction/duplication, but once they were all injected with a drug cocktail designed to stimulate all areas of the brain’s memory centers, the last thing she clearly remembered as her Alpha self was fast-forwarding through every damn memory, of every second of every minute of every hour of every day/week/month/year/decade in a dizzying rush of images, pseudo sensations, emotional twinges, and physical sensations...and then they were all quiet, as the needles and sensors and electrodes were removed, and the realization of what was going to happen to them, or more rightly the other Thems, finally hit each of them. Next to her on the right, Mila Demkakova started sobbing, while her life partner Colin Garbhach groggily whispered, “Shut up…my head’s splitting!,” and the Leas sighed in unison, while the other couples, the ones Annemie barely knew, had hardly spoken to, Ophelie Jivanta and Koenraad Dehaan, and Giulano and Rafela Aefre-Sheppard, leaned over to face each other, and whispered soft, reassuring words to one another...but Duncan was different from all the others. He’d lifted up his hands, fingers tented, and placed them on his chest, and began smiling into the flesh-surrounded triangle of space b
efore him, as if deep in one of his Yoga meditations. Not once did he look at Annemie, or acknowledge any of the others around him. But she could tell from the calm look on his face, even in profile, that Duncan had somehow achieved a personal Nirvana—and that he alone was actually looking forward to this process....

  While Annemie/Alula didn’t physically recall the events which transpired in that memory extraction room when she awoke, she did read the brief journal entry which her Alpha had left for her, and which the lab techs who de-wombed her gave to her a couple of days after she’d mentally and physically integrated to the point where she was actually capable of reading the lines which Annemie had scrawled minutes before she was tubed and injected and sedated, on paper still wavery with immersion-fluid stains....

  Neither of them had spoken about the events of the memory-extraction process that night, their last night as regular, single-issue people; after a final exam, and the indignity of requisite intestinal voiding prior to a last night of sleeping in a real bed together, Duncan had maintained that Zen-like calm, so much so that Annemie was afraid to break his envious serenity. After a fitful, sleepless night listening to his even, fluttery breathing, they’d been placed in the chambers which would be their literal “home” for the next century or so, shielded from as much cosmic radiation as humanly possible, due to a combination of structural design (their cryochamber was located deep within the ship, surrounded by multiple work stations and outer walls well-padded with insulating tiles plus Kapton thermal blankets of coppery hue) and bio-engineering (the fluid in which their naked save for skin-tight waste-extraction/removal lower briefs bodies rested was filled with antioxidant chemicals and non-organic substances specifically created to avoid radiation poisoning, should any manage to seep into their individual chambers), and the last thing Annemie Alpha had to say to her Next was a barely legible “love, now and forever.”

  The translation of Duncan’s tattoo, the Gaelic phrase they’d planned to have engraved in their wedding bands, before the whole colony/cloning project came to their attention....

  Those words had proved inspirational for her /Alula and /Pili selves, but by the time /Ottah was ’woomed, they’d become something of a burden, considering how Duncan’s /Mosi, /Manu, and /Mensah selves became increasingly possessive, and deliberately unchanging throughout each cycle of their young-to-very-early-middle-age existence...when not working (he in navigation/bio-fuel lab/air purification, while she maintained the botanical lab, and also worked the “day” shift monitoring the passing cosmic dust for stray particles of Brownleeite, a rare, mineral less than 0.0001 in width which the ship encountered perhaps once a decade—what little of it they’d managed to collect was stored for later use as a natural semi-conductor on their destination planet), the two of them holed up in their cabin, rereading cherished books on their personal datapads, or rewatching favorite movies from the cultural database, or listening to the same music over and over on their personal music systems. Always personal, though, always shared...just as they always looked the same upon ’wooming, and stayed the same while in each cycle. Which made all the days and weeks and months and years somehow bleed into each other...until today, until an hour ago. When everything changed, all at once, but all Annemie could do was mentally go through the list of successive clone names as both of the Leas (although mainly Jansur) tried to explain to her What Had Happened to Duncan/Badru and Duncan/Anum: “It was a freak accident, nothing anyone could’ve foreseen, or prevented—the vectran straps holding Duncan/Anum’s ’woom snug against the inner support columns were weakened, like they’d been rubbing on the corners of the support, which is crazy, I’ll admit, that stuff is two times stronger than Kevlar, but you know how strong the Duncans are—”

  Anum means “born fifth” but Layla means “born at night.” I guess people in India didn’t count on having more than two girls...Ottah is a male name, too, Duncan/Manu looked it up once—

  “—the nearest thing I can figure is, Duncan/Badru kept hanging on the tank itself, maybe lying on it, and all that moving around made one of the straps rub against the support, which wouldn’t have happened if they’d put round supports in the gravity-enhanced sections of—”

  “Like I’ve said through the last two Emerge-ations, those squared-off supports are insane in any section of a ship, zero-grav or not,” Veronica/Rabiah cut in, leaning against her mate’s fully tat sleeved left arm, and stroking the top of his hand, which rested on his seated thigh.

  “Rabiah”—another one of those birth names which had nothing to do with any particular birth order. It meant “born during spring,” but who knew when spring was on this damned ship?

  “Yeah, but who’s gonna rebuild the supports now? And with what? All the building materials are in the aft cargo hold, the sealed one—anyhow, when that meteroid shower hit the solar sails this time, it tore one of them loose, and that’s what made the ship rock—Giulano’s been outside, repairing the sail, and Rafela’s working on a way to better secure all the rest of the tanks, just in case the next time the ship takes a hit nothing will come loose—”

  It’s funny, how the names for the boys skip from “born third” to “born fifth”...maybe four is an unlucky number for Indians, like it is for the Chinese...my roommate in college, her parents changed her birthday from May 4 to May 1st, because her Mom was Chinese, and it was an unlucky number—

  “—which is something we’ll have to think about after we figure out what to do about the Duncans...actually, I know what to do with Duncan/Anum, it’s the other one that’s the—I mean, you are going to have to make the final decision, you being his partner and all, and there being no next of kin around—”

  “You sound like an intern, Jas,” his wife sighed, before leaning over and grasping Annemie/Rabiah’s interlocked-fingers-hands with both of her tattooed hands. Glancing down at them, Annemie/Rabiah found herself confused to the point of feeling queasy; for awhile those same hands had tiny stars on the knuckles only, then they were covered with henna-red Indian bridal style decorations, and just a short time ago, they were covered with the words “Boog’” and “Three”; but now Veronica/Rabiah’s hands bore Sailor Jerry-style brightly hued tats, the outlines clear, thick black around blobs of color she couldn’t quite make out as specific figures, because of the liquid pooling in each eye. Wrapping her palms and fingers tightly over those of Annemie/Rabiah, Mrs. Lea explained, “Jas has several options available for you, but some take too much time, which Duncan doesn’t really have in his condition, while others are...sorta out there.”

  “Yeah, and Ronnie means that literally...like from out-there—” he indicated the vast emptiness beyond the surrounding confines of the ship with one large hand extended toward the nearest bulkhead.

  All she could do was echo “‘Out there’?” while the couple sat staring at her intently, probably watching for signs of impending shock. They’d already told her the extent of Duncan/Badru’s injuries—the ripped-off-its-moorings ’woom had landed directly on top of him, and the weight of the clone within coupled with another hundred pounds of chemical-rich nutrient-laden pseudo amniotic fluid, plus the added pounds generated by the life support/waste removal equipment inside the tank, plus the artificial womb itself had created sheering/crushing injuries severe enough to damage his right leg from the thigh on down, his abdomen (including some of his intestinal tract), his right arm from the shoulder to fingertips, and his right ear was severed when the remaining half of the broken vectran strap whipped past it before hitting the floor. Nerves, blood vessels, and bone were crushed beyond even the ministrations of the Da Vinci robotic surgical arm, so for the time being, Dr. Lea had cauterized the wounds at the trunk, leaving on the damaged limbs prior to obtaining Annemie/Rabiah’s consent to amputate, but he had repaired the internal damage to the intestines by removing the affected section and attaching the free ends together—a simple procedure, one the Alpha internist Dr. Lea could’ve performed on Earth in even the worst of conditions. Th
e missing ear was actually the simplest thing to fix, once Veronica/Rabiah carved a new scaffolding ear-form out of inert sterile cartilage, and her husband grafted on some induced pluipotent stem cells derived from Duncan/Bardu’s skin cells, But even with the sophisticated-but-limited medical instruments and computers on board their ship, there was nothing either Lea could do about the missing limbs. If the Next had been more severely damaged, and much, much younger than the still ’woomed Duncan/Anum happened to be, a transplant of the damaged clone’s limbs might have been a possibility, but—and this was a massive, insurmountable but—Duncan/Anum had only received minor injuries, mostly deep tissue bruises and a couple of easily-splinted broken bones in his tumble from the unmoored ’woom, and given his closeness in age to the more badly injured fourth Duncan, Dr. Lea told Annemie that the best option would be to keep her mate alive for as long as possible, until the Next was at least a couple of years older/more mature, so that the gap between Duncans would be lessened...he’d been up and around for a couple of years longer than her fourth version, which meant that given the usual rate of cellular degradation of the Annemie clones, even under the best of circumstances, the usual order of Duncan/Annemie deaths/births would be reversed, probably for the entire remainder of the journey. Which was enough of a paradigm shift in itself, but there was also the matter of Duncan being the dominant member of their partnership, something Jasnur/Badru explained would “create an entirely new relationship between you...I don’t know if your partnership will last through this. And given the importance all of the Duncans place on their physical selves, I don’t think prosthetics will work in this situation, especially in zero grav...he needs some sort of actual, physical replacements, if he has any hope of regaining his sense of self—”