skonen_blades

In all of this world, in all of its places
There’s actually, truly, not that many faces
As I get older and get to see more
I see quite a few that I’ve witnessed before

It’s not that there’s only a handful here, no
But more that the billions of faces here flow
From a number of face archetypes somewhat few
Say maybe five thousand, three hundred and two

Give or take. I can’t say that I’ve whittled it down
To a number exact. No, my figures are round
But I’m seeing more noses I’ve already seen
More jawlines, I swear, that have already been

Like a composite sketch artist drew for police
Every person on earth just before their release
From the womb to the public with similar traits
From a limited number of facial templates

Like we’re all at a worldwide strange masquerade
And only a thousand unique masks were made
The rest are just copies with differing sizes
Of tiny details on our fleshly disguises

I know when it gets down to our DNA
We’re all individuals in special ways
But facial variety might have run dry
It might be we no longer diversify

And as I get older I notice it more
I see a face twice, then three times, and then four
And if I survived to a thousand and three
Would every face be familiar to me?

I’d mix up most faces. Mistakes would be made.
I’d see a whole jumble from every decade
We all forget names and remember the face
And sometimes it’s hard to remember, to place

That face combination of meat, skin, and bone
Imagine if most of the faces were cloned
Experience showing the same face refrain
Again and again and again and again

We’d become face-blind as centuries passed
As multitudes of those face patterns amassed
In brains filling up with identical looks
In our mental appendix of face-picture books

Uniqueness is only a product of time
Humanity’s face just a small paradigm
The young see uniqueness through naiveté
Uniqueness gets more common every day

It’s compounded daily until we can’t see
Until, at a point, theoretically
We wouldn’t see differences when we were old
We’d just see one human from one simple mold

I can’t say that one point of view is the best
Newness is life so I can’t here suggest
Peace lies with the old ‘cause that’s plainly not true
But that’s just what I’m thinking. What about you?


tags

“It’s not that I hate being rich. I love it. It’s just that I feel undeserving. I wish my situation wasn’t so unique.” said Carl Whiteside 4 to his therapist.

“You mean being the first and likely only billionaire clone to exist?” asked the cellular-propagate therapist.

“Exactly. I’m in an unusual situation. I was given a law education as the indentured servant of the late Carl Whiteside Prime. I was made the executor of his will.” CW4 said.

“Yes, we’ve been over that. Business as usual. Plenty of cloned lawyers execute their owner’s last wills before mandatory destruction. But in your case…..” the therapist trailed, hoping to lead Carl 4 to his present problems.

“Well, I found a loophole. I had never been properly registered as a clone. Perhaps because Carl had a sentimental attachment to me as he had no children of his own. He had me proclaimed as a ward. In legal terms, it’s very much like adoption. There was no law against it because no one had thought to do it before. I never left the grounds of the estate. All of my education was online. I was like a pet.” rambled Carl.

“You didn’t have the standard organ harvest clause.” prompted the therapist.

“No. There were several cloned brainstem truncates in the basement chambers for any organs that were needed.” Carl said.

“So you were in many ways a quasi-person.”

“Indeed. And Carl Prime left his entire estate to me. Including the workforce of copyrighted gene imprints of himself.” finished Carl. Nervously, he took a sip of water.

“I remember the case. The people vs Carl Whiteside 4. It was a sad watershed moment for clone rights. You ended up being allowed to retain ownership of his estate, including the DNA replicates. But the loophole was closed thereafter in order stop the wealthy from passing their money down a line of clones instead of family.” said the therapist.

“Right. So I’m the only….one.” said CW4. He looked around the room nervously and took another sip of water.

“Correct. Which leads us to today. What seems to be the problem?” asked the therapist, slightly impatiently.

“Well, doctor. That’s just it. I’m not the only one. All of the workforce that I own and rent out to companies around the world are dying under the awful conditions that all clones work under. And they’re me. They’re all me. CWs. Numbering up to nearly two million. My eyes, my body type. My face. I can’t take it anymore.” Carl Whiteside 4 sobbed.

“I see. The guilt of a Prime and you have no fellow clones to talk to.” The therapist stroked his chin.

“Yes. That’s exactly it. I feel like a slave owner except all of my slaves are me.” said Carl, sniffling. He was managing to get himself under control.

“Well, Carl. You’re in a unique position so I’ll have to give you some unique advice,” said the therapist. “A lot of humans in your position turn to drugs, alcohol, or other means of shoring up their denial to blind themselves to the moral turpitude they’re mired in. If you won’t consider liquidating your entire workforce…..”

Carl Whiteside 4 blanched at the suggestion.

“….then I suggest you learn to be more human. Distract yourself from the clone plight and take up a hobby. Maybe an addiction as well. Do some research on what would suit you best. And you’ll need some sleeping pills. I’ll prescribe some. Good luck.” concluded the therapist.

Grimly, Carl Whiteside 4 nodded. He steeled himself for the future.

“Our time is up.” said the therapist.






tags

White clam chowder and over-easy eggs. Soup and eggs for short.

Mass was the problem with colonizing. Getting mass near C was expensive. The smaller the load, the better. Sending ten thousand colonists was impossible.

But sending ten thousands eggs and ten thousand loads of semen was way cheaper.

The ship had a chilled cargo of those two ingredients to make human babies. Womb ships, they were called. They had a skeleton crew of scientists, techs, teachers, and caretakers trained to take on whatever challenges might arise at first contact with the target home but after they’d landed and seen that everything was alright for seeding, they’d get underway.

The birthing tanks would be unfolded and irrigated with dehydrated amniotic solution. These giant uterariums would then be flooded with the soup and eggs slurry sometimes referred to as brunch. The old exponential dance would start and babies would pop up like strawberry Christmas lights on the vine. Tendriled, manufactured, multiumbilicals would snake out and attach themselves to a thousand belly buttons. Each tank was filled with fraternal millituplets.

Wait time was the human usual. The children would be boosted with learning enhancers and xenoviral protection. A small percentage were always lost to errors in cell replication no matter how tailored the dna but the average yield was 90% or 900. Harvest would happen in two-year stages, nine hundred per year. This was called the familial ladder. Ten years of baby making before shutdown for 9,000 humans.

The crew would foster them with help from the AI adoptives, working as a team to cram as much knowledge and mental health into them from the get go before they took on their new world.

It was a system that had worked twelve times before. Twelve Edens had successfully flowered with no humans needing expulsion from angry gods.

This was going to be unlucky thirteen.

The tailored enzymes would fail and the entire crop would be born sociopathic and cruel unbeknownst to the crew. As the children grew, they schemed and the crew began began to meet with accidents. Before any of them figured out was what happening, they were gone.

The children were geniuses. As the other batches reached fruition and were born, they were taken in by the first two waves and taught to be just as awful.

The planet survived and flourished. They developed weapons and a reputation. They broadcast torture videos and vile non-consensual pornographic videos. Their system of government was opaque. It seemed like anarchy but they had such organizational skills.

Their planet is isolated. Quarantined. Embargoed. Struck off the records as a failure, they’re monitored for signs of extra-system aggression. They’re an embarrassment.

A closeted mistake until sixteen minutes ago when their entire planet, now decades into post-womb colonization and nearly five generations deep, completely disappeared off of everyone’s scans.

And reappeared near Earth Prime bristling with nuke barrels and planet crackers pointed at our race’s home.

The pirate planet had come home, prodigal son returning.

They didn’t open fire immediately but they did send a message system-wide on all channels before they started the war.

“No more wombships.”

After a heated exchange of nuclear fire that the pirate planet lost, they drove their planet straight into Earth. Terran defenses didn’t stand a chance.

We no longer use wombships for colonization but we are still trying to figure out how those little bastards made a whole planet capable of faster-than-light travel. None of the other Edens have come anywhere near that kind of technology. The philosophical implications of their success don’t bear thinking about.

Evil might be smarter than good.




tags

“We need backup!” shouted Officer Saul into his cruiser’s police radio.

Heavy fire was peppering his unit with smoking holes. Someone was playing the drums on his car and Saul had no idea where the bullets were coming from.

It was just after lunch and they’d responded to an emergency call in this alley. They were pinned down and immobilized. It was only a matter of time before the bullets found something explosive or worked their way through the armour to Saul and his partner.

Their car shimmied under the hail of bullets like a shivering dog.

“Snap it back!” shrieked Officer Markowitz. He was Saul’s partner.

Both cops leaned into their head cradles, nestling the studs on the back of their necks to their seat-jacks, and hit the red panic buttons.

Immediately, the last three days of recorded data, memories and thought processes were shunted back to HQ.

Thunder kept kicking the car hard. It wouldn’t be long before the bullets made a doily out of the roof. How did neighbourhood kids get this much ammunition?

“Okay, let’s go!” yelled Saul.

“On three!” bellowed Markowitz with a maniacal grin. This was not going to go into the databanks. It was also a one way trip if this hailstorm of bullets kept up. They both knew it.

“One, two….THREE!” shouted Saul. They rolled magnesium grenades out of what was left of their car-door windows. The flash was fairly weak under the glare of the noon day sun but anyone looking directly at it would be blinded for a moment.

Markowitz and Saul high-fived each other, shouldered open their battered doors, and both tucked and rolled out of the cruiser, guns pointed skyward and firing.

Their bullets rained up, the ammunition from an entire street gang rained down.

Markowitz felt the bullets stitch their way up his body to his eye before it all went black.

Saul flash-cooked with a laugh when the bullets finally pierced the armour of the car’s gas tank.

----

Back at HQ, bodies awoke with shuddering gasps. They were right beside each other in the clone tanks.

Markowitz’s fresh body was weak and unused but healthy with a 90 per cent match of features from the previous one. The moments before his death spooled out in his head.

Saul’s body was shorter this time, and more muscled. They were getting low on matching stock for him. His body type was less common.

They had at least two weeks of physiotherapy ahead of them to get them back up to cop status.

“It’s a good thing we called for backup,” Said Markowitz.

“You got that right.” said Saul, and called in an air strike for the alley.





tags

Liposuction for the brain:

A ludicrous symposium written on the back of a napkin in the shade of a walrus tongue by two scared clones of Jesus.

The Iron Age has hurt us. We tear the buildings down. In the movies, the bad men have scars.

I have a physics bill that I want passed into law. I want the senate of universal field equations and religious ideals to ratify it. I need to have it added to the unseen constitution in between Newton and Hawking.

A cross between gravity and pheromones. Snake-like emotion rays in a red clay jug. This is a broth made from weaselbone stock and seasoned with mulberry bush. This the straightest line between two points that doesn’t respect law.

I stripped the seconds out of this watch. All of them. They’re in a bag in the freezer. They’re great with ice and vodka.

The watch still works but it doesn’t tell time anymore. It’s a watch for a mime.

I wrapped up Rome and sold it to a time-traveling salesman. He sold it to the States a hundred years ago. This is Temporal Tennis.

I make soap out of the fat that I suck out of my ideas.


tags

It’s a little ticklish when the needles go in but the anesthetic keeps her from moving. It keeps her laughing on the inside.

Grown from a vat of jaguar with a splash of greyhound and a swirl of human, she’s extremely thin and toothy. This is her last treatment before she’s shipped off to Overman Ranker’s Field Farms for training.

She’ll be part of an Assassin’s Guild nick-named The Circus. All of the killers are animal hybrids. The term ‘guild’ is a bit of a misnomer. ‘Kennel’ would be more accurate. The assassins are little more than happy pets that are conditioned to be stealthy and to kill without mercy.

An animal’s nose full of the scent from the victim’s clothing is much more efficient than a photograph/dossier when it comes to tracking a man down in the dark.

Tyrania is two years old. She’s either happy or in pain. No other emotions exist within her. The pain of punishment tells her what not to do. Right now, she’s happy. The spinal tap keeps her immobilized while the nano-somes do their knitting and pearling to the building blocks of her epidermis.

After training, she’ll be able to pass for human. The skeletal creature on the table with dark spots dotting the long, grey fur will become something more akin to feral super model when the process is finished.

She’ll be killing in the higher classes. It’s the bear-and-croc mods that they send to the poor places.

Her long nails are retracted and painted a garish red. The newborn killers always choose cosmetics that look like blood on their nails and lips. It’s comforting to them. It’s frightening to see them smile in the mirror after their first reward of makeup. More often than not, they’ve smeared a line of lipstick around their lips. Their eyes glass over with the dreams of blood as they tilt their head at their reflection.

They get trained to be human on the Field Farm. I mean, they get trained to kill people in any number of ways with the aid of mental downloads and grueling days of physical training but they’re also told how to act at the dinner table and how to keep a conversation going.

We teach them to be background. They’re expendable so there’s no exit routes planned when they’re sent on missions.

I miss the ones that don’t come back. I don’t like the ones that do. They change after a successful mission.

This one here, Tyrania, is looking straight up at the ceiling as I prepare the depilatory cream. I’m in her peripheral vision. I give her a wink.

I feel like a dentist operating on a child.



tags

It wasn’t until I opened my eyes that I knew what had happened.

Lisa Sagan and Andrea Hawking were helping Petra Turing make sure my vitals were stabilizing. It was Henrietta Einstein that was chairing the ‘wake. I could see my dear Shelagh Netwon looking down from the observation booth with tears of joy in her eyes.

I’d been caught and killed. They’d had to wake up another copy of me.

I needed to know how much memory I was missing and if the Two-X project was still functioning.

We’d wrested control from the governments. We were the smartest minds on the planet. We’d taken over from the war-mongering males and turned the entire continent into a matriarchy that was feared and respected.

It wasn’t enough.

We need the world to be with us if we were to conquer space.

“Don’t try to move” said Carla Marconi. I bristled at the sound of my old enemy’s voice but remained still. Soon, I would leave this hospital bed and be debriefed and rebriefed. The project was safe. I could see that much from here.

The black ceramic hummed above us in the nuclear cooling tower. Miles long, it crackled with barely restrained power. It wouldn’t be long before the world would fear us and have no choice but to obey. It was regrettable but the quickest solution.

The weapon is of my design.

My name is Tamara Tesla. A glorious future awaits.



tags

I am a fraction of the human equation.
I am long number whose end is unknowable because of its place in the future.
I am rounded down for practical purposes for today’s formulas.

I was manufactured.

There are no more fathers. There is only one Mother.

I am processed meat.

The human factory of my birth is located in Missouri. I am a patchwork quilt body of rejuvenated dead flesh that marks me as a highly expendable worker.

The specifications my of birth factory’s product line were three: Tall, Male and Strong.

The automated collectors of the dead brought the corpses into the rear-loading rendering tubes at the Factory. There, the bodies were brought inside and separated into elementary components of tissue, fluid, tendon and muscle. Chemicals added elasticity and tensile strength. A youthful vigor was restored.

Like a sausage or a can of spam, these parts of the dead were reconstituted together into a human form by machines designed for the task, blurring with the bored speed of efficient programming. Staple gun retractors pulled tendons taught over heel bones and kept them tight with glue-gun biopoxy.

Sewing machines churned out templates of thin jigsaw skin by the acre to wrap us near completion.

No appearance specifications were included in our reincarnation. We came down the tracks the exact same height with skin like calico cats.

No two of us were exactly alike. Our eye colours were random from eye to eye. Hair sprouted from our heads at the whim of the random swirling flesh we rose from. Neopolitan morlocks. Shelley’s legacy. True Frankensteins.

We were grown for hazardous labour.

All Factories grew humans to order. The ones up North and on the Coasts grew humans for the general population and a pristine few grew bodies for the rich.

Monitored green jars of physical perfection grown for beauty, longevity and intelligence.

Not us.

There hasn’t been a true birth in two centuries.




tags

I came around the corner looking down. I was going through my keys with one hand while carrying my bag of groceries with the other. I was on the top floor. I was pretty winded from walking up the stairs. The elevator hadn’t worked in days. It was an old building. I looked up towards my apartment at the end of the hall.

And dropped my groceries. Someone was standing in front of my apartment door. It was me. Me about twenty years older with a wild stare and a knife in his hand.

I stared at myself while the other me slowly grew a smile on his face that didn’t reach his eyes. With a grunt he raised his knife and ran towards me with insane abandon. He twitched his head back in mid run to look at the ceiling and started yelling like an Islamic warrior.

I dropped to my knees and jerked my gun out before he got to me. I put six bullets in him. He went down in a mess of defeated sighs and disappointed twitches. His scream wound down to silence like a robot running out of batteries before his throat closed with a click. His blood pooled out around him in a slowly growing lake.

I stood up and looked at him. This was getting serious.

This was the second one this month. I must do something really bad in the future to make myself want to come back in time and kill me. I’m a police officer but I’m not in charge of anything important. Just a detective with the temporal investigation squad. Being a Temp means I spend the day going through the encyclopedias in the time safe and seeing if there are any discrepancies with the encyclopedias in the regular library. It’s boring work. When I find something, I kick it upstairs to the bosses. I’m not important.

Going back in time and killing yourself is pretty much the most illegal thing a person can do. No one has succeeded in doing it yet. Something always happens to make it not happen if you see what I mean. If anyone ever succeeded, the theory is that all of existence would get caught in a loop. So far, reality has protected itself.

There's a saying in the agency; "Being a temporal investigator means never having to have said that you were sorry". It highlights the ridiculousness of our job. Every day we check the past without really knowing if we're already living in a changed world. I mean we're pretty sure because of the time safes but it's all theory.

I killed the first version of me that came back over three weeks ago. I'm still doing the paperwork.

That means that there should have not been a second version of me to come back for another attempt. Also, if the 'me' that came back three weeks ago was from an earlier time than the latest one, then the one who I just killed should have never been. Either way, I shouldn't be able to remember both of them but I can. I'm getting woozy just thinking about it.

I make a mental note to try to take the next one alive if one shows up. I try not to think about how getting information from a future version of myself is going to twist the timestream into moebius knots.

I’ll tell my captain in the morning. Right now I need a drink.



tags

Ah, those pesky Fetts.

Who would have thought that Boba Fett’s ‘dad’ would be the DNA basis for all of the Empire’s stormtroopers? Boba must have had so much disdain for the others.

“Think for yourself” he must have thought to himself as he watched his clone brothers follow orders and die by the hundreds in their shiny white armour. There are twins and there are triplets but what is it called when there are hundred of thousands? Googuplets? They were the keystone cops of the universe and they were copies of him. The disgust he must have felt had to have been absolute. He achieved a certain emotional distance. He didn’t talk to them. He was in it for himself. He was a bounty hunter. He was a loner. He was bent on revenge over the death of his father.

He had no idea he had a sister.

In the cloning process, only males were produced. Theoretically, this kept them easier to control. The batches were grown with the X and Y chromosomes always kept at fifty percent each so the mix resulted in XY copies across the board. There were big jugs, for lack of a better word, of X chromosomes and Y chromosomes.

Occasionally, for reasons of maintenance, oversight, or laziness, the X’s would empty first and you’d end up with a batch of nothing but Ys.

This would give you huge overmales. They were too hard to control and didn’t live too long since their hearts had a hard time pumping blood through so much muscle tissue. They were giant beserkers with poor attention spans and learning difficulties; just as prone to attacking each other as they were to attack the enemy. Useless to the Empire in its battles. Two batches were tried out in the regular conditioning and the resulting casualties coupled with poor strategic performance ended the experiments. Double Ys batches were now flushed to the stormy artic oceans of the water planet that the cloning facility was based on.

Occasionally, for reasons of maintenance, oversight, or laziness, the Y’s would empty first and you’d end up with a batch of nothing but Xs.

Girls, in other words.

Sairo Fetts.

Standard procedure was that these batches were also flushed. That was not always the case.

Years before, a Kaminoan researcher named Bettian Sairo agreed with the uselessness of the YYs. He also agreed that having just males in the conditioning process made for easier control. It gave him an idea, however. There were sixteen cloning facilities on Kamino. His idea was to take one facility and produce nothing but women. His theory was that if several batches of women were also raised with no outside influences, their effectiveness as soldiers would be just as good as the men.

This was proved in a couple of controlled experiments with four female clones who were terminated at the end of the experiment.

He was given the green light for his plan.

Bettian began. His clones were named Sairo after him.

The double-X bitch-batches began.



Year one: Birth

Seven thousand, seven hundred and seventy eight pinhead hearts fluttered awake, pea sized lungs drew liquid breath and started growing. Hexagonal windowpanes spit forth babies dripping with ropes of blue mucus. They were washed. They were tagged. They started conditioning.



Year two: Indoctrination

The Sairos all had red hair. They passed their tests quickly and showed abnormally high aptitudes for spatial dynamics and engineering. Their combat skills were not as high in strength as the male batch statistics but they nearly doubled the numbers in flexibility and agility. Things looked good for Bettian.



Year three: Revolution

Bettian’s body was located floating in the ocean near to the wreckage of the station after the fight and the escape. The Sairos, advanced physically to the age of seventeen, had taken over, escaped from, and then destroyed the cloning station. No one was sure of the details or where they ended up. They had called in a cloaked pirate cargo freighter on encrypted channels under the guise of a pickup. They killed the crew and hijacked the ship. The freighter was found adrift in space parsecs away. They had set up routine answers for the monitoring scans back at the cloning station. Their disappearance wasn’t noticed until days after they had left. After entering the station to inspect the malfunctions and odd responses to their inquiries, the search crew incinerated when the charges that had been left behind were tripped and the station went up in a nuclear fireball of ions and steam.



That was years ago.

One of them, the last of to be created, had been given an accidental extra chromosome. The last squeeze from the tube has dropped in one extra X for her. She was XXX. She was the leader of the revolution. Powerful, unstable, psychic, pyrokinetic, telekinetic, intuitive, two steps ahead of her own insanity in order to lead, react and hide her power until the moment of flashpoint. She had the women netted and communicating with her mind.



A.

She told them to run, hide, marry and disappear.

Most of them did.

Some of them became mercenaries.

One Sairo mercenary has snapped and is hunting down the XXX. She is working her way through the rest of them, gathering as much information as she can as she goes along, planet to planet, hoping to come face to face with the Sairo that started it all.



Or



B.

She locked the doors on her trusting sisters in the pirate cargo ship and blew the locks after jetting off in an escape pod. They decompressed, screaming and betrayed. Red haired XXX Sairo Fett became a mercenary.



Poor Boba. He never knew he had a sister.



baggage