The Clone Ranger: Episode 6

Journal Entry 684

It has been eight days since Jack Unit 754 whispered to me about females, and I have thought of little else. I have tried to distract myself with my observations — 583's sketches grow more elaborate by the day; he is drawing the magnolia tree near G7 now, petal by petal — but my mind keeps circling back to 754's words. Soft curves and delicate features. I have stared at my own face in the washroom mirror until my eyes blurred, trying to imagine what the opposite of this face might look like. I cannot do it. It is like trying to imagine a color I have never seen.

And there is something else, something I have not written down until now because I do not have the words for it. When 754 described them, I felt a strange pull low in my body, a warmth that spread outward and left me restless for hours afterward. It was not like hunger or tiredness — the only other things my body has ever demanded of me. It was a wanting. I have turned it over in my mind for eight days and I am no closer to naming it. It embarrasses me, though I cannot say why.

I need the truth. And there is only one person on Raven 5 I trust to give it to me.

I have not visited Black Bird ZX98 since our conversation beneath the magnolia tree, though I promised him I would. Nineteen days have become twenty-seven, and the promise has sat in my chest like a stone. Today, my shift ended, and instead of walking home, I walked to G7.

The soap smell hit me first, as always. Then I saw him — copper hair catching the late light, walking the path between the buildings with that unhurried stride of his, as though time were a thing that happened to other people.

"Black Bird ZX98," I called. "Do you have a moment?"

He turned, and his face broke into a genuine smile. "Jack Unit 382. I was beginning to think you had forgotten your promise." He gestured toward our bench beneath the magnolia tree. The blossoms are starting to fall now; the ground beneath it is carpeted in white petals. "What weighs on you, my friend?"

I sat down heavily. There was no point in being clever about it. "Females," I said.

He blinked. Then, to my surprise, he laughed — a warm, low sound. "Ah. So the rumor has reached you too."

"You know of it?"

"I am old, 382. I have been on Raven 5 longer than almost any clone living. I hear many rumors. Most of them are nonsense." He leaned back against the bench. "This one is not."

My heart began to pound the way it had when 754 first whispered to me. "They are real?"

"They are real," he said. "The original humans — the ones you and I were copied from — came in two kinds. Male and female. The females are... as your friend described. Different in shape, different in voice. Different in a thousand small ways I could not list for you if I tried."

"Then why are there none here? Why are all of us — Jacks and Birds alike — male?"

"Because we were not made to be people, 382. We were made to be soldiers." His voice was gentle, but the words landed like stones. "Mantis and Raven wanted armies. Armies, in their wisdom, were to be male. It was simpler. Cheaper, perhaps. The non-clone citizens of Raven 5 — the ones who left when the treaty was signed — they had females among them. Families. Children, even. I saw them, in the early days, when I stood guard at the president's side."

"You have seen a female?"

"Once, properly. The president's wife, at a negotiation summit, many years ago." He was quiet for a moment, and I realized he was remembering. "She was nothing like 754's whispers, and everything like them. That is the trouble with rumors. They take the truth and dress it in costume."

I stared at the fallen petals at my feet. "Do you think I will ever see one?"

"Honestly? No." He said it kindly. "No one new comes to Raven 5. The cargo ships are automated. We cannot leave, and we cannot call out. You know this."

The disappointment settled over me like dust. But beneath it, the other thing was stirring — the pull, the warmth, the wanting without a name. My face grew hot.

"ZX98," I said slowly, "why do I want this so badly? I have never seen a female. I would not know one if she stood in front of me. And it is not only curiosity." I hesitated, then pressed a hand low against my stomach. "When 754 described them, I felt... something. A pull. A sense of restlessness. I do not have a word for it."

The old Bird was quiet for a long time. The smile had left his face.

"I do not have the word either," he said at last.

I stared at him. "But you — you know so much —"

"I am a clone, 382." His voice was gentle. "The same as you. No one trained me to understand these things. Whatever the engineers put into us, they did not include an instruction manual for emotions and feelings. I don't think they actually intended us to feel things."

He looked out past the magnolia tree, toward the identical rooftops of the workers' district.

"Many years ago," he said, "I felt something like what you describe. A sense that something was missing, like a thought my mind could almost touch but never hold on to." He was quiet again. "I made a decision, back then. Wanting what you cannot have — and cannot even understand — is a particular kind of misery, 382. I decided I would rather be at peace than be haunted. So I set it aside. I buried it under routine, under duty, under years. Most days, I do not feel it at all."

"And the other days?"

A small, sad smile. "The other days, I sit under this tree."

I did not know what to say. Somehow this undid me more than any answer could have. I had come to the oldest, wisest person I knew, and he had told me: I do not know either.

"Then why can I not do what you did?" I whispered. "Why can I not set it aside?"

"754 told his rumor to more than just you, 382." ZX98 leaned forward. "123 laughed until he choked. The others shrugged and went back to their shifts." His ice-blue eyes held mine. "You lost sleep over it. And you are the only one who walked to G7 in the falling dark to ask an old Bird for the truth. Does that not tell you something?"

I stared at him. "That I am defective? That is what 123 would say."

"123 says many things." ZX98 spread his hands. "Perhaps the engineers copied more than they meant to. Whatever Jack Maltus was — whatever any of the originals were — perhaps some of it leaked through into us. Unintended. Unlabeled." He looked at me steadily. "I am guessing, 382. I want you to understand that I am only guessing. No one gave me these answers. I have only had more years than you to sit with the questions."

"Why me?" I asked. "Why can I not let it go, when the others can?"

"That," he said, "is the question you should be asking. Not why you want to see a female — but why you, of all the thousand Jacks on this planet, cannot let the wanting go."

I sat very still. The magnolia petals drifted down around us, each one the same and each one somehow not.

"Because I am not only looking for a female," I said at last, the thought arriving even as I spoke it. "I am looking for proof."

"Proof of what?"

"That something different from me can exist." I gestured at the mill behind us, at the identical figures moving between the buildings. "I look at a thousand faces exactly like mine, and some part of me whispers that this is all there is — that the universe contains only Jack and Bird Units, forever. A female is simply the most different thing my mind can imagine." I looked down at my hands — mill hands, clumsy and calloused. "And my body... my body seems to know something my mind was never taught. As if it remembers a life I have never lived."

ZX98 was quiet for a long moment. Then he tapped his temple, the way he had done before. "Perhaps it does remember. And perhaps that is why you cannot let go, while the others can." He stood, brushing petals from his shoulders. "You cannot meet a female, 382. But you can meet the Jacks around you as if they were strangers — as if each one might surprise you. 583 with his sketches. 754 with his whispers. Even 123, with his cruelty. Every one of them is a locked door. You have simply never tried the handles."

I walked home in the falling dark, his words turning over in my mind like stones in a river. And I made a decision — a small one, but mine.

Tomorrow, I think I am going to ask 583 to teach me to sketch.

It will almost certainly be terrible. 123 will mock me for it, if he notices. But it will be mine — a thing I chose, not a thing I was programmed to prefer. And perhaps, in the lines I draw, I will find the first small proof that I am not only what Mantis made me.

And for the first time, another thought came to me unbidden, and it frightened me even as it thrilled me:

What if I could leave Raven 5?

It felt like the first honest thing I have thought in 684 days.

United are we. But perhaps — just perhaps — I am beginning to learn what that might actually mean.

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Thanks for reading Clone Ranger: Episode 6. I'd LOVE to hear your thoughts in the comments.
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