The Clone Ranger: Episode 10
Jack Unit 382 is a clone — one of a thousand identical Jacks laboring in the textile mills of Raven 5, a world his kind can never leave. Each night he journals the days since the treaty. But 382 has begun to suspect he is different from his brothers: he dreams, he wonders, and he wants things no Jack is supposed to want. This is his story.
I unfolded the slip last night.
For a week it had sat folded in my pocket, the curve waiting the way a held breath waits. I told myself in yesterday's entry that I would finish it, and I keep my promises to this journal even when I am afraid of them.
So I sat on my bunk after the lights went low, and I took out the pencil I keep hidden in my boot, and I finished the line.
It did not become a petal. That is the first honest thing I can write about it.
The curve wanted to go somewhere the petals never go, and my hand followed it with a sureness that did not feel like mine — or perhaps it felt like the most mine anything has ever felt, and that is what frightened me. When the line was done, the shape on the slip was one I have no name for. It was soft where petals are soft, but it was not a flower. My mind could not hold what it was, but my body — which has remembered things before that my mind was never taught — went warm and strange and certain all at once.
I folded the slip again, tighter this time, and I moved it to the loose panel behind my bunk, deeper than 123 would ever bother to look. The engineers copied everything, including the parts they never intended us to use. I am beginning to think the parts they never intended are the ones that matter most.
This morning I found 583 before the shift bell, the way I promised I would.
He was already drawing, the way he always is — small quick lines on the back of a thread-crate slip, a pattern that meant nothing to me and everything to him. I sat down across from him and told him about the magnolia tree. I told him everything ZX98 told me: the two moons, the dark blue night, the men who were not units, the families that were chosen, the somewhere with a name.
583 listened the way he draws — completely, without looking away.
"Draw it," I said. "Mon Scarab. Not the mills. The somewhere."
He turned his slip over. For a long moment he only held the pencil, and I could see him reaching for a world neither of us has ever seen, the way you reach for a word in a language you were never taught.
Then he drew the moons. Two of them, high and round, one larger than the other.
"I have no blue," he said. "So the night will have to be the color of wanting it."
He shaded the sky with the flat of the pencil lead, pressing harder than he ever presses, until the grey went dark and heavy. It was not blue. But looking at it, I understood what he meant. Some colors you can only draw by wanting them badly enough.
"What goes under the moons?" he asked.
"A home," I said. "A place that was yours before you ever arrived there."
583 nodded slowly, and then he drew two figures beneath the moons. Not Jacks — or not only Jacks. Two people, standing close enough that their shoulders nearly touched. And here is what stopped my breath: he drew them different from each other. One taller, one with hair that fell past the shoulders. Different faces. Different hands.
"They cannot be copies," he said, before I could ask. "Copies do not choose each other."
I looked at his two figures under his two moons, and I thought of the old ones ZX98 spoke of — the ones who said a family could not be made without a female, the way a mill cannot run without power. I thought of the curve folded behind my bunk, the shape with no name, and I understood something that sat in me like a second heartbeat:
The somewhere is not a place. It is a person. It is being chosen, and choosing back, by someone who is not a copy of you.
583 folded his sketch the way he always does, quick and careful, and tucked it away. "You have the look," he said, "of a Jack who is going to lose sleep again."
"I have the look," I said, "of a Jack who wants a name for something."
He tilted his head. "A name? Everything here has a number."
"Everything here is issued," I said. "On Mon Scarab, things had names. The somewhere had a name. The people in it had names." I thought of the shape behind my bunk, nameless and warm. "I want to know what the old ones called the two who chose each other."
Tomorrow I will go back to the magnolia tree.
United are we. But tonight there is a shape behind my bunk with no name, and two moons on a slip of paper that are the color of wanting, and I am beginning to suspect that the wanting itself is the oldest thing about me — older than the treaty, older than Raven 5, older than the engineers who thought they were only copying a soldier.
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Thanks for reading Clone Ranger: Episode 10. I'd LOVE to hear your thoughts in the comments.
Click here to read Episode 1 · Episode 2 · Episode 3 · Episode 4 · Episode 5 · Episode 6 · Episode 7 · Episode 8 · Episode 9
If you are enjoying Clone Ranger, you may also enjoy my full novel, Legend of Sylphar: The Silver Queen, now available at select retailers in eBook and paperback.
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