The Clone Ranger: Episode 7
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.
Journal Entry 691
Seven days. It has been seven days since I sat beneath the magnolia tree and told Black Bird ZX98 I would ask 583 to teach me to sketch, and tonight I am writing with charcoal dust under my fingernails. It will not wash out. I have tried three times. Part of me does not want it to.
I did not ask him the next day. I waited three days, because asking felt like stepping off a ledge. On the fourth morning, I found 583 on his break, drawing the mill's great door on the back of a thread-crate slip, and I said it before my courage could leave me.
"Teach me."
He went very still. Then he laughed — not a mocking laugh, but a surprised one, as though no one had ever asked him for anything before. Which, now that I think of it, may be exactly true.
"No one has ever asked," he said quietly. And then he tore the slip in half, handed me the blank side and a stub of pencil, and said: "Draw what is in front of you. Not what you think it looks like. What your eyes tell your hand."
I drew the mill door. It was terrible. The lines leaned like a drunk Bird, the proportions were wrong, and the whole thing looked like it was melting. But they were my lines. No engineer programmed them into me. No shift supervisor assigned them to my hands. I chose them, badly, and they were mine.
123 saw. Of course 123 saw. "Look," he announced to the break room, "the defective unit has a hobby. What's next — a Jack with poetry? A Bird with a broom?" The others laughed. 583 said nothing, but his jaw tightened, and I understood that he has heard this before. I understood something else, too: 123 mocks what he cannot imagine doing himself. That thought felt like a small, private victory, and I tucked it away.
That evening, 583 showed me a sketch he keeps folded inside his boot, where 123 will never look. It was a cargo ship, drawn from glimpses — the long grey hull, the running lights, the way the sky bends around it as it climbs.
"They leave," he said. "Every week, they leave. I draw them so I can pretend—" And he stopped. He did not finish. He folded the sketch back up and put it away, and his silence told me the rest.
I have thought about that unfinished sentence all week.
Last night I stood in front of the washroom mirror and tried to draw my own face. It is harder than the mill door, because I keep wanting to draw the face I think I have — a perfect Jack face, symmetrical and correct. But 583's voice was in my head: draw the thing that is different. That is what makes it yours. So I drew the truth. The left ear, slightly larger than the right. The small scar through my eyebrow from a loom accident three years ago. The grey-green eyes that are mine and also everyone else's.
My ear has embarrassed me for as long as I can remember. It is the one flaw in an otherwise perfect copy. Tonight, looking at my clumsy drawing, I felt something I have never felt about it before: fondness. It is the one part of me the engineers did not get quite right. It is the one part that is only mine.
My hands are mill hands — thick-fingered, calloused, clumsy on the pencil. ZX98's words came back to me as I struggled: every one of them is a locked door. You have simply never tried the handles. I think my own face has been a locked door too. Tonight, I tried the handle.
There is something else I must write down, though I barely understand it. Yesterday I tried to draw a magnolia petal the way 583 does, petal by petal, curve by curve. And as my pencil followed the soft curve of it, 754's words came back to me — soft curves and delicate features — and that warmth rose low in my body again, brief and confusing, while I was drawing a flower. A flower. I do not know what my body wants. I do not know why a petal and a rumor should stir the same restlessness in me. I am writing it here because ZX98 told me the wanting was built into the original — into Jack Maltus, into all of us — and perhaps my body remembers something my mind was never taught.
I thought of ZX98 tonight, too. On the days the wanting comes, he sits under the magnolia tree, and he has made his peace with that. He chose to set it aside — he told me so plainly, and I believed him, and I do not think he was lying to himself.
But I am not ZX98. I do not want his peace. Not yet. The haunting is the only thing I have ever felt that was entirely mine — not issued, not programmed, not shared with a thousand identical brothers. I would rather be haunted and awake than peaceful and asleep. Perhaps that makes me foolish. Perhaps that makes me defective, as 123 says. But it is my choice, and I have so few of those.
Tomorrow I am going to ask 583 to finish his sentence. I draw them so I can pretend— Pretend what? That he is aboard? That the ship is going somewhere worth going? That someone, somewhere, is drawing him?
I am afraid of his answer. Because I think it will be my answer too.
And tonight, when the shift whistle blows and the sky goes dark, I am going to stand outside and watch for the weekly ship. I want to see it climb. I want to watch it leave.
United are we. But my pencil is mine, my ear is mine, and my wanting — unnamed, unprogrammed, unshared — is mine.
Thanks for reading Clone Ranger: Episode 7. I'd LOVE to hear your thoughts in the comments.
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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