The Clone Ranger: Episode 8

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 698

I watched the ship leave last night.

The cargo ships climb on the same night every week — you can set your shift schedule by them — and yesterday, when the whistle blew and the sky went dark, I walked out past the mill yard alone and stood in the open ground where nothing blocks the sky, and I waited.

It climbed. That is the only word for it. It did not fly so much as it climbed, the running lights blinking steady as it rose, the long grey hull shrinking until it was nothing but a thread of light, and then nothing. No sound reached us. The ships are automated. No one waves from their decks. There was no one on it to miss, and no one below to be missed.

I stood there long after it was gone, with my hands in my pockets and 583's folded cargo-ship sketch sharp in my memory, and I understood what I had not understood sitting beneath the magnolia tree.

Everyone else watches the ships leave. They glance up the way you glance at weather. Only 583 draws them, so he can pretend. And only I stand in the dark afterward, feeling as though something has been taken from me — though nothing was ever mine to take.

This morning I found 583 before the shift bell and did what I promised myself I would do. I asked him to finish his sentence.

He went quiet in that way of his, the pencil stopping mid-line. For a moment I thought he would not answer.

"I draw them," he said finally, "so I can pretend I am somebody aboard."

Not that he is going somewhere. Not that the ship is going anywhere worth going. Simply that he — not Jack Unit 583, not another identical worker on Raven 5 — is somebody aboard, going somewhere with a name on it.

He folded the sketch up quickly after that, the way he always does, and I knew I had been given something fragile and rare, so I handled it with care.

"I know what you mean," I told him.

"You do?" He looked at me then — really looked, not the half-glance Jacks give each other on the line. "Have you ever wanted to be somebody aboard?"

"Every night this week," I said.

And that was the whole conversation. It did not need to be more. But it has sat in me all day like a stone in a river, because here is the thing I cannot write around: 583's sentence was my answer too. I was afraid of that, last week. I wrote that I was afraid. Tonight I am not afraid anymore. I am something worse than afraid. I am certain.

Something else happened today, and I am still turning it over.

At lunch, 583 asked to draw me.

"Your face," he said, as though it were nothing. "You have been drawing yourself. I want to draw you. There is a difference."

He is right, and the difference is this: when I draw myself, I draw the flaws — the larger left ear, the scar through my eyebrow — because I am trying to find the parts of me that are mine. But 583 draws people, and when he drew my face on the back of a thread-crate slip, I watched the pencil move and saw something I had never seen in the washroom mirror.

I looked like someone he was glad to see.

My face, his pencil, his eyes — they told a different truth than the mirror does. The mirror shows me a copy. 583's drawing showed me a person, sitting across from another person, being seen. When he turned the slip around, he was smiling in a way I have never seen him smile, and I felt that low, unnamed warmth again — different this time. Not restless. Full.

"It is not finished," he said. "I did not get the eyes right. Your eyes are thinking about something far away. I do not know what it is."

I know what it is. The ships, climbing. The somewhere with a name on it. The somebody aboard.

Tonight I did not draw my face. I drew a magnolia petal the way 583 taught me, curve by curve, soft and patient — and as the pencil followed the curve, I let my mind wander somewhere I have not let it go before.

I have never seen a female. I do not know what one looks like, and ZX98's description was careful and brief. But my hands wanted to draw more than a petal tonight. They wanted to follow a curve that was not a flower's — a line my mind could almost see but never quite hold, the way ZX98 described his own buried wanting: a thought the mind can almost touch but never hold on to.

I stopped before the line was finished. I folded the slip in half, the way 583 folds his, and I put it where 123 will never look.

I am not ready to know what that curve is. But my body, as I have written here before, seems to remember something my mind was never taught — and tonight my hands remembered it before my mind could stop them.

Tomorrow, I think I will go back to the magnolia tree.

I want to ask ZX98 something I have never thought to ask: what was the original world like? Not Raven 5, not the mills. Mon Scarab. The world Jack Maltus came from. The world where there were females, and families, and children, and somewhere with a name on it — before the engineers copied everything, including the parts they never intended us to use.

If I cannot leave this planet, then I want to know what "leaving" would have meant. I want a picture of the somewhere, the way 583 has a picture of the ship.

And if ZX98 does not know — and he has told me plainly that he is only guessing — then perhaps the wanting itself is the picture. Perhaps the haunting is the map.

United are we. But tonight my pencil drew a line my mind did not teach it, and it is mine, and I am going to follow it.

Thanks for reading Clone Ranger: Episode 8. I'd LOVE to hear your thoughts in the comments.
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