The Clone Ranger: Episode 9

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 705

I went back to the magnolia tree today.

ZX98 was already there when I arrived, sitting on the bench with his hands folded in his lap, looking at nothing in particular the way he does when he is thinking. He did not seem surprised to see me. I have begun to suspect that very little surprises ZX98, which is either wisdom or exhaustion, and I have not yet decided which.

"You have the look," he said, "of a Jack who has been carrying a question."

"I have been carrying it all week," I admitted, and sat down beside him.

The petals were coming down slow in the afternoon light. I watched one land on the bench between us and did not brush it away, because I wanted something to look at besides his face while I asked.

"What was it like?" I said. "Mon Scarab. The world before. The world Jack Maltus came from — before the engineers copied everything."

ZX98 was quiet for a long time. A petal landed in his copper hair and he left it there.

"382," he said finally, "I was decanted on Raven 5, the same as you. Everything I know about Mon Scarab, I heard from Birds older than me, and they heard it from Birds older than them. What I am about to tell you is third-hand guessing, and I want you to hear it that way."

"I hear it that way," I said.

"The Mantis were builders," he said. "That much is solid. They built the mills on Raven 5, they built the treaty ships, they built us. Jack Maltus was one of their generals — a soldier, not an engineer. The engineers took him the way they took all the originals: a scan, a sample, a pattern. Then they built a thousand of him and called it a workforce."

"And the Birds?" I asked. "Were you copied the same way?"

"Same process, different original." ZX98 leaned back against the bench. "The rumor says our pattern came from the president's own son — dead before the treaty, gone before any of us were decanted. I cannot prove it, and I am not sure I would want to." He was quiet a moment. "The name I know for certain. We are named for the Black Bird Warrior. A real soldier. Not a copy. Dead long before the engineers built their first Bird."

I looked at him then and tried to picture the original he might have been copied from, the president's son, and could not. It unsettled me, how easily I had never wondered.

"As for the world itself — I have heard it had two moons. I have heard the sky went dark blue at night instead of grey. I cannot prove either one. What I believe, because too many old Birds said it the same way, is this: on Mon Scarab, the Jacks were not units. They were men. And men had — " He stopped, and for the first time in my memory, ZX98 looked unsure of his words. "They had families."

I had heard the word before. 754 used it once, carelessly, and I did not ask what it meant because I did not want 123 to hear me ask. Now I asked.

"It was not a unit," ZX98 said. "A unit is assigned. A family was chosen — or so the old ones said. People who belonged to each other on purpose. And there were females in it. I have never seen one, 382. I want that plain between us. But the old ones said a family could not be made without one, the way a mill cannot run without power."

Something in my chest pulled tight at that, the way it pulled the night I drew the unfinished curve. I said nothing, and ZX98, watching me, nodded like I had spoken.

"I know that look too," he said quietly. "I wore it for a year, thirty years ago, sitting on this same bench asking an older Bird the same questions you are asking me."

I stared at him. "You?"

"Me." He smiled, but it was a tired smile. "I wanted the somewhere too, 382. The world with a name on it. I lay awake the way you lie awake. And one night I understood something that has kept me company ever since: wanting what you cannot have, and cannot even understand, is a particular kind of misery. So I decided I would rather be at peace than be haunted. Most days I do not feel it anymore. Some days — " he gestured at the tree, the petals, the bench — "some days I sit here."

We sat in the quiet for a while. I thought about the curve folded in my pocket, the line my hands drew that my mind did not teach. I thought about 583's portrait of me, the face of someone glad to be seen.

"I am not sure I can choose what you chose," I said.

"I am not sure you should," said ZX98. "It was my choice, not a prescription. But I will tell you the one true thing the old Bird told me, the thing I have carried for thirty years." He leaned forward, and his ice-blue eyes held mine. "They had a word for the somewhere, 382. They called it home. Not the barracks. Not Raven 5. A place that was yours before you ever arrived there."

Home. I turned the word over in my mind all the way back to the mill. A place that was yours before you arrived. I have never had anything that was mine before I arrived — everything I own was issued. But the wanting, I am learning, was issued too. The engineers copied everything, including the parts they never intended us to use. Perhaps the wanting is the map. Perhaps the haunting is the picture of the somewhere.

Tomorrow I will find 583 before the shift bell.

I am going to ask him to draw Mon Scarab — not the mills, not Raven 5, but the world as ZX98 described it: the dark blue night, the two moons, the somewhere with a name on it. I want to see whether somebody else's somewhere can become mine, the way his ship sketches became mine. I want to watch his pencil try to hold a world neither of us has ever seen, and I want to find out what my hands do while I watch.

United are we. But tonight I am going to unfold the slip in my pocket, and I am going to finish the curve.

---

Thanks for reading Clone Ranger: Episode 9. I'd LOVE to hear your thoughts in the comments.
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