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Author Topic: [Non-40k Short Story]: Emancipation  (Read 2336 times)

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Offline Sir_Godspeed

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[Non-40k Short Story]: Emancipation
« on: March 18, 2013, 10:51:11 PM »
This is a sci-fi short story I wrote a while ago as a sort of "proof of concept" for what would happen if a futuristic society cloned an army, and then subsequently found itself in a state of peace. Themes like the personhood of a clone, posttraumatic disorders, views of biotechnology, religion, labour market and social dumping, would make their appearance, as well as less lofty things like loneliness and a sense of alienation. Needless to say, the piece below is just a very minimal look.

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In a sidestreet of the buzzling metropolis of Lhossa, where the traffic was barely existant, where some architectural features still existed from when the city had been populated by hopeful settlers from the overpopulated planets of Earth and Mars, behind the inviting glass front of a Goylic pub, two men had decided to meet.

Brik sat in front of Kal, looking at him with a tired smile, lines clear in the corners of his eyes, holding his hands around a bottle of beer.

“Kal, I didn’t think you’d come!” he exclaimed. Suddenly looking around himself. The look of the tall, broadshouldered man looking nervously at the clientel that mostly consisted of older, retired blue-collar men having hushed, but friendly conversations was odd.

Brik grimaced, before turning back to Kal, who sat down in front of him.
“Finally decided to step outside the program, did you?” he said with a light chuckle, taking a sip of the beer. Kal looked at him and leaned closer, his look grave with concern.

“We’re not supposed to drink alcohol, Brik,” he said in a hushed voice. “If I’m ID’ed by any of the cams in this area, Guidance’s going to rip me a new one,” Kal looked around suspiciously, wondering if they should move away from the window.

“Relax Kal, cams here aren’t programmed to search for us explicitly. As long as you wear you little hat and don’t look up you’re fine,” he took another sip of the beer. A moment of quiet passed, the two identical men, apart from a few marks, scars and the like, staring empty-eyed into the room or out on the street.

“Damn it, Kal,” Brik suddenly said, breaking the silence. “Don’t you ever... don’t you ever feel this is a waste of time?” Brik looked up at him with a tired look. “I mean, I’m holding a storage worker’s job, I’ve got only the ‘allowance’ the confeds hand me down, and my talks are regular check-up with the shrink, or the program counselor, or sometimes the other guys at work,” he sighed heavily, moving the bottle around with one hand, while the other rubbed the eyes, “Hell, until I met you, I hadn’t met a Brother in months. It’s just so... I don’t know... I’m just so damn tired, you know? Like after a month in a stalemate battle and the bastards are dropping ordnance on you, so you never get a good night’s sleep. It’s like that, only... I don’t know... there’s no explodind shells, no strafing runs. Just... looks. Comments. Kids pointing at ya. People whispering. I don’t know these people! They all look so damn different, and they come from all kinds of places and, and...” the clone ran ut of words and silently mouthed the beginning of something, but he stopped, and took another sip of the bottle.

“It’s okay, Brik. I feel like that too. I guess. I’ve-... I’ve got this old man at work I talk with. He’s a good guy, he's been a nighoutrageously sexy lycra-clad pixiechman for ages, so he showed me the ropes. I’m not actually s’posed to go eat lunch with him, but sometimes he takes me to this diner outside the place we guard. He talks about when he was young and visited all sorts of places,” Kal chuckled, “like you said.” Then, his looks got more somber; “But the others? They tolerate me because of him, I think. They give me the looks when I enter. They don’t want a clone around them when they’re eating their lunch. Like I'm stealing the job from someone else. Someone not born from a vat. Someone without a barcode in the neck,” Kal's look settled on a scraped line in the table, his fingers idly picking in it, digging up old chips of wood.

“Sometimes I just want to grab a gun and shoot their damn heads clean off,” Brik suddenly muttered. He looked up at Kal, gave him an apologetic look, almost cringing, and shook his head. “Nah, s'nothing, just ramblin’. I always think of shooting stuff when I don’t know what to do,” he looked up again, looking even more tired this time. “It’s all I can, Kal. I’m not a crate-stacker, or a paper-filer, or a, a-... I'm a damn fine shooter though. I used to be good at it, you remember, right, Kal?”

“I do, Brik, but-” Kal began,

“I know, I know. It’s crazy talk. It’s just that back in the troop, I was somebody, somebody people could come to for advice. Hell, they trained us all that time, and we thought that was all there was to life. And I got the Drill Sergeant all proud when I fired to my first silver mark. When I was - what, eight?”

“Nine,” Kal interjected.

“Yeah... Good times,” Brik said, a faint smile forming as he caressed the beer bottle with his thumbs. After a short while, it vanished slowly, leaving a look of despair. “I feel like a damn caged animal, Kal. Y’know when they trained us for capture and OPFOR interrogation? It’s like that...” he looked out of the window as he talked, turning slightly away from Kal. “Everytime that damn counselor looks up at me and asks how I’m doing, I feel it in my gut. It’s like a knot inside, that makes me answer in single word answers, look at the floor. He knows it too, the counselor. He knows exactly what’s going on, and that just makes it worse.”

Another moment of dead, heavy silence followed. The buzz of conversation around them continued unabated, the occasional crescendo of hoarse laughter, or coughing.

Finally, Kal spoke up; “Listen Brik, I’ve got an early shift tomorrow. I should be getting home before evening check-in at the apartment terminal.” He shifted uncomfortably.

“Yeah,” Brik began, turning around, with that pale smile of his, as thin as a knife cut. “It was good seeing you, Kal. It was good seeing one of the Brothers again.”

“Of course, Brik. We’ll do it again - once we’ve reached another stage of the program. Once we’ve got less check-ins and more freedom. Then we’ll get together and... I don’t know, go see a show or something. Something funny. Like those talking animals.” Kal’s smile grew broader as he tried to cheer up the other clone. His friend, his brother.

“Heh, yeah,” Brik began, taking one last sip of the bottle before shoving it away. "I mean, they can't keep us like this forever, can they? Sooner or later they'll see that we've become properly integrated."

The two near-identical men shook hands, consciously resisting the urge to salute, and then left the pub together. Outside, it was now dusk, and neon signs were beginning to light up, bathing entire streets in dots and rays of iridescent red and green. A sheen of water lay over the gutters beneath the various walkways. Up in the sky holos droned on about dental cleaning products and sunny travel destinations. An omnicopter hovered over them, probably bringing a batch of mid-level functionaries home to their comfortable suburban homes.

“You ever have dreams, Kal?” Brik asked, absent-mindedly, as he zipped up his coat and put on a cap.

“Most nights,” Kal retorted, putting his own hat on.

“No, I meant like... dreams. Like... from battle,” Brik pressed the issue.

“I know you did, Brik.” Kal looked at him from under the brim. “Drinking doesn’t make you forget, Brik,” he added, knowing what lay beneath the seemingly idle chatter.

“Makes it easier to have to remember though," Brik said, and looked up at him, a worried frown on his face, melting into the familiar smile. Apologetic, and tired. In the odd light from the street, every line in his face seemed deepened by a mile. He looked almost aged. Kal had never seen an aged clone. He didn't think there were any.

“Take care, Brother,” Kal said in a hushed voice. “It was good seeing you. Like in the old days.”

“Yeah. The old days,” Brik answered. “See ya around, Brother. Take care.”
« Last Edit: March 20, 2013, 03:02:29 PM by Space Marine Godspeed »

Offline Myen'Tal

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Re: [Non-40k Short Story]: Emancipation
« Reply #1 on: March 20, 2013, 04:08:18 PM »
I like it :), the future sounds dark and depressing, which it probably would be if people had to clone their armies to fight for them. What kind of world would that be(unless it's like star wars or something :P)?
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Offline Sheepz

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Re: [Non-40k Short Story]: Emancipation
« Reply #2 on: March 20, 2013, 05:54:32 PM »
I enjoyed that. Will there be any more?

It kind of reminded me of Nine Lives by Ursula Le Guin, from the collected short story book 'The Wind's Twelve Quarters.' Not so much the fighting aspect, but the clone part. Have you read it?

Offline Sir_Godspeed

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Re: [Non-40k Short Story]: Emancipation
« Reply #3 on: March 20, 2013, 07:47:45 PM »
I like it :), the future sounds dark and depressing, which it probably would be if people had to clone their armies to fight for them. What kind of world would that be(unless it's like star wars or something :P)?

I haven't done that much worldbuilding here, since this was pretty much just a spur-of-the-moment thing, but I imagine it's a world that has somehow managed to keep popular opinion in support of cloning, through a number of rhetorical means. In terms of politics, I imagined it would take place after what was slated to be a huge war between to interstellar superpowers (but nothing near the 40k scale of things), that kind of never escalated and was eventually settled in a fairly robust peace treaty. The dissonance between the Armageddon-scare that lead to the creation of the clones and the sudden anticlimax of peace would probably be interesting to explore.

And you're indeed right in that it was probably born from a spark I had when watching the Attack of the Clones many years back. Some time later, I read about the American civil rights movement, and that moved me from wanting to write about clone soldiers in the field, to writing about clones after war.

Quote
I enjoyed that. Will there be any more?

I'm not actively working with it. At the moment, I kinda feel it stands fairly well alone - it's not particularly ambitious, it's just two guys talking and I actually had a genuinely good experience writing a very simple scene like this. I've got some other scenes in my mind, but not as self-contained as this one.

Quote
It kind of reminded me of Nine Lives by Ursula Le Guin, from the collected short story book 'The Wind's Twelve Quarters.' Not so much the fighting aspect, but the clone part. Have you read it?

I've never heard of it, actually - but now that I've googled it, It sounds very interesting, and I might seek it out for a read. :)


Anyways, thanks for the compliments, guys!


 


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