Aeon

This is another Naomi Quinn story in the Fallen Earth setting. It also introduces a new character, Mikayla Bloodmoore. Credit for the song goes to the band Lacuna Coil.

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An excerpt from Clones, by Stanley Suebook.

Clones. Everyone knows one. They walk our streets, eat our food, do our work. We order them around, set them to task, have them do what we would not. But what do we really know about them? They’re the perfect military weapons, expendable soldiers grown ready with pre-set skill sets. No one really knows why they appeared when they did, no one knows what they’re thinking. Some of them claim to remember the days before the Fall, before the world went dark and everything went to hell. Four years ago the first one stepped out of its birthing chamber and into our world. Now they work for us. Or do they?

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The sign above the door read Second Original in simple blue print on a white background. Replacing the ‘O’ was an iconic stick figure with a second directly behind it but a touch to the side. The door to the bar was closed with a tall man standing in front of it with his arms crossed. A collar clung to his neck, lights dimly pulsing. As she approached his eyes flicked down to her similar collar before he stepped aside and allowed her access.

Second Original was a Clone Only bar established a year ago to give the clones residing in town and traveling through a brief refuge. It was a dark, somber place that encouraged its patrons to sit down, have a drink, and just relax and reflect. Against the center of the far wall of the oblong building stood a stage elevated two feet from the ground. The paneling surrounding the elevation was a matte black, matching the booths, tables, and benches of the bar. She entered the bar to find a woman standing on stage with three men behind her while she sang. Two men held guitars while the third worked at a rebuilt keyboard, all three instruments wired to amps on either side of the stage. The amps had the volume set to ‘2’ yet the sound of the music filled the room completely, the strumming of the guitar’s somber music massaging the listener as they entered.

The singer stood out the most to her, a spotlight from the ceiling on her. Black clothing adorned the trim and built woman, a black corseted tank top hugging her chest with black cargos covering her legs. Her long black hair fell over her shoulders to frame a beautiful face as she sang. Her voice was high and airy, the hints of echoes following her words as she sang with an almost ethereal feel.

“There is something in your eyes flowing them over, stealing all the harmony which lives in me. Your hands are covering my tears. Oh, why?”

Naomi claimed a booth against the wall and slid onto the bench. The place wasn’t as nice as it would’ve been before all this but given the times it was a rather nice establishment. A waitress made her way over to her as she sat her had down on the table, a hushed word just barely audible over the music sent the waitress away with her order. In a place like this everyone spoke in soft, hushed words. It was a place of relaxation and reflection, remembrance and forgetting.

Some clones embraced their memories, fought to tear down the walls in their mind and pull them from the darkness. Others, most that she’d met, simply wanted to forget them. Those that did remember the old days were commonly depressed and downtrodden folk, the muted colors of the new world washing away their hopes and dreams. She had to fight the same thoughts every time a memory surfaced. Sometimes she wished they’d all just go away so she could salvage what she had left of a life and move on. Memories weren’t needed these days, they were just ancillary. No one paid you to remember the past.

“There’s a sort of inner dance trying to seduce me, feeling this anomaly which takes me.”

The music was bittersweet, another call back to the days before the Fall. It was an oldie as much as it chided the older people to admit it back then. If she remembered right, the original artist was a band called Lacuna Coil. The tone of the music fit the setting perfectly. It had a somewhat eerily detached sound to it that fell so well in line with how the majority of the patrons who came here felt in society. To most people, clones weren’t real people. They were just tools to be used, sent in to places too dangerous to risk real people to work and gather. No one cared if they died, they’d just step out of the LifeNet pod and get back to work. Because of that, few seemed to value their lives much at all.

The majority of the clones were accepting to this way of life. It was work, after all, and you had to make chips to survive. Even a clone could starve. While they were treated as disposable labor, the Normies or Nabis (nah-bee, Natural Births) kept a wary and distrustful eye on them. The same fact filled human history, people feared what they didn’t understand. When you take mortality away from the equation, people become detached and stop caring so much. Yet how can those who still retain their mortality completely trust someone who doesn’t?

“Your touch… You’re here… Your heart…”

Life goes on, as they say. Naomi didn’t know who They were but she rather sourly wanted to give them a nice punch in the head. They said a lot of things. Depression had riddled the clones for a long time, stymied only by work and assimilation into the communities or refusal to accept their memories. Some, however, were starting to stand up and try to fix the problem. That’s when places like this started to appear. The majority of them were underground. Not too many Normies or Nabis supported the idea of clones gathering in large groups all alone. These days paranoia ran thick.

The waitress returned rather quickly, setting the bottle of beer on the table before Naomi. She flicked a chip to the waitress before taking a sip as she watched the singer perform. It wasn’t just places like this that were starting to pop up. There were people too, clones who believed that their awakening in this world meant something. They viewed their cloning as a rebirth, a step towards something important. It wasn’t a religion but a purpose. Through-out history people have clung to purpose and ideas like a raft out at sea.

One of those clones had stepped forward to make a name for herself. Weeks later she had found some friends to support her and no sooner had they agreed on a name than they began performing. Renew, they called themselves, just a band of performers who traveled from venue to venue where ever they were accepted, singing songs of old that had been forgotten. The lead singer, Mikayla Bloodmoore, was said to have grown tired of how clones were being treated. She referred to them as ‘her kind’. Perhaps she was right, perhaps they were different than the Normies or Nabis. She didn’t preach that they were any better or superior, simply that they deserved to be treated better. Respected. Other clones thought they were superior to the Nabis due to their loose affiliation with immortality as they saw it. No one quite knew if clones could die of old age yet although Naomi suspected as much. Just because they’d wake up in a new body because they took a bullet to the head didn’t mean they’d be eternally young.

She sat her bottle down to join the applause quietly as the song ended. The woman had a downright angelic voice. It had been four years since the first clone stepped out of the pods and they were slowly starting to come together. Ever so slowly they were coming together, communities and ties forming. Already the way Clones spoke to Clones differed from how they spoke to Normies. They could reference things from first hand experience that the Normies only heard about in story and legend, they knew things that the Normies couldn’t remember. The world had changed but had left them the way they were.

The small sign on the end of the stage read Renew in red on white letters. The hum of the inactive guitars faded as Mikayla turned around to her band members and spoke quietly. The soft smile that had brushed her lips at the end of the song had lingered as she turned her back to the audience while the band discussed the next song to play. The somber atmosphere lingered as well in the silence and dim light as the patrons mulled over their own internal dialogue while watching their drinks or the occupied stage. For better or worse, the world had left them as they were. That’s what made them different from the Normies, not their mortality.