Cloned Workforce 1 (Patreon)

I finally have a new scene to share with you guys, but first, let me update you on various things:

As I mentioned earlier, next month, Patreon is forcing me to switch billing cycles from the start of the month to "some consistent day of the month" which should correspond to when you joined. I don't really know how this works. If your day is the second of each month, are you going to be charged on November 1st and then again on the second when we switch over? Hopefully not, but this is a question for the company, not me. I'm just passing along the news.

Next, I wanted to confirm that the audiobook for "Executioner's Gambit" has been submitted and is being reviewed by Audible. When they're done, it'll go live. How long will it take? Nobody knows. Sometimes it's only a day, sometimes it takes ten days or even longer. Regardless, if you are interested in the audiobook, I ask you to buy it the moment it goes live (I'll post about it here). If I can get enough people to buy it right off the bat, then that boosts the book's rating which can help sales.

Also, did I mention that the paperback is available internationally now? Not sure if I said that. You can find it here:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DJ5LTG4Z

And finally, I'd like to announce that I'm going to start asking for writing suggestions again this month. Yay. But please note, I'm still working the same job-I-dislike, and it's really hurting my creativity and productivity. I doubt I'll be able to write as many of them each month as I used to. Sorry. I will try to do at least one each month, but I can't make any promises. Life will be better when I retire, but that's still over a year away.

Enough said. What happens when a krakun wants a ship of clones?

———

The krakun gazed down at his slaves and grinned. Projoiticy loved the uniformity of his anup crew. They were like gears in a tiny clockwork mechanism. Not all the same—some a little larger, some a little smaller, some male, some female—but damn were they trustworthy. If he handed them a task, they did it. Or at least, if they couldn’t accomplish a task, they warned him well in advance that they thought they’d fall short. They never surprised him with failure.

Projoiticy wasn’t the only krakun seeking that sort of perfection. Krakun in general sought something, anything, that they could rely on to do their work for them. For millennia, the giant lizards had been convinced that A.I. could fill that void—computers as smart as a person but with the clockwork precision of a machine.

They proved to be neither.

So, then they sought out slaves. Slaves were more reliable than A.I. because they were easily threatened and controlled, but they weren’t precise like machines. They lied. They cheated. They were lazy. They provided enough disappointment that they were barely worth the trouble of keeping them around.

Not like Projoiticy’s anups!

And of all his anups, he was most proud of Rah. Rah was the leader of his anups, the voice of his people, the organizer, the one who made sure things got done. If Projoiticy only had a zillion more Rah’s…

The krakun’s eyes opened wider. Pulling the communicator from his necklace, he tapped a button and waited, but it didn’t take long before Rah came jogging across the desktop. “You called, sir?”

“What is the status of the Solar Queen?” asked the krakun.

“Improved,” said Rah. He pulled his own mobile from his belt and tapped the appropriate buttons to pull up the ship’s latest status report. “The ship’s scientists and medical personnel concur that H7N2 has run its course and been eradicated. Blood tests from the remaining crew show that none have any signs of contagion, and the ship has been sanitized. It should be safe to transfer replacement personnel aboard without risk of another outbreak.”

“How many crew survived?”

“Not many,” said Rah. “Only five hundred and twelve. That’s enough to keep the ship operational, but their gene pool has bottomed out. They need twenty times as many individuals to maintain genetic diversity over the long term. We can transfer a hundred at a time from your other gateships back to the Solar Queen until the…”

“No,” said Projoiticy, raising a claw in a halting motion. “Instead, I’d like to use this opportunity to try a new experiment.”

With a few gestures, the anup pulled up a blank sheet and an on-screen keyboard on his mobile’s screen. “Yes, sir,” he said, waiting attentively in a relaxed but yet alert posture.

“Instead of restocking the Solar Queen, I’d like to replace the crew … with clones.”

“Clones…” said Rah, a note of hesitation in his voice, “as in recreating a person from a genetic sample?”

“Yes, that’s right.” The krakun’s eyes glinted, and the ends of his mouth curled in a smile. “I theorize that a crew of clones would be far more efficient than a general population. I want you to test that out. Replace the crew, compare their performance to other ships, and let me know how it does.”

Rah captured the instructions as best he was able, but his ears wilted slightly. Most of his owner’s commands required no additional instructions, but he’d never asked anything quite like this. “Sir, I’d have to check with the Solar Queen. I don’t know if they even kept genetic samples of their dead crewmates—”

“No, not them,” laughed the krakun with a roll of his eyes. “We’ll transfer those five hundred and twelve off when we’re ready to replace them. Roll them back into the other crews once this replacement crew is ready.”

Rah tapped some notes. “Yes, I see. So, which crew will we be cloning?”

The krakun lowered himself down on his elbows so he was nearly at eye-level with the anup. He pointed one huge talon at Rah’s chest. “You.”

“A clone of me?” gasped Rah. “Sir, I appreciate your confidence in me, but running an entire starship? I don’t see how—”

“Not just one of you,” he roared a laugh. “A ship-full of you! Use some budget and have clones made.”

Projoiticy stood and headed toward the door, but before he left, he called over his shoulder, “Let me know how the experiment goes! I’m so excited to see if this works out.”

# # #

Rah scowled as he studied listings for cloning labs. Around him, the rest of his crew wound down from a long day of work—washing dishes, socializing, quietly playing games.

Of all the krakun’s slave races, anup showed the least physical variance from one individual to the next. Their coats ranged from solid charcoal grey to solid black. Their physiques ran from wiry muscles to bulky muscles, and their height… Well, they were all tall—compared to other slave races, at least. The canids were tiny compared to their krakun masters.

At a casual glance, the crew almost looked like clones, and only with more careful scrutiny did one start to notice the variations that marked this individual or that one.

Tired of researching, Rah tapped an entry with a flashy ad. An emerald green krakun answered on the second ring, but his pleasant smile withered slightly when he noticed the caller was a slave. “Kho’s Restoration and Repair Clinic. How may I assist you?”

Rah smiled an uneasy smile. “I need to enquire about cloning,” he said.

The krakun nodded. “Send me your owner’s medical records, and let me connect you to the right doctor. Does he need a limb cloned or an organ?” When Rah hesitated, the krakun clarified, “Will the cloned portion include any bone or tendon?”

“No, no, I think you misunderstand,” said Rah. “I’m sorry, I’m new at this. My master doesn’t want to clone krakun tissue. He wants to clone a slave.”

The krakun scowled. “That’s … impractical,” he grumped. “We could do it, of course, but is your owner aware of the expense? Restoration surgery on a slave will surely cost more than replacing the slave.”

Rah frowned. “No, he didn’t want to repair an injury. He wanted to clone a whole new copy.”

“Oh, one of those,” sighed the lizard.

“One of…?”

The krakun leaned into the camera and lowered his voice, glancing around to make sure nobody was listening. “A great-aunt … or was it great-great-aunt of mine? Whatever. She was always a bit of an eccentric, if you know what I mean.”

Rah shrugged.

“Anyhow, she was one of those who had a beloved Gasping Lizard instead a brood of her own.” He made a look of disgust. “When it died, she had it cloned.”

“Ah, I see!” said the anup, excited once more. “And do you know who did that?”

The receptionist frowned so hard that his lower lip stuck out in a pout. Instead of answering out loud, he flicked up a keyboard on the display and quickly tapped in a name before disconnecting the call.

Rah circled the text with a paw pad and tapped “Call” from a list of options. To his surprise, a ringel answered this call—golden jewelry in both ears, a ring in her right nostril, and fur striped with bright white and teal. “Crazy Yrnrie’s Rock-Bottom Taxidermy and Cloning,” she said with a grin. “What sort of pet can we preserve or restore for your master?”

“Uh,” gasped Rah in surprise. He muttered, “Perhaps, I have the wrong number—?”

But the ringel just rolled her eyes. “Don’t be like that,” she said. “Tell me what you need.”

Rah scowled for a moment before explaining. “My owner wishes to clone me.”

The ringel shrugged. “Sure, we can do that. Unusual but not unheard of.”

“Actually,” Rah explained, “my owner wishes to make multiple copies of me.”

She rolled her paw, urging him to continue, and when he didn’t, she asked, “How many copies?”

“Uh…” whispered Rah, his voice trailing off, “ten thousand?”

“Sorry, I couldn’t hear you,” she said with a squint. “Did you say … ten thousand clones?”

The anup couldn’t manage words, so he nodded.

“Ten thousand clones … of you?”

He winced. “...Yes?”

“For what?” she grunted with some degree of exasperation. “Are you going to hide inside a trench coat and pretend to be krakun? Is he trying to create an army?”

“No! No!” said Rah, waving his paws. “He wants the clones to operate a spaceship.”

The ringel covered her mouth with one paw and tapped her fingers on the desk with the other. “Why would it take ten thousand anup to operate a spaceship?” she asked. “Is the steering wheel a kilometer tall, and it takes thousands of you working together to get it to budge?”

Rah tried to envision a sea of anup trying to steer an oversized ship for a moment before shaking away the notion. “No, nothing like that,” he said. “You see, we’re talking about a gateship. These are generation ships that are self-sufficient. You don’t rotate crew on and off a gateship. The crew will be replaced by their cubs when they die, who are then replaced with their own cubs. You need a really big crew to ensure genetic diversity.”

She rolled her eyes. “A crew of clones doesn’t have genetic diversity. They’re all identical.”

Rah raised a finger, ready to explain, but then he realized she had a point.

“Plus—and this is gonna be very awkward if I’m the one explaining this to you—but if everyone aboard the ship is a clone of you, then they’re all guys. I don’t care how many guys have sex, no one is getting pregnant!”

The finger Rah had raised slowly lowered like a deflating balloon.

“No wait, I take that back,” she said.

Rah whispered, “Guys can reproduce…?”

“No, of course they can’t,” she laughed. “I take back the bit about not caring how many guys have sex. Ten thousand guys having an orgy sounds like a lot of fun.”

———

Reviewer's link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1W_XeHawIeWxYeeIhuri4iHpEJ1IHbfxsKx0ENcd8WFw/edit?usp=sharing

Thoughts?