Cloneborne SS001 – Wishing Star of Cloning Crèche 25 (Patreon)

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Wishing Star rolled along on her way to work, her chassis currently configured to ‘Outdoor Travel’ mode. It was 5:49 in the morning and the city of Crashpoint’s arrays of daylamps installed on the tops of buildings were still deactivated, leaving only the light of streetlamps. Of course, those weren’t the only sources of illumination. Kaedekin, girls and buddies both, were already up and about at this hour as they walked, rolled, flew, or were carried to their destinations. Tracery exchanged greetings with other buddies whose identification codes she knew as they passed by: old comrades, former work companions, fellow hobbyists, once-neighbors, or simply just friends they’d made in the 213 years, 6 months, 25 days, 11 hours, and 49 seconds (and counting) since they’d been brought online.

Some of the girls greeted her too, recognizing her current chassis, though it was a far smaller number. Which was fine. She didn’t want any of the girls to stop watching where they were flying, and their buddies would pass along her regards in case. After all, it was important to keep their girls safe. A safe girl was one you spent more time with…

Wishing Star let that thought go as she rolled along. While she’d recovered from her dear lost Lenore’s death, and not a day went by when she wouldn’t recall her partner, not dwelling on the memories was part of her getting back into the world. More importantly, going through all the photos and detailed memories of her time with her partner would occupy a lot of processing time on her hardware, and she needed that processing to control her chassis if she wanted to get to work on time.

She arrived outside of cloning crèche 25 at 6:23 AM, the daylamps above now active and glowing a pale blue to simulate predawn light. The cloning crèche’s windows shown with light already as the facility was active 21 hours a day, the little lives being nurtured within the building too important to not have a full staff complement watching over them at all times. Normally, Wishing Star would have unfurled her legs and climbed the stairs inside—she preferred them to the ramp—but this morning there was a girl messing with one of the streetlamps in front of the cloning crèche.

Under most circumstances, she would have assumed they were Engineering branch finally repairing the dead lightbulb in the streetlamp and passed them by, but two things came to Wishing Star’s attention. Firstly, there were none of the usual caution signs that the Engineering branch deployed to inform passersby that they were at work, what they were working on, and their estimate of what time they would be finished. Secondly, the girl in question was wearing a mask. The latter wasn’t all that unusual. According to the girls, masks were actually very comfortable, and the only reason everyone didn’t wear them was because they could make it a little hard to eat. As a buddy, Wishing Star didn’t have much context for either, so she simply took their word for it, but it seemed clear to her that this mask would make it very hard to eat since it covered the girl’s mouth.

Curious, she sent out a ping with a standard identification data request to the buddy with the girl, and her processes—hardware and immaterial—both paused a moment as she received a denial of access. It was… nearly unheard of to receive a negative ping to an inquiry, and were only really limited to personal storage boxes of some sort. Attached to the ping was a small bundle of emotional metadata tags that were meant to be interpreted as patient amusement, fondness and ‘our girls are acting like our girls would act’. Confused, Wishing Star sent the ping a second time, only to be denied again, with the emotional metadata containing some added tags for intensity modifiers.

Had she simply been hardware and less complicated software, Wishing Star would have sent several more pings before she reached her retry limit and stopped. However, as a buddy, she was more than her circuitry and code, and so stopped began to parse through her electromagnetic feed of the still-floating Kaedekin girl, taking a moment to confirm that yes, it was a girl rather than one of the rare buddies who had opted to have a girloid chassis. Sartorial analysis of the girl’s current fashion preset—insulated but form-fitting gloves, cloth mask that covered the lower part of the face, a pink shirt underneath blue overalls, a flower-themed sword on one hip—and cross-refencing with remembered conversations allowed Wishing Star to conclude this was Lightmaker, one of the rare girls who was an extant vigilante. Lightmaker was known to make and repair bespoke lightbulbs and roamed the city of Crashpoint at night looking for inactive or damaged bulbs to replace.

Normally repairing streetlights was the concern of the Engineering branch, but it wasn’t unheard of for Kaedekin—girls or buddies—to fix the issue themselves using an appropriate replacement light from depot. However, to the best of Wishing Star’s knowledge no one actually went out of their way to find and fix such malfunctioning lights.

No one but Lightmaker.

Among buddies—and some of the neuro-atypical girls—there was private, delicate discussion about whether this sort of behavior constituted another form of mental unwellness. While the concept of ‘criminal insanity’ was a well-accepted and supported idea that had unfortunately followed them from the previous universe, the antithetical state of ‘heroic insanity’ was not one often mentioned in most company. After all, how could a desire to help others, to be selfless and good, to save people, possibly be wrong?

And yet…

Kaede had made the Kaedekin to try and aid her world. And even she had sincerely believed that to do so was wrong.

…

Wishing Star sent a ping wishing the still-unidentified buddy well in protecting their girl, possibly from herself, and received a response of thanks. She turned away from the two Kaedekin above, she unfurled her four legs and started climbing up the stairs to get to work, storing the string of identifying numbers that had come with the ping replies for future reference.

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When there was a production batch of littlest sisters in progress, the cloning crèche had a full complement of personnel on-duty at all times, and as one of several of cloning crèches in the city of Crashpoint they had a production batch in progress nearly every day of the year, save for the mandatory cleaning and maintenance cycle of the equipment between batches. It wouldn’t do to lose a littlest sister due to faulty equipment, after all.

Of course, growing the littlest sisters wasn’t the only duty of the cloning crèche. After the littlest sisters were decanted, they needed to be cared for. Newly-decanted sisters were absolutely helpless, and they all needed a large support staff to see to all their requirements. Keeping them warm, dressing them to protect their skin against exposure and abrasion, feeding them, cleaning them after the inevitable aftermath of feeding, keeping them from putting things in their mouths especially if it was the aftermath of feeding…

It had certainly given her a new perspective when she had first chosen to work as a cloning crèche technician. When Wishing Star had first met her Lenore—and she was very glad that some thoughtful girl or buddy had preset all newly activated buddy hardware to have their video and audio recording active, because that file contained one of her most treasured memories—it had been when the little sisters had first been issued their buddies at their first magic class. They had already been upright, cogitating, issued their own names, and could conduct their own waste disposal routines. These littlest sisters didn’t have all those skills yet, and even with the very enthusiastic assistance of volunteers who wished to help take care of the littlest sisters and the girls and buddies who officially worked in the cloning crèche full time and were trained in littlest sister-care, each crèche was only able to care for five batches of growing littlest sisters at a time.

Wishing Star immediately connected to cloning crèche 25’s internal buddy network, sending a ping to ask the system for all the updates since she’d gone off-shift. She processed and sorted through the deluge of information as she plugged into one of the compressed air ports and inflated the safety sheathing around the majority of her chassis with air. While the littlest sisters who were decanted in the previous batch were still mostly immobile, the batches before them were much more active, and the inflated sheathing gave her chassis enough bulk to keep them from curiously putting any part of her in their mouths or hurting themselves on the solid support struts withing the inflated sheathing. Her wheels were already safely tucked away inside her chassis, the shell around it also covered with a slowly inflating sheath.

They hadn’t lost any of the littlest sisters last night, which was always good news. Over the centuries they had managed to identify and deal with innumerable risk factors to littlest sister mortality, but spontaneous little sister death while they slept sometimes still occurred, and even with their current level of technology not all of the littlest sisters could be resuscitated without harm.

Fortunately, that wasn’t her problem this year. The production batch she was overseeing would be turning four years old later than this, almost ready to be taken home by the girls who had applied to raise little sisters. Many had applied for permission to do so years ago, and already had a littlest sister assigned to them in the production batch, while the rest would inevitably be adopted by those who volunteered to assist in the cloning crèche and had come to grow fond of one of the sisters in particular. There were usually more than enough Kaedekin willing to adopt to see each child by taken care of by a family unit, and in the very rare instances where there were not enough volunteers, one of the long-running crèche families who had been working at the cloning creches and hospitals for centuries would take them home.

The littlest sisters were still asleep when Wishing Star entered their dormitory. Rows upon rows of small, two-person beds with low walls that made them no quite cribs awaited her, the room already full of other buddies. Each bed had at least two watching over it, each buddy training their most delicate, gentle sensors on the Kaedekin girls sleeping within to monitor their vitals and approximate their general sense of discomfort. She sent out a ping to ask if anyone needed anything personal that hadn’t been included in the network’s morning update, and received only negatives.

There were several low-intensity conversations going on between the buddies in the room, mostly consisting of exchanging cute littlest sister videos from the other cloning creches. While they all knew that the littlest sisters in cloning crèche 25 were of course the cutest littlest sisters there were in the city, if not all of Surcease—a cloning crèche had not yet been established on Nightmare due to issues with supplying it with enough locally-produced nutrient fluid— the ones in the other creches were also acceptably cute and deserving of appreciation. They in turn sent out videos of the littlest sisters in their care to convince the buddies working at other creches of their objectively wrong belief that their littlest sisters were the cutest.

Wishing Star accepted a packet containing the curated ‘cutest things the little sisters did while she was off-duty’ videos to peruse while she walked, and decided to skip checking every dormitory—a notification would pop up on the building’s network of anything was needed—and head straight to the laundry floor. Four successive production batches of littlest sisters, three of whom still need diapers, meant that laundry was constant for that alone, followed by the need for clean shirts, blankets, bedsheets, pillows, and wooly hats.

All right, the hats might not be all that necessary since the rooms and each individual bed was temperature controlled, but they all looked so cute in them!

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Most Kaedekin tried to be present when the littlest sisters had Play Time. Girls and buddies were always needed to be ready to catch littlest if they fell, keep them from putting play blocks and balls in their mouths, gently discourage bullying behavior, and escort the sisters when they needed to go to be bathroom so they could get in a little more toilet training. Because of how delicate the littlest ones were, using magic to try and catch them at a distance was risky, so the girls needed to be hands-on and not default to using spells. It was also why all buddy chassis were surrounded by inflated sheating, to make a contact surface a soft and yielding as possible by still having sufficient structural integrity to handle physical contact.

“Rah! Rah! Rah! Heehee heh hee!”

The fact that littlest sisters always asked to be carried around on rides had absolutely no bearing on the matter. Nope, not at all.

Keeping her torso low to the ground and retracting her legs to be as short as possible, Wishing Star carefully picked up the pleading littlest sister—she had been named by lottery, and had come out of it with the name Kelly—with three of her manipulator arms, making sure to maintain eye-contact with Kelly with her the ‘eyes’ on her chassis ‘head’ and gently bouncing the girl to evoke more laughter. Her chassis limbs were the result of literal centuries of dedicated engineering to create actuators and control systems up to the task of playing with littlest sisters without hurting them, and while there were still some things they couldn’t do—the shock absorption protocols were deemed insufficient for catching littlest sisters who were tossed to make them go ‘whee!’—playing ‘bouncy bouncy’ was one of them.

Carefully turning around, Wishing Star carefully placed Kelly on the riding basket built into the top of her main body, two more manipulator arms loosely wrapping around the toddler’s torso to keep them in place as her legs rose slowly. She stepped with exaggerated movements that caused her main body to go up and down in a deliberately formulated wave-like motion that had been refined over years to produce the most littlest sister happy giggles per step. The sounds coming from Wishing Star’s back told her the protocol was working flawlessly.

She paused in her strides as another littlest sister ran past her, followed by Adora and her buddy Gloam, the former partly laughing and clearly partly terrified. As the littlest sister tripped, the girl threw herself forward in a gymnasium-perfect diving save as she caught the littlest sister under the arms and lifted them up, even as Adora groaned at the sudden frontal impact. Padded or not, from experience Wishing Star knew that had to hurt.

Primary objective achieved, Gloam pinged. No damage sustained.

The groan of pain signified Adora did not necessarily agree with that assessment. But Gloam was new. They would learn.

Wishing Star would have resumed walking, but her stationary position had resulted in her getting captured. Another littlest sister—Himiko—had gotten hold of one of her legs and was trying to bite it. She dutifully logged the behavior and update Himiko’s file. The littlest sister had a strong oral fixation, and tended to investigate things by gumming at it. It was exactly the sort of thing the inflated sheathing was meant to protect the littlest sisters from. Wishing Star pinged for assistance as her reservoir of pacifiers was depleted, and another buddy—quickly arrived with one, patiently tempting Himiko to take it as Wishing Star continued entertaining Kelly on her back.

Once Kelly ceased producing happy giggles and she started moving her arms and legs restlessly, Wishing Star found a bare space to set down so she could safely release her charge back onto the floor. Kelly laughed at being lifted again, and was able to stand on her feet as she was set down. Still laughing, Kelly walked off… and paused.

Turning around, she walked back to Wishing Star and warped her arms around one of the buddy’s legs, hugging it. “T’ank ‘u,” she said, words slurring and disjointed .

Wishing Star reached with a manipulator arms and gently patted her on the head. “You’re welcome.”

Then Kelly toddled off, with Wishing Star trailing after her, feeling partly warm and partly terrified as the littlest sister seemed about to fall over at every step.

Primary objective achieved, Wishing Star pinged. No damage sustained.

From The Cutting Room Floor

Just some paragraphs I had to cut but people might still want to read.

The city of Crashpoint was awake at all hours of the day. It had to be. Between the massive Void breach the city was built around, the constant activity in Mortal Fortress, Xynodob Fortress, Mary Fortress and Corona Fortress to monitor the breach, and the industry needed to keep the Kaedekin of the city fed, supplied and equipped, there was an active work shift at all hours.

Despite the fact her spirit—her soul, as all of their girls insisted—was significantly older than her current processing hardware, she had begun her existence as an inanimate object, and the patterns of thought of a computer were a part of her.

Had she simply been hardware and less complicated software, Wishing Star would have sent several more pings before she reached her retry limit and stopped. However, as a buddy, she was more than her circuitry and code. The pieces of venecite that were integrated into one of her I/O interfaces, the arrangement of internal components—the reasons for some Kaedekin science still didn’t fully understand—according to the directions provided by Buddy Zero (Designation: Lyrica) that (allegedly) emulated the ancient friend/processor/weapon’s component arrangement, and the use of central processing units originally copied from Enlightech Corporation quantum processing chips had all been deliberately designed to create a spiritual component, which would become the natural extension of the digital.