I.

I have never doubted God’s Wisdom in that He knew what He was doing when He didn’t give babies the ability to remember being sustained in liquid (that they don’t actually breathe) and transitioning to air. They go through this horrible trauma without any lasting memory. The experience of using lungs the first time is akin to the panic of drowning in air, like a goldfish that has been dropped while cleaning it’s bowl. It works out for us, not undo much for the goldfish. I certainly understand why babies cry during this transition. I was in warm liquid and suddenly not. I hacked up the nastiest stuff imaginable. I convulsed and hacked… and twitched… trying in vain to expel the remaining liquid. God spared me this memory when I was born a couple lifetimes ago. Technology did not.

I woke like so many times before, to Jodie’s smiling face above me. “Hey there.” The freckles. The bright copper red of her hair, and her smell. The sense of smell ties strongest to memory. Her smell was intoxicating… made my goldfish impression worth it.

It was comforting but terribly wrong. I was just reborn there she was… Again imprinting herself on my psyche just like a mother does with her newborn child. She of course was not my mother and this raised all kinds of Oedipal concerns. Not that I minded, but this of course was not a mother/child relationship. I wonder if it was because all these repeated scenes that this was the reason I became obsessed with her. It was simple: I loved Jodie. I always have. She however did not reciprocate. She cared for me; I’m sure that. It was complicated; she decided we were too good of “friends” to fuck it up with personal feelings. So I loved her silently in my heart, knowing it was a one-way street. Maybe that’s what fucked all this up.

My clone chamber was illegal, homebrewed, cobbled together for miscellaneous parts stolen, or bought on the black market… But it was sterile. I had formal training as an EMT, but didn’t have the stomach for the blood, so I crossed over in the related field of clone technology. Cloning is only legal and licensed clinics, and you had to buy a clone insurance policy at astronomical prices for a little slice of immortality. I built it for my own selfish reasons trying to blur the line between the haves and (me — the principle) have-nots. I quickly realized that a lot of money to be made doing this on the black market. That is how Jodi came to me. She was one of my first customers, became my friend after a very brief romantic involvement, and opened doors to me I had no idea that existed. She had friends that could get things, information, and most importantly… Work.

Work. That was life really. Things have been hard since the Old Republic had collapsed. There was no Great War or ecological ruin that brought apocalypse. No asteroids, no aliens. Ours was a ruin brought on by simply running out of oil. It was mostly economic collapse. It made the 20th century’s Great Depression look like a week between paychecks. These are indeed lean times.

My homebrewed clone “ facility” was small, constructed in the back room of the 24th floor apartment. It was very basic, but it was effective and sterile. Despite this Jodi gave me a shot of antibiotics. This was mostly to fight off the pneumonia that new clones were susceptible to. Life usually ended unexpectedly, and people were often in too much of a damn hurry to start living again. New lungs seldomly dried out properly it took weeks sometimes.

Thus was our ritual. Our routine when one of us died.

With everyone else it was a little different; I was the expert on cloning and it was usually me bringing everyone else back. Which when you think about it was more than a little odd in and of itself — especially since half the team was male. However on those rare occasions that something happened to me, Jodie knew enough about it to start the automatic recovery process and assist in the awakening. I was low maintenance. I didn’t wake up pissed demanding my tattoo back. Each time I woke up, one of the first things I did was scan Jodie’s face and hands, looking for familiar scars and such that would lend me clues to whether she had been cloned as well.

Another negative thing about “buying the farm” was that I usually had no concept of how much time had elapsed since my last backup. I usually did one backup a week — especially since I had lost the better part of a year once. I despised catching up on a week’s worth of current events. Anything more than that tends to be a real bitch.

II.

The job didn’t feel right from the beginning. I voiced my opinion early on — even though I knew it was a waste of breath. I was outvoted. Originally we were hired by the Yakuza to steal someone’s life. The man was dead. The Yaks killed him but they weren’t finished with him yet. They wanted his DNA and memories…the stuff clones are made of. All they told us was that they had unfinished business. When you have unfinished business with the Yakuza, not being able to hang with Gōmon was no excuse not to finish business. We didn’t ask for details, thus keeping us off the unfinished business list.

As if dealing with the Yakuza wasn’t bad enough; the man’s wife approached us asking for the same thing. A sample of the DNA and a copy of the memories were all she wanted. From what she told us, she had recently been cloned because her husband had stolen something of great value from the Yakuza and would not tell them where it was. The bastard refused to talk even when they tortured and killed his kids. They did the same to the wife. Finally, they tortured him for a lengthy period of time, even by Yak standards and then allowed him to die.

The insurance company registered her death and cloned her. The woman’s clone awoke to find her life in shambles, as her children were too young to be cloned. This was one of the few vulnerable times where dead means dead. Meanwhile, the husband’s memories were tied up in probate. It’s no wonder that she wanted a piece of his ass.

It wasn’t a stretch of the imagination to see where this would end. I am sure the Yaks didn’t want a copy of this man floating around. Not to mention that depending on when he last backed up his memories he may have no idea what the hell anyone is talking about. That would have been a nightmare… Wake up with your wife standing over you with murder in her eyes, or much worse to wake up in a Yakuza warehouse somewhere, hanging from chains. Not knowing why — put through all of that for something “you” didn’t do. I told Jodie in confidence that I thought it was a really bad idea. Let the Yaks have him — no copies. What if the wife extracted her revenge on one clone and then made up with the next or worse yet turned a copy over to the cops? Jodie listened politely but DA, who insisted we call him ‘Devil’s Advocate”, had already made the decision. It was decided that we were doing it. Jodie prowled in, I was electronic security, Anastasia was the sniper, Bill was the pilot. Of course, DA was heavy weapons.

It was to be a quick job. While Jodie was hitting the cryo-vault I was supposed to tap into the facilities network, shut down the security systems and start copying the man’s memories. Once copied, all trace of him was to be deleted in the facilities mainframe. After we were back in the air, I was to make a second copy and remove a sample of the DNA. If all went well…

It was an offshore data haven… former oil rig, supposedly secret, but luckily mostly automated. There would be one or two guards on duty at night with a dozen or so standing by. The crazy Russian bitch Anastasia would use her 20mm smoothbore to take them out at a kilometer and they wouldn’t know what hit them — at least not till their clones were awakened much later.

We waited till darkness, prepped our gear, nobody saying much. I had all my hacking stuff plus the 10mm automag that Jodie insisted I carry, and the frag grenade that D.A. insisted everyone carry. It was a bit paranoid but it was prudent. In these times there is a saying. “Be careful where you leave your dead — they have a habit of coming back to haunt you.” This was primarily because of the government’s development of field data collection modules. Like much that the government developed they were very expensive, large and clumsy but also effective as hell in one capacity. FDCM’s resembled a large bell, which would be placed over a body (that didn’t necessarily have to be dead), and once activated it froze the head. A simple twist of the FDCM and the head would snap off. It was a convenient way of transporting DNA and memories in one package. As a cloner, this prospect was particularly disturbing. Data could be extracted two ways. The subject could be fully cloned and awakened or partially cloned and brain scanned. There were several side effects to this primitive procedure; genetic defects, sterility, but the really nasty part of it, was that a “field clone” remembered all the trauma and death itself — which from what I understand was a fresh slice of hell.

Therefore given what we do — that was why it was important to carry a grenade or something else that would cause severe traumatic damage to the brain. We don’t want to give an enemy information, but on a deeper level nobody wanted dead end clone and memories to go with them. This cause and effect had spawned great amounts of violence out of desperation.

The “bus” was a vectored thrust military transport similar in principle to the harrier jump jet. Physically it resembled a minivan with no wheels. It was extremely loud and kicked up a lot of garbage, but it will land on a dime, and would take off inside it’s own footprint. That made it extremely useful in an urban environment. More than anything it could carry a lot of people or payload and made a semi-stable weapons platform. As we piled on I booted the jamming gear up and did a final check on my weapons and equipment. Wild bill fired up the twin Rolls Royce Pegasus IV engines they thrummed to life with bone rattling vibrations that were felt then heard, before building to a mind numbing shrieking drone. Everyone else had already strapped in and I was slow. Bill goosed the throttle, spun the bus on its axis and accelerated roughly. I was thrown off balance and landed at Anastasia’s feet. She eyed me suspiciously, caressing her sniper rifle. I can only imagine what she was thinking.

We flew dark. We had to, given the nature of what we did on a common basis. No lights, no id beacon, the skin absorbed radar, and the only thing to give us away was the intense thermal bleed in the IR band and the banshee wail of the engines. Thanks to the Doppler Effect, unless someone was sneaking up on us, by the time you saw or heard us it was probably too late. We approached the facility, which had formerly been an offshore oil rig, . Anastasia identified the guard tower and holed it with 20mm depleted uranium rounds. At a 1000 meters, fourth round hit before the sound of the first did. Before the bus even touched down I was in the security grid reassuring the AI that we were not intruders and seducing control away from it. It gave up with a lot less of a fight than I anticipated. I took it as a primitive and/or cheap artificial intelligence. As soon as the bus hit the deck, we all got out, and moved to our positions. Anastasia disappeared for high ground, D.A. ratcheted a round into the under barrel grenade launcher and mumbled something about “securing the perimeter”. I took cover and watched Jodie’s sleek form become one with the shadows, and then I returned my attention to the data terminal. Wild bill reported that he had moved out to a quarter mile to loiter, but I wasn’t really paying attention because I was a bit puzzled by the facilities AI or rather it’s behavior. I was getting its full sensory input, and I noticed the slight change in barometric pressure from Jodie’s approach that should have triggered the AI to investigate further. Why it did not I could not guess. I heard the crisp static of the radio. “Jodie here, I am at the cryovault… Any alarms yet?”

“No,” I replied, “but I think something is wrong…”

“Well figure it out while I am getting the DNA.” Jodie said more than a little annoyed. I could hear what she was doing; I rigged her mike to transmit continuously so that I could monitor her. I could hear her picking the lock on the freezer/vault, and then the latch operating. I still didn’t have a good feeling about the behavior of the AI, when it suddenly got quiet.

Anastasia broke the silence: “I am thinking maybe that I not cut guard’s throat with sniper rifle… SUKIN SIN!” followed by two loud reports from her 20mm smoothbore. A fraction of a second later the tower was exploded and suddenly there was automatic fire everywhere.

“Jodie! Get the hell out — “

There was an earsplitting shriek for a millisecond, cut short by the sudden rush of static on the microphone as it succumbed massive overpressure. Overpressure from the explosion that killed Jodie. The explosion made the deck ripple. It threw me off my feet and ruptured my eardrums. I was dumb with the shock of it. My shaking hands had trouble finding my ears and when they did they were greasy and slick. I was bleeding from them. I faintly heard someone screaming — maybe it was me I wasn’t sure. I couldn’t make anything out. I fumbled with the headset not comprehending Jodie was gone. All I knew was that she needed me. I tried to get on my feet. There was sharp pain in my left knee. I shifted my weight and tried again, barely supporting my weight. I had double vision. Behind my eyes, every heartbeat ferried a bolt of lightning — a million volts of agony directly into my brain. I tasted copper.

Jodie… Was she dead? She needed me. I lurched out from behind cover, not capable of thinking any further than Jodie. It never occurred to me until later that there was no point limping towards the remains of the structure she had been in. Neither were there anymore. It didn’t occur to me I would sear my lungs fatally. It didn’t look real when the first round hit me in the chest. I didn’t feel it. My brain was busy being pile-driven by my merciless beating of my heart. It just kind of knocked the air out of me. Scarlet bloomed near my right nipple. A second penetrated just below the collarbone and I am sure that I felt it shattered the shoulder blade on the way out… Three more rounds hit me in quick succession. I felt as if I was floating on my back in a swimming pool. The moment unfolded slowly for me. Aside from dying it was beautiful. There was an entire galaxy of blood droplets that formed above me as I flew. The smaller ones made perfect spheres, unable to overcome surface tension. I thought of gravity and planets. The larger ones oscillating alternating between widening and narrowing like they were standing in front of a funhouse mirror. They cycled for a small eternity and there was a bone jarring impact. The constellations of blood left my line of sight as a new eruption of blood left my nose and mouth.

I couldn’t connect my thoughts anymore.

“Boom Boom” said my heart sadistically to my brain, adrenaline giving a final push toward the crescendo.

I was dying. I needed to pull the pin on the grenade. It was the last thing I could do to protect Jodie.

“Boom Boom”, the heart shrieked.

“Jodie. Oh god Jodie…” Was all I could think.

“BOOM BOOM!” the heart screeched again.

My fingers fumbled with the grenade, slippery with blood. “Motherfucker,” the brain conceeded, “we failed.”

“Boom… boom…” the heart whispered almost tenderly, accepting the brains surrender.

“Jodie.” The brain replied quietly.

“Booom.” The heart agreed mournfully and rested for the space of two beats.

“Must…” I rasped.

“Boom Boom?” The heart inquired tiredly.

“Jodie.” The brain scolded.

“Boom…” the heart mumbled tiredly.

“Pull…” I choked.

“Jodie”, we all agreed as the blackness closed in.

“Boom…” the heart farewelled.

“Pin.” I gurgled with the last of my breath.

My grenade rolled from my hand with the pin still in it. I hesitated… I fucked up.