Wolfgang expected a more violent reaction to his statement, but Joanna just sat there, her dark skin growing ashen as she paled.
“Well?” he said.
“I remember the stories, of course. But God, cloned eight times in three days? It’s unbelievable what they did to you. I guess they broke you eventually.”
“No,” he said. “They didn’t. After I was cloned the first time, they tortured me, then made a mindmap, then cut me while they were still making the map as I bled out. That was so I could wake up with full memory of my experiences. They did this six times.”
She winced. “If you didn’t break, then what happened?” she asked.
“In my eighth body I woke up remembering everything, except my desire to fight. They’d removed it. They welcomed me immediately, gave me good food, and they started their propaganda campaign. That’s when the clone riots of the Earth finally got to the moon.”
“Oh. That’s when they brought in a hacker,” Joanna said flatly.
He nodded. “I expect they had grown several bodies for me, and I’d forced them down to the last one. They could either start the process to make more bodies or just take the quick way.”
“Quick, expensive, and highly dangerous,” Joanna said.
The words tasted like sour lumps in his mouth, and he swallowed. “I retained all memory of my resistance, and I knew that I had changed my mind, but remembering my arguments against cloning didn’t make me want to bring them up again. I no longer believed.
“They took my faith from me. I didn’t think that was possible.”
He got up and walked to her kitchenette. He poured himself a cup of water from the tap. He drained it and refilled it. “They got one thing right: I no longer believe I became soulless when I was cloned. Now I know I became soulless when I was hacked.”
He drank the water in his plastic cup and then threw it at the wall behind her bed. It bounced off and flew toward Joanna, who flinched and ducked.
“You tipped the balance for cloning laws,” she said. “I remember seeing the news reports about you, and the more detailed report from some operatives we had on Luna. That night the Codicils passed.”
He continued. “I was relieved when they passed, even though my new masters were not. I had been programmed to not care what had happened to me, but I saw enough of what they were doing to disagree with them. I broke from the group, took on a new name, got some protection, and started the University of Luna clone studies program. The church was no longer for a soulless man. I colored my hair and started wearing lenses, but I’ve dropped those in later years, certain no one would recognize me after those times so long in the past.”
Joanna looked as if she wanted to hug him, and he very much hoped she wouldn’t. Thankfully she stayed in the chair. “I’m sorry for what you’ve been through,” she finally said.
“Thank you.” He felt slightly lighter for some reason. “It’s not your fault. I’m over it now.”
“I had a hand in it. If we hadn’t spent so much time debating all those months, maybe they wouldn’t have done that to you. I remember the news stories about you. It broke my heart that someone had to suffer like that in order to get a law passed.”
“I wasn’t the only one.”
She smiled slightly. “But you’re the only one here, now. So I’m apologizing to you. Politics is almost never violent toward the people who are actually making the political decisions.”
“That is an understatement,” he said, frowning. He retrieved his cup and filled it again.
“I need to know the rest,” she said. “I heard the rumors. You were a vigilante, weren’t you?”
Shame flooded him. He hated that word. It made him sound like he had been dressing up in a child’s costume and pretending to be a hero. He had called himself a hunter at the time. Even now that sounded silly.
“One of the few things I appreciated about cloning was the patience it gave you. I waited a few decades, learning how to protect myself. Keeping an eye on the people that kidnapped me and cloned me. And then, yes, I went after them. They fought back of course, and killed me seven times. I just wanted them to know what it was like. I killed the people who kidnapped me, the man behind it all, and whatever hacker I could find.”
She cocked her head. “How do you feel knowing we have a hacker on board?”
“Furious,” he said.
“Knowing what was done to you by a hacker, why don’t you have more sympathy toward Hiro, who is clearly a victim of the same thing?”
“Because logic doesn’t drive the desire for revenge,” he said.
Her eyes grew wide. She stood up, swaying slightly on her prosthetic legs. He saw then how tired she was.
“Wolfgang, logic has to be the dominant factor here, or else we’re all vigilantes.”
“You know my stance on clones. I preached that they had no souls, that they were less than walking dead people. I never thought I was committing a crime when I removed a clone.” He rubbed his face with both hands. “Besides, as I said, my faith was effectively gone by then.”
“‘They’?” she asked, tilting her head. “You’ve been cloned more than anyone on this ship.”
He rubbed his hands over his face. “Thinking about that time is difficult. The hacking, it turned my past life into a dream or someone else’s memory. Occasionally I’ll get strong feelings of who I was. I tried to tap into that when I hunted. One thing I remember is that we’re not meant to be God,” he said. “I don’t know if cloning kills the soul or not, but I do know the act of cloning is against His will.”
Joanna now threw her own cup against the wall, startling him. “I’m so sick of that argument. I’ve been hearing it for centuries. Playing God. Wolfgang, we played God when people believed they could dictate their baby’s gender by having sex in a certain position. We played God when we invented birth control, amniocentesis, cesarean sections, when we developed modern medicine and surgery. Flight is playing God. Fighting cancer is playing God. Contact lenses and glasses are playing God. Anything we do to modify our lives in a way that we were not born into is playing God. In vitro fertilization. Hormone replacement therapy. Gender reassignment surgery. Antibiotics. Why are you fine with all of that, but cloning is the problem?”
She continued before he could answer. “And you should know, you should know, that you’re no different. Traumatized, yes. Horribly treated, of course. Abused. You could probably benefit from a few decades of therapy. But you’re still you. Your soul hasn’t gone anywhere.”
“How do you know?” he asked, his voice tight. “It amazes me how people who have no faith in a higher power seem convinced that they know the absolute truth, that their opinion will sway thousands of years of deeply held belief. How do you know what’s in my soul?”
“I know because I went through it too! I’ve been cloned multiple times, sometimes through difficult circumstances, and I know that I’ve remained the same!”
His voice was low, his eyes narrow. “Have you ever been hacked?”
Joanna stopped. She opened her mouth, then closed it.
“That’s a no,” he said softly.
“Not to my knowledge.”
“Then you don’t know what it’s like. You don’t know how it feels to be changed.”
“It’s only numbers. If the concept of the soul is so powerful, then how can you reduce it to numbers and then allow math to fundamentally change who you are?”
“I think we’re done here,” he said, retrieving both hurtled cups from their spots on the floor. He returned them to the kitchenette.
“You came here! You wanted to unload secrets! Why are you letting your temper get the better of you?” she asked, staring up at him with her arms crossed.
“This isn’t a discussion any longer, this is a religious persecution,” he said.
“Clones have already been excommunicated! You fought for that yourself. You’re talking out of ten sides of your mouth! You’re a priest, but you’ve been thrown out of the church, but you still believe, but you don’t have a soul. You follow the religion that says ‘Thou shalt not kill’ but you hunted hackers. How can you reconcile all of those sides? Would a man with a soul worry about having one?”
He took a deep breath, feeling rage unravel in his chest. “A man with no soul will mourn its loss, every day of every life. A man with a grudge and nothing to lose can hunt; it’s not like he fears hell anymore. I’m beyond saving, Joanna. You can’t confess the loss of a soul. You can’t do penance when there is nothing to heal inside you.”
She did something unexpected, then. She put her arms around him. He froze, unsure what to do, but she held him. She was much shorter than he was, her head coming up to his chest. Her hair, in a soft halo, just managed to tickle his chin.
“You’ve been hurting for so long,” she said.
He sat at the edge of her bed, awkwardly placing her next to him. He felt like something had broken inside him, something that had been pulled tight forever.
“You shouldn’t be alone right now,” she said. “Why don’t you stay?”
He nodded numbly, and she eased him up to put his head on the pillow. He was asleep immediately.
Day Four
He woke when the light in her rooms started to brighten, simulating a sunrise. She had slept in her easy chair, letting him have the bed. She had removed her prosthetics and looked very small. Her face was calm and still, and he felt an unexpected warm feeling toward her. He waited for the shame at losing control, his anger that she had seen him vulnerable, but it never came.
She must have heard him stirring because she opened her eyes and smiled at him. “How are you feeling?”
“Better,” he said. “Much. Actually—”
Her eyes went wide and she sat up in her chair. “IAN, did you watch the medbay all night?”
“Sure did. Maria came to visit the patients, and then left. Everyone else slept,” the AI said.
Joanna slumped with relief. “Thank you for checking on them. I will be there shortly.”
There was silence, and he figured IAN was gone. Then the AI said, “I think you may need to go to the medbay, actually. Right now.”
Katrina hated the war dreams.
She hated the dreams where she was taken back to the field, the time shrapnel had blown her legs off. She could feel the pain in her legs, again. Then there were the dreams where she was field medic to her fellow soldiers, carrying them out of the danger zone and dressing wounds. Then there was the time she had to inject a dying soldier with adrenaline to restart his heart.
She opened her eye. She was in the medbay. The memory of the previous day came back to her. Her hands came up to feel her face, the throb of where her eye had been starting to demand her attention. The doctor had put an IV in her arm, but the bag was empty and she pulled the needle out with impatience. Where was Wolfgang? The cot to her right was empty, the covers rumpled and slightly bloodstained. The bed to her left had Hiro in it, still asleep. Today she would have to try him for assault, battery, mutiny, conspiracy, and more, and then figure out what to do with him. Wolfgang could take care of that. Beyond Hiro was the most familiar face to her.
Her clone still slept in her coma, still keeping her secrets locked away. This Katrina knew. She knew who had attacked her, who’d probably killed the rest of them. She even could have ordered it done herself. Katrina didn’t put it past her. Or them.
Katrina no longer saw the woman as herself. That one had a different time line, different experiences, and she would never give them up. Selfish.
The dreams ran through her mind again, making her shudder. Her onetime employer, Sallie Mignon, had offered to hire a hacker to remove the worst of her war experiences, but she had declined. She didn’t want to be messed with, and she wanted those memories. You never knew when they could come in handy.
She looked around at the room, wondering if she could stand up. She was dizzy and movement hurt her face. Joanna hadn’t left her with anything resembling a chamber pot, which was bad since Joanna had also been pumping her full of fluids and her bladder was uncomfortably full.
Katrina had been resourceful her entire life; she wasn’t going to stop now. She eased herself out of bed and onto the floor, blessing the low gravity that made it possible to do so without too much pain. She limped across the floor to the doctor’s cabinet, dragging the IV stand as a walking stick. The cabinet was locked, naturally. It had an old-time mechanical lock, something Katrina had learned to pick in her time in the armed forces.
A bit of time rooting around Joanna’s office—immaculately clean and orderly, of course—and she found the desk items she needed to pick the lock.
Katrina rooted through narcotics, a lot of medicine she had never heard of, and then she found it: umatrine, the recently developed synthetic adrenaline. She filled a syringe with it and dragged herself across the floor again, stopping at last at the other clone’s bed. Her face ached, but it didn’t matter. She was here.
“This has to be done. I need what’s inside you, and this is the only way to get it,” she whispered. She pulled open the gown and exposed the breastbone. “Into the heart, if I remember.”
“Does the doctor know you’re doing this?” Hiro asked, startling her. His eyes were open, glittery black spots in a pale face, and he lay on his bed, tightly bound and not struggling. “Or IAN?”
Katrina looked up reflexively, as if she could see the AI hovering above her. “He’s faulty anyway. And no, the doctor is gone. I need this information.”
The sound of a digital lock came at the door. Katrina quickly jammed the needle between the clone’s ribs and into the heart, her thumb tightening on the plunger.
Nothing happened. The plunger didn’t go down. Smart syringe. Shit.
“Katrina!” Wolfgang shouted, running forward. He grabbed her and pulled her off her clone.
She screamed and struggled, waving the syringe around. “No, we need her, she has to tell us!”
The doctor caught her wrist and pried the syringe out of her hand. “Give me that, you’re going to hurt someone.”
She hurried to check the clone’s vitals.
“How is she?” Wolfgang asked, holding Katrina with maddening strength. She hadn’t realized how weak she was. Her head felt as if it were going to explode.
“She’s fine,” Joanna said, sounding relieved.
Katrina stopped struggling and then threw an elbow up behind her and into Wolfgang’s chin. If he had been healthy, it wouldn’t have fazed him, but his concussion had left him weakened too. He let her go, swearing. Katrina leaped forward and grabbed the doctor’s hand. Joanna was so startled she didn’t register to fight back. Katrina wrapped Joanna’s hand around the syringe tightly and pushed it into the clone again.
The doctor cried out in surprise and pain, stumbling into the bed as Katrina pulled her off balance. But the smart syringe responded to Joanna’s hand and depressed the adrenaline into the clone.