It was the absence of pain that made his eyes fly open some time later.
The chronic pain of the elderly was something everyone accepted as a fact of life. Waking with your lower or upper back throbbing, having your joints greet you loudly once you stood for the first time in the morning, and other maladies of getting old. Gunter had heard it was worse on Earth, with the increased gravity, but he figured he had it bad enough as is.
Only now he woke feeling good. Strong. His hands flew to the back of his head, expecting to find a bandage, but he only felt thick hair. He traced his face, finding no wrinkles, and the backs of his hands were pale white with no age spots.
He wondered briefly what the sound was in the room until he realized the high-pitched whine, the sound of an animal in a trap, was himself.
He flailed and fell off his bed, hitting the tiled floor in a way that would have broken his hip a day ago. He was naked, and saw that his whole body was young and strong.
They did it, I can’t believe they did it, they will burn for this, burn for it, oh Lord, what have I done to displease You?
Rosalind interrupted his panic by opening the door. He pushed himself away from her, against the cot, covering his genitals and avoiding her eyes.
She gave him a sour look. “Please. It’s not like I haven’t seen it all before, many times,” she said.
His outrage that she, a priestess, had seen a man intimately, rose briefly before he remembered that she was a sham. For all he knew, she could have been having carnal experiences while she was posing as a chaste member of the church.
For his own modesty, he didn’t move his right hand, but reached up with his left and pulled the thin sheet from the bed to cover his lower half.
Rosalind yanked the sheet off the bed and dropped it on him, dismissing his shame. “Whatever. You’ll get used to it. You’ll need time to acclimate to your first waking. How do you feel?”
“You’ll die for this,” he whispered. “Murderer, soul slayer, abomination.”
“Careful how you throw those words around, Gunter. Every word you sling against clones, you’re slinging against yourself,” she said. “Can’t you see now? I didn’t slay your soul; you’re just like you were before, only with a younger body.”
“How could you do this to me? I supported you! I invited you into my church!” he asked.
“All the while you were calling my kind abominations,” she said coldly. She took a chair from the table and sat down. “Anytime I started to develop any warm feelings of friendship toward you, you helped dampen them by telling me how I’m a soulless freak.”
Adrenaline flared in his chest like fireworks. Dear God, he had forgotten what such strength felt like. “What do you think is going to happen now? You want me to stand up and say, Hello, I’m a clone priest and clones are not soulless, and God Himself approves!”
“That’s a start,” she said. “Think, if you’re the first head of a church to welcome clones into the fold, you will have parishioners for centuries, tithing and supporting. Most clones are savvy with money and build wealth to support themselves through their lives. That’s what the church wants, right? Tithing?”
“You think this is about money? You killed me for money?”
“Oh, unclench, Gunter. You’ve been to the Vatican; of course it’s all about money. Clone money is the same color as anyone else’s. They figured it out when they finally accepted women and queers and”—she gasped, mimicking an outraged priest—“a queer woman like me. Now they can figure it out again. But we need your anecdotal evidence to support us.”
“I won’t do it,” he said. “I will expose you.”
She sighed. “Gunter, cloning you is not the only plan my organization has for you. You could help us now, or help us later, but you will end up helping us.”
“I’ll die first!”
She leaned forward, all warmth gone from her face. “Then we will clone you again. We can do this all day.”
“Then do it,” he said, standing up and dropping the sheet. “I won’t break.”
She stood. “You don’t know the first thing about clone technology, do you?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Never mind. Dinner will be served in an hour.” She reached into her bag. “In the meantime, I brought you some reading material.” She produced View from the Vat, the first memoir of the successful entrepreneur clone, Sallie Mignon. “See the story from another point of view. I hope you change your mind. The alternative won’t be pretty.”
Breakdowns
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.