From New Columbia I would fly to Mars, the galaxy’s biggest spaceport. Once on Mars, I would either receive my next assignment or I would find a hotel room and rest until my next job arrived—I didn’t care which.
Assignments meant money, but it also meant fighting for the good old Unified Authority. I didn’t really mind having bombs explode around me. Even when an assignment meant risking my life to save a worthless punk like Jimmy Callahan, I preferred it to lounging around some hotel. I could not help myself, it was in my neural programming.
I enjoyed the study of philosophy, politics, and intergalactic relations, but only as they applied to combat. I was designed for battle, and a soldier was all I could be. I was screwed.
I went to the gate to wait for my flight, which would leave in another three hours. I cherished short breaks like this. It was the long ones that drove me crazy.
I put on my mediaLink shades, streamline glasses with retinal displays built into their hinges. Lasers painted images on my retinal tissue, opening a world of books, magazines, and video feeds. I could play games, watch movies, write letters, or catch up on the news. On this particular day, I decided to read.
My favorite reading was ethical philosophy. At the time, I was reading The Complete Works of Spinoza . Spinoza argued that men could not feel love, desire, or passion without already having a germ of that emotion within them. It was an interesting concept that was especially true of military clones. Our loyalty was programmed into us. We loved the government that made us. Even when we realized that the government hated our kind, we still loved it. Even when we hated the government back, we remained loyal.
Clones were also programmed to think they were natural-born. Your average soldier clone did not know he was cloned and programmed to love nothing but their country. They just thought of themselves as patriotic citizens.
Was Spinoza so depressing, or was it just my overapplied interpretation of his work? I looked around the gate. This particular flight was a business flight. Men in suits sat scanning the mediaLink or writing memos. Women in suits did the same. A young mother tried to busy two small children by reading to them. I had no love, desire, or passion for any of these people. They were natural-born, I was synthetic …a rare synthetic. I was a clone who knew he was a clone. My model was designed before the Senate added a death-reflex to its military clones to prevent them from rebelling against their makers. When other clones learned they were clones, a gland in their brain killed them. When I learned I was a clone, I went to a bar and got drunk.
If Spinoza was right, perhaps I felt no love or passion for humanity because the germ did not exist in me. Perhaps the germ of love required a soul. Most religions stated that clones do not have souls. Perhaps I proved them right.
The Unified Authority was right to build neural programming and the death reflex into its clones. Judging by my example, once clones knew they were apart from humanity, they closed themselves off to it.
As I said before, I was a one of a kind clone. The rest of my kind were created at a time when the Republic was under siege. The Galactic Central Fleet, an armada of warships, had vanished. As a last resort, the military created battalions of Liberator clones and sent them to the Galactic Eye to kill whatever unknown enemy was there.
The battle ended quickly. The problem was that having created a living, breathing super weapon, the Unified Authority did not know what to do with it. When the generals sent Liberators to settle smaller battles and domestic problems, they did not like the results.
Liberators were sent to stop a riot on Albatross Island, a penal planet in the Perseus Arm. The Liberators killed the prisoners and then turned on the guards and the hostages. With the exception of a few prison workers, the Liberators killed everyone on the planet.
In the end, Congress banned Liberator clones from the Orion Belt and let attrition thin them out. I stepped off the assembly line in 2490. By that time only four Liberators still existed. Three were wild and bloodthirsty, caring only about their own survival. One was religious and completely loyal to his U.A. creators. He was my mentor. To this day, I do not know whether to admire or despise him.
I feel them all inside of me, struggling for control of my emotions. When I close my eyes at night, I sometimes think I can hear the ghost of Sergeant Tabor Shannon, a Marine who happily gave his life for the Republic. When I pass through great crowds, I feel isolated and I imagine Sergeant Booth Lector sneering at everyone around him. Both men were Liberators. Both died in battle.
Shannon remained patriotic to the last, hoping for the best in a world that considered him an insect. Yes, I was still putting my life on the line for the Unified Authority; but as a mercenary. I could at least tell myself that my allegiance was to myself. But Lector was the only one whose allegiance was truly just to himself. He remained in the Marines because he could not figure out a way to escape the Corps.
Looking back, I think Shannon and Lector were both full of shit.
In the Marines, you scuttled into your transport when your sergeant yelled for you to get your ass on board. But on a civilian flight, pretty flight attendants ask the passengers to board their flights. The door to our commuter flight opened and an attendant with long dark hair welcomed us. We formed a line and quietly took our seats.
The flight took off smoothly, rising through the sky. When we were about two hundred miles outside of New Columbia, the blue and white atmosphere ended and turned into the blackness of space. To this point, the ship traveled slowly in the climb, never moving more than two thousand miles per hour. We picked up speed and traveled another eight hundred miles to the Broadcast Network in a couple of minutes—a painfully slow pace.
I reclined my seat and stretched out for the short ride. We were traveling 240 trillion miles to Mars. The flight would take just over an hour, and I had had enough of Spinoza and needed the rest.
I turned my head toward the porthole beside my chair and watched the tint shields form over the glass, dimming out stars and planets under a blanket of inky blackness. We would soon reach the Broadcast Network. I could not see the discs through the shields, but I knew what was coming.
A thousand miles outside of Safe Harbor, our spacejet slowed to a crawl as it approached the two gigantic elliptical discs that formed the New Columbian sector’s broadcast station. The discs were approximately one mile across and reflected everything around them like giant mirrors. Many things happened over the next few moments. A silver-red security laser, able to X-ray a ship, its contents, and its passengers, searched the spacejet for criminals and contraband. Once the U.A. Port Authority completed its search, the galaxy’s largest super computer sequenced our travel to make sure no other ships would enter our travel space.
The spacejet did not enter the discs. As it approached, jagged tendrils of electricity stretched out of the glossy face of the sending disc. The blue-white lightning was so bright that I could see it through the tint shielding on the window. The air in the cabin crackled with static electricity. Had the tinting failed, the glare of the Broadcast Network’s electrical field would have blinded me. Even if I closed my eyes and placed my hands over my face, that light would blind me.
“Prepare for broadcast,” the pilot said over the loud speaker.
And then the first 10,000-light-year jump was over. We had traveled sixty trillion miles in less than one second. We traveled the remaining one hundred eighty trillion miles in the next few minutes—the time it took to emerge from a receiving disc and glide to the broadcast disc beside it. The transfers took approximately thirty seconds and we made four of them.