So for another couple of years, the complaint was that everyone in the world looked exactly the same: a bland uniformity of height and weight and physical type. And the world was too small for these half-giants anyway; what a bore it was to be constantly bumping your head, knocking your knees, fitting through spaces nobody had had the time to redesign for larger humans.
So the wheel of fashion turned, and soon the true individualists of the world were turning out in short or skinny or even midget forms, and everyone was cutting back at least a little. “Grow your home: shrink yourself!” became the battle cry, and eventually the maximum-height types found themselves the butt of good-natured humor and even, in some cases, less-than-good-natured suspicion. What good was a tall politician? A burly contract negotiator? Just what were they trying to pull?
Around this same time, it began to dawn on the general populace that they could make copies of themselves. This quickly resulted in “xeropollution,” with some individuals creating as many as ten thousand independent instantiations, literally overrunning certain urban areas— most notably Dallas, Texas, the home of the Plural Five. Governmental and corporate powers took a dim view of this practice and reacted with harsh measures, including a three-month, near-total moratorium on faxation, and the sanctioned mass murder of key individuals to reduce their numbers. This led—again, primarily in Dallas—to a number of armed skirmishes that represent the only “hot” conflict of the Wars, with a definite and easily measured death toll of 325 individuals. (The mortality rates for instantiations of these individuals is less well known.)
Fortunately, the rapid development of the Lodney Re-convergence Filter permitted human copies to be merged back into single individuals, with all memories and subjective experience intact. Strict limits were soon enthusiastically and bloodlessly enforced, first on total number of copies, and later, more fairly, on aggregate copy-hours over predefined periods of time.
These transient waves took a long time to settle out, and in some sense continued through the Queendom-era fashions of hair color, skin pigmentation, and self-plural cooperation. But for practical purposes, the Fax Wars were over a decade after they had begun, with the vast majority of human beings choosing modest plurality and the convenience of death and rebirth, over the theological virtues of singletonism and walking. And choosing, yes, to embrace their unique physical attributes as symbols of their heritage and identity.
“Clothe thyself in beauty if thou must,” the playwright Wenders Rodenbeck instructs us in his satirical classic, Uncle Lisa’s Neutron. “ ’Tis charm we find in dreadful short supply.”