1:2:7 Indexing (Part 1)

Thunk. The door closed and locked itself. Destiny followed Tolan out of the clone’s quarters and into their back office. The room was stacked floor to ceiling with old papers and discarded, and in some cases disassembled, technology. With all of the papers and furniture, the room was incredibly cramped but if it were stripped away, it would have nearly been the same size as the clone’s quarters. Destiny took a moment to take in her surroundings before she spoke.
“What is all of this?” She waved her hands around the mountains of printed sheets.
“It’s my life’s work. You’re standing in the sum total of everything I’ve ever achieved.” Tolan relished the opportunity to talk to someone else about their work.
Destiny’s question remained unanswered. “I meant why is there so much paper. You live on a planet that is seventy years away from your species’ home planet at the speed of light but you’re still printing things off?”
Tolan stopped what they were doing. “I also live in a hole in the ground.“ They shook their head. “Internet on the surface is slow enough when it works. It doesn’t exist down here.” Tolan went back to their search.
“What are you looking for anyway?”
“Illia only has one man made satellite; it’s connected to a secret military guild installation called Serenity Point. It’s locked up tighter than an acolyte’s knickers but, it’s still vulnerable to some ancient tricks.” Tolan chuckled as they opened a box filled with yet more paper.
“Right…” Destiny continued her scan of the room. She wondered how they ever found anything.
“The cocky gits didn’t think to put a password on their network so I had the clones run something called an ethernet cable from Serenity Point to this terminal here.”
Destiny’s eyes widened. “Ethernet?”
“It works… Sort of. It’ll do for our purposes.” Tolan reassured her. They held aloft a tattered sheet of paper.
“What’s that for then?”
“While they didn’t encrypt their connections, I did.” Tolan sighed. “I put it on a rotating password so if they ever managed to find and decrypt my bug, their access would be cut by the next day and they’d have to do the whole process again. Trouble is, I often forget which password is for which day.”
“Well, at least it’s not on the device itself.”
“Here we go. Wednesday’s password.” They smiled. “Oh it’s a classic.” They swept aside some papers covering a keyboard and typed in the word password with a capital P.
A progress bar appeared on the screen. It did little else.
Destiny stared at the screen. It didn’t help. Nothing. “Is it working?”
Tolan nodded. “It’s several kilometres of frozen glass. It takes a bit to get there and back again. We’ve got a few minutes.”

Destiny cleared herself a chair. There was something in the pile she had just moved that wasn’t entirely paper. She set the stack down on a nearby pile, removing the anomalous item; a rectangle of polished wood, framing an image behind a glass screen. The building in the background and some of the faces in the foreground were familiar.
“Ah, those were the days…” Tolan held out their hand for the picture. “That was one of the last groups I put through training before everything happened.” There was a solemnity to their smile as they returned the photo.
“Is that who I think that is?” Destiny pointed to a woman with dark, cropped hair who was snuggling up to a slightly more rugged looking Lore.
“Loren and Misha.” They sighed. “Couldn’t keep their bloody hands off of each other. Practically proposed to her. I saw their gauntlets in her office. She was the only person who was allowed to dust the box.”
“Really?” Destiny looked surprised. “Lore doesn’t seem the type. So what happened between them because Undulia was virtually drooling when we first met her.”
“Everyone heard the rumours, and the other stuff…” Tolan shuddered. “A rising star in the Inquisitoriam visiting humanity’s premier colony is nothing new but there was something else…”
“What were they here for then?” Destiny was getting comfortable.
“He… They wanted to see my labs so for the week they were in Celreagaire, I had them and what felt like most of the military guild storming around my lab. Lore took particular interest in my work. Apparently cloning technology fell off on the home world, being replaced by those freaky Biomechs to bulk out their military forces.” Destiny glared at them. Tolan clearly wasn’t picking up on it as they continued. “I thought it was strange that they’d send an Inquisitor to see some outdated tech so, like everyone at the time,  we started speculating. It became a lot clearer when he,” Tolan pointed to the figure stood beside them in the picture, “Commander Rhys was arrested and disappeared.”
“Undulia wasn’t in charge?”
“She was when Lore left, that’s for sure. Undulia was just a junior officer but a week with Lore and she went from fetching drinks to placing the orders.”
“What do you mean ‘disappeared’?” Destiny edged closer.
“When the gateway to The Conglomeration was first locked, Celreagaire had a Prime Minister and a Commander of the Military guild. They worked alongside each other to maintain peace. Then, Rhys came along. The people loved him, I’ll admit, I too was drawn in. He was just a Leftenant when he was pushed to run for PM. Three months later, he’s being sworn in. He promised he would be a ‘hands on’ Prime Minister, and he was. He kept working through the ranks of the Military guild, most of the time hampered by his status, until he reached the top. He’d been Prime minister for nearly the full eight years, that’s Celreagairean years not standard, but the people still loved him. When he became the Commander, he merged the two titles. It seemed pointless having both so he used them as he saw fit. When he was in uniform he was The Commander of the Celregairean Military Guild and when he was pressing flesh, he was the Prime Minister. It worked. He was a legend. Then Lore’s visit happened and it was as if they took Rhys with them when they left. Rhys was gone and no-one knew where; Undulia knew. She came forward with evidence that not only was he embezzling funds from the Department of Ongoing Terraforming but he was using that money, and his position in the Military guild to support and arm a some rogue faction…” Tolan paused. “I actually can’t remember the lie she came up with but by the time she had told it, Rhys was nowhere to be seen and his family were the first of many to be quietly relocated here. Nice bunch.”
“Is that how you got here then, you piss Undulia off too?” Destiny rapt was like a child listening to a bedtime story.
“That was a bit later. After Lore’s visit, my department received one of the last deliveries Illia received; everything was brand new and top of the line. New cloning vats, new breeding techniques. I went from being able to churn out ten trained grunts every five years to basically printing officers. Obviously they needed some real world training but most of it was handled by the vat programming. Pass me the picture?” Tolan extended their hand. Destiny obliged. “These clones were only two months old when that was taken.”
“Sorry to cut you off but why does such a small city need such a big military presence?” Destiny took back the picture and put it back on the desk.
“They don’t just protect the city. My clones were designed, perfected, for the icy tundra. They’re the reason Celreagaire isn’t as cramped as it should be. They replaced the Sat’Mach, protecting the builders every time they moved the outer wall so we could expand.”
“So how did you get down here then?” Destiny glanced over at the computer’s progress bar. They were getting close.
“Two years into the embargo, Lore appears. They had this helmet on.” Tolan put their hands to the sides of their head. “Massive thing it was. Big bronze dome… Anyway. They came to me, set that bloody great helmet down and handed me a suitcase with enough Rel to destabilise the economy…” They started counting on their fingers. “Six times over. That’s unimportant, they tell me that the money in the case is to cover the costs of producing a unit of clones; then they hand me the strangest genetic sample I’ve ever worked with, some strange Human-Quatarrian hybrid DNA, and a batch requirements form. Standard unit of fifty two troops which could be split into four groups each with good coverage of the whole battlefield. They said that weapons and armour would arrive shortly, gave me a date and some co-ordinates then it was helmet on and they were gone.”
“Human-Quatarrian?”
“Yes, but it was more than that. After a more thorough investigation I discovered that Quatarrian DNA is ‘Darwinistic’ for a lack of a better term. It codes by survival of the fittest as if it were alive. The clones are their own subspecies of the two, completely unique but representing the best of the two original donors and their species. Their renal system follows the expectations of a human with a few extras but it’s as if their kidneys are made out of Quatarrian material. Like having a sword but instead of steel and wood, it’s actually solid Vaaltrium.”
“So… Hang on, they paid for fifty two clones but you’re only giving them four? How much does that make each of them worth?”
“If you’re splitting the funding equally, close to seventeen million Rel.”
“Why would they give you so much money… Where did they even get that much money?”
“I don’t know. I told them that I’d only need a fraction of the money they offered. For that seventeen million, I could have produced an army of six hundred and seventy six soldiers. I only spent what I needed and because most of them died before they became huge money sinks, I’ve barely touched it. Sure I’ve used some of it down here. My clinics can be run free because of it but I’ve barely dented it. Anyway… A couple of weeks after Lore’s second visit, I get an unexpected guest in my lab. She came in, looked around, and left. Two days later, she’s back; does the same thing. Third time was when I started acting. Undulia had never cared for my work. She was a firm believer that clones were inherently less effective than natural born citizens because they lacked the same patriotism, care for their home, that the natural borns did. I managed to move a tenth of Lore’s clones to my Middlethem’s storage rooms before Undulia made her move. She had me arrested on suspicion of collaboration with Sat’Mach terrorists. Funny thing was she fought to keep me out of The Conglomeration. I didn’t fancy spending my life in prison and I had some clones that needed me so I came out.” Tolan exhaled coolly. “Oh, she did not like that. No jury was going to let me stay on the surface after that.”
“That’s another thing I don’t get. As a species, you’ve developed faster than light travel, time travel even, but you’re still openly hostile towards non-binary people, Nulls, third gender individuals. What is wrong with you?” Destiny seemed almost angry.
Tolan gave a heavy sigh. “It’s mostly just Illia I hope. We launched our first manned missions into space in the nineteen sixties. By the turn of the millennium, we were mining Titan for its hydrocarbons; twenty four years later, we made first contact with our first alien species. Our technology was catapulted thousands of years into the future in no time at all but because of this, our social development took a back seat. There always seemed to be an excuse. Transgender and non-binary people campaigned for years to change that and, to an extent, they did. As we explored space, met new species and discovered sentient life away from Earth, it became easier to see transgender people for the people they were. They didn’t seem that different to everyone else when there were aliens using our toilets.”
“So why are you here?” Destiny slightly raised her voice.
“Two thousand and thirty and Earth is not only open to extra-terrestrial tourists but we started allowing aliens to become Earth citizens.” Tolan gave another cool exhale. “That did not go down well… Old rhetoric started getting dusted off and suddenly, Earth was too small. Granted, it was, but some of the species that were applying for citizenship wanted to live where humans couldn’t; the Arctic, Antarctic, the Australian outback, even Texas.” They shook their head. “Certain groups started protesting the discrimination against some of the less advanced species but that only seemed to make things more divided. Some very tenuous correlations were drawn between the aliens, some of which had trinary sex and gender systems and non-binary humans and, especially after the Faochite incident, anti-alien and anti-null sentiment were synonyms. Five years later, the first Illian colonists started their journey in suspended animation. Two thousand and forty, the Null Recognition act was passed then was almost immediately forgotten about for twenty years; for the first time, planet wide, people like me had some form legal recognition even if it was only the bare minimum. The act meant that you couldn’t be fired or discriminated against for being a null and you could change your gender marker to an ‘x’. It was rarely enforced. Twenty years later, the law was updated meaning that nulls, as they continued to call them, had all the same rights as any man or woman not just on Earth but across almost all of The Protectorate and could easily access the same social and medical facilities that transgender people were graced with in the late twenty twenties. With the first ship half way there, preparations were made to send a second ship with more up to date technologies. Two thousand and seventy, the second ship left, it was planned to arrive in twenty one twenty five, ten or so years ago; by this point, Illia would have been out of proper contact with Earth or any other human colony for nearly ninety years so to make things easier on the colonists, they examined the culture two thousand and thirty five and found enough people who fit the bill to fill the ships. Most of the people they sent, even after ten years of living with the ‘Enhanced Null Recognition Act’, were chosen based on their attitudes aligning with those of the thirties. They were all told not to talk about the changes in law and, when she came to power, Undulia made sure those who wanted to bring the act to Illia weren’t heard because they became the second set of humans to be forced into The Conglomeration.” The computer trilled ending Tolan’s history lesson. “Perfect timing then.”