"Mark, what's wrong?!" GroundZero asked as she ran into their apartment.
"I-- oh, who am I kidding?" Mark replied as he turned toward her, his voice inexplicably sad and yet angry. "Up there, on the rooftop, talking about my nights with Elvira, the way the moonlight glowed softly in the Throne Room... It was all a lie. I never made love to your Empress, I've never been in the Throne Room, I never had my dick sucked off by those fuckingly beautiful octuplets in my basement all those centuries ago! It was Jim who did all of that, it's his life I'm remembering, his joys and pleasures. I'm just a copy of him. And that's all I'll ever be!"
GroundZero gazed up at Mark, at the clone of her father, and she felt her heart ache. She could see his pain in his face, in his eyes. And she was overcome by a need to comfort him. "Don't say that, Mark! You're a man too. Your own man. You're not some mindless clone!" Mark looked at her and his voice caught in his throat, "When Jim recovers from whatever it is that the Essence has done to him they are going to come for me and put me back in that nutrient bath. Do you think they would do that if I were a man?"
GroundZero said nothing in reply. What could she say? But she could not help but see her father in this man and she knew that her father would never give up on himself no matter what the odds were against him. So she asked Mark the question that she suddenly realized was the only one that really mattered. "If you were a man, would you let them do that?"
Mark bristled at GroundZero's words, but he chose to look away from her, shame faced, rather than stand up for himself.
GroundZero did not give up though. "Mark," she beseeched him, "they took you out of the nutrient bath you were born in so you could hunt me down and take me back to the Palace. And that's exactly what you set out to do. But along the way you started thinking for yourself. You realized that when your usefulness was over, when dad got better, they'd have to put you back where you came from. After all, the Empire can't afford to have two Jim Russells running around the solar system, not when dad is the Empress' Advisor. And then you did something that, I believe, only real human beings can do. You made a choice. And that choice was to live. Don't give up now."
Silence fell over both of them then, and GroundZero feared that Mark wasn't convinced by her argument. When he looked at her again he said, "Being with you has made me forget what I really am. But I can't keep pretending, I can't fool myself that these memories are my own. Or that I am something more than just a copy of Jim."
There was such resignation in his voice and a terrible sadness. GroundZero wanted to make that sadness go away. So she reached up to hold Mark but he stepped away from her. The space between them was just a few inches but it might as well have been as wide as the solar system. He seemed so weak now, so vulnerable and so defeated. But she knew he was none of those things if he would only believe in himself. And somehow she had to make him see that.
"Mark, so what if everything you are was given to you by my father?" she said. "Does that make you any different from me? Since my birth my mother and father have guided me, instructed me, molded me. I am as much a product of their creation as you are. And I wouldn't give that up for all the world. They gave me my start, my beginning. They are and will forever be an integral part of my past. Just as my father is the whole of your past. But the future is my own to create. And like me, your future belongs to no one but you. And that future begins now."
Mark gazed at GroundZero, at the woman he thought of as his daughter. But she wasn't his daughter. And in a twist of irony, his very memories of her served to remind him of that. The daughter that he knew, that he remembered, was not the defiant, strong willed woman that now stood before him. His daughter was younger, far less mature, and much more carefree. Mark understood the reason for the discrepancy of course. The purpose of maintaining a clone for Jim was to safeguard the continuance of the Empire in case of a critical breakdown or crisis. Obviously in order for that purpose to be served the clone needed to be as up-to-date a copy of Jim as possible. And so on a relatively regular basis Jim would download genetic memory packets into the genebank. But the last time he had done so was two years ago. Everything that had happened to Jim since was a blank slate for Mark. As far as he knew, Jim was a completely different person now. Just as GroundZero was a different person from the young girl he remembered talking to just a few days ago, in a conversation that had actually taken place over two years ago.
He wasn't the same as Jim, or was he? Mark was so confused. But he knew that, whatever the answer, he had to make a decision and he had to make it right now. He had to decide if he was going to spend the rest of his life as a clone, nothing more than a second-hand copy of Jim Russell, or if he was going to live his life as a man.
Gazing at GroundZero he could see that she was trembling, her breasts quivering ever so slightly in dreaded anticipation of how he was going to answer that simple, little question. It was clear to him that she was afraid he was going to make the wrong choice.
"Alright," he finally said, his heart thumping in his chest. "What's past is past. From this point on... we won't let the past hold us back. But things are going to get real bumpy from here on in. Don't forget, they sent me out to hunt you down. When they figure out I've gone AWOL we're both gonna be on the hunted list. I jacked with the data records before we got here so my hovercar is clean and we won't leave a credit trail. But they've got the whole system on their side to help them track us down."
"Yeah," GroundZero smiled as she glided up to Mark and wrapped her arms around him. "But you helped build that system from the ground up, and I'm an expert giga-coder with enough know-how to run circles around their security gridchecks. So let them come hunting, I really don't think they're going to find us."
Go back - Go to the parent episode.
Sat Feb 8 16:29:26 2003