Scribbles and Drabbles

Notebook Drabble 69 - AI Clone

Luis shouldn't exist.

Clones were born sterile. The A.I. did this to control the genes and ensure people didn't go rogue. Clones could apply to have children and become caretakers. They could send the DNA of non-clone partners, and the A.I. would use it to create a batch. Unapproved machines wouldn't use clone DNA to create new life. If someone tried, an alarm went out, and all the powers would react to the lawbreaker as if they were in the Great A.I. lands.

It was a hard law; each Power followed them under the condition that the others followed theirs. Hard laws were tight and sacred. Each Power had edicts deemed too dangerous to let people break and remain neutral to the other Powers. The Great A.I. viewed the corruption of its will and cogs as the worst crime to be committed against it.

Luis's mother drilled that fact into Luis often and hard alongside the Powers' hard laws. The Great A.I. could calculate and predict patterns, but it knew scientists would eventually be able to bypass the process. 

Amber Song didn't care. 

She was obsessed with one of their elite soldiers and wanted his child. She wanted it bad enough to break that law and clever enough to succeed without ending in metal shackles at the first flitter of the idea. She planned, and plotted, and Luis was the product. She used back-alley science that involved ancient reproductive science, long abandoned as science moved past it. A three-person baby but with two parents. His mother used the nucleus from his father's blood cells to fertilise her egg and grew him in a test tube until the embryo could be inserted into her

And by the stubbornness of an obsessed woman, Luis came to be.

Unsurprisingly, she never told his father what she had done. She didn't tell him the full truth until she was on her deathbed, leaving him alone. His blood was special; he should never let it be used in a transfusion, and never let any scientist or doctor look at it.

Alone on the backwater planet that Amber picked to hide from the Great A.I., Luis followed most of the rules but kept that one to heart. He shouldn't exist; it didn't shock him that some of his biology was weird. He'd had cancer as a kid, too. All in all, the universe seemed set on removing him. 

The main rule that he broke involved going into space. She wanted him to stay on a border planet. Sadly for her, the funds she left barely covered her funeral. He needed work, and the best-paid jobs involved mining.

They were always hiring new runners. Jean did a good job of finding a decent corporation that didn't have slave contracts. The mining base had a decent reputation, unlike many dead-end places, and a fair apprentice programme for teens entering the job. It smelled suspicious until a closer investigation revealed that the Great Al owned the corporation. It was not technically a government mining colony but a private investment for the good of the sector. 

Mining was a dangerous job, and not entirely because of the work itself.

Jean got him signed up, packed up, and came with him to help him settle. He missed Jean. The old man kept in touch, but Luis wished he could have stayed home.

Instead, he got to live in a 4-mat room that never warmed and lived pay cheque to pay cheque. The Overseer claimed that it was on purpose. They didn't want the apprentices to run off and get into bad habits too young. They ate what the company provided, lived in the rooms given and wore the uniform provided. They weren't gambling, boozing or whoring their money away but they weren't living either.

He didn't know what to do next, but this was killing him. He had stricter regulations because he was underage.

"Luis, I hate to tell you this," drawled Mindas, the older teen, three drinks in and passing Luis another bottle to drown in. "But you're cogged."