Klyber’s mouth formed an amused smile. “Yes, the infamous identity programming—clones don’t know that they are clones. Have you also heard rumors about their dying if they learn the truth?”
“I’ve heard that,” I said.
“They weren’t thinking about the works of Plato when they came up with the death reflex, but a similar idea is found in The Republic. Plato did not want mobility between his classes. I think he was most concerned about ordinary citizens trying to become warriors or rulers. Are you familiar with that?”
We had studied Plato when I was growing up in the orphanage, but I could not think at that moment. I shook my head.
“No? Plato said that if people challenged their station, you were supposed to tell them that they were made yesterday, and all that they knew was just a dream. Sounds ridiculous.
It sounds a bit like the death reflex. Plato thought you could control the masses by stripping them of all that they knew with a little lie…Plato’s lie.
“The Senate wanted something a little stranger. If clones saw through the lie, the Senate wanted them dead. Putting guns in the hands of a synthetic army scared them. They wanted to make sure they could shut the synthetics down if they ever saw through the lie. I was against it. A mere scrap of neural programming seems like thin protection against a danger that could potentially wipe out our entire defense. The Senate debated it in an open session.
“The hardliners won out, of course. The majority argued that renegade clones would be the greatest threat to the Republic, and they had a point. They said that once the clones realized they were not human, there would be no reason for them not to rise up. Fear of the warrior class goes all the way back to Plato, himself.
“What else do you know about clones, Corporal Harris?”
His questions were torture. “How do they die?” I asked. I could not remember my mouth ever feeling so dry.
“What kills them?” Admiral Klyber gave me a benevolent smile. “A hormone is released into their bloodstream. It stops their hearts. It’s supposed to be fast and painless.
“Do you know why Congress is afraid of its own cloned soldiers?” Klyber asked. The humor left his smile, and his gaze bored into me.
“No, sir. I don’t.” By then I felt more than dizzy; my stomach had turned. Arguments took place in my head as I considered the evidence that proved my humanity, then shot it down with questions about clone programming. I never knew my parents. Did that make me a clone?
“No, not because of a mutiny…because of me,” Klyber said.
“When I was a young lieutenant, I oversaw the creation of a special generation of cloned soldiers. It was done during the troubled times, Corporal Harris. Our first explorations into the central region of the galaxy ended in disaster. A fleet of explorer ships simply vanished, and everyone feared the worst. That was the only time I can ever remember when the politicians stopped talking about expansion and colonizing the galaxy.”
The words “central region” seeped through my whirling thoughts. I focused on them, considered them. “Were you stationed with the GC Fleet, sir?” I asked.
“No,” Klyber said, putting up a hand to stop me. “I was safe on Earth, a recent graduate from Annapolis, with a promising career and some highly placed friends. My father was on the Linear Committee, Harris. I had guardian angels who kept me safe and put me on the fast track. I was assigned to oversee a special project. It was important that Congress not get wind of the project, or the Senate would have canned it. My father knew about the project, of course, but he was the only member of the Linear Committee who did.
“Morgan Atkins was the senior member of the Linear Committee at the time. The entire Republic worshipped him. Did you know that Atkins was on the Committee?”
So confused that I did not even understand Admiral Klyber’s question, I shook my head.
“Atkins was big on manifest destiny. ‘Humanity can never be safe until it conquers every inch of known space,’ ” Klyber said, lowering his voice in what I assumed was a parody of Atkins. “No one challenged Atkins. He single-handedly ran the Republic.
“The Galactic Central Fleet was Atkins’s idea. He wanted a fleet that was so powerful that all enemies would fall; and when Atkins called for action, by God, people jumped. The problem was that Atkins’s fleet had to be self-broadcasting. We usually sent self-broadcasting explorer ships to set up discs; but with explorer ships disappearing, he wanted a self-broadcasting fleet.”
Klyber rubbed his eyes. “God, what a nightmare. The Galactic Central Fleet was just like they say—bigger and more powerful than any fleet ever assembled. Just building the broadcasting engines cost trillions of dollars. In the end, each ship cost five times what normal ships cost.
“It took three years to build the fleet. Three years, and all of that time the military was on high alert looking for any signs of an invasion.”
Klyber stopped speaking for just a moment. His gaze seemed far away, but his eyes stayed focused on mine. “We tested for every contingency. The explorer ships could have been destroyed by some kind of broadcast malfunction, so we bounced the GC Fleet back and forth across the Orion Arm until no one knew where it was without daily updates.
“Once we were sure of the broadcast engines, we sent the fleet to explore the inner curve of the Norma Arm…the center of the galaxy. The ships flew near Jupiter. They initiated the self-broadcast, then they were gone. It was just like the explorer ships; we simply never heard from them again.” Klyber sat up. “Atkins accompanied the fleet. It was his pet project.”
“I don’t understand, sir.” I said. “Atkins went with the GC Fleet?”
“My father never trusted Atkins,” said Klyber. “He had me assigned to research a new class of clones around the same time Atkins proposed his grand fleet. Congress never knew what I was doing. Atkins never knew. It was strictly a military operation.”
“Liberators,” I said.
“Liberators,” Klyber agreed. “You’ve probably heard rumors about Liberators having animal genes …We experimented with genes from animals, but it didn’t work. Liberator clones were not very different than earlier clones except that they were smarter and far more aggressive. We gave them a certain cunning. We made them ruthless. They needed to be ruthless. We thought we were sending them to fight an unknown enemy from the galactic core—something not human. Do you understand?”
Klyber did not pause for me to answer.
“One of the scientists came up with the idea of ideas…” Klyber smiled for just a moment, then the smile vanished. “Hormones. Classical conditioning. We mixed endorphins in their adrenal glands. The mixture only comes out in battle. A drug that would make the clones addicted to war. Only a scientist could come up with an idea like that, Harris. It never occurred to us military types.
“You need to understand, these clones were our last hope, and we had no idea what was out there. We were sending them into hostile space. Whatever was out there had annihi
lated our most massive fleet.”
“An alien race?” I asked.
“No. No aliens, just a crazy bastard politician. It turned out that Morgan Atkins was behind the whole thing. He wanted to build a new republic, with no allegiance to Earth. He was the ultimate expansionist, pushing the idea that Earth was just another planet and not the seat of man. It sounded good. It sounded poetic and freedom-loving, but anyone with an ounce of intelligence could see that his views would lead to chaos.