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Literature Text
Interval 8.1
March 5, 1984
1400, Fairport, AL
Armacham Corporation / Auburn Offices
"It's what you've been doing for a while, isn't it?" David Hoyle asked, and Genevieve beside him nodded deeply.
"It got to be too … expensive to keep working on new subjects. After all, the Department of Defense likes it when their soldiers work. We found ones that did, and worked with them."
Soldiers in two small projects had been placed as 'control groups' within military bases. Hardly anyone really noticed them, the dozen men looked like everyone else: shaved heads, fit bodies, voices fresh from dropping. Brown haired, brown eyed men.
Exactly the same man, in fact.
They didn't place more than three of them in any given region. Each of the soldiers was given a number and a name, obviously. A background and some pictures of home. Implanted suggestions of life. Falsehoods that they themselves believed wholeheartedly. They were not born to this world. They were made to it. Custom made, designed by Harlan Wade and his team of genetic engineers. He'd truly hit his stride there, Genevieve thought. Now if only he'd shave that ridiculous mustache.
"I can see the profit margin making a huge difference there," Hoyle said. "It's what kept my father's company from folding, anyway."
They were mostly silent, watching the development of the new batch of cloned men. Below the catwalk they stood upon was an assembly line of sorts, from mysteriously bubbling tubes grew human life. Though neither Aristide nor Hoyle could – or wanted to – completely comprehend the raw science of it all, they knew they liked the results. Hoyle's family fortune had been well spent on his share of this new industry. It was already beginning to turn a profit: bioengineering tools, hardware and machinery like the ones found below in the lab. Not 'like', they were the ones his family's development firm had made for Armacham.
With all the advances that Armacham had been making in the genetic engineering field, far and away stranger than any science fiction that was on TV now, Armacham was poised to truly corner the military market, or any market which required people. They could – with reasonable ease – duplicate anyone with precision. They could add or change features, select for build, gender, muscle mass. Those quirky genetic markers that had plagued the early days of Icarus were ones they simply decided to remove from whatever subject was inserted. If they couldn't do that, they knew better than to put them into the project at all. Thankfully, and even Genevieve breathed a sigh of relief about it, none of those markers were related to the typically dangerous 'skin color, nose width' – they were scientists. Not Nazis. Plus, they didn't have those issues with creating a clone that wasn't destined to enter Icarus. Anyone's samples would do just fine for that.
So now, with the potential to remove 'real people' from the battlefield, David Hoyle had also gotten it into his head that his political career could swing into high gear with this process. It would. Genevieve certainly believed it, and he didn't need her help to bolster his own ego.
The social ramifications of removing any 'new subjects' from the military, however, were where they both had started to run into trouble. Clearly, there would never be a day when it could be said publicly that 'we're replacing all the soldiers with clones' – even though on such a basic level that was what people wanted. They wanted to be safe, they wanted to know that their borders were secure and their distant investments were protected. They didn't want their boys going overseas and dying in a nameless dirty town or being gunned down in a jungle.
Why then, were they so resistant to the idea that they could keep their boys at home, where they belonged?
"Something stupid about free will," was what David had said that one night. They wanted the illusion that they could choose to send their children off to war, watch them die, and grieve over their ashes. They wanted to have peace at the cost of blood. They wanted the military bases to keep pumping money into local businesses, and supporting the economy, he punctuated that with a stab of his fork over his dinner plate.
Genevieve and David had discussed that at length, numerous times. It was one thing they agreed upon vocally, usually over dinner. It came down to economics, a subject which both of them had mastered long before. But there was an element which frustrated them to no end. Genevieve had jokingly repeated something she'd heard from some comedian, "society would be great, if it wasn't for all the people," or words to that effect. It rang too true to her. People, she claimed, should know their place. Some were natural leaders, some were fit for nothing more than drudgery and toil. If everyone fell into place, did their part, they would all benefit.
Since her place had almost always been at the top of a very nice, very big heap of money, she'd never had to seriously consider any alternative views. Plus she'd learned long before, while in college, that she could talk her way around sticky bits even to the point of people believing that she shared their views.
Those views had come into conflict with some of the employees, but she simply blew them off and went on with her daily tasks at Armacham. Her father would be retiring soon, and she was not going to take anything less than his position in the company. Times had changed, of course. New investments and links to other companies – Aperture for instance, her first major move as a young exec some eight years prior to annex the company after certain legal indiscretions on their part – were making the board of directors list get longer and longer. As long as she kept herself insulated with allies, her spot was assured.
Even if she didn't, there was still a consistent move to keep her as the figurehead if not the actual leadership. It was good, they claimed, to have a strong woman visible as the 'head' of a company as large and complicated as Armacham. It brought bile to her thin lips that they would think she'd settle for that. Her father had been visible, he had been the face of Armacham and the muscle behind it as well. She was stronger than they knew. Perhaps it was just that there were too many fingers in Armacham's pie, and different views on what 'strength' meant.
Perhaps her less-favorite board members merely needed the right… incentives, to see things her way.
David quietly said, "what about more… private applications of this process, Genevieve?" She blinked, glanced back down at the cloning tubes. Someone was moving a sample into one, she followed their motion and pondered. She knew he didn't mean 'dirty' ones, but what exactly did he mean?
"I mean," as though reading her mind, he added, "what about that project that Aperture has started working on, their brain-wave controllers?"
It suddenly clicked in her mind, yes there had been that memo. Aperture was making strides, but they always seemed to be stumbling about their own feet. Like a drunken centipede. They could hardly be called advances if they unerringly ended in embarrassing failures that had to be swept under the rug. Fortunately they did still produce some gems. That, and they were an ideal tax write off. Aristide turned to face her companion. The look on her face indicated he should elaborate, which he did.
Hoyle explained what he knew: because of safety concerns, they'd been working on robotic systems. Not like the clunky assembly line armatures at a car plant, but real robots. Ones that could simply replace the people that kept dying in unfortunate industrial accidents. They had had less success developing a computer system complicated enough, so far, to control the things though. And that was why they began experimenting with placing people into enormous nets of sensitive wiring; control the robots as though they were really right there in them. It had its up side. The down side was that at least one department of Aperture had been copying this very room's ideas: to clone things, and use the clones instead of 'real' people.
Not that it would matter in terms of corporate theft, they were blanketed under one company umbrella. They shared secrets like that frequently enough. If they were working on a duplicate process they could always access it or even fold it in to Armacham's work.
Aperture being what it was, however… They were trying to grow just brains to put in the robots bodies. They had hundreds of robots already. Ready and waiting. Genevieve rolled her eyes and pressed her manicured nails into her forehead when Hoyle got to that part. She waggled with her other hand to continue, it could only get worse, right? Brain to brain connections did work better, he'd seen a report. Specially trained people could maintain a robot working with an object for a while, but only without distractions. They claimed it felt unnatural, working through the eyes of a cold machine.
But then when they tried it without a 'robot brain' in the way… The one success they had shown, with a brain (who knew where that had come from) that they'd squelched into a robotic shell and connected up to a similarly arranged net of wires in reverse of the 'hot-box' on the other end… It worked very well, three four-hour long sessions. Until the body on the robot overheated and cooked the brain inside it.
It also cooked the brain of the guy in the hot-box, but that was irrelevant. People at Aperture were all crazy enough to do that stuff, let them do it. Let them be the guinea pigs. But it had worked. Well enough that the operator insisted he could feel through the robotic hands, they'd been fitted with pressure and heat sensors, before those heat sensors melted. Hoyle expressed his belief, "it does have the potential to be applied to this project." After all, nerves worked better than wires. They didn't need robotics, they had clones.
"Where are they getting their raw materials from?" Genevieve asked, the whole thing sounding rather morbid to her. "I haven't seen any requests for it, that would be something I would hope my people here would send across my desk first."
"They've been using their in-house … collections team, for that. Wade mentioned, didn't he?" Hoyle said, "they have a much wider variety of samples than we do… than you do, here," he corrected himself with a wink.
"Oh! From that horrific bring your daughter to work day thing?" Genevieve said. Now that might be a legal disaster waiting to happen. She needed to get her law people on that, make sure that everything was covered. But Wade's name rang another bell in her mind. He had been fiddling with that crazy daughter of his own, she'd been unruly and apparently was a bit of a pyromaniac to boot … His project, Origin wasn't it? She could hardly keep track of what everyone was working on. There were so many different things she had to pay attention to. No one in this company could do it all.
No one… alone.
"You ever get the feeling that you need to be in two places at once?" Hoyle whispered, "I know I do." If he wasn't a mind-reader, she wasn't sure who could be. She decided that later on, she'd find out whether Hoyle had been tapped by Wade for that Origin project. And if he hadn't, to get him on it.
Genevieve pondered this whole development, and looked down at the yellowish-orange containers that supported quickly growing human tissues. "I think I should make some calls," Aristide said, putting on her professional mask. "District Attorney Hoyle, I do believe you're a man after my own heart. I'll have one cloned, and sent up to your estate."
March 5, 1984
1400, Fairport, AL
Armacham Corporation / Auburn Offices
"It's what you've been doing for a while, isn't it?" David Hoyle asked, and Genevieve beside him nodded deeply.
"It got to be too … expensive to keep working on new subjects. After all, the Department of Defense likes it when their soldiers work. We found ones that did, and worked with them."
Soldiers in two small projects had been placed as 'control groups' within military bases. Hardly anyone really noticed them, the dozen men looked like everyone else: shaved heads, fit bodies, voices fresh from dropping. Brown haired, brown eyed men.
Exactly the same man, in fact.
They didn't place more than three of them in any given region. Each of the soldiers was given a number and a name, obviously. A background and some pictures of home. Implanted suggestions of life. Falsehoods that they themselves believed wholeheartedly. They were not born to this world. They were made to it. Custom made, designed by Harlan Wade and his team of genetic engineers. He'd truly hit his stride there, Genevieve thought. Now if only he'd shave that ridiculous mustache.
"I can see the profit margin making a huge difference there," Hoyle said. "It's what kept my father's company from folding, anyway."
They were mostly silent, watching the development of the new batch of cloned men. Below the catwalk they stood upon was an assembly line of sorts, from mysteriously bubbling tubes grew human life. Though neither Aristide nor Hoyle could – or wanted to – completely comprehend the raw science of it all, they knew they liked the results. Hoyle's family fortune had been well spent on his share of this new industry. It was already beginning to turn a profit: bioengineering tools, hardware and machinery like the ones found below in the lab. Not 'like', they were the ones his family's development firm had made for Armacham.
With all the advances that Armacham had been making in the genetic engineering field, far and away stranger than any science fiction that was on TV now, Armacham was poised to truly corner the military market, or any market which required people. They could – with reasonable ease – duplicate anyone with precision. They could add or change features, select for build, gender, muscle mass. Those quirky genetic markers that had plagued the early days of Icarus were ones they simply decided to remove from whatever subject was inserted. If they couldn't do that, they knew better than to put them into the project at all. Thankfully, and even Genevieve breathed a sigh of relief about it, none of those markers were related to the typically dangerous 'skin color, nose width' – they were scientists. Not Nazis. Plus, they didn't have those issues with creating a clone that wasn't destined to enter Icarus. Anyone's samples would do just fine for that.
So now, with the potential to remove 'real people' from the battlefield, David Hoyle had also gotten it into his head that his political career could swing into high gear with this process. It would. Genevieve certainly believed it, and he didn't need her help to bolster his own ego.
The social ramifications of removing any 'new subjects' from the military, however, were where they both had started to run into trouble. Clearly, there would never be a day when it could be said publicly that 'we're replacing all the soldiers with clones' – even though on such a basic level that was what people wanted. They wanted to be safe, they wanted to know that their borders were secure and their distant investments were protected. They didn't want their boys going overseas and dying in a nameless dirty town or being gunned down in a jungle.
Why then, were they so resistant to the idea that they could keep their boys at home, where they belonged?
"Something stupid about free will," was what David had said that one night. They wanted the illusion that they could choose to send their children off to war, watch them die, and grieve over their ashes. They wanted to have peace at the cost of blood. They wanted the military bases to keep pumping money into local businesses, and supporting the economy, he punctuated that with a stab of his fork over his dinner plate.
Genevieve and David had discussed that at length, numerous times. It was one thing they agreed upon vocally, usually over dinner. It came down to economics, a subject which both of them had mastered long before. But there was an element which frustrated them to no end. Genevieve had jokingly repeated something she'd heard from some comedian, "society would be great, if it wasn't for all the people," or words to that effect. It rang too true to her. People, she claimed, should know their place. Some were natural leaders, some were fit for nothing more than drudgery and toil. If everyone fell into place, did their part, they would all benefit.
Since her place had almost always been at the top of a very nice, very big heap of money, she'd never had to seriously consider any alternative views. Plus she'd learned long before, while in college, that she could talk her way around sticky bits even to the point of people believing that she shared their views.
Those views had come into conflict with some of the employees, but she simply blew them off and went on with her daily tasks at Armacham. Her father would be retiring soon, and she was not going to take anything less than his position in the company. Times had changed, of course. New investments and links to other companies – Aperture for instance, her first major move as a young exec some eight years prior to annex the company after certain legal indiscretions on their part – were making the board of directors list get longer and longer. As long as she kept herself insulated with allies, her spot was assured.
Even if she didn't, there was still a consistent move to keep her as the figurehead if not the actual leadership. It was good, they claimed, to have a strong woman visible as the 'head' of a company as large and complicated as Armacham. It brought bile to her thin lips that they would think she'd settle for that. Her father had been visible, he had been the face of Armacham and the muscle behind it as well. She was stronger than they knew. Perhaps it was just that there were too many fingers in Armacham's pie, and different views on what 'strength' meant.
Perhaps her less-favorite board members merely needed the right… incentives, to see things her way.
David quietly said, "what about more… private applications of this process, Genevieve?" She blinked, glanced back down at the cloning tubes. Someone was moving a sample into one, she followed their motion and pondered. She knew he didn't mean 'dirty' ones, but what exactly did he mean?
"I mean," as though reading her mind, he added, "what about that project that Aperture has started working on, their brain-wave controllers?"
It suddenly clicked in her mind, yes there had been that memo. Aperture was making strides, but they always seemed to be stumbling about their own feet. Like a drunken centipede. They could hardly be called advances if they unerringly ended in embarrassing failures that had to be swept under the rug. Fortunately they did still produce some gems. That, and they were an ideal tax write off. Aristide turned to face her companion. The look on her face indicated he should elaborate, which he did.
Hoyle explained what he knew: because of safety concerns, they'd been working on robotic systems. Not like the clunky assembly line armatures at a car plant, but real robots. Ones that could simply replace the people that kept dying in unfortunate industrial accidents. They had had less success developing a computer system complicated enough, so far, to control the things though. And that was why they began experimenting with placing people into enormous nets of sensitive wiring; control the robots as though they were really right there in them. It had its up side. The down side was that at least one department of Aperture had been copying this very room's ideas: to clone things, and use the clones instead of 'real' people.
Not that it would matter in terms of corporate theft, they were blanketed under one company umbrella. They shared secrets like that frequently enough. If they were working on a duplicate process they could always access it or even fold it in to Armacham's work.
Aperture being what it was, however… They were trying to grow just brains to put in the robots bodies. They had hundreds of robots already. Ready and waiting. Genevieve rolled her eyes and pressed her manicured nails into her forehead when Hoyle got to that part. She waggled with her other hand to continue, it could only get worse, right? Brain to brain connections did work better, he'd seen a report. Specially trained people could maintain a robot working with an object for a while, but only without distractions. They claimed it felt unnatural, working through the eyes of a cold machine.
But then when they tried it without a 'robot brain' in the way… The one success they had shown, with a brain (who knew where that had come from) that they'd squelched into a robotic shell and connected up to a similarly arranged net of wires in reverse of the 'hot-box' on the other end… It worked very well, three four-hour long sessions. Until the body on the robot overheated and cooked the brain inside it.
It also cooked the brain of the guy in the hot-box, but that was irrelevant. People at Aperture were all crazy enough to do that stuff, let them do it. Let them be the guinea pigs. But it had worked. Well enough that the operator insisted he could feel through the robotic hands, they'd been fitted with pressure and heat sensors, before those heat sensors melted. Hoyle expressed his belief, "it does have the potential to be applied to this project." After all, nerves worked better than wires. They didn't need robotics, they had clones.
"Where are they getting their raw materials from?" Genevieve asked, the whole thing sounding rather morbid to her. "I haven't seen any requests for it, that would be something I would hope my people here would send across my desk first."
"They've been using their in-house … collections team, for that. Wade mentioned, didn't he?" Hoyle said, "they have a much wider variety of samples than we do… than you do, here," he corrected himself with a wink.
"Oh! From that horrific bring your daughter to work day thing?" Genevieve said. Now that might be a legal disaster waiting to happen. She needed to get her law people on that, make sure that everything was covered. But Wade's name rang another bell in her mind. He had been fiddling with that crazy daughter of his own, she'd been unruly and apparently was a bit of a pyromaniac to boot … His project, Origin wasn't it? She could hardly keep track of what everyone was working on. There were so many different things she had to pay attention to. No one in this company could do it all.
No one… alone.
"You ever get the feeling that you need to be in two places at once?" Hoyle whispered, "I know I do." If he wasn't a mind-reader, she wasn't sure who could be. She decided that later on, she'd find out whether Hoyle had been tapped by Wade for that Origin project. And if he hadn't, to get him on it.
Genevieve pondered this whole development, and looked down at the yellowish-orange containers that supported quickly growing human tissues. "I think I should make some calls," Aristide said, putting on her professional mask. "District Attorney Hoyle, I do believe you're a man after my own heart. I'll have one cloned, and sent up to your estate."
More background info. I wanted to show how certain projects in this AU differ from the original universes.
Visit my journal for complete chapter links and credits.
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Visit my journal for complete chapter links and credits.
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© 2011 - 2024 lethe-gray
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Forgive me my dear friend but (being the dunce that I am, I had to read a mechwarrior novel three times just to understand the plot) I am terribly confused of the plot right now.