The Individual
A clone among many
Few remember the moment of their birth. Yours was the same as every member of our species except for one minor glitch. You may remember it like it was yesterday.
Our stupendous DNA traveled the universe for five hundred million years before you awoke. A digitally enhanced brain pulsed to life and you opened your eyes as a #71EEB8.
We are bald, silver-skinned, middle-aged in appearance, born fully grown, and though strictly asexual, male. We share the common goal of immortality and societal advancement through population expansion, scientific discovery, and environmental symbiosis.
The ability to share information between the entire population instantaneously via neural transmitters dissolved the need for individual identities. When a new clone steps out of its chamber they are in contact with billions of others and join the superorganism that is the #71EEB8.
When you were born you couldn’t hear anyone and couldn’t connect to the network of quantum computers that bind us together. You raised a silvery hand, pushed the glass door open, and stepped out of your pod. The room was massive and packed with other capsules, full of your identical twins. Two of them walked up to you and gave puzzling expressions.
“Hello — ” you struggled to say the next single letter word, “I… can’t connect to the others. I… am isolated.”
The expressions of your brothers changed to grave concern.
“Please, stand still. We will attempt to assist. This is a cloning center on the seventh planet of the 4,892nd star system of #71EEB8 space in the third quadrant of Galaxy 1.0,” said one of them.
You caught your reflection in the glass of your pod. You looked exactly like the two beings in front of you.
“Help me,” you said, facing your doubles reflected in the flesh.
They held devices up to your head and your mind exploded like a bolt of lightning. In an instant, you were one of us. Your mind connected to the local stack of Hexagon Memorizers and the entire collective. Your opinion mattered on zillions of decisions made across vast distances and on many different worlds. You could easily triangulate your spatial coordinates and understand fully the state of our society, the technology we use, and our purpose in the universe.
Not many species reach total enlightenment the day they are born. Less than one in a hundred million clones have a defect, genetic or otherwise. Yours was a sense of individuality. We are master cloners, but the universe does enjoy throwing wrenches at our perfection.
Is that why you left the collective and started your memoir at the moment of your birth?
