3-2 CLONES

The Halls of Healing are filled and an aura of pain and suffering suffuses the air. It’s not just the clone soldiers here; while many of the Jedi strike force were slain, many more were grievously injured and are now under the care of the healers. MedCorps personnel and Jedi healers rush around the room, tending to Jedi and clones alike. You even see Chief Healer Che barking commands to younger healers while also tending to several of the injured on her own. The scent of bacta and alcohol is thick, thankfully overpowering the stench of blood. However, it does nothing to stop the moans of pain that echo through the halls.

It’s not a battlefield med-center, but the vast number of casualties make it seem almost like it. It’s a chaotic mess, only barely held together by the elder Masters here.

Master Corr is in the same boat as most of the other healers. She too, is responsible for several patients while also responsible for supervising a handful of healers, nurses, and droids — and, least of all, you.

You do your best to stay out of the way of the healers, taking advantage of your small stature to allow others to squeeze past, but that’s not all you do. Vazin’s training, though rushed, pays off. You act as an extension of Master Corr, running errands for her, such as fetching supplies or delivering messages, and finishing documentation of the patients, making sure to keep your eye out of sight of anyone. On rare occasions, you’re even asked to use Stanch and Purification!

It’s not fun though. It’s a terrible, exhausting job even when you’re merely the errand girl. The atmosphere weighs heavy on you especially. Your sight, your ears, your mind are assaulted by the suffering of many — some of whom you recognize. Masters and Knights lie in beds or cots, bleeding from varying wounds. Some are riddled with holes, others are hideously burned, several others are missing limbs entirely. All of them are in tremendous pain.

Yet, somehow you’re able to keep going. You want to shut them all out of your mind, but something stops you: the faint flame of compassion. How can you empathize with your patients without it? How can you do it without keeping your mind open to their suffering? And, even if you close off your telepathic sense, you cannot stop all your other senses from flooding you anyways.

Every time you finish up with one patient, you are immediately directed to the next. There’s always so much to do. Perhaps that’s a good thing. It keeps you from dwelling too long on the suffering of each patient — the next simply driving out the thoughts for the previous. Perhaps that’s a sad thing too.

“How do you do it?” you ask Master Corr one time. “How do you keep going? There’s just so much… so much pain. I have compassion, but how do I hold onto it when all I want to do is shut myself away?”

As busy as she is, she doesn’t have the time to turn to you. Her words are warm though, filled with wisdom and emotion. “Xena, I do shut myself away. At least, a small part of myself. You must be clinical, but also compassionate. After all, it’s from that compassion that you can draw the power to heal.”

She places her hands on the stump of a patient’s leg whilst another healer holds the patient in a healing trance. As she concentrates, you can see the rictus of pain lessen in the patient’s face, then disappear.

“It’s a balancing act, Xena. You cannot look away from the patient — how would you know what’s wrong? But, you must detach yourself. You cannot internalize their pain. It is their burden. Taking it onto yourself is not worth the effort as it will prevent you from helping others too. No, what a healer must do is slowly ease that pain away. Remove it from the patient and cast it aside. That way, it is nobody’s burden in the end. Do you see what I’m getting at?”

You think for a moment, then nod. “Yeah. I think so, but it’s really hard to stay detached.”

“It’s what you’ve been training for your whole life, Xena. Emotional control. Detachment while remaining compassionate. This is your time to put that into practice. Take the patient’s pain away, but through your detachment you will not take it upon yourself to bear it instead. Be the healer. Help them.”

As Corr’s operation finishes, you turn to the side and lift up your headband, then scrawl down the patient’s name, injuries, and other details onto the datapad. You then mark them as “seen to by Master Corr” with the date and time, then add a few more details about the operation and the patient’s current status. A second later, it’s all uploaded to the MedCorps’ data storage and you can move on.

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“Master Corr, it’s not just the pain though. You’re removing the source of the pain.”

“Yes, that’s the idea. Good observation. It’s very difficult to take away a patient’s current pain, but you can cure what ails them. Attacking the symptoms is poor practice in my opinion. And, there’s already plenty of ways to deal with pain, no matter how debilitating it is at the moment. That’s my mindset, at least. Others may disagree.”

“So, there is a way to actually remove the pain?”

“Yes, there are techniques to lift it up and away for brief moments, allowing the patient, who may or may not be the user, to get some needed rest. However, I find that if they’re not properly treated in the time between uses of techniques, the result is the patient feeling like they were injured twice over. Nobody likes that.”

“I understand.”

There’s no physical division between the section for clones and the section for Jedi. There’s simply a point where there are no more wounded Jedi, and instead there are clones. The two of you approach this point over time, having worked your way through the Jedi under Master Corr’s purview. It’s not that the clones have a lesser prioritization, though. Other healers have been through, or are working on, the clones at the moment. Master Corr was simply assigned to work on Jedi first.

As you finish taking down the details of the last Jedi Master Corr worked on, you surreptitiously look down the line of clone soldiers, most of whom are anesthetized and unconscious. They’re… truly clones. They’re identical in appearance, with only slight variations to muscle tone and mass. You’re not sure how exactly they were grown or raised, but the fact that they’re all so similar shows that they’ve probably all been given the same type of food, and the same training regimen.

It's a real army. It’s an army of replicae.

You feel a sense of unease as you turn toward the first clone. It’s unnatural, what has been done here — what has been done to them. Messing about with genetics is one thing, creating copies of someone using their genes is another.

“Xena, come on.”

You look up, realizing you’ve been standing there, staring at the clone for far too long. Master Corr beckons to you so you hustle over to start helping out. The man’s arms are set in casts, apparently having broken both of them doing something. What’s worse, however, is that he’s also missing a good chunk of his torso and there’s apparently shrapnel spread throughout his internal organs. He’s lucky that he didn’t immediately bleed out on the battlefield, and even more so that he has survived long enough to be given care by healers here. Master Corr will sort him out soon.

But, the more you look at him, the more your feeling of unease grows. Perhaps he isn’t lucky. The use of replicae is unnatural, and reality will not stand for it. The Warp will not like it. Perhaps these men are not so lucky after all.

Abhumans, they are. Abhumans in a very small sense of the word. They’re not beset with mutations, so perhaps the technology used for this is highly advanced, yet they’re not truly human at the same time. Even so, they are people. Master Corr treats them like people. You can see that they’re people, having souls and psyches like anyone else. The Force curls around them, embracing them; they’re not rejected.

You just can’t shake the feeling that something will go wrong. There is a tragedy brewing, if not already made. And, only a minute later, you’re proven right.

“What?!” Master Corr cries. The MedCorps member who delivered the news shakes, not with fear and Corr’s wrath, but with equal rage. These soldiers, while recognized as the new Grand Army of the Republic, are no better than slaves in the eyes of the Galaxy. Unpaid. No rights. An army bred for war with no hopes and dreams beyond that.

You silently shake your head. It’s not good. You know it’s not good at all, but it’s par for the course. Misfortune at their conception. An atrocity with no clear cause.

What can you do, though? Is this something you can really accept? Is this something the Jedi Order can accept?

The public apparently already has.

A commotion at the entrance to the Halls of Healing distracts you, drawing your attention away from the poor trooper in the bed and the library of curses building up in Master Corr’s mind. Master Corr turns away from the MedCorps member, gazing over to the growing mess.

“Xena, would you like to go check that out for me? It could be nothing, or it could be important. On the other hand, I could use your help here while I extract the shrapnel. Your Stanch and Purification would be helpful.”