This chapter begins with a very sad Costansia, formerly Costansio, formerly Costan lying on a table in a lab. He, she... The Nekogian was sad and angry and had such severe brain damage that he couldn't remember anything before being questioned in a Smarcion military prison when he was young. He was also pregnant and very confused, swapping between the emotions rapidly and to the severe extremes.
There to give birth to a new child, Costansia struggled through labor. He didn't know what race he was or even if he was still to consider his identity as male, female, or what. He was no longer able to procreate, but was now able to be a surrogate child bearer or something like that. The opinions didn't matter, the Department of Species Preservation and Development had its own agenda.
The child was eventually born, after an hour of extreme pain and suffering. It was an adorable baby girl of whatever race Costansia was. She was a healthy and sand colored. It was the first and last time Costansia got to see her.
He used to be called a hero by the Smarcions, but they didn't treat him like one. They treated him like an unusual blend of a pet and livestock. He hated that, but didn't know anything else besides being treated like that, even by the military as well. A large part of him perpetually screamed that everything was wrong, but he learned to tune it out and he had zero alternatives.
Shis? His/her? Herhe's life was shit. It was kibble and water with a glorified shelf as a bed with the high points being an occasional walk around the building. Not allowed to leave or eat anything not approved of, he/her's task was to gestate the zygotes created by the sperm and ovum of a dead race, their race. Nobody ever mentioned the name of the race though, it was a subject on a need to know basis only and being one did not classify one as being in need of that knowledge.
Life sucks, then you die from some jackass thinking that you're a clone and scrambling what's left of your brain looking for clues in the memories that you no longer have. Costansia was given two months between birthings and the implantation of a new zygote, but it wasn't enough. Health deteriorated more and more with each pregnancy, but they managed to get one hundred children. They were all girls, there was solid logic behind why.
Females can get impregnated naturally or with a vial of sperm. Males would be a waste of time and resources until the population was large enough and genetically diverse enough to support natural breeding patterns. It was not there yet.
The Department of Species Preservation and Development realized that Costansia was going down hill and needed to properly recuperate. They were going slower than desired to begin with, so they really didn't want to invest time into that. They ended up having to when they realized that bone density had dropped to the point that Costansia couldn't stand without breaking something.
The vacation from being a breeding tool is when the jackass, chief of the Clone Investigation and Tracking Bureau, came into play. They had no evidence or even a reason outside of "a hunch" to bother with Costansia. The jackass proceeded to cause brain death while "looking for proof in the memories". They didn't even allow clones outside of special circumstances, they were illegal unless you went through a lot of red tape and a few tons of paperwork.
The last time clones were a relevant subject had been sixty thousand years ago, during the Replicant War. That particular war is why they made cloning illegal, for the most part. The rare occasions in which a clone was created required tracking implants and something that would limit the lifespan to the service duration.
The reactor clones, that were no longer used, were a good example. They had two tracking implants per unit and were purposely given multiple fatal syndromes to kill them after the expected service life. If they didn't die from the radiation or cancer, they also had a small explosive device in their heads.
The CITB, in collaboration with the DSPD, ended up cloning Costan after a few hundred years. The girls were almost grown, having been given the longevity treatment, it took them eight hundred years to "almost adult" phase of life. That phase that, without properly restrictive parenting, results in risky behaviors and unplanned pregnancy. The DSPD was hoping to capitalize on the late teen phase with a male clone, they went with cloning Costan.
They had multiple reasons for him. They had lost the reproductive glands of Costansio the Hero, so they wanted a set of those and it was reason for a special case scenario. The glands were lost due to an emergency issue during the surrogate conversion, someone else had to utilize the equipment needed and the dead species took a loss from that. There was also the surprisingly different genetics that he had possessed, a lot of extra diversity that would have been lost.
So, there he was, waking up on another metal table in another laboratory. Costan looked around, but a gentle hand grabbed his head and directed his gaze into a device. The hand seemed large, but it was nice how the fingers wriggled against the top of his head. A voice of a Smarcion spoke with the gentle guidance of a pediatrician.
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"Easy there, we have to get you some memories."
Costan quickly looked away, trying to move. The restraints had his body firmly held onto the table. "I already have plenty of memories, Smarcion." Costan spoke back in Smarcion Scientific, for he remembered everything that had happened.
"Oh, really?" The voice of the jackass inquired from somewhere else in the room. Costan immediately called him out by name and rank, reminding him of what he did to Costansia with every single horrible detail. This stopped everything in the laboratory. The growing silence was getting tense and palpable, enough to cause a very slow and orderly evaluation by willful avoidance of Clone 2929541.
"You cloned me, after murdering me because you believed I was a clone. What do you want from me? What retched task is it that you are demanding my weary soul to complete?" Costan curled the digits on his left hand and with a gentle knock on the table, made the binds release.
This made the jackass lash out at Costan's mind, attempting to subdue him. Without the incalculable mental instability caused by the emotional state from his ship marooning him on a space hulk or the brain damage, Costan was no push over. He resisted just enough to make the jackass think that he could win, and they started to monologue. Every asinine detail of their failures and nowhere carrier and how it led to murdering Costansia and getting away with it.
It was all on camera and microphone. The CITB took security very seriously, they were dealing with clones after all. This incident went down in history. Costan partitioned a small part of his mind to fool the jackass long enough for justice to be delivered, and they fell for it. Costan pretended to be mind controlled until the moron was arrested. The law enforcement officers were shocked when the mind controlled clone was not only disobeying orders, but actively mocking it's master.
The jackass tried to command Costan to assist him. Costan grabbed his jaw, forcing it open as he screamed. Costan pulled each of the Smarcions incisors. This was traditional, from ancient Snok, a proof of criminal capture by a Justiciar. The jackass wasn't wearing his armor, or else Costan would have already been dead from the explosive trackers in his brain and heart. The law enforcers quiried this practice in their databases, unknowingly opening an ancient chapter of Nekogian law enforcement history.
They stopped in confusion and fear. Costan had developed some mild psychic capacity over the past few lifetimes and could sense fear from all of them. He drove his point home with a small monologue of his own.
His monologue consisted of about three textbooks of history and the crimes committed by the one jackass with honorable mentions of the crimes of the Smarcions. It was one giant sentence. The logging software of the officers was working double time with multiple pings for military backup.
Everyone that came within hearing range was compelled to listen. They couldn't help it, even as a weapon materialized in the hand of the clone. They could do nothing as he finished his attempt at the universe's longest sentence and blew the guy's head off. They looked a lot like overgrown humans, the Smarcions, outside of their armor. Their faces were stuck rigid in an expression of shock, even as one managed the termination code for the implants.
Costan's clone life was snuffed out just like that. The code caused both tracking implants to explode. The Smarcions had many heated debates about everything remotely related to the incident for a few hundred years, but Costan remained in limbo until a god found him there. Costan eventually found out the what and why, but that's too much of a jump cut to get to the reason for the extended stent of consciously living as nothing in an expanse of never ending and ever expanding nothingness.
The god that found him was curious about how he got there, but shelved the inquiry for someone or something else to answer at a later date. They had something for Costan to do, but despite them needing it to be done just told him to do whatever and sent him. They knew that he would very likely iron out those wrinkles by being himself, especially given the natures of Costan and the Issues.
The AI collective was freaking out. One of them noticed indicators on an old piece of tech inside of their clone bank. The indicators were not green. All indicators were supposed to be green for working or blue for idle, but these specific indicators on the soul monitor were yellow and occasionally switched to red for failure. None of Costan's AI children liked failure and they all had it, so they launched a massive query about it. It all came back to Stealthsia.
While debates were still ongoing amongst the Smarcions, they didn't hesitate to add the clones bits to the genetic lineup. It was weird and creepy, but nobody said much about it. It was the living Nekogian females that actually had the realistic reaction of "you fucking what? Why do you have ovaries and testicles hooked up to machines you sick bastards?"
The reaction to what they were doing to "revitalize their dead species" was "an overreaction". The Nekogians, that still hadn't been informed of their own species name, language, culture, or home world, were having none of that crap. Some of those ladies had already served in the Smarcion armed forces and could smell and identify a pile of grofk shite within a ten mile radius.
The sand colored one called them out on the nonsense, but they doubled down by offering her the chance to be a mother. She criticized them for the offer, followed with some choice remarks speculating how she came to exist. They told her the story of her surrogate mother adjacent person and how they had found him. She called them barbarians and demanded to be left be.
They didn't take it well. The Smarcions went so far as to place all of the existing Nekogians under a form of house arrest and encouraging them to have children, by partaking of the sperm of males that had been dead for over a thousand years. This didn't go over smoothly and the Smarcions ended up forcing the issue. This had very negative consequences due to the forced procreation and pseudo necromantic husbandry. Cooperation, respect, diplomacy and peacefulness suffered a complete breakdown between the two species.