Memory #7

[identityformations]

Notable Neutral - Growing up montage: clone culture, vid tutorials, surgeries (OS, MD 345, 348, 596)

Regained - Game #76, The Green Knight, envelopes with fun challenges

Montaaaaaage time! This is easy to place in his mental timeline, at least, since this is pretty much his childhood until age 14. Kind of like Ven's recent-ish montage memory, I'm going to do this more as a summary of What He Learned than anything else.

So he was raised in a corporate clone creche, with a batch of fellow clones of varying ages. Group child-care, by no means miserable, but very clinical. We know from unrelated scenes that the clones are kept in separate dormitories for boys and girls, with probably a two-thirds majority of boys, though they are allowed to mingle. They are well cared for physically and kept in excellent health--in general. Mark wasn't, we'll get to that later.

This is a conversation excerpt during Mark's planning for the clone-rescue fiasco, which I am including for major infodump:

"I want to make it a night drop [...] because that's the one time all the clones are together in a small area. In the day they're all spread out in the exercise and play areas, the swimming pool and what-not."

"And classrooms?"

"No, not exactly. They don't teach 'em much beyond the minimum necessary for socialization. If a clone can count to twenty and read signs, that's all they need. Throw-away brains." That had been the other way he'd known he was different from the rest. A real human tutor had introduced him to a vast array of virtual learning programs. He'd lost himself for days at a time in the computer's patient praise. [...] "The clones pick up a surprising amount of information despite it all, though. A lot from their holovid games. Bright kids. Damn few of those clones have stupid progenitors [....] By the way, make sure the troops realize they won't look exactly like kids. We're taking them in their last year of development. They're mostly ten or eleven years old, but due to the growth accelerators they will appear to have the bodies of late teenagers."

"Gawky?"

"Not really. They get great physical conditioning. Healthy as hell. That's the whole point of not just growing them in a vat till transplant time."

"Do they...know? Know what's going to happen to them?" [...]

"THey're not told, no. They're told all kinds of lies, variously. They're told they're in a special school, for security reasons, to save them from some exotic danger. That they're all some kind of prince or princess, or rich man's heir, or military scion, and someday very soon their parents or their aunts or their ambassadors are going to come and take them away to some glamorous future...and then, of course, at last some smiling person comes, and calls them away from their playmates, and tells them that today is the day, and they run..." he stopped, swallowed "and snatch up their things, and brag to their friends..."

It's mentioned in there that getting access to a proper education is one of the ways he knew he was different: this is the other.

When the other clones went to the doctors for treatment they came back stronger, healthier, growing ever-faster. Every time he went, and he went often, their painful treatments seemed to make him sicklier, more stunted. The braces they put on his bones, neck, back, never seemed to help much. [...]

When he first began to suspect the true purpose of his fellow clones, for rumors passed among the children in ways even their careful handlers could not totally control, his growing somatic deformations brought him silent suppressed joy. Surely they could not use this body for a brain transplant. He might be discarded--he might yet escape his pleasant, smiling jailer-servants...

He's been subject to pretty much constant physical trauma since early childhood--it got worse from there, in fact--but those doctor's visits haunted him a bit, as we notice later when he visits Aral in the hospital:

For one thing, the place smelled entirely too much like the clinics that had helped make a torment of his Jacksonian youth; he found himself remembering details of early surgeries and treatments that he thought he'd altogether forgotten.

Unrelated to his major medical trauma, there's also the note here that he'd remember the childhood friend from his first memory: a fellow clone who he secretly taught to read.

This is also a memory where I'm going to have to make a headcanon call: we know that clones have names that they're raised by, they're not designated by number or anything. Reasonable human socialization for maximum health, after all. We also know that Galen called him Miles, never gave him a name of his own. It's never indicated whether Galen told the company to raise him as Miles when he first ordered him cooked up, but I think it's a reasonable assumption that he did. The other possibility would be coming up with some headcanon childhood name, and that complicates a lot of stuff. So: in this memory, his name is Miles. He was raised as Miles.

+ Clones in my world were raised like kids before being used as transplant bodies, that's almost worse.
+ I'm pretty sure I was never intended to be a transplant body, but I was raised with a batch of clones who were.
+ I was raised under the name Miles. Do I even have a name of my own?
+ My deformities aren't genetic, what the hell?
+15 aversion to pretty lies and stepford smiling.
+20 bookishness.
+20 accustomed to pain from early childhood.
+20 iatrophobia.