Downloading Teaching Love to a Clone

Mankind’s war with visitors from a different world once left the human population reeling, but scientific advances soon allowed them the unique opportunity to preserve their species through the act of cloning. By sending the clones out to fight in the war, humanity was able to rebound, but none gave a thought to what would happen if a clone should learn to think of itself as anything but a weapon. For Corbin, the night janitor in the cloning lab where generations of clones have been created, there is no longer anything jarring about seeing a partially formed clone move for the first time within the confines of it’s gestation chamber. He keeps his head down and his music up, trying to survive the war in the hopes that there might be something left of the world when the fighting is through. That all changes when he realizes that one of the latest clones, Ronin, is actually responding to the music. Doing what he swore he’d never do, Corbin becomes invested in Ronin’s development, communicates back and forth to him through the glass, and later, teaches him about what he is, why he was created, and so much more. Beneath the backdrop of politics, questionable ethics, and the tail end of war, Corbin sets out to do something that the generals, the scientists, and even those who offered their genetic material to the cloning process never considered possible: Teaching a Clone to Love.