Harvest Moon

[troof_therry]

 

The first and worst sensation of waking up from cryosleep is the sensation that the innermost part of your sinuses is frozen shut. You can’t warm-up the brain enough to work after warming up the rest, since it has to tell blood to get flowing–having body temperature bloodless body parts just won’t do, I guess. If you can imagine that crispy feeling your nostrils get, walking outside on an extra cold day, and just extend that all the way into the back of your throat and also somehow in your eyes and front half of your skull, you’ll have a pretty good idea about what it was like for me to wake up today.

I have memories of one other occasion of cryosleep, waking up from the big jump out to this colony, Phosburg. I was barely conscious when they gave me a gun and a badge and an office, which was funny because I distinctly remember being trained to be a social worker. The fact that I was in that office this morning, coming out of that cold sleep funk, could only mean one thing: I am not the same person who was shipped out here in the first place.

“Sheriff Warsh, good morning and welcome to duty,” the computer says in a formal but upbeat way. I groan because my tongue is mostly frozen. “Stay still within the capsule until the warming process reaches completion.” It decided I was all the way warm in five minutes, about three hours before I was ready. After a hot coffee-like drink and a long time pulling on clothes the computer pulled out for me, I received the briefing.

“Last night, 4.26/10 Sol Year 3732, you were slain in the line of duty at 312 Northplace, Phosburg Township, Brimrock Exoplanet. Your previous life was five months old. Please investigate to limit excessive usage of the life restoration system. The laws we live by must be upheld. As colony sheriff, you have executive judgment of the situation and the authority to press any charges necessary by any force necessary.”

I learned a lot of surprising things at once this morning. We made clone imprints of my original memory back in 3581, which means that this colony has seen over a hundred years of development. Reassuring to know that, if I wanted to write a letter home to Earth or any of the waystations, my family and acquaintances won’t be there to receive it unless they’re also playing permanent sheriff somewhere. Of course, it took a hundred years to get here in the first place, so that was not new news. Having been killed yesterday was an uncomfortable revelation, but, at the time, I felt that was a problem for yesterday-me. The implication in being made sole member of a police force for a colony on the boundary of space was that the only help coming was yourself, and always too late–the clone machine only turns on when the life of the previous sheriff stops.

I was pretty rattled, though, by the tone of the computer message. It wasn’t able to tell me how I died the day before or who was involved, but it assumed I would leap in and administer justice in an investigation of my own death before even telling me what the weather was like today.

“The best thing about waking up today, and waking up here, in this job, is that nobody gets to tell me what to do,” I said to the computer, thumbing my nose at it as I adjusted my trousers and walked out of there, leaving my gun behind. If I had woken up in a better mood, I would have noticed the handwritten message right next to my gun that said “leave the gun behind.” It all worked out anyway.

*****

Colony expansion happened at the behest of companies looking for rare earth elements on exoplanets, among other resources. When companies chartered these expeditions, they did so with minimal oversight from any agency besides themselves. And in spite of the reassurances that people wouldn’t get left behind if some sort of merger or acquisition caused reshuffling of the company assets, that’s exactly what happened here.

“Technically we’re all the children’s children’s children of benched company resources” a grocer told me after I told him who I was and asked for an explanation of where and when I was. “They know they basically own us all, but the cost of moving us around to a new world now that they decided that this project wasn’t lucrative for them anymore is too much.”

“Sheesh,” I said.

“Right? And so they left us behind. We have access to very few company materials anymore, even their network. Your cloning tech is one of few original resources that still seems to be working just fine.”

“Really? Have you seen a lot of clones of me?”

“Ha. You don’t know yet. That’s pretty cool.” But then she had to help another customer.

I don’t like the idea of dying, but I wasn’t feeling particularly threatened by the neighborhood. In the couple days of memory I had from my original self, there wasn’t anything here. Everybody came to Brimrock all at once, and to hear her tell it, nobody who wasn’t a quadrillion dollar company had apparently managed to work out an alternative way of producing cheap space travel that wasn’t fiercely accused of infringing upon the property rights of those already in space. 

Some of the last communications this colony received were messages celebrating court victories. The last communication was a general information thread, no more than a couple of pages long, suggesting things that could and could not be done with company property in the event of a long wait for resource utilization. “For a laugh,” a coffee-like shop worker said, “you should see what they said about sheriffs.”

I was pleased to see that the metal and other materials from our dropships were repurposed into a pretty cute town. Phosburg wasn’t large, only a few thousand people from a couple hundred that we started with, and they all lived close together in the center part of town. Several apartments with multiple floors surrounded downtown and, as far as I could tell, nobody lived in their own house. They had brick buildings and sidewalks and no means of transportation except for little motored bikes that sometimes had baskets attached.

“We were building according to company code,” said the owner of a sandwich restaurant. “The first foremen passed away from mining health issues before they could really lay claim to the nicer places they were supposed to get, and everybody after mutually decided that maybe we should act like this town is a family thing.”

“Wow, that sounds so nice,” I said.

“Yeah, except you don't really have a place in it. We have our own system of governance now that doesn’t include shooting or jailing anybody, and you’re the only thing that keeps coming back from the time before.”

“Do you think someone is killing me off to try and cut off that connection? Maybe they want to deplete the clone resources?”

“I’m going to say that it’s not really my place to say, but you’ll figure it out by about noon. Don’t worry yourself about it, sheriff man.” 

“Well could you tell me if I’m gonna die today, at least?”

“I don’t think so. I mean we never know. We have doctors here who are able to do a lot of the medicine that came before us, but sometimes you just eat something bad and get sick and that’s that, you know? This ain’t heaven. It’s hard sometimes here.”

The sandwiches are pretty delicious, though.

*****

Besides Phosburg itself, Brimrock was a small planet that was covered in rich soil, red rocky hills, sizable bodies of almost potable water, and plants that were all brought over and quickly planted to make a cool, shady forest. Only a native algae-like growth was responsible for a lot of the breathable air. Patches of that bluish growth added bursts of color beyond the forest to the red desert.

At noon, a bell gonged with a calm tone muffled by the buildings and the trees, and a man in a wide hat stepped out into the town square. 

“You look like someone I’m supposed to talk to,” I said.

“Sure am.” He was just about the oldest person I had seen yet. Maybe 80 or 90 years old, but people can live a really long time. For a colony world, I wouldn’t guess him to be older than 120.

“Guessing you know what I’m going to ask.”

“Sure do,” he said, with a wide grin.

“Guessing you’ve had this exact conversation before.”

“Sure have. About once every few months if we’re lucky. Name’s Thad. I’ve come to talk to you about your forebears.”

“Am I in danger, talking to you about this?”

“No sir. But I reckon that, if you follow me to the graveyard, I’ll be able to give you concern and then solace in equal measure.”

“Not really cozy with that. The graveyard?”

“See? I knew you wouldn’t like that idea. Like I knew you’d go shopping, get some coffee, get a sandwich, and then sit on that bench waiting for me. Just go along with it. I mean you probably got the pimento sandwich right?”

“I had a Cuban sandwich.”

“Oh, I see that not every sheriff is the same!” he guffawed. “Listen, it’s going to be alright. Just some things are easier to see to understand.”

We went to the graveyard beyond the edge of the trees, but before we stepped past the clearing and looked at it, he showed me a plaque commemorating everyone who had passed away before. 

“I don’t see my name on this.”

“It’s right here!” he said, pointing to the bottom right margin of the plaque. 

“Thom Warsh,” I read, and then I counted up 86 tally marks.

“That’s a lot!” I sputtered. “I die like every couple of years!”

“And I said I come out to talk to you, a new you, a few times a year. What do you make of that math, sheriff man?” He smirked.

“Uh, I have no idea,” I said.

“Look.” And he pushed the last stand of tree branches away to reveal a vast swath of farmland. All up and down the hills, different kinds of crops were being grown. There were a few buildings scattered about and plenty of men and… more men at work.

“That’s you. That’s you. That’s also you. That guy? That’s you!” he laughed, pointing at each farmer that I could see.

“I don’t understand. Does nobody in town want to do this work? Isn’t it technically a violation of clone law to have multiple versions of the same person at play simultaneously?” 

“Yessir!” he said, and then he waved to a man who was definitely an older version of me. “This fella will talk to you about this situation. I’m going to take the rest of the day off, I’m getting too old for this even though your face is so funny every time.”

And he left me to myself.

*****

I like the way I look when I’m about forty years older. Great beard, great hair. Goodness, I’m glad that I don’t have to look forward to going bald.

“Basically, you’re the last person who remembers what life was like before we lived in this weird bubble world,” Older Me said. “Also the algae that grows on this planet helps prevent hair loss for some reason, in case you’re thinking that you look good when you’re older. Yes, but not without taking care of yourself.”

I sighed. All of the sheriffs, all me, live in cottages surrounding the farmland. We do go into town, but try to only go one at a time so as not to overwhelm the locals. There are about a hundred versions of me working out here as farmers. Every time the population in town grows beyond a certain point, we trick the computer into printing a new version of me to help out on the farm. 

“What about the sheriff job? Do they ever need someone in town to be a cop?”

“Listen, what did you think of what the computer said to you this morning–that you had been ‘slain in the line of duty’?” 

“It didn’t sit right with me that the first thing I was asked to do as sheriff is go out there thinking that someone had done something wrong and needed to be punished for it.”

“First of all, glad to hear that. Not every clone coming out thinks exactly the same thing, but there are a lot of commonalities. Second, have you considered that every colony world that our company started also started with a single sheriff? And that when we read news of those other sheriffs, they always seemed to have some kind of justice that they were administering?”

“Was there more news besides what we came in with?”

“Only a little,” he said. “But it sorta confirms the same mentality–the sheriff was the one who was supposed to uphold the kind of peace that we see in Phosburg now, but sheriffs who play active roles in being justiciar wind up causing a feedback loop that makes things worse. Admittedly, you also tried being the ‘lawman’ when you first came here. It didn’t go well, and it left you with a lot of regrets.”

“So we’re just farmers, then?”

“Like I said, we’re the only ones that remember how things were. That, if a few people have the power, they make all the rules benefit themselves. So we represent a handful of people that luckily all have the same mindset, that have the power to assert whether or not people in the town are trying to acquire material power over each other. If need be, we can correct that and make sure people in town respect each other.”

“Do you vote against them like you’re all different people, or how do you guarantee the people in town hear you and respect what you perceive as a power imbalance?” I asked.

“Well, our population represents two guarantees. One, that we’re significant enough a force that we could coerce change if needed. Two, that we’re utterly disinclined towards violence. So we work our asses off as farmers to ensure that people believe the second part of this. People from town are more than welcome to work with us, mostly to understand that we’re gentle folk, but we usually appoint one person to be the representative.”

“Is that me?”

“Heavens no, you have no idea how to talk to people yet. Honestly, that’s probably the reason they made you a sheriff instead of a social worker. Spend some time here literally talking to yourself, though, and you’ll start to understand how to talk to other people better.”

I was struggling a little bit. The political gesturing inherent in having hundreds of me versus several thousand people in town was overwhelming.

“I’m sorry, but how do we know this system is working? Like how do we know that we’re not making something more messed up than what we came from? Or like, if sheriffs are supposed to ensure people behave a certain way through violence, how is our own system really that different?”

He laughed. “We are making this up as we go along! There is no way we could repeat this experiment, and it definitely is a raw deal that we have to be some kind of sacrifice for the greater good when we have absolutely nothing to support that this all works or will keep working!”

“But,” he leaned in, “wouldn’t you rather live in a world where you need a plow more than a gun?”

Comments

[drippedonpaper]

Wow, I really like this. Very creative and, in a way, very much relating to our lives today. We have people disagreeing and way too many guns.

I really like this story. Are you going to continue the idea? It could make a great book!

[troof_therry]

I really liked writing this one! It's definitely a one off even though cool things could happen here.

Thanks for reading and your nice comment!

[banana_galaxy]

This has got to be such a mindf*** to wake up to if it were real! I support the ending, but I'm not sure how I'd cope with the reality of being cloned this much.

[roina_arwen]

Very interesting idea, and I like that each clone has its own idiosyncrasies.

[erulissedances]

I loved the premise here - the idea that the sheriff continued to be cloned again and again. It must be strange to see yourself replicated again and again.

- Erulisse (one L)

[dsrmousey]

This was very cool and a great premise. Peace~~~Desiree

[gunwithoutmusic]

This was such a cool idea, and I was not expecting the ending at all! Here I was ready for a hard-boiled sci-fi detective thing and you completely flipped the script on me and I loved it! :) Good job!

[ofearthandstars]

Oh I *love* this and the message behind it! They have defunded the sheriffs and reemployed them for good!

[d0gs.livejournal.com]

The creativity in this is wonderful!