2327
More communist space lesbians below the cut!!
How much we have changed since then, my dear! I suppose that is why it hurts to look too far into your own past--it is like seeing a stranger's face in your own mirror.
She is so little like you, that girl, and yet she has your eyes. Even then she has your eyes.
The world Mary 37 had managed to lose herself in would not be so alien to you. After a thousand years, of course, all the original buildings have crumbled, but over the course of the civil renaissance we erected plenty of tower blocks and offices and warehouses to take their place. With exceptions; on a planet where the population is painstakingly maintained at a stable one and a half billion, we have no need to stack our skyscrapers so high. You could even be forgiven for mistaking our cities for previous-era versions of your own, since our architecture prioritises function over form.
You must understand we have fewer resources to waste on aesthetics, and besides, we have no need for beauty, or so the Party would like us to say. Fideles potius quam pulchra--although everyone knows that even the soldier castes are engineered as much for their seamless looks as for their loyalty to the state.
Mary was native to earth, where I was based at the time. I had a strange hunch that she was within a thousand or so miles of the office I was sitting in. As usual, though, my suboordinates were busy letting themselves be fooled into whatever our mark wanted us to think. Within two minutes of the investigation opening, the newest of my girls approached me looking smug.
She was a 29-Lindow--the newest version of my genetic line, and she had my looks right down to the ambiguous mid-brown hair. Rebeca, if perhaps you found it intimidating to see younger, more qualified women stepping onto the bottom of your own career ladder, imagine how you might feel if they were clones of you. Fortunately, whatever had made me successful had not been copied through to her.
"Mary's public transport record shows she took the tube to Johannesburg spaceport three hours before her procedure was due," she said. "We need to contact both departures since then and order them to turn around."
"We" was a euphemism for "you"--Alice 29 did not have the authority to order anyone around. "Have you contacted the landside transport authorities for the security imaging from Mary's tube carriage?" I said, without looking away from my screen. I could hear Alice's confusion in her silence.
"Is that important, comrade?" she asked after a second.
"Undoubtedly. Whoever was travelling under Mary's identity card will also need to be apprehended, since impersonating one's own clone is a crime against the state." I spoke slowly, as if to a child. I could tell without looking that this annoyed Alice a lot.
"Respectfully, comrade"--I hate the kind of people who call you 'comrade' all the time, did I mention that?--"you are making a rather large assumption. We have conclusive proof that Mary intended to board a--"
I turned around. "No, you have conclusive proof that Mary wants us to spend the next week waiting for two long-distance space transports to receive a message, respond, turn around, touch back down, and tell us that there is nobody of that particular registration aboard, legitimately or otherwise. Much as I hate to criticise the glorious mechanisms of the state, it is not difficult for someone as well-engineered as Mary to obscure their own or someone else's identity if they are trying hard enough."
Alice was blustering. "You can't use someone else's identity card," she said. "All the manuals say so. If it doesn't match your internal chip it won't let you use it."
"Believe me when I say there are ways of getting round that problem." I was wasting time and I knew it; I turned back to my desk. "I'll have someone contact the spacefaring authorities, to be certain, but you will contact tube security and go through their scanner records with a fine-toothed comb to try and find out exactly who it was that managed to pass themselves off as Mary and Unidentified Baby Bechdel. That's your job now. Get cracking."
There is a certain habit (I did not notice until I started living without it) peculiar to people who live under our kind of government. Even as Alice was walking away I was examining the language I had used for signs of disloyalty. "Getting round that problem"--could I have been implying that ID card exclusivity was a problem? Alice was safe, since new versions rarely ever had their loyalty questioned. But I was an old version now, and of all the castes, we Archivists--Information Scientists is the correct term, which nobody uses--are said to be the most likely to defect. Aside from the Omega caste, of course, but anything said about them is naturally hearsay. I had good reason to be worried, although I did not know that yet.
How much we have changed since then, my dear! I suppose that is why it hurts to look too far into your own past--it is like seeing a stranger's face in your own mirror.
She is so little like you, that girl, and yet she has your eyes. Even then she has your eyes.
The world Mary 37 had managed to lose herself in would not be so alien to you. After a thousand years, of course, all the original buildings have crumbled, but over the course of the civil renaissance we erected plenty of tower blocks and offices and warehouses to take their place. With exceptions; on a planet where the population is painstakingly maintained at a stable one and a half billion, we have no need to stack our skyscrapers so high. You could even be forgiven for mistaking our cities for previous-era versions of your own, since our architecture prioritises function over form.
You must understand we have fewer resources to waste on aesthetics, and besides, we have no need for beauty, or so the Party would like us to say. Fideles potius quam pulchra--although everyone knows that even the soldier castes are engineered as much for their seamless looks as for their loyalty to the state.
Mary was native to earth, where I was based at the time. I had a strange hunch that she was within a thousand or so miles of the office I was sitting in. As usual, though, my suboordinates were busy letting themselves be fooled into whatever our mark wanted us to think. Within two minutes of the investigation opening, the newest of my girls approached me looking smug.
She was a 29-Lindow--the newest version of my genetic line, and she had my looks right down to the ambiguous mid-brown hair. Rebeca, if perhaps you found it intimidating to see younger, more qualified women stepping onto the bottom of your own career ladder, imagine how you might feel if they were clones of you. Fortunately, whatever had made me successful had not been copied through to her.
"Mary's public transport record shows she took the tube to Johannesburg spaceport three hours before her procedure was due," she said. "We need to contact both departures since then and order them to turn around."
"We" was a euphemism for "you"--Alice 29 did not have the authority to order anyone around. "Have you contacted the landside transport authorities for the security imaging from Mary's tube carriage?" I said, without looking away from my screen. I could hear Alice's confusion in her silence.
"Is that important, comrade?" she asked after a second.
"Undoubtedly. Whoever was travelling under Mary's identity card will also need to be apprehended, since impersonating one's own clone is a crime against the state." I spoke slowly, as if to a child. I could tell without looking that this annoyed Alice a lot.
"Respectfully, comrade"--I hate the kind of people who call you 'comrade' all the time, did I mention that?--"you are making a rather large assumption. We have conclusive proof that Mary intended to board a--"
I turned around. "No, you have conclusive proof that Mary wants us to spend the next week waiting for two long-distance space transports to receive a message, respond, turn around, touch back down, and tell us that there is nobody of that particular registration aboard, legitimately or otherwise. Much as I hate to criticise the glorious mechanisms of the state, it is not difficult for someone as well-engineered as Mary to obscure their own or someone else's identity if they are trying hard enough."
Alice was blustering. "You can't use someone else's identity card," she said. "All the manuals say so. If it doesn't match your internal chip it won't let you use it."
"Believe me when I say there are ways of getting round that problem." I was wasting time and I knew it; I turned back to my desk. "I'll have someone contact the spacefaring authorities, to be certain, but you will contact tube security and go through their scanner records with a fine-toothed comb to try and find out exactly who it was that managed to pass themselves off as Mary and Unidentified Baby Bechdel. That's your job now. Get cracking."
There is a certain habit (I did not notice until I started living without it) peculiar to people who live under our kind of government. Even as Alice was walking away I was examining the language I had used for signs of disloyalty. "Getting round that problem"--could I have been implying that ID card exclusivity was a problem? Alice was safe, since new versions rarely ever had their loyalty questioned. But I was an old version now, and of all the castes, we Archivists--Information Scientists is the correct term, which nobody uses--are said to be the most likely to defect. Aside from the Omega caste, of course, but anything said about them is naturally hearsay. I had good reason to be worried, although I did not know that yet.