“They did what?!” The shout echoed in the familiar conference room. David Meyer noticed that he was standing, that he had thrown his chair backwards against the wall, that he was the one shouting. He didn’t care. This was too much. Even for ONI, even for the butchers that had been willing to kill almost all of the children.“They cloned the children,” Catherine said for a second time, her voice nearly burning with rage. “Flash-clones of each and every one of them.”“That’s not possible!” David snapped back, desperately trying to will his own words to life, even if his stomach had already sank too low. “You can copy a human body, but you can’t copy the brain! Personality, memories, all of those things, they’re like scars on our brains! They’re developed over experience, they’re not genetic. If you flash-cloned a human, you’d have a living body with nobody home!”“And yet that is what they have done!” Catherine barked at him. “I hate this as much as you, David, but we cannot ignore the reality! ONI cloned the children! Accept it and move on! What matters now is how we will respond to this!”David clenched his fists, and for a moment, he wanted to punch the conference table. He almost did it, too. His muscles tensed and knitted together… but then, after a moment, he managed to wrestle his body under control, and stopped himself from shattering his hand on the table.“Seventy-five deaths, Catherine,” David hissed, the words slithering out of him like a snake. “That’s all I could think about for the past eight years. Against all the odds, against all the bullshit from ONI – no offense, Michael-”
“None taken,” Captain Michael Stanforth responded, waving a hand negligently, though his eyes were laser-sharp and his expression was as grim as David’s.“We managed to save those lives,” David continued, jabbing a finger downwards, as if to point at the entire ONI headquarters that they were currently in. “Seventy-five potential deaths, and we saved every single one! Paul and I just finished the second set of personalized surgeries last week. We’re pretty sure that the third set will work in nine months’ times. And now, it turns out that none of it mattered anyway! ONI already killed off every one of those kids, before we ever had the chance!”“Seventy-four deaths,” Chief Mendez said, in one of his rare comments in these meetings. “Daisy’s flash clone is still alive.”“Fine, seventy-four, whatever!” David growled, nodding with a harsh, clipped motion to the Navy NCO. “You get what I mean. The goddamn insult of it. What was the point?”“The point is that we saved their lives,” Paul said, speaking up for the first time. He was also red-faced like David, but he was shaking his head fiercely. “David, we get it, but it’s in the past now. There could have been a hundred and fifty deaths, and we managed to reduce that number. We don’t have a time-machine, and I’m all out of magic buttons. We can only move forward. Never back. Just like Catherine keeps telling us.”“Exactly, Paul,” Catherine said, nodding to their fellow scientist. “I am in full agreement with you about the moral, legal, ethical, even scientific crimes committed by the acquisition teams. To clone a human, knowing that they would die… it’s atrocious! They didn’t tell me any of this, and I’m all for kicking in Keeler’s door to demand answers and scalps, but it won’t help the children!” Her words slashed across David like a saber, cutting skin and peeling flesh. He recoiled, even though Catherine hadn’t spoken with any venom, hadn’t been cruel about it.
The children, David reminded himself, as the horror rose up once again.The Spartan-IIs had suffered through dozens of psychological torments in the past eight years. Everything from separation anxiety to identity fragmentation to alexithymia to developmental arrest to Stockholm syndrome. Each and every one of those was another potential crime to be laid at the feed of David, Catherine, Paul, and Steve, and his Psychology Team had done their best to help the children recover from those traumas.But finding your own grave? Realizing that your family buried a clone of you, mourned a different body that they’d believed was you?
That was something so horrible that it didn’t even have a name! For all David knew, they were going to name that crime against humanity after him, or Catherine, or the program as a whole! He didn’t even know who had it worse: Daisy, for literally coming face-to-face with her own flash-clone, who had somehow beaten the odds and survived years past the expected expiry date, or every Spartan that had gone to their hometowns seeking nostalgia, and had somehow stumbled into a graveyard with their own dead body in it!And that was David’s fault. He hadn’t done anything with the flash-clones, true, but his Psychology Team been the one to come up with suggested activities for Catherine’s graduation present. The team had come up with most of the options… and David himself had thought of visiting the local cemeteries. The idea was that the kids could see some of their family history, some of the names of their deceased grandparents or great grand-parents, and learn about the things that they’d never had a chance to hear from their own family.Stumbling across their own tombstone hadn’t even entered his imagination as a potential downside.
Yet now, nearly half of the fifty-four Spartans from the initial graduating class had done exactly that!Worst of all was that fact that they’d done it months ago. Catherine had done her best to give the kids their summer vacation, but even arranging the fastest UNSC military couriers as transportation didn’t change the fact that Slipspace was a slow way to travel. Some of those kids had spent two months on their home planets, while others had only gotten a week or two before turning around.And none of the Psychology Teams had gone with them, because there was no possible way to explain that to Section Zero. They were lucky enough that Section Zero had allowed Mendez’s trainers to chaperone the kids! So now, twenty four of those kids – twenty-five, including Daisy herself – had come back with a new trauma.
They’d been stewing in it for weeks without anyone to help them. Even discounting the time spent in cryosleep, because the scientific literature insisted that nobody dreamed in cryo, there had still been days at the absolute shortest timeframe. Days of kids having to think about that, bearing that weight on their own.What might they think? The kids were smart, and polite, and had been educated as best as possible through the combined efforts of David and Catherine and Franklin. But this was unexpected, not just to the leadership of the Spartan-II program, but to the children themselves.They might think that this was intentional. That ONI just wanted to twist a knife into their guts, and remind them that they could never go home again. They might think that this was proof that Catherine really was the monster that the bastard Wilson had described, two years ago, during that horrible trial. They might think that this was some kind of divine punishment, or some karmic balancing for their own debts. David knew that some of the kids viewed their lives as blessed in some ways, because they’d never seen the horrors of war, just the joys of training with an unlimited budget. They could see this as their punishment for enjoying the past eight years, rather than being humble about it. They might not realize how thankful they should be for all the work that the Program’s leadership had put in to ensuring the kids didn’t grow up traumatized – not that David or any of his Psychology Team would ever tell them to do that.David slowly put his chair back in its place, and sat down on it. He cradled his head, elbows planted on the conference room’s table, and tried to stop the shaking of his arms. “Well, this is pretty horrible,” said Steve, on the other end of the table. “…At the risk of sounding like an asshole here, what can we actually do?”He wanted to strangle that cocky little prick. But the man had a point.“Other than keep trying to find that damn acquisition team and squeeze the answers out of them?” Sergeant Johnson asked rhetorically. “Not much. And since we’ve had so much luck finding them in the first place…”“We should do something for the families,” Catherine said. “I don’t know what we can do, without risking a breach in classification, or without piling an insult on top of their already grievous injury. Yet the fact remains: ONI took their children, and then made them watch those flash-clones die in front of them. We should do something to repay that.”
“Nothing,” Michael Stanforth muttered, with a sigh. “There’s nothing we can do. If we give them some kind of weregild, that will tell them that ONI was involved. If we try to do it indirectly, we’d still need to send agents out to all those planets to do it, and that’s potentially noticeable. And it’ll cost more of the budget, which I should remind you, we shouldn’t be over-using since the project is technically about to end.”“Yes, yes,” Catherine replied, waving a hand at his reminder. “I know, I know. I heard you the first time. We don’t want to give Vice Admiral Caldwell another reason to start digging into our affairs.”“Section Zero isn’t the problem,” Michael disagreed. “The problem is whoever was backing Wilson in the first place. You convinced plenty of them to drop their cases, but there’s still a lot of bad blood. We’re making them look bad, and they’ll do anything to keep themselves on top. Right now, they’re focused on stealing the credit from Steve’s power armor, but nailing you for something like this would be far more effective.”“Lazy ungrateful slackers,” Catherine said with a grimace. “Attacking another employee because their good performance makes yours look bad is an illogical and ridiculous move. It only demonstrates that they care more about their relative status in a power structure, rather than the mission statement of the company as a whole.”David snorted, though he wasn’t feeling particularly amused at this moment, with all those moral problems still looming over them. It was still nostalgic and comforting to hear Catherine’s habit of thinking of everything in economic terms, however.“Being illogical and ridiculous is human nature,” he said, repeating the same words that he had often told her when they had this argument. “You can complain all you want, but people will always be that way. Human psychology never changes.”Catherine rolled her eyes, but she didn’t continue their usual argument.“I get the desire to do something, but it’s only gonna make things worse,” Johnson remarked, with a huff of ill-temper. “For all we know, those parents have moved on. What was Doc Meyer saying? A few weeks is the average lifespan of a flash-clone in a lab?”“Fourteen weeks,” David said, tersely. Johnson nodded to him in thanks, a bitter smile on his face that showed David there was no harm meant.“For almost all of ‘em, their kids died seven years ago,” Johnson continued. “You wanna drag up those bad memories? You wanna remind them that their child is gone? That’s just gonna hurt them even more. Give ‘em space. Don’t drag them into this again. Don’t re-open that wound, Doc.”
“Some wounds do not heal properly if left alone,” Catherine said, biting the words off as if they offended her. “They might still be suffering, you know. That is our responsibility to fix.”David’s longtime friend didn’t say the next words, but everyone heard them all the same: it was their responsibility to care for the children, and what were the parents but extensions of that?
“Maybe…” Paul started to say, before stopping. His expression was awkward, embarrassed.“What?” Catherine asked, turning to look at him. “Go on. Spit it out, Paul.”“Maybe ONI did it this way for a reason,” Paul said softly. “Maybe they wanted the parents to have something to bury.”
Catherine blinked, and tilted her head, seemingly not understanding.David, however, sucked in a breath as he grasped what Paul was getting at.“That’s possible,” he admitted, hating the very thought, but knowing that his hatred didn’t mean anything about whether it was true or not. “They might have thought it was nicer that way. Gave them closure.”“What are you talking about?” Catherine asked, baffled.
She looked between them, and David swallowed. He knew her too well, and he knew she wasn’t going to like this.“ONI might have thought this was the merciful option,” he said, picking his words carefully. “If their children had just gone missing, then it’s possible that the parents would keep looking. Obviously, they wouldn’t succeed, but they might have spent years trying and failing. Like… a book you never finished.”
David stopped, his throat tightening as he struggled to explain it.
The thought disgusted him. It was abhorrent. Nauseating. But there was a certain sick logic to it. If you believed that flash-clones weren’t people, that they didn’t have souls or their own value, then why not use them to help a ‘real’ person get over their grief? Why not use them as a tool that would both sell the lie better, and also help the parents close that book of their own accord?
He didn’t think for a moment that ONI had done it out of anything as nice as sympathy. They’d probably done it just because their analysis had judged it the optimal, efficient path that would minimize the chance of those parents finding out about the Spartan-II program. But even a mushroom cloud like this could have a silver lining.
“And if they gave them a dying flash-clone, then it would be over,” Paul added, taking up the next part when it became clear that David himself couldn’t. “The parents would be sad when the clone died, and they’d mourn, and grieve, but then… it would be over. They could bury the body, and move on with their lives.”Catherine’s face tightened, and she looked ready to spit fire. In older days, her eyes might have flashed with some tiny light, but apparently she had lost whatever trick of positioning she’d used to use. Maybe she just got tired of posing herself in front of a light in the exact right position for it.“Yes, because what is the value of emotional suffering?” the brunette doctor growled. “It’s not like stress casualties are a thing that exist. Or time off for bereavement.”“I think they’re saying that ONI did care about those things, Catherine,” Steve suggested gently.“Except ONI didn’t care,” Catherine spat back. “I’m not just talking about the parents. After all, they allowed the suffering of the flash-clones. Those are human beings too, and ONI willingly sacrificed them, just to enable this… façade of closure. It’s as if their dog died while they were away from home, and so they bought another old dog from the pound, just so he could die in front of them, and they could grieve over a second dead dog! It’s performative! ONI might have claimed to care about human life, but they only cared about the parents. Not the seventy-five children they were condemning to death by creating them in the first place.”She hissed, and then she slumped back down in her chair.“But bad logic has never stopped us from doing evil things before,” she whispered, partly to herself, but still audible to the rest of them. “What cruel monsters are we of the human race. We’ve always been so selective about what counts as ‘human’.”“Speaking of that…” Michael Stanforth spoke up, clearly unhappy about something. “What will we do about Daisy?”“I’ll meet with her immediately,” David said. “We’ll need a counseling session for every single Spartan, no matter if they saw their grave or not. We have to tell them the truth. We owe that to them. For Daisy herself, I’ll handle it. She needs help, and some level of trauma is inevitable, given what she saw.”“That’s very kind of kind of you, David,” Michael said, slightly impatiently. “But I meant Daisy, the flash-clone. The one still on Sargasso. The one that saw our Daisy, the Spartan. What do we do about her?”“We keep ONI from touching her,” Johnson said quickly, his voice hard. “Don’t tell ‘em nothing, and keep them away from her. Or you know what they’ll do. They’ll rip her apart to figure out how she lived this long.”“I agree in principle, but not in practice,” Michael said, which earned him a growl from the Orion. “You’ve hit the nail on the head, Sergeant: how exactly did she live this long? It’s an extreme outlier.”Catherine was staring at Michael, her eyes wide. She looked like she couldn’t believe what she was hearing.“Why are you bringing this topic up?” she asked carefully.Michael Stanforth met her gaze evenly, and he spoke with a calm tone.“Because we should do everything in our power to keep Daisy alive,” he said, his voice firm. “She is still a flash-clone, and she undoubtedly has several physiological issues related to that. I believe that we have an obligation to see to her health, no matter what. It is the right thing to do.”“They never should have assigned you to this Program,” David muttered, shaking his head and trying to hide his grin. “We’ve ruined you, Captain. We’ve given you a heart. Don’t you know you’re not supposed to have one of those, in ONI?”Paul and Steve chuckled. Johnson bit his lip, probably torn between joining them or scowling at David. Mendez, as always, kept his usual stoic demeanor, but David imagined that he could see the tiniest twitch of the man’s lip – in an upward motion, indicating approval.The Navy Captain smiled slightly, and nodded to David as if acknowledging a touch in a fencing match.“I am increasingly of the opinion that ONI, above all other departments, requires a heart to function properly,” he said, turning his gaze over to Catherine.
“Yeah, yeah, kum-ba-yah and all that jazz,” Sergeant Johnson said, rolling his eyes, though his good-natured smile gave away the sarcasm to David. “But how exactly are we supposed to do that, Captain? We go anywhere near Sargasso for a second time, and someone in ONI’s gonna be wondering why. Plus, since she’s only fourteen, it ain’t like we can just offer her a high-paying job in the Hive, to convince her to move here. She’s still got her parents, and there’s no way in hell they’re gonna let that girl out of their sight.”“What do we know about the flash-clone of Daisy?” Mendez asked, leaning forward in his chair. “What information did Daisy and Corporal Navarro learn from her? How much did they tell the flash-clone?”“In reverse order, not much, a fair bit, and not enough,” Catherine said, sighing. “Corporal Navarro did an excellent job of keeping the two Daisies from chatting too much. However, the most important information was made clear to her – she knows that she is a flash-clone now. She knows that she is the replacement for the original Daisy. She knows that her survival was a statistical impossibility. I would rather than she didn’t know any of that information, but the circumstances of the situation required it.”“This is still a severe breach of the Spartan-II Program’s classification status,” Michael said, reminding them of his earlier point. “Yes, I understand that Daisy and the Corporal were surprised, but now we’re stuck in a situation where we’re already going to be in trouble, and we have to ensure that nobody finds out.”“Didn’t expect that out of you, Captain,” Johnson commented, leaning back in his chair. “But how, precisely, are we gonna do that?”
“Simple,” Michael Stanforth said, with a gesture towards… David? “We hire her.”“Hire the fourteen-year-old?” David asked, frowning at Michael.“If she’s a member of the Spartan-II Program, then she has the requisite security clearance to know about it,” Michael said. “The same way that we had to give security clearance to the psychologists that you kept hiring, David. Remember?”David did remember. He remembered one of the more notable instances of that, with Jason Thompson, back when he had been hired.“Wait,” David said, raising a hand. “Daisy’s last name. She’s a Thompson. So is Jason, one of the psychologists I hired with that method. Are they related? Did we accidentally hire a relative of one of our Spartans?”“No,” Mendez told him, with a quick shake of his head. “Common name, but no relation. I checked.”David let out a quick sigh of relief. If they had done that, this already complicated situation would have gotten even worse.
“I am all for it, but I don’t see how we can justify it,” Catherine said, tilting her head to the side. “That would only draw attention to her, exactly as you warned us about earlier, Michael. What possible use could the Program – or ONI as a whole, for that matter – get out of a sickly teenage girl? We can’t augment her, even if she was in perfect health. By the time we could bring her to Reach, she’d be too old for the augmentation surgeries.”“That’s simple, Catherine,” Michael Stanforth said, tapping the conference table with a finger. “We hire her as a medical research subject.”“Say what?” Johnson coughed, jerking forward in his chair as he turned to stare at the ONI officer sitting next to him. “You better not be suggesting that we cut her open.”“Not at all,” Michael said, shaking his head. “No surgeries, no procedures. Just non-invasive medical scans. And we don’t just hire the flash-clone. We also hire Daisy’s mother.”“…maybe I missed something,” Steve said, squinting a little. “Why would we hire her mother?”“From what Daisy was able to gather from her flash-clone, the primary reason that she’s alive right now is because of her mother,” Michael Stanforth explained. “Cynthia Thompson is a doctor, and apparently was able to recognize the signs of early onset organ failure in the flash-clone. Cynthia’s solution was to replace the organs before they had a chance to fail.”David blinked. He was one of the best MD’s in the UNSC, so he knew more about this topic than anyone else in the room. That solution was standard practice. Flash-cloning was an amazing tool in that regard, and it made organ transplants almost perfect compared to the older days. No compatibility issues, no risk of rejection. However, there were two problems with that Cynthia Thompson’s actions in this specific situation.
The first is that Daisy was, herself, a flash-clone. There was no way that the Thompson family had the adequate amount of DNA samples required for a properly grown organ transplant. You couldn’t just use a single drop of blood and call it good. Which meant that the only way they could have gotten those samples… was from the flash-clone itself. And a flash-clone was an imperfect copy. Normal flash-cloned organs from the original body’s samples required nearly a dozen organs to be grown in order to get a single viable, transplantable end product. The process fried some of the DNA, screwed up the ability to replicate it. If Cynthia Thompson was trying to grow replacement organs from an imperfect base… those rejection rates would have been vastly higher. Catastrophically higher!There was no way that those organs would have worked in the long term. A single set of replacements wouldn’t have been enough. Daisy’s clone would have needed… dozens of surgeries. New transplants to replace old ones. It was insanity. Human beings weren’t meant to go through multiple sets of organs!The expenses alone should have buried them. The process of cloning an organ was cheaper than it used to be, but when you were going through dozens, hundreds, maybe even thousands of samples in order to get the requisite numbers…“How many organs did she go through?” David asked, numbly.
Michael glanced down at his datapad.“According to the clone Daisy,” he said, “Eight sets of kidneys. Six livers. Four sets of lungs. Three hearts. And that’s just the ones she remembers.”“It’s a miracle she’s alive right now,” David muttered, wide-eyed.
He was stunned. Forget the rejection rates, forget the expenses. The sheer willpower indicated by Cynthia Thompson’s refusal to give up on her daughter was awe-inspiring. Every doctor knew that they’d eventually lose a patient. Every doctor was trained and taught on how to handle the disappointment. Those in the emergency care field were even worse off, because of the horrific inevitability of triage. In a crisis situation, a flood of casualties could overwhelm a hospital’s ability to handle them, and some of the worst off would be left to die, so that they could save as many as possible.
It wasn’t quite the same as the situation with the flash-clone of Daisy, but the stress was! David couldn’t even imagine the mental burden that woman had carried for the sake of the clone she thought was her daughter. The weight on her shoulders. Oh, the first operations were probably optimistic, but at some point, Cynthia Thompson would have realized that it was going to keep happening. That no matter how many transplants she gave Daisy, the organs would inevitably fail, over and over again. That the woman hadn’t given up was… frankly, it was a feat of mental fortitude that David had only ever seen in one other woman.He turned his head slowly, and looked at Catherine Halsey.Catherine had a strange look on her face. She noticed David looking at her, and glanced back at him, meeting his gaze with a bewildered yet oddly admiring expression. It seemed that she had picked up on exactly the same thing that David had – the similarities between her and Cynthia Thompson.“A medical research subject…” Paul said, thinking out loud. “That would obviously cover all of her medical expenses, as well as putting her here on Reach, where there’s always a hospital available.”“I think that we wouldn’t have to brief Daisy or her mother on the Program, either,” Catherine mused, putting a hand to her chin as she stared into the distance. “We could hire her because of the medical irregularity of all those organ transplants. We hire her mother, as the foremost expert on the subject, and an expert on flash-cloning organs. She probably has more experience that almost anyone in the galaxy, at this point.”“Same thing you did with all those experimental surgeries,” Johnson said, biting his lip as he nodded towards Paul. “If anybody from higher up asks, you’re just doing the same thing. The public story is that you’re studying the medical miracle, and the private story is that you’re doing it to help out the Spartans somehow – and we don’t tell anybody the real truth, that we just want to keep Daisy’s clone alive.”“But we’ll need a better story to tell ONI in private,” Michael Stanforth said. “Yes, it’ll help out the Spartans somehow… but how?”
“It doesn’t matter, just make something up,” Steve said, rolling his eyes. “The only people who’d see this are the ONI top brass, and they’re not experts on it. They’d believe whatever story you come up with.”“Perhaps we say that it’s because Spartan organs are different then normal,” David suggested. “Something about the size, thanks to the growth hormones. Or the interactions with their muscular, skeletal, or nervous augmentations. Because of those differences, we have a perfectly natural concern that if a Spartan gets injured, and needs an organ transplant, that it wouldn’t work.”“And since transplants are a common enough medical procedure, that makes the Spartans fragile,” Chief Mendez added. “Compared to normal soldiers, they’d have much longer recovery times, and much worse odds. It would lower their readiness and ability to quickly respond to emergency situations.”“We’ve invested so much in our Spartans,” Catherine said, with a mocking edge as she smiled at them all. She spoke as if she was talking not to them, but to the ONI higher ups. “How could we possibly allow this horrible fragility in our super-soldiers? Why, as soon as we discovered it, we clearly acted with the utmost haste to ensure that this weakness did not interfere with…”She trailed off, clearly searching for the right words.“Interfere with the operational tempo of the Spartans’ deployments,” Sergeant Johnson tossed in, with a smirk of his own. “We couldn’t let those lazy brats just sit around for months, convalescing, when they could be out there shootin’ Innies for the good ol’ U-N-S-C.”“Exactly that,” Catherine nodded in agreement. “Thank you, Gunnery Sergeant.”“Oh, anytime,” Johnson drawled, as self-satisfied as a cat that had caught the canary.“That’s settled, then,” Michael Stanforth said, folding his hands over his stomach as he reclined in his office chair. “I’ll start working on the paperwork. They won’t be directly affiliated with the Spartan-II Program, but indirectly, instead.”“Do we have enough favors to cover that?” Catherine asked, frowning slightly. “I don’t think I can convince anyone in Section One or Two to take her on. Our medical research is really just in Section Three, and only thanks to the program itself.”“I’ll take responsibility and handle it,” Michael Stanforth told her. “We could easily just stick her in a hospital near one of the less-classified bases, put her in a ‘team’ consisting solely of herself and her daughter. As Steve said, doesn’t really matter.”“On a related note, we should come up with an explanation for Vice Admiral Keeler,” Catherine said, snapping her fingers as the thought struck her. “I know he’s been very supportive, but we need at least… some kind of excuse to justify bringing Daisy and Cynthia Thompson in. He’s not going to buy the excuse about the Spartan’s fragility. He knows more than enough about Steve’s power armor, he’ll know that a bullet getting past that stuff is very unlikely.”“Tell him the same as the public story, but with a small twist,” Paul said. “It’s medical research, sure, but not just hypothetical. What was it that you used to say about the experimental surgeries? That ONI wouldn’t care about the lives we’d save, but they would care about the positive PR benefits from bragging about those lives? The… macro effects, rather than the micro.”“Yes, yes,” Catherine replied, nodding sharply. “We’ll tell Keeler that we’re pursuing… improvements to flash-cloning, something like that. Then, if we can find anything that improves that technology, we spread it around the UNSC and loudly heap the credit onto ONI. He’ll eat it up, he enjoys that kind of thing.”“Whatever you think will work,” David said, sighing as he thought about Daisy, and her flash-clone, and the horrors that ONI had already performed. “Just so long as it convinces them to let us help this poor girl.”