Now he was a Nobody, but once he had been somebody. His name had been Bruce Starshield, if only for a few days.
He had awoken in one of the cloning facilities, his last memory that of having his mind backed up - never a good sign - with his family gathered around to comfort him and fill him in on the two months that separated his last mind scan and the accident.
He'd always been something of an adrenaline junkie. Prior to his death, he had been getting heavily into space diving, burning through the VR training in a matter of weeks, then diving Earth and Mars in rapid succession. He'd set his eyes on something further afield, something a little more challenging - Tau Ceta E. Against his parent's wishes, he'd rented a transport and jumped system to do the dive.
It had been a freak accident. The warp field had destabilised in-transit, dropping the ship out of warp without engaging any of the mechanisms designed to stop the ship spreading itself as a fine spray of atoms across several light years of space, which is exactly what happened. He had been killed.
But it was fine now. He was back. No harm done.
The next few days had been committed to sleeping off the ressurection sickness and slipping back into a life that was his but slightly different. Friends he had made during his weeks of space diving - friends he no longer knew - would ring or drop by to offer condolences, to say hi, or to arrange another dive, but he found he longer had any interest in space diving and soon the calls petered out.
And then, just as life was returning to normal, he turned up. Bruce Starshield. The original. As it turned out, the disaster had somehow destroyed only half of the ship. The intact half, severed cleanly down the middle from bow-to-stern, had been flung out of warp on the edge of the Tau Ceti system, venting atmosphere and with most of its systems dead. Bruce Starshield had fought valliantly to stay alive, sealing himself in a jefferies tube, salvaging systems and components to construct a distress beacon even as his oxygen ran dry. By luck, a passing trawler hunting star-whales had found him and given him a lift back to Earth. As one of the few people to ever survive a warp field collapse, he returned home a hero.
Amidst the celebrations, the clone was taken aside by the Planetary Governance AI who politely explained how there had been a mistake, the clone should never have been decanted and by rights shouldn't - couldn't - exist. He was an undesirable. For the benefit of the true Bruce, he was expected to move away, leave the family and life that was no longer his. His citizen ID was to be stripped along with his name. He would be allowed to live out the remainder of his natural existence but then that would be the end of it - his mind would not be backed up nor a replacement cloned. Týr apologised for the inconvenience, though it seemed unable or unwilling to understand the clone's objections.
So that was that. He was a Nobody or, a less polite term, Save Scum.
There were three avenues a Save Scum could take. It was always possible to reclaim citizenship status, though it was by no means easy. An identity could be forged or stolen, and there were always those individuals who, having grown bored of existence, could be persuaded to surrender their bodies and lives to another. But they were very rare in the Union.
Alternatively there was Rebirth. Alien races with curious means of reproduction or who wished to bolster their population numbers would sometimes offer to take in strays, rebirthing them (sometimes literally, sometimes technologically) into their species, granting them a new identity and citizen ID.
Then there was Contact, an organization that existed only semi-officially within the Union that dealt with other civilizations. Contact was a fan of Nobodies - as individuals, they had little to lose, they could be moulded more effectively into Agents, and if their cover was ever blown the Union could deny any involvement with them. They were, after all, not even citizens.
For most Nobodies however the choice was death. Unable to cope with the nihilism of a life without immortality, they threw themselves into danger, becoming explorers, fighters, thrill-seekers, anything to hasten their inevitable oblivion.
The Nobody that had once been Bruce Starshield had decided on...
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