Jacquelline Jilles Part I

Jacqueline Jilles

Part I

         To refer to Jilles' Acres as a typical farm would be, at its core, a factual thing to do; There are, however, a few abnormalities that serve to make it unique. The most blaring of these glitches would more than likely be its location: The spacious ranch was tucked away on a back-water asteroid out in the Cassiopeia system, a chain of stellar rocks notorious for their lack of policing. Not only that, on the surface itself, the farm was positioned directly next to an active volcano- an enormous one, roughly the size of Origin's ancient state of New Texas. Whether that was a suitable place for a farm was a matter of much contention: on one hand, it meant for an easily accessible font of geothermal energy, and the land surrounding, like some overgrown skirt, was undeniably fertile.

          From the opposing viewpoint, of course, it was an active volcano; while it hadn't loosed its considerable potential wrath since a good decade prior to the farm's construction, the possibility of a deathly conflagration would be enough to scare most individuals out of such a venture, potentially off the planet, as the farm was the only plot of colonization on the otherwise deserted object. The homestead had some protection- a massive thermic net that surrounded the half of the land brushing against the mountain, theoretically capable of resisting up to eighty metric tons of lava before beginning to weather. The required moxy brings us, then, to the land's proprietor. To call the woman in question a farmer would be, once again, a technically truthful claim for a person to make; though, just the same as the ranch, the owner was formed entirely by peculiarities that painted her as a sharp deviation from the norm.

          Jacqueline was the last in a chain of the entrepreneurial sort; dating back to her great-to-the-factor-of-seven grandfather, Riddlemont Jilles, they had been making a sizable income due in part to a grand intuition in the field of business and, in equal measure, a complete disregard towards the fairy-tale concept of 'ethics.' Yes, the Jilles had been rooted in all of the shiftier sides of the galactic economy: the synthesis and distribution of Hyperjolt (guaranteed to keep you awake fourteen days straight, and lucid for none of them), the progressive movements towards TGMDA (Total Genetic Modification of Domestic Animals), a copious slew of hostile corporate takeovers (hostile in the sense of, more oft than not, physical aggress), and, more recently, the human cloning industry, still at the heart of such fiery debate as it was in the simpler times of its primary discussion.

         Jacqueline herself grew potatoes. Everyone needed potatoes, she figured, and by the sheer magnitude of spuds that her land afforded her the chance to grow, she was certainly making a profit by supplying the outer rim systems. No profit could be made from stagnant practices, as it happened, and, since Jacqueline was unmarried and unwilling to invest in any 'fallible dolts' to work on her prime estate, she was all alone: one pampered woman to manage three thousand acres- it was laughable in concept. She had an ace up her sleeve, largely in part to her family's aforementioned unsavory practices: the lattermost connection, the HCI, proved to be a wildly accessible distributor of able bodies, as long as their funding held up, and the youngest Miss Jilles capitalized on the opportunity of cheap labor in full, sending a monthly stipend subtracted from her russet ledger to the leading industry in such matters, IdentErsatz.

         As much as she loathed spending her money, she couldn't help but find some enjoyment whenever they sent her one of their catalogues. They were fairly straightforward, with a number of faces, organized by gender, race, eye color, function, and a small bio about their prototypes attached to each. The prototypes were, in layman's terms, the people who would volunteer their image and genetics in order to serve as a base for a clone; people who would sacrifice their individuality for mass-production. In some other time, it might have been unnerving, but from the sheer bulk of IdentErsatz's brochures it was evident that they weren't short in supply.

          The truly interesting thing about the clones, the part that Jacqueline simply adored, was that you could pick how long you wanted them aged. The HCI literally grew these humans from scratch (at a greatly accelerated rate in comparison to nature's design); if one were to order a three-year old, then they would get a three-year old. If they wanted an older man, then they could have that, as well.  Not only that, but one could request a basic mentality for the clone, an inserted mentality. For instance, if you wanted the older man to serve as a grandparent, the kind folks at the HCI could modify his neural connections to ship you a mail-order body, perfectly convinced that he was, and always had been, your grandpa, with the artificially constructed olden-times stories to boot.

         Obviously, babes and the elderly had no great use on a farm such as Miss Jilles', and she developed, quite quickly, a preference for twenty-three year old men, and twenty-five year old women. She couldn't pinpoint what her draw to those particular ages were, and, not having been raised to fancy introspection, she assumed the superficial stance that the clones not only worked, but also looked the best at those respective stages. The farm had been in operation for seventeen years, and over that period she had amassed a collection of seven-hundred and forty-three able persons. Seven-hundred and forty-three sentient, breathing beings, each as falsely real as the last. To say that number, the current number, was the true amount that had passed through Jilles' Acres would be an absolute fallacy; yes, the number that had been shipped to her was a great deal more- something far above one thousand, at least- and Miss Jilles' nature, asides from the plain of her being an opportunist, is really found by analyzing the cause of the populous discrepancy.

         Farmers use tools. Tools are useful when they're strong. When tools get weak, you throw them out. That was the philosophy that Jacqueline sought fit to prescribe to; each and every clone that she ordered had been tailored for the specific purpose of maintaining her crop, and if they failed in that, than what good were they? No good, in her mind, and it wasn't uncommon to hear the crack of a laser resounding across the ranch's wide expanse as she made her daily rounds, hovering just overhead on her favorite dais. If she saw a body falter, either due to illness, injury, or simple fatigue, she wouldn't hesitate to remove the cog from her machine. They weren't people, she would affirm to herself, and she would never order them with memories, personalities, or even a firm grasp on language save for an understanding of basic commands. She wanted automatons, and she got them. She was a cold woman, but her efficiency spoke for itself. She was making change faster than she could keep up with, the only expenses going for seed, clones, and food, and her saturnine location granted her protection from all but the nosiest of inspectors- propagates of those "business ethics," zealots that she considered as useless as her broken workers. She saw fit to dispose of them, too, on the chance occasion that they'd come around- after a while, she figured, they'd just stop coming.

         Well, regardless of just how tight she ran her ship, a bunch of bodies laying around didn't do her business any good. The clones hadn't ever been allowed to indulge in any stimuli, and they were quite literally "born" for labor, but they could still recognize one of their own on the ground, and it was certainly bad for morale in addition to giving the whole place that kind of road-kill odor. By the end of her first year with the clones, she had found a solution, along with a new respect for cremation: the neighboring volcano had a wide mouth, wholly accepting of whatever detritus she needed to dispose of, and so she took to installing a lift up the side of the mountain. She also made sure to instruct her clones on proper protocol upon finding a corpse- they didn't have to report it, or anything that required them to really think; all she asked was that they'd drag the bodies to the lift and load them up. The mechanism was on a timed rotation, so they didn't even have to activate it (she had it perform its operation once a month at first, but as the cadavers began to pile up outside of its carriage, she had to recalibrate it to a weekly pattern).

         Yes, yes, it was a good system, and as long as she could keep a steady supply of puppets and a curtain over her dealings, Jilles' Acres would continue raking it in indefinitely. And seeing as the only factors capable of jeopardizing the set-up were a couple of valiant stiffs and a small army of soulless, empty drones, the future looked just about as shiny as the titanic stack of gold bricks that Miss Jilles kept piled by her bed; beautiful, material, and inexorable- and just as rooted in refined physicality as the woman who saw fit to hold them so dear. Greed it one of those things that can manifest itself, altering the very composition of its host as readily as any parasitic creature. That being said, it's also one of the most fleeting, as, just like the parasite, or mold, or what-have-you, it's harbor will run dry. It might seem lush and inviting and perfect for habitation, but the veracity of the situation was this: whether it be the eventual dilapidation- the withering of the shelter or the storm that was bound to hammer in the roof roiling the air on the other side of those flimsy, illusive walls, the dissolution (and, unfortunately, the reconstitution, if time can vouch with any reliability) of avarice is a strict inevitability.