Identical : Clones of Jaffir

By Suzy Stewart Dubot and Cleve Sylcox

The male species is extinct, so cloning its inhabitants is a question of survival for Jaffir.
More than three hundred years on, the clones are called wo's and men are mythical creatures.
When a series of inexplicable disappearances occur, leaving the police baffled, a Tuner is called in to use her psychic powers.
But — not even a Tuner can envisage they will lead her to another galaxy and men…

• Language: English
• Publisher: Suzy Stewart Dubot
• Release date: Aug 13, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223827757

Suzy Stewart Dubot

An Anglo/American who has lived in France for nearly 40 years, she began writing as soon as she retired. She moved to London in 2012 and spent more than a year there with family. The spring of 2014, she returned to France, Her laptop has never had any trouble following her.Before retiring, she worked at a variety of jobs. Some of the more interesting have been : Art and Crafts teacher, Bartender, Marketing Assistant for N° 1 World Yacht Charterers (Moorings), Beaux Arts Model, Secretary to the French Haflinger Association...With her daughters, she is a vegetarian and a supporter of animal rights! She is also an admirer of William Wilberforce.(If you should read her book 'The Viscount's Midsummer Mistress' you will see that she has devoted some paragraphs to the subject in Regency times.)PLEASE BE KIND ENOUGH TO LEAVE A REVIEW FOR ANY BOOK YOU READ (hers included).

Book preview

Prologue

The news was particularly alarming.

According to all accounts, another small group of woS had disappeared.

Vanished without trace.

The first group to go hadn’t worried too many people. They were three friends who had gone away for a long weekend. It was initially presumed they’d got stranded somewhere and would soon turn up, a day late perhaps, with a reasonable explanation. But they hadn’t, and their car had been found abandoned on a residential street, far from home.

The second group had dematerialized without leaving any evidence as to where they’d gone; bags and coats all left behind. They had been customers at ‘Short Cuts,’ Trina’s hairdressing place, and it was known that there was no real connection between any of them. Trina wasn’t able to enlighten anyone either, because she’d been one of the seven to vanish.

In the history of Jaffir, nothing like this had ever been recorded. After forensic examination of the site, the police were baffled and freely admitted to it. They were going to need the services of a Tuner, which is always a tough thing to admit.

CHAPTER 1

ILO LOOKED ACROSS AT her boss, Medla, who was a good-looking wo in her middle fifties. This reassured Ilo, because she happened to be an exact replica, only thirty years younger.

It didn’t happen often that identicaux worked together. There were so many versions of clones out in the world that it was rare to actually work with someone who was genetically identical.

But Haven was a smallish, elite town which had been her grandmother’s birthplace, and that had increased the odds, somewhat.

Ilo had established with her boss they shared the same great-grandmother who’d had two cloned children before the legislation had changed. They, in their turn, had clones and so on down the line fanning out the family tree as they got nearer to Medla and finally Ilo. They were all basically replicas of each other but modified by age differences and environmental influences.

If someone were to drop in from another planet, it would be natural for them to assume Ilo was Medla’s daughter. Although age had added weight to Medla, and her ‘look’ was that of a mature, middle-aged wo with short blond hair, their features were the same; the most obvious being the same blue eyes.

Ilo’s real mother, Taftt, was yet another version of Medla, except she had chosen to dye her long hair a rich mahogany color. It was quite surprising how, by changing the color and length of her hair, she had changed the focal point. It was now her blue eyes which stood out, while Medla’s short hair style tended to accentuate her high cheekbones.

Ilo rolled her eyes thinking she would never succumb to the middle-aged model that Medla represented. No suit and flats for her. She was determined to flash right up to the end with as much individuality as she could muster. Already, her hair was a vivid, spiky orange on top of her head, while an ear-to-ear band at the back of her head had been shaved into an intricate design. Below it, her thick, mahogany-colored hair hung past her shoulders.

She liked tattoos too, so regularly had ones which lasted six months or more put on various parts of her body.  And her body was in peak condition with the workouts she put in at the BE* every day before work. Tattoos never look good on flab; that was a given.

Tell me you have that report, Ilo, Medla pleaded. I know I didn’t give you much time to put it together, but it’s a matter of urgency.

Yes, here it is, Ilo said as she placed the report on Medla’s desk. You didn’t ask for it, she continued, but I’ve added a map with everyone pinpointed on it.

Great initiative, Ilo. I appreciate it, Medla said smiling at her younger self. There were advantages to working with an identical, and one was how both their minds tended to work in a similar fashion.

Different environments ensured that each person had a touch of individuality and would have a different approach to a problem, but the end result was usually pretty much in line with results of others with identical genetics.

*BE – Body Enhancer, which comes close to what we know as a health club.

-o0o-

Each inhabitant of Jaffir knew its history. You had to know it if you wanted to graduate from upper school and go on to higher studies. In fact, you had to know it even if you were going to be outside digging up potatoes.

It was an obligation.

The date given in the text books was about three hundred years ago when there had been another human gender on the planet known as a male or a man—a he.

In school, they’d seen pictures and diagrams of the person and had wondered what good he’d been, because he was a skinnier version of themselves. They could see all his ribs under a flat chest, which would be useless for breast feeding.

Here it was pointed out to the students that he’d had a small appendage, which they didn’t have, serving in a reproduction process. Without going into the particulars, they learned it had worked relatively well until a virulent virus had contaminated the planet.

Because the male gender chromosomes were ‘XY’ and not ‘XX’ like the woS, they had been unable to resist the attack to their genetics. No amount of medicine, blood transfusions or other manipulations had been able to save the ‘males.’  They had all slowly died leaving only the wos to fend for themselves.

At the time, there had been rumors that a group of wo dissidents (they had been known as women having been created by the reproduction system between a he and a she) had created the virus focused directly on eliminating the ‘Y’ in males. It was known that woS, in general, had become tired of wars, violence and the general mishandling of the world by men, not to mention the fact that men never ceased to try and dominate woS in every domain. If memberships in the men’s clubs, where they were sworn to stick together, didn’t work at keeping women below them, then sometimes other methods were used with physical force being the last resort.

Of course, there had been nothing concrete to corroborate the rumor. Many woS, who grieved for their partners, had left information behind to confirm that some of the men had been loved and appreciated.

When it became apparent no males remained anywhere in the world, the initial, desperate reaction had been to resort to artificial insemination using the frozen semen stocked in banks all over Jaffir. During a period of three months, woS from every corner of Jaffir had hastened to benefit from the procedure, knowing the supply was limited.

The little that had been kept aside as a reserve had been quietly sold on the black market when woS realized that it was a ‘now or never’ situation and willingly paid the high price.

With the resulting pregnancies, there was new hope that males would once again populate Jaffir.

Big mistake.

BIG miscalculation.

The virus hadn’t mutated enough to become innocuous. No males were born and all the semen was used before the error was discovered. For a second time, the race was headed towards extinction.

That was when cloning had become a serious affair. Successful animal duplication techniques were applied to woS and—lo and behold—they worked. Life continued after all, with woS duplicating themselves. Techniques had improved in the three hundred years since, and no one considered it more than a natural process for propagating life.

-o0o-

Ilo sometimes wondered about those extinct men. Like the other extinct species which she’d studied, she felt a profound sadness that it had been allowed to happen, mostly from stupidity or some form of greed. You don’t appreciate what you’ve got until it’s gone, and then it’s too late.

She was twenty-six-years old going on twenty-seven. Sometime soon, she would have to decide if she wanted a child, or if she would apply for exemption. It was written into the law that each wo had to have one duplication to perpetuate the race or find someone to replace her; a surrogate volunteer inseminated with her genetic code. The age limit for duplication had been set at thirty because after that, cells were already on the decline for correct cloning.

It wouldn’t be too hard to find someone to duplicate in her stead, though, because there were woS who actually enjoyed having a second and sometimes a third child. Volunteers were listed in an on-line directory, and she would only have to pay a fee a little above that of having a child herself. The government provided adequate maintenance for those mothers having multiple children in accordance with the reproduction legislation. Once she renounced her right to have her own infant and passed the task onto a surrogate mother, she would no longer be able to reproduce a second child of herself. If the maternal instinct grabbed her one day, she could always act as a surrogate for someone else.

There was a sound reason the law only allowed a single duplication of any person. It was to keep as much genetic variety on Jaffir as possible without one model over-taking another.

The law was strictly enforced by keeping DNA registers of every child born.

Her mother had been one of those woS who had agreed to