Chapter 16
Green Mountains, Homeland
Milton was in the mess hall in the secret Lucid lair. He had just gone through the serving line and was looking for a place to sit down. Most people in the room, which seated about sixty people, were in groups at their tables. A distinct looking man caught Milton’s eye. He had seen the unusual man before, but now he was eating alone and looked like he had just gotten his food and would be sitting there for awhile. The man was distinctive because his skin had a definite powdery blue look. Was he sitting alone because he looked so weird? Milton’s dad told him once, don’t be a coward; be a friend to someone who has no friends. All your friends don’t have to look like you; be the same age; or be like you. He thought back to his days in Hartford, and his best friend, Randy Klosterman. Randy certainly qualified as one of those guys who didn’t have many friends. Milton took a chance and in turn got a loyal, but sometimes annoying friend. There was probably a reason why the blue guy, who looked to be in his thirties, did not have a friend, but Milton was unaware of it. Although he was far more weird looking than Randy Klosterman. What if the blue guy was hostile? Or insulting? Milton thought the man might have a justification to be overly defensive and hate life given how unusual he looked. “Be brave and be a friend.” He could hear his dad’s advice in his head, or “You have to be a friend to have a friend.”
He almost involuntarily sat down across from the blue guy. Upon quick glances of closer inspection, Milton could see that the man’s hair, including a couple of days beard growth also looked bluish. The man was wearing some really dirty clothes. Milton found it difficult not to study his blue features.
The man immediately said, “What’s up, kid? You feel sorry for me or something?”
“Yeah, actually.” Milton started munching on some greens while he was pulling his bread apart. He looked at him square into the eyes. “You want me to leave or something?”
“Did I say that?”
Then Milton said as if they had been friends a long time, “No, I just wondered if you were saving a seat for all the other blue guys.”
The man scowled, and then cracked up laughing. “Good one, kid.”
“Call me Milton,” he said with a smile.
“My real name is Lance, but some call me ‘True’. I guess I like that better.”
Milton pointed at him, “Oh yeah, I get it. ‘True Blue’. That’s cool. At least I hope that is why they call you that since I said it.”
“Yeah. But don’t call me the depressed kind of blue. I really hate that. I suppose now you want to know why I’m blue.”
“Well . . . yeah. Of course. Unless it bugs you too much to talk about.”
“No, why would it?”
Milton shrugged his shoulders. “Some things bug some people.”
“Anyways, I didn’t tattoo my skin or dye it or anything like that. I was part of an experiment, called the ‘Sneeches’. I never did know what where that come from, but it was meant to create a new race of people to make the regular races seem pointless or something stupid like that. They hacked the DNA of a bunch of us designer babies and messed with our skin color. They told us that everyone would eventually want to look like us and some other stupid Homeland psycho-religion lies. Anyways, they figured out that their messing with our skin chromosomes made us highly susceptible to melanomas. I’m surprised they didn’t turn around and cull us like they do the clones. Anyways, that’s why I just stay down here in the dark and work with worm and toothpick on excavation and construction.”
“Those androbots?”
“Yep. They never complain. I love it.”
“Sounds like pretty tough work to me.”
True looked around. “I helped make all of this. A lot of people are safe because of this place.”
Milton asked, “Sounds like your dream job alright. But is there a reason why you are here, instead of living out in regular society?”
“Let’s just say I’m like you and everyone else here, we don’t fit out there. They call me ‘True’ because of the blue thing, but also because I speak the Truth. Those smurfs don’t like that. But I really don’t care what they like or not.”
“No one knows that better than me,” Milton confessed, but almost had to choke himself to keep from commenting on a blue guy’s reference to “smurfs”. “I could tell you a long story about myself, but you would never believe it all.”
*******
Beth stood for a moment looking around in the field and wiped the sweat from her brow while she leaned on her hoe. She knew she could not outwork her hypervigorous clone friends, but she wanted to do her best so they wouldn’t think she was a wimp.
Jenn came by with a bucket of water and said, “Here Beth, get a drink.” She held out a communal dipper to drink from.
Beth took a big drink with cool water running down the sides of her mouth and down her front. Then she stopped and inhaled and caught her breath, “That’s good.”
Jenn said loudly, “These crops are looking good. It helps when the plants don’t have to compete with a bunch of weeds. You girls are the best.” She went around and continued to give everyone a drink. Then she went to the dozen or so other farm hands in the area with more water.
After a few more minutes of hacking stubborn weeds out of the rows, Beth said to Little Jenn, one of the “Julia” clones, “Why are you girls so happy doing this hard work?”
“Because we don’t have to follow the UCA clone laws any more. We are happy to be free.”
“You think being here is free?”
“Yes. It is a place where you can do what you want. Why else would you come here?”
“Yeah but, we have to hide, you know. There are those militia guys out there protecting us. If we were really free we wouldn’t need them out there.”
Jenny said, “You mean there are places that are freer than here? That is hard for me to imagine.”
“That clone place must be real sad.”
“They told us that we were at the clone facility for our own protection. It was for the good of the world. Let’s don’t talk about it, okay?” Then Little Jenn speeded up her pace of cultivating the row even faster. Her face got serious as she whacked the soil at an angry pace.
Beth knew that she had touched a yet another nerve. Maybe freedom meant different things to different people, all according to what they were used to, but she came to realize that clones don’t like thinking about their upbringing.