Gaiaterra: Elysea's Conflict/Cloning

Bodies
Resources.

Resources were always needed in order to wage warfare. An endless hunger that drove nations to bankruptcy, made every victory a temporary respite from the need for more resources, and made every defeat that much more painful to bear. Sometimes, war was merely an excuse to acquire more and more resources, feeding the need now in order to be that much fuller later. There were - and are - many varieties of resources. Most obvious were materials, ore that fed the nations as they clashed in world-shaking wars, rubber, steel, and power for roaring vehicles of destruction, and money that flowed back and forth unceasingly between nations and factions. But there was one resource that was more important than all of the above. Some nations, some factions would throw money in order to keep what they had of this precious commodity. Others would give up freedom in order to gain security for it. This most precious of all resources, more valuable than gold or ore... Are bodies.

The participants in the War of the Beard western front knew the importance, and the preciousness, of bodies. The Adeptus Mechanicus needed bodies to throw in droves at enemy fortifications, needed bodies to man the tanks that crashed into enemy lines, and bodies to keep the helicopters flying overhead and raining death down. The Protectorate similarly needed bodies - bodies to set up as bait for Coalition forces, bodies to man the lines of trenches, bodies to keep the shells flying, and the machine guns shooting. Without bodies, without people to make the tanks and the guns and the helicopters, bodies to man these same instruments of death and use them to devastate the opponent's own supply of such resources, the war would be lost. Neither side was willing to lose this war - and both sides would do anything to keep their supply of bodies as high as possible. And by the point of 1946 V.C., later deemed one of the bloodiest years in all of the War, both sides had developed their own means of ensuring constant, and solid, supplies.

In retrospect, the spark that would start off the path to what is now known as cloning began even before the "Year of the Unveiling", in the form of the medical technological growth spurt that came about during the western front. As battle raged, the Protectorate began project phoenix king to develop new medicines and treatments to aid their wounded soldiers, many of which would be later developed by the Western and Eastern worlds after seeing their effectiveness. One such discovery done by scientist Yoshi Matsui, however, was never spread outside of Ulthuan until Yuri stole it - the ability to reproduce organic tissue and organic material out of cellular samples, and later even DNA and RNA. With a simple selection of cells, Protectorate doctors could create swathes of protective skin, artificial blood, and in time even entire organs to replace that lost by soldiers in battle. It was this ability to create entirely new tissue and biological matter that would lead to the twin paths the Protectorate and Mechanicus took after 1946, and then after directly to the Collective military.

During the Year of the Unveiling, the Protectorate demonstrated a new use of the medical technology that enabled one to regrow tissue, a use that would forever change the way they fought wars. In early 1946, one of the Protectorate's vaunted heroes, Lei Feng, was reportedly killed in battle. As the Protectorate's people mourned, the body was retrieved... And an experimental procedure was put into place. A nucleus from a cell sample taken from Lei Feng's body was inserted into a nucleus-less egg cell and then put into what could only be described as an "artificial womb". While his intact brain was taken out of his body and frozen, the cloned egg was fertilized, and inside the chemical nutrient tank of the artificial womb grew and grew, at an accelerated rate far surpassing the norm thanks to psionic biomanipulation. In addition, as the egg grew into a fetus, growth hormones and 'aged' pieces of Feng's DNA were put into, in an attempt to increase the aging process. After all of this, months passed... But, five months after being counted as killed in battle, Lei Feng's brain was put into a genetic and physical duplicate of his old body... And revived. Memories of everything since his 'death' gone, his physical body weak, Lei Feng was nonetheless the first person in history to be cloned - at least, in body. And soon, he was not the only one, as word of bodily cloning technology spread, and more and more senior Protectorate members began giving orders for their bodies to be cloned should they die. The process was a far cry from the modern Collective process, taking months to work, and reliant on the person's brain being both intact and preserved... But it was only the beginning for Protectorate.

For the Adeptus Mechanicus, however, things took a different turn. When they witnessed the return of Lei Feng from seeming death, as well as the return of several other Protectorate soldiers and generals confirmed killed in battle, the Adeptus Mechanicus realized that their long opponents had found some means to tip the balance of power - they could keep the bodies they lost. The Adeptus Mechanicus, and the Coalition as a whole, however, would not stand idly by and keep what moral superiority they had, for after the long years of fighting and warfare and the arms race they found themselves in, defeat was a black morass they would do anything to avoid falling into. Instead, determined to crack the secrets and find out what the Protectorate had found out, they set their own doctors to attempt to study and, if possible, replicate the effects. Their findings... Were different. While the Adeptus Mechanicus found that the cloned soldiers were the result of accelerated growth, they failed to realize that the Protectorate had made entirely new bodies - instead, they believed that the dead bodies were simply brought back to life. And so they tried as well, using a variety of means... Dead soldiers were hooked up with electronics to stimulate their brains and attempt to make them act, cloned cancerous cells were implanted to regenerate men (and, unknowingly, deform them) wounded in battle almost immediately, and the legs and arms lost by soldiers were replaced with metal and steel 'bones', with layers of regenerative flesh and tissue wrapped over them. And when the soldiers, as they almost all did, could not mentally handle the changes that the Adeptus Mechanicus made, the doctors attempted to treat their brains, poking and prodding and surgically modifying them to make them believe they were whole and normal again. The end result, known as a "Servitor", was almost entirely different from what the Protectorate had achieved, but in its own way, it worked just as well. And, in an attempt to dampen the morale of the Protectorate, the Adeptus Mechanicus unveiled its own new abilities late in the same year, and by the end of the War the Mechanicus, whose land became irradiated by the war's end, would develop a hatred for their flesh and embrace their cybernetics, becoming a cult that worshipped something known as the "Machine Spirit".

Once more, the two sides were matched. And with their new methods of keeping or replacing their resources of flesh and bodies, the Adeptus Mechanicus, alongisde the Coalition, and the Protectorate set out to war once more. The results would be unlike any war ever experienced in the world before... Or since.

War
Peace.

Peace was the objective of the War of the Beard long after the goal of vengeance had been lost under the churning mud, boiling heat, blistering cold, and acrid smell of the battle lines. Sides fought like maniacs just to get a glimpse of peace, times when the roar of the hounds of war would cease for a few precious moments and the adrenaline that constantly flowed like water was allowed to disperse and drain away. In the end, maybe that was why both sides seemed to fire their superweapons so readily and accepted the deaths of millions of lives by their actions - for the combatants, it meant a final peace.

Life
Death.

In the aftermath of the War of the Beard, the Protectorate began to focus on cloning, as it would massively help with their now crippled populous. But by the year V.C. the lab responsible for it was suddenly destroyed in a massive fire with all of its data lost, thus the project was abandoned. Though years later, when they fought the Collective, they would realize that Yuri had attacked the lab and stolen all of its data.

In the aftermath of the War Yuri began sneaking into the ravaged Ulthuan and Mars and ransacked the underground labs and VIP bunkers of both sides, slaughtering their weakened defenders and taking what he could use. It was from records that the knowledge of teleportation, matter manipulation, and much more was discovered... But the most valuable of secrets discovered was cloning.

The Collective merged the two efforts of the fighting factions to create what is deemed modern cloning, combing the technology of the mind and the science of the body to create something new and greater than the sum of its parts. Using the genetic material from Collective soldiers, they created new people, new bodies and minds in vats and tanks - clones. Using cloning, the Collective was able to make themselves a kingdom of the dead, with the Drukhari particulary taking glee in outpacing the Asur in population.

The clones themselves are treated only as second-class citizens, and are indoctrinated to never question this - but under their teachings and brain molding, they are human as ever. They have thoughts, dreams, wishes, regrets, fears, and fetishes, but this is something that the rulers of the Collective never address or acknowledge, with exception of Yuri and his sect. Indeed, in many ways, the Collective is a far worse kind of tyranny to its so-called subjects than the Voshkod - for even the Voshkod acknowledge that they are still people. Clones are not thought of as people, but as mere cogs in a vast and great machine, cogs that can easily be replaced if defective. Perhaps worst of all is that, with the technology of cloning, the analogy is partially true - when people can be efficiently replicated and regrown by batches when the very process of thought can be manufactured using only a bit of genetic material and the right tools when it is possible to send clones out to die in droves because it is thought better than wasting the lives of natural humans... The question is asked:

What measure is a cloned human?