Chapter 1: Overcloned
Streek shambled into mess room of the Star ship and yawned. The strong aroma of coffee hit him and he moved toward the coffee machine. Ben had already made a pot of coffee, which only involved pressing a button on the machine.
It was just past nine hundred hours, Standard Galactic Time. While traveling in through space you couldn't tell what the time was without reading clocks, it would even be hard to tell if it was supposed to be morning, afternoon or evening.
Streek poured himself a mug of hot coffee. Ben was nowhere to be seen again. They were into the third day of their five day trading mission, transporting Star ship parts to New Heidi and Streek had barely seen his Captain since they set off.
'He's in his workshop again, working on something.'
When they had the Apollo Creed, Ben spent most of his time in the cockpit. Now they flew in the Clubber Lang, which had a room Ben had made his workshop, where he tinkered away on various projects.
Streek was glad to have the new ship, the Lang was twice the size of the Creed, which was only a small shuttle. It was faster, better defended and had a larger cargo hold, but they were still small time in the scheme of things.
Streek didn't think he would have been able to fly in the Apollo Creed anymore anyway, it carried horrible memories for him and Ben. It was two years ago when Ben had tried to take the shortcut through unprotected space and things ended pretty badly for them.
Streek and Ben never talked about that day, and Streek had done his best to try and forget that it happened. The Apollo Creed was damaged beyond repair, and things got pretty hard for them for a while.
Ben didn't despair though, he got an idea and he got to work. He sold the Apollo Creed to a scrap yard and then managed to go into debt even further, buying a small mining craft.
The mining craft was even more cramped and more crappy than the Creed, it didn't even have a name, other than the ID number NC-6964 painted on its hull. Streek called it "The Trashcan", because it smelt like one.
Ben and Streek went out and joined the 'Bull-Ants', prospectors who flew small, often barely space worthy mining crafts, swarming around and fighting over the crumbs of valuable minerals that the large mining organizations left behind.
They would both work long hours and barely make any scratch though, the debtors were becoming more insistent, and the other Bull-Ants weren't too friendly either, they weren't welcoming of more competition.
It turns out Ben had an ace up his sleeve though, he had spent many long hours developing a computer program that gathered information and predicted where mineral rich comets and asteroids were going to be. Both of them were surprised when it actually worked and the buyers were surprised the first time they came back with a hull full of silver ore.
Both men were overjoyed when the Trashcan started bringing in good money for them, pretty soon their debts were payed. Their success didn't go unnoticed however, soon there was a swarm of Bull-Ants following them whenever they went out and once again they were fighting over crumbs at their mineral hot spots.
The exercise had started to become barely profitable again and they were getting quite sick of the tiny, smelly mining craft. So Ben and Streek decided it was time to give the Bull-Ant game away and become traders again.
Ben shopped around for a while before he found a modified Namcorp Hauler he fell in love with and christened her 'Clubber Lang', another strong foe the legendary Rocky Balboa of pre-warp Earth defeated in combat.
Ben got to work creating a new program which predicted trends in market prices and showed the best trade routes. So far it had proven moderately profitable. Now they were on their fourth trade mission since buying the Clubber Lang.
Streek got himself a bowl of cereal and went and sat down at the table. He got up the news on his TAB and skimmed over the headlines, "Pirate activity on border planets on the rise", "Power price blowout predicted", "Earthquakes in Junossi VI kill 128". He navigated to the comics.
Ben came into the mess room "Coffee, coffee, coffee," he said to himself.
"Morning Ben," said Streek looking up from his comics.
"Is it?" asked Ben, he looked at the time in the corner of the screen on the wall "Oh yeah." He had dark rings under his eyes.
"Were you up all night?"
"Yeah, guess I was," said Ben as he poured himself a coffee, emptying the pot and getting the dregs.
"What are you working on anyway?"
"Uh, it's a surprise."
Ben took a sip of coffee and screwed up his face "Ugh, needs sugar." He turned around and opened the storage compartment and fumbled around. Streek looked down at his comics.
"Coffee, coffee, coffee."
"Hey, what are you doing? I told you to stay in the workshop!" said Ben, annoyed.
'Who the hell is he talking to?'
Streek wondered as he looked up, his eyes went wide and he let out a gasp.
There was another Ben in the room. Ben was still standing at the counter with the coffee cup in his hand, and there was another identical Ben by the doorway. "I don't take orders from clones! Did you take the last of the coffee?" said the Ben by the door.
"You're the clone, you idiot."
"Hey, that's my coffee cup, give it here!"
"Fuck off! Go back to the workshop!"
"Ben?" said Streek puzzled.
Both of them turned to Streek and simultaneously said, "What?"
"What the fuck...?"
Streek couldn't tell them apart, both were stocky young men with short, messy, sandy blonde hair. They wore the same dark blue track pants and white shirt with the band name 'Quadrilogy' emblazoned on it, and both had dark rings under their eyes.
"I cloned myself, buddy," said the Ben by the door rather casually.
"I cloned myself, you're the damn clone!" said the Ben with the coffee cup.
"...and my clone doesn't seem to know that he's a clone."
"Cos' you're the damn clone."
"Ben...?" said Streek. Once again both answered simultaneously, it was a little unnerving the way they did that. Streek didn't know which one was the original Ben and it seemed neither did they. "How the hell did you clone yourself?"
The Ben by the door looked like he was about to say something but the one with the coffee spoke first. "I met a guy at that spacer bar in Brandona, he had a piece of Alien Tech for sale, asked me if I was interested. I got it for a steal. Turns out it was a cloning machine, took me a little while to figure it all out."
"I bought the Alien machine in Brandona! You were created last night!" said the other Ben.
Streek couldn't believe it, Alien Tech! Ben had bought Alien Tech on board, it was like the shortcut all over again. Ben had acted with foolish recklessness and he kept it secret from him because he knew he would have objected. The Federation was zealously hunting down every piece of Alien Tech out there and severely punishing those who have anything to do with it.
"Ben, you fucking idiot!! What have you done!!?" Streek didn't know which Ben to be pissed off at.
"I got a great deal on it man, you have any idea how valuable this kind of tech is? I had to test it out!"
"He needed some sucker to dump it off on because he knew the Feds were closing in on him. Now they're going to catch us with it and send us to the prison planet Piranese for the rest of our lives, you Cockhead!"
"Whoa, Streek, you need to relax." said one of the Bens.
"That's exactly what you told me when you were taking the shortcut, and look how that turned out! We need to jettison that damn machine, the sooner the better!"
"Whoa there, let's not do anything..." Ben was interrupted by a pinging alarm that signaled thirty seconds until they reach a way-point and drop out of hyper-warp.
The Ben with the coffee cup put it down on the bench. "If you're not a clone then you would know the name of the system we're coming up on now."
The other Ben looked at him coolly. "It's the Moranda System, Dickhead!"
"You must have read that somewhere."
"Yeah when I set the flight plan!"
"I set the flight plan, you stupid clone!"
"I'm getting sick of this conversation." said Ben as he walked past his other self toward the cockpit.
"Hey you better not sit in my Captains chair." called out the other Ben, going after him.
Streek pushed his cereal and his TAB away, he wasn't in the mood for them anymore. He pushed his coffee away too, he didn't need to be even more jittery. He was still furious at Ben. He was also quite curious.
Streek got up from the table and made his way to Ben's workshop. Ben was a messy worker, tools and parts and screws and bolts were strewn all over the several bench tops, a strange oily smell filled the air.
Then Streek saw it in the far corner, it was unmistakably Alien design. It was a large pod that stood eight feet tall, it was a silvery color that was almost luminous and it had no straight edges at all, each curve seemed impossibly smooth.
"Wow!" Streek mouthed quietly. He slowly moved closer to it, admiring the machine, it seemed as much a piece of artwork.
Streek saw that Ben had wired up a TAB to the bulky base of the machine in order to interface with it. He must have been spending all that time in here working out how to speak with the Alien computer so that he could use the machine. Ben was like a genius with that kind of stuff. Unfortunately, he could also be a stupid risk taker.
Streek waved his hand over the TAB and a holographic text screen appeared. "ENTER COMMAND", it read in bold green letters. "I don't think I want a clone," said Streek to himself, "I'd probably just fight with it like Ben."
