Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/18/84 exptools; site ihlpg.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!mhuxr!ihnp4!ihlpg!jcjeff From: jcjeff@ihlpg.UUCP (jeffreys) Newsgroups: net.jokes Subject: YASDS / YAFGS - About Clones (Quite Long) Message-ID: <367@ihlpg.UUCP> Date: Tue, 9-Apr-85 14:02:14 EST Article-I.D.: ihlpg.367 Posted: Tue Apr 9 14:02:14 1985 Date-Received: Wed, 10-Apr-85 05:47:33 EST Distribution: net Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories Lines: 202 I recieved a clone joke from England today. I do know who sent it to me, but I'm not sure if it is original or somebody else should get the credit: That's enough of a disclamer about the origin, so here it is: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ LAUGH, CLONE, LAUGH. A miracle had happened with his birth. The impossible. The zillion-to-one deviation. Incredibly, into the royal family a Good Guy at last had been born. This was the secret that had burgeoned now within - Himself. Juniko, sole son of Erstava, Tator of Phrenophalia. He had such humane thoughts, such ennobling aspirations, so many plans for the betterment of the world. He found it almost unbelievable that someone like himself, so close to the throne, should have a predictable chance of eventually being in a position to bestow and dispense and achieve so many many perfections. Unlikelihood of near infinite order - yet there was no doubt: here he stood, self-realized, the only son, one step from the pinnacle. The universe of man quivered and waited, a throbbing heartbeat away from its ultimate destiny. From very early in his youth Juniko had a plan based on a scientific development whose real implications had never seemed to occur to his father; the discovery of perfect cloning. Take a few cells from a man and regrow his whole body. Create a total twin of the original. It could even be with the same thoughts and attitudes: duplicata exactica. Although it didn't have to be. Already subtle methods which did not interfere with the basic abilities of the individual in any way had produced successful modifications. His father's plan was to project a clone of himself, endlessly into the future. The Tator had a narrow view of cloning and intended to limit its benefits to himself and as a reward for loyal service to his person. Cloning was costly, he emphasised. Obviously, the great mass of people could never afford its price. Accordingly, since it was automatically limited in application, it followed that other necessary limitations could be applied, on the principle that law and order must be served. Juniko shrugged and smiled to himself whenever he heard his father expound on the price and realities of politics. Who cared about cost? Such problems could be worked out. Juniko felt even more scathing of the short-sighted biologists who were enthralled by the restricting concept of cloning future Shakespeares and other geniuses, which the Tator said he was willing to have done in all instances where it would serve the public interest. 'Naturally, that, also,' Juniko thought to himself, smiling with scorn. But his goodness, his ideal, transcended all such miniscule imaginations. Let there come an end to sorrow! - to needless suffering, deprivation of body, mutilation of mind, starvation of soul. Let sad things cease! - and in their place, a smile upon each human face! And so, to begin - subtly, cautiously - the change must come in circles around the throne, spiralling downward through the nobility to the fringe group and finally, systematically, to the great mass of the People themselves. The heartbeat - his father's - that stands between the slave. Now world and the brave New world to come must not be allowed to clone endlessly into the future. One day that heart will falter, and when it does, the Tator will call for his eldest son, for he trusts no one to perform the cloning act but his smiling, loyal Juniko. An assassin's ray! The heat sears the flesh of the Tator from the waist up, scorches the hair from his head, evaporates one eye. More dead than alive, Juniko's writhing father screams for his son and is rushed to the secret laboratory. The Tator dies with a smile on what is left of his crisped and contorted face as his last conscious feeling is of the knife slice that will preserve the necessary portion of his flesh to ensure his rebirth. He will be back! But black, eternal oblivion is his fate. Smiling, sorrowfully, royal Juniko feeds the fatal piece of his father's flesh to the Palace piranhas... The new regime begins. Curiously, some people actually resent cloning, resist self-duplication, not realising it will be beneficial for them They go so far - too far! - as to try to escape from Phrenophalia, to flee to Zarnocopia to the west or seek asylum in Megatropolis to the east. (Of course, to go north or south would be unthinkable.) The robopo always bring them back, of course: 'The Metal Police always get their man.' Or woman. And 'afterward', all clones admitted how wrong they had been and how right Juniko. From the beginning Juniko had one personal thought, one small concession to ego: There should be a tiny differentiation between the created and the creator. Not much, nothing overtly egotistical - Phroide forbid! - but...instead of laughing like all the rest, he would...smile. Simply - smile. Thus the ever-laughing people would be able to recognize their benefactor. And recognizing him, love him. Since, from birth, he had always been a smiler; had smiled perhaps with a little fear, perhaps even propitiatingly when his father stormed; had smiled with secret joy over his great plans and had smiled with pleasure as those deific dreams came to fruition - accordingly, there was no need for a Juniko clone. Juniklone - and he added one more smile to his life total as the portmanteau crossed his mind for the first time. After his father's death and his ascendancy to Tatorship, he bit by bit came to realize a strange phenomenon: There were a few natural laugh-prones around the Palace, people who always had, they confessed to him, had an innate desire to laugh and laugh all day long but had restrained themselves because of his father. Juniko was glad to spare such individuals the expense of cloning. He even felt better because such natural rictal stock existed. Natural-born laughers were the automatic answer to any criticism from pre-clones who otherwise might dare to cavil at the idea that everybody but Juniko needed a clone. In fact, thank God for the naturals! He welcomed them all with his warm heart; treated them like personal cloneys. It was beautiful, Juniko even had to laugh to himself occasionally. There he would be among a group of happy laughers, and all of a sudden his own perpetual smile would break and rictivate, elevate to laughter, and he would laugh uncontrollably along with the rest. Phrenophalia became a funderful world of laughing people - until one day the Secretary of Offense (soldiers now laughed all the way to the wars) was laughingly telling something to Juniko and Juniko caught a strange look in the man's eyes. The face was laughing. The eyes were not. A fantastic, shattering reality struck Juniko: He's not laughing with me, he's laughing at me! Juniko fought off a bad feeling of, shek! - people are really no damn good after all. Juniko, Tator of Phrenophalia, continued to smile before his people, of course, but it was a Pagliacci smile, for inside him now grew a grief ineffable, a sadness beyond name. And an awareness that he had actually noticed the phenomenon from the beginning but had valiantly forced himself to blindness, mentally blotting out the fact that the human race was really rotten. As he though these dark thoughts, he walked like a zombie along a corridor of the Palace. As everywhere else, it was bedecked with a multiplicity of mirrors. Reflected in one of these he saw that his smile had taken on some of the old fixed quality that had been there so often when his father was alive. The silent internal conflict ended in what he finally decided had to be a win for the world. It was necessary, he realized, to learn to distinguish between the people who were laughing for the joy of it and those whose laughter was ill-meant. Juniko was not able to immediately decide what should be done with those evil subjects whose abuse of laughter has despoiled his idyll. And that was his fatal mistake, for his paranoia began to become evident to those close to him, who remembered the example of Caligula, the Roman emperor who married his sister and performed an enormous number of crimes. Nobody wanted another Caligula, except perhaps Caligula's sister; but the problem was not complicated, as Juniko did not have a female sibling. All admitted the Juniko the Original did have some good points, so his joint executioners agreed to reincarnate him via clonage and, opting for a nonparanoid Juniko the Second, a part of him was preserved and regrown after his assisted demise. The world held its breath; watched and waited and wondered. Here, in the twenty-second century, Phrenophalia of course is no longer on the map. Some of our senior citizens remember when it was laughed right off it. That was the first time Juniko Two had a rebirthday party with all his little happy, joyous, laughing friends, all hollers and horns and serpentine and games and goodies and funny hats and candy and cake and ice cream and - Suddenly! Inexplicably! Juniko Two was not laughing, was not even smiling, was not even crying. Juniko Jnr was - Screaming! It would have been comical if it had not been tragical. You intuit what had happened, of course. He was the first I SCREAM CLONE! The End (of a shaggy clone story). ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ The only thing I had to do with the above was to post it. So please don't blame me for anything other than that!! -- [ It's not the end of the world....no it's not; If it's the end of the world, well so what ? - Marti Webb ] ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ || From the keys of Richard Jeffreys ( British Citizen Overseas ) || || employed by North American Philips Corporation || || @ AT&T Bell Laboratories, Naperville, Illinois || ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ || General disclaimer about anything and everything that I may have typed || ------------------------------------------------------------------------------