War Requiem - Introit
Everyone has a story to tell, a legacy left behind in the sands of time in the desert of eternity, a treasure to be found. The stories, like all treasure, differ in relative value and appearance - some are happy and highly valued by their owners; others are melancholy and considered a burden. Some walk away from their legacy with strength; others stumble away from theirs broken and devastated, hoping that they can receive compensation for their perceived loss from the man upstairs, whoever he may be. But the life everyone is given is theirs and theirs alone, and the best to hope for is to be able to leave behind a legacy that is valuable to those who wander by it. It is up to them to decide how their story is written.
Like everyone else, I have a story to tell. My name is Jacob Dragonsfield, and I am twenty five years old. I am a human with short, brown hair, sharp facial features, and piercing green eyes. I am an average height for an adult human, standing at about six feet tall. I am 140 pounds of muscle, hardened by my service, and remarkably strong for my seemingly scrawny size. Other than that, I am mostly unremarkable. My story began like any other story - with a small beginning. I was born twelve years after the discovery of the Colkorenians (more familiarly referred to as furs), and their immigration and integration into our society. I had a mother and father and a brother, and there were no complications that occurred when I was born. I seemed to be a completely normal, healthy child. But I had a secret, a secret buried so deep within me that it would almost remain undiscovered if the society I lived in wasn't consumed by the secret I and many others had - I was a clone of my brother. When it was discovered that my mother was pregnant, the fertility specialists artificially induced a split of the blastocyst, creating identical twins. It was later discovered that my mother wanted this because she was anticipating legislation that would allow the use of clones for the purpose of farming for organs. By the time I was born, however, any hope of such legislation had been destroyed. Cloning a human being was a highly controversial practice due to the questions it raised, such as questions of identity, ethics, and many others, so nobody, especially politicians, wanted to talk about it. But still, there was some legislation concerning people like myself. We were, by law, not considered citizens and therefore incapable of holding political office, voting, or even attending school past the high-school level. In other words, we had no rights because we weren't considered to exist according to law. As you can imagine, my life was already veering away from normality even after birth. As I grew up, humans always seemed distant, often even hostile towards me. The furs were at least polite, and some were friendly enough. But I lived in the shadow of my brother, a shadow I probably wouldn't have been under if I wasn't a clone of him. But I was a clone of him, and there was no way to change it, to change how people perceived me and treated me. My mother treated me the worst as a child, starting with refusing to breastfeed me as an infant. I was artificially fed, often put in incubation tanks, and held periodically by nurses in white gowns and surgical gloves, almost always furs; human nurses often refuse to help cloned infants, instead letting them die off for want of contact with others. But even as I grew up, my mother would often leave me behind whenever the family was going out to do something, send me out of the house when company or friends were coming over, refuse to feed me except for when she absolutely needed to, forcing me to stay isolated from everyone else as much as she possibly could when I was home and my father wasn't on leave, and fight with my father about me.
The only two humans who actually treated me somewhat decently were my brother and my father. My brother, Steven Dragonsfield, knew I was a clone of him; he simply didn't care. He treated me like anyone would treat their brother - fighting and quarreling from time to time, but otherwise like best friends. He looked exactly like me, only his eyes were a little more pale and his hair slightly lighter. He knew how our mother treated me, and seemed to want to compensate for that, often sneaking me food when my mother wasn't looking or unlocking the door to whatever room I was locked in and spending hours with me, making up fantastic stories where we role played as heroes. I was grateful for my brother growing up, and even after I was forced to leave home, my brother often wrote to me. His letters were a godsend to me.
My father - my heroic, tragic, wonderful father - had a special place in his heart for me. As extremely as my mother hated and dehumanized me, my father loved and protected me and my dignity. My father was like I would later become: a soldier at heart. He served in the United Nations Special Forces, which meant that he was away from home for long stretches of time and then was home for long stretches of time. He knew just how deeply my mother hated me and fought viciously with her about me. She would have just as well shot me in the head and dropped my flesh in a remote location, but to my father, I was his son. Eventually, things got bad enough between my father and mother that a divorce was filed, mother took Steven and left us, meaning that I ended up spending long stretches of time with my father's parents, who were polite enough to me, but really didn't care about me. When my father was killed during the War as it was in its early stages, I was the one who received his posthumous Medal of Valor for his role in saving his unit in the jungles, sacrificing his own in the process. That was when I decided that I was going to follow my father and join the armed forces. It was later that I discovered that if I served, I was legally considered a citizen according to law. It was as if I had no choice in the matter. But that no longer matters to me.
Everyone has a story to tell. My name is Jacob Dragonsfield, and this is my story.