But he knew that he would have to bide his time. Ryan was the leader, and although any of the companions could act independently if it was necessary, in a situation such as this they would have to take direction from the one-eyed warrior. A hierarchy had to be maintained if they were to pull together.
It was just that Jak would have preferred to pull right now. Instead, he waited as the fat man began to unravel his tale. He glanced across at Doc, whose obvious distaste and disgust for this symbol of the corrupted world that had birthed the Deathlands was about to grow greater.
“THE FIRST THING you must know about me is that my name is Emile Taschen. I am not the first to serve that name, although I am the same as the others. You see, although animals had been successfully cloned in the public eye before the nukecaust, there was always so much squeamishness about the concept of cloning in human beings that the technology was kept quiet. I am the third Emile Taschen, my two previous bodies having died from nothing more serious than old age. Number four is currently being grown in the labs, where he will be kept at fetal stage cryogenically until I get older, and will then be nurtured and birthed before I die…if I can ever be said to actually die.
“I am taught my own memories and ideas, and these are absorbed into the blank state of my being. I am the perfection of science and humanity. Everything else is lesser, and I bestride it like a colossus, leaving everything to wither and die in my shadow.”
So that was the answer, Mildred thought. Cloned, and then the clone kept in isolation and fed the ideas and thoughts of the previous generation so that it became a carbon copy rather than a genetic copy open to variation from social conditions. It would seem that Taschen had solved the problem of living forever, even if it did seem somewhat by proxy. And what if some of the memories fed to the clone were distorted by time and telling? How could it have a grasp of identity? Perhaps this gradual erosion of identity accounted for the creeping defects of agoraphobia and the onset of madness. She was halted in her thoughts as Taschen continued.
“You’re probably wondering how someone such as myself managed to create such a structure as this without being part of the military-industrial complex on either side of the divide. The answer is simple. You become that which finances the military industrial complex. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that what you refer to as ‘jack’ has always been the oil on the wheels of human activity. It was the same in the days before the nukecaust—perhaps more so.
“I first became aware of the Totality Concept when I was a banker in my homeland of Switzerland. In the days before nukes, my land had always maintained neutrality, based around our banking industry. Money was the richest commodity in every way, and it bought peace, as well as prosperity. Those who controlled the jack controlled the world. But nukes made things different. Even with bunkers to hide in, there would be little to come out to—certainly not a society that we could serve any purpose within. So when the political situation of the world worsened in the latter half of the twentieth century, I knew I would have to search for a solution to my problem.
“It was then that the cabal of generals first came to me. They were from the U.S. military, and they were seeking a way to hide and increase the funds they had taken from their military budget. There were scientific and weapons projects that were being developed away from the eye of the U.S. Congress, which would either have stopped them or made their existence more open. This wouldn’t suit the cabal, who took the usual military view that a civilian government was more of an imposition than a necessity. Democracy was a concept for which they had little, if any, use. Something I agreed with—you must always watch your own back, on the assumption that nobody else will be bothered.