Entry Twenty – Days after Geonosis, One Hundred Thirty
The Bucket acquired its first official Coruscant Guard unit today. At the moment it's not a very large unit, only a single company, but there are apparently plans to expand the presence. The clones took official possession of a shiny new base on Level 1325, though only the barracks wing for this one company is complete for now. Apparently the army loves ceremony. The simple business of arrival became an entire event. Every police prefect in the Bucket attended, plus a one hundred officer honor guard. Xeril wore his dress uniform, not well. I think he has been stress eating, but the usual coat hides weight in a manner the shiny blues do not. Myself I was obligated to attend as the representative of the Jedi Order. I have difficulty imagining a more complete waste of three hours.
Perhaps ceremonies of this nature have useful symbolic value, but one presumes this usually involves an audience. Absolutely no one not required to appear did so, not even off-duty officers. The local residents almost completely ignored the affair. I note almost because someone arranged for a sliced camera droid to project the Blue Comet, the symbol of the Wandering Star syndicate, onto the barracks roof at the same time they raised the Republic flag. The clones shot the suborned machine down quickly enough, but the incident was still seriously embarrassing, or would have been had anyone been watching. Instead I was able to observe corruption in real time as several prefects snickered openly at the embarrassment of the clones.
I was able to meet with the Clone Captain afterwards. He goes by Eights, apparently a reference to his identification number. I felt bad for the man, he clearly was unable to converse with me with any sort of casual nature and kept obviously battling with some sort of programmed compulsion to call me 'commander.' It made even bland discussions miserable.
The clones, now that I have finally had the chance to meet them up close, unnerve me. Reports and guidance from the Council have stressed that each clone is an individual, how their unique natures can be felt in the Force. Maybe that's what the Masters feel, but my senses kept counting out identical reactions to similar stimuli. The contrast with the backdrop of the underworld could not have been starker. When they raised the flag up all the clones turned and saluted as one, and in the Force they shown out as a furious beacon of focus and pride. The officers, though they all managed to appear roughly at attention, were out of sync. They balanced on their feet differently, continually bent their hands in new directions, and presented the same muddled inconsistency as any assorted crowd in the Force.
The clones may be unique, if one looks closely, but they are still clones. Their distribution curve forms a bare spike even when compared to other professionals in the same field. Compared to the galactic population as a whole it is a practically dimensionless line. It is not simply biology. The way they move and stand, every aspect of their body language reveals how these men, bred from an identical template, were brutally trained to be the same. Identical twins, as anyone who endures a genetics course learns, often display wide phenotypic variation despite their mirrored genotypes, but these men were nurtured to be copies of each other above and beyond their shared heritage.
I do not like it. Everything about the project, about this army, it feels like a mistake, a path that should not have been taken. Not that I can blame the Kaminoans, cloning is built into the very structure of their society. They were given a set of objectives and met them with considerable efficacy.
But why clones? Why not droids? Certainly there exist specialized tasks where the flexibility of a living mind combined with the consistency of cloning is ideal, older records suggest the Kaminoans often produced batches for a variety of hazardous environment industrial jobs in the past. I can see the utility of such moves, but this grand army is entirely different. Clones may well be superior to droids in combat, and surely they will make better police, but warfare demands death. Bloodless victories are anomalous. Soldiers perish even during training exercises; Kayi showed me the statistics for the Ayae. How many human lives were birthed on Kamino and never even lived to see combat?
If a clone is worth ten droids in combat, then I say build eleven droids. At least then no one dies.
Even a volunteer army seems as if it would have been superior. The Republic produced the clones, and now it pays for them, but there was no shortage of desperate souls before. The Bucket alone contains enough downtrodden hopefuls to populate a vast army in return for room, board, and a regularly paycheck, and I have seen firsthand many places that are worse across the galaxy. War demands suffering, truly, but why could we not have taken some measure of ill from elsewhere and repurposed it? Why did we create fresh new faces purely for the ax to fall upon?
This troubles me greatly, and I feel my own perspective is woefully inadequate. I need to talk to understand it. Isoxya and Kayi will know much, I think, but I should find a clone to speak too, one on one. Captain Eights would be far too awkward, but there are clones with medical training. Perhaps this unit has one with who might talk with me. That would even fit my duties, maybe even offer a path to access military medical supplies. I shall have to find out.
Notes
Wandering Star is a canonical crime syndicate active in the Coruscant Underworld. Though not one of the big galaxy-spanning names, it is a significant local presence.
Clones having difficulty reconciling the problem of a person they mentally put in the 'Jedi' category but who does not have a military rank was something that showed up in the most recent batch of TCW episodes with regard to Ahsoka.
Speaking of TCW, Rex has the memorable line in the final arc emphasizing 'without the war, we wouldn't exist.' As it happens, and as Nema is ruminating upon here without realizing the truth, that's not actually correct. There is no military need whatsoever for the Republic to have specifically produced a clone army, it was absolutely bursting with volunteers who would have joined up for three meals a day and a paycheck (one of the better bits of Solo, as a film, is how it demonstrates this same dynamic with regard to the Empire). The clones only exist because they allowed Palpatine the means to spring Order 66. The tragedy is boundless.