He was given what might have been a lab coat but could more aptly have been called a sack with sleeves, and led through long, rough-cut stone hallways –tunnels?- full of hurrying men and women in patched and stained lab coats, holding clipboards, coils of wire, woven baskets of unidentifiable pieces of machinery, bowls of soup or oil or sand or less identifiable substances. All wore lab coats and gloves; all had some sort of headset, most were talking to themselves or to the headsets. Dib noticed, with a nasty shock, that the some of the ones in the less-patched lab coats had headsets that trailed power cords into what looked like irken paks lashed on to their backs, glowing a faint cyan blue against the off-white of the cloth. One or two were missing limbs, maneuvering through the crowd on shining alien spider-legs. The presumably lower ranked scientists stood aside as they passed, carefully keeping their own feet out of the way of the sinuous metal spikes.
His guide walked quickly, forcing Dib to hurry on unsteady legs, totally lost but filled with an immense, detached sort of calmness, and the girl finally brought him to a large room covered with papers taped to the walls and stopped, stepping aside. Dib glanced back at her, and she smiled nervously. "He's in there, sir."
"Uh, thanks. Thanks a lot."
She turned to go.
"Hey, what's your name, anyway?"
She shrugged apologetically and left, vanishing into the busy hallways.
"They aren't allowed to tell you their names." A tired voice said from behind him, and Dib whirled around to see a haggard young man, maybe in his early twenties but with an air of wry hopelessness that made him seem far older, seated on a large patched pillow. A pad of paper and a stick of charcoal was loosely held in his scarred hands, the sleeves of his lab coat rolled up past bladelike elbows and smudged to amottled grey from countless hours of sketching. The man was all angles, it seemed, even his wild mop of black hair sticking everywhere in sharp, greasy tufts, and his figure looked gauntly tall even sitting down. Dib shifted his weight uneasily as he saw the two bandoleers of paks slung around his chest in a shining 'X', the wires feeding into a considerably bulkier headset than what had appeared to be regulation and the tinted blue visor that scythed bladelike across one mechanical eye, small streams of text running through the color in front of the cyborg metal orb.
"They can't tell you their names or our numbers, kid, or a good deal of other information. It messes things up." The man elaborated. "I'd tell you but I've lost track of how many of you I've seen years ago. Probably years ago. No days, see? Everything's tunnels."
"And they all died?"
"Believe it or not, about thirty or so killed themselves. The techs figured if they could bounce ideas off each other they could come up with something that only one of us couldn't."
"They killed themselves?" Dib repeated, horrified.
"More accurately, they killed each other. Couldn't figure out which was the boss, then went crazy. Schizophrenic paranoia, as far as anyone can tell. Not particularly mentally stable, if you know what I mean."
"Um." Dib sat down hard on the rough stone floor. Rat soup or no, this was getting hard to handle. "And this isn't a dream or something?"
The man snorted bitterly. "If you figure out a way to wake up, tell me."
"Just...what's going on? Half an hour ago I was in my room with Gaz waiting to watch me explode or something, and then I wake up with this girl scared to death of me and calling me sir!"
The man sighed, rubbing the bridge of his nose, his expression softening slightly.
"Sorry. Rat soup only goes so far, doesn't it? So, time for introductions. You're a clone, and I'm truly sorry for you. You get to keep your name for now, since you're the only active-status clone at the moment, but mostly you'll be called 'sir'. The techs're big on formality; there's a quasi-caste system going on. When there's more than one Dib in a room they're called Alpha, Beta, Gamma, and so on according to age, but the pecking order's pretty simple right now, because a missile got lucky last week and blew out half the generator galleries,and there isn't a lot of power to spare. Some of the guys in Communications think that the irkens have found a way to pick up on our radio frequencies, and the only reason they're not just melting half the hemisphere to get at us is that it would mess up the biosphere. Earth's a lot more fragile than most planets, and from what we can understand the Tallest have their antennae in knots trying to deal with us without blowing up the entire planet." He grinned viciously. "Earth's too valuable to scrap, and we're too irritating to let live. I hope those green bastards are getting some really nice ulcers over that one."
"Hold on, hold on," Dib pleaded, raising his hands. "This is too much. Look, uh- Mister- sir- uh- what am I supposed to call you?"
The man smiled. It wasn't a happy smile. "What, didn't I say? Call me Alpha."
Dib stared at the man in horror, trying to fight down the panic that was roaring up through the layers of chemical numbness.
"Take deep breaths."
"It helps?"
"Not all that much, but if you keep hyperventilating you could crack your very expensive skull on the ground."
Dib took a deep breath, then another. The calmness that had been almost ripped away flowed back slowly, and he steadied himself a little. Alpha watched him pityingly, leaning back again to let his younger self regain his composure. Dib tried to distract himself by studying the hundreds of sheets of paper on the walls, diagrams of engines, generators, textile looms, chemical equations, mining machinery, air- and space-ships, guns, calculations of air pressure and gravity and energy, meteorology tables and sketches of irken anatomy, tentative labels circling vulnerable spots. It was all in his own handwriting.
Alpha explained while Dib studied the pictures, trying to make sense of what his twins had gone through before him.
After Dib had made a copying kit for himself, he hid it in his father's lab where it remained for years, while Dib himself grew up and forgot about it, or, if he remembered, never found the time to update it. His ongoing quarrel with Zim grew more and more ritualistic as Zim's leaders grew more distant, the news of the Empire less frequent, and Zim more delusional. It was entirely likely that Dib and Zim worked out an unspoken ceasefire of some sort, or at least a significant lessening of hostilities. What remained of Dib's 'case files' hinted of a young man grown almost affectionate towards the alien, and the reports grew less and less frequent until the near-anecdotal entry in which Dib reported Zim's reactions towards a mug of hot chocolate, apparently the first dose of real chocolatethe alien had ever consumed. It turned out that the chemical structure of the cacao bean, when combined with massive amounts of sucrose, had an intoxicating effect on Irken biochemistry.
Zim was actually in the midst of a quasi-official truce with the young man at the time, both of them working together to end the fallout radiation of the pair's latest nuclear-powered-mech-battle, which had been giving humans nasty radiation burns and sent Zim into molt, complete with unbearable itching. Dib had not-so-innocently handed Zimthe mug of cocoa to see what would happen. Zim had drained the cup, demanded seconds, then thirds, spilled most of his fourths from an incoherent rant emphasized with his mug, and passed out mid-snarl. Dib cleaned up the mess, tossed a blanket over him –doing away with his opponent would have cut off his access to the irken's superior technology- and gone upstairs to report success.
It was the last entry in the log.
The main computer at Membrane Tech logged a swarm of dense objects heading for a collision course with earth, putting them down as probably asteroids. The usual anti-debris missiles were sent out to disintegrate the rocks, a flashy meteor shower was predicted in the paper. The scientists, under Professor Membrane's supervision, returned to the task of making the Perfect Sandwich.
Twenty six hours later, weeks before even the wildest calculations expected them, the 'asteroids' arrived and leveled all major cities to miles of molten metal and glass in the space of two more hours. It was presumed that Zim had somehow achieved contact with his leaders to introduce them to his newest obsession; within two days a small, worthless, unknown planet was suddenly the only place in the universe that could deliver irkenkind's first and only recreational drug, and its repulsive population the only race to be able to tolerate the water –and backbreaking manual labor- necessary for its production. Within a week civilization as anyone knew it had been erased, and within a year Earth was essentially one big candy factory.
The scientists at Membrane Tech, however unprepared, were still a collection of the brightest minds in the northern hemisphere, and had reacted quickly enough to honeycomb the land around the laboratories with a maze of twisting, winding tunnels carved through the stone underneath, protected from radar, stocked with enough raw materials and spare parts to ensure that the Irken's victory could never be wholly complete. It was then that they found the minidisk-
-"What's this?" Simmons asked, turning over the cardboard box in his hands, horrified fascination reflected in his eyes as he read the lettering on its surface. Dib smiled bitterly before a brief spasm of coughing overtook him –the silicate dust from the tunnels was everywhere, eating away at their lungs, but there was never enough time, never enough time and they'd fix themselves later- and pulled the restraining straps of the Spittle Runner's seat over his chest. "A little present, maybe, from me to the world." Dib told the aging man, then lowered the round shielding on the front of the ship. He could still see the childishly careful D-I-B penned on the 'gift', as what was left of the world dropped away beneath him-
Dib gasped as he was backhanded hard across his face. Opening his eyes he stared into the gaunt, scarred face of his older self.
"Wha-" He managed, trying to sit up.
Alpha's face slid backwards, and Dib realized that he was being held by two spiderlegs under his arms, suspended eye-level with the taller man, who was balancing on four more of them. Alpha breathed a sigh of relief and set the boy down, the twolegs used as arms retreating into their paks. Using his four walking legs he backed away a few feet in a disturbingly sinuous motion, lowering his body gingerly on to the cushion again.
"Now is the time where I say, 'Perhaps you are indeed…' and trail off all dramatically," The man said, rubbing the bridge of his nose tiredly, "And then you say-"
"Indeed what?" Dib snapped.
" 'Indeed…the Chosen One.' Or some crap like that." Alpha sighed, flopping backwards.
"The what now?" Dib asked flatly.
Alpha raised a long-fingered, skeletal hand. "You know, just generally chosen. Lead our people to glory against the oppressor. Same shit, different day, huh? You had a seizure or something. I'll have to ask the Techs to stop experimenting with the nutrients. Run along now, and I'll tell you the rest when you're not likely to bite through your own tongue again."
Another lab-coated man had stepped into the room and gave Alpha a brief bow, who gave a brief snort of either laughter or disgust, then gently took hold of Dib's hand and led him back through the halls into a huge room full of bunks, most of them empty. As Dib slipped under the sheets and out of consciousness, he couldn't stop wondering why his older self's eyes had been so fearfully, desperately hopeful.