One Chance

Kamino

31 BBY

There's a well documented law that's determined that ninety percent of everything is worthless. It's my people's belief that Tipoca City should be the remaining ten percent.

I was seven the first time my family was granted access there. Not yet an adult, but more than halfway through the process. Up until that point the sea had been our home. A cold, shallow place, but the only one I had ever known. It had taken years of pre-screenings to get here. Decades of tracking our immigration status and hearing the horror stories about the entire generation of our family that had been deemed unfit to enter.

All throughout the process we were reminded that life had many permutations. That it could take a weaving path, equal parts invigorating and meandering. A web that would coil out in a thousand different directions. It didn't take us Kaminoans long to pinpoint the right line, to acknowledge the most dangerous permutations.

While among other worlds, among other people, green eyes might have been considered an interesting quirk, an inviable trait, here it was something else entirely - a death sentence. It spoke to genetic inferiority, of a threat to the status quo, something to be stamped out, to be exterminated posthaste.

It had been three generations since its appearance in the bloodline. My family tracked the trait immediately upon my fertilization, and sure enough, there it had appeared, clear as day. I should have been flushed away then and there, a taint on the bloodline, an outcast by genetic determination. Unfortunately, my parents had other ideas, had allowed emotion to get in the way of reason.

Genetic alteration had long been considered our people's business, an enterprise we could base our entire society around. For me it would have to be a saving grace.

There wasn't much that could be done for a green eye, not for one as far along as I had been. There were only so many blood tests one could tamper, only so many ways one could thwart what was already predestined. And yet we found a way, colored eye contacts be praised, analysis be damned.

When they first opened the city gates for me as a child I feared I was walking into a jail cell. How far could a pair of blue eye contacts bought off the black market really get someone? It took a few months after the doors closed behind me to realize I was to be one of the jailers.

Tipoca City was special that way. It was an industrial shell where everyone worked and slept, yet no one truly lived. An ivory tower stretching past our planet's perpetual storm, unconcerned with the relentless tide. Like all things here, a defiance of nature.

Now unanimous with the place, the cloning facilities that set that standard had once been considered a side project - a lucrative diversion. Beforehand, our primary clientele worked in the underworld, operatives that needed a new lease on life, wealthy enthusiasts off the moons of Iego. When a hooded man came requesting a fighting force millions strong in a decades time most of us balked at the idea, it was too demanding, the human template too rigid. We were being asked to artificially create enough individual beings to inhabit a dozen planets. Or, as it were in this case, conquer a thousand more.

Where we saw impracticability, the director of operations saw opportunity, billions of credits upfront making the pill a little easier to swallow. Soon the differences in eye color became all the more important, workers separated into caste, taken away from their families. Gray eyes were the ideal, the leaders among us. Yellow eyes left you somewhere in the middle, a constant battle between who you strived to be and who you were one line of code away from having been. Blue was where all the rest went - the grunts that made up the bulk of Tipoca's work force. People who might as well have been terminated at birth, people like me.

It was strange how quickly a subsect of the blue became the most valued workers in the city, a ticket to a lottery that had been entered before birth. Armorsmiths had long been considered the least prestigious trade a blue could be appointed, now however, with millions of soldiers to be outfitted, their knowledge was highly sought after.

With body types as peculiar as the Clones, that knowledge became all the more crucial. Even in the early days I can recall thinking how strange the early human prototypes were. Why were their necks so stout? It was a far cry from the long, savory elegance we had been taught to strive for. Their skin seemed only to be there to create complication, hair grew out of practically every pore of their body, fluid would drip from every hole. Were these really the warriors the hooded man had requested? The ones to wage a war across the stars?

At one point the Yinchorri species were considered a worthy contender. So strong, so muscular, so resistant to heat. Those were warriors.

All the same, the template had been identified, and we weren't ones to question the clientele.

Work was slow at first, tepid even. The incubation process was the most crucial part, yet also the most time-consuming. Months of waiting and inspecting and all of it to ultimately discover that the entirety of the first batch had been contaminated, that they would have to be flushed away. Setbacks were expected at this stage, but even the head of operations was struggling to come to terms with the billions of credits that first batch had just wasted. Only a couple lines had gone corrupt, only a couple variances, but that was a couple too many. Perfection was the law of the land.

And it was that law that all further action had to be considered by. Financially it made all the sense in the world to continue to raise them, to have a force that could do the menial work that would make even the blues hesitate. The only issue left was a rather large one, one that delayed the discussions by months and ultimately extended the first batch's lives through infancy.

It came down to a simple matter of hurt pride. Allowing the subjects to live would be a walking representation of our people's collective failure as cloners, of our stumbles into the other ninety percent. We simply couldn't have that. An alternative had to be reached.

That was where I came in. It was my job as a 'blue' after all - body disposal.

I'll never forget how quiet it was walking into the ward by myself for the first time, hands full of anesthetic. Up until that point I had only ever taken two lives, each a practice run on other failed experiments - mercy killings, not like this, not mass genocide. We often wondered why the euthanasia couldn't be administered by droids, but the answer became clearer the closer I approached.

These were creatures created by our hand, bred for our purposes. We had as much responsibility in them at life as we did at death. Row after row of human babies gaping up at me in fascination. Small, pudgy, pathetic beings that smiled as the chemicals came swirling towards their unsuspecting bloodstreams.

And yet, I noticed one common abnormality between the lot of them, one simple error.

They had green eyes.

End