Swans and Klons by Nora Olsen Read Free Book Online Page B

me to bring you something to eat?”
    “Some fruit,” Rubric said thickly, still half asleep.
    “I’ve been awake for hours, thinking. I’m sure now that Klons and humans are the same. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”
    This woke Rubric up like a bucket of cold water being dumped on her head.
    “But they’re not like us! They’re thicko and less self-aware and don’t have complex emotions. We can see their primitive—” Rubric faltered and fell silent. She couldn’t think of any actual examples to support her case.
    “I think we just see them as less than human because we’re told to see that,” Salmon Jo said. “Maybe they are not as smart because they don’t grow up the same way as us. Or maybe they are as smart. What is smart, anyway?”
    “We can’t jump to conclusions,” Rubric protested. “We could have misinterpreted the whole thing. Maybe there’s one piece of evidence we don’t know about that explains everything.”
    “What does it mean to be human anyway? I’m not sure anymore what a human is,” Salmon Jo said. Her thin, muscular body was vibrating with tension like the string of a musical instrument.
    “I do,” Rubric said crossly. “I’m a human, and so are you. You’re just making it too complicated.”
    “I don’t know,” Salmon Jo said. “I don’t know.” She repeated herself three or four more times as she fastened her running shoes. “I’ll get you some fruit. I just don’t know.”
    Rubric was left alone with her thoughts. Suddenly she couldn’t stand lying in bed anymore. She got up and dressed in yesterday’s clothes. She tried to think of everything she knew about why Klons were Klons and how they got that way. It seemed she didn’t know anything, no more than she knew why the sky was blue.
    She took her handheld screen out of her cloak pocket and sat down at Salmon Jo’s desk. She looked up Klons hatched and origins of Klons and how Klons not humans . All the results were simple texts for children, with lots of graphics but little content. The information was scanty and repetitive. Over and over, she read:
     
    Klons are engineered to be different.
     
    Klons are so different from humans.
     
    Klons are engineered to complement us.
     
    Nothing explained how they were different or how they were engineered. Finally, she found a more advanced text, one she remembered reading a few years ago for academy. It had no graphics and was a history of Society. She read:
     
    During the Gendered Period of human history, male humans conspired together to subjugate the females and institute a system known as patriarchy , where males were in control. Because of their hormonal and neurological differences, males were typically brutal, non-nurturing, and emotionally underdeveloped, and had poor social skills. These hormonal differences also caused males to wage war, a violent conflict between societies that led to countless deaths and injuries, and poor quality of life.
    Women were forced to imitate animals in order to reproduce. Like other mammals, when a male and a Panna shared a sexual experience, the Panna might become pregnant , meaning she would grow a fetus inside her own body, inside the uterus organ (now vestigial in women of Society). Humans were unable to control the timing of these pregnancies . The only way to further the human race was to share sexual experiences with men, so no matter how distasteful this was, the majority of women continued to do so. The females excreted their Hatchlings, which they called babies or infants , through a painful and dangerous process known as childbirth . Many women suffered serious injuries or even death during childbirth . In addition, in most cases women were forced to be the sole caregivers for their own young, leading to exhaustion, depression, and an unhealthy bond between mother and child.
    The advent of Cretinous Males took the world by surprise. In 2043, the world first took note of the afflictions visited on