Set
There's not a word yet, for old friends who've just met.
posted
Leeta 87, from the cloner world of Kartikeya, named for an Indian diety by an Indian astronomer long after they had exhausted Roman names, and, coincidentally, it turns out, settled by Indian colonists, centuries later.
Leeta is one of the 8th generation of Kartikeyans, and each generation consists of a dozen clones, from each of 108 founding ‘families.’ Each ‘family’ consists of a single individual, and their many clones. In earlier generations, those who died had their memories extracted by neurochemical mapping soon after death, and downloaded into the minds of the clones of the next generation, so that each of the 12 children would, in theory, benefit from the life experiences and accumulated wisdom of their 12 ‘parents’ from the previous generation. Often, bodies would be lost or damaged beyond the capacity of the readers to recover their memories, and so later generations took to periodically ‘backing up’ their memories, in case of accident, so that their next generation wouldn’t lose that valuable experience if they died in such a way as to make their body unrecoverable, or their memories unmappable.
The technology and tradition has progressed such that each Kartikeyan of the surviving families (only 94 remain, most of the others having deliberately disbanded and assumed differing lifestyles, but one having left the planet en masse) now have a neuromechanical implant that records their memories and life-experiences, and, every 24 hours, uploads this information in a flash to a central storage unit. (Kartikeyans working off-world often have portable downloaders, that link up to storage units kept at local embassies or other regional civic centers devoted to the service of their off-world population.) The internal computational system also helps to store and integrate the many lifetimes worth of memories that the average Kartikeyan now holds, as an 8th generation Kartikeyan could hold the memories of many dozens of lifetimes, and would find them overwhelming, if unable to effectively compartmentalize and ‘pack’ them away until needed. Due to their tradition of only downloading information from their cloned past generations, Kartikeyans, while still functionally human in intellectual capacity, are capable of more easily dealing with the abundance of ‘memory’ and conflicting life experiences. Attempts at downloading memory information or experiental data from non-cloned Kartikeyans has proven disastrous, and led to madness (requiring telepathic therapy, as the information could not be safely extracted from the Kartikeyan mind without destroying *all* of their memories, both of previous lives and their own current life).
Someone unfamiliar with the Kartikeyan numbering scheme might think that an individual named ‘Leeta 87’ is the 87th iteration of her line, or that she contains the memories and life experiences of 86 previous ‘Leetas.’ She is, however, of the eighth generation, and each generation has twelve members. The fact that the last three members of the twelve clones from the eighth generation are referred to as Leeta 810 (Eight Ten), Leeta 811 (Eight Eleven) and Leeta 812 (Eight Twelve) also tends to confuse the uninitiated, who may come to believe that there are eight hundred and twelve individual Leetas!
As a result, *if* Leeta 87 had the memories of every clone from each of the previous seven generations of ‘Leetas,’ she would have 84 lives worth of memory and experience. Due to the loss of data and unrecoverable memories rampant in earlier generations, Leeta 87 (Eight Seven, not ‘Eighty-Seven’) only has the memories and life experiences of 61 previous ‘Leetas.’
That still makes her a formidably competent woman, as she has been a surgeon, a starship engineer, a geophysicist, a mathematician, a championship gymnast, a fencer, two different types of martial artist, practiced and performed in three different musical styles, a fungus farmer, an extreme sports instructor, an environmental systems engineer, a computer analyst, a computer programmer (six times, she’s particularly fond of that discipline), a translator, a low-grav dance instructor, a special effects artist, an architect of underwater and deep space arcologies and habitats, a holo-sculpter, an historian, a therapist, a soldier (three times), a medic / emergency services worker (many times, at least once per generation), a security / intrusion specialist, a financier, a priest (twice, of differing faiths) and a political satirist, among many, many other lives. She’s particularly fond of ‘trying new things,’ which can be difficult, when she’s already done so much, and in this eighth generation, she has taken to travelling off-world extensively, with ten of her twelve clones travelling in different directions, each seeking new experiences to bring home to enrich the lives and potential of the ninth generation of her family. As a result, one of her selves has become the only non-Braalian to get as far as the playoffs in magnoball, despite lacking native magnokinetic abilities and being forced to rely on the magnetic armbands used by non-Braalians. Even the two ‘stay at home’ Leetas, Leeta 86 and Leeta 811, have taken unusual routes, with Leeta 811 going into politics and Leeta 86 marrying and raising a family ‘the old-fashioned way’ (although she still intends to leave her life experiences to the next generation, so that the ninth generation of Leetas know what it is like to be a wife and mother).
Registered: Aug 2006
| IP: Logged |
Set
There's not a word yet, for old friends who've just met.
posted
(While Cosmic Boy has met this particular magnoball enthusiast, back on Braal, she is Leeta 84, and not the same individual that will join the Legion as Leeta 87.)
The choice of over a half-dozen Kartikeyan lines to abandon this clone system, as well as hundreds, if not thousands, of individual ‘non-traditional’ pairings and relationships and children being born to clones, as well as an increasing tendency to explore opposite-sex cloning, has resulted in the population of Kartikeya being a rich tapestry of both clones and non-clones and the children of differing clone lines. In generations past, such alterations in tradition led to civil unrest, and even war, but those times are past, and clone and non-clone Kartikeyan society is fully integrated in the modern day.
Like most Kartikeyans, Leeta 87 had the dusky skin, brown eyes and long black hair of her ancestry, unaltered physically from the first generation 'Leeta' who arrived on Kartikeya from the Indian subcontinent of Earth. While some past (and present) incarnations of Leeta have been fuller figured, depending on vocation, Leeta 87 was lean, and took after her more athletic and physically adroit past lives. While four of the current twelve 'Leetas' of the eighth generation are male, Leeta 87, obviously, is not one of them.
As a Legionnaire, Leeta 87 brought a plethora of skills and life experiences, and it seemed that on every mission, she would ‘remember’ some useful talent or knowledge that would assist her teammates in overcoming the obstacles and challenges that faced them.
Leeta 87 unwittingly became quite a threat to global security when an unscrupulous individual found a way to ‘hack’ the Kartikeyan embassies download processing center on Earth, initially tapping into the memories and experiences of every Kartikeyan on Earth, and using the information pillaged from these unsuspecting clones to steal from their accounts, use secret information they had acquired as a result of their jobs, etc. to enrich himself. He went a step too far when he used Leeta 87’s knowledge of Legion security codes to attempt to steal data from the Legion itself, including Flight Belt frequencies and secure communication codes, and while he wreaked havoc for a short time (and Leeta, and the other Kartikeyans, where suspected of espionage and betrayal!), his overconfidence led to his capture, with a vindicated Leeta 87 leading the charge to his arrest. (He was later determined to have been a clone himself, of none other than Tharok, of the Fatal Five!)
Fellow Legionnaire Dream Girl helped Leeta 87 to upgrade the security of the Kartikeyan download network, relieved that the villain had not succeeded in his ultimate goal, to *upload* his own command programming into the hapless Kartikeyans and using them as his remote controlled slaves. Using ‘Naltorian Predictive Algorthymns,’ Nura ensured that no hacker unable to predict the future would be able to ‘hack’ the Kartikeyan download processors again.
Registered: Aug 2006
| IP: Logged |
posted
Love your history of Leeta 87, Set! All our questions have been answered! Who knew that she was such a gifted hero?
From: Brooklyn, NY | Registered: May 2010
| IP: Logged |
Hyperpath: Email this page to someone!
Printer-friendly view of this topic | Subscribe To Topic
