Tales of the Ela-pocalypse – The Clone Saga – Dr. Sharon Bertroche

We never should have let Dr. Ferrers leave.  People like to say that hindsight is 20/20, it’s not true but some things are obviously a mistake in retrospect.  Dr. Ferrers had the training and background to deal with a variety of medical issues that we’ve encountered.  He was invaluable.  We were stupid back then.  We let him go with the others to look for his family even though there’s no way they survived the fall of Alpha.  We felt like that was his decision to make.  He wouldn’t have liked being kept here against his will at first but he would have gotten used to it. 

That’s what we’ve all learned.  You can get used to anything. 

Maybe Dr. Ferrers could have helped me.  Maybe not.  Brain injuries are tricky.  I never fully recovered from 20256250’s attack.  I get confused easily.  I have trouble remembering.  I get angry for no reason.  I lose time.  Sometimes I sleep for days in a row without waking up.

For a while in Year Two I would to torture some of the clones.  57886251, 10046688, 00039974, I would carefully record which one it was and what I did to them.  It made me feel better at the time.  Eventually I realized that it was just sick.  They looked like 20256250 but they weren’t her, they didn’t do anything to me.  They couldn’t even understand what was happened to them.  It the same as torturing an animal for no reason.  I stopped doing that but not as soon as I should have. 

Killing Gene was probably a mistake.  He was a good leader.  I never expected that.  He was such a shit Administrator that nobody anticipated that he would be a good crisis leader.  When the world went away he made the hard decisions and he kept us together as much as he could.  He gave us some kind of hope. 

Maybe he had to die though.  Maybe it was a sacrifice.  Gene had to die to absolve us of our sins.  He’s the one who made the decision to start eating the clones so that made it okay for us to do it.  Gene decided that, not us.  And we killed Gene so justice was served. 

If Dr. Kohutek was still alive I’d ask her.  She was good with psyops.  I think she’d say that there was a mental health benefit to killing Gene, it was self-care.  Killing him was a way to let ourselves off the hook for what we were doing.  Not justice in any sense of the word, but a way to handle the shame.  Then again Dr. Kohutek killed herself in Year Zero so maybe she wasn’t that good at her job. 

We made so many mistakes.  We can’t truly blame ourselves now because those people aren’t who we are now, they didn’t know what we know.  Those people we were back then had no reason to think that Alpha Complex was gone.  It’s perfectly reasonable to sit here and think about all the harsh moves we should have made early on but they didn’t know.  Year Zero Sharon didn’t know what I know.  It’s not fair to castigate her for what she did in the past.  She didn’t know. 

Was letting Dr. Baidyabhusan create her hybrids a bad idea?  Or was exiling her for doing it after the fact the bad idea?  Doing both was certainly a mistake.  Either we should have told her no or we should have supported her fully in her work. What she was doing was amazing but I understand why some other people were so disturbed by it.  Playing god they said, like that’s not what we were all doing.

That was before though.  Now I doubt anyone would care if Dr. Baidyabhusan did that now.  Not with what we’ve done.  I wonder if she survived out there in the dead world.  I don’t think anyone else could, but she had created herself protectors and assistants.  She might have established herself out there somewhere. 

I hope so.  It would be nice to talk to her again.