The holographic projection beamed high from the holotable in the throne room. A gargantuan monument on the new colony, made in Marcus’s own—and by proxy, the clones' own—image. The grey, marble statue stretched so high that Marcus’s stone fingers almost touched the heavens. It dominated the view of a vast nature reserve, towering at the center.

  “It looks magnificent, your excellency,” Ironsides said, standing at the other end of the table as Marcus basked in the blue image of his own glory. “Cultural buildings are oft not given the priority they deserve, but they serve a function. A center for the people to provide relaxation, and to remind them where their bread is buttered. Not to mention, such a monument on The Creator’s World will provide cohesion for the empire, which will allow us to reach new tiers of civilization faster.”

  “Yes, we could do with that.” Marcus leaned forward, stroking his chin as he looked at the statue. “It reminds me of ancient Greece or Rome, or something.”

  The First Minister’s brow furrowed. “Pardon, your excellency?”

  Marcus laughed. “Oh, yes, forgive me. You don’t know what those are. They were old civilizations back on my home planet, Earth. Very primitive by your standards, I’m sure. But they built many beautiful buildings.”

  Ironsides smiled, nodding respectfully. “I should have liked to see it.”

  “Hmm.” Those words prompted a thought in Marcus. “Mayhaps you might, in some form. You know, Ironsides, I have walked the streets of our cities on Neptura. You know what I saw?”

  “What?”

  “Absolutely nothing,” the Grand Archon remarked, rather glum. “Yes, there was cheap propaganda, flying cars, tidy streets. But there’s no character to any of it, you know? The buildings are all blocky and square and easily forgettable.”

  “Forgive me, your excellency, but I’m not sure what you mean.”

  Marcus stood, walking down the steps toward the table. “I mean that, when you go to cities like Rome, you see these vast, beautiful monumental buildings that leave an impression upon you forever. The buildings themselves are a testament to the high cultural achievement and the power of that civilization. What you said about this monument, Ironsides, can be achieved with buildings. But our buildings are ugly and lifeless.”

  He could imagine it now, a vast metropolis of white marble and hanging gardens and rivers, the skylines dominated by the same flying cars, the buildings lit by their blue hololights. Gargantuan domed structures lined with towering columns and guarded by statues. Great amphitheaters large enough to host any kind of game. And of course, the houses of the gods, or in this case, the god. Him. Vast temples to host the image of Marcus, and thus the image of the clones, to forever remind them what they are fighting for.

  He always imagined such a thing when he thought of a glorious civilization, but when he really thought of it, he could make it anything he wanted. Maybe he could have pyramids, too, or go a step further and make everything look even more futuristic and oddly shaped than it already was, like those old Soviet brutalist buildings he had seen in Eastern Europe on his business trips, or the vast neon metropolises of China.

  Fuck, maybe we can build it all!

  The possibilities were truly endless. “Ironsides, I want you to gather some architects and bring them to me, and I will show you exactly what I mean. It’s about time we gave Neptura some aesthetic.”

  As Marcus spent most of his morning imagining what the new cities on the colony world would look like, which had been a nice distraction from the increased military buildup recently, a clone attendant walked in with some haste, came before the table, clicked his heels, and saluted.

  “Your excellency,” he said. “The Minister for Innovation has requested an urgent meeting at once.”

  “Oh?” Marcus said, now taking his eyes off the holographic projection of the monument. Perhaps Claric had finally made progress on the issue of Marcus’s mortality, because if he hadn’t, then he saw no reason why this meeting would be ‘urgent.’ And it couldn’t come soon enough… He had been here for almost fifteen years now.

  Fifteen years… He would be around forty years old, and no shit. Everytime he looked in the mirror, he saw more and more grey hair. The lines creased his face with each expression like the wearing of an old leather boot. He had found he got pains in his knees or back more often than before, and he was getting out of breath quicker whenever he had to climb long lengths of stairs.

  Claric needed to hurry up.

  “Send him in, then,” Marcus said, now eager to hear what Claric had to say.

  The clone attendant bowed respectfully. “Claric requested you come to the quantum clone vat, if you may, your excellency.”

  Marcus raised a brow. “Bold of him.” But in any case, his interest had been piqued.

  They had prepared his skyhawk for flight as he made the laborious journey from the throne room to the take-off pad at the top of the command complex. The aircraft whisked him over Neptura’s sprawling urban zones.

  As the cities thinned out beneath him, the industrial sprawl of Neptura gave way to vast tracts of rolling grasslands before breaking up to its vast oceans. In the distance, the towering industrial machinery of the old quantum clone vat loomed in the distance.

  The skyhawk banked lower, circling the structures that churned out steam and smoke. He caught sight of the entrance platform, where Claric stood waiting as the skyhawk landed, his pale blue robes whipping in the wind.

  The landing was smooth, the aircraft settling into position as the servos whined and the doors hissed open. Marcus descended, his boots clacking against the reinforced landing pad.

  Claric wasted no time, bowing quickly before turning and motioning toward the vaulted entry doors of the immense facility. “I am grateful you came so quickly, your excellency,” he said, his voice draped in a strange anxiety that Marcus did not often hear from him. It made him shiver.

  “You made it sound urgent,” Marcus said, stepping into stride beside the scientist. “Have you made progress on the issue of my mortality? I can’t see what else would be so urgent, and I’m getting old, Claric.” Marcus scratched his now grey hair.

  Claric hesitated. His hands, normally still and composed, twitched at his sides. “I think it would be best if I show you.”

  They walked through the corridors of the industrial complex, where the labourers and other staff made way as Marcus’s column of armed guards parted them like Moses with the Red Sea. They passed the observation windows along the far-stretching corridors, where beneath, in the vast, dark chambers below, hundreds of thousands of clone vats glowed like fire bugs with their pale blue light.

  At last, Claric led him into the central control chamber, where massive holographic arrays pulsed in the air before them. Streams of data ran through the display, strange symbols that looked alien to Marcus’s eyes, cascading down in wide segments before fading into nothing. “This is what we’ve uncovered,” Claric said, stepping forward and activating the interface.

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  At once, the display changed from symbols to images—figues, grainy and distorted, pulled from the fragmented Forerunner logs. The audio at first was weak, but then words started bleeding through the static.

  “...Abominations… the project is flawed…” a man’s voice said.

  “...are too subservient. Such a weapon can be twisted… Used as a tool for the very oppression we fought against…”

  Marcus narrowed his eyes as the ghostly figures of the long-dead Forerunners argued amongst themselves, their words fragmented, but the meaning crystal clear. They had been divided…

  Claric adjusted the projection, isolating key dialogue segments. “This is a record from the final years of what was called ‘the Revolutionary Commission,’” he explained. “We’ve managed to decipher fragments, and your excellency… forgive me, but the implications are most troubling.”

  “...We must leave them behind… They can’t rule themselves… It would be a catastrophe…”

  “...Damn you, Arten! You would abandon everything?!”

  “...Better they are abandoned than used as weapons against humanity.”

  Claric turned to Marcus, his face a shade paler. “This is it, your excellency. This is why there is no detailed history of the Forerunners. The Revolutionary Commission collapsed, not from external pressure but from within. They fought and bickered over the future of their clone army, and in the end, after some kind of struggle, the last remnants of the Forerunners fled after a lot of them had killed themselves off.”

  Marcus stared at the figures flickering before him. An uncouth lot of space farers. The very people the clones had once revered as mythical revolutionaries were nothing more than fractured idealists who had abandoned their own creations.

  “Where did they go? How do you know they fought? Their words don’t speak to that effect.” Marcus stroked his chin, never taking his eyes off the Forerunners.

  Claric cleared his throat. “Well, based on the opinions and consultation I’ve had with my colleagues on the subject, we estimate that one of these Forerunners had already tried to use what at the time would have been a small clone army to enforce his will over his comrades. Else I don’t see why they would be so fearful of the clone army being used for oppression. It isn’t impossible that, perhaps, some kind of civil war broke out between various factions each commanding their own clone armies. I’ve already set up a commission to do another survey of Neptura to see if we can find any archeological signs of a war on the planet.

  “Then one of them says, ‘We must leave them behind,’ meaning they had other destinations in mind to flee. But the biggest implication of this, your excellency, is that perhaps there are other lost human colonies out there independent of Vespera.”

  Marcus’s eyes bulged. “There are more humans out there then, in the stars?”

  “Possibly. This all occurred centuries ago. Whether any such colonies had survived is now unknown, but we are assuming there are other human governments out there in the stars, yes.” Claric nodded.

  Marcus didn’t like that implication, knowing well how other human governments interacted with one another on Earth. Well, better to be the one with an army billions strong…

  “But that is not the most critical discovery, your excellency, nor why I called you here,” Claric fiddled with his fingers, and Marcus sensed he was trying to be careful with his words.

  He frowned. “Spit it out then.”

  “The most troubling discovery… your excellency…” his lips quivered, “comes from the genetic records embedded in a cipher in the quantum clone vat.” He brought up a new data stream, washing away the flickering figures of the old Forerunners.

  A genetic ID signature came up before him in the form of symbols and reeling words. “This… This, your excellency, is you.”

  Beneath it, the label burned in glowing Forerunner script. “Host Profile: Prime Conduit.”

  “Host?” Marcus said, confused. “I already know I’m the host. We are all the same person. What is your meaning, Claric?”

  Claric turned to him now, watching him carefully. “Forgive me, your excellency, but you were not really one of the Forerunners. You are just the body they used for the army. A biological key left behind with the rest of us. You were never meant to rule us, nor be the Grand Archon. They didn’t just abandon us, they abandoned you. I imagine that they thought, without a council to oversee the clones, we would simply wither away and die off. Or maybe they didn’t have the courage to kill the original clones after they had been bred. Either way, it doesn’t matter. We are but the forgotten relic of a long lost war.”

  Marcus’s jaw clenched, and he found the only thing he could hear was his pounding heartbeat drumming in his chest. All of the terrible implications of this information… It took all his strength just to keep standing upright.

  Everything these clones have built, everything I have built my empire upon—It’s all a lie. A vein pulsed at his temple, and a cold fear, the likes of which he had never felt before, now clutched his heart.

  I could lose it all. They could question my position, overthrow me, they could lynch me. I could be left to rot in insignificance for the rest of my life, never unlocking the secrets for immortality, and I must discover them.

  Lest I die and live forever…

  The Forerunners never planned for this war, for this long flight to Vespera to complete their revolution, never planned for his rule, nor Neptura’s rise. The monuments, the empire, and its armies… all of it had been built on a misinterpretation of history, or straight up fairytales.

  And now, Marcus Dain was left with a choice.

  He now suddenly looked at Claric, his ever humble, loyal servant, with a venomous glare. Will he betray me, will he let his tongue slip about this information?

  “Who else knows about this?” Marcus said, his voice etched with a sharp tone. It carried through the hollow, dark chamber.

  Claric gulped. “No one, your excellency. I made sure you were the first to know.”

  “Good.” Marcus stepped forward, face to face with Claric, like staring in a mirror, only an inch between them. “You will tell no one about this, do you understand? As far as you’re concerned, I am still your god, I am still the Creator, and I am still the Grand Archon!”

  The clone licked his lips, his eyes widened, and his hands trembled. “B-But, your exce—”

  “No buts!” Marcus roared, now grabbing Claric by his tunic. “Do not forget your position rests upon me, and you suggested policy that was in direct contradiction to the government, the policy that cost Valen his career. Do not think for one second that I will not let that little secret slip if you should go running your mouth! Do you understand?”

  The clone nodded, a layer of sweat sheened on his forehead. “Y-Yes, your excellency!”

  “Good.” Marcus released him, falling back until he hit a wall and then sliding down until he sat on his ass. He could do nothing but let his head fall into his palms.

  “Your excellency?” Claric spoke, his voice soft, almost feeble.

  “What?” Marcus spat.

  “There was one more thing I think will be of interest, if I may.”

  He frowned, lifting his head from his palms, raising his tired eyes to meet Claric. “If it’s another revelation about how everything I believe is a lie, I’d rather swallow a bullet.”

  Claric turned, walking to the old data banks that displayed the crippling information, and pressed a button. A small, rectangular object popped out from one of the terminals, flickering with light. Claric kneeled beside Marcus, handing the curious object to him. “This is you. Everything about you, or your old life before you were frozen in cryo sleep. I thought you might want to look at it.”

  Marcus only glared at him but took the object out of his hands anyway. “Leave me. I need to think. And remember what I said.”

  “Of course, your excellency.” Claric stood up straight and nodded. “Insert the memory reader into the terminal over there when you are ready, and all will be revealed.” Claric pointed to a primitive looking screen. “I would never abandon you, and you can be assured that I am eternally loyal to the Creator. Glory to Neptura.” He saluted and walked out.