Whether you’ve got a replica, a doppelgänger, or a straight-up clone, having a duplicate of some sort certainly helps you move through life a little bit easier, from a temporary stand-in to a more permanent kind of donor. But they have to know how to successfully emulate their source material, right? Which means that you probably have to train them up. Here are a few of those times that training your duplicate (knowingly or unintentionally, closely or indirectly) came in handy…
Battlestar Galactica’s Cylons
When your entire society is made up of only 12 models, the average Cylon is bound to run into dozens of others with their face, if not their identical personality. The Number Six and Number Eight models in particular find that they range from sweet to savage, empathetic to humanity’s struggle or fervently worshipping the Cylon cause. To manage these disparate personas, each number’s class includes senior figures who help shape “younger” models, from the rebirth nurses who assist the resurrected Caprica-Six to “overseer” Sixes who orchestrate the human/Cylon breeding between Sharon/Athena and Helo Agathon.
Speaking of the Number Eights—if they didn’t look alike, Athena and Boomer could be entirely different people. Their run-ins have tended more toward body-swapping than mutual help; however, when Athena arrives on a rebel basestar later in the series, she encounters a group of Eights who beg her to lead a mutiny against the cruel Sixes. Instead of letting them blindly follow her, she delivers her one and only crucial lesson: to choose a side for themselves.
Portrait Training in Harry Potter
According to J.K. Rowling, the portraits we see in Harry Potter aren’t imbued with characteristics of a living person the moment their painting is complete. In order for a portrait to act like it’s subject, it has to be “trained”, even given certain information if you expect it to hide secrets. This is true of all the portraits of former headmasters in the Headmaster’s Office at Hogwarts—each new portrait is painted while the current headmaster/mistress is in office, and they keep their portraits out of sight, but close enough on hand for it to learn from them. By the time each headmaster retires, their portrait is all trained and ready to dispense wisdom to the new headmaster. Or a desperate Harry Potter, if you’re the portrait of Albus Dumbledore (and don’t pretend to be asleep, Albus, that’s just rude).
Data and Lal
Data is a sort of duplicate of his own creator, Noonian Soong, who based all of his androids on his own physical person. But Data was able to develop on his own, separate from his human parents, being discovered apparently “abandoned” at the Omicron Theta colony by Starfleet. Becoming an officer of Starfleet and valued member of the Enterprise crew, Data eventually makes the choice to create his own “child”, as it were, in the form of Lal. She’s not an exact replica—in fact, she’s quite a bit more advanced than Data is in a number of way, and develops the ability to feel emotions before him—but she is trained according to Data’s personal desire to be more human. When Lal is about to be separated from Data by Vice Admiral Haftel, the emotional burden proves to be too much for Lal, and she suffers from neural net cascade failure. It’s possible that if Data had created Lal to be a bit more similar to him, she might have more easily survived.
Molly Southbourne and the mollys
From her first lost tooth, Molly Southbourne learned to always fear when she bled. Fear, and then react—as each drop of blood created a duplicate molly (which she intentionally thinks of in the lowercase), Molly trains so that she can be ready to murder her doppelgängers at a moment’s notice no matter the situation, from scraping her knee to losing her virginity. An unnamed prisoner hears this grisly origin story in Tade Thompson’s The Murders of Molly Southbourne, as a grim Molly recounts her many kills and her discoveries about just how deadly the mollys—and Molly herself—are. But she’s not just talking to hear herself speak; by the end of the novella, the prisoner comes to realize that she too is a molly, except she’s the first molly who hasn’t wanted to murder her predecessor on sight… and Molly doesn’t know why. The best way Molly can sum up her training is to cite a fictional epigraph from one Theophilus Roshodan:
With each failure, each insult, each wound to the psyche, we are created anew. This new self is who we must battle each day or face extinction of the spirit.
Whether it’s nature or nurture, something about the circumstances of her imprisonment has shaped this twelfth molly into something entirely different. And now she’ll spend the sequel, The Survival of Molly Southbourne, figuring out why.
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The Survival of Molly Southbourne
The Doctor and “Hand” Ten
How much the Doctor “trained” his duplicate—created by an excess of Artron energy and his severed hand following the Tenth’s Doctor near-regeneration experience at the hands… plunger… of a Dalek—is debatable, but his memories and desires translate over well enough for “Hand Ten”, as he was often called, to know precisely what the Doctor wanted when he was given the opportunity to stay on an alternate dimension version of Earth with Rose Tyler. The two Doctors are so in snyc that Hand Ten immediately understands what the Tenth Doctor is hoping he’ll do—tell the woman they both adore that he has a human life to share with her, along with those three little words she’s been desperate to hear, given freely. The other Doctor gets the chance to have what no Doctor has ever experienced before: a life on the slower path with someone he loves. It’s probable that Rose’s Doctor develops his own little oddities and quirks (he’s already got some of Donna Noble’s essence built right in), but his ability to be the Tenth Doctor so exactingly is what makes him so perfect for Pete’s World.
Carers in Never Let Me Go
Kazuo Ishiguro’s quiet novel (which was adapted into a film in 2010) is all the more disturbing for how placidly it lays out its premise: Kathy, Tommy, and Ruth—three friends in a love triangle, who came of age at boarding school together—discover that their sole purpose is to provide organ donations to the people who cloned them. They never actually meet their “possibles,” aside from one point where Ruth thinks she’s tracked down her older predecessor; this only enhances their existential crisis, if they can’t even confront the reason behind their short lifespans. The “training” herein takes on two parts: boarding school adolescence, in which the clones are encouraged to paint and discouraged from smoking, keeping their bodies and souls “pure”; and caring. That’s the name for a potential career path for clones like Kathy, who look after their fellow clones who have donated once, twice, three times, and are nearing “completion” of their life’s purpose. Ishiguro’s writing matches this feeling of inevitability… that is, until the clones hear the rumor that they can defer their donations, if they can prove they’re in love.
Lincoln and Tom in The Island
Released the same year that Never Let Me Go was published, Michael Bay’s surprisingly nuanced thriller also tackles the ethical dilemma of clones-as-organ-harvesters; but in this case, the truth is kept from them. Instead, Lincoln Six Echo and Jordan Two Delta believe that they are part of humanity’s last surviving enclave, protected from the supposedly inhospitable world inside a compound where all they do is eat well, work out, indulge their artistic sides, and hope that they win the lottery for “The Island”—a paradise free from contagion. It’s an idyllic existence—until Lincoln discovers that “going to The Island” is a euphemism for donating essential organs to your sponsors, whether they’re comatose or alcoholics, or even serving as a surrogate mother for a sponsor who can’t conceive. While Lincoln has spent his short lifespan being primed to be the perfect specimen, the real training is when he comes face-to-face with his brash, hard-partying, Scottish sponsor Tom—and then has to learn enough about him to fool the assassin after them in a classic “no, he’s the clone!” shootout scenario.
Moon
In Duncan Jones’ Moon, the protagonist doesn’t create his own clone, but he does have to work with him to foil a dastardly plan. Sam Bell thinks he’s coming to the end of a three-year lunar assignment, eagerly anticipating heading back to Earth to reunite with his wife and baby daughter. When he’s in a frightening accident during a routine EVA, he’s grateful to wake up back in the base. But—how did he make it back? He investigates the accident site, only to find himself, barely clinging to life. This is kind of a shitty way to learn that you’re a clone. The two Sams quickly realize that they’re only the latest in a long line of Sams, and, even worse, that they’ve only been designed to live for three years. Which means Older Sam only has a few days left to teach Younger Sam everything he’s learned, figure out a way to send Younger Sam back to Earth, evade the prying eyes of their bosses, and work out a plan to expose the horrific truth of the lunar colony, to ensure that no Sam Bell has to go through this again.
MEM by Bethany C. Morrow
In an alternate 1920s Montreal, the practice of memory extraction has been developed to the point that traumatic memories can be removed from people and processed into “mems” living people, who breath and eat, but have no true sentience. These duplicates are not “trained” so much as “locked away and forgotten”—the whole point of them is to free their “sources” from the weight of the past, as they relive and react to the memories they were born from. But then we meet “Dolores Extract #1” who seems to have a consciousness of her own, and a will, not to mention a passion for movies. (In fact, she’s rejected her given title and taken a new name, Elsie, from a favorite film character.) Rather than accepting any training from humans, Elsie is determined to educate herself, and find a way to live a life apart from her creators.
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MEM
Bobby Wheelock (The Boys from Brazil) and Algernop Krieger (Archer)
This next batch of clones aren’t technically trained to do anything. But they would have been, if a couple of horrifying plots had come to fruition. In The Boys from Brazil, iconic ’70s thriller writer Ira Levin used historical fact to create a terrifyingly loony conspiracy theory. Nazi hunter Yakov Liebermann receives a phone call from Brazil and is tipped off to a series of mysterious murders, and soon learns that former SS operatives have been activated to kill 94 men—all of them 65-year-old civil servants, each with a 13-year-old son. The reason? Well, the men’s sons are all clones of Adolph Hitler, and Mengele is hoping that if he recreates the exact narrative of the Fuhrer’s life, one of the boys will recreate history. (That’s the loony part. Mengele really did flee to South America, there were real Nazi-hunters, and obviously there are still plenty of Nazis walking among us, looking just like you or me.) Liebermann ends up battling Mengele himself for one of the cloned boys Bobby Wheelock, but luckily Bobby rejects Mengele and sets the family attack dogs on him. (See? Loony. But this is a far better ending than in real life, where Mengele simply drowned rather than dying in agony as animals tore him apart.) We also don’t see the training in Archer‘s parody of the book, but we can infer that it happened. Dr. Krieger, the mad scientist responsible for both cybernetic advancements and pig hybrids (and the sole authority of Fort Kickass) spends two seasons insisting that he’s not a Hitler clone—“If I was a clone of Adolf goddamn Hitler, wouldn’t I look like Adolf goddamn Hitler?”—carefully not mentioning that he was raised in Brazil by a Nazi scientist, and only came to the U.S. after his pack of Dobermans ate the man who might have been his father. But in Season 5 the gang visits a Central American dictator and discovers the man has three Krieger clones, who are all working together to launch a nerve gas attack on New York, and have clearly been trained in a level of organized evil that our Krieger never achieved. Original Krieger fights them, three Kriegers are killed, and the one that’s left insists he’s Original Krieger.
But isn’t that exactly what a clone would want you to think?
Orphan Black’s Clone Club
Two words for you: CLONE. SWAP. Adaptability must be a strong gene among Project Leda, because Sarah and her sestras have a remarkable penchant for getting mistaken for one another and then having to lean into that. The clones aren’t so much trained as baptized by fire, like in the pilot when Sarah has to fool Beth’s boyfriend after a mere few hours of even learning her doppelgänger exists (it says a lot about both of them that she succeeds); Cosima as Alison, in which she accidentally “outs” herself as queer to the PTA; anytime Helena barely manages to play a cartoonish, and usually murderous, version of one of her sestras; and our personal favorite, Sarah-as-Rachel interrogating Alison-as-Sarah. Except in rare cases where they have enough warning to prep one another, the clones usually just have to wing it, based on whatever mannerisms and quirks they’ve picked up simply by spending time together. It’s the best sort of training in that it’s more organic, and speaks volumes about the depth of their various relationships.
I never liked Rowling’s explanation. I think the easier answer would have involved magic. Like the person gives some hair or blood that’s mixed into the paint and viola! A portrait that has your personality and memories.
We can’t forget Cyteen, where Ariane Emory creates a program to posthumously educate her own clone to recreate her own experiences growing up as closely as possible.
Clay People by David Brin is one of the best cloning novels I’ve ever read, even if the “dittos” aren’t exactly clones.
It was a concussion, and he just preferred regular ties, okay!
I subscribe to the idea that, while he is the original Krieger (knowing about the “chip” and his Waifu seem to confirm it), the concussion and head injury have left him genuinely not knowing whether he is the real deal himself or not. Although I love that, in typical Archer fashion, nobody really cares.
Damn, I want a Krieger spin off series.
For another learning by osmosis example, how about Miles and Mark in Brothers in Arms and Mirror Game?
What about clones created by time travel? I just finished watching the German Netflix series Dark, which uses the “mysterious mentor who turns out to be your future self” trope more than once.
In Gene Wolfe’s _Fifth Head of Cerberus_, the intention of cloning in the protagonist’s household was for the original to investigate himself. But he ended up training his clone all too well.
In Moon I love that in the short period they are together the two Sam Bells go through almost an entire child to parent relationship cycle. In the beginning the new clone acts like the sullen, angry teen to the older clone’s more measured adult. This is followed by a more equal relationship between respected adults followed by the new clone caring for the older clone much like an adult child cares for and aging, failing parent.
Does “All You Zombies” count as cloning?
#3 I believe it’s Kiln People
#9 interesting hypothesis!
Of course, there’s the Grand Army of the Republic in Star Wars, though only Boba was actually trained by Jango (for a brief time).
In the Clone Wars series, we do see clones training other clones.
“Sestra” always irritated me, because it’s just the Ukrainian (and Russian) for “sister”… but how come someone who otherwise speaks fluent if accented English doesn’t seem to know such an obvious word? It’s the same sort of “she’s foreign! She speaks foreign!” characterisation which has French characters constantly exclaiming “Sacre bleu!” in the middle of their perfect English dialogue, and it was old and tired fifty years ago.
I’m pretty sure the Hugo and Locus award winning novel “Cyteen” by C. J. Cherryh fits in here. A brilliant scientist is cloned after her death and her clone is emotionally and educationally manipulated as she is raised in hopes of reproducing the dead woman’s scientific genius. The novel explores the ethics of cloning and the legal and ethical rights and status of clones in society that sees them as essentially slave labor.
@9, I don’t see how ‘all you zombies’ can count; they are not clones.
Bujold’s Lotus Durona raised her clone to be a willing victim of a brain-transplant (moving Lotus’s brain to Lily’s younger body.) We just get the bare facts in Lois’s book, though a fanfic goes into more detail… no wait, it goes into Lotus’s life, but ends with the new clone.
Clarke’s Imperial Earth has a line of Titanian dynasts reproducing by cloning; not so much training as single fatherhood.
Schlock Mercenary has one guy, Gav, duplicate himself (full mind-copy) 950 million times using someone else’s infrastructure. Later on, some of them try to help other Gavs diversify mentally. “in an instant Gav had gone from being a single, doomed individual to an entire galactic demographic. There are so many of him now that his tastes in entertainment, foodstuffs and the like have become major industries, and he outnumbers several entire sentient species.”
very cool post, thanks![.](//s04.flagcounter.com/mini/Jkzv/bg_FFFFFF/txt_DEDEDE/border_FFFFFF/flags_0/" width="1"/>)
There have been several clone stories I can think of, but two which occur to me here that haven’t been mentioned are in Seanon McGuire’s October Daye series and in the Eschaton trilogy by Frederic pohl.
In McGuire, the clone is actually a death omen of October, created with all of October’s memories up until that point, but after that point diverges and becomes very different person acting like Toby’s sister.
What’s particularly interesting though, is what happens after this, since instead of the death omen dying when October was supposed to, Toby gets her blood changed and she continues.
This means from two exact original copies, we have two effectively genetically different people, who just happen to have the same set memories up to a cutoff point, even each developing their own sexual orientation.
In terms of the series, sadly McGuire seemed to forget making the two spark off each other and Toby get continuelly annoyed by her surrigate sister, once the clone plot was revealed, but its I liked the idea of developing two different people from a similar source.
Eschaton has some of the most interesting use of clones I’ve seen.
Okay, if Ftl travel is impossible, how about just sending something like a startrek replicator through space at normal speed, then using Takyons to program it to copy whatever you need at the other end.
Need to chat to some humans without anyone realising they’re gon? Well no problem, just teleport them to a station, leaving their clones on earth.
this not only makes a really interesting way around a love triangle (always helpful when there are enough of each partner to go around), but also makes for some really nasty situations, for example, if you want information, just vivisect one clone, record the experience and transmit information into the heads of the next few to pop out.
It all ends well of course, though for Frederik pohl it was a surprisingly dark plotline.
The secondary plot of Paula Volsky’s novel The Luck of Relian Kru is a sorcerer attempting to create (and then civilize) clones of himself. This was a delightful book — well worth reading!
Have none of you read the Bobiverse books by Dennis Taylor? They’re the ultimate act of this. One very smartship goes out and creates copies of itself to be the shepherds and protectors for flocks of humans who have to venture out into space or die. The clones create and train each other and then spread throughout the universe, each growing into their own person. They’re lots of fun.