The primary plot of the story is about the protagonist (the 7th clone after the original, codenamed "H") entering a horrific "training regimen" of torture and beatings to force him to lose weight and gain basic manual labor/survival skills within a few months or else be killed
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Replying to @arthur_affect @BootlegGirl
And during this excruciating process developing a seething hatred for his past self whose every past indulgence has made his life now correspondingly harder, and who put him in this situation by mindlessly agreeing to anything that made his life a bit more convenient
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Replying to @arthur_affect @BootlegGirl
(With, of course, the irony that it *wasn't* really his past self who put him in this situation -- he *put* his past self in this situation, when he was created And could've avoided this fate if he'd just been the first clone to not come back for a new clone)
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Replying to @arthur_affect @BootlegGirl
The overseer in charge of torturing him taunts him with the fact that 1) the Company doesn't expect the cycle will ever end until his money runs out, which won't happen for centuries, and 2) not ONE of the new clones has ever even ASKED about the welfare of their predecessors
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Replying to @arthur_affect @BootlegGirl
The story ends with this kind of cheesily predictable Wham Ending The fully-trained-up H, transformed into this starved broken shell of a man, is told what his first assignment will be in his new career and we're only told it's "worse than anything he'd imagined"
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Replying to @arthur_affect @BootlegGirl
And he asks "Can I just know one thing? Where am I? What am I doing? The real me" The Company guy thinks he means the current clone, who ironically is codenamed "I", and tells him he's having huge banquets on a pleasure planet and well on his way to ending up back here
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Replying to @arthur_affect @BootlegGirl
Also, the guy who's torturing the clones is the original version of the guy.
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I though that was the most messed up part, the original guy taking out his self hate on generations of himself.
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"multiple aspects of one integrated real-world personality split via Genre into multiple different characters" remains one of my favorite sff tropes
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Replying to @perdricof @Diamandahagan and
because in the end there's only one orson the one who binges, the one who crash-diets, and the one who hates himself for both
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I don't remember the exact wording in the story but at the end there was some phrasing that in-universe means the Company's medical treatments mean the original's indenture will never end but out-of-universe acknowledges all the clone shit is only a conceit
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Replying to @arthur_affect @perdricof and
"A? A will be here for I, and J, and K A knows too much - A will never leave, and A will be the last to die"
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