Trope-a-Day: Expendable Clone

Expendable Clone: Not clones, no, both because clones are their own people, and because the number of suicide missions in which you’d be better off sending a cloned meathat rather than, say, instantiating your forked mind-state in the MB-77 “Glorious Song of Bloody Slaughter”-class heavy-duty war mechanical are very small indeed.

Expendable forks, on the other hand, yes – some may get to merge back with their original post-mission, if their vector stack can be recovered, but most of the rest just get to know that while they die, they will also live on.  Curiously to some, that often seems to be enough, but then, the originals all live in a culture that believes in pattern identity theory – and, of course, know how important the mission is to, well, them.  Or may be the kind of idiot-savant forks described back in Me’s A Crowd.

Decerebrate clones, or in more modern times, organ-level clones, on the other hand, are not people by virtue of being mindless, and may be freely expended for, say, organ harvesting.  Or, indeed – among the more decadent set – steak.