EP265: We are Ted Tuscadero for President

[Talia]

The ending sent a shiver straight down my spine. I found it both chilling and heartbreaking.

I can't imagine there wouldn't be some sort of "clone rights" group that would delve into the mysterious vanishings of the clones, though. I can only see this ultimately ending in massive scandal all around.

But that's not the story the author was out to tell.

This story is going to stick with me for a while. Not because of the whole cloning thing, but because of the tragedy of the main character.

Boy, I'm bummed. Time to look at pictures of baby animals or something.

[Loof]

I really enjoyed this story, particularly the ambiguities in regards to power and the truth.

[gateaux]

I so loved this story; it didn't try to do too much but enough to keep me engaged. Great reading!

[neltek]

I think I quite liked this one.
Actually some of the discussion on here has helped my mind delve deeper into the details.
I don't think it was my favourite style of story - but was good.

[hardware]

Not too much to say that hasn't been said other than it was a nice one. I would love to see this developed into a nice little indie SF dramedy flick actually. Any takers ?

[Devoted135]

"The Prez, there's only one of me til suddenly there's two of me and when two is what you see of me -GADZOOKS! Three of me! Three's the proper score of me, there's three of me, no more of me, and we can tell you -WHOOPS! Sorry: Four of me."

I love this reference so much

I really enjoyed this one, and was definitely feeling attached to *this* Ted by the end of the story. I wonder what the community would do if they knew what had happened to their Ted clone? (And yes, it's not cloning, but as a research biologist I've just given up at this point  )

[Calculating...]

I was a fan of this one, I love the idea that the future of our politics is personalized clones/proxies/whatever.  Although i found myself disbelieving the story towards the end when the proxy didn't realize what the original Ted was doing...seemed like a let down, so maybe the proxies weren't exact clones, they were altered so as not to think like the original?

[Planish]

This was an okay story, and for me "Okay is the new Good".
I was half expecting to find that there was no original surviving Ted, only a board of directors, cabal, whatever, and the Ted clones were mascots or spokes-actors à la Ronald McDonald. That would have been too much like real life, and so not SF.

Many years ago I was in Ottawa, and one of the government minions said that 95% of what comes out of Parliament was determined by people 3 levels down from the federal cabinet ministers.

nitpick @Mur, in the closing credits: "... recently someone asked me how to spell Daikaiju. D-I-A-K-A-I-J-U ..."?
tsk-tsk

[stePH]

nitpick @Mur, in the closing credits: "... recently someone asked me how to spell Daikaiju. D-I-A-K-A-I-J-U ..."?
tsk-tsk

I thought it was spelled "DA-I-KA-I-JYU" (in kana). But properly, it's spelled like this:

[Wilson Fowlie]

Many years ago I was in Ottawa, and one of the government minions said that 95% of what comes out of Parliament was determined by people 3 levels down from the federal cabinet ministers.

Yes.  If you haven't already, you can see this illustrated quite well (and quite hilariously) in the British sitcoms Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister.

[kibitzer]

Yes.  If you haven't already, you can see this illustrated quite well (and quite hilariously) in the British sitcoms Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister.

Some of the best British telly I have ever seen! I'm pretty sure it's all true...

[Loz]

Then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher said that it was true, and the writers insisted that some plot points in YPM were straight from ministers and other officials (having a 'diplomatic tent' at an event in Saudi Arabia so that British officials could still drink alcohol in a country where it is supposedly forbidden).

[yicheng]

I didn't really care for this one.  I, too, flailed and flopped about cloning and how it worked, and the way Ted was treated by the different people felt really creepy because I was sure that he was going to be thrown back into the clone-recycling vat as soon as his tour of duty was up. 

Also, too many plot holes in this story to count: the largest of which is what I call the Prime Law of 4chan, "There is ALWAYS porn of it"!  In a world where you can just make docile clones of people, why wouldn't you have armies of sex clones running around everywhere.  Even if it's highly expensive and restricted, there ought to be several thousand black-market cloning facilities popping up overnight in any number of countries with lax laws (Switzerland, Thailand, North Korea, Mexico, Argentina, etc, etc).  Besides the personal uses by billion dollar moguls, think about what would happen in a world where you can literally make a copy of anyone.  There would literally be millions of porn films made by clones of every famous person ever.  Want to see Paris Hilton do it with a clone of Jesus?  Viola!  How about a gay flick with Edward and Jacob from Twilight?  It's cake with clones!  Want porn of Sarah Palin and Barack Obama doing the dirty?  No prob.  How about the Pope with Margaret Thatcher?  Probably got that too.

Dude, that's like a seriously eff'ed world.

[Scattercat]

How do you know such porn doesn't exist?  The story doesn't really address the world of underground pornography.

[yicheng]

In the age of the Internet, there is no more "underground".  Not when you can give anyone college age or younger a credit card and a broadband connection and ask them how much porn they can get and get back the answer as: "All of it". 

But to address your point, I guess nowhere in the story does it explicitly say that there isn't a crazy amount of porn of every famous person there ever was on the Internet, just like nowhere in the story does it explicitly say that Invisible Pink Unicorns haven't taken over the world's governments.  But I think something that far-reaching and society-impacting would probably make it into mention in everyday conversation, like "Hey Ted, don't leave any DNA on your silverware because they'll make clone porn out of that." or "Hey Ted, did you see that latest Harry Potter movie?  No, not the lesbian clone porn with Hermione and MacGonagall, the one with the original actors."

And even if the polite society was too polite to mention it in passing conversation, I still maintain that it's one eff'ed up world.

[Scattercat]

I don't tend to mention a lot of porn in my day-to-day conversations. 

Also, these are legal government clones, and the implication was that cloning was not something ordinary people had a lot of access to.  I'd imagine that underground clone-porn sites would have to be pretty underground in the same way that snuff films are currently pretty underground. 

Basically, I agree with you that this porn is a likely consequence of the technology existing, but I don't see why the story is flawed for not mentioning it.  The existence of cheap, free porn on the Internet is a huge consequence of that technology, but a story from back in the 1950's could have been about a hypothetical massive computer network and not be flawed for not dwelling on the idea of porn.  Hell, a modern story about the Internet and computers wouldn't be flawed for not mentioning porn.  Plus, right now we have Photoshop, which means that we can already see anyone we want spliced into a porn picture, and that hasn't exactly destroyed culture or had any real impact on anyone beyond skeevy people who really, really like celebrities.

[yicheng]

Scattercat, I'll admit that when I posted it earlier, I was posting mostly out of jest.  But I do stand by my criticism that if cloning was to become available there would be more far-reaching society consequences than seemed to be represented in the story.  A non-porn related impact would be that the entire judicial system would have to be rewritten around cloning.  Case in point: If I have another clone of myself, and I murder someone OJ-Simpson-style leaving plenty of DNA evidence for the CSI's to find, they'd never be able to convict me, because they can't prove definitively that it me and not the clone (nor vice versa).  In another example, every professional sports organization in the world would shell out millions of dollars for a chance to clone a Babe Ruth (or whoever), Michael Jordan, or Muhammad Ali.  How would that affect the popularity of sports as a whole?  For that matter, how many pop icons would be cloned overnight?  Michael Jackson?  Elvis?  Marilyn Monroe? 

[Scattercat]

Probably a lot.  Sounds like an awesome set of stories!

I still don't see why it's a flaw that this story, which focused on the use of clones by presidential candidates, is in any way at fault for not writing every possible story involving cheap magic-clone technology. 

Let me try another tack.  In Star Wars, there are very likely Force-sensitive people who don't become Jedi and use their powers to cheat at gambling and become criminal masterminds.  (In fact, such people have featured in the various spin-off products.)  Is Episode IV a bad movie because they didn't include one of those? 

This story was very much about the use of clones in the political arena, and in particular the experiences of one clone out of hundreds in one small town in the middle of nowhere, at a time when the cloning technology is still pretty expensive (at least to get the initial copy made.)  I can't get mad if the story's central premise has a lot of interesting and potentially cool implications; I'd be annoyed if they tried to fit all of that in, frankly.

[yicheng]

We may have to agree to disagree.  I'm not sure if using Star Wars really helped your cause, because they are enough plot wholes in that series to fly a Star Destroyer through.  Episode IV was actually one of the better Star Wars movies (probably because Lucas hadn't gone really really crazy yet), and in and of itself (before the whole Star Wars universe was ludicrously constructed with it's midichlorians and non-jedi force-sensitives), it was pretty much internally consistent.  After all, in that movie, for all we know Luke, Obi-Wan, and Vadar are the only Force-sensitives we know of.

As for the story, I have to say again that "expensive" doesn't imply "rare".  After all, Ferrari F430's are pretty expensive, but you still see one of two of them just driving around.  There are implications in the story itself that other candidates besides Tuscadero employ cloning tech, so at the very least, it's available to private citizens (presumably ones with lots of money).  And this means that more powerful private individuals (e.g. Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoc, etc) most definitely would have access to cloning, to say nothing of other countries and multi-nationals.  Imagine what a bored Saudi prince with a few extra $M lying around would buy himself for his birthday if he could clone anyone he wanted to.  Or what intelligence agency would do if they could clone anyone (say a foreign diplomat with top secret access to information and computer systems).  I don't expect the story to cover all of it in any great detail, but I simply think that plopping down Mayberry, USA, and saying "there's cloning, but everything else is exactly the same" is too much for me to swallow. 

I don't expect you to agree with me, nor do I expect you to suddenly hate the story because of what I said.  I actually found the characters fairly enjoyable, but the inconsistencies were too flagrant for me to get past.

BTW, I think Bruce Sterling's "Distraction" is a good book on a similar subject of politics in the future and genetic manipulation.

http://www.amazon.com/Distraction-Bruce-Sterling/dp/0553576399

[Balu]

Imagine what a bored Saudi prince with a few extra $M lying around would buy himself for his birthday if he could clone anyone he wanted to.

What an idea, and what a setting. Those guys aren't even supposed to drink.

[yicheng]

Imagine what a bored Saudi prince with a few extra $M lying around would buy himself for his birthday if he could clone anyone he wanted to.

What an idea, and what a setting. Those guys aren't even supposed to drink.

Wahhabi Arabs are not Saudi Princes.  You might want to do some research on Saudi history.  The excesses and "liberal" indulgences of the Saudi family are quite well-known, and are one of the main grievances of Islamic Fundamentalists.

And BTW, Jews aren't supposed to drive on Saturdays and eat Cheeseburgers but I'll bet you can more than few that do.  Technically Christians aren't supposed to that either, but that's a whole new can of worms.

[LaShawn]

Add me to the list of people who loved this story!

[Balu]

Wahhabi Arabs are not Saudi Princes.  You might want to do some research on Saudi history.  The excesses and "liberal" indulgences of the Saudi family are quite well-known, and are one of the main grievances of Islamic Fundamentalists.

And BTW, Jews aren't supposed to drive on Saturdays and eat Cheeseburgers but I'll bet you can more than few that do.  Technically Christians aren't supposed to that either, but that's a whole new can of worms.

Saudi Princes are Wahabi. At least technically.

Speaking of which I wonder if, given DNA from his heirs and the correct technology, one could use cloning techniques to produce a new Mohammed? And if so would he be able to hear God as well as in his first physical incarnation?

As for Jews eating cheeseburgers, they'll be sorry when the rapture xenovirus is deployed and only the non-cheeseburger eaters are left behind as the chosen people.

I mean really, what a bunch of schmucks! It isn't as if the aliens didn't warn them in good time.