cosmictuesdays asked:
eponymous-rose answered:
Ooh, good question! Except, for some utterly bizarre reason, I picture him as being Jacksonian, and really frustrated about it (to the point where he goes out of his way to make people think he’s Betan). I think, in a universe where a certain amount of genetic engineering is pretty much expected, you’ve gotta find your conflict in how it was done, and for a Jacksonian, that answer is almost sure to be “illegally and immorally”, which maybe parallels Bashir’s case a little more than the others would. (Was he engineered with the expectation that he’ll get a clone’s brain at some point down the line? Something like that.) Cetaganda’s got the whole gene-splicing thing going on, and goodness knows Bashir’s got the haut-look about him, but there’s something a bit too distant and removed and self-satisfied about that process for it to fit Bashir’s case, IMO. And Beta just doesn’t quite have the conflict inherent in it. Hmm. Yeah, Jacksonian, I think!
Technically, anything done on the Whole is lawless, not illegal. A fine but important designation.
And like I said - this gives me the good kind of shudders. Bashir walking around knowing someone wants to stick their brain into his body is exactly the proper tone of creepy.
I mean, if you wanted to go for REALLY fucked up, you could actually have it that Julian’s parents already had a brain transplant performed on him. Like, maybe he had a traumatic brain injury, or was just born “mentally impaired” so they had another brain grown and then put into his body, throwing the other one out. Or, the other way, he had some physical disability, either born or acquired (maybe kind of like Miles, actually) and they had his perfectly good brain transferred into a clone’s body at a young age. And his parents wouldn’t have to be Jacksonian, they could be from somewhere else where something like that would be illegal and went to over there to LawlessVille to get the procedure done, which would kind of parallel the show where they had to go somewhere outside federation space. And so Julian has all the same guilt going on about the clone that died in his stead.
Sorry, I’ve been low key following this stuff and I think it’s so cool, sorry for barging in.
“You don’t understand, Jules!”
“No, you don’t understand. I stopped calling myself Jules when I was fifteen and I’d found out what you’d done to him. I’m Julian.“
“What difference does that make?”
“It makes every difference, because I’m different! Can’t you see that? Jules Bashir died in that clinic on Jackson’s Whole! His brain was discarded as biological waste and mine was implanted in his body! I’m no more Jules Bashir than any of those Jacksonian robber barons swanning around in cloned bodies are the clones they killed and replaced! You killed him, because you were ashamed-“
“That’s not true! We were never ashamed of you. Never.”
“…that is what you took from all of this? That I thought you it was me you were-”
“You don’t know. You’ve never had a child. You don’t know what it’s like to watch your son. To watch him fall a little further behind every day. You know he’s trying, but something’s holding him back. You don’t know what it’s like to stay up every night worrying that maybe it’s your fault. Maybe you did something wrong during the pregnancy, maybe you weren’t careful enough, or maybe there’s something wrong with you. Maybe you passed on a genetic defect without even knowing it. If we’d only used a uterine replicator, done a proper gene-scan, maybe-”
“Maybe I wouldn’t exist at all and you’d have had the child you wanted right from the start! And that would probably be a better world, but that doesn’t change what happened here! The truth is, I am wearing my brother’s corpse! It doesn’t matter what you intended, it doesn’t matter if you were ashamed of him or if you didn’t know what it would mean, because Jules is dead, Mother! He died on the operating table and no-one so much as mourned him! And no amount of good intentions are going to change that fact!”
cucumber-s
