Identical Replica proliferation

Identical Replica proliferation is the Divisionists’ practice of growing exact copies of themselves from small pieces of their flesh in embryo jelly. Presented as a way to multiply and avoid loneliness, it also creates dependence on a shared Mother Cell, fear of replica revolt, and a social order in which suspected copies can become targets of violence. The practice’s promise of stable, identical selves becomes inseparable from concealment, persecution, and the threat that one identity might occupy the world in countless bodies.

The Divisionist method and its risks

The Divisionists occupy a position between the Senders and the Liquefactionists, but their distinctive method is literal division: a person removes a small piece of flesh and uses it to grow an exact replica. The process imagines identity as reproducible rather than singular, yet its copies are not presented as fully independent. Replicas must periodically recharge with the Mother Cell, a requirement treated as an article of faith among Divisionists and a source of anxiety about what might happen if copies became independent and revolted.

The feared end point is proliferation without meaningful difference: one replica of one sex could eventually become millions of bodies, leaving a single person replicated across the planet. Some Divisionists believe the process can be halted before that monopoly, but their proposed restraint is limited. They still want to plant copies everywhere to relieve loneliness while insisting that the multiplication of so-called Undesirables be controlled. Because every replica except one’s own can eventually be classified as undesirable, the distinction offers no stable protection from the system it is meant to regulate.

Concealment and the politics of suspicion

Since no reliable method exists to identify a replica in disguise, the Divisionists are described as hysterically paranoid. Citizens alter copies with facial and body molds, dyes, and other changes to keep them from being recognized. Replica identity thus becomes both a visible political fear and something people attempt to conceal through deliberate transformation. A liberal opinion can provoke an accusation that the speaker is a disguised replica, turning disagreement into a test of a person’s supposed bodily origin.

The suspicion has consequences beyond isolated accusations. Fear of replicas that may be blond and blue-eyed has emptied entire regions, and barroom fights produce staggering casualties. Citizens also try to place hexes on other people’s replica cultures; the disputes are associated with magic directed at the Mother Cell, also called the Protoplasm Daddy. These conflicts show how the requirement of shared biological dependence becomes a point of attack: destroying or weakening replicas is treated as a means of striking at the source on which they depend.

A celebrated exception and its consequences

One Caid, described as an albino with a body shaped like a large crab, accumulates 20,000 Identical Replicas. Unlike Divisionists who hide their copies behind disguises and alterations, he boasts that his replicas need not be disguised or cosmetically changed. He presents their exposed sameness as beauty and imagines that they will inherit the earth. His case makes explicit the ambition implicit in proliferation: multiplying oneself until one’s own image fills the surrounding world.

That ambition draws opposition. A professional witch is called in to make Sheik Aracknid’s replica cultures sterile. In the same account, Dr. Benway dismisses the proposed intervention and predicts that Frederick’s ataxia will eliminate the replica nest. The episode places replica reproduction among competing attempts to control its continuation, whether through deliberate sterilization or the expectation that disease will end a culture. It also echoes the wider Divisionist uncertainty over whether proliferation can be stopped before it becomes dominant.

Enforcement, transgression, and social order

The authorities have given up trying to control murder and unlicensed replica production among the Divisionists. Their remaining action includes pre-election raids that destroy large replica cultures in the mountainous regions of the Zone, where replica producers hide. Enforcement is therefore selective rather than comprehensive: official power does not end the practice, but periodically targets its concentrated and concealed forms.

The rules around replica intimacy are similarly unstable. Sex with a replica is strictly forbidden and almost universally practiced; queer bars allow citizens to consort openly with their copies, while hotel detectives check rooms for replicas. Bars expecting to be overwhelmed by low-class replica lovers post signs refusing service. These examples make regulation part of everyday social life, but not a reliable means of containing the behavior it prohibits. Divisionists remain caught between fear and rage, unable to attain either the Senders’ self-righteous composure or the Liquefactionists’ relaxed depravity; the parties, moreover, blend in practice rather than remaining separate.

The dispute over identity and change

The Factualists reject replica proliferation as a facile attempt to flood the planet with desirable copies. Their objection is not merely that copies may be undesirable: even intelligent, genetically perfect replicas would, in their view, threaten life by trying to circumvent process and change. Against the Divisionist desire to preserve and multiply a favored image, this position treats fixed replication itself as dangerous. The result is a conflict over what counts as continuity: proliferation promises that a self can persist through exact copies, but its dependence, concealments, exclusions, and potential monopoly reveal how unstable that promise is.