This blog post peels back the curtain on the cloning industry in the Reality Gradient universe. It’s the first in a series of posts which introduce the model factory, and the traits of models from those factories, as well as models from each one, pulled straight from the pages of my dystopian science-fiction novels.

After a multi-year climate destruction event known as Equilibrium split the nation into two halves, creating a desert from most of the mid-west, even the fundamentalist southern states eyed cloning as a recovery strategy. Breakthroughs in League City created a ‘Silicon Valley’ of cloning in Texas. The Cloning Revolution was in full swing.

In 2157, Regious Madison, proposed a law in Louisiana that if clones were created by a company there, then they were the property of that company, and not actual United States citizens, having not been born, but manufactured. Once proposed, a national discussion emerged, and the national opinion on cloning soured. The term ‘clone’ was used in such a negative way, that those proponents of cloning shifted to calling clones ‘models’ instead. In February of the same year, cloning companies began marking their clones with bar-codes on the inside of their wrists, a practice that became widely adopted.

This legislation was deemed “The Madison Rule,” and relegated models to the status of, for all intents and purposes, slaves. The reinstitution slavery within the borders of the United States was complete. Corporations who make, sell, and lease models blew up as the Madison Rule legitimized owning others as property. Factories were created across the United States, and over time, these factories began to specialize in their cloning methods. Models from the Bentley were workers, Briggs were fighters, Caldwells were sex workers, among others…