The equilibrium settled and the Rapid Assembly Population began to move out of the longhaul ship to settle on the planet they had chosen for the endpoint of their journey. Distillation Mimics were common in the first generation, where the algorithm sought to distribute certain characteristics throughout the masses in mathematically chaotic patterns that were designed to promote variety as opposed to homogeneity.
Darn was sat there looking at his quintuplet siblings with their potato like faces, and he wondered how it could have all gone so wrong in his family as a whole, but so right for him. Within his family he was an anomaly, but he knew that they were not, and that they were so like that they were likely to have all manner of genetic defects, that only an astute family planner was going to be able to breed out of their line. Hopefully one would marry in.
When he hit the age to be able to leave home he ghosted everyone, and was unashamed to say that he never looked back. Sat here though, waiting for the amnio-camera to report back on the pregnancy his new wife was experiencing, he was fearful that, given the number of embryos they had detected, he was looking at a rather unfortunate expression of the faults in his own genetic make-up. No abortion squad would touch such a fruitful woman.
Maybe it would be all right, but he was beside himself with worry. When the doctor came in the room with that expression on his face, Darn already knew that they had succumbed to The Same Error. He woke up and realised the doctor had not looked at him like that, that he still had to wait to see if they were all Distillation Mimics. He went to the dispenser and took a Stab-Tab, jabbed it in his wrist, and activated the Bleed Out Pump.
His five perfect children only ever knew that their father had Bopped. No other memory of him survived. If only he had waited.A family that had survived longhaul had birthed a son who couldn’t even weather a sprint. Darn lost the Marathon.