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The Tator dies with a smile on what is left of his crisped and contorted face as his last conscious feeling
is of the knife slice that will preserve the necessary portion of his flesh to ensure his rebirth. He will be
back!
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But black, eternal oblivion is his fate. Smiling sorrowfully, royal Juniko feeds the fatal piece of his father's
flesh to the Palace piranhas...
* *
The new regime begins.
Curiously, some people actually resent cloning, resist self-duplication, not realizing it will be beneficial for
them. They go so far too far! as to try to escape from Phrenophalia, to flee to Zarnocopia to the
west or seek asylum in Megatropolis to the east.
(Of course, to go north or south would be unthinkable.)
The robopo always bring them back, of course: 'The Metal Police always get their man.' Or woman.
And 'afterward', all clones admitted how wrong they had been and how right Juniko.
* *
From the beginning Juniko had one personal thought, one small concession to ego: There should be a
tiny differentiation between the created and the creator. Not much, nothing overtly egotistical Phroide
forbid! but ... instead of laughing like all the rest, he would ... smile. Simply smile.
Thus, the ever-laughing people would be able to recognize their benefactor. And, recognizing, love him.
Since, from birth, he had always been a smiler; had smiled perhaps with a little fear, perhaps even
propitiatingly when his father stormed; had smiled with secret joy over his great plans and had smiled with
pleasure as those deific dreams came to fruition accordingly, there was no need for a Juniko clone.
Juniklone and he added one more smile to his life total as the portmanteau crossed his mind for the
first time.
After his father's death and his ascendancy to Tatorship, he bit by bit came to realize a strange
phenomenon: There were a fewnatural laugh-prones around the Palace, people who always had, they
confessed to him, had an innate desire to laugh and laugh all day long but had restrained themselves
because of his father. Juniko was glad to spare such individuals the expense of cloning. He even felt
better because such natural rictal stock existed. Natural-born laughers were the automatic answer to any
criticism from pre-clones who otherwise might dare to cavil at the idea that everybody but Juniko needed
a clone.
In fact, thank God for the naturals! He welcomed them all with his warm heart; treated them like
personal cloneys.
It was beautiful: Juniko even had to laugh to himself occasionally. There he would be among a group of
happy laughers, and all of a sudden his own perpetual smile would break and rictivate, elevate to
laughter, and he would laugh uncontrollably along with the rest.
Phrenophalia became a funderful world of laughing people until one day the Secretary of Offense
(soldiers now laughed all the way to the wars) was laughingly telling something to Juniko and Juniko
caught a strange look in the man's eyes.
The face was laughing. The eyes were not.
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A fantastic, shattering reality struck Juniko:He's not laughing with me, he's laughing at me!
Juniko fought off a bad feeling, the feeling of,shek! people are really no damn good after all.
Juniko, Tator of Phrenophalia, continued to smile before his people, of course, but it was a Pagliacci
smile, for inside him now grew a grief ineffable, a sadness beyond name. And an awareness that he had
actually noticed the phenomenon from the beginning but had valiantly forced himself to blindness, mentally
blotting out the fact that the human race was really rotten.
As he thought these dark thoughts, he walked like a zombie along a corridor of the Palace. As
everywhere else, it was bedecked with a multiplicity of mirrors. Reflected in one of these he saw that his
smile had taken on some of the old fixed quality that had been there so often when his father was alive.
The silent, internal conflict ended in what he finally decided had to be a win for the world. It was
necessary, he realized, to learn to distinguish between the people who were laughing for the joy of it and
those whose laughter was ill-meant.
Juniko was not immediately able to decide what should be done with those evil subjects whose abuse of
laughter had despoiled his idyll. And that was his fatal mistake, for his paranoia began to become evident
to those close to him, who remembered the example of Caligula, the Roman emperor who married his
sister and performed an enormous number of crimes. Nobody wanted another Caligula, except perhaps
Caligula's sister; but the problem was not complicated, as Juniko did not have a female sibling.
All admitted that Juniko the Original did have some good points, so his joint executioners agreed to
reincarnate him via clonage and, opting for a nonparanoid Juniko the Second, a part of him was
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