I know this is being discussed in the Hari's uploaded consciousness thread, but I thought I'd separate it out....
I can't make any sense of the replacement Cleons pointed out by Brother Dawn. Exactly how does this work? So, they grow Cleons that are each a certain year old from, what? Age 1 to Age 90? and freeze dry each of those 90 Cleons? So that, just in case a Cleon accidentally dies or proves to be a failure they can replace him, no matter the age?
Am I understanding that's how this works?
If I've got it right, then there's this warehouse of Cleons and they can just implant the right memories and mind into the one they need. SO, Problem with Brother Dawn? No problem. Erase damaged Brother Dawn, Roll out Brother Dawn age 17, download the saved mind into him and he's ready to go. No interruption in service.
Now, someone said that these can't be as good as the "grown from birth" types...but that makes no sense. If you're going to replace Brother Dawn with freeze-dried Brother Dawn then he has to be AS GOOD as one grown from birth. OTHERWISE you're going to end up with an inferior Brother Day on the throne and running the Empire! 😱 I presume that whoever created this wacky plan made darn sure that this freeze-dried replacement would be as good as the grown-from-birth sort. I mean, you already got rid of the "grown from birth" Brother Dawn because he wasn't satisfactory. You don't want a problem with the him once he becomes all-powerful Brother Day and is giving orders to, say, firebomb planets.
Which brings us to the question...Why in the world are are the Cleons bothering to bring up future emperors from birth? You could skip all those years of raising a kid, and risking that he'll go wrong or die in an accident, and just bring out the freeze-dried one. Age, whatever, ready to be and do whatever Brother Dawn does when he's of an age to share rulership (does he do anything?).
I mean, if the aim is to have the exact same Cleons over and over again, as close to the original as possible, why risk variants? Just use the freeze-dried ones.
Can anyone explain why they need to do the whole life cycle thing with the baby and the nanny and the life lessons all that when they've got at least 90 Cleons waiting to be used in the Imperial Warehouse?
And there we have it. At the very end there Brother Dusk says (more or less) "I want a new Brother Dawn decanted and brought up to speed by tomorrow" indicating that Brother Dusk, at least, thinks that the bottled Cleons can be taken out and used in place of the born ones with no interruption and no inferiority in service.
So, the bottled Cleons clearly are not considered inferior to the born ones--Brother Dusk pretty much says that.
Which, once again, seems to make the whole idea of raising the from birth kinda pointless.
Of course, now there's that wrinkle which says that born or bottled, none of them are exact replicas and none of them can be depended on.
Which in itself undermines the whole premise of the problem with clone emperors that are exact replicas. Would Cleon the First's scheme have worked if no one had interfered with the DNA for however long it's been interfered with?