"...If you did warn them, though, would that mean a you not existing who could've?"

"Presumably, yeah, but, like, all kinds of people could exist who are not existing for good reasons, most saliently it not being a good idea for their theoretical parents to have a kid, and whether 'you are overwhelmingly likely to get divorced' is a good enough reason or not shouldn't necessarily change based on whether they'll get a Bell if they have a kid before doing that. Besides," Pattern shrugs, "Aurora has a twin sister, so maybe they sometimes get a Lexi instead."

"I don't know," says Tony, "if I heard there was a twelve-year-old me about to clone himself, I would, like... probably give him a hug, but I wouldn't stop him. I don't think Sherry'd want me to."

"Okay, but, like - Angela's pregnant. They're probably going to have a bunch of kids because of angel cultural stuff, let's say it's six. And based on what we know about how templates work, that's a very good piece of information for all the other Bell-Joker pairs about how they'd have kids if that happened. I bet Jane doesn't count, although if Angela manages to have a little winged biological Jane I will be super impressed with template attractors, like, as a force in the multiverse. So say Rose meets all of Angela's kids and she doesn't get along so great with kid number three. And say that Rose would've had three kids, but decides to stop at two because she doesn't like Angela's third kid. I think that would be a good thing for Rose to do, to stop at two, even though somebody who presumably likes existing doesn't get to exist a second time. I think it would be good for us to warn a standard Renée and Charlie. But they could decide from there."

"I guess," says Tony. "Man, this shit is complicated."

"And you were worried about me getting bored," scoffs Pattern.

"Bored or depressed!" says Tony. "Don't forget depressed."

"All right, I guess we haven't precluded 'depressed'," laughs Pattern. "But I feel pretty okay so far. Kind of annoyed about the distinguishing features thing but something will crop up eventually."

"I bet it will!" says Tony.

"I really wonder how templates work. It's so peculiar. We all seem to have different sorts of attractors. Like, Atlantis Sherlock and Tony are actually twins, but the Sherlock name appears even without the usual explanation. Our names don't seem to work the same way. My parents even told me once that if I'd been a boy they'd have named me Alexander - I guess that's where Lexi's name came from, but for some reason Cam is named Campbell and not Alexander. And then Rose has a last name that means 'swan' in her pseudo-French but the first name seems to center around the sound."

"And if you look at the Tony-and-Sherlock pairs," says Tony, "it kind of seems like Sherry's the one who matters and we're just along for the ride, and then you have the one Tony who's never had a Sherlock and the one Sherlock who's never had a Tony and Iron Man is basically a Tony but Strat actually was Sherlock Holmes, like, in the 1800s."

"Yeah, I have no idea what's up with that, the way Sherlocks vary so much more," says Pattern, shaking her head. "It's like, you've got the Tony template, being its own thing, and that can work on its own, observe Iron Man. And if you reach into templatespace in a particular way by cloning yourselves, or if you're a twin, then you get a version of Strat, who also works on his own, and the templates sort of know who to be well enough to spot and deliberately emulate fiction about him, which, don't ask me, did Pearl even have access to the books?"

"Nope!"

"So the name can, causally, come from the books, but doesn't have to, it will fly out of nowhere and attach to the template however it can. The template features can, causally, come from deliberate emulation, but they don't have to."

"Yep, sounds about right," says Tony. "...I wonder what happens if a Bell clones herself."

"Probably not a Lexi. Although maybe a Lexi, if genes don't matter that much, she'd just look different, it's not like you could mistake me for Cam. Even Rose looks different from the rest of us without any obvious reason to, she's super pretty. I should wish up a genome sequencing lab and attach Jane to its outputs and have her tell us how we all match up."

Tony laughs. "Well, don't try it," he says. "The cloning thing, I mean. Totally try the gene sequencing."

"Yet you wouldn't stop a twelve-year-old you who was going to try the cloning thing," observes Pattern.

"Yeah, because I know Sherry, and I know the clone would be a Sherry. We don't know who a cloned you would be. And even though it turns out well when it's Sherry, 'for science' is a bad reason to have kids."

"Golden didn't exactly have Elspeth for politics, but she had her when she had her because she needed an explanation for removing one of the Volturi's human servants," Pattern volunteers.

"...That seems kind of sketchy, but I wasn't there, so maybe it was the best idea going," shrugs Tony.

"Well, the alternatives were leaving Elspeth's surrogate mother to die, or delivering some sort of speech to the people-eating paranoid trigger happy vampire rulers of the world about the value of human life."

"Yep. So, best idea going."

"I mean, people have kids because of accident all the time, I'm not sure scientific motivations are worse than 'whoops' and 'whoops' kids routinely turn out fine. I have no imminent plans to clone myself, though."

"I dunno, like, the danger with cloning yourself for science is that if you're doing it for science and not for the kid then you might end up caring about the science more than the kid, or not knowing what to do with them once you've got 'em, and I mean I fully acknowledge that I'm projecting here but it just - it could have been so not worth it."