Those of us who grew up here on the Moon tend to think of the Sharp Wars as beginning with the Expulsions. Much as our tendency as Americans to think of World War II as beginning with the attack on Pearl Harbor, this is a misconception born of our perspective as a people isolated from the earlier parts of the conflict.
In fact, the Sharp Wars begin almost a decade before the Expulsions, with the Arizona Memorial Incident. Although Mitchell Sandoval’s actions could be more than adequately explained by PTSD from his experiences in the Energy Wars, the press pounced upon his experimental combat biomods as having made him unstable.
This played on the attitudes that had been present in American culture from the moment the US cloning program was revealed in 1984, in response to the Lanakhidzist Revolution in what was then the USSR. In some ways the perception of cloning and biomodding as Frankenstein science predated those revelations, having been developed in various works of fiction such as The Boys from Brazil and In His Image.
From this came the tendency to stigmatize the victims of those technologies, although the difficulty of identifying the actual culprits involved in these secret government programs also played into it. But after Sandoval’s actions, it turned into a hue and cry to “get them under control,” which in practice meant making the stigmatization of clones a formal matter of law, with identifying marks on driver’s licenses and other forms of ID…
—– PR Yamaguchi, essay for history class, Shepardsport.