Chapter Text
Months before the clay for the terracotta that made Cowboy Bdubs was dug out of the ground, Bdubs Prime stood over three new Bdubses fresh out of the kiln.
“I need you guys to go out to the mining desert and get me sand for concrete,” he said, thrusting a diamond shovel at each of their chests.
They volleyed looks of “can you believe this guy” between each other. One by one, the diamond shovels clattered to the ground and the freshly brewed Bdubs iterations started wandering away. The three of them had equally laborious tasks they’d rather do than languishing under the hot desert sun for some other guy. “HEY,” Bdubs Prime warned, tripping over himself to snatch the shovels off the floor. “You’re gonna have to learn the value of hard work one of these days!”
A week later, when every last bit of available sand was sucked up from the lake and riverbeds and skillfully covered with dirt and clay, the three New Bdubs Iterations met again in the pottery studio.
“You’re in here too, huh?” The first peered over the second’s shoulder at the lump of clay he was messing with.
The second leaned back to show off the rudimentary shape of a torso to the others. “No way am I going to mine sand if I can get some other chump to do it for me, right?”
“Oh yes, perfect logic from an almost perfect Bdubs,” The third agreed.
They worked through the night to create three of their own Bdubses, and in the morning, they attempted to send them off with diamond shovels and a shulkerbox each. The nine new Bdubses’’ faces harmonized into a medley of distaste.
“How come you can’t do it?”
“Yeah, what’s stopping you from mining sand yourself, you lazy–”
“I got better things to do than to listen to some schmuck I just met…”
Like their creator, the three Bdubs iterations were left in the dust amidst a clatter of shovels.
This whole process repeated a few more times, getting more dramatic and dire as sand from nearby areas got more and more scarce. As the single player world crowded with more different and niche Bdubs iterations, tensions rose. Beaches were replaced with gravel and stone, sand from sugarcane farms was swapped with dirt. Factions rose and fell; wars were fought, dragged out, and bloodily gaspingly won.
At the height of this tension, a 6th generation Bdubs had a bright idea. All this time, every Bdubs would make a lower fidelity copy of himself, but what was left over was always a drive to go out and do what he Wished. Maybe he could incept the wish to find fulfillment and joy from mining sand in this new Bdubs’s heart from the very beginning and solve the problem once and for all?
Whispers of this Bdubs made its way around the world, and every Bdubs set aside their tasks (tree farming, mining for ores, smelting clay into terracotta, turning terracotta into more Bdubs to conscript into the Sand Wars) to witness the creation of such a man who would enjoy the task they spent their lives avoiding.
Orange dawn rays washed over nearly identical faces as the crowd pushed around the locked door to the pottery studio. A man wearing a smock with suspiciously tall hair slid out of it and closed it behind him quickly. “Let the poor man get his pants on before meeting seventy hundred versions of himself, he was just born!” He said, shooing the heckling crowd.
Before long, a man with sand already in his hair stepped sheepishly out behind his maker. He turned to him and clapped him on the back. With the added stiffness to his hair and this new Bdubs’ slouch, there was nearly four inches of height difference, which helped clarify the dynamic to those in the back of the crowd.
“Sand Lover Bdubs, we have been warring for nearly 15 days now, over who shall be the one to mine the sand in the hot hot blisteringly sweaty hot desert. And you have been created, you have been cultivated to bring this war to an end.”
The crowd clamored and hushed each other, grabbing and shoving the others off in equal measure. Sandy Bdubs sputtered and put a hand to his chest, turning his head to face the sea of identical faces looking back at him expectantly.
Maker Bdubs knelt before Sandy Bdubs and lavishly presented a diamond shovel, glittering with enchantments. Putting a rehearsed quaver in his voice, he proposed, “Would you pretty please with a cherry on top do me the honor of mining sand for all of us and the good of the world?”
The crowd nearly folded over on itself leaning forward with bated breath.
Sand Lover Bdubs yoinked the shovel out of Maker Bdubs’s hands and brandished it to the crowd. “Boy, would I!”
The men around him burst into cheers, clapping him on the back and guiding him to the desert he had only seen in his gifted memory.
The other Bdubses ebbed and flowed around him like a riptide pulling him deeper inland until they reached the biome he had been born to destroy. By this time, Sandy Bdubs was quivering and shaking and tearing up. He turned to address the crowd.
“I really can’t thank you enough for this opportunity…” His throat closed, thick with emotion. After a moment of dipping his head back to look up at the starry sky blurred through tears, he began again. “It’s always been my dream to mine sand and I can’t believe I get to do it with all of my favorite people, so… Thank you. Thank you so much.”
Sandy Bdubs knelt in the sand. It was still clinging to the heat after evening set in, and he could feel that warmth radiating through his jeans. The diamond shovel reflected the crescent moon, accentuating the curve of its blade. He willed his shaking hands to still as he held the diamond shovel reverently. With all of the love and attention and care in the world, he dug up one single block of sand. He cradled it in his arms like an infant, carding his fingers through its fine dusty grains just like he’d imagined the second he was gifted thought, then crumbled into sand himself, falling neatly into the shulkerbox he had set down for his task.
The rest of the Bdubses had stilled like a herd of deer.
In the middle of the pack of haunted faces, a shuffling slowly turned into a clanking and a sifting. Bdubses from newest to oldest had started taking their shovels out of their inventories and began to dig sand like their lives depended on it. A sweaty silence hung over them, punctuated only by crunch and heft of scoops of sand and the clatter of shulker boxes opening and closing. Whenever their wide eyes met another’s, they focused back on their task. Knowing that one day, one of him would also die upon completion of his wish. Not knowing if he himself would die before the other.
Bdubs Prime woke up 16 days after making his first sand clones to a wall of shulkerboxes, heavy with sand, blocking the exit to his modest bedroom. “Oh great. Cool! Awesome,” He intoned, glad that he finally, FINALLY had his materials at the great cost of his personal time. As he broke through the wall of shulkerboxes, he was confronted with the original group of three looking up at him with sad wet eyes. “What the? Don’t look at me like that, don’t you all have something better to do?”
—-
Being born was like waking up from a dream where he’d been suffocating in a pillow. Colors bloomed where his eyes blearily focused, ones he couldn’t name. Which sucked, because he was supposed to be good at colors. He knew this before he could recognize that the face looking unflatteringly down at him was his own.
“Who’s this ugly mug lookin’ down at me like a phone that went dead,” he wondered idly. “Doesn’t he have something better to do than interrupt a man’s beauty sleep?” The fact that he couldn’t move or feel any part of his body slid over his brain like the man’s thumb tracing his lips stretched over his dashing smile. He couldn’t blink away the man's fingers that got uncomfortably close to his gorgeous sparkling eyes, but when he pulled away, the world around him sharpened into focus. He was in some sort of workshop, with dirty rags and smocks covered in splatters of paint and open cabinet doors showing off different supplies and tools. And bright fluorescent lights, shining directly into his eyes.
Just when the fact that he couldn’t squint or even move his eyes started to concern him, the world twirled barfiliciously as the man lifted him up and sat him down somewhere else. The man pawed at his neck and suddenly he could feel his body again! It felt like a sack of wet dirt. His hands were a puddle in his lap and and his legs hung heavily off the edge of a work table. Again, he couldn’t move, but being made aware of his body was grounding. He watched with vague interest as the man waffled on how to put his arms around him, draping an arm around his shoulders and then twitching it back, like a weird mating ritual for birds.
Eventually the man committed to hefting him up, bending his back in a way that even he, in his muted state, knew was a mistake. The man grumbled a curse and hobbled across the room to an open kiln. “He’s putting me in there. It’s hot in there. He’s gonna turn me into a crispy Bdubs,” He thought dully. He knew that he should have been fighting back, but the novelty of remembering his name kept him occupied until the man had laid him in a fetal position in the bottom of the kiln. From his folded up position, he could see the man pick at brown smudges on his formerly white shirt. The man let out a sigh, which was cut off by a crash, frantic shuffling of feet, and a familiar laugh laid doubly and triply over itself.
“Judas Priest,” the man griped like he was beset by one thousand curses. He worried at his lip, considering Bdubs laying there for a moment. Bdubs considered that he should make a case why he shouldn’t be air fried, but before he could force a protest out of his paralyzed mouth, the man slammed the lid of the kiln and shut Bdubs in the heat and the dark.