by Terry Bisson
He turned his sparkling, brighter than real-life eyes toward the lieutenant.
“Is my client being officially charged with auto theft?”
“I didn’t steal the Cadillac,” said Adam. “It’s mine.”
The lawyer admonished him. “I advise you to refrain—”
“Shut up!” said Adam, slamming his fist down on the desk so hard that the coffee cups bounced.
The virtual lawyer disappeared.
The lieutenant scrolled on down in Adam’s file. The next section was headed by a red flashing marker:
medical alert
medical alert
medical alert
“Hmmmm,” said the lieutenant.
“Hmmmm, what?” said Adam impatiently. “Look, are you going to help me or not?”
The lieutenant smiled.
“Of course we are,” he said, in a conciliatory tone. “We’re sending a squad car out to your house to check out your story.”
Adam relaxed. “Thank you!”
The lieutenant got up, and gently took Adam’s arm. He ushered him across the room to a small waiting room and unlocked the door.
“If you’ll just take a seat in here, I’ll get you as soon as we have news.”
Weak-kneed with relief, Adam stepped inside and sat down. He was so relieved and grateful that he didn’t notice the lock click shut.
Sixteen
Automation is a modern miracle. It means making things without human hands. But when those things themselves are human, the miracle begins to resemble a nightmare, which is why the entire procedure must be hidden from prying eyes.
The Embryonic Tanks were hidden deep in the central building of Replacement Technologies, under the Main Laboratory. A Code Three pass was required even to enter for cleaning.
Most of the work was done by robotic extensions.
The Embryonic Tanks were connected in a circle, like a giant doughnut. Each tank was filled with gelatinous fluid, and each contained an embryonic sac, penetrated by tubes.
Each sac contained an adult-sized embryonic unit: a faceless biped, human-sized, human-shaped, but without features, color, gender, hair, or personality.
In short, a blank.
Overlooking the tanks was the Main Lab office. A man stood at the windows, looking down. It was Dr. Griffin Weir. Still in his tux from the big party.
As Dr. Weir watched, an articulated robotic arm the size of a dinosaur’s limb unfolded from tracks that crisscrossed the ceiling above the Embryonic Tanks.
The robotic arm reached down past the catwalks and into one of the tanks. Barely disturbing the thick, clear fluid, it chose a blank, still in its sac. Weir nodded and turned away from the window.
The arm pulled the sac through the fluid, into a transport cylinder, and then a door hissed shut.
The cylinder traveled through a system of tubes, up toward the Main Lab.
Dr. Weir was waiting when the blank arrived in the Main Lab, still in its sac. With a smooth, splashless surge, it was dropped into a secondary tank, the DNA Infusion Unit.
The tubes leading into the DNA unit stiffened. The fluid began to bubble with life-giving and life-shaping fluids.
The blank began to color and fill out, just a little. It began slowly to take form …
“Jesus, Doc!”
Irritated at the interruption, Weir turned. Marshall, the security chief, was checking the Syncording Library, where personalities and memories were digitized and stored on disks.
“What?”
“You should see this stuff from the war. We picked the wrong guy to make two of!”
“Which was our mistake, not his,” Weir said. “And he’s still a human being.”
“Yeah,” said Marshall. “One human being too many. Wow! Look at that. That’s the Navy Cross, right there!”
Dr. Weir shook his head in frustration and turned back to the DNA Infusion Tank. Why did Drucker hire such thugs?
Weir pushed the question to the back of his mind. Because in truth, he didn’t want to know.
Marshall studied the list of Adam Gibson’s battle honors for a little longer, with a mixture of admiration and apprehension. Then he closed the Syncording file and joined the doctor at the DNA Infusion Tank.
Something was happening.
Marshall stood behind Weir and watched, fascinated, as the blank began to take on shape and form. Absorbing the new DNA, it slowly became human.
And female.
Hair appeared. Nails. A rudimentary (and faintly familiar) face. Hands and feet, breasts and hips. Nipples. Lips. The body straightened as it took on definition, morphing slowly (but in cellular time, with lightning speed) into a small, trim, but still lifeless woman.
Suddenly a valve opened and the fluid drained from the sac, back to the embryonic tanks, where it would bathe and nourish the remaining blanks.
Meanwhile, the nude and still dripping, lifeless body slid out of the emptied tank, onto a steel autopsy table.
It was Talia, Marshall’s petite fellow thug.
Dr. Weir checked her pulse and respiration then reached up above, and lowered the Syncording Implant hood over her head. It began to glow.
The body on the table took on life as the personality and memory were downloaded; even unconscious the difference was subtle but real. The body took on a sexual glow.
Marshall couldn’t take his eyes away.
Talia moved a finger … then a hand … then an arm.
Suddenly she opened her eyes and sat up. Marshall and Weir backed into the shadows.
“Goddammit!” Talia started screaming and waving her arms. “Son of a bitch!”
She stopped, suddenly, looking around. She pulled a plastic sheet up enough to cover her nakedness. “Piece of shit Wiley. I’m going to kill him. Where is he?”
Marshall pointed to the robotic arm, which was pulling a second blank from the Embryonic Tanks. “Here comes Wiley now.”
Talia wrapped the sheet around herself and stood up. Unsteady at first, she quickly gained confidence and even grace as the generic cells of her new body adjusted to the patterns encoded in her DNA.
She studied her reflection in a stainless steel wall panel.
“I look like crap. You have any idea what my hair treatments cost?”
Marshall wasn’t interested in her womanly complaints. “What does Gibson know?” he asked.
“He knows he’s been cloned. He knows we’ll kill anyone who sees the two of them together.”
“What’s that?” Dr. Weir looked from one to the other with horror. “Does Drucker know you’re talking about killing innocent…”
“Relax!” Marshall put a reassuring hand on the doctor’s arm and said soothingly, “That was just a threat. Of course we’d never do it.”
Then he turned back to Talia and his voice went steel again: “Where’d he go?”
“Excuse me? I was dead, remember?” Bored with Marshall and his questions, she turned to a nearby table. A body on it was covered with a plastic sheet.
She pulled back the plastic and saw—
Herself, bloody, broken and very dead.
Meanwhile, Marshall was talking to Dr. Weir. “Look, Doc, I can finish Wiley if you don’t want to…”
A beeper beeped.
Marshall pulled an ultra-thin LCD screen from his jacket pocket and studied it.
“Never mind,” he said to Dr. Weir. “We found him. Can you hurry Wiley along?”
Barely listening, Talia studied her corpse dispassionately. She reached over and removed the earrings from the corpse’s ears.
“Gotta pierce my damn ears again,” she muttered.
This didn’t, however, involve a trip to the jeweler. Talia put a stud up to her earlobe and, with a quick, decisive motion, pushed it through.
She did the other, then wiped the blood off her fingertips on the plastic sheet as she covered up the corpse again.
Seventeen
In the police waiting room, Adam paced back and forth.
There was a barred window, a large flatscreen TV, and a closed door.
He tried the door again.
“Shit!” It was locked.
He checked the window. The bars were solid. To make matters worse, outside, a familiar SUV was pulling into the parking lot.
* * *
Marshall parked, and he and Vincent got out. Marshall handed his foosh gun through the window to Wiley, who was in the back seat of the SUV. “Give your gun to Wiley, too,” he said to Vincent. “We’re supposed to be doctors.”
Vincent did.
Wiley laid the two guns on the seat beside him. He was clutching his chest and breathing in deep, hoarse, ragged gasps.
“What’s wrong with you?” Marshall asked.
Wiley tapped his chest. “It feels tight, all across here, where the tires ran over me. You know—constricted.”
Marshall and Vincent exclaimed knowing, exasperated looks. Wiley’s complaints were an old story.
“You were run over by two cars,” Vincent explained patiently. “Your chest was crushed.”
“Exactly,” Wiley said stupidly, looking from Vincent to Marshall. “I mean, no wonder, right?”
“No, Wiley, completely crushed,” Marshall said. “As in dead. As in, you’ve got a totally new chest now. One that’s never been crushed.”
Wiley looked back down at his chest. “Then how come it’s hard to breathe?”
Vincent turned away to hide a laugh.
Marshall sighed. “Why don’t you just relax right here. The air will do you good.”
* * *
Trapped. Adam felt a rush of panic. The door was locked. The window barred. The only other wall held a wide flatscreen TV.
Very wide screen …
Adam turned off the overhead light and put his eye up against the television screen.
Through the flickering images, he could see a small room next door.
Just as he had suspected: the TV was actually a one-way mirror used for observing suspects from the room next door. That room, he could see, opened onto a corridor leading—he hoped—outside.
Adam jammed a chair under the doorknob, thus effectively locking the waiting room door from the inside. Next he turned the TV up, as loud as it would go. Then with a short sharp shock of his elbow, he cracked the TV screen.
* * *
Outside, the lieutenant was escorting the two doctors to the waiting room.
Why two? he wondered. Is the nut case dangerous? Well, it was none of his business anyway. All the lieutenant wanted was to get rid of him.
“… but if he goes off his medication,” Marshall was explaining, “the paranoid delusions come back. It’s very sad, because at other times he seems almost rational.”
The lieutenant nodded absentmindedly. He was wondering why the door was closed, and why the TV was so loud?
As they approached the closed door, a passing cop said, “Tell ’em to turn it down, will ya?”
* * *
Inside the waiting room, Adam was carefully but quickly removing the glass from the broken screen. Through the hole he could see the other room.
He stacked the pieces on the ledge as the lieutenant first knocked, then banged on the door.
Adam saw that he would have barely enough room to squeeze through.
“Hey, you! Open up!” yelled the lieutenant.
Adam carefully removed the last of the glass.
* * *
In the SUV, Wiley was talking on his ear phone.
“I’m right here,” he said.
He listened. Then whined: “But if they’ve got him locked in a room…”
He listened some more. Then whined some more: “Right, I’ll be alert. I’m always alert.”
* * *
Through the hole in the wall behind him, where the TV had been, Adam saw the chair that was holding the door go flying.
The lieutenant ran into the waiting room, after bursting the door open.
Marshall and Vincent were right behind him.
Adam hurried out the open door of the observation room, into the corridor. Slowly, casually, he walked out the front door of the station house.
A cop passed him on the steps to the sidewalk without giving him a second look.
On the sidewalk, Adam picked up his pace. He was about to turn the corner, when a man stepped out of the shadows and blocked his way.
Wiley.
Adam remembered the young thug’s feral grin. He remembered the satisfying thump thump of his tires running over Wiley’s face.
“You’re dead!” he said.
Wiley’s foosh gun was already out and pointed at Adam’s head.
“No. You’re dead!”
Above and behind them, two cops came out onto the precinct steps for a smoke. Wiley nudged Adam with the cold steel of the gun. “Don’t make a sound,” he whispered.
Then he made the mistake of glancing up at the two cops—and at that moment, Adam lunged.
Adam gripped Wiley in a hammerlock with one hand, and struggled for the gun with the other.
It waved wildly, pointing toward Adam’s face, toward Wiley’s; pointing toward the two cops who were still unaware that there was a struggle going on only a few feet below them—
And pointing across the street.
Foosh! A neon sign down the block exploded in a shower of sparks and broken glass.
Wiley turned to see—and Adam pulled up and back, snapping his neck expertly.
The two cops ran down the steps and across the street, never noticing where the shot had come from.
Adam watched them go—then lowered Wiley’s limp corpse to the sidewalk. “Try to stay dead,” he said, as he slipped Wiley’s gun into his own pocket.
Then he turned and walked away into the night.
* * *
Hearing the commotion outside, the lieutenant and two other cops rushed out of the building, their guns drawn. Marshall and Vincent followed close behind.
The cops were looking for Adam. Instead, they found Wiley. One of the cops bent down over the corpse, then looked up. “Hey, Doctor.”
Marshall and Vincent hurried over to the body, with the lieutenant right behind them.
Marshall bent down and pretended to feel Wiley’s pulse. “This is our associate,” he said. “Gibson must have knocked him out.”
“Knocked him out?” The lieutenant was amazed. The man’s head was tilted at a horrible angle. “He looks dead.”
Marshall nodded to Vincent, who picked up Wiley, draping his arm over his shoulder. Wiley’s head hung down at an angle that would make it impossible to breathe. He looked like a broken doll.
“No, his pulse is strong,” said Marshall cheerily. “He’ll be up and around in no time. We’d better get him to the hospital, though. Let us know if you find Gibson.”
The lieutenant nodded and watched them go.
Up and around in no time? He looked at the other cops and they both shrugged. Whatever. Then went back into the station house, drawn by the familiar smell of stale coffee.
Eighteen
There is nothing more beautiful, thought Catherine Weir, than a greenhouse at night. The soft light, the flowers reflecting off the glass, as if the sky itself were a carpet of petals—
She was in her nightgown, watering her orchids. It was something she liked to do at night. It was easier to communicate with the flowers when the world was still.
“Darling?”
She grimaced. Even a single loving word broke the spell.
She turned and saw her husband entering the greenhouse. He was still dressed in his suit and tie from the clinic opening.
“You’re still awake?” he asked.
Catherine smiled. “I wanted to wait up for you, and spend some time with the flowers.”
She turned back to her orchids with a smile, while Dr. Griffin Weir closed the door behind him.
“Is that a new one?” he asked, as he took her hand and bent down to smell the flower’s fragrance.
She nodded. “Cross-pollinated. It took me seventeen years to get it right.”
“If you had told me what you wanted…” Dr. Weir began.
His wife stopped him with a gentle smile. “I know. You’d have engineered it in half an hour. I’m not in that much of a hurry, Griffin.”
Rebuked, he leaned over and gently kissed her cheek. “What do you say, let’s go up to bed.”
Catherine started taking off her gloves. “Good idea, let’s.”
She felt a trickle of blood from her nose. She touched her face, and saw the blood—and collapsed into her husband’s arms.
Nineteen
Hank was having a little trouble with his balance.
He used his hands to steady himself as he walked, smiling and slightly tipsy, down the corridor toward his apartment.
He pressed the lock pad and the door slid open. The light came on.
“Honey, I’m home!” Hank called out.
There was no response. No big deal, Hank thought. I’ll do it by hand.
He shut the door behind him with his foot, while with one hand he reached up and touched a panel on the wall.
A woman wearing extremely scanty lingerie appeared in the middle of the room, smiling—and flickering only a little.
“Hi, sugar,” she said. “Have you been working out? You look so good!”
Hank nodded to the holographic image as he took off his jacket and flung it into the corner.
“I recorded all your sports programs for you,” said the virtual girl. “Thought maybe we should watch them together…”
Hank sat down in a reclining chair. The hologram followed him and stood over him, fingering the bows on her bikini panties:
“Or should I just take these off right now?”
Hank leaned back in the chair, and the lights dimmed automatically.
“Oh, Hank!” said the hologram, flickering and then reappearing on his lap. “I think it’s so sexy when you go right to the chair.”
She was just starting to pull off her top over her head, to reveal fantasy-perfect breasts, when there was a knock at the door.
Hank frowned. “Better zip me up, sweetheart. Ah! Careful!”
The chair tipped forward and the lights brightened.
