“These aren’t just clones. They’re making avatars.” Jeremiah was astonished at the realization. “They’re making totally controllable fucking avatars.”
“But ten times worse,” Brent said, “because these will be real. These will be out there in the world and no one will even realize it. This is freaking huge. No wonder they’re willing to kill to protect this thing. We don’t even know how far up this goes.”
“Don’t delete these photos, Brent. And back them up somewhere. We may need them. If we’re going to stop them, this is useful. But for God’s sake, don’t let your phone out of your sight.”
“Count on that.”
“Well, I can tell you another thing you can count on. No one is ever going to see me singing Sinatra in the hallways of ViMed. I am getting the hell out of here long before day 239.” He shook his head. “I don’t even know the words to that song.”
Chapter 23
Days 113-127
A few days later, Jeremiah and Dr. Young took the Meld again. She was silent as she prepared for it, bringing in the two syringes on a metal tray and making sure to lock the door to the office to guard against someone else coming in and contaminating the connection. But no one had ever come into the office in all the times Jeremiah had been here. He sat sullenly and waited for the needle and hoped he’d be able to hide his secrets. The more he knew, the more he feared the Meld.
There was a momentary jolt immediately following the injection and Jeremiah was hit with a vivid sense of being in water. The impression was so real that it completely threw off his equilibrium, as though he were instantly not on solid ground. He kicked his feet and had to catch himself to keep from falling off the chair. His breath caught in his chest. The sensation was real enough that he could almost taste the salt from the ocean on the tip of his tongue and lifted a hand to shield his eyes from the sun glinting off the waves.
“I’m sorry,” he heard Dr. Young say from very far away. “My mind wandered. I’m just thinking about a trip to Jamaica last year. Focus on the light.”
An hour or more seemed to pass in a few minutes. Before he knew it, he was fully aware of his surroundings again, the effects of the drug completely gone from his mind. The memory of what he’d seen was hazy, half-remembered and retreating fast.
“Well?” he asked. “What did you see?” He hoped he didn’t sound as nervous as he felt.
“I do detect some change in you,” she said, and a fleeting look of perplexity crossed her face. “There’s something a little bit more, I don’t know, settled. You aren’t as meticulous with your responses to stimuli. I sense more instinct...something different.”
“Is that bad?”
“Not necessarily,” she told him. “But it is a change, and that could be important to the experiment. I also sense a marked increase in your emotional depth, but I think that’s to be expected after the loss of a loved one. A lot of it may be perfectly normal reflection, a period of introspection. That is actually a useful coping mechanism. It means you’re working out your grief in a healthy way. I’m glad to see it, but...” She paused in a manner that made Jeremiah suddenly uncomfortable.
“Was there something else?”
“I’m not sure,” she said, and leaned in to look him hard in the eyes. “Jeremiah, are you absolutely certain there’s no suspicion at home? No one who might be questioning the clone’s authenticity?”
Oh, shit, he thought. Had he let his mind wander? Had she detected thoughts of his mother? Of the emails he’d read? Of Louie? He’d tried to be so careful, but there was no telling what he’d been thinking about under the Meld. If he’d thought about these things for even a moment...
“No,” he said flatly.
“I’m sensing something. It’s quite strong, but I can’t pin it down. Meld isn’t an exact science, mind you, but I have a distinct feeling that someone close to you knows something is wrong. And it’s very possible that I am detecting something that you yourself are not even consciously aware of. But somewhere in your own mind, Jeremiah, I think you have the same suspicions. There’s someone who isn’t fully convinced. I’m almost positive.”
In his head he wanted to tell her yes, he had plenty of suspicions. You bet there was someone who wasn’t convinced. But he kept his cool. He had to.
“I don’t think so,” he tried. “Maybe I’m remembering something about my mother again. Memories, maybe, some jumbled-up thoughts? You remember how upset I was when she didn’t recognize me...or the clone, rather. I haven’t been myself, you know?”
“Maybe,” she said thoughtfully, and leaned back into her chair. “Maybe it is related to that. Let’s talk about something else.”
He breathed an inaudible sigh of relief, happy she was off the topic for the moment.
“Like what?”
“In Brent’s reports, I see the clone and Diana have been at odds lately. Something about an argument on your anniversary?”
Jeremiah steeled himself against the onslaught of prying he knew was coming. But at least this was something he could handle.
“It wasn’t anything serious,” he told her. “Just one of those things. I think the clone had a little too much to drink, is all.”
“Is that typical?” she asked. “Was drinking an issue before?”
“No,” he said defensively. “It’s not a big deal.”
“Is the clone drinking more than you usually did at home? Has that become a problem for him?”
“No, not that I’ve seen. Look, Natalie, this isn’t anything to worry about. I’m sure it’s blown over by now. They looked okay at the funeral. They’ve probably already forgotten about it, with everything that’s happened.”
“Perhaps,” she said, her eyes narrowing. “Still, anything out of the ordinary could be important data. Any atypical behavior by the clone, or anyone close to him, needs to be looked at.”
“You’re reading too much into it,” he told her. “Haven’t you ever had a drink on an empty stomach? It happens.”
She was quiet for a moment and then shrugged as though agreeing with him. She changed the subject abruptly, as she often did. It always gave Jeremiah the feeling she was connecting dots he couldn’t see. It made him nervous. Especially now.
“What do you miss most about your life, Jeremiah? What’s the first thing that comes to your mind when you think about that?” she asked expectantly.
“To tell you the truth,” he said, “it’s mostly little things that I miss. Sitting at the kitchen table on Sunday mornings. Dinnertime. Talking with Parker about school. I even miss bugging him about homework or cleaning his room. I suppose I miss being a father. I miss Parker most of all. That gets worse the longer this goes on.”
“Worse, how?”
“You know how it is with kids. Things change so fast. I feel like I’m getting more and more disconnected from him. I don’t know what he’s thinking about. I don’t know what new game he’s playing or what music he’s listening to. I don’t have all those little details anymore. I feel cut off.”
For a moment, Natalie’s expression looked almost sympathetic. Her eyes lingered on his, and her mouth tightened in a way that suggested she understood. But the expression was fleeting and she got right back down to business.
“I’d like to do another session with the Meld in a week or so, just to keep up with what you’re feeling,” she said. “But let’s call it a day for now. You look like you could use some rest.”
* * *
Rest was the last thing Jeremiah got over the next several days. Every time he tried to sleep his mind would spin in fifteen different ways. He now knew, without a doubt, exactly how far Charles Scott and the people working with him would go to save this project. And somewhere in the back of his mind he wondered what role Meld had played in all of it. Was it the drug that had made his mother so confused? Was that what made her question the clone? His own role in bring
ing it to the public, in assuring the world it was perfectly safe, was eating at him. There was blood on his hands, he realized. He was complicit in every single death, including that of his own mother.
Underneath it all, Jeremiah worried about what he might have revealed to Natalie through the Meld. Did she sense his suspicion? His memory of what happened under the drug was, as usual, foggy at best. He couldn’t be certain about what she’d seen, about how well he’d managed to control his own thoughts. And the prospect of taking the Meld with her again was looming. He couldn’t let her see what he knew about Scott. He had to hide what he knew about the greater scope of the project. He couldn’t afford to rouse her suspicion.
And he was still fixated on the notion that he had to keep Louie a secret, too. As he watched the clone every day, infiltrating and taking over every aspect of his life, it was his dog’s loyalty that somehow kept him tethered. He needed it more than he thought was logical, but with everything that had happened, it seemed like all he had left.
No matter what that clone did to coax and cajole him, Louie wanted nothing to do with him. There was no aggression anymore—the medicine had seen to that—but there was a stubborn reluctance that could not be broken, and Jeremiah delighted in that. It felt like some sort of small victory. And it gave him some inexplicable gratification to know that Charles Scott’s grand experiment wasn’t as infallible as he probably thought it was. Every morning the clone would attempt, and every morning he would fail, to lure Louie onto the leash. Finally, he’d just give up and wake Parker to walk him before school, which never went over well.
“You know, it’s been scientifically proven that teenagers need more sleep than adults,” Parker informed the clone. “What the hell did you do to make this dog hate you, Dad? Kick him or something?”
Keeping that secret—just one small thing that he could be certain belonged, securely, to him—was becoming increasingly important to him. As Jeremiah obsessed on it, that knowledge almost came to signify his last remnant of personal self under this microscope. He wasn’t going to give it away.
So, some nights, when he couldn’t sleep, he’d find himself at the computer, searching for a way to control his own thoughts, even under the influence of Meld. In the dim glow of the monitor, he’d fuel himself on French roast and study articles on self-hypnosis, meditation and astral projection. He’d sit in the dark and practice sending his consciousness in willful directions until he realized the futility of it. He didn’t believe in any of this.
He’d usually end up trying to exhaust himself with an hour on the treadmill, staring blankly at vistas as dull as he could think to program into the monitor—an empty suburban street, a high school parking lot, a construction site left padlocked and vacant overnight. And if all else failed, he’d finally settle on the couch, put on the headset and play IF, blowing things up in satisfying blasts of virtual obliteration, not caring who was watching or what they might have thought. In time, all that practice gave Jeremiah enough confidence to challenge Brent outright.
“You really think you can take me?” Brent said after a particularly dull weekday afternoon viewing. “You’re on.” He opened two beers and took a seat on the couch.
“I’ve made a few adjustments,” Jeremiah told him. He turned on the game and donned his headset, and his avatar appeared on the wall in all his menacing glory. “Meet Clyde,” he said.
“Whoa, you have been busy. He looks pretty tough.”
“Indeed. He’s a mercenary for hire. Kills first, asks questions later. He’s a Gulf War vet, watched his CO get blown to bits in front of him and then ate lunch. Came back from combat a little whacked out and his wife left him six months later. Took his baby girl. Ever since, the only thing keeping the demons away is a little more action. He never says no to a job.”
“Jesus, Jeremiah,” Brent said with a smirk. “Does he have a favorite color, too?”
“What’s wrong with a little backstory? Gives him substance, I think. It makes him seem more real.”
“Yeah,” Brent told him, wide-eyed. “Except he’s not real. He’s made of pixels and photons. And maybe a little bit of crazy.”
Jeremiah just shrugged and started shooting.
“Hey,” Brent said after they’d gone a few rounds, “you want to really test Clyde out?”
“Yeah. Start shooting.”
“No, not with me, I mean with someone else.”
“In case you haven’t noticed,” Jeremiah said, “you and I are the only ones here. You want me to call Scott? Challenge him to a game? Maybe get a pizza?”
Brent smirked. “I accessed the beta platform. Been playing with this guy who’s pretty good. Better than me, honestly. I still can’t beat him.”
“Do you really think it’s a wise move to take a risk like that? So you can play a game?”
“I know what I’m doing,” he said. “I’m not a complete idiot. Besides, I think Scott and the rest of them have bigger things to worry about right now than me getting on the beta. Believe me, they’re not even looking at this.”
“Okay, then,” Jeremiah said. “What do we do?”
Brent began a series of fast maneuvers with the handset, typing in lines of code that appeared in rapid succession on the side of the screen. It looked like gibberish to Jeremiah.
“There,” Brent said. “We’re in. Now I just need to send this guy a request. He’s usually around in the afternoons.”
He typed a screen name with the handset and Jeremiah’s eyes grew wider as each letter appeared on the screen: L...o...u... D...o...g...1...2...3.
That was Parker’s screen name. Jeremiah was certain of it. It was the same name he used for everything—every password, the combination for his locker at school and every game he played online. Jeremiah had told him more than once that he ought to vary it up a little, but he never did.
“LouDog123?” he asked. “That’s who you’ve been playing?”
Brent looked at him sideways. “Yeah. So what?”
“Brent. That’s Parker. You’ve been playing Infinite Frontiers with my son.”
“No.”
“That’s Parker,” he said again. “Remember? He asked the clone for the beta? That’s him. I’m sure of it.”
On the screen, LouDog123 accepted the game request and an avatar somewhat less sinister looking than Clyde appeared blinking on the screen, waiting for battle.
“What do I do?” Jeremiah asked, a sudden wave of worry momentarily paralyzing him.
“I suggest you begin with a grenade,” Brent said. “Just play. He won’t know it’s you.”
For the next half hour, Jeremiah engaged in a gleeful, surreal and violent battle with Parker. Despite how much he’d been practicing, he was hard-pressed to even keep up with his son. Parker was good at this, and Jeremiah had to work just to keep the tenuous connection going. One mistake and he feared the game would be over. He resisted the considerable urge to stop firing and just start typing all the things he wished he could tell him. He wanted so desperately to talk to him, to have even a casual conversation—to ask him about school, music, other games he’d been playing—but he knew he couldn’t do that. Instead, he let Clyde do the interacting for him. Every grenade he launched, every blast from his gun, every duck and cover, felt like a little step closer into Parker’s life.
When it was over—only when Parker’s avatar accidentally stepped on a land mine and blew himself to bits—Jeremiah was caught off guard by his own disappointment. He could have stayed there all night.
Good game, Clyde, Parker typed onto the side of the screen.
Jeremiah looked at Brent.
“Answer him if you want to,” he said. “Go ahead.”
Thanks, he typed, his hands shaking visibly. You, too.
The connection severed, Jeremiah slumped back against the couch and took off his headgear. He sighed heavily and didn’t
even attempt to stop the tears he felt stinging the back of his eyes.
“I don’t think I can do that again,” he said to Brent. “It’s just too hard.”
Chapter 24
Day 145
On a Tuesday evening, Jeremiah and Brent sat down to view the clone as he was arriving home from work. Jeremiah leaned back against the couch and opened his third light beer of the evening, hoping it might help him sleep later, and Brent, businesslike and dressed in his lab coat, pretended he hadn’t been counting. Jeremiah didn’t care one way or the other.
The camera came on and showed an inside view of the front door of Jeremiah’s home opening onto the hallway, a patch of evening sunlight illuminating the dust bunnies on the floor. He heard Louie’s tags jingle and saw the dog walk sheepishly into the room and yawn when he saw it was the clone and not someone more interesting, like the mailman or a complete stranger.
“Hey there, pal,” the clone said uselessly, leaning down to scratch the dog behind the ears. Louie acquiesced, but just barely, and shook his head away after only a second or two. “Where is everyone?”
Tossing his keys on the small table in the hallway, the clone walked into the dining room and through to the kitchen, calling as he went. “Diana? Parker? Anybody home?”
No one answered. He opened the refrigerator and grabbed a soda from the door. He looked around the room for a note or some hint of dinner in the oven, but the lights weren’t even on. It appeared that no one had been home all day. Jeremiah could see the clock on the oven. It was twenty past seven. There should have been someone home by now. Parker should have been pretending to do homework while playing some computer game in his room. The clone called out again as he went upstairs. Louie followed slowly, keeping his distance from the clone, but wondering, certainly, whether anyone was going to even consider letting him outside.
“Dog’s probably got to pee,” Jeremiah said out loud.
The clone walked through the upstairs hallway and opened the door to Parker’s room. The light was off there, too, but Jeremiah could see a swath of typical clutter on Parker’s floor—books, laundry, dog toys—and it made him flinch for a moment to remember how much he missed his son. The clone stood there in the doorway, thinking about God knows what, looked down at Louie again and sighed.
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