by Sean Platt
Why would he need Timothy’s help? “Help” from Papa Friesh would only dull a brilliant idea to a good one.
But what bothered Timothy most was what he couldn’t say. Neven, despite his years of polite veneer, was a beaten child inside. He’d learned to hate long before he’d learned to love. Eden, in Neven’s hands, was a terror that would surely hunt and trap many seasons of Timothy’s thought.
“You’ll keep in touch?”
“Or my dad will.”
“And if you’re dad’s not around?” Dammit. “I mean if he’s on a trip or something and leaves you in charge? Will you forget about your old Uncle Timmy?”
Neven managed to chuckle. He’d never been called “Uncle Timmy” before and was grateful for it.
“Sure. I’ll ‘stay in touch.’”
After a quiet moment, Timothy decided to try one last time. He pointed across the view.
“A whole section of forest burned up north. I heard some asshole was just careless and dropped a match.”
Neven said nothing.
“That’s the thing about fire,” Timothy went on. “It’s a fantastic tool. It cooks food and warms people and everything else. But if it isn’t contained it’s deadly. Spreads out of control.”
Neven turned to look full-on at Timothy. His eyes were as clear as the lake, and he could see all the way to the bottom.
The fire metaphor had been a mistake. Insulting. Transparent. Neven wasn’t stupid, and could obviously see right through Timothy’s gutless attempt to make a point.
“I didn’t hear that some asshole was careless and dropped a match.”
“No?”
“I heard that it was set. That someone piled up brush, lit it, and let the wind have its way.”
“An arsonist, then. A criminal.”
“Or a visionary.”
Timothy frowned. “How, exactly, does arson make someone a visionary?”
“Because if nobody ever had the guts to set fires, we’d never know how far and wide they could burn.”
Chapter 50
A Fatalist Thought
Papa marched into the room. Seeing his body language, Ephraim didn’t merely turn his head from the big screen. He actually stood.
“I know where he is,” Papa said.
“Wait. You mean Neven? Where?”
“A satellite island offshore of New York. Manmade. Four miles up the coast and ten from the shoreline. I’m guessing about an hour in a boat the size of the one Fox left at the dock. Maybe the boat the Altruance clones took, too, if I could find any agency’s reference to it. But the agencies right now …” He trailed off with a futile exhale, his gaze wandering to the onscreen news about yet another panic riot.
“How did you find it?”
“I’ve got a lot of information about the Connollys. My last chat with Neven scared the hell out of me, so I was motivated from the start. I dug, researched, hell, even bribed. I know more about Evermore than Wallace probably ever did, down to all the little companies and divisions of companies that it acquired or owned over the years. Stuff that the accountants did to create tax shelters legally — a trick that’s a lot easier when your primary location is in international waters. There are shell corporations all over, in two dozen countries.” Papa shook a sheaf of papers, presumably home to his newfound evidence. “Including a subsidiary of a subsidiary called Walker Holdings, whose main business appears to be real estate.”
“Real estate?”
“Looks like Neven bought land all over the place. As far as I can tell, most of it’s vacant. Property he grabbed and held onto just in case Evermore might need it. I was able to find almost all of it on satellite images, but I couldn’t see the island that Walker Holdings owned off the eastern shore of New York. Not until I had one of my people pull archival images of the place where the paperwork said the island was located.”
“Archival? You mean someone erased it from Google Maps?”
“Maps, GeoSurvey, you name it. The practice is old hat for Evermore; Eden itself is practically a ghost. The only difference is that people know the island is there and that the satellites just won’t let them see it. Money goes far.” He shook the papers again. “But friends in the right places go even further.”
“Are you going to call GEM and tell them where Neven is?”
“Not if the director is compromised, which I’m pretty sure he is.”
“The cops, then? The FBI?”
“I don’t know that we can trust them.”
“Because you think people there are compromised, too?”
“It’s not that. It’s …” Papa exhaled, fell into thoughtful silence for a moment, then looked up at the big screen Ephraim had been watching. Ava Bloom was in the foreground. The background was chaos.
“Look at what’s happened in just three days since Neven sent his first wave of clones ashore. Is this news from New York?”
“Detroit, I think.”
“I’d bet my bottom dollar there aren’t any of Neven’s clones — 1.0 or 2.0 — in the entire state of Michigan. What you’re seeing now is our connected age backfiring on us. New York citizens watched hundreds of Altruances march into Jubilee. It was a single, contained incident and they weren’t even hostile, but seeing all those clones was enough to unsettle everyone, everywhere. People here panicked and that spread like fire, across the internet, to the whole damn world. Not right away, but soon enough. Once the people at Jubilee saw that it wasn’t a joke or a costume. Once two of the clones were shot by trigger-happy drunks and GEM went ahead and confirmed that yes, the two who’d been shot were genetically identical.”
Papa waved toward the screen. “And now look what’s happened. Irrationality at its worst. It’s a few hundred clones, but suddenly everyone is sure that their neighbor is one. That the local sheriff is a clone. That the damn president is a copy. The authorities are so backed up with crank calls and reports of looting idiots that it’ll be easier and safer if we just help ourselves.”
“Wait. You mean you want us to go after Neven?”
“That was always the plan.”
“But without help? What if he has an army of guards?”
“He doesn’t have enough manpower. Guards would have to be 1.0 clones, not 2.0s. He only had so many of those after Eden, and no way to make more. The Domain is a 2.0 factory. The Altruances were his first batch.”
“How do you know there aren’t more clones out there than the few hundred Altruances, even if Neven just made them?”
Papa pointed at the screen, at Ava Bloom.
“Well, she’s a clone. And there’s you, and there’s Sophie, and there are all the rehabilitated dromes. I’m sure there are other celebrities out there, but you saw what Eden was charging. Other than Wood, it’s probably all 1.0s, mostly dromes. People who weren’t modeled after an original, and only look like other dromes of the same design. This thing everyone seems so afraid of?” Another nod toward the news report. “This fear that someone is replacing people like Invasion of the Body Snatchers? It’s ridiculous.”
That felt unfair. Ephraim knew most of the clone story, and Papa had apparently had a microscope up the Connollys’ asses for years. The public just learned that human-replication style cloning was a thing. “Rational” didn’t exist. Not yet. This was uncharted ground, and people always feared the uncertain.
Papa slapped his pack of papers onto the room’s large central table and spread them out — mostly images, tips pulled from disparate enough secret sources that they’d needed to be printed.
“This is how I know there aren’t more clones.”
Papa’s finger was on an image of something that looked like a massive white-walled apartment building that had toppled onto its side, its many units knocked out of true by the fall. Cubes comprising the structure looked like they’d been pulled apart and stuck back together at random with neither rhyme nor reason. The whole thing was maybe thirty or forty cubes long and five or six high, but those numbers could onl
y be approximate. It looked like it’d been architected by Dr. Seuss.
“What’s that?” Ephraim asked.
“It’s the Domain. I sent a photo drone to scope it out. This is what’s on the island that wasn’t showing on any of the maps.” Papa tapped the photo. “Each of these cubes is an independent Precipitous Rise/mentation chamber — the system needed to make 2.0 clones. Each cube can make one clone at a time. Only one. Do you understand?”
“Um …”
“I can’t get an exact count, and I don’t know if there’s a row of cubes in the middle, without exterior walls, but based on what I see here there’s simply not enough room in this structure for more than 300. Each one probably has a clone in it now, someone’s pattern taken from the database. It looks like they’ll be ready for release in four or five days. But before that, most if not all of those cubes had an Altruance Brown in it. 300 cubes, 300 Altruances. At most. And no more clones until the current batch is done.”
“Why did he only do Altruances?”
Papa shrugged. “Maximum shock value? I don’t know. They’re 2.0, but only barely because Neven didn’t have the Quarry tech back when he took the original’s pattern, likely during his Tomorrow Gene. This ‘invasion,’ as Ms. Bloom keeps calling it, is about making people feel uncertain and afraid. Neven wanted the world to know what was possible. That’s phase one: letting the secret out, so people know enough to be scared, and start imagining the possibilities.”
Ephraim shrugged. “I don’t understand. How is Neven supposed to profit from this? Or what you said about him wanting to split-test the world. How does this benefit Neven at all?”
“I haven’t worked that out yet. He can’t make money on this in any obvious way, and any test he’s hoping to try won’t be valid without a lot more subjects. To tell you the truth, I’m not sure what he’s up to. I just know that we can’t let him do it.”
Ephraim looked at Papa. Then he thought about himself. Neither was a super spy. Papa looked like a businessman nearing his Golden Parachute, and Ephraim was a scared guy with thoughts that had refused to stop spinning since well before Jubilee. He was falling to pieces. Papa’s stern words about his mental health when he’d first insisted they go after Sophie were true, and the last year’s events had shattered him completely.
Then maybe that’s a reason to go. Out in a blaze of glory.
But it was a fatalist thought. A pessimist’s thought. What a man might think when he thought he’d die anyway — or that dying for the right cause, in the end, might be less painful than living.
He made himself think of Sophie. Increasingly, she was his anchor. When his mind swam, and his thoughts were hard to hold, Ephraim thought of her. Imagined having her back. Hoped that he knew his genetic twin well enough to believe Real Ephraim wouldn’t harm her and had only snatched her out of fear.
What must that be like, having nobody? No clue where to go?
Ephraim knew the answer all too well. For him, it had been murder.
Ephraim looked at Papa. “Have you heard from Sophie?”
“No.” His face fell. “I’m sorry.”
“Any idea where she is, seeing as you found the Domain so easily?”
“No.”
“I mean, since you had all sorts of resources for all this tricky stuff—” Waving an arm across the table. “—Sophie should have been easy by comparison.”
“It’s not quite that simple. But—”
“Seeing as there are traffic cameras all over the city, and obviously you know people who can get images from cameras. And satellites. That truck had license plates when it drove away. Someone must have seen it. And surely Ephraim isn’t carrying cash, so anything he buys would be trackable by a man with access to—”
“Please. Don’t start this again.”
“Why not, Papa? It’s easy. So easy that the only reason I can think of for not trying to track Sophie down is that you just don’t want to.”
Papa’s expression said, That’s not fair. But Ephraim was tired of taking his pat answers. Tired of listening to him drone on and on about “the mission” when Sophie was suffering, probably a phone call away from a powerful man.
“Okay, Ephraim. Do you want the truth?”
“Of course.”
“I can only call in so many favors. Trust and favors are finite. You only have so much, and when you spend it all, it’s gone. Every time I ask someone in The Change about Sophie, I forfeit a chance to ask about Neven. The truth is that finding this—” He stabbed a finger on one of the photos hard enough to bend the first joint back. “—might only be the beginning. Right now, I can’t trust GEM or the NYPD or the FBI, but in three or four days, Neven might release his second round, and that might include a clone of the NYPD commissioner and the director of the FBI. Then how much will they be able to help us? I might not have enough favors and contacts left for what’s lying ahead. It’s you and me. Understand? We’re in big enough shit right now, and you keep insisting that I take all the bullets out of my gun.”
“But Sophie—”
“—is tough. And persuasive. And I know Ephraim, too. I ran a whole psychological workup on him. Ephraim has her, but he won’t hurt her. You’re asking me to sideline everything I’ve prepared for since the day I met Neven Connolly, just to spare Sophie some discomfort and inconvenience.”
“You don’t know he won’t hurt her.”
Papa didn’t reply, but his face said enough: If I were to bet on which Ephraim Todd was more likely to hurt a person, it’d be you, not him.
“Look,” Papa said. “There’s something I haven’t told you because I thought it’d make you harder to deal with. If you promise to keep ahold of yourself and remember the larger purpose, I might be able to ease your mind.”
Ephraim’s muscles relaxed, disarmed. He wasn’t sure he could make that promise, but there was no way he was about to turn Papa down.
“Okay.”
“Do you promise? The Domain is what matters, Ephraim, no matter what. Do you understand me?”
Ephraim nodded. He couldn’t bring himself to say yes.
Papa took it for close enough.
“This isn’t the first time The Change has needed espionage. We’ve developed systems. Almost nobody here has a MyLife because it imposes on a person’s mind rather than letting it be free as taught by The Change, but anyone who acts as an informant does have a tiny part of a MyLife left inside. It can’t generate a signal on its own that goes more than a few feet, and the only information it can send is ‘on’ or ‘off.’ People learn to control it by flexing certain tiny facial muscles. Anything more elaborate than that and a signal sweeper can tell it’s there. But sometimes it gives people an edge.”
“What kind of edge?”
“If one of those little implants is tethered to a Doodad, it can send simple messages without anyone knowing.”
“Wait. Sophie has one, doesn’t she? And she’s been sending you messages?”
“Just one. She sent it around 2 AM the first day — a few hours after she was taken. There hasn’t been anything since, probably because Ephraim finally realized he should pull the battery from her Doodad and she lost the ability to transmit.”
“What did the message say?”
“It said, ‘OK.’”
Ephraim put his hand over his face. He was suddenly overcome, his knees weak. He leaned against a couch, needing it to stay upright.
“If she has a signal — if she ever gets her Doodad back — she’ll be able to send more messages. If she does, I’ll know immediately. But if she gets a connection, she can also pull audio messages and listen to them without anyone knowing, right through her cochlea. I’ve been sending her updates, Ephraim. She just needs to tether a phone at some point, and she’ll know everything we know.”
“You’ve told her all of this? About the Domain?”
“I left a message, yes. I told her I was going to explain it to you and that afterward, that’s where we’d go. I desc
ribed its location as best I could and gave her the GPS coordinates, just in case she has access to the web. But you have to understand that she may never get those messages. Even if she does, they might just be news bulletins, if he keeps her captive. She might not be able to reply — probably won’t. I can’t promise you anything, and there’s absolutely nothing this allows us to do in terms of reaching or helping her. Eyes on the prize; you promised. But there is one thing I can tell you, that I know for sure. Two things, actually. The first is that as of 2 AM on Sunday morning, Sophie was doing just fine. ‘OK,’ in her own words.”
Ephraim blinked. Hard. Tried to find his center. But his thoughts were impossible to hold.
“And?”
“And that if she were here right now, she’d tell you what I’m telling you.”
“You don’t know that.”
But Ephraim did. Sophie was, in just about every measurable way, a better person than he was. What Neven, Fiona, and even Papa had put Ephraim through had made him so much worse. But Sophie was better, and did what was right. She was strong. The way he needed to be.
“Okay,” Ephraim said before Papa could respond. “Fine. Whatever. We’ll go. How and when?”
Papa must have sent a message to someone while Ephraim was thinking because there was a movement beyond the window. He shifted to look and saw a helicopter beyond the garden, its rotors starting to turn.
“We fly to the shore, then approach the Domain by boat,” Papa said, “and we do it now.”
Chapter 51
LIke a Real Person
Sophie tensed her jaw. Shifted the tiny muscles around her ear.
She was being stubborn, denying the obvious. She knew exactly what to twitch to activate her implant and had known two minutes ago that there was no connection. How could there be? Real Ephraim hadn’t just taken the battery from her Doodad days ago; he’d stopped at two separate charge stations to throw the Doodad into one trash can and the battery into another one fifteen miles away. She had no tether and magic wasn’t about to bring her Doodad back.
