The Tomorrow Clone (The Tomorrow Gene Book 3)

by Sean Platt

  “I get the picture.”

  “If you want to see yourself that way, fine. But only for now. Until you drive off and leave me behind. Because what you decided to do today?” Sophie pulled Ephraim’s Doodad from her pocket and nodded at the parking lot, where he was setting her free. “That’s the first act that defines the new you. So, no, Ephraim. I’m not going to laugh at you. I’ll admit that I didn’t like you much when I met you, but I can see the good in you, too.”

  “Because you see it in him.”

  Sophie nodded. She didn’t like the direct comparison because it established Clone Ephraim as “better,” but it was an argument Real Ephraim seemed to understand.

  “And if I decide to … to …”

  “To make a change?”

  “You won’t think it’s ridiculous?”

  “Do you?”

  Ephraim gave a sharp exhale as if to say: Touché.

  “I’m not going to go back to Eden, and I can’t hide in motels forever. The other Ephraim made me a fugitive. What other choice is there? I’ll try to see it as a New Age retreat.”

  “They’ll take you in,” Sophie promised. “The Change has seen plenty of people more lost than you.”

  Ephraim nodded as if trying to convince himself. “I could come with you.”

  She shook her head. “It complicates everything if Neven knows that Eden doesn’t think he’s dead.”

  “There must be something else I could do. Something less visible.”

  “I just need a Doodad to check Papa’s messages.”

  “Or you could just call him.”

  “I can’t reach him. He’s either somewhere without service, or something is blocking his signal. But I got the latest, and know where they’re going. I can help.”

  “You think you can get there in time? Before …”

  “I used to think so, but then some asshole started talking my ear off as a way to delay going on his New Age vacation.” Sophie raised her hand to comically frame her mouth and whispered, “I think he’s one of those nut jobs with The Change!”

  Ephraim laughed. Sophie gave his hands a final squeeze and moved to step out.

  “I could drive you more of the way.”

  Sophie nodded at the building. “My rental will, too.”

  “At least let me pay.”

  “Your money will be tracked until you reach The Vineyard, which is why you’re going to charge the truck down the street and not again. Papa has untraceable credits everywhere.”

  Ephraim sighed. Sophie stepped out, then looked up at him.

  “Just go. Take a leap of faith.”

  He nodded. They said quick goodbyes. Then Sophie closed the door, and the truck drove off too slowly, Ephraim turning to look back more than once.

  Once alone, Sophie tried Papa again.

  Still no answer. She left a message:

  “He just dropped me off. I’m renting a car now. I got your last update. Don’t worry if he knows you’re coming, because I’ll be close, and I’ll be waiting.”

  There were covert ways Papa could speak to her, too, just as there were furtive ways that she, with a paired Doodad, could speak to him.

  If they got into a tight spot — if they needed an extra pair of hands — Sophie would be ready.

  Chapter 57

  A Secret Weapon

  Ephraim woke to see Papa sitting on the other bed, looking at his Doodad as if it had done something to offend him. Then he shrugged and set it on the end table. It looked like a priceless antique. The room would have cost a fortune if the woman behind the desk last night hadn’t had a palm tree tattooed on her hand.

  “Man. You can sleep. It’s after ten.”

  Ephraim sat up. “You should have woken me!”

  “I told you. We need to kill time to figure out if anything can be done to block his file dump.”

  Ephraim considered Papa’s Doodad. “Were you calling Sophie?”

  “I can’t get through to her. But I did leave her an update. Told her we left the Domain and what we found. I gave her the cabin’s GPS coordinates.”

  He wasn’t sure why that made his neck itch, so Ephraim shook it off. “Any news on your plan to block Neven’s file dump?”

  Papa shrugged. Nothing could be done because Neven lived in computers and biotech. He would surely have a cloud-based, redundant system in place behind his dead man’s switch. But there was no harm in trying, and blindly hoping.

  “Green Lake is just outside of Syracuse. Neven’s timer hits zero at almost exactly 9 PM, and it’s 10 AM now. You do the math.”

  Ephraim sat the rest of the way up, swinging his feet onto the floor. He hadn’t thought to pack sleep clothes, but the Syracuse Hilton’s VIPs were given pajamas free of charge.

  “We should allow extra time just in case.”

  “Just in case what?”

  “I looked it up last night. Green Lake isn’t a state park. Hasn’t been since the twenty-teens. It’s private land now.”

  “Right,” said Papa. “It’s owned by a Dharma Enterprises. The same company that owns The Vineyard.”

  “You don’t own The Vineyard?”

  “I own Dharma,” Papa explained. “And when I heard Green Lake State Park was being taken apart and offered for bids, I bought it. Too many memories to let it go to a developer. It’s been a while. I’d mostly forgotten about it.”

  “And you don’t think Neven knows you own it?”

  “Oh, I’m sure he does. That’s why he chose it. He can check Google Earth just like anyone else. He knows our old cabin is standing.”

  “But what if you’re wrong?”

  “I’m not wrong. You know I’m not.”

  His eyes went to their luggage, but Ephraim knew Papa was thinking specifically of the thumb drive Neven had left them, containing Wallace Connolly’s Shoebox files. It was a strange mix of research notes and nostalgia — the former of which would soon go public and the latter of which had the opposite effect on Papa than Neven intended.

  Neven wanted Papa to look in Wallace’s figurative eyes and see what he saw: that Neven was doing now what Wallace had always wanted. But sifting through all those old images, watching all those old vidstreams, and reading all of Wallace’s personal recordings had only convinced Papa of the opposite. Wallace had turned on his early convictions, and Neven’s actions right now would appall him.

  Ephraim had found something else in the virtual box. As his newly active mind parsed the contents, he’d grown increasingly convinced that something was amiss — something just out of sight, a specter lying in wait around the next bend. Something big and obvious that played only in the eye’s tiniest corner.

  Something to do with Neven.

  Something very wrong that no one could see.

  “Right?” Papa said after Ephraim’s long pause.

  He blinked, returning from the Shoebox to the present. “I suppose.”

  “You feeling okay?”

  “You keep asking me that.”

  “You keep not looking okay.”

  Ephraim inhaled. Exhaled. “My thoughts …”

  Papa looked bothered. “They’re hard to hold, aren’t they? Is it tricky to concentrate?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How long has this been happening?”

  “About a week. I thought I was just jacked up on stress, but it isn’t going away.”

  “Maybe that’s all it is,” Papa said.

  “But you don’t think so.”

  Papa looked like he was edging a lie. His shoulders slumped. “I was afraid this might happen. At first, I thought I was being paranoid, but after Neven’s hologram insisted that you come to the cabin, too, well, I started to think I wasn’t paranoid at all.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You’re his pilot, Ephraim — his first attempt. You were a 1.0 clone, but you’re self-actualized now. Sophie and the others? They’re also self-actualized, but they were deprogrammed at The Vineyard. You weren’t.
That shouldn’t be possible. It’s like a deep-sea diver coming up from breathing mixed gasses at high pressures. Deep divers have to depressurize slowly; they can’t just return to the surface or nitrogen will bubble into their brains, and they’ll die. The same should have been true with you. Conditioning — false reality implanted rather than experienced — is like breathing something foul. If you don’t come off that reality slowly and learn how to handle it …” Papa shrugged.

  “I’m not sure what you’re saying.”

  “I thought you were fine. It seemed you’d adapted. You knew what you were and you seemed, logically, to know what from your past was true and what wasn’t. But then it’s like something caught up with you. Ephraim, you deserve the truth. Neven meant to break you. Force you to snap. And it worked. He made what is essentially a 2.0 clone — no, beyond 2.0 — from a 1.0. It proves that there are two ways to make what he wants, two types of clones for his experiment. There are 2.0s made in chambers like those at the Domain, and 2.0s like you.”

  “What does this have to do with Neven wanting me at the cabin?”

  “I’ve been through Wallace’s research. And I’ve been through all we were able to pull off of the Domain’s servers. Which was almost everything, probably because Neven wants me to understand exactly what he’s doing. I think he’s concluded that the Domain’s process isn’t quite right. Not quite as good as the process that made you, anyway. I think he considers you far beyond clones like Wood. If they’re 2.0, then you’re 3.0. And he can’t ignore that now that he knows.”

  “But Neven himself …”

  “Neven is different. He wasn’t grown to adulthood in a week, then filled with fake memories. He grew as a child in a normal — albeit twisted — way. The fact that he dripped his brain into a slower version of the Quarry and downloaded it into a new body changes nothing.”

  “Wood, then …”

  “It’s not the same,” Papa insisted, his voice slightly frustrated.

  Papa had already decided that this was true, and now he had the unpleasant task of explaining it to Ephraim, the diver who’d resurfaced too quickly, and now had bubbles in his brain.

  “Neven grew that body. Neven’s process implanted the memories. The new Hershel should be the same as the old one, but according to Neven’s, he isn’t.”

  “Why isn’t he?”

  “Neven doesn’t know. That’s why he’s so frustrated. He did some conditioning on Wood, but that doesn’t explain the problem. The bottom line is that you are a better, more complete clone than the new Hershel Wood. And that, I think, is why he needs you now. He wants to examine you, end to end. He wants to know what made his sole 3.0 so much better than his 2.0s.”

  “In my head. It feels like I’m assembling patterns.”

  Papa nodded. “Exactly what makes you better. Exactly what makes you a true clone in Neven’s mind, meaning ‘better than God could make.’ You’re proof of everything he believes. Everything he needs to believe. If he can reverse-engineer you like he did the Quarry, he can make clones with superior minds all day long. Clones that he thinks will fulfill his father’s vision, and validate his existence. Prove Neven’s worth in his late father’s eyes.”

  “But you said there was something wrong with me. That this pattern-making was somehow harmful.”

  Papa nodded. “I’m sorry, Ephraim, but I think it is. Neven knows it, too, but he thinks he can fix it in future versions.”

  “What about current versions? What about me?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe Neven can fix you. But that fix, if he can do it, comes at a price.”

  “What price?”

  “He’ll have figured it out. There’s something not quite right with his 2.0 clones right now, a missing ingredient. You have what they don’t. To fix you, Neven must understand you. And understanding you gives him the ingredient.”

  “If that’s true, I shouldn’t go to the cabin.”

  “You have to.”

  “If he doesn’t have the missing ingredient, he can’t release his information.”

  “Of course he can,” Papa said. “This isn’t a choice between yes and no. It’s a choice between bad and worse. If we deny Neven, he’ll do what he’s already planning. If we do what he says and he figures out what makes you tick, he’ll add that knowledge to his file drop and make it worse.”

  “Bad is better than worse.”

  “I’m holding out hope for yes versus no.”

  Ephraim sighed. He looked at Papa’s Doodad, with which he’d probably been futilely trying to cut the internet’s wires all morning. But there was no way. Neven wouldn’t be launching his plan from the cabin even if he was at the cabin. His logic bomb would be somewhere in the cloud, ready to dump in countless directions at once. The only way to stop it was Neven calling it off.

  “Chin up, Ephraim. We have a secret weapon.”

  “Your contacts?”

  Papa shook his head, then indicated his Doodad. “Sophie.”

  Chapter 58

  Message Left

  Message left for Sophie, 4:07pm EDT on Thursday, October 2:

  Sophie. It’s Ephraim. I hope you get this. I don’t understand how this message system of yours works, but obviously, I can’t ask Papa. I took his Doodad while he was taking a nap and right now I’m downstairs, so he doesn’t hear me. I’m just calling the last number he called, and it syncs with the last time he called you, so I assume this is right. He says you’ll know to check for updates. I hope you do. Because if you’re on your way to us, there’s something you need to know.

  Something is wrong with me, Sophie. I can feel it in my head. Papa knows. He says it’s a problem, but I don’t think he understands what it is. He’s not in my shoes to feel it. My mind is opening up. Changing. I can see all sorts of patterns. Papa says it’s my brain’s delayed reaction to learning I’m a clone without going through deprogramming.

  Doing that was supposed to kill me, or at least mess me up, but it didn’t, and now I have this hyperawareness. It’s breaking apart, but focus comes with it. And now I can see all sorts of things I couldn’t before.

  I’ve been looking through all the research Neven left for us — the stuff he says he’s going to release to the world at 9 o’clock tonight. That, and all of his father’s records and personal effects on the thumb drive. From all of that and some stuff I’ve seen along the way, I’ve reached a few conclusions.

  Two things are clear. The first is that Neven can’t release what he wants to without my help. If Neven lets his research, Fiona’s research, and the GEM database out into the world, it’s going to backfire. He doesn’t know that now, but I’m going to tell him. And he will believe me.

  The second thing I’ve realized is the reason I’m leaving you this message. I know what’s wrong with me. And what’s ‘wrong’ with me is RIGHT. And that’s you, Sophie.

  I think my mind didn’t break when Neven told me the truth because I’d already begun to love you. I didn’t know it yet, and you weren’t even you at the time. But the seed was there, and I loved you all the same. By the time we went to Eden, I’d made decisions that were, strictly speaking, irrational in your favor. I risked myself for you because something deep down inside told me to. And that’s not how things are supposed to work. What life is supposed to care most about is “to keep on living” or “to protect the line” if there are offspring. But life doesn’t sacrifice for other life it isn’t genetically related to unless there’s one thing in the mix.

  And that thing is love.

  Risking my life for yours doesn’t make sense. We don’t have children to carry on my genes. It only starts working if I love you. Which is exactly what happened on Eden, when I stepped in and killed Neven, and risked myself.

  I think that’s when the change started inside me. Love isn’t rational. It can’t be explained. But it is something you can see evidence of if you know where to look for the scars. I’m not making this up. I’ve done my research. There’s even a gene called
“AVPR1A” whose gene promoter can be … well, I won’t bore you with the biochemistry, but it’s true. I’ve done a scan that I’ll show Neven, to prove I’m different. I can see you there in that scan, right there on Papa’s Doodad.

  As to what’s changing inside me now? Well, there’s evidence that people can delay dying until loved ones arrive to say their final goodbyes. Not to be dramatic, but I think that’s a bit like what happened to us. You changed me a little at a time, and that change insulated my mind from the harm that usually kills clones who are confronted with the truth.

  But it’s catching up to me now, and who knows? Maybe my days are numbered like Papa seems to think. But don’t count me out yet, because he doesn’t understand this any more than Neven does. Papa thinks he gets it all, but he doesn’t. When I was about to shove a letter opener into his neck, Papa asked me what I wanted most. He thought I’d say ‘revenge.’ I’d want to clear my name and kill the people responsible for what I’d been through. Instead, I said that what I wanted more than anything was to find you.

  I’m not what was expected.

  It’s something in our genes, Sophie. Some artifact of the way Neven made us. That’s all I can figure. No matter what it looks like, even Neven’s perfect clones aren’t the same as their originals. What would be the point if they were? Remember Papa’s story, about Neven wanting to “split test the world” and prove that clones are better? That HE is better — and, I suppose, finally worthy of his father’s approval?

  He can’t prove that clones are better if they’re duplicates. So, no. Neven makes tweaks as he builds us. For clones like Hershel, he tries to make them suggestible. All are slightly optimized. Whatever that optimization looks like, it alters things between us. It changed you some, but Papa says I’m Neven’s pilot. Special in a way I can’t figure out. But it doesn’t matter. It only matters that if Neven takes the process he used to make me and gives the resulting clone some of what I went through — including someone to love — then I think he’ll have the 3.0 clones he desperately wants.

  At least 3.0. But that’s a whole other story.