The Tomorrow Clone (The Tomorrow Gene Book 3)

by Sean Platt

  “You are, though,” Neven said. “Just like there are two ways to become thin — through surgery or discipline — there are two ways to evolve a clone’s mind. The harder way is better. I don’t envy what I’ve put you through, Ephraim, but it was worth it. You are one of a kind. Born a clone like any other, conditioned completely and filled with a mix of memories both real and false. The cliché was true. What didn’t kill you made you stronger — even, as it turns out, when you killed me. I’d hoped you’d live through it, but didn’t know if you could. The fact that you’re still alive? And enduring that mental strain? It’s so far beyond my expectations.”

  Five seconds of silence. Trees blew in the waning light. Papa’s wristwatch ticked. Neven’s shoes scuffed the hardwood. Ephraim’s pulse was thunder. There was the lightest of noises, like something blowing through the clearing or leaves striking the building’s outside walls. Or like someone treading through a hallway, perhaps in her socks, shoes in hand as makeshift weapons.

  “What failed in my 2.0 clones succeeded in you, Ephraim. It’s not just trauma that changed you — that made you 3.0, as it were. I’m not kidding when I say you should be dead by now. Something has kept you alive. Something in your firing patterns, in your genes, in an epigenetic effect with one of my tweaks that I never saw coming. I have no idea. That’s what I need to understand.”

  “So you can release your research as new and improved?” Papa asked. “Why would we help you do that?”

  “Because it’s set to go out anyway, as the 2.0 formulation. It’s not a bluff. You have a choice. I can show people how to make clones like Hershel, or you can give me what I want, and I can show them how to make clones like Ephraim.”

  “Well …” Papa said.

  Neven looked at Papa. The shift in his expression was subtle, but Ephraim saw surprise — another troublesome variable, the dawning of something unexpected. Papa had only said one word, but its tone was wrong, and Neven could feel it.

  “I took the original Ephraim’s scan from the copy of the GEM database you’re about to release,” Papa said. “Then I ran it through a simulation of the original Eden process, also pulled from your data bomb. The simulation should show exactly what you did to create this Ephraim the first time.”

  “I’ve done the same simulation,” Neven said. “Obviously it doesn’t work. That old process makes a normal 1.0 clone, same as any of Eden’s original batches. I told you; his experience matters.”

  “I know. So I took it further. I ran the 1.0 simulated clone, through Ephraim’s exact memories, which I got from a cortex scan I did on Ephraim yesterday.”

  “And?” Neven said, leaning forward.

  “The simulation survives, but it’s fatally flawed.”

  “Flawed how? You mean like Hershel is flawed?”

  “No. It’s something different.” Papa looked at Ephraim on the couch beside him. He looked sorry, as if he were about to deliver some terrible news.

  “Interpreted in ones and zeroes, it looks like cascade failure,” Papa said. “The brain hyper-activates, lighting up all sorts of areas that are usually quiet or dormant. Then it goes dark. All mental activity just stops. Every single time.”

  Neven’s eyes went to Ephraim. “Then your simulation is wrong. He looks alive to me.”

  Papa fished the Doodad from his pocket. He unlocked it and flicked around for a while. Then, with an air of What the hell, he handed it to Neven for inspection.

  Neven’s eyes scanned the Doodad, his finger working.

  “Your simulation isn’t wrong,” he decided. “It’s just incomplete.”

  “There’s more. Since I have a full scan of Ephraim as he is right now, I can run projections that you can’t. I ran them on my simulations. They’re different, Neven.”

  “Different how?”

  “Ephraim is experiencing the same,” Sigh. “Well, the same mental failure. But something is keeping it from overwhelming him. It’s like he is a crumbling dam, but has a team of masons running around to patch it. The disease is there. It’s just somehow being held at bay.”

  Papa tapped the screen a few times while the Doodad stayed in Neven’s hands. Ephraim couldn’t see what he was doing, but he must be showing Neven even more covert research on the man’s favorite subject: more scans, more projections, more invasions into Ephraim’s private places.

  “His endorphins are elevated,” Neven said.

  Papa nodded. “And his natural opioid production is up. It’s like he has his own full-time pharmacy, doling out painkillers and mood elevators. It doesn’t fix anything, but it keeps him afloat. But why is it happening?”

  Neven shrugged. “Honestly, who cares?”

  “Who cares?”

  “I can work with this, ramp up the clones’ opioids and endorphins.”

  “Wait. You mean increasing them across the board?”

  “Why not?”

  Papa looked at Ephraim, who tried to look at least a little surprised. He’d been through this already, running the same simulations and projections on himself that Papa had. They were stumbling toward conclusions that Ephraim had already discovered.

  He knew what made the difference. He knew why he lived while the simulations died. He knew what magic elixir had changed his chemistry, what was coming, and exactly how he planned to answer it.

  “Well,” Papa said. “If you create a wave of 3.0 clones with constantly-amped-up chemistry, they’ll be …”

  “Unusual?” Neven finished.

  “I was going to say psychopathic. Whatever’s happening with Ephraim is natural. Everything is subject to his body’s checks and balances. He produces more opioids and endorphins at some times and less at others. It’s subtle and moderate. But if your clones start with trauma, since that’s how you make a clone like Ephraim, they’ll be like meth heads on Scream. You’ll be giving drugs to unstable people, turning them manic and almost impervious to pain.”

  “And?” Neven said.

  Papa stared. “You’re mad,” he said, mouth agape.

  “I’m not ‘mad’ at all. I’m happy.”

  “I meant—”

  Neven snapped. “I know what you fucking meant! I’m not a stupid kid and never was!”

  Looking surprised by his outburst, Neven took a breath to compose himself. Then he continued.

  “Genius is always seen as crazy by those who don’t understand, Timothy. You know that. God knows my father said it to you often enough.” He held up Papa’s Doodad. “Thanks for the solution. Between these projections and the live test subject right here,” indicating Ephraim, “I know exactly what to do.”

  Papa shook his head. “You can’t. Showing people how to make clones like that will be worse than telling them how to make 2.0s.”

  “Not true.” Neven was flicking through Papa’s Doodad with a sociopath’s delight. “The 2.0s were flawed. I knew that. They’d die off, just like Wood and the Browns will. But these won’t. And as a bonus, it makes my point so much better than I’d hoped.”

  “What point?”

  “That clones are superior to organic humans.”

  “These won’t be clones. They’ll be maniacs.”

  “I disagree. They will be like their human counterparts, only better. They will feel less pain. Less negative emotion. I’ve already tweaked them to be highly intelligent, but with these changes, they won’t have to second-guess their visions. They won’t have to have that nagging voice in their ear telling them to slow down, the way you were always impeding my father.”

  “They won’t have a voice telling them to slow down and think?” He shook his head. “That’s called a conscience.”

  “It’s called a weakness. It’s something I’d think you’d understand. The two of you used to dream about changing the world together. Instead, you changed it apart. My father wanted to push forward. You, as you proved with your ‘religion,’ always wanted to pull back.”

  “The Change isn’t about pulling back. It’s about knowing what’
s important.”

  “Ritualism. Bullshit.”

  “Freedom,” Papa said.

  “Another set of chains.” Neven’s head rocked side to side. “I used to respect you, Timothy. You even pushed back in an honorable way. And that meant you had a spine. But now look at you. You used to believe in something, instead of pretending at faith.”

  “And you, Neven?”

  “I held my father’s vision while you ran from it. I’m only finishing what he started when he made me.”

  “Wallace regretted everything, Neven! He wanted to take it all back! He hated himself for what he did to you and your brother, and that’s why, before he died, he was already funneling most of Eden’s profits into philanthropy! We were going to work together again; did you know that? Before he died, we were preparing to—”

  “I know,” Neven spoke quietly, but not kindly

  “What do you know?”

  “That you’d tied his hands. That Eden was about to start sending most of what it made to you. To The Change, to ‘change the world.’” Neven’s words were a mouthful of poison. “I had to undo it all. Everything we built afterward? The entire profit engine, to fund all of this?” Neven waved his hands around the room, meaning everything. “I had to do that. Me.”

  “You knew,” Papa said, “and yet you’d choose this? You won’t learn from your father’s experience?”

  “He was twisted. By you.”

  “Listen to yourself, Neven! Nobody could twist Wallace Connolly! Nobody but himself!”

  “He simply lost his way. I refuse to do the same.”

  “What you want won’t help the world, Neven! It will end it!”

  “Change,” Neven said, “is never easy.”

  Papa looked down, exhaled. Defeated. Sad. “This isn’t what he wanted.”

  “Of course it is.”

  “You aren’t fulfilling his vision. You’re destroying it.”

  “You’ve never understood him,” Neven said. “I understand.”

  After a long, quiet beat, Papa looked Neven in the eyes and said, “If your father were here now, he’d be ashamed of you.”

  Neven’s head shook slowly, smugly.

  “I’m the triumph of his own natural selection, nothing more or less. He couldn’t hate me without hating himself. I didn’t ask to be made. He made me. He ran the experiment. I didn’t ask to win the face-off with my natural brother; I just did. It’s not my fault he died; it was his inferiority that did him in. So don’t you dare tell me what my father would think or what he’d do, ‘Papa’ Friesh. I’m his clone. I am Wallace Connolly, only better. I—!”

  “Except that you’re not Wallace Connolly,” Ephraim said.

  Neven’s head turned toward him, eyebrows furrowed, interrupted in the middle of his anger.

  “And you never were.”

  Chapter 62

  Up Ahead ...

  Sophie crept forward but stopped when she heard something.

  Voices ahead. Or below. She wasn’t sure. The sound bounced around.

  That, and she was scared enough to imagine anything.

  What do you think you’re going to do? You don’t have a weapon, and you weigh 115 pounds soaking wet.

  You’re going to get yourself killed. Maybe you’ll get Ephraim and Papa killed. You couldn’t stop Neven with a solid steel pipe. You’d barely be able to lift anything that might stop him.

  But this wasn’t a game of might. Sophie’s fright was a liar, making her believe this was something it wasn’t. She had to trust Papa. She wasn’t muscle. She was here to force Neven’s hand. To be there at the moment that Ephraim needed her.

  But Sophie had no idea how that might work, and with every step down the upstairs hallway, she became increasingly convinced that the nagging voice inside her was right.

  Are you going to surprise him so he drops a magic button that Papa can grab to end this? Are you going to jump on his back, and never mind that he can fling you away? What does it mean that nobody gave you a mission? What does it mean that you’ve come all the way out here without any plan?

  It meant that she was determined to help, whatever that meant.

  Why didn’t you try and find a gun? People are always finding guns in movies. How foolish are you, Sophie Anne?

  Despite what Hollywood and the most ludicrous commercials said, guns weren’t simple to acquire. Not if a person didn’t have ID, didn’t know any criminals, looked like a famous actress, and weren’t willing to sit through the mandatory waiting period.

  Sophie moved toward a patch of light ahead, but then she stopped, hearing voices. Whisper quiet or far away. Maybe just the breeze.

  Sophie strained to hear. If those were voices, she’d at least have some idea of what she was walking into. She didn’t need a plan as long as Papa, Ephraim, and Neven caught her up while she eavesdropped.

  But she could barely hear them. And they probably weren’t voices anyway. Sophie was jumping at shadows.

  A scraping came from down the hall, over toward the patch of light. The sound of something moving or being moved. The air thickened. A psychic thing; a weight of tension that descended when a person said the wrong thing, or when a secret was revealed.

  Sophie could feel it in her bones.

  She didn’t know what to do next, but Sophie was certain that she was about to step into something that no one saw coming.

  Up ahead, the game had changed.

  Chapter 63

  Troublesome Thoughts

  Neven didn’t ask Ephraim to repeat himself. He merely waited, caught off guard, his eyes like a laser on steel.

  In his peripheral vision, Neven saw Timothy’s stunned face, almost stupid, unplugged. Up until now, Timothy surely thought he had this handled. He was the man with the plan, leader of millions. He’d grown up with Neven’s father. He knew Neven and his history, and it seemed that he’d made the Connollys and Evermore his intrusive life’s work.

  But the punch had come from Ephraim and seemed to have hit Timothy as squarely as Neven. A voice inside him whispered: Kill him. You have what you need, and you can take the rest from his corpse.

  It wasn’t true. He needed Ephraim’s live mind; that’s why he’d told Timothy to bring him. Without a functional brain, Neven could only know that Ephraim was better — but not how to fix what was wrong with his clones.

  Kill him anyway.

  The voice inside him was panicked. Petulant. Angry.

  “Do you understand, Neven? You’re not your father’s clone. You’re his son, but you’re half your mother.”

  “I didn’t have a mother.”

  “Of course you did. I found it in the files you gave us. Did you know her, Neven? Her name was Mary.”

  “Mary was my half-brother’s mother.”

  Ephraim replied carefully, as if treading on brittle glass.

  “I looked her up last night. She’s alive. She’s an activist. Used to be a social worker. But now, at every juncture, she seems to have chosen the path that allows her to make the world a better place.”

  “Who cares?”

  “Because you don’t just have one legacy, Neven. You have hers as well.”

  “She was my brother’s mother,” Neven repeated. But his words were empty, said like a parrot who can’t understand. Inside his awareness, something was settling into place: little things he’d noticed over the years, like how his beard came in so much darker than Wallace’s had in his old photos, how his father’s hairline had a distinct widow’s peak whereas Neven’s was ruler-straight.

  Timothy Friesh was gaping, trying to understand.

  “Mary Delgado, Queens, age 23 at the time of her donation,” Ephraim recited. “She was carefully screened, her eggs run through endless elimination rounds. Your father’s notes say that he wanted someone neutral. If he could have made the natural child in his experiment without a mother’s genetic contribution, he’d have done it. But unfortunately, natural reproduction is always ‘one plus one.’ If he could have
assembled an egg from nothing — his own custom genetic code — he’d have done that, too.

  “But neither was an option, so Wallace used his connections at a donation bank in Chicago to find a donor whose genes were healthy and complementary to his own, but weak in their expression. He wanted someone down the middle of the road on everything, not specifically anything. Mary was neither stupid nor smart, tall nor short, pretty nor ugly, hot-tempered nor ice-cold. Bland genes gave him a blank canvas to impress himself without Mary’s traits getting too much in the way.

  “It’s possible that your mother never knew that she’d donated to his cause; the notes don’t say. They only tell us what you already know: that Wallace, always the scientist, controlled every possible bit of the inherently messy reproduction process. Both boys — Wallace’s clone and his child with Mary — were fertilized and grown in vitro, inside a synthetic womb that today seems primitive compared even to Eden’s old Precipitous Rise chambers. Both were born into a world where every condition was carefully controlled, down to when they ate and how much face time they had with Daddy. I don’t have to tell you the rest. You did the same process yourself on Eden, repeatedly.

  “Wallace seems to have realized the problem almost immediately, though according to the notes he refused to admit it for over a year. I’m sure you’ve seen it yourself, Neven, though you’re more blind than your father ever was. It’s not a fair test, comparing two entirely different people. You can’t compare a clone to a natural child. They’re only fifty percent the same. Wallace knew that, but he was driven. But the good news, if you choose to see it that way, is that he’d begun to take it back well before the clone’s death.”

  “But the organic child died.”

  “Come on, Neven. You’re too smart not to have figured this out long ago. Your brother wasn’t natural. You were. He was the clone. The technology was too new at the time. It was before Precipitous Rise, and Wallace guessed that raising you in glass instead of inside a surrogate exacerbated a weakness in the clone’s more fragile makeup. He had a weak heart, and one day, it simply gave out. That didn’t happen to you, Neven. Because if there was one thing remarkable about your mother, it was her heart.”