by Matt Forbeck
"It's a simple question," I said.
"For most people, maybe." He gestured toward the stairs. "Let's go up and have a little chat."
"I'm not going anywhere until I know who I'm dealing with."
"You want to play it that way? The man who is holding all the bullets but nothing to shoot them with?"
I hefted the clip in my hand and wondered how much damage I could do by throwing it at him.
"Who are you?" I said again.
"Are you still looking for the man who killed you?"
My heart felt like someone had stabbed it with an icicle. "Officially, no," I said.
"And personally?"
"Always. Until I find him."
"So, now you can stop."
I froze. I didn't want to move a millimeter. I'd been looking forward to this meeting ever since I came to back in that crèche in the Amortals Project, but I hadn't seen it happening like this.
I'd tried to put some distance between myself and that victim I'd seen on the thrideo. I never would have let something like that happen to myself. The torture and humiliation that man – that victim – had gone through, that had happened to someone else.
Because of that, I'd set out to solve a murder, not my murder. Or so I'd told myself. That helped give me some perspective on the incident. Otherwise, I might run screaming into the night.
Now, though, confronted by my killer – and him having the upper hand on me once again – some ancient part of my brain informed me that I'd been a fool. That it had all been a front. That I needed to flee from this man, or I would go through all that again.
And this time, the protective layers would be stripped away. I'd not just have to watch and listen to every last detail. I'd have to feel the pain, taste the blood, smell the fear. Whoever followed after me – in my next life – he might be able to extract some measure of vengeance, but I was clearly doomed.
But why, then, had the killer unloaded my gun? Why not keep it and shoot me? If quick death wasn't good enough for me, then what horrible things did he have planned?
Maybe he was just waiting until he could prepare another set of cameras to record it all again. I glanced around the room, searching for the telltale glint of light off a lens. I came up empty, but that might only mean he was saving my murder until later.
Who the hell was he?
"Turn on the lights," I said, my voice barely a croak. "Please."
"Are you sure you're ready for that?" he asked.
I nodded carefully. I might not like the answer – and it might not help my successor, who would never remember any of this – but I had to know. Even if the truth died with me – even if it killed me – I had to know.
The ceiling light – a single bare cluster of tiny LEDs packed together like the glowing facets of an insect's eye – flashed on. The blindness had left me, but it took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the stark and brilliant illumination.
The man stepped forward into the light. He wore khaki shorts, sandals, and an old college T-shirt with the logo nearly worn off. His tanned skin showed the glow of fresh exposure to the sun. His dark hair swept back from his forehead, the area around his temples having gone a solid white that extended all the way down through his full and bushy beard. Crows feet surrounded his deep, dark eyes, which glinted with wisdom and determination.
I knew that face peering down at me. I knew the wry smile on those lips. I just couldn't believe he was standing there before me.
"Dad?" I said.
The man's smile widened, showing all his straight white teeth. "No, Ronan," he said with a soft laugh. "I'm you."
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
I sat there and stared at the man, my mouth wide open, my heart feeling like it might have stopped. I rubbed the bump on my head, wondering if the blow I'd taken there had knocked me out without my brain letting me know about it.
"I'm dead," I said. "You killed me when I came in the door. This is some kind of misfiring of the last few active neurons in my brain."
The man knelt down before me, reached out, and slapped me across the face. "That feel like a death-dream?" he said.
I rubbed my cheek. The sting from the slap helped refocus my brain. I swung my fist at the man. He blocked it and slapped me again.
"Concentrate here," he said to me as he stood back up. "This is as serious as it gets."
I glared at him as he backed up a few steps. "What the hell is going on?" I asked. "You can't be me. I'm sitting right here."
He smiled again at that. "I'm not exactly you," he said. "I'm not your father – our father – either. I'm your predecessor."
I goggled at him. "You're the me that forgot to back himself up for three months and then got himself murdered in a gruesome way?"
He shook his head. "That's not quite it."
"Then how, exactly, is it?"
He ran a hand over his beard. "I'm the man who figured out a way to make sure he never had to back himself up again."
He reached down to offer me a hand up. I was too stunned to refuse, and I let him pull me to my feet. He clapped me on my shoulder. "Let's go to the den. I don't know about you, but I need a drink."
He gestured for me to lead, so I did. I knew the way.
My head swam as I climbed the stairs, and not just from whatever he'd used to zap me. I clutched the railing to make sure I didn't fall. I didn't understand how this could be, how my earlier self could be here with me. It violated everything I knew about my life – or lives.
Once I reached the first floor, I let my feet guide me straight to the den. Like the rest of the house, it was paneled in rich golden woods that complemented the reddish color of the logribbed exterior. The fireplace set into the room's inside wall was dark and cold. I'd warmed myself by it more nights than I could count. Hot as the weather was right now, I felt frozen, and I wished I could start a blaze in that hearth to thaw me out.
The man who claimed to be me left the door open behind him as he followed me in. He crossed the room and went straight to the double doors concealing the wet bar and liquor cabinet. Once inside, he uncorked a bottle of thirty year-old Glenlivet and poured a few fingers for each of us into short, square glasses.
He handed one of the glasses to me and motioned for me to take one of the pair of overstuffed red leather chairs that sat near the window opposite the fireplace, across a weathered wooden table from each other. I'd played countless games on this table with my parents: chess, euchre, mahjong. As Cal got older, we'd continued the tradition, only with newer games, like Magic: The Gathering and Settlers of Catan.
My old copy of Settlers still sat there on the table. The man caught me looking at it as he brought the bottle of scotch over to join us.
"I started out letting Cal win," he said.
"But he picked up on it pretty fast," I finished.
I slammed back the scotch and held out the empty glass for a refill. The man winced at me as the liquor burned down my throat.
"That's a sipping whisky," he said.
"I needed a bracer."
He nodded as he tipped another stiff double into my glass. I picked it up and gazed into it as if it answers I needed might be swirling inside it.
The man raised his glass in a toast. "May you be in heaven half an hour before the Devil knows you're dead."
"Sláinte," I said. This time I sipped the scotch, and the burn came slow enough for me to enjoy it.
We both sat there in silence, savoring the drink and dreading leaving that quiet moment for the next.
"So," the man said finally, "I suppose you have a lot of questions."
"A few," I said, "but I think I've figured it out."
"Good," he said with a smile. "That will make it easier."
"Sure." I smiled right back at him. "I've gone insane."
"That would be the simplest answer. Sadly it's wrong."
"That complicates things." I put my drink down on the table. "Bring me up to speed."
The man took a sip of the
scotch, set it down, and began to speak. "It all started thirty years ago, but I wasn't around for that."
"I remember farther back than that."
He put up a hand to stop me. "You're still thinking about this as if we're the same person. We're not. That's just a clever fiction the Amortals Project sold to everyone to keep us excited about amortality."
"We share the same genes and the same memories, but we're not the same?"
"If you have two copies of the same book, are they the same thing? As a book, it's distinguishable from any other title, but the copies are essentially the same. They're interchangeable, sure, but they're also two separate items.
"So we're more like twins."
"But separated at a hundred and ninety-nine years old rather than at birth."
"But – but…" I wanted to protest but couldn't put my complaint into words.
"Yeah," he said softly, "I know."
I looked down at my chest. I couldn't believe it. Despite myself, I was wondering about my soul.
"It seems so silly, but–" I couldn't finish the sentence.
"I know," the older me said. "I haven't been a church-goer since long before Colleen died. I'm about as areligious as you can get, but the Amortals Project always implied that the soul transfers from one body to the other."
"They never actually said it? I could have sworn I'd heard that from them."
"Maybe from a technician, who might have even believed it, but not in any of the official material. They're very careful about it. I checked."
I stared at him. "Then what the hell are we?"
He shrugged. "Damned good copies of the original."
"Aren't we supposed to attack each other now out of some twisted sense of jealousy?"
"You played too much D&D as a kid."
"So, how long have you known?" I asked.
My other self smirked. "Five approached me about it right after my last backup."
"Five was involved in all of this?"
He nodded sagely. "For almost thirty years."
"I didn't think we got along with him at all."
"You remember the last time you died before this week?"
"But that wasn't me. You just–"
He cut me off with a sigh. "Just roll with the mutating definitions, all right? Do you remember it?"
I nodded. "That was the whole business with the One Resurrectionists, right? We worked with Arwen Glover on that."
"Yeah, although we don't remember any of that. Ever wonder why that is?"
"Just another case of us not backing up often enough." I stared at him intently as he raised his eyebrows and pursed his lips. "Or not? What was it then?"
I put my glass to my lips again and downed the rest of the scotch. My older self filled it again straight away.
"What's your real question here?" he asked. "What have you spent every day of your very young life trying to figure out?"
"Who killed me?" I squirmed in my seat. "Or who killed the last me, who I thought was you? Wait. Who was that then?"
"A clone," he said. "One that had never been activated."
I gaped at him. "You stole it from the Amortals Project."
He gave his head a tight shake. "They have that place locked down tight. Also, if a clone of me went missing, they would have figured out what happened right away."
I cocked my head at him. "So the real question, then, isn't who killed me – or someone who looked an awful lot like me. It's why?"
"So I could disappear."
I nodded. "Sure, I get that. Hell, I've wanted to do that many times myself. But there must be easier ways to walk away from it all. Ways that don't involve bootlegging a clone and murdering it in a gruesome way."
He sat back in his chair, and I realized that even though we were much the same person, he didn't fully trust me. Thinking about it, I didn't entirely trust him either.
"And how the hell could you do that? You grew a copy of yourself and you killed it?"
He shook his head. "It wasn't alive really. We never imprinted it. It might as well have been brain dead."
I knew that for the massive rationalization it was. "What was with the eyes? And all the bullets? Wasn't one enough to kill something that wasn't alive?"
He sighed at my sarcasm. "The clone didn't have my implants. My lenses, my nanoserver, all the rest. If my corpse showed up without those, Paul Winding would have spotted the discrepancy right away. I had to leave enough for him to identify me but no more."
I pushed my drink away. The way my stomach was roiling, I couldn't take any more of it. "But why record it? Why the thrideo?"
He took a long sip of his drink and waited for me to figure it out.
"You just wanted me too mad to think. You've been behind all of this, haven't you?" I said. "You gave that homeless guy the money to ask me for change. You sent the Kalis after me – and me after them."
He put down his glass. "I needed time. I knew the killing wouldn't be able to fool you or Patrón for long, so I tossed a few red herrings in your way."
I got out of my chair and began to pace the room. My father used to do the same thing in this room when we'd play chess and he was waiting for me to figure out my next move. It felt right.
"How long have you been planning this?"
"Me? Only since Five approached me about it."
"So he grew the clone for you?" My head spun. "Is that what's in that room in the basement that Six told me about?"
He nodded. "The science behind force-growing clones from cells to adulthood in a short time is tricky. Only the Amortals Project has mastered it. We had to be patient about it."
I blinked. "So who started all this? Five?"
"No, it was our past self, the one right before me. While investigating the One Resurrectionists, he figured out that they were right. The Amortals Project is an abomination."
"Sure, but that abomination gave birth to us. Like it or not, we wouldn't be here otherwise. A lot of very powerful people could say the same thing."
My past self shook his head. "While the fiction about souls and such bothers me, that's not the real issue here."
My eyes widened in shock. I would have put good money on our former self having launched all this to expose exactly that horrifying crime. "That's not enough?"
"Copying the dead, that's just a tool. It's nothing. We've been able to clone creatures for over two centuries. Putting old memories into them, that was the big trick that made this all possible, but it's still just a tool, a new kind of science. No, it's what you do with the tool that matters."
"Which is what?"
"There's a conspiracy, a group of amortals that have been running the country – the world, really – since the dawn of the twenty-first century. They're in charge of the Amortals Project. They decide who lives and who dies."
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
"A shadowy cabal with the power over life and death?" I stopped pacing and turned on him. I couldn't keep my incredulity from my voice. "Are you out of your mind?"
My past self's mouth tightened into a flat line across his face. "It sounds insane, but it's true. They're called the Brain Trust. My past self discovered this while he was working with Arwen thirty years ago. They learned about it when they foiled the Brain Trust's plan to kill the President and the Pope."
"Why would this Brain Trust want to assassinate anyone? I thought the President and the Pope would have been charter members."
He snorted. "Shadowy cabals have a tendency to implode. President Westwood had blackmailed and intimidated the others into backing his run for the White House, and they were ready to get rid of him."
"What about the Pope? He's not amortal."
"Exactly. But if they could kill him and turn him into one to 'save his life,' think about how that would roil the Catholic Church."
My stomach churned at the thought.
"But our past self put a stop to all that," he said. "He threatened to expose the Brain Trust, and with Patrón's help, they
killed him for it."
I sent my mind back to those days, searching my memories for something that just wasn't there. I realized, though, that this had been the point at which my friendship with Patrón had soured. At the time, I'd attributed it to the stresses of the job, but now that I knew what had really happened it all made far more sense.
