by Matt Forbeck
"And then they just brought him back without any of those troublesome memories." I shook my head. "But why didn't it end there?"
"Before they killed him, he and Arwen decided to do something about it. They needed someone outside of the government to give them a hand, so they brought in Five. He'd already been a part of the One Resurrectionists, but he was only involved with the political protests, not the faction that had been prodded into doing the cabal's dirty work for it."
"So we asked him to step up his game and join our plot instead?"
"Essentially, yes."
I put out a hand to steady myself on a chair. "Why?"
He folded his hands on the table in front of him. "Do you know how they backup your memories?"
"They hook you up to this helmet full of wires, and they analyze and capture all of your brain activity, then copy it into a supercomputer." I waved my hands to show that I knew I was cutting out several important steps.
"That's what they tell you, but that's not it at all."
The phone in the corner of the room rang.
I stared at it. I hadn't heard an actual phone ringing in more decades than I cared to count. I hadn't noticed the phone when I walked into the room because it had always been there: a cordless model attached to a landline. My father had installed it, and I'd never bothered to throw it away, perhaps out of some twisted sense of nostalgia for a time before we were all tethered to the net. It seemed my descendants had shared or at least respected that.
After my father died, I'd hooked the phone up to a VoIP modem. As an experiment, Cal had reprogrammed it to bounce the signal through a large number of random redirects and anonymizers to make the line untraceable. He thought since his father was a "spy" that it would be fun. It had proved useful more than once over the years, although mostly to keep the people back at HQ from knowing where I was on vacation.
The other me got out of his chair and answered the phone. "Hello, Arwen," he said. "I'm going to put you on speakerphone."
He pressed a button on the cordless handset and put it down in the middle of the table. Arwen's voice came through it clear and strong, although a bit delayed, like talking to someone in the Lunar Colony.
"Are you both there?" she said.
"Yes," we said in unison.
I glared at my other self over that, and he shrugged an apology at me.
"I can't tell you boys how thrilled I am to see this all finally coming together. It's been a long wait."
"Nine's not quite up to speed yet, Arwen," my older self said.
"Nine?" I asked.
"I came up with that for you," Arwen said. "You're the ninth person to be known as Ronan Dooley the original."
I closed my eyes and rubbed my forehead. This was all making my skull spin.
"I suppose that makes me Eight," said my older self.
"If you like," said Arwen. "I still think of you both as Seven's sons."
I groaned. "Isn't this going to get confusing if we start talking about Five and Six? Can't we use Greek letters or something?
"That would make you Iota," said Arwen, unable to suppress a giggle, "and Eight would be Theta."
Eight smiled. "Theta's an ancient symbol for death." He looked at me. "I don't think Iota fits him though."
I shook my head, barely able to believe I was playing the codename game with these two. "Don't we have other things to talk about? Is this why you called, Arwen?"
"Omega," she said. "I think you're an Omega."
Eight grinned. "If all goes right, you'll be the last of us. That works."
"Whatever," I said. "Arwen? What did you really call about?"
"Right!" she said, remembering. "My friend on the inside tells me that you two are about to receive some unwelcome visitors."
"How long do we have until they arrive?" Eight asked.
"I'm not certain," Arwen said, "but it's on the order of minutes rather than hours."
"We need to get out of here," I said to Eight. "Now."
"Good-bye, Arwen," he said to the phone. "I'll be in touch once we get settled."
"Good luck," her voice said. "To you both."
Eight stabbed the disconnect button with his finger, then glared at me.
"Did you call for help on your way in?" he asked.
I shook my head.
He made a frustrated noise. "Damn it. They must think you're dead."
"How you do figure that? I just got here." I ran a hand through my hair. "Are you sure you didn't kill me back there? It would explain a lot."
He stared at me until recognition dawned on his face. "No, but I might as well have. Patrón must have been tracking your nanoserver."
"I turned it off back in Chicago," I said, confused.
He smirked at me. I wondered if I looked that smug when I did it or if it was something that had come to him lately.
"It doesn't have to be powered on for them to be able to track it," he said. "It works even when you stop breathing."
"So I come up here, and he sends in the troops? Why?"
"Because he thinks you're dead."
"But why would he?" I rubbed my head where he'd zapped me. I had thought he'd hit me with a taser of some sort, but tasers don't make you blind. "What the hell did you do to me?"
He fished the device out of his pocket. "It's a HERF gun. A short-range, narrow-focus EMP generator. Fries any electronics in its area of effect. Permanently."
"No," I said, horrified. I tried to turn my nanoserver back on. It had been one thing to voluntarily cut myself off from the net and from all my layers. I'd always known I could turn them back on. To have them permanently removed, that was something else altogether.
I smacked myself in the back of my skull as if my head had some sort of loose circuit. "No, no, no, no, no."
"Did you go blind?"
I stared at him. "Yeah."
He nodded. "They superpolarized when I killed your nanoserver. When they depolarize naturally, you can see again."
"Why?" I said as I grabbed him by the front of the shirt. "Why did you do this to me?"
I felt violated. I'd been connected to the net since before my first death. I felt naked without it. When I'd severed the connection voluntarily, I'd felt free. Now I just felt like a barefoot child walking through the snow.
"It had to be done," he said. He glanced out a window at the sky. "I just didn't think they'd move on it so fast."
I shook my head at him and choked back the urge to throttle him. I pushed him away from me.
"I have a rental," I said, heading for the front door. "I untethered it from the net. We can use that to get out of here."
"And go where?" he said as he chased after me. "If they catch us together, it's all over. Better we split up."
"You have your own hovercar?" I asked as we emerged from the Shack.
"In the garage." He pointed to a separate building nestled into the woods on the far side of the clearing in front of the house.
"Anything incriminating inside?"
"Tons," he said, "but nothing that should give anyone a clue about what's up – for a while, at least. Here."
"What about the cloning room in the basement?"
"Set to self-destruct if anyone without our DNA manages to open it. We don't fool around."
He tossed me one of a pair of ancient walkie-talkies he'd scooped up on his way out of the house. Each was a voice-activated headset you plugged into your ear, like the ones the Kalis that blew up my apartment had used. Cal and I had played laser tag while wearing these when he was a kid.
"They're scrambled," he said. "Use channel five."
As we left the cabin, Murphy came running up to us again. He stopped short and gazed up at the two of us, confused, then started to sniff around.
"You cloned him too?" I asked, scratching the dog behind the ears.
"Five started him going the moment he hauled the spare body out of the crèche. He thought I'd appreciate having an old friend waiting for me."
> I heard a roar coming down out of the evening sky above us. The sun still hung low in the west. The east had darkened with the oncoming night, but not enough for any stars to show yet – except for one, but it wasn't a proper star. Patrón had bypassed the standard channels and sent his team after us in a federal orbital transport. It arced out of the indigo sky like a shooting star aiming straight for us. It would be here in under five minutes. There was no way to avoid it.
"Go," I said, smacking Eight on the back. "Get your vehicle and get out of here. I'll draw them away."
"Thanks," he said, a wry, satisfied smile on his lips. "I need the room to finish up all the preparations. Once everything's ready, I'll see you in DC."
He set off at a run toward the garage. Murphy glanced up at me, his ears canted high with curiosity, then went chasing after Eight. I watched them go as I made for my rental. I'd never had a chance to see myself like this, other than through thrids. He moved the same way I did, although a hair slower. Still, he knew his business and every step showed he was determined to get it done.
I gestured for the hovercar's door to open, and I jumped in. I grabbed the controls and brought the machine straight up into the air. An alarm blared until the hovercar managed to close the open door, by which time I was already a hundred feet in the air.
"You there, kid?"
I fumbled for the walkie-talkie, which had slipped under my seat. The hovercar wobbled as I did. When I finally got my hand on it, I saw that it was on and already set to channel five.
I fumbled with the headset until I got it jammed in my ear. "Roger," I said.
"It's Ronan, actually," he said.
"Cut the jokes. That transport will be here in no time, and we both need to be as far away from the Shack by then as we can."
"Already on it," he said. "Which way are you headed?"
"I'm going to head deeper over the lake. Make them think I'm bolting for Canada."
"Won't that bring the border patrol down on your–? Ah," he said, getting it. "That's the idea. You want all the attention you can grab."
"Up to a point, yeah."
"I'm heading not-north then. Good luck."
"Hey," I said, not quite ready to let him go that easy. "What were you about to tell me before Arwen called? About how they backup your memories."
The channel remained silent long enough that I wondered if he'd dropped his walkie-talkie or shut it off.
"Still there?" I asked, letting my irritation seep into my tone. "Come on. Don't leave me hanging."
"There is no supercomputer for them to copy your memories into," he said. "No computer could possibly capture and record every neural connection in a human brain. Not even close."
I frowned as I coaxed the hovercar higher into the air. In the sky behind me, I watched the transport follow its inexorable arc toward the Shack.
"So how do they do it?" I asked.
"They copy them directly into your clone."
I felt like someone had punched me in the throat.
He continued. "They force-grow your clone to adulthood and then copy your memories into it. They leave it trapped there in storage until you die. When that happens, they just wake up the clone and send him on his merry way."
"You can't be–" I stopped myself. No one would joke about this. No amortal, for sure.
That meant that the Amortals Project – the US Government – had set up a program that kept copies of thousands of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the world in suspended animation until they were needed. I had been one of those clones, kept unconscious for who knew how long. I hadn't been reactivated in thirty years.
"I was kept on ice for thirty years?"
"Probably less. Once force-grown, clones age just like anyone else. If you were the first backup after I was activated back in '38, you'd be in something like your fifties now, and you don't look it."
I felt nauseous. The shoreline of Isle Royale peeked up over the edge of the northern horizon as I zoomed toward it. Canada lay just beyond that, somewhere beyond the curve of the globe.
"How many?" I asked. "How many copies of us did they make?"
"I don't know for sure," he said. "It could be that they make a new clone for each backup, but that seems like a waste. My guess is that they create a new one at least every five years."
So many questions churned in my mind. What did they do with the obsolete clones? What if they couldn't overwrite a clone's memories? Then they would have to use a fresh clone each time. For Secret Service agents like me, who were supposed to backup weekly, that would be fifty-two new clones a year. That would make me the latest in a line of over three hundred life-ready clones.
"They have to be able to overwrite memories," I said. "Otherwise, it's insane."
"Having them create and murder at least five clones between you and me isn't enough? The original entered amortality a hundred and thirty-six years ago. That's at least twenty-seven copies of us made, only eight of which ever saw the light of day."
"Oh, God."
"He didn't have anything to do with this. Check your six. The transport's left the Shack and is heading your way."
I scanned the sky behind me and spotted a small speck of metal glinting orange in the sun's dying rays and growing bigger with every passing second. I didn't have long.
"Think of it," he said. "If they had to come up with a new clone every week, that would be over seven thousand clones of us floating around. But we didn't come in every week, of course."
"Think of the lives we saved," I said. I couldn't bite back my bitterness.
"Think of what they might be doing if they can actually rewrite the memories of clones. What's to stop them from doing that to an activated clone?"
I wondered if I could open the hovercar's door at this altitude to be sick.
"How many gaps in your history do you have?" he asked. "Would you even notice if a decade went missing?"
"We can't trust our memories," I whispered to myself.
"No," he answered. "We can't trust anything."
The deafening roar that had come racing up behind me finally became too painfully loud for my stunned mind to ignore. I looked behind me and saw the massive transport taking up half the sky.
CHAPTER THIRTY
The transport bristled with rotary machine-guns and red-tipped missiles, all of which pointed directly at my tail. It grew closer as I watched it, looming over my tiny hovercar like a leviathan about to swallow me whole. Then, an instant later, it pulled past me, nosing high overhead. Its bulk hovered over me, the wash from its jets rattling me right down to the roots of my teeth.
I spotted a woman sitting in the glassteel blister that housed the transport's belly gun. She pointed straight at me, and then stabbed her finger down at the ground.
For an instant I wondered why the transport's captain hadn't just radioed his demands to me directly. Then I remembered that my nanoserver was shot and that I'd disabled the hovercar's communications equipment. After fussing with the fuse box for a moment, I switched the hovercar's communications gear back on, and the dashboard leaped to life. A hoarse male voice blared in my ears. It belonged to someone who was used to having people follow his orders.
"…approaching Canadian airspace. If you do not respond immediately, we will be forced to blow your craft from the sky. You have thirty seconds to comply."
I waited.
"One last time. Agent Dooley. This is Captain Henry Moloke of the United States Air Force. By the authority of the Department of Homeland Security, I hereby order you to land your aircraft. You are approaching Canadian airspace. If you do not respond immediately–"
"What seems to be the problem, officers?"
Captain Moloke sighed in relief. "Thank God," he said, his voice soft and grateful. Then he spoke firmly again. "Please identify yourself."
"Agent Ronan Dooley of the United States Secret Service. My passport is in order, captain. Go ahead and check my credentials."
"Actually, si
r, you are currently broadcasting no credentials. Is your nanoserver functioning correctly?"
I grimaced. "Not at all."
"We can have that repaired once we get you back to DC."
"No need for that," I said. "I'm on vacation up here. I'm sorry someone put you to the trouble to find me."
He hesitated. "I have orders to bring you back to Washington immediately, sir."
