“They never do.” Davis looked up at the media helicopters hovering half a mile away. She knew their nose cameras had impressive capabilities. They were combing the crime scene on live TV, adding to Cotton’s ego. “Cotton goes for camera-ready catastrophes.”
“But what’s the point of hitting sham start-up tech firms every couple of years? What’s it accomplish?”
“Cotton’s probably smart enough to realize that if he punches above his weight or too often, we’re going to get some serious manpower focused on this case.”
Falwell considered this.
Davis stood at the edge of the still smoking crater. It was easily twenty feet across and five feet deep. “Two and a half years since the last attack. And nearly two years since the one before that. Who has that kind of patience, Thomas? Who can keep operational security within a group of anarchists for that long?”
Falwell stowed his computer tablet. “I have to say this, Denise. And you need to hear me out.”
She almost cringed. “What? I thought we were good.”
“It’s not that. I’ve been chasing Cotton for seven years. And now that there’s been another bombing—and it’s all over the news again—D.C. will give you additional manpower. Just like they did me.”
“I won’t let them forget all the hard work you did, Thomas.”
“Not my point. My point is that in a year or so this team will be pared down again.”
“Then we’ll have to capture Cotton before then.”
“I’m just letting you know that Cotton is like no narcissistic sociopath I’ve ever heard of. There comes a point when we have to ask ourselves whether Cotton still fits the BAU profile.”
“Okay . . . we can have them do another workup.”
“I’ve never seen anyone who’s content to disappear for so long—to be almost forgotten. Only to strike again somewhere far away and always with faceless, masked followers. There’s something here we’re not seeing. We’ve had informers inside antitech anarchist groups for years now. It’s as though Richard Cotton doesn’t exist except when he’s attacking.”
She walked up to him. “It’s been a long road, but I hope you know that I need you to do exactly what you’re doing: telling me what you really think.”
He nodded.
Davis walked back toward the knot of emergency vehicles, where Dwight was now approaching with an FBI ERT member. She spoke over her shoulder. “Use the extra agents while we’ve got ’em, Thomas. Chase down all the loose ends. And if Cotton doesn’t exist between attacks, then we’ll just have to conjure him, won’t we?”
CHAPTER 5
Master Copy
Don’t you need to resequence him before transport?”
A blond man, physically identical to the first except for his lab coat, bristled and looked up from a holographic computer display. “I’m sorry, do you have a medical classification?”
“I’m just saying, if you gave a longer estimated time of departure, I’d have time to hit the R&R levels before we go.”
“You’re always ‘just saying.’ You’ve got diarrhea of the mouth is what you’ve got.”
“I’ve been away from civilization a long time.”
A clattering noise.
“C’mon, don’t be an asshole. Give us a few hours before they send us back, man.”
Grady watched the men from an inclined position on a metallic table. Grady was still a disconnected head—unable to feel a thing below his neck. And it was panicking him. He stared up at the lights, trying to calm himself—especially because listening to his rapid breathing without feeling anything was freaking him out further.
“Mr. Grady, please stop hyperventilating.”
“Just pump him full of PP-3 and put him on ice for a while.”
“Stop telling me how to do my job.”
“C’mon, do me a solid. A few hours are all I need.”
“I’m not falsifying official paperwork so you can get laid.”
“You’re such a kiss-ass.”
Another two identical men entered Grady’s field of vision. They weren’t handsome, but they all shared that thick-necked, swarthy, alpha-male demeanor. The two new arrivals wore gray guard uniforms with Greek numeric patches on the shoulder—Delta-Alpha and Theta-Tau—as though each was his own fraternity. They glowered down on Grady.
The first tech complained, “Damnit, get the hell out of my lab. All of you.”
“You’d better give us a few hours, Zeta. I haven’t been in the real world for a year and a half.”
“It’s not up to me.”
A ragged older man’s gruff voice boomed out. “Get the hell out of here, you three!”
The two most recent arrivals ducked out without a word. The last one remained, eyeballing someone, who soon walked into Grady’s view. It was the eldest Morrison. The one from Hedrick’s office.
The younger Morrison glared. “I’m not afraid of you, old man.”
The elder Morrison got right in his face. “That can be rectified.”
“A man your age should be careful.”
Morrison smirked. “That’s funny.” He suddenly head-butted the younger man. The young soldier collapsed, and in moments Morrison had his boot on the man’s neck. “Because it’s you who should be careful.”
“Get off me!”
Morrison called out, “Boys! Get this idiot out of here before I kill him.”
Two other clones hurried in and grabbed their compatriot.
Morrison glowered at them. “All of you stay on the transport. You won’t be here long.”
“Yes, sir.”
Morrison’s aged, scarred face followed the men as they carried their injured comrade out. He finally looked down on Grady. “Kids.”
Grady was at a loss for words.
“Don’t give me that look. Mother Nature’s always had clones, Mr. Grady. They’re called twins.” He shook his head ruefully. “I’ve just got way more of ’em than most people.” Morrison turned to the clone in a lab coat. “Zeta, how much longer?”
“About five, ten minutes. Depends on his protein folds.”
Morrison nodded absently, observing the complex imagery on a nearby screen. “I never could get used to all this high-tech crap.” He looked down at Grady again. “But it’s like they say: Anything before you’re thirty-five is new and exciting, and anything after that is proof the world’s going to hell.”
Grady was still trying to get his helplessness-induced panic under control. His breathing was labored.
Morrison scowled at him. “You need to relax, Mr. Grady, or that collar’s going to have difficulty controlling your respiratory functions. We have all the genetic information necessary to make a copy of you, but as you might have noticed, that’s not the same thing as having you.”
The lab technician halted his work and looked up at the ceiling. “Would you stop with this already?”
“I’m talking to this man, here. Do you see me talking to you? Was I talking to you?”
“I think you were talking to me in a way, yes.”
“Just get him prepped. The sooner we get these substandard Neanderthals out of here, the better.”
“I copy that.” The younger man sighed and turned back to his work.
Morrison glowered down at Grady again. Morrison looked old and tired as he rubbed his calloused, thick fingers against his closed eyes.
Grady felt the words forming as a means to keep his mind off the vertigo he was feeling. “Why are you doing this?”
Morrison looked up. “Doing what?”
“Taking away my life.”
“If the director says you need a time-out, then you need a time-out. Hibernity does a great job of changing people’s minds. Literally.”
Grady searched the man’s eyes for some human kindness. He saw none. “Th
is is wrong.”
“Wrong. Right. They’re a matter of perspective. I’m sure gazelles think lions are wrong.”
“And you and your clones are the lions.”
“I’d say they’re more like hyenas.”
The lab technician slammed his computer tablet onto the counter. “Dad, give it a rest already.”
“What? I can’t talk to this poor unfortunate without getting comments from the peanut gallery?”
“I’m not gonna just stand here and listen to you talk shit.”
Morrison turned back to Grady. “You know why they cloned me back in the ’80s, Mr. Grady? Because I was the best special operator the U.S. military ever produced. High intelligence, top physical characteristics—the most determined to survive and overcome. To win. But as it turns out, genetics isn’t destiny—it’s statistics. After two decades it has become quite clear that something about us is not genetic.”
The younger clone interjected, “You don’t even understand the science: The seat of consciousness—what’s known as ‘sensorium’—exists partly as an expression of particle entanglement in higher physical dimensions. The human brain is merely a conduit.”
Morrison gestured toward his younger self. “My point exactly. That’s why none of you will ever be me.” He turned back to Grady. “Turns out you can’t copy people. Just flesh. Now it’s all biotech design. Like Granny Alexa up there.”
The lab technician glared. “Tau said you wanted us all liquidated.”
“Not all of you. Just the less-than-faithful reproductions.”
The lab technician still glared.
Morrison threw up his hands. “What do you want me to say?”
The clone stared hard at Morrison for several moments. “There are times when I feel like murdering you, sir.”
“Well, give it your best shot, son. Just don’t fail.”
They faced each other in tense silence.
Morrison finally grinned. “We share a predilection for homicide. Some of us are just better on the follow-through.”
The lab technician took a deep, calming breath. “I refuse to give in to my genetic predilections.”
“I rest my case.”
The technician turned away in disdain.
“Relax, Zeta. You’re one of the good ones.”
The lab tech looked up. “I’m finished. His file’s done. Now, if you’ll excuse me.”
“Good.” Morrison took one last irritated look at the lab clone. “Nox him first, and get him onto transport.”
“Goddamnit . . .”
Grady searched for the words to convince them. “Wait. Don’t do this. I—”
But the irresistible urge to sleep swept over him like a suffocating blanket.
SIX MONTHS LATER
CHAPTER 6
Exile
Jon Grady gazed from the edge of a thousand-foot cliff, across an endless expanse of deep water. He guessed the plunge continued straight down beneath the waves to crushing depths. Such cliffs ringed the island. An island so distant from everywhere that there were only two species of local bird—one flightless—and almost no wildlife. No rodents. No snakes. Limited plants even. Perhaps one day a migratory bird population would arrive. That might give him some indication of where he was.
At nights Grady stood in the darkness near his cottage, gazing up at a riot of stars and the cloud of the Milky Way arching overhead. It was even more glorious than he’d remembered from his years wandering the Sierra Nevada and Canadian Rockies with his parents. Those were blissfully innocent times. An escape from a childhood otherwise spent enduring therapeutic efforts to “fix” him. He credited his parents with saving him from that.
Psychosis was a mental disorder whereby a person lost contact with external reality. And to all outward appearances the young Jon Grady did not engage with reality. As a toddler he had stared in wonder at things unseen, absorbed in his own world. Thought to be suffering from severe autism, he spent most of his early years under specialized care—not uttering his first words until the age of five.
And yet those first words were a complete sentence: “I want to go home now.”
And home he went, to all appearances noticing the outside world more each day.
It wasn’t until Grady was seven years old that his mother helped him understand that other people did not perceive numbers as colors—that five was not a deep indigo, nor three a vermilion red. Likewise musical tones were not part of most people’s mathematics. Grady “heard” math as he pored through its logic. Discordant notes were immediately evident. Mathematical concepts took on specific shapes in his mind relative to one another. At times the shape and sound of math problems seemed somehow wrong. Cacophonous.
He was usually correct when he had that feeling.
All of this made him different from other children. And different meant he became a target. So from an early age mathematics was his only playmate. He formed a close relationship with the natural laws all around him.
As the only child of grammar school teachers, Grady received the best care they could afford and a loving, stable home life. But it wasn’t until age ten—after he’d undergone years of fruitless autism therapies—that he was correctly diagnosed.
Congenital synesthesia was a condition where one or more of the senses were conflated within the brain. In Grady’s case he suffered from both color and number-form synesthesia—sometimes known as grapheme—which meant he perceived numbers as colors, geometric shapes, and sounds. He saw numbers normally as well and could draw their actual outlines, but he simultaneously imbued them with more than was actually there.
The neural basis for synesthesia was imperfectly understood, but a normal brain dedicated certain regions to certain functions. The visual cortex processed image perceptions but was further subdivided into regions involved in color processing, motion processing, and visual memory. The prevailing theory was that increased cross talk between different specialized subregions of the visual cortex caused different forms of synesthesia. Thus, Jon Grady’s brain had more internal information exchange than those of most people.
The effect made him sound crazy to those who didn’t know him. About the only thing that gave Grady peace was being outdoors. Hiking and stargazing seemed to calm him more than any therapy ever had, filling his senses with wonder. And his parents resolved to give him that wonder. They sold the family home, bought a camper, and began a protracted tour of national and state parks—homeschooling Grady as they went.
Those years were his happiest childhood memories. Visiting Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Yellowstone, Yosemite, Glacier, and more; soaking in the natural world as they roughed it; backpacking through the wilderness. The more he saw, the more comfort he took in the natural world. Observing the stars in Tuolumne Meadows. Traversing the Chinese Wall in Montana or the gorges of the Canadian Rockies. Stringing bear bags at night with his father and staring up at the stars in the deep darkness of arboreal forests. He’d never felt so much at peace, watching the majesty of the physical laws that governed the cosmos arrayed above him. It was all there before his eyes.
It was in that remote wilderness that Grady began to formulate his concept of the universe and its structure. By age thirteen he began reading widely in physics—which drew him to brilliant minds like Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Feynman, Einstein, Maxwell, and especially Faraday. For the first time he felt a connection with other minds. The fact that Faraday had little formal training yet discovered the magnetic field through his intuitive lab observations inspired Grady to pursue his passion for inquiry into the natural world.
Eventually, as Grady reached college age, his parents again settled down and took teaching positions. They encouraged Grady to pursue an education, short on money though they now were.
Never a joiner and with scant academic records, Grady was nonetheless accepted to the State Univer
sity of New York at Albany as a physics major. Yet he quickly grew frustrated at the survey-level courses taught not by professors but by harried graduate student teaching assistants. Grady’s impatience with others undermined him socially—as it always had.
By the time Grady dropped out of SUNY, he’d become deeply interested in the work of Bertrand Alcot, the head of Columbia University’s physics department. Alcot focused on hydrodynamics—a branch of physics that deals with the motion of fluids and the forces acting on solids immersed in fluids. Grady directed a flurry of unsolicited and unanswered emails to Alcot, making outrageously ambitious assertions, always including mathematical proofs (flawed as they later turned out to be).
Then one day he got an answer.
A year and a half after he’d starting sending his messages, while working as a mathematics tutor, Grady received a reply with a simple correction to one of his equations. As he studied Alcot’s change, Grady realized the revision was a more succinct solution—and one that gave him new ideas.
And so they continued, communicating mostly in mathematics—beginning a chess game whose pieces were the elemental forces of the natural world.
Grady’s reverie was disturbed by a gust of wind. The smell of the sea brought him back to his new reality and surroundings. The tiny island that was his prison.
He remembered the deep wilderness of North America as unspoiled by light pollution, but the night sky here had a clarity unlike anything he’d experienced. In this pristine world even satellites were readily visible, pinpoints of reflected sunlight racing through the firmament. At first he’d mistaken them for aircraft, raising hopes of signaling for rescue. But no, these moved too fast and lacked navigation lights. As days and weeks passed, it was clear no aircraft—nor indeed any ship—ever crossed the horizon. He was far from the air and shipping lanes.
Grady had examined the constellations overhead, trying to derive his position on the globe. Normally he’d locate the North Star and use it to judge his latitude with an outstretched hand—its position above the horizon would roughly correspond with his own latitude in the Northern Hemisphere. But the polestar was nowhere to be seen. The Southern Cross in the Crux constellation was clearly visible, though—which meant he was somewhere in the Southern Hemisphere, and that made his location more difficult to divine. There was no comparable polestar in the global south. Calculating latitude here involved tracking the movements of the top and bottom stars of the Southern Cross as they crossed the meridian—or something like that. He couldn’t recall precisely.
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