by Drew Avera
“Easy,” the woman he’d come to know as Svetlana told him, or perhaps she was speaking to them. She stood in front of him, as tall and well-dressed and malevolently beautiful as he’d remembered. “It starts now,” she told him. She raised a hypodermic needle. “This is a sedative. You’ll want this. You don’t want to be awake when they extract the stem cells.” She shrugged. “You can either allow me to give it to you peacefully, with no struggle, or I can use this.”
She held up a taser in her other hand. It was probably the same one that had been used on him back at Busch Gardens, when he’d been captured.
“If I have to use the taser, I will not bother with the sedative. It is your choice.”
The thugs she’d brought with her looked as if they wanted him to resist, though he noticed they didn’t say a word. They respected her authority, or perhaps feared what she was capable of. Either way, he wasn’t getting out of this cell unless they took him and he really didn’t feel like being awake during surgery, especially not to prove a point.
“Give me the shot,” he told her, offering his arm.
She smirked and moved around behind him, yanking at the waistline of his pants.
Shit. Don’t even get to keep my dignity.
Something sharp and painful stuck him in the ass and after that, he remembered nothing.
Chapter Seven
“Well, shit,” James Fuller said, sitting back from the video display. It had frozen on the image of the mysterious man who’d commanded Nate’s captors and Fuller massaged his knuckles and stared at the face, slightly out of focus, shrouded in a fog of the unknown.
“I tell you what,” the old man expounded, “your boss Nate has more good in him than I do. I’d have popped a cap in that boy Patty sure as shit and no fooling, just like that fancy blond did. She’s Russian, that’s for damn sure,” he added as if Roach hadn’t been able to figure that out herself from the accent. “FSB most likely. The big question is, who the hell is this guy?” He pointed at the mystery man. “What did Nate call him? Bob? That don’t sound Russian to me.”
“How did Nate know him?” Roach wondered. “He sounded as if he were surprised as hell to see him.”
“I feel like I’ve seen his face somewhere,” Fuller said. “I can’t quite recall when.” He grinned at the two younger people as if he were sharing some secret of the universe with them. “As you get older, it gets harder and harder to figure out where you put your memories. Your boss probably knew that.”
“Nate wasn’t that old,” Ramirez protested. Roach stared daggers at him and he looked confused for a moment until he abruptly realized what he’d done. “I mean he isn’t that old,” he corrected himself.
“Well, not in terms or pure years,” Fuller admitted, “but he’s a dupe, so they add up faster.”
Roach shook her head, frowning uncomprehendingly.
“He’s a what?”
Fuller blinked as if he wasn’t sure how she didn’t understand.
“A dupe. Surely you both know that?”
“Mister Fucking Old Guy,” Ramirez told him, still sounding as if he resented the man, “I ain’t never heard that word before right now. What the hell do you mean Nate is a dupe?”
“Don’t they teach you kids nothin’ in school anymore?” Fuller sighed and settled back into his chair as if he were about to tell them a bedtime story. “When they first came up with the mechs, like the Hellfires, the isotope reactors leaked radiation like nobody’s business. Back then, they didn’t figure they could get away with sticking just any poor bastard inside anyway and letting them die in ten or fifteen years from cancer, so they came up with the dupes.”
He rubbed at his chin thoughtfully. “Well, now that I recollect, they musta’ been working on the dupes already and someone just saw how they could be useful and put two and two together and came up with the idea.”
Roach snarled, already losing patience with the old man.
“You still haven’t told us what a dupe is,” she ground out.
“Oh, yeah, right,” Fuller said, laughing. “Guess I forgot that part. You see, they figured out a way to take genetic material from a donor and grow an adult copy Except of course, it’s a blank slate, no memories ‘cause those ain’t in your genes, so they had to come up with how to read memories from the original into the dupes…the genetic duplicates, I think the correct term is.”
“Wait a fucking minute!” Ramirez interrupted him, his eyes going wide, the blood draining out of his face. “You’re saying Nate is some kind of copy?”
“Well, yes,” Fuller confirmed. “DoD told me all about it. Didn’t he tell you?”
Roach couldn’t answer, couldn’t bring herself to speak, but Ramirez was shaking his head.
“Well, I guess it ain’t anyone else’s business, usually. Anyway, the thing about the dupes is, they got a shorter lifespan, only twelve or fifteen years.”
“How come I never heard anything about this ever?” Ramirez demanded.
“Well, it ain’t something you’d want to be bragging about, I suppose. They stopped it all around nine or ten years ago when the shielding technology improved enough for regular people to pilot a mech without getting all fucked up.” He grinned broadly. “Before that, I flew helicopters, but since then I been piloting Hellfires. Best thing I ever did. They’re so much more fun.”
“Why wouldn’t he tell us?” Ramirez whispered the words, sounding like a kid whose puppy had gotten run over.
“Why the hell would he?” Roach grunted. She was feeling the same sense of betrayal, but it was important not to let Ramirez see it. “We didn’t need to know. It’s still not important. He’s Nate, whatever else he is. Why should it make any difference?”
“I don’t know,” Ramirez admitted. “It just seems like a big secret to keep.”
“Mebbe he just didn’t want to be constantly answering questions about it,” Fuller suggested. “Shit, I’m sorry I brought it up, now, but I thought it might be relevant. You try running that Bob dude’s face through DoD biometrics? You got access to that through your dedicated server, right?”
“Yeah, though I don’t think we’ve ever actually used it before,” Roach admitted. “I’m not sure I did it right because I didn’t get any result.”
The older man frowned, scratching at his mustache.
“That don’t seem right, if he’s really someone important. The DoD may not be worth much when it comes to actionable intelligence, but they keep files on everyone.” He shrugged. “Everyone who ain’t dead already.”
“They can save themselves some time then,” Roach said. “If this guy hurt Nate, I’ll put him in the ground.”
Svetlana Grigoryeva had seen terrible things, much worse than the laparoscopic drills going into Nathan Stout’s thigh, yet for some reason she had to look away. She concentrated on Robert Franklin’s voice to shut out the high-pitched whining coming from the makeshift operatory, listening to him lecture the doctor, or technician or whatever the man’s official title was.
“It’s vital there be no contamination,” he was saying, though Svetlana wasn’t entirely clear what might become contaminated. “I need as clean a sample as you can get for the next phase. The genetic grafting is going to be vital to extending the lifespan.”
The room was odd. It appeared to have been some sort of police interrogation room with a one-way mirror, though why they would have, or need something like that in what had been the White House was a mystery to her. Franklin probably didn’t know, either, or he would have already launched into some long, boring, overly-detailed explanation to impress her with the breadth and scope of his historical knowledge. The man was brutally efficient and an engineering genius, but he was painfully clumsy with a woman. She was never quite sure if he was trying to be a father figure to her or get into her pants, and either choice was equally creepy.
“Are you going soft on me, Svetlana?”
She half-turned back to him, saw him staring at her in obvious amuseme
nt. She didn’t try to pretend she didn’t know what he was talking about, simply shrugged noncommittally.
“He’s under, you know,” Franklin pointed out. “You made sure of that. It’ll hurt when he wakes up unless we drug him again, but he’s not feeling anything right now.”
“I am aware, Robert.” She made her voice cold and distant, feigning anger and disdain when she really felt incipient nausea. “I have simply never cared for doctors.”
“They usually cut people open to try to help them,” Franklin pointed out, “whereas you have been known to have a different motive for slicing into someone’s flesh.”
She considered telling him the story of her first visit to a doctor, when the FSB agent who’d taken her in had sent her for a checkup before she was allowed to start training. The man had poked and prodded at her, given her inoculation after inoculation, test after test…and then put her under and had her sterilized. He’d seemed jovial when she’d woke in the recovery room, assuring her it was for the best, that her life would be so much less complicated if she didn’t have to worry about children. She rejected the idea. He’d either make light of it or, perhaps worse, attempt to sympathize.
“Everyone has their phobias,” she said instead. “I would feel the same if it were you on the other side of that glass.”
“It will be, eventually.” The thought seemed to excite him and she thought he might rub his hands together like some cartoon villain, but he restrained himself. “You don’t know how long I’ve waited for this.”
“You? Ten years, I assume. Otherwise, you’d be dead.” She smirked at the dig, knowing it would hit home.
“I’d think a good Russian materialist like yourself would recognize that the continuation of consciousness from one life to another is an illusion.” He sounded grumpy and she knew she’d succeeded in needling him. “I have the same genes, the same shape, the same memories in the same matrix. A difference which makes no difference is no difference. I am as much Robert Franklin as the man born in the previous millennium in Waukegan, Illinois. If anyone is a different person, it’s him.”
He jabbed a finger at the glass and she followed it automatically, mouth curling into a snarl at the sight of the parted flesh at Nate’s thigh, the flecks of blood being wiped away by a nurse. He looked dead, motionless, his face covered by an oxygen mask, the skin of his thigh discolored by the disinfectant. She looked away quickly.
“The real Nathan Stout died decades ago, alone and bitter and purposeless. This man has snippets of Nathan’s memories along with bits and pieces of the dupes since, whatever the Department of Defense technicians deemed important to his job. He’s a chimera, a patchwork man put together by bureaucratic Frankensteins.” He sneered at her. “Yet somehow, you seemed more concerned with his fate than mine.”
“You are concerned enough with your fate for the both of us,” she shot back, losing the reins on her mouth for just a moment, losing control and instantly regretting it but unwilling to go back. “Your purpose is a worthy one or I wouldn’t work for you, but I think you’re more interested in how it aggrandizes you than how it benefits the world.”
She fought not to wince, knowing she’d surely angered him and also knowing how dangerous that could be. But when he met her eyes, there was no anger, but something else. Is it pride? Respect?
“Well, you have come a long way from the FSB assassin I found hunting me down all those years ago,” he said quietly. “I sometimes wonder what would have become of you had I simply let you finish the job.”
“It would have inconvenienced you, nothing more,” she admitted. “My employers didn’t know you were a dupe, and they surely weren’t aware you had the equipment to copy yourself over and over, with each day’s memories backed up on your hard drives.” She laughed, not without bitterness. “You should have heard the moaning and gnashing of teeth each time an agent returned claiming to have killed you and yet the next week, you were back again, still working against us.”
“I wasn’t working against you,” he corrected her. “As you so aptly pointed out, I was working for myself. We have far too many people working for what they think is best for governments that have been dead for decades now.”
He stepped in front of her, taking her face in his hands and she felt her skin crawl at his touch. It wasn’t fair. He wasn’t like the powerful men who’d abused her as a girl, yet she couldn’t get the image out of her head whenever she was close to him.
“It is hard for you to trust me,” he discerned, his eyes boring into hers. “I can understand that. I have my own reasons for seeking the end of the current system, it’s true. They betrayed me, stole my ideas, my company, my life, after everything I had done for them. Revenge kept me going when little else could. But a man can only keep himself going for so long with mere revenge as a motivation.”
“You are a philanthropist now?” she wondered, letting intractable cynicism creep into her tone. “Is that what I am supposed to believe?”
“Philanthropists are rich men with guilty consciences. I want a world without nations because that is the world I would live a full life in, raise a family in, grow old in.” He grinned lopsidedly. “Again. For the last time.”
He let her face drop from his hands and walked back over to the one-way mirror, unafraid to admire the job his surgeons were doing. She rubbed her palms over her face as if she could wipe away the taint of his touch.
“There was a woman who lived back in the 20th Century named Ayn Rand who wrote about something she called Objectivism.” Franklin shot Svetlana a grin. “She was Russian, too. Born in St. Petersburg, like you. Her philosophy was ‘the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.’ Some people have argued this is simplistic, unworkable, that it would lead only to a technocracy.” He snorted derision. “As if what representative democracy has brought has been so wonderful that nothing else can be tried.” He raised a finger. “That is the real failing of the West in the 21st Century, my dear. The idea that nothing but representative democracy can be allowed, that anything else may be tolerated for a brief moment as a stepping point along the way. It has led us to this, hasn’t it?”
He waved around them at the chambers he had appropriated for his work. “Their monuments are wreckage, their government no longer exists except in the minds and hearts of fools such as our Captain Stout. And Europe, it is worse, if that can be imagined, a nightmare of jihad and crusade and retaliation upon retaliation. The time has come to try something different. And I will be the one to bring it about. China will not simply step in and take over what is left of America and Russia. I will build something that can stand against them, a federation not of politicians, but of creators.”
It sounded wonderful when he spoke of it. She’d always thought so, always thought how nice it would be to be free of the politicians and the generals. But she made herself look at what they were doing in the operatory, at what they were doing to the poor dupe who was the key to all these plans.
Maybe, she thought, he is not the only dupe here.
Chapter Eight
“Okay, I think that’s got it,” Ramirez said, clucking his tongue as he peered intently at the readout from the maintenance board and checked off the final item on the tablet with a plain, silver stylus. He stuck his head up into the open hatch of what had been Patty’s Hellfire and yelled up to Fuller. “You’re clear, dude. All checks are good.”
He stepped aside and Fuller dropped down to the ground with surprising agility for a man of his age.
“Nice piece of equipment you got here,” he told Roach, patting the leg of the mech. “Well maintained.”
“Our tech…,” Roach began but then trailed off and started again, the corners of her mouth drawing down. “The guy who used to be our tech was former Navy. Very conscientious.”
“Dix was a good guy,” Ramirez said, as if giving the man’s eulo
gy over again. He set the tablet down on top of the diagnostic sensor and leaned up against the side of the mech’s maintenance gantry. “I miss him. He taught me everything I know about mechs.”
“He died in combat?” Fuller asked, his tone a bit more respectful and solemn than Roach had grown used to in their short acquaintance.
“Recently,” Roach said, clamping down on the subject with the finality of her tone. She’d put Fuller into Patty’s old mech because she still couldn’t bear the thought of letting anyone take Dix’s machine.
“Your friend died in combat, another turned traitor and a third captured,” Fuller mused. “That’s some hard luck. Gotta be rough on you, being XO when the unit’s falling down around you.”
“You sound like you’ve been there,” she said.
“You don’t get to be as old as I am and never command nothing,” he said. “Eventually, just by surviving, you got the most seniority.” He sagged just a bit, leaning against a worktable. “No one seems to realize you got seniority by everyone around you getting killed.”
“What happened?” she asked him, sensing there was a story he needed to tell.
“Back before they fixed the shielding on mechs, I flew attack helicopters,” he said, a mouth that seemed used to smiling sinking into a frown. “Comanches. I liked them birds, nice and fast and stealthy. Not stealthy enough, though, I guess, since you don’t see ‘em much anymore. We were up near the Cascades about ten years ago, when the Chinese launched the first attacks on the west coast. They were trying to send a force up through the mountains to penetrate into Yakima and from there to the rest of the western states, but we had enough tanks and helicopters to shut them down.”
His expression went bleak and hopeless.
“I saw them Chinese tanks and APCs down there as small as toys in the roads of that mountain pass. And I guess someone in higher didn’t think we’d be able to stop them, ‘cause right about the time we were heading in for our attack run, we got warned off, told to get clear. We tried, but when the nuke went off, we were still close enough for the EMP to take out our engines.”
