Dislocations

by Eric Brown

  “The bastards!” Daniel swore. “What did I say when they let the protesters gather out there? The thin edge of the fucking wedge.”

  Lauren Miekle looked around the group and said reassuringly, “It will not happen here. We have our own security team working twenty-four seven.”

  “I wouldn’t trust the fuckers not to mortar us,” Daniel went on.

  Back in the news studio, the anchor woman said, “And now we’ll cross to Lakenheath, Norfolk, where a member of Allianz England is speaking to our reporter…”

  Travis’s stomach turned as the screen was zoomed in on a familiar face, thin and pinched against the bitter cold. A reporter said, “…speaking to the deputy director of Allianz England, Ute Gebbler. Ms Gebbler, your reaction to the action committed by your organisation in Germany?”

  “Let me start by saying that the Allianz is a loose confederation of opposition groups whose policy varies from country to country. And I must state, categorically, that Allianz England is vehemently opposed to the violence carried out in Bonn. I want to assure our followers here that such action is totally contrary to the non-violent, peaceful ethos of Allianz England…”

  “Hey!” Daniel called out, nudging Travis, “isn’t that the German bitch you had a fling with years ago, boy?”

  “For chrissake…” Travis muttered. He looked at Kat and said, “I knew her for a few months back in ’88.”

  Kat smiled and shook her head, and Travis took that as meaning that he didn’t have to explain himself to her. He moved away from the group by the screen, found the almost empty bottle of Scotch, and tipped the last of the whisky into his beaker. Then he slumped into a bucket seat and watched the events of the evening unfold in Bonn.

  After a time, the music started up again, and one or two people drifted back onto the dance floor, but the mood of anticipation and celebration had departed. Travis remained where he was, reading the banner by-lines scrolling beneath images of burning domes, towering shuttles, and angry crowds. The time when he thought he could ask Kat to dinner had passed: everyone was too distracted by events in Germany now and, anyway, he was way too sloshed to articulate an invitation.

  Later, he recalled seeing Kat on the dance floor, Daniel crowding her with his sheer physical presence; then Kat was gone—she was no longer dancing like some goddess, but pushing her way through the dancers and crossing the room. She came to the exit and slipped through the swing door. A minute later—or was it sooner that that?—Daniel followed her.

  Travis sat up, swaying. Had Daniel followed her, or was it just coincidence? Should he go and see if Kat was okay? He knew what a dick Daniel could be around women, particularly when he’d had a few. He stood up, his legs rubbery beneath him, then abandoned the idea.

  “Sod it…” he said, found half a bottle of vile Indian whisky and took a mouthful.

  KAT

  AS SHE RODE HER ELECTRIC MOTORBIKE ON THE LONG, straight road through the forest towards the base, she thought about her day ahead. She’d played this moment over and over in her head. The point of absolute divergence.

  She’d visited Unit 7 before, so it was easy to visualise. The Isolation Unit was a hermetically sealed block where the clones were kept away from contamination from terrestrial microbes and spores. It made sense: why take the common cold, tooth decay, or athlete’s foot to the stars?

  She could picture in her head the observation rooms with windows into the sealed areas. In her imagination, she would be in one of these hushed rooms, watching with a handful of assembled technicians. The steady, repeated spike of a heart monitor would trace across the nearest smartsurface—in her case, the viewing window—and beneath it numbers would scroll rapidly, tracing the approach to awareness of her double in the room on the other side of the glass.

  Through the big window she would see a hospital bed with sides raised, a figure lying covered by a sheet, a female form discernible through the coverings. And above the sheet, a head with a fuzz of newly grown blonde hair, and the face Kat Manning saw every day of her life.

  Her double. Her clone.

  Until now, an empty canvas, identical to her in every physical respect save for the most vital: what went on inside her head. Until now, the EEG, running its brain-activity trace on the glass below the heart monitor, had shown only the occasional nu-complex spikes associated with deep coma.

  But then…More pronounced and frequent spikes. Surges of activity. There would be an excited babble in the observation room, backs being slapped.

  Kat would hold herself apart from the celebrations as she watched herself wake up. Saw her own eyes open, look around.

  She would look on as her clone sat up, clutching that sheet to her naked form. As she fumbled to lower the bed’s safety rail, swung her legs out—still clutching the sheet to herself—and took her first Bambi steps.

  Eye contact. Pausing before the viewing window.

  Now, the voices, the hum of machines, all of it would recede, and it was only the two of them, Kat and Kat.

  Kat—which one of them instigated this gesture varied each time she imagined the scenario—would raise a hand to the window, press palm to glass. In perfect synchrony, the other Kat would do the same until they ended up palm to palm, separated only by glass, like two figures on either side of a mirror.

  And then, slowly, original Kat would let her hand fall away, leaving her clone motionless, the illusion of two sides of a mirror now disrupted.

  It was the perfect representation of the moment of absolute divergence, when two instances of the same person cleave apart from their shared past.

  Her conversation with Sunita Patel the other day had changed all this. No longer was Kat going to be one of many onlookers from another room; now the director had granted her access to the quarantine area itself. She was going to be in there with her double, close enough to hold her hand as she woke.

  Security checks today at the base were understandably thorough. The usual contingent of protestors seemed fewer this morning, perhaps shocked by the actions of their more radical German counterparts—she hoped that was the case, at least—and had been moved farther away to a holding area by Brandon Road. The official protest enclosure by the main entrance was deserted, perhaps another indication that the local protest was dismayed by developments at Mendig Base, or maybe just a sign of tightened security.

  She slowed her Yamaha to have her wrist scanned by security, unaccustomed to this level of calm around the entrance.

  Travis Denholme had told her that riding her electric bike on the icy roads was an accident waiting to happen, but then Travis was such a fusspot—only made bearable by the fact he fussed because he actually gave a shit. She found it ironic that he was the one who’d hit a protestor last week, his car’s smart systems not quite smart enough to anticipate erratic human behaviour. It had been funny seeing him drunk at the party last night, allowing himself to loosen up in the conversation a little and even—words she never thought she would assemble in relation to Travis Denholme—getting up and strutting his stuff on the dance floor!

  Now, the gates rolled back far enough for her to surge through with a wave of thanks to the guards. She didn’t envy them their job on a frosty morning like this.

  Normally, whatever her schedule, she would go straight to Unit 1, where the project staff were based, but this morning was different. This morning she was impatient to look in that existential mirror.

  She pulled up in the parking bay by Unit 7.

  Armed guards stood at the doors, a measure she hadn’t seen here before. It made sense, though: the base’s perimeter was long and vulnerable. This had been a US airbase in the previous century, and protest was not a new thing here; back then, there had been peace camps outside the American bases scattered across the English countryside, with protestors regularly cutting their way through fences to protest at the presence of a foreign power’s nuclear missiles.

  She flashed her wrist across the scanner at the entrance, and the doors swung
open, letting loose a gust of warm air as she unzipped her leathers. The noticeboard on the wall flashed up a welcome and told her she was fifteen minutes early for her first appointment.

  Ward Richards stepped out into the lobby, a man who somehow combined equal measures of laid-back, attractive charm and thoroughly irritating arrogance. She would have sworn he was coming on to her at one point last night, if she didn’t know for a fact he was besotted with the mission administrator, Lauren Miekle. Mind you, last night it had felt as if every half-cut arsehole in the entire base had been coming onto her, as the build-up of pre-launch tensions had been temporarily released by Lauren’s generously shared single malt.

  “You do realise how out of order this is, don’t you?” he said.

  So, no smooth charm this morning, Richards was up for a fight. Kat was more than capable of meeting it with plenty of fight of her own, but this morning she just wanted to get on with things.

  “Ward, I’m sorry,” she said, even though oil on the waters was hardly her preferred approach. “I know it looks as if I went to Sunita direct, over your head, but she’s an old friend, we were just talking. It really wasn’t anything more than that. I wasn’t being devious or trying to undermine you or Lauren.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” he said. “But you got what you wanted anyway. Lauren’s furious, says you’re letting an ego trip endanger vital work here.”

  She had got what she wanted, and they both knew that. Direct access to the moment when her double came fully to awareness, that magical point of divergence.

  “It’s bang out of order,” he said again. She could see him visibly smarting at her going over his head. It was always an ego thing with Ward. “Do you realise how many billions of dollars are at stake here if there’s any contamination? Had you heard that after the attack on Mendig, das Bundestag is debating withdrawing the base’s launch licence? They’re arguing we’ve gone beyond the point of being able to justify the additional investment needed since the assault, and it’d be against the will of the people to do so. The German project has already been delayed six weeks, and every day’s delay gives all those tossers who have opposed the project more chance to pull the plug altogether.”

  Maybe it wasn’t simply an ego thing. Ward was no different to the rest of them on the project. Everything was coming to a peak. They were all under a lot of pressure and no one wanted to risk being a point of failure. And, in a few days when work here was completed, what lay in store for him? They all had to move on in one way or another.

  “I’m not asking for anything special,” Kat said, using all her skills and experience to keep her voice calm and her body language non-confrontational. “You have suited technicians going in and out of the clean zone all the time. The protocols are in place.”

  “You’re neither trained nor experienced, which makes you an extra risk. Kat, please, all I ask is that you observe from this side. You have no need to be in there. What do you think you’ll see that you can’t see through the window?”

  “I don’t know.”

  For a moment, Ward thought he’d clinched it. She’d admitted she didn’t know what she would be looking for. Then she saw from his expression he knew he’d been suckered by her answer. She didn’t know what she might see from close quarters and that was precisely the reason she had to be there.

  She watched him visibly deflate before her, giving a final shake of the head to indicate his displeasure.

  ¤¤¤

  The room was just as she had seen it on tours early in the project’s life, and as she had imagined it ever since. The big viewing window occupying most of one side, from knee-height up to the ceiling; the hospital bed, surrounded by medical monitoring equipment; the low, non-directional lighting emanating diffusely from fibres in wall and ceiling.

  The big difference this time was that she was on this side of the window, and if she wanted she could reach out and touch her double’s hand where it lay on the sheet.

  She turned away from the lifeless face capped with a fresh growth of soft blonde hair, the shortness of the hair an indication of how young this empty body was. At some point she would reflect on this—the aversion to looking directly at her double, the way she thought of her clone as ‘it’ rather than ‘she’—but not now. The feeling in her gut was strong, like magnetic poles opposing each other, and as a psychologist this reaction was fascinating, but as a person, right now, she would rather not think about it.

  The window’s smartsurface displayed graphs and data, and the ones Kat understood told her that the status of her clone was stable. The imprinting hadn’t started yet; her double, still a blank canvas, was still, in truth, an ‘it’.

  Beyond the window’s semi-reflective surface, Kat saw the project’s mission administrator, Lauren Miekle, standing tall and square-shouldered with her arms folded. The tension in her posture was obvious, even without Kat’s professional skill in reading people, and she wondered if that was simply the stress of this critical point in their work, or if she was pissed with Kat, just as Ward had claimed.

  Kat nodded to her, trying to make eye contact, and was rewarded with a brief, hard-to-interpret nod in return.

  She looked again at her body double.

  The sheet was pulled up to its—her—neck, just one arm lying above it, the hand resting on the flat of the belly. Was this a sign that the clone had, at some time, voluntarily moved that arm, or had one of the technicians arranged its limbs like this?

  These people had seen her naked. Or at least, as good as. They had grown this body from stem cells, using algorithms developed by Ward Richards’ company to guide differentiation into tissues and organs, an accelerated growth from a generic clump of cells into this pristine copy.

  They had inserted tubes in the body to feed and evacuate it, had cleaned it and dressed it and massaged medicated oils into its sensitive new skin.

  It. Kat. They knew her intimately, and it was hard not to feel in some way violated.

  She hugged herself now, standing beside the door, about as far from her clone as she could be and still be in the same room. She had expected the immersive suit to feel clumsy and distancing, but in reality its hermetically sealed fabric and mask were like a second skin—not unlike the suits the first colonists would wear in their early days on the surface of the target planet in the 19 Draconis system they had dubbed Newhaven.

  Her double looked so peaceful. In this context age had no real bearing, but Kat’s double looked a good decade younger; no older than early twenties. It looked, if not happier, then less worn down by the world. Less…concerned.

  She.

  This distancing was not a healthy response. This thing before her was a woman, an individual, a she. Or at least she would be when her mind was populated and awoken.

  Kat looked up, and saw movement beyond the window, a technician talking with Lauren, pointing at the glass in a way that told Kat they were looking at something on its smartsurface, invisible to her from this angle.

  “You okay?”

  She looked round, and saw that Ward Richards had appeared in the doorway from the decontamination lock.

  She nodded; she hadn’t expected sensitivity from him, let alone insight.

  “Freaks you out, seeing your clone up close, I imagine,” he said.

  “I thought I was supposed to be the psychologist, not you,” she said, and they both laughed. Truce.

  Ward gestured at the window. “Louis has just initiated the imprinting process. He and Lauren are watching the readings.”

  That was what the technician—Louis—had been showing Lauren: data from the imprinting systems streamed through his carpal implant to the nearest smartsurface.

  Ward moved to the bed, leaned over the clone, and unceremoniously flipped an eyelid up. He didn’t explain, and Kat didn’t ask, although she suspected he was just going through the motions, doing something doctorly to cover a pause and reassert his ownership of this space.

  “It’s going to take a while,” he
said, staring at a panel by the bed where he’d be seeing his own datastream. “You shouldn’t expect too much. Our new Kat’s effectively being born as a whole person; there’s so much medication in her system she’ll be high as a kite when she does finally stir.”

  “She’s not me,” Kat said, and Ward paused and studied her, a wry smile on his face. She shouldn’t feel so defensive, she knew. And also, it was genuinely fascinating for her to be studying her own reactions in this way. She hadn’t expected this.

  Maybe it wasn’t just the process, but Ward, too, that had got under her skin, with his hostility and now his patronising commentary. She’d never actually witnessed an imprinting like this, but she’d worked intensively with trauma patients who had undergone forms of this process as they were reimprinted onto partially renewed and regenerated bodies. She understood aspects of the process better than Ward himself.

  He glanced at her again, with another flash of that smile. Did he understand how rattled she was?

  She took a deep breath, forcing herself to focus. She glanced at the window, saw Lauren and the technician, and on its smartsurface read a display of her double’s vitals: heart, pulse, blood pressure, and the EEG showing that familiar pattern of inactivity punctuated by occasional nu-complex spikes.