The Big Sheep

by Robert Kroese

  Keane nodded approvingly.

  “Just to be clear, Miss Jhaveri,” I said, “you no longer believe there is any sort of conspiracy or plot against you?”

  “No,” she said. “I do not.”

  “And you don’t wish to retain the services of Mr. Keane and myself to investigate any threat against your person?”

  “No,” she said. “That isn’t necessary. I’ll pay you for the time you’ve put in, of course. It’s the least I can do.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “It was our mistake. We should have realized the condition you were in.” I added, for good measure, “Mr. Keane would never take money from someone in a psychologically compromised state.” That earned me a scowl from Keane.

  “Thank you, Bryn,” said Selah. “Sorry to drag you away from the set, but I thought it best if you cleared up this misunderstanding in person.”

  “No problem,” said Bryn. “I’m sorry for all the trouble I caused.” She gave a little smile and turned to leave.

  “One more thing,” said Keane. Bryn froze and turned to face him. She glanced at Selah, who continued to regard her with no identifiable emotion.

  “Yes, Mr. Keane?” Bryn said. “What can I do for you?”

  “If it’s not too much trouble,” Keane said, “I’d love to get your autograph. I mean, Priya’s autograph.”

  “Oh, of course!” Bryn exclaimed. “No trouble at all.” She walked to Selah’s desk. “Do you mind…?”

  “Not at all,” said Selah, handing her a pen. She pulled a sheet of paper from a drawer and put it on her desk. Bryn leaned over the desk and signed, in big round letters:

  Priya Mistry

  She handed the paper to Keane. “Thank you so much,” Keane gushed.

  “You’re quite welcome,” said Bryn, with a smile. She turned and walked out of the room, closing the door behind her.

  SEVENTEEN

  My comm was blinking as the aircar arced away from the Flagship lot. It was Priya’s bodyguard Roy. Or one of her bodyguards, at least. I almost didn’t answer it, but if he had learned something about Priya’s disappearance, I needed to know.

  “Hey, Roy,” I said. “What’s up?”

  “Not much,” he said. “Élan Durham is sticking to his story that it was Stacia who was killed in the blast. He’s telling everyone Priya is taking a couple of days off. Any luck on your end?”

  “Nothing conclusive,” I said, which was certainly true. “I think Keane may have some ideas, but so far nothing has panned out.”

  “You’ll tell me if you find her?”

  “Of course,” I said, feeling a little bad about the lie. Just a little, though. This was business, and Roy was smart enough to know I was lying. Priya was our client. For all we knew, he was involved in her disappearance. I wasn’t going to tell him anything unless I thought it would help us find her. Still, there was something in Roy’s utterly guileless nature that made me want to tell him the truth. Somehow I couldn’t believe he’d ever do anything to harm Priya. “Seriously, Roy,” I found myself saying, “I’ll call you as soon as we know anything.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a quizzical glance from Keane, who was obviously wondering why I was making such a promise. I wasn’t sure I knew myself.

  “Thanks,” said Roy uncertainly. “Same here. Although I’m not sure how much good I can do wandering around the set. I’m a bodyguard, not a detective.”

  A thought occurred to me. “Hey, Roy, one more thing,” I said. “Do you know a guy named Carlos? Or Jamie?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Roy. “You got last names? Who are they? Something to do with Priya?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Don’t know the last names. Just a couple of thugs I ran into recently. They could be related to this other case we’re on.” Again, technically true.

  “If you tell me what they look like, I’ll keep an eye out,” said Roy.

  They look like miniature versions of you, I thought. But I said, “I think it’s unlikely you’ll run into them.” Very unlikely. In fact, it’s almost as if you’re intentionally being kept away from each other.

  “Okay,” said Roy, clearly not satisfied with this answer but not eager to press the issue.

  “Gotta go,” I said. “Good luck, Roy.”

  “Yeah,” said Roy. “You too.”

  I ended the call, not sure why I felt like such a jerk brushing off Roy. It’s not like I had shot him in the foot or something.

  I turned my thoughts back to the conversation with Selah. “Are we really going to try to get the sheep for her?” I asked Keane. “We’re already obligated to retrieve it for Esper.”

  “Our taking this case for Selah was preconditioned on her telling us the truth about Priya Mistry,” Keane replied.

  “You think she was lying.”

  “I do.”

  “Good,” I said. “So do I.”

  He regarded me with bemusement. “Really?” he said. “About what?”

  “Our meeting with Priya—or whoever that was—at the Palomar,” I said. “If she wasn’t Bryn Jhaveri, what was she so scared of? And how did she know about Noogus? Unless the story about Noogus is just part of the act. But why would anybody make up such a weirdly specific detail like that? It just doesn’t hold together.”

  Keane nodded. “Selah seemed to be unaware we had spoken to Priya at the Palomar. She must have debriefed Carlos and concluded you hadn’t had a chance to talk about anything substantive with Priya at Griffith Park. So she told us a story that was consistent with what she thought we knew.”

  “But then how do you explain the multiple Priya Mistrys? Who was the woman we just talked to in Selah’s office?” I asked. “Was that the original Priya? The one who hired us? Or some kind of impostor?”

  “I’m not sure any of them are the ‘original’ Priya,” said Keane. “But no, I don’t think she’s the one who came to our office. Selah put her up to that. She’s lying.”

  “Or acting,” I said.

  “Precisely,” said Keane.

  “So that whole story about Bryn Jhaveri, the sympaths, gene therapy … that was all bullshit?”

  Keane thought for a moment. “It has the appearance of truth,” he said. “Or it would, if we hadn’t met the Palomar Priya. My guess is that most of the details of her story will check out. But she’s definitely hiding something.”

  “Just like Takemago with the sheep,” I said. “I’m getting tired of clients telling us most of the truth. It would make our job so much easier if they would just tell us everything up front.”

  “But so much less interesting,” Keane said. “Do you still have the note I sent up to the Palomar Priya? The one she autographed?”

  I fished it out of my pocket and handed it to Keane. He pulled a sheet of paper from his own pocket, unfolded both of them, and then compared the signatures. “What do you think?” he asked.

  “Looks like a match,” I said. “But, assuming there are multiple Priyas, wouldn’t Selah’s people have trained them all to sign their name the same way?”

  “Of course,” said Keane, studying the two papers. “Signatures are tricky, though. It’s a damn good match.”

  “How many do you think there are?” I asked. “Three? Four?”

  “Priyas?” said Keane. “Impossible to know. Head toward Esper. We need to consult an expert.”

  “An expert on what?” I asked.

  “Genetics.”

  * * *

  It was a rare occasion that Erasmus Keane decided he needed to consult with any sort of expert, but he had researched Dr. Takemago’s background, and he was convinced she was one of the very few people who could give us some meaningful advice about the Priya Mistry situation. Takemago had spent the better part of the past thirty years studying genetics and was considered a world-class authority on a wide variety of topics, including in vitro fertilization, cloning, and—of particular interest to Keane—biological mimicry. Just as important, Takemago had called us, an
d not Jason Banerjee, when the sheep’s tracking device started transmitting. That meant she trusted us, and increased the odds that we could trust her.

  We met Takemago in her office, which was cramped and sparsely furnished, but—she assured us—free of any cameras or listening devices. A wall display showed Mark the sheep amiably munching on cud in its pen. Occasionally the sheep would look up at the camera, as if wondering who was watching it. The effect was somewhat unnerving.

  Keane gave her an abbreviated version of the story Selah had told us, and then handed the doctor the papers with the two signatures. She studied them with interest.

  “They do appear to match,” she said after some time. “And you met both of these women?”

  “Yes,” said Keane.

  “Both of you?”

  I nodded. “We spoke to each of them. They were no farther away from us than you are now. Keane wasn’t there when I met the third one, in Griffith Park. But if I didn’t know better, I’d have sworn they were all the same person.”

  “You concur, Mr. Keane?”

  Keane nodded. “Regarding the two I met, yes.”

  Takemago shook her head. “Triplets,” she said. “It has to be.”

  “It’s possible,” said Keane. “But if so, our client went through a lot of acrobatics to avoid a very simple explanation.”

  “Well,” said Takemago, “in my professional opinion, the gene therapy story is nonsense. Even if the technology existed, and it’s not clear it does, and even if somebody was crazy enough to actually try something like this, there’s no way they could have fooled two reasonably observant individuals at close quarters.”

  Keane looked dubious.

  “Consider this,” said Takemago. “Human beings have evolved to be extremely good at identifying other individual humans. The race’s survival depends on it. A guard lets the wrong person through the gate, and a whole settlement is wiped out. There are a million ways to tell two human beings apart. Not just appearance, either. Gait, odor, pheromones, speech patterns, dialect, nervous habits … even the way people breathe. Even parents of identical twins have little difficulty telling them apart, despite the fact that they are genetically identical and were raised in exactly the same environment, because of tiny differences in appearance and behavior that accrue as the result of differing experiences. The ability of one human to recognize another by appearance is especially acute when it comes to heterosexual males observing nubile females. There is nothing on Earth men pay more attention to than the appearance of sexually attractive young women.”

  I had to suppress a shudder while listening to Dr. Takemago clinically describe Keane’s and my observation of Priya Mistry. Flashback to sex ed with the nuns at St. Stephen’s.

  “But if the impostors had been trained to act exactly the same as the original…,” I started. “Dress the same. Were given the same perfume to mask difference in odor. Given lessons in how to talk, how to walk…”

  “Are you familiar with the uncanny valley?” asked Takemago.

  “Sure,” I said. I’d become pretty familiar with sim terminology while working at CSI. In fact, their name, Canny Simulations, Inc., was a play on the term. “The uncanny valley refers to the sense of revulsion that occurs in observers when a human simulation isn’t quite right.”

  “Correct,” said Takemago. “As a simulation’s verisimilitude increases, it reaches a point where it’s almost but not quite humanlike. The sense of dissonance, the is-it-human-or-not response, manifests itself as a feeling of revulsion in the viewer.”

  It occurred to me, as Takemago was talking, that this revulsion could be thought of as the diametric opposite of the overwhelming sympathy and attraction one felt about a sympath like Priya Mistry—that is, like Bryn Jhaveri. I didn’t see what this had to do with the proliferation of Priyas though. “What’s your point?” I asked.

  “The point,” said Takemago, “is that something like that also happens with two people who look very similar to each other. The more one person looks like another, the more the remaining differences are magnified. If one modifies person A to look like person B, no matter how hard one tries, one is going to end up with a person who is almost-but-not-quite-exactly like person B. What you are telling me is that you two men—two healthy, exceptionally observant heterosexual males in your thirties—met a woman whose affect and appearance were highly memorable, and you had a substantive conversation with her, interacting with her at a distance of less than five feet. Then, less than a day later, you met another woman in a hotel bar who was made up to look like the first woman, and you couldn’t tell them apart? Unless they were monozygotic twins, it seems highly improbable. Even if they were twins, you probably would have noticed something was off if you were looking for it, and it sounds like you were.”

  “There are no other possibilities?” I asked.

  Keane had gotten up from his chair and was staring, transfixed, at the docile beast happily chewing away in its cage.

  “Clones,” said Takemago. “I presume that’s what you are implying. Also impossible, unfortunately.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “You said this woman is in her midtwenties. The technology to clone humans didn’t exist twenty-five years ago. Even if it had, it was illegal. No reputable lab would have attempted it prior to the Collapse. And again, even if these women were clones, they would be no more similar than monozygotic twins. Unless they were raised under identical laboratory conditions, noticeable differences would have manifested by the time they reached their midtwenties.”

  “Let’s assume they were grown in a lab, then,” said Keane.

  I raised an eyebrow at Keane, but Takemago just shrugged. “The technology to clone humans has existed for nearly a decade,” she said. “That is, we’ve been able to make healthy, genetically identical copies of other mammals, and there’s no reason the principle couldn’t be applied to humans. But there is simply no way the clones could be in their twenties. Scientists couldn’t reliably clone healthy pigs or monkeys twenty years ago.”

  “What if they only appear to be in their twenties?” Keane asked, still watching the wall display. “What if they are in fact much younger?”

  “What are you talking about, Keane?” I asked. “Artificial aging?”

  “Sure,” said Keane. “Why not?”

  “Because Priya Mistry is a human being, not a block of cheese,” I said. “You can’t put a person under ultraviolet light and make them age faster.”

  “Dr. Takemago,” Keane said, ignoring me. “Are you familiar with the work Esper did a few years ago on age reversal?”

  Takemago paused. “I … understood that was just a rumor.”

  I glanced at Keane, certain he had picked up on Takemago’s hesitation. She was a terrible liar.

  “Jason Banerjee indicated otherwise,” said Keane, evidently deciding not to make an issue of it. “He implied that they were pretty close to cracking the problem of immortality when they were forced to pull the plug. If that’s true, then Esper had probably identified the gene sequences responsible for aging, and determined, in theory, how to alter them to stall or even reverse that process. How much more difficult could it be to accelerate it?”

  “Accelerated aging,” said Takemago, nodding thoughtfully. “It’s possible, although it would likely give rise to a variety of health problems. Your hypothesis is that these clones were born some time in the recent past and then artificially aged to their current apparent age.”

  “Exactly,” said Keane. “Let’s suppose they were born six years ago and subjected to an artificial aging process to cause them to age at five times their natural rate, making them appear to be in their midtwenties.”

  I shook my head, thinking Keane’s flight of fancy was getting pretty far removed from the empirical evidence. But Takemago took him seriously.

  “The problem is,” she said, “the accelerated aging would only affect their biology, not their mental development. In other words, they would have
the mentality of six-year-olds.”

  I shuddered as I pondered the possibility that the Priya whose cleavage I’d admired was a kindergartner. But no, she didn’t talk or act like a six-year-old or even a fifteen-year-old. She may have been a bit unstable, but she had the mind of a full-grown woman.

  “Also, it doesn’t explain Noogus,” I said.

  “Noogus?” asked Takemago.

  Keane nodded. “Our subjects appear to share not only the same personality,” he explained, turning to face Takemago, “but the same memories. They seem to have had the same childhood. And I don’t mean they were sisters living in the same house. I mean, they both had exactly the same childhood.”

  Takemago nodded, deep in thought. “Well,” she said after some time, “it’s possible…”

  “What?” I asked, as she trailed off, seemingly lost in her ruminations.

  “Understand that this is purely hypothetical,” she said. “I’m merely conjecturing, based on what you’ve told me.”

  “Got it,” I said. “What are you getting at?”

  “Suppose the subjects are clones, conceived sometime in the past decade, but artificially accelerated to an apparent age of twenty-seven. It’s virtually unimaginable that anyone would devote the resources required for such a project, but so far this scenario is within the plausible realm of current technology. There are a number of practical problems with accelerated aging, the chief one being that once the process is started, it would be hard to stop. The subjects would continue to age at several times the normal rate, developing problems like osteoporosis, arthritis, and dementia at an extremely young age. Not to mention various forms of cancer, which would almost certainly develop as a result of the accelerated cell growth. But we’re observing the subjects only over a very short period of time, so we’ll ignore those problems for now. That leaves the matter of intellectual and emotional development.”

  “Memories and personality,” I said.

  “Correct,” said Takemago. “The tendency is to think of the brain as hardware, and memories as software. In this model, the brain is just a big hard drive that stores memories for future use. But the reality is more complicated. A better analogy would be firmware, in which the physical form of a computer system is dictated in part by the programming the system has retrieved. In other words, you can’t simply copy one person’s memories into another person’s brain and expect the subject to act exactly like the original, the way you can move your data and operating system from one system to another. You’d need to rewire the target’s brain to function the same as the original.”