Counterpart

by Hayley Stone

  “What? Why?”

  “While we were refueling in Bettles, I had the thought that something might be left over to salvage. Maybe some equipment or medical supplies survived the inferno. It was worth a look, since we were so close, anyway. And I wanted to see…I don’t know. I knew it was all gone. I just needed to see the facility with my own eyes again, one last time.”

  “Okay.” Suspicion crawls down my spine like a stranger’s fingertips. It’s a fight not to rush him with my theories, but I also don’t want him to turn defensive or clam up. “Find anything interesting?”

  He mumbles something, forcing me to scoot closer and ask him to repeat himself.

  “The facility,” he says again, “it survived. Well, parts of it, anyway.”

  Fear grabs me by the throat, making it difficult to get the next words out. “But we saw it explode. Brooks went up in flames.”

  “I know. Believe me, I remember.” He drags a hand through his rumpled brown hair. I wonder how long it’s been since he slept. Darkness hangs beneath his eyes like a shadow of his troubled thoughts. “But Brooks is a big facility. Maybe the machines managed to disarm some of the explosives when they invaded, or maybe they were duds to begin with. Either way, when we went back to investigate, we discovered the eastern wing fared particularly well, including the cloning room. There was some water damage from the sprinkler systems, and without heating, all of the old computers were frozen beyond recovery. But the caskets…”

  “Caskets?”

  “Capsules, I mean.” He corrects himself quickly, his cheeks flushing pink. “Sorry. Ulrich used to call them caskets because they look a little like—”

  “Coffins. Yeah, I remember.”

  “The capsules were…gone.”

  “You mean empty.” I don’t know why I say it. If they were empty, Samuel would have said they were empty. But he said gone. As in no longer there. What he should have said, and what’s implied by his guilty, stricken look, is taken. The capsules, and their contents, were taken—and we both know by who.

  Samuel squirms under my gaze. “Rhona, I’m sorry. I didn’t think…I never imagined—”

  I give a small jazz-hand performance, heading off his excuses. “Hold on. Stop. Back up. Are you saying the machines took the capsules?” My horror is tempered by selfish relief. I was right, and wrong. It’s not Rhona, my celebrated progenitor, back from the dead to reclaim her life and Camus, but a brainwashed clone. The person responsible for smuggling in the machines, for committing atrocities against McKinley’s innocent population—it’s just another clone.

  “We searched the whole base,” Samuel says. “There was no sign of the capsules, or the—what was inside them.” He cleverly avoids the word “clone” as if doing so will avoid reminding me of what I am. Less than. Secondary.

  “How did this happen?”

  “That’s just it!” Samuel gestures with his hands so wildly it draws the attention of the men playing pool nearby. He drops his arms and we both inch a little farther into the curve of the booth. I don’t mind our sudden proximity, but I worry what effect it might have on Samuel. We haven’t spoken much since I made my decision to stay with Camus, and Samuel departed with his scavenging team. I don’t want to make this reunion any harder on him than it already is.

  “It shouldn’t have,” Samuel continues, not giving any indication that he even notices our arms pressed against one another. “The contingency plan should have worked. But it didn’t.” He casts his eyes down at the table, and when he speaks, there’s a sharp ache in his voice. “This is all my fault, Rhona. I should have implemented more safety protocols. Ulrich wanted to place more bombs. I should have listened to him—”

  “The time to beat yourself up about this is later. Right now, we have a clone on the loose somewhere inside McKinley. I need to know what I’m up against here. I counted six capsules, including mine, when we escaped Brooks.”

  He nods. “Right. There were six clones, including you, but only one of them was as far along in their development. The rest were suffering from defects, both physical and mental, that I was trying to correct. Psoriasis and trichotillomania, for instance. As I began experimenting with mapping neurons, I found comorbidity became a major issue.”

  “Why is that?”

  He rubs at his wrists. “Do you really want the specifics?”

  That’s when I realize how much Samuel has been keeping from me. All the grisly details of cloning—the hideous failures that must have preceded success. Samuel is a terrible liar, but he’s not half-bad at hoarding secrets, especially when he’s trying to protect my feelings.

  Or himself.

  I haven’t forgotten how the council interrogated Samuel upon our return to McKinley. In a less than stunning twist of events, human experimentation is still frowned upon, even when no laws and no law-enforcement agencies exist to fight it anymore.

  “Yes,” I answer. “Tell me.”

  So he does.

  Samuel begins by explaining the challenges he faced in trying to clone me, working with decades of older research, most of it outdated and unhelpful. Page after page about cloning goats and cows and corn and wheat—meat and vegetation to help solve growing hunger crises around the world. The climate was changing before the Machinations, whole regions suffering from record-breaking droughts and extremely cold winters. It destabilized the Middle East. Which destabilized Europe, which destabilized the relationship between the United States and the New Soviet Union, which increased tensions between the United States and Asia, specifically China, and so on.

  “I know all this,” I interrupt. The council briefed me months ago, filling in the gaps in my knowledge, not only for practicality’s sake, but in case I was ever drilled by our allies about the geopolitical circumstances leading to our current predicament. The “real” Rhona would have had all this memorized. She lived it, after all. “This created an arms race which led to the creation of the higher echelon and the machines.”

  “Yes and no. Calling what preceded the Machinations an arms race is like calling a triathlon a brisk walk. The technology sector exploded. It wasn’t just about AI and weaponry. High-speed communications, medicine, cloning…Everyone seemed to have some crazy idea for an invention that would solve all our problems. Some of them were good ideas, too. Great. Others, less so. I waded through a lot of scientific journals, trying to parse the good from the bad while conducting my own research. Reliable science is built on trial and error, after all.”

  “Great, but what about the clones?”

  “Right. Right.” He flattens his hands against the table. “Well. A lot of them died, at first.”

  “How many?”

  “Twenty-three,” he repeats softly. “Before that final—batch, I guess you’d call it, twenty-three died. I struggled to get the accelerated growth rate right in the beginning. Anything faster than nine months caused a lot of problems. Heart attacks, seizures…It frequently compromised their immune system, too. If they weren’t dying from minor infections, then it was allergic reactions to I don’t know what. Materials in the capsule itself, maybe. The latex in my gloves. Who knows?

  “And every now and then, the—I always called it ‘the mold,’ but that’s not exactly a scientific term—didn’t work right, either. DNA is notoriously prone to mutation, especially when all I had to work with were aging cell cultures.”

  “So, what? Some of my clones grew two heads?”

  He gives a dry chuckle. “I’m not that bad at biology. Mostly the mutations killed them in their infancy, but every now and then one survived long enough to show their phenotype—their physical traits. A departure from your appearance rendered the whole project moot, obviously. And I only had six capsules, so I could only work on six…um, projects at a time.”

  My mouth goes suddenly dry, the implication coming at me clear as a knife flashing in daylight. “You killed them.”

  “They were never conscious,” he insists. “They had no thoughts, no dreams, no f
ear. And they wouldn’t have felt any pain, at any point. It was all done as humanely as possible.”

  As humanely as possible. At these words, I lean away instinctively, putting distance between our shoulders. I know the comparison is unfair, unearned, that it’s just science, but it feels like my friend just admitted to murder. “And you did this twenty-three times?”

  “No. It happened much more rarely, and not as much toward the end, as I perfected the gene translation. Although, in the last round—the one including you—another clone developed albinism. White skin, red eyes instead of red hair. I called her Rhona the White.” His smile is sad, and it causes a painful twinge in my heart. He’s never told me this before, any of it. I can see why. “You were showing every sign of surviving, and she was technically healthy, so I left her alone. Just in case.”

  “Just in case what?”

  Samuel meets my eyes reluctantly, not quite ashamed, but neither proud. “This is going to sound horrible,” he says as a preface, as if everything else he’s told me has been unicorns and stars, “but I thought, if something went wrong with one of your organs…well, there wouldn’t be any risk of rejection with a cloned heart or lung or liver. You have to understand, none of them had your memories, your personality yet. The neural adjustments would have come later, after I was sure the body was viable. At that time, they weren’t…they were just…”

  “Empty meat.” I don’t mean to be cruel, but I can’t help it. He’s talking about my genetic sisters. Women who could have been me. “Shells. Is that what you were going to say?”

  For once, he doesn’t apologize. “I won’t pretend what I did was ethical, but it was necessary. It was what you wanted, what you asked me to do.”

  Not me, I think. Her. The arcade music hasn’t intensified, but I feel its powerful rhythm in my chest like someone taking a hammer to my lungs. I suck in a shaky breath. “You should have come clean about all of this sooner.”

  He angles himself toward me, face looking drawn. Nearby lights turn him alternately blue and purple. “Honest to God, Rhona. I didn’t know about Brooks until I was standing in its ashes again.”

  “Not Brooks. The cloning process.”

  “I wasn’t keeping it a secret.”

  “Weren’t you? You never mentioned any of this before.”

  “I didn’t think you’d want to know,” he says, then drops his voice down, almost to the point that I can’t hear him over the din. “I wish I could forget.”

  I want to be angry with him, furious over his callousness, but he was right to do what he did. Given our limited resources, there was no other option but to dispose of the failed clones. And were our places reversed, I can’t help feeling I might have made the same ugly choice to honor a promise made to someone I love. To Samuel, or Camus, or Hanna.

  And that frightens me.

  When half the forest is on fire, I can’t stop to obsess over the survival of a few individual trees, or the whole thing will burn down. I have to rise above personal feelings. My decisions led us here. That’s what Lefevre told me, and only now am I beginning to understand how right he is. I charged Samuel with the task of cloning me. I asked of him—my best friend, my only living family—something not only morally questionable but emotionally reprehensible.

  And here I am, giving Samuel the third degree. Incredible.

  “Rhona?”

  “Do you ever regret it?” The question tumbles out of me before I can think about it. I grind my nail against the table’s lacquered surface, picking at a greasy smear, and close my eyes against the arcade lights tumbling endlessly through the dark.

  “Regret what?”

  “I don’t know. Meeting me? Becoming my friend, my partner in crime. Agreeing to my plan, and everything that happened afterward. I know this sounds like I’m fishing—I’m not. Answer honestly. Do you ever regret knowing me?”

  “Never,” he says, but then, to my surprise, he corrects himself. “Sometimes.”

  It hurts more than I expect. Like anticipating a light slap and being sucker punched.

  “Lately?” I ask.

  Samuel takes a moment. Looks over at the Space Invaders console, where a bald Chinese man has stepped up to play. I’d give my left hand to know what he’s thinking at this moment. Samuel, that is. Not the stranger.

  “Yes,” Samuel admits, then cuts his gaze back toward me, adding hastily, “But it’s not for the reasons you think. It’s not about you being with Camus. I understand you love him, Rhon. I do. And I’m happy for you. He’s a good man, even if he doesn’t think so.”

  That’s an odd comment…

  At the same time, Samuel’s assessment is spot-on. Camus told me point-blank what his priorities are. It isn’t the resistance or the base. I would have let the world burn before losing her. He was referring to my predecessor when he said that, but we’ve come a long way since then. I used to think we anchored each other; now I wonder if we’re risking dragging each other down. How much time do we spend worrying about losing each other?

  “It’s not about the errors in cloning, or the attack on the base,” Samuel continues, ignorant of my personal crisis. “It’s…” He sighs, smiling wryly, and gives a small shake of his head, like he can’t believe what he almost confessed.

  “What?” I press.

  Samuel rubs the back of his neck. “I’ve always known a day was coming when you would outgrow me.”

  “Seriously?”

  “I know. It sounds pathetic. Needy. It’s just this feeling I can’t shake. Like, maybe it’ll happen weeks from now, months, even years—but there’s a time coming when I’m not going to be worth anything to you. I’m just going to be an albatross around your neck. One day, I’m going to let you down.”

  “Samuel. That’s ridiculous.”

  “Is it? Even when we were kids, I couldn’t understand why you’d choose to hang around with some awkward nerd instead of your flock of other friends. You’ve always been a leader, Rhona. But, me? I’m a follower.” His mouth twists and he looks terribly sad. His pupils, dilated to see in the dark, have devoured the color in his eyes. “You have plenty of those now.”

  “Stop it,” I snap. “You’re not some…service animal, and you’re not exchangeable. You’re my friend. My best friend. With the way things are going, maybe the only one I’ll have left in the near future.”

  Samuel stares at the table, nodding. It’s the same dull nod a child gives to their parents when they explain that yes, they’re getting a divorce, sweetie, but it doesn’t mean Mommy and Daddy love you any less, and nothing will change. I know I’m not getting through to him, just as I worry whether anything I say will be the truth.

  “Samuel. I’m not friends with you because of what you can do for me,” I tell him. “Or because of the secrets you’re keeping for me. I’m a little insulted you’d think that. I don’t know if I necessarily agree with the methods undertaken on my behalf, but I understand. And it doesn’t make me love you any less. You get that, right?”

  Still no eye contact. “I know.”

  I’m not convinced he does. And the fact he has such doubts is deeply troubling.

  But I can’t deal with it right now so I change the subject, liberating us both from this uncomfortable conversation. “Samuel, something happened in the IC lab tonight. There was a machine with my face and voice…my memories…”

  He jerks out of his slouch. “What?”

  I give him the rundown on what happened with the machine, leaving out some of the more grisly details, and the fact that the thing was searching for him. It would only traumatize him further, and make him feel guiltier for not being here.

  “If the machines took the clones,” I say, “they must have accessed the servers storing the original Rhona’s memories, right?”

  “That room was destroyed in the explosion.” He says this so confidently, I know he must have visited the server room to double-check. I picture Samuel sorting through the rubble of his ambition, touching pieces of blo
wn-apart metal, the edges still sharp enough to split open his fingers. “But”—Samuel picks aggressively at the facial hair on his cheek, thinking aloud—“maybe the machines accessed the servers before then. If so, they’d have everything they need to re-create my work.”

  “Perfect. What about the clones in the capsules? How much of a danger do they pose? You said they were underdeveloped…”

  Sighing, he answers, “Until the attack, I would’ve told you they weren’t capable of the complex motor movement required to pull off something of this nature. Not in the condition we left them. But clearly the machines have continued the project.” He hunches his eyebrows in thought, and as he talks, it’s as if he’s speaking more to himself than me. “But, why? What are they hoping to accomplish by cloning you?”

  “I was wondering the same thing myself.”

  He shakes his head. “Unless the clones receive continual medical care, their physical and emotional development will not only halt, but decline rapidly. It still seems impossible. Even kept in the capsules, I’m surprised they survived being moved.”

  “At least two of them have,” I say, thinking of what happened to Wrangell base.

  “Two?”

  My head pounds, just considering the tangled web of issues. “It’s a long story. I’ll tell you all about it later. For now, you need to go straight to the council. They’re going to want to hear everything you just told me. Maybe then they’ll finally start listening to me again.”

  Samuel lifts his brows. “Everything?”

  “You can leave out the sentimental parts,” I tease him, trying to return to the easy rhythm of our friendship. But it’s like switching directions in a fast-moving stream. “And maybe don’t go into detail about the process itself.” He nods.

  I begin sliding out of the booth, but pause on the edge. “By the way, have you seen Camus tonight?”

  “No. Why?”

  “He’s been missing all night. And with a maniac clone on the loose…” I trail off, not wanting to empower my worries by speaking them aloud. “Anyway. I’m going to head back to our quarters now, but if you see him—”