by M. D. Cooper
Her friend waited patiently for her, as she rose and plopped the sheets into the box alongside the data cubes.
“Nope,” she said now, wiping the dust off her hands and shoving a strand of hair out of her face. “What rumors?” She looked over at the AI student, who was wearing an expectant expression on her face. “Well?” the human giggled, poking her friend in the shoulder. “Spill, girl! What’s the big secret?”
The AI set the box aside, made her eyes wide, and whispered dramatically, “Some say this lab is haunted. They say a woman, a post-doc doing some sort of secret research, died in here. And then…” the AI looked furtively around before lowering her voice further, “they say some sort of super-secret spy stuff went on in here, and—” she gulped, “an AI was killed.”
The human propped her hands on her hips and stared skeptically back at her friend. “Really, Liv? You’re telling me you believe that kind of stuff? C’mon, we’re scientists. We know better.”
Liv huffed, rolling her eyes at the human. “Well, I for one believe where there’s smoke there’s fire. Mark my words, Anna,” she warned, grabbing the box and hauling it to the entrance, putting it down next to a dozen others just like it. “Something went on in here. Why, who knows what we’ll find behind that locked closet door?”
Anna sighed, shaking her head. “Didn’t facilities say they’d send up an override key to cancel out Doctor Ethan’s security token?” She paused as she pinged facilities.
Surprisingly, for once, someone replied. As she reiterated her request for the override, the worker on the other end pulled it up, noting that it had been misfiled.
Anna closed the connection with a satisfied look on her face. “The key is on its way up now.”
“Good,” Liv replied. “If there’s not too much in that closet, we might be able to get out of here in time to catch that concert down in the commons tonight. I hear that cute guy is playing those old acoustic drums again—topless…with his rather nice chest all sweaty.” She waggled her eyebrows suggestively as Anna rolled her eyes and smirked back at her.
The two busied themselves filling boxes with the remaining materials left behind by the lab’s previous occupant, until the facilities worker arrived with the override key. They directed him to the sealed closet and waited while he applied it to the scientist’s token.
With a snick, the closet doors slid open, and the girls saw a cart, laden with unusual equipment.
Anna sighed. “Why don’t you go on to the concert, Liv? It’ll take a while to itemize everything here; no sense in us both missing Mr. Topless Sweaty Chest.”
She turned away from the closet as she finished speaking to see the AI’s eyes riveted to the closet’s contents. Something about her expression caused chills to run up Anna’s spine.
“Liv,” she said, turning back to see what might have caused her friend to look—well, like she’d seen a ghost. “Liv, what’s wrong?”
The AI pointed her finger at the shelf installed at eye-level, just behind the cart. “That’s…Anna, someone’s alive in there.”
* * * * *
Ethan snapped out of his dormant state back into awareness. He was in a featureless place, and he sensed the presence of others near.
“Hello, my name is Doctor Ruth,” one said, and he recognized the voice he’d heard speaking to him in the featureless room. “You’re at El Dorado Memorial Hospital in the AI Wing.”
He nodded and offered her a tentative smile. “Hello, I’m Doctor Ethan.” He looked at the other two. “Why am I in a hospital? I feel fine; would you mind if I sat up now?” One of the other two raised a restraining hand. “Wait one more moment, please. Doctor Ethan, you said your name was?”
He nodded, and the third AI made a notation on a medical holo chart, while the second AI looked up at a holo hovering over Ethan’s head.
“We’re just running your matrices through a complete n-level scan to ensure you’ve come to no harm while you were out.” After a beat, he nodded and the holo winked out.
“Looks like you’re good to go.” Stepping back, he gestured for Ethan to sit up. “Did you know you were subjected to two EM pulses fairly close together prior to your dormancy?”
Ethan paused at the edge of the exam table, looking down at his legs dangling over its edge. He took a moment to think back over the past few days he could recall. He nodded.
“Yes, I have a human, a postdoctoral fellow at the university, who set off an EM the other day.” He shook his head. His eyes were focused inward, so he missed the look the AI exchanged with the one taking notes. “We had a long discussion about how dangerous such things were afterward. But you said—” he looked up at the one who had spoken, “there were two EMs?” He frowned in confusion.
“What was the last thing you remember, Ethan?” Ruth asked, smiling reassuringly at him.
He thought back. “Well, a colleague of mine pinged me to let me know about a delivery, but when I arrived, I couldn’t find her.” His eyes widened, and he looked up sharply at her. “There was no delivery, was there?”
She smiled kindly. “Well, that I couldn’t tell you. But I suspect your last memory occurred immediately before that second EM.”
Ethan shook his head slowly. “What in the stars is going on?”
“That’s what we’re here to find out,” the third AI spoke up for the first time. He looked over at the other two and nodded. “His security token and ident checks out as Doctor Ethan, no artifacts indicating he’s a clone.”
Ethan’s eyes widened, and his head jerked back in reaction. “A clone? But…that’s illegal.”
The third AI nodded. “It most certainly is, sir.” He offered his hand in the human way for Ethan to shake. As he took it, the AI introduced himself. “I’m Samuel, with the hospital’s risk management department.” At Ethan’s blank look, he explained, “You came in as a John Doe. It’s not often an AI is admitted to a hospital under those conditions. Since there was some question as to your identity when you were brought in, we took the time to do a scan of your fundamental base neural lattices and machine-level code. We had to ensure that you were who you claimed.”
Ethan knew his expression must convey the confusion he felt. He looked from the AI to the doctor and back again. “But why in the stars would you think I was a clone, of all things?”
Ruth answered, her tone gentle, as if she were delivering bad news. “Ethan, you were found in a storage closet in the university. From what I understand, it was in one of your own labs. Or at least, a lab you used to run.” She exchanged a speaking look with the other two. “You—or rather, someone we thought was you— was murdered in your lab five months ago. Your lab has been cordoned off as a crime scene these past months. The university only recently reassigned the lab to a different professor within Neurosciences. You were discovered by a couple of grad students who were clearing it out.”
Ethan looked shocked. “Murdered? Why would anyone want to kill me? I have no enemies.” He looked alarmed. “But if it wasn’t me— Stars! Someone was murdered in my lab!” He started to his feet, but the doctor laid a restraining hand on his arm, pressing him back down.
The AI from Risk Management looked grim. “Perhaps now would be a good time to bring the investigator from the Gendarmerie in?” he asked the other two, and Ruth reluctantly nodded. Samuel nodded to Ethan. “I’m sure this will be straightened out soon.” He nodded to the other two, turned, and walked out the door.
Moments later, the door opened again, and a female AI dressed in the uniform of a Sonali Gendarme entered. She took one look at Ethan and shot the doctors a glance.
“Shut this expanse down, now,” she ordered, and the featureless operating theatre dissolved, to be replaced by a thin data stream, with very limited-access bandwidth. Ethan was left with a single low-pass optical feed attached to his core’s housing, restricting his vision to the room in which he was sequestered. Through it, he saw the humanoid frame of the gendarme from the expanse, standing next to an AI wearing clean room scrubs.
“Pardon me,” he sent tentatively into the room.
The response was immediate. The gendarme pinned the optic with a gimlet stare.
“There’ll be no pardon for you, Prime,” the AI stated, her tone flat and her expression hard. “Or are you so arrogant that you thought we wouldn’t recognize that sweater vest?”
DOPPELGANGER
STELLAR DATE: 10.13.3191 (Adjusted Gregorian)
LOCATION: Prime Minister’s Office, Parliament House
REGION: El Dorado Ring, Alpha Centauri System
Lysander shunted aside the data he had been reviewing as his assistant escorted Ben into his office. He rose with a warm smile and walked around his desk, gesturing for the human to settle in the seating area.
He couldn’t help but notice how drawn the man looked.
It had been five months now since Judith had departed on the Speedwell, and the SIS was no closer to finding Prime than they’d been the day the starship had left the ring—despite the many hours dedicated to the task.
He wasn’t sure which was hitting the analyst harder: that, or the communications lag between them and the ship, now measured in weeks instead of days. He suspected both were taking their toll on the human.
As Ben sat, Esther pinged Lysander, requesting permission to access his office’s holo emitters. The vice-marshal had asked for him and Ben to meet privately with her earlier that day, but had not shared what it was about. Her projection appeared on the sofa next to the chair Ben had chosen, so he opted for the sofa across from her.
She sent Lysander a mental greeting and then turned to Ben. “Have you told the prime minister about what was found yesterday in the lab where Landon was killed?”
Ben shook his head. “No, I was waiting for you to arrive before I began my debrief.”
Esther nodded, and Lysander felt his curiosity pique.
“You found new evidence?” he asked. “Something that could lead us to Prime?”
“Yes—at least, that’s our hope. And it wasn’t something, it was actually someone,” Ben replied. “A cylinder, encased in an isolation chamber. One of the students who found it was an AI. She immediately recognized the unit and brought it to the attention of the university.”
Lysander shot Esther a sharp look. “Was it—?”
She shook her head. “No, it wasn’t Prime.”
“Damn. That would have been too easy, I suppose.” Lysander suppressed a flare of disappointment. “Although it would have explained why his activities have dropped off, and we’ve only seen copycats for the past week or so. So, who was it?”
“Well, that’s the funny thing,” Ben said, quirking a brow at him as he paused a beat. “It was Doctor Ethan. The real one.”
Lysander stared back at Ben as he turned the information over in his mind. “If Ethan is alive, then who was in his frame?”Ben’s face turned grim. “That’s what my technicians back at the SIS are about to find out.”
* * * * *
Ethan—the real Ethan—stood sifting through code he hadn’t written, in a place he never dreamed he would see: a top secret, state-of-the-art laboratory deep inside Tomlinson Base. He’d heard rumors of a government installation there, but had never imagined himself inside it.
And certainly not under these circumstances.
Given where he’d been found, and the damning evidence he’d been found with, he understood now why his discovery had been flagged. Cloning an AI without permission was a crime expressly prohibited by the Phobos Accords; to do so meant inviting one of the harshest sentences El Dorado’s criminal justice system could mete out.
The part he still had trouble wrapping his head around was going from being arrested by a hostile gendarme to being employed by an ESF vice-marshal. He’d been nonplussed when Esther had shown him to a lab where a schematic for a shackling program was projected, one he recognized.
It was the same one the prime minister had sent by way of Judith. A project I never completed, he thought with a pang of remorse.
But now it appeared as if he had completed it. Or at least, his doppelganger had.
Esther had left him to puzzle out a problem: she presented him with a shackling program that looked remarkably similar—but this one, she told him, had defied the SIS’s every attempt to deactivate it.
A snippet of code caught his attention, and he drew closer to the revised program to examine it in more detail. Then he realized why it felt familiar.
Ethan knew that every coder had distinctive patterns that made the code they wrote unique. Whether it was formatting structure, annotation, methods of object orientation, assembly flow, or a combination of these factors, a coder could always recognize something that he or she had written.
He recognized his own style when he saw it.
He reached out to the vice-marshal to give her the disturbing news.
She answered the ping immediately.
He sent her a mental nod.
How does one begin to say, ’oh, and, by the way, that token was mine’?
Esther took the decision out of his hands.
He felt the sympathy Esther sent over the connection.
He cringed a bit at that.
She paused for a beat, her voice tinged with compassion.
After their conversation ended, he took a moment to step away from the lab and be alone with his thoughts. It was damned disturbing to realize that somewhere out there was a sick, twisted copy of himself, someone most likely cloned—and altered—by Lilith Barnes.
His memories leading up to his imprisonment in that closet all pointed to her obsession with nonapeptides. He was certain she had experimented with his clone, made changes to his own base code that had resulted in a true sociopath. It was sobering to think that the potential for such evil existed somewhere within himself.
What’s the ancient human saying? ‘There but for the grace of God, go I’?
He paced the corridors, deep in thought. He was just approaching the base’s central lift when an agent exited, head bent over the materials he held in his hand. Ethan stepped back, but
not quickly enough, and the man bumped into his frame.
“Sorry, I—” The agent looked up, and his eyes widened.
And then the strangest thing happened. A look of pure hatred crossed the man’s face. The holo sheets he’d held dropped to the floor, and the man snarled as he made a single, abortive lunge toward Ethan that ended in sudden convulsions.
Ethan looked on in shock as the man’s eyes rolled to the back of his head, and he dropped to the ground.
* * * * *
Two levels up, Ben stood, the thumb of one hand hooked casually in his pants pocket, while the other rested on the desk next to where his best technician sat. His casual demeanor was studied; it belied the anxiety he felt as Rena zoomed in on the image he’d asked her to pull up on her holo.
“No doubt about it, sir,” Rena said as she spun her chair around to face him. She pointed over her right shoulder at the snippet of machine-level code hovering on the display. “That is a clone.” The tech spun back around, highlighting two sections of code.
How she’d managed to extract it from the shredded remains of the cylinder was a mystery to Ben. He was just glad the forensics team had been able to recover the remains of the AI they’d thought was Ethan when they bagged the evidence from the university lab.
For the first time in weeks, the tight band that had settled around Ben’s chest began to loosen. “Very nice, Rena,” he praised. “Can you confirm the cylinder retrieved from Ethan’s frame was his clone, and no one else’s?”
“Let me see….” She chewed on her lower lip in thought as she considered the problem. With a few deft moves, she rotated the 3D representation of the code, first this way, then that. “I’m afraid there’s not much to go on. I think they assumed it was Ethan simply because campus security has this cylinder and frame exchanging Ethan’s authorization token with the university’s system when he arrived. But they should have him on file….”