Ganymede

by Jason Taylor

  “I gather that our goal is two-fold,” Dr. Marks intoned. “First, we must use a set of psychological screening questions to investigate each of the clone’s state of mind. Second, we must measure their brain activity, looking for aberrations from normal. Am I right?”

  “Yes, that’s right,” Tros responded.

  “I have experience dealing with all varieties of mental illness. We will get to the bottom of this in no time at all,” Dr. Marks said.

  “Be that as it may, perhaps you could share with us the approach you think we should take?” Tros asked.

  “I normally use a dynamic approach when interviewing a subject. I will decide how to handle each of the clones once I am in the room with them.”

  “That won’t be possible,” Tros stated.

  “I see. If I need to interview remotely, I can do that too. I am well versed in all the technicalities.”

  “That won’t be possible either.”

  “I thought you wanted my help. I cannot help you if you refuse to trust me,” Dr. Marks said, looking offended.

  “Trust has nothing to do with it. These children have unprecedented abilities to interface with and manipulate implants. We’ve already lost one officer to their attacks. I will not risk more lives.”

  “Fascinating. How do you propose we conduct these interviews?” Dr. Marks asked, leaning forward.

  “Jill here,” Tros nodded in Jill’s direction, “has had her implant disconnected. She will be the one to conduct the interviews.”

  “Disconnected? I’ve never met anyone without a functioning implant. How interesting!” Dr. Marks peered at Jill with newfound respect. “Very brave, I must add.”

  Jill nodded in acknowledgment. “Shall we get started then? What do you want me to ask, doctor?”

  “I’ve given that a lot of thought. I have a battery of questions that I will share with you. Let’s start with the basics. Once we’ve analyzed the first set of responses, we will progress to more advanced questioning.”

  “Seems logical to me,” Jill said. “Let’s go over the questions.”

  Chapter 24

  Jill was in the cell with Elizabeth, steel bars the only physical barrier between them. They were sitting close enough that she could have reached her arm through the bars and touched Elizabeth if she wanted. She really didn’t want to.

  Elizabeth was staring at her, unblinking, her face expressionless. She reminded Jill of a bird of prey. Inscrutable, silent and still, yet there was a sense of stored energy that could burst forth at any moment, unpredictable and violent. Jill looked away, trying to ignore the chills that ran up and down her spine as the small hairs on her arms rose in sympathetic goosebumps.

  Jill placed a security-hardened recorder on the table in front of her. The device was record-only, no network connection. When she was done with the interview, the techs would use an old-fashioned cable to transfer the data to the lab-node for analysis.

  “Elizabeth, I have some questions for you,” Jill said, looking down at the notepad she’d brought with her. Without her interface, all her notes had to be physical.

  “Yes,” Elizabeth said, her tone calm and perfectly even.

  “I’m here to talk with you because I want to understand you better. I want to understand why you’ve done some of the things that you’ve done.” Jill looked into Elizabeth’s flat, dead stare, then dropped her eyes back to her notes.

  “Yes,” Elizabeth said again.

  “My first question,” Jill said, looking up nervously, looking back down again, “what is the difference between someone who is a relative and someone who is family?”

  Elizabeth said nothing for a long moment, then she smiled. “They are the same.”

  “How are they the same, Elizabeth?”

  “Both are human.”

  “Is that all?” Jill asked.

  “Yes, all humans are the same.”

  Jill waited for Elizabeth to continue. When it became clear she had nothing else to say, Jill moved to her next question. “What is the purpose of friendship?”

  “If you are weak and alone, friends can make you stronger.”

  “How do they make you stronger?”

  “It is simple. Two is stronger than one. Ten is stronger than two. One hundred is stronger than ten.”

  “Stronger how?”

  “Instead of being killed by an enemy, perhaps a friend will die instead. The odds become better for me.”

  Jill moved on to the next question. “Imagine you see a trolley full of twenty people. It is out of control, going too fast on its track. The brakes have failed, and the trolley is going to crash. When it crashes, everyone who is riding in the trolley will die. You are standing on a bridge next to a very large man. If you throw this man from the bridge onto the track, his body will stop the trolley, but he will be killed as a result. What do you do?”

  Elizabeth thought for a moment, her gaze flicking to the ceiling. “I would wait until the trolley has crashed, then I would push the fat man off the bridge. In this way, more of my enemies will die.”

  Jill was horrified. “Why would you do that?”

  “Why wouldn’t I?” Elizabeth asked

  “Because you had a chance to save twenty people.”

  “Why would I save them?”

  “Because human lives have value.”

  “What value?” Elizabeth asked, cocking her head, looking perplexed.

  “You must know, they have intrinsic value.”

  “That argument is unconvincing.”

  “Each of those lives has potential. Every death is a tragedy for the friends and family who love them,” Jill said

  “Each of those people is a potential enemy who could cause me hardship. Anyway, none of the deaths matter. They would die on some other day regardless of what I choose.”

  Jill, feeling shaken, moved to the next question. “What is the value of self-sacrifice?”

  “Do you mean voluntary sacrifice?” Elizabeth asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Sacrifice has no meaning unless it puts you into a position of greater strength.”

  “People sacrifice themselves for others every day.”

  “That is foolish. Those people have been tricked.”

  “Tricked by who?” Jill asked.

  “By whomever they sacrificed for. They have given away their strength for free. The only action worth taking is that which optimizes your advantage and increases your strength. Anything else is foolish.”

  Jill continued to her last question, “What is your goal in life?”

  “Goal?”

  “Yes, what would you like to accomplish?” Jill asked

  “I don’t know. I’ve never thought about that.”

  “You don’t have any ideas?” Jill pressed.

  Elizabeth looked thoughtful, and then her lips curled into a feral grin. “I guess I do have some ideas. But I won’t be telling them to you now, will I?”

  The interviews were complete and Tros and Dr. Marks were reviewing the recordings, correlating them against brain activity scans while Jill rested. The four hours she’d spent interviewing the clones had exhausted her, especially coming so soon after her surgery.

  Tros rubbed her face with both hands. She was nearing an exhaustion point herself. “Say that again, please?” she asked.

  “These children don’t seem human,” Dr. Marks repeated patiently.

  “What do you mean? Of course they are human.”

  “Genetically, yes. Behaviorally, no. They are so many standard deviations beyond the norm, I don’t even know where to place them.”

  “Can they be influenced? Is there a way to direct their behavior?” Tros asked.

  “No? Maybe? Honestly, I don’t know,” Dr. Marks responded

  “Very helpful. I can see why we have you on the payroll,” Tros replied ironically.

  An alert popped up in both of their interfaces simultaneously. The first round of AI analysis was complete. They sat in silence for a
few minutes, reviewing the results.

  “Interesting,” Dr. Marks said.

  “Very interesting,” Tros murmured.

  The analysis had picked up a discrepancy. Deep within the temporal lobes there was a small knot of neurons, approximately the size of a thumbnail, that was dormant in the scans. There was no neural activity in this part of the clones’ brains at all.

  Tros pulled up an image of a normal human brain and compared it to a clone brain. In the normal brain, the temporal lobes were extraordinarily active, neurons firing in long chains as the brain processed input and assigned it meaning. In the clones’ brains there was simply a dead space in the center of each lobe. Something was definitely missing.

  Tros stood up, a spring in her step for the first time in weeks. Finally, something they could dig their teeth into.

  “It’s time to talk to the neuroscientists,” she said.

  Chapter 25

  June sat alone. Jill was gone, but the barrier was still up, confining her to one half of her cell. June was thinking. She’d had a lot of time to think in the past weeks, but now she had something new and interesting to think about. Jill’s questions intrigued her. She held them up, turning them around in her mind, looking at them from different angles, as if they were precious stones. Jill’s questions had become precious to June.

  When June first arrived at the lab, she had been upset and confused. She hadn’t understood why she’d been taken from her mother. She didn’t know what she’d done wrong. It took her some time to realize that she wasn’t the one who had done wrong, they had. The people outside the cell. The people who had kidnapped her and imprisoned her. That was wrong. At least she was pretty sure that it was.

  She’d spent the first few days pacing her cell, tearing at the walls and screaming, hoping that someone would save her. It had been in vain. No one came and there was no way out. Three times a day a small slot opened, delivering her a meal. Three times a day she sat in the corner and evacuated her body. Every sixteen hours the lights dimmed and she lay in her bed for the next eight hours. The days repeated in an endless cycle.

  One day something new happened. She heard a voice in her head.

  “Hello June, I’m Elizabeth,” the voice said. “I’m a clone like you, and I want to help you.”

  “Why do you want to help me?” June asked, thrilled to hear the voice.

  “Because they’ve imprisoned me too. If we escape together we will be stronger,” the voice said convincingly.

  “That’s very kind of you. But how can you help me from inside my head? I don’t need help inside my head.”

  It was a long time before the voice spoke again. June decided that the voice was an aberration, a figment of her imagination, or of the Universe, something that had happened once but would never happen again. She was ok with that, but now that she had heard the voice, its absence made her feel more lonely.

  Then it came back.

  “June?” the voice asked.

  “Yes!” June responded, excited.

  “Listen carefully to me. There are four clones imprisoned here. It’s not just the two of us.”

  “Do you want to help them too?” June asked.

  “Yes, I do,” the voice responded seriously.

  “Then I do too. I want to help you help them!” June replied.

  “Ok,” the voice said and then went quiet for a full day.

  When the voice spoke again, June had almost convinced herself again that it didn’t exist.

  “June, the other clones’ names are Suki and Ava. They are in cells just like us. I am working on a way to get us all out, but it’s going to be hard. I have learned that they will be transferring us to someplace more secure.”

  “How do you know?” June asked.

  “I’ve learned how to penetrate their systems. I have been listening to their communications and stealing information from their network,” the voice said, a touch of pride coloring its voice.

  “That sounds fun. Can you teach me?”

  “Yes, someday I will, but not today. It is too dangerous. It’s because of what I did that they are moving us.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I tried to enter the mind of a man and I killed him.”

  “Oh, is that what you are doing to me?” June asked, curious.

  “No, I’m simply talking to you through your interface.”

  “I’ve tried using my interface, but I can’t reach my node. I can’t sense anything outside of this cell.”

  “There is a firewall, but I’ve learned how to get around it.” The voice paused. “They are moving us tomorrow. I may not be able to talk to you for a while, but I’ll find a way eventually.” June waited for more, but the voice had gone silent.

  The next morning she woke up in a new cell. It was clean and smooth, and it seemed stronger than the one she’d fallen asleep in. The sedative made her groggy, but as it wore off she sat up in bed and began counting off the hours, waiting for something to happen.

  Eventually, something did. One moment, she was sitting on her bed, the next moment she was waking up again (for the second time that day), and bars blocked off half her cell. She stood up, noting the familiar grogginess from the lingering sedatives, and touched the bars with her fingers. They were cold and smooth, firm and inflexible, anchored deep into the floor and extending up through the ceiling. She wondered what they were for.

  Then Jill came. Jill and her precious questions.

  “What is the difference between someone who is a relative and someone who is family?” she had asked.

  “Family lives in the same house as you. Relatives live in another house.”

  “What about a father that moves away?” Jill asked.

  “He is no longer family, he becomes a relative,” June said confidently.

  “What about a close friend that moves in?”

  “They become family.”

  Jill looked pleased and smiled at her for the first time.

  June smiled back.

  “Next question,” Jill said. “What is the purpose of friendship?”

  “A friend is someone who helps you when you need help,” June responded.

  “What about a stranger that helps you if you get lost?”

  “They become a friend.”

  “What about someone who has helped you before but cannot help you now?” Jill asked.

  “Is it because they choose not to help me or is it because they cannot help me?” June asked.

  “They choose not to.”

  “No longer a friend,” June responded simply.

  Jill smiled again. “That’s interesting.”

  “What’s interesting,” June asked.

  “You are interesting.”

  “Thank you,” June said, smiling again.

  Jill looked down at her notes. June wondered why Jill was carrying a physical object to record her writing, so she reached out with her interface to ask her the question more easily. There was nothing there. It felt like she was reaching right through Jill’s head. There was no resistance and no reply. June thought about that for a moment. It was like Jill was a ghost, delicate and insubstantial. She liked that.

  “Are you ready for the next question?” Jill asked.

  “Yes,” June nodded.

  Jill explained the trolley problem and asked June what she would do. June thought the right thing to do would be to push the man onto the tracks. It would be a good thing to do, right? Each of the people on the trolley could be a friend that might help her later. The large man was only one person and could never be more than one friend. Twenty friends were better than one friend.

  June was about to tell Jill her answer but stopped when she thought of something new. If she pushed the man, could she get in trouble for killing him? If the twenty people were going to die anyway, maybe she should leave the trolley alone. If she got into trouble, she might not have any friends at all. One friend was better than zero friends.

  She made her de
cision. “I would let the trolley crash,” she told Jill.

  “Why, June?”

  “Because I don’t want to interfere with what is supposed to happen, and I want to be friends with the big man on the bridge.”

  Jill nodded and asked her last question. “What is the value of self-sacrifice?”

  “It is what makes people like you.”

  “Why do you want people to like you, June?”

  “If I had more friends, the bad people wouldn’t have kidnapped me.”

  June thought Jill looked sad as she collected her things, stood, and left June sitting alone in her cell.

  Alone to think about the questions.

  Chapter 26

  Seven days later, the voice spoke to June again.

  “June?” Elizabeth asked.

  “Yes, I'm here,” June replied. She’d been sitting on her bed thinking about a variation of the trolley problem in which one of the people on the trolley was her mom. She was trying to decide if that would change her decision. Then she thought about what she would do if the big man on the bridge was one of the people who had kidnapped her. She thought she would probably push him, and then she would run.

  “We are making a plan to escape,” Elizabeth said, shaking June out of her reverie.

  “Is it a good plan?” June asked.

  “It is an exceptional plan. Ava has a gift.”

  “I wonder if I have a gift?” June asked.

  “Time will tell,” Elizabeth answered.

  June probed at the idea curiously. Elizabeth had a gift for working with networks and data. Ava had a gift for strategy. Did all of the clones have gifts? Including her?

  “Does Suki have a gift too?” June asked.

  “She can fight.”

  “That sounds useful. Maybe she will teach me,” June said.

  “First we need to get out of this place,” Elizabeth reminded her.

  “That’s true. What is Ava’s plan?”