by Dan Wells
“They already suspect that you were the leak with Guru Kuvam,” said Sunny. “And now, with a whole case missing—”
“A whole case?” Decker’s blood froze. I didn’t steal a whole case!
“I’m not saying you took it—”
“I didn’t take it,” said Decker.
“I’m not saying you did—”
“No, I’m serious,” said Decker, “I didn’t take it. Was it blank?”
Sunny nodded. “Thirty tubes. Sixty ounces.”
Decker closed his eyes. “Mother of Mercy. Sixty ounces, loose—worse than loose, they’re in the hands of someone with the kind of resources to break in and take whatever they want. Why didn’t you—” He stopped himself before saying “Why didn’t you tell me someone else was stealing ReBirth?” I thought we were the only ones—our surveillance didn’t indicate that anyone else even knew about the product. What’s going on? He took a breath to recenter himself. “What is someone going to do with sixty ounces of blank ReBirth?”
Sunny shook his head. “I don’t … Look, Lyle, I don’t know who took it. I’m not saying it was you—”
“Yes you are!” said Decker, now even more nervous. His charade as Lyle Fontanelle had just begun, and now it was crumbling before he even had a chance to use it for anything. “You’ve said three times you don’t think it’s me—if you really don’t think it’s me, then why won’t you let it drop?”
“Listen, Lyle, I am sticking my neck out for you, okay? I came in here because you’re my friend, or you used to be, and I don’t know what you’re doing but it’s stupid, Lyle, it’s reckless and its dangerous and it’s stupid. They’re serious about this, Lyle. You know they have Susan.”
Decker sat back in his chair, forcing himself to look … not calm, because Lyle was never calm, but … not frantic, either. Nervous but not guilty. “What are they going to do?”
“They’re not going to do anything, if you start being smart about this. Now, we don’t have much time left, but I’m going to leave for the meeting and you’ll have a minute or two to do whatever you need to do—I’m not saying you need to do anything, but if you do … I don’t know. Marcus and his men will be here in about four minutes. If you need to…” He stopped. “I don’t know. I’ll see you at the meeting.” He opened the door, stopped, and turned back. “Be smart about this, Lyle.”
He left.
Decker sat, motionless, sorting through the implications of the conversation. They think I stole something—which I did, just not the thing they think I stole. But it doesn’t matter what they think I stole because if they find the ones I actually stole I’m as good as dead. If not for Sunny I would be dead—it’s good to know Lyle has at least one friend in here.
It’s going to make betraying them so much easier.
Decker walked quickly to the filing cabinet, opening the third drawer and pulling it out as far as it would go. In the back was a small cardboard box with ten small vials of blank ReBirth, half an ounce each. Future shipments would be smaller, but for now these half-ounce vials were being prepped as a launch event bonus: 200 percent more, absolutely free, but only if you buy now. Buy now. Decker shook his head. The size of these vials is really kind of terrifying all on its own. It’s simply too much ReBirth to be in any one place.
He laughed nervously. I’m even starting to sound like Lyle.
He sat down at his desk, pulled his tape dispenser and tissues within easy reach, and opened the box. The vials glinted in the light—thin glass cylinders with narrow plastic lids. He wrapped each one in tape to keep them sealed, then in tissue paper to keep them from clinking, and then looked down at his socks. Did he dare? Even having them on his desk was frightening; to put them so close to his skin, where a single crack could contaminate him in a heartbeat, was terrifying. They were still blank—that is, they were supposed to be blank—but how could he be sure? What would even happen if he imprinted a new vial—would it carry Lyle’s DNA, or Decker’s, or some unholy combination of both?
It didn’t matter: NewYew had started checking bags, to make sure nobody took any lotion without permission. Hiding the vials was the only way to get them out of the building. He slid each little packet down into his socks, shivering with a sudden cold sweat.
With the last vial safely in place he stood and examined his pants, making sure they hung properly around his calves. The vials were completely hidden. He stepped, testing the way the pants raised and the socks moved; it looked good. This might work. He looked at his watch and smiled. Just in time.
Decker broke down the thin cardboard box and folded it into a tight wad, hiding it in his pocket—if they searched the office, he didn’t want them to find even that. He grabbed Lyle’s laptop and phone and left the office, heading down the hall to the elevator. There was no sign of Marcus Eads or the rest of the security team. And now? he thought. Now I play the game, better than Lyle ever played it. Sunny wants a team player, and I can be the best damn team player they’ve ever seen. I don’t care about Lyle’s medical hobbyhorse at all—I can drop that in a second, and toe the company line and do exactly what they want. I can be a better Lyle than Lyle was.
The elevator dinged, not the up light but the down, and when the doors opened Decker looked up, saw the passenger, and froze in midthought. It was Lyle, another Lyle, standing there in the same suit, the same face, the same haircut. Their eyes met—the same eyes—and for just a moment the other Lyle seemed as shocked as he was, and then the doors closed and the other Lyle disappeared again.
Decker stared, frozen in place, and a moment later the elevator opened again. Empty. Decker shivered.
Who else is here? He can’t be the real one, and he can’t be from Ibis—we don’t have anybody else at NewYew right now. It’s too big of a risk. The elevator hung open and empty, while Decker’s mind roiled in terror. Does NewYew have other Lyles? Of course not. They didn’t even trust the one they had, and all the accidental copies were locked down in São Tomé. Then who could it be?
Realization dawned just as the elevator doors began to close, and Decker shot out his hand to catch them.
It’s the other thief—the one who stole sixty ounces. The other thief is a Lyle.
And I can’t expose him without making my own face a liability. They’d never trust another Lyle again.
He stepped into the elevator, hit the button, and turned to face the door. He watched it slide closed, just as the other Lyle had watched it slide closed moments before: the same position, the same clothes, even the same stance. Decker shivered.
Déjà vu.
23
Saturday, June 30
12:15 P.M.
Ibis Cosmetics headquarters, Manhattan
167 DAYS TO THE END OF THE WORLD
Lyle had mixed twenty-seven batches of ReBirth in the last week. He had followed his recipe; he’d changed his recipe; he’d ignored his recipe completely and freehanded the entire thing. He’d made good lotion every time, but it didn’t copy DNA.
After determining that the retrovirus wasn’t doing the copying, his next best theory was that the functional lotion had become contaminated with something else, perhaps something in his laboratory at NewYew, and so he had mixed a series of batches (numbers three through twelve) without any of his standard clean protocols—he didn’t wash his hands, he didn’t keep the tools or beakers clean, he didn’t protect the ingredients. On Wednesday a message came through from Abraham Decker containing a full list of the other chemicals and substances present in his laboratory, complete with photos of the laboratory layout. Lyle wanted to talk to Decker in person, but the Ibis Lyles assured him it was too dangerous at the moment; Decker was struggling to maintain his cover, and even sending the lists and photos had put him in danger of discovery. On the weekend, maybe. Lyle buckled down, waited for the weekend, and mixed more batches. Numbers thirteen through twenty-seven were various attempts to re-create specific contaminations from Decker’s list of ingredients, trying to see if any
of them, or groups of them in combination, could reproduce the accident that had created ReBirth. None of them had.
“What I need to do,” said Lyle, “is analyze the lotion in action.” He talked to himself all the time now, for there was no one else to talk to. The Ibis Lyles had refused his request for an assistant. “If I could watch it under a microscope, and really see what it’s doing and how it’s doing it, I might be able to make it work.” He reached for the phone to call the secretary, but stopped when he heard the lock on the door click open. Someone was coming in. He looked up and watched himself walk through the door, his own face in his own beige suit.
“Hello, Lyle.”
Lyle felt the familiar queasiness that always seemed to hit him when he saw one of his copies. He set down the phone. “Which one are you,” he asked. “Brady? That’s the CEO, right? Ira Brady?”
“We call him Prime now,” said the other Lyle. “Our real names are potentially dangerous these days, and we needed a good way of differentiating who was who.”
Lyle raised his eyebrow. “So Brady is Lyle Prime? As in, the first? The original? Shouldn’t that be me?”
The other Lyle shrugged. “It’s really more of a seniority thing, but … there you go. Sorry.”
Lyle shook his head, sitting at his desk. “Well, great. First I’m not the only me, and now I’m not even the real me.”
“At least you’re still you,” said the other Lyle. “The rest of us who are you are actually somebody else, from our point of view. You have to admit that’s worse.”
“You’d think so, but I don’t know,” said Lyle. “This is still pretty mind-blowingly weird.”
The other Lyle walked toward him, extending his hand. “I’m Abraham Decker, by the way. I’m you at Ibis—and that’s always how I used to explain it, even before this whole … mess. You were the head chemist at NewYew, and one of the best in the business, and I was the head chemist at Ibis—kind of in your shadow, I guess. Now I’m you at NewYew and you’re me at Ibis. In a weird sort of way.”
Lyle looked at the man’s hand and grimaced, feeling another wave of queasiness. “I’m sorry. No offense, Mr. Decker, honestly, but it’s just too strange to shake my own hand.”
Decker/Lyle nodded, dropping his hand and backing up toward another desk chair. “I understand completely.” He grabbed the chair by the chemical counter, pulled it forward a bit, and sat. “And please, there’s no ‘mister’ necessary, everybody just calls me—well, I was going to say that everybody calls me Decker, but these days everybody calls me Lyle. Even Prime and the others, as part of the charade.”
“I’ll just call you Decker,” said Lyle, smiling ruefully. He knew the man was here to talk about the lotion, to answer the questions Lyle had been pestering Ibis with for days, but now that he was here Lyle saw his chance to ask about other news—about NewYew, and ReBirth, and the world outside. The product launch event was only a few days away. What was really happening out there? “You were finally able to get away from NewYew?” he asked. “They don’t have you under surveillance?”
“I’ve managed to gain a level of trust,” said Decker/Lyle, “probably more than you’ve had in several months, actually.”
“They trusted me,” said Lyle, though even as he said it he felt a flicker of doubt.
“They’re holding your intern hostage,” said Decker/Lyle.
“Susan?”
Decker/Lyle nodded. “Everyone knows you had a thing for her, so they’re holding her hostage to keep you from talking. Cynthia explained the whole thing to me in a very uncomfortable meeting. You have information that could bring the entire company down, and they don’t trust you to keep quiet, so they’re using Susan as an … insurance policy.”
Lyle shook his head; he’d suspected they might try this, but to have it confirmed, and so coldly, was a shock. He looked at Decker/Lyle harshly. “You have to keep quiet. Don’t let them hurt her.”
“I don’t care for her one way or the other,” said Decker/Lyle, “that’s the irony here. But I do care about their trust, because it’s the only way I can get the information and the access that I need.”
“So you’re playing along.”
“All it took was to stop bickering,” said Decker/Lyle, shrugging. “I don’t attack their ideas the way you did, and every now and then I suggest a few of my own in the same vein. They love me now.”
“This just keeps getting better and better,” said Lyle, throwing up his hands. “I’m not the only me, I’m not the original me, and now I’m not even the best me.” He could just imagine this impostor in the boardroom, laughing at Jeffrey’s jokes and cheering at each new plan to turn his lotion into vast, heaping piles of illegal profits. More effective than me, but far, far worse. “At least I’m not living a lie. Or compromising every principle the real Lyle ever stood for.”
Decker/Lyle raised his eyebrow. “You mean scientific advancement?”
“I mean saving lives.”
“I told you, I won’t let them hurt Susan.”
“I’m not talking about Susan,” said Lyle, “I’m talking about everyone—saving lives in general.”
Decker/Lyle smirked. “When have you ever stood for saving lives?”
Lyle stared at him, his mouth hanging open. “I … what do you mean? I’ve always stood for saving lives.”
“Just ‘lives’ in general?” asked Decker/Lyle. “Is that a charity I’m not familiar with? The Saving Lives Foundation?”
“I mean helping people,” said Lyle angrily.
“Well, okay,” said Decker/Lyle, “but again: which people? I don’t want to be a jerk about this, Dr. Fontanelle, but I’ve spent years trying to emulate you, first in my own job and now in yours. You’ve never been involved in any charity organizations, you didn’t contribute to any relief efforts or nonprofits in anything more than a token capacity, and even then only when it was your own company’s new flavor of the week. Tossing a couple hundred bucks at the Haitian hurricane or the Salvation Army doesn’t make ‘saving lives’ one of your core principles. I’ve been playing your role … accurately.”
“My life is not a role.”
“It is for me.”
Lyle blustered, waving his arms as he searched for the right words. He had always thought of himself as a good man, an honest man, a man who helped his neighbors and did what was right and made the world a better place, but now that he was confronted about it—by himself, no less—he couldn’t think of a single example. “I am not…” He gave up on examples. “I am a good person.”
“I’m not saying you’re not.”
“I have never stood for destroying lives,” Lyle said, punctuating his declaration with a point of his finger, as if this was the clinching piece of evidence. “No one can say that I’m a destructive or a bloodthirsty or even a careless person. I help people.”
“Not hurting people isn’t the same as helping them,” said Decker/Lyle.
“But what NewYew is trying to do will hurt people,” said Lyle. “That’s what I’m saying, and that’s what you’re helping them do, in my name. And in my whole”—he waved his hand over Decker/Lyle—“body.”
“That’s where I disagree with you,” said Decker/Lyle, leaning forward. “They’re not going out of their way to help people, no, but they’re not hurting anyone, either. They’re going to bring an amazing product—your product—to market, and yes, they’re going to make a mind-boggling amount of money doing it, but that doesn’t make them evil. They’re not stealing from anyone, they’re not oppressing anyone, they’re not even deceiving anyone. They’re better than Ibis in a lot of ways, and while I’m only working with them as a ruse, I still feel some pride in what we’re doing. You’re giving the scientific presentation at the launch next week—well, I mean I am, but it’s you. It’s both of us, in a way.”
“They would never let me speak at an event,” said Lyle.
“Not the old you,” said Decker/Lyle, “but you said it yourself: I’m better at
being you than you are.”
All of Lyle’s anger and frustration seemed to come together then in a single point, his anger at NewYew for misusing his technology, at Ibis for imprisoning him, at himself for failing twenty-seven times to re-create his own discovery. At this calm-voiced, amoral, fun house–mirror version of himself that twisted his own words and called him a monster. Before he even knew what he was doing he was out of his chair and grasping the evil Lyle by his own lapels, yanking him from his seat, shoving him to the ground, and then he was punching him, smashing his fists into his face—into his own face, except every time he hit the face looked less like his own, mussing its hair, cutting its skin, streaks of blood welling up on its cheek, and suddenly the other Lyle was punching back, his own enemy fist lashing out at his own face, his real face, and felt his brain pulse and thump and rattle as he beat himself senseless. A moment later more hands appeared, bigger and stronger hands, and the Ibis thugs were pulling them apart. Lyle regained his footing, shrugging off the thugs’ meaty hands, and when they saw that he was no longer trying to lunge forward they let him go. He stood panting, wiping the blood from his cheek with the cuff of his shirt. The Decker/Lyle stood across from him, wiping blood with the flat of his hand, flanked by a thug of his own. Another Lyle, untouched by the fight, stood in the doorway.
“Are we done with our little tantrum?”
“I don’t want to do this anymore,” said Lyle, and suddenly he felt like crying. He panted again, gasping for breath. “I don’t want to do it.”
“Are you Prime?” asked Decker/Lyle. The third Lyle nodded, and Decker/Lyle walked toward him. “I need to get cleaned up. NewYew’s touring the Manhattan Center in three hours, prepping for the product launch. I can’t show up looking like I’ve been in a fistfight.”